Michael Muller On Swimming With Great Whites & Moving Towards Fear

Michael Muller is Hollywood's most in-demand photographer. But that title doesn't even begin to capture the breadth of his extraordinary, Hemingway-esque life. It's a path defined by his commitment to curiosity. An unquenchable thirst for adventure. Unbridled creativity. And an impulse to always, always move towards fear. Traveling to 60 countries before he even entered high school (a count that is currently at 200), Michael spent the greater part of his childhood living in Saudi Arabia. It was there that his passion for photography blossomed. The more he saw, the more he felt drawn to capturing his experiences in imagery. By his mid-teens that passion had already become a career, documenting the snowboarding & punk rock scenes across California. But he soon found himself behind the velvet rope in Los Angeles, documenting the next generation of silver screen superstars. But the ripe age of 22, Michael established himself as a leading Hollywood entertainment and fashion photographer. Today Michael is the top dog in his game — a guy who has photographed everyone who is anyone for every prominent media outlet from Vanity Fair to Esquire: Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Jeff Bridges, Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Hugh Jackman, Bruce Willis, Scarlett Johansson, Nirvana, Leonardo DiCaprio. You get the picture. The question isn’t who has he photographed, it’s who hasn’t he. That iconic photograph of Kobe Bryant bowing that graced the cover of TIME magazine in February? That’s Michael. That blockbuster movie poster or billboard you love? Chances are that’s Michael too -- the man behind countless studio campaigns from Marvel movies to Inherent Vice. But Michael’s truest passion — and a primary focus of today’s exchange — is sharks. Specifically, great whites. Documenting them on film. Understanding them. Educating others about them. And most importantly, preserving them. This conversation is about so many things. It’s of course a recap of Michael’s unbelievable life, which is more adventure novel than a resume. It’s about the nature of creativity. It’s about what drives him — his philosophies on work, passion, service — and the incredible power of the image to shape culture. It's about his relationship with fear. PTSD. And how swimming with sharks changed his relationship with himself and the natural environment we all share. It’s also keenly focused on preserving our oceans, specifically protecting our sharks, 100 million of which are killed every year. These apex predators are beyond vital to our ocean’s ecosystem, and without them, you’ll soon learn, our oceans will crumble. But more than anything, this conversation is about what the great whites represent: fear. It's about why the only way to overcome this debilitating emotion is to move towards it. To face it head-on. The visually inclined can watch our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Charismatic and larger than life, Michael is unlike any previous guest I've hosted on this podcast. This conversation is one for the ages. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  I mean, the first thing I'd say is what I sort of write in every book, which is, there is nothing to fear but fear itself. Do not let fear control your life. You're either in fear or you're in faith, one or two. And I think if you just try having some faith, trust the universe, follow your dreams, you'll start to see results. You've just gotta have that trust. And the second thing is, the young creative's like, please, please, please, follow your dreams, do your creative. Don't chase the money. Because I, in 35 years, have never once woken up and been like, ugh, I gotta go to work today. Not once. I get paid and made a living doing something I love to do. I wake up every day, I'm like, oh, I'm so excited to go create. Such a gift.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  You know, we only get one life, and I definitely don't want to be 780 going like, oh, I wish I always wanted to go here or do this. I always wanted to take pictures. Do it. Life's so short. It's precious. You have today, forget about all your yesterdays. What are you gonna do today? That's it.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  That's Michael Muller, and this is episode 552 of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. If you're into great white sharks, or even if you're terrified of great white sharks, if you dig great storytellers and creative geniuses, then you, my friends, are in for a treat because today's episode is absolutely killer.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  Have I mentioned that today, finally, after obsessively trying to make this happen for a very long time, I've got the great Michael Muller on the pod. Michael is, how do I describe this? He's like this larger-than-life, almost Hemingway-esque character who has lived quite the extraordinary life. He's an extremely talented artist and a charismatic figure who has packed millennia of adventure into his mere five decades here on Earth. This is a guy who traveled to 60 countries before he even entered high school, a count that's currently at 200.

• 3:35Rich Roll?

  And after spending the greater part of his childhood living in Saudi Arabia, a passion for photography blossomed. The more he saw, the more he felt drawn to capturing his experiences in photographs. In his mid-teens, his passion quickly turned into a career documenting initially the snowboarding and punk rock scenes across California. And by the time he was 22, he had established himself as a leading Hollywood entertainment and fashion photographer. Today, Michael is the top dog in his game, straight up. This is a guy who has photographed everyone for every prominent media outlet out there,

• 4:19Rich Roll?

  from Vanity Fair to Esquire. Joaquin Phoenix, Brad Pitt, Jeff Bridges, Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Scarlett Johansson, Nirvana, Leonardo DiCaprio, and everybody in between. The question isn't who has he photographed, it's who hasn't he? That iconic photo of Kobe Bryant bowing that graced the cover of Time Magazine back in February, that's Michael.

• 4:44Rich Roll?

  That iconic movie poster or billboard that you love? Chances are that's Michael, too. The man behind countless studio campaigns for everything from all the Marvel movies to inherent vice. But, and here's the thing, really. Michael's truest passion and a primary focus of today's conversation is sharks, specifically great white sharks. Documenting them on film, understanding them, educating others about them, and most importantly, preserving them. It's an obsession that led him to invent and patent a studio lighting system, which he now takes with him underwater to light the ocean life in ways never seen until now,

• 5:29Rich Roll?

  shooting stunning and really surrendering photographs of these apex predators. He's currently transforming this imagery into an extraordinary virtual reality experience. He gave me a taste. It's really unbelievable, in the hopes of dispelling the many myths about these creatures and helping people to overcome the common fears that we have about these creatures. In addition, Michael has partnered with Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford, who you'll recall from episode 533, and also who helped make today's episode happen. Thank you, Andrew, with this VR technology to help people with PTSD and anxiety. And finally, Michael is an avid philanthropist.

• 6:11Rich Roll?

  He's worked in many capacities, as a United Nations global advocate on behalf of refugees. He's also the co-founder of Kids Clicking Kids, which distributes cameras to children in hospitals and encourages them to photograph their world, and many other philanthropic pursuits. So, this conversation is many things. It's a recap of Michael's unbelievable life, which is more adventure novel than resume. It's about creativity. It's about what drives him, his philosophies on work, passion, service, and the power of the image to shape culture.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  It's also keenly focused on preserving our oceans, specifically protecting our sharks.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  Over 100 million sharks are killed every year. And that number is really shocking. To put it in perspective, sharks kill about five people per year. Five people per year in comparison to the 100 million sharks that we kill every year. It's unreal. These apex predators are beyond vital to our ocean's ecosystem. And without them, as you'll soon learn, our oceans will crumble. But aside from environmental service and preservation, I really think this conversation is about what the great whites represent, which is fear. And the only way to overcome them is to move towards them.

• 7:37Rich Roll?

  Yes, I'm talking about literally swimming at them to face them head on. And it is with this that I give you Michael Muller. So I feel like we just had a whole experience together before the podcast.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  The experience.

• 7:58Rich Roll?

  We had that. We tried to get the VR working, the shark VR thing. We might be able to get it working mid podcast, in which case we'll take a break. But I really wanted to see that before we talk today.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Technology, gotta love it, right?

• 8:11Rich Roll?

  It's crazy. Well, I was just saying like, yeah, the whole Oculus thing is at a certain point where it's amazing, but also not super user friendly or it's kind of janky, right?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say this, if your sons or my daughters were here, you'd be watching it.

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they'd have it figured out for sure already.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Our generation, yeah, I don't know if it's the tech or just us, but yeah, I mean, you know, that's why Apple's been so successful, in my opinion. Simple, easy to use.

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  The user interface is always super intuitive.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Whenever I'm making like websites and stuff, I tell the developers and even ad clients, I'm like, people are, they're not dumb, but they're impatient. Like you gotta be, you know, when they go to a site or something, you gotta be able to get to it real quick.

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  You're trying to figure stuff out, you leave.

• 8:58Rich Roll?

  I know. And at like 53, forget about it, you know?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  That ship has sailed, so leave it to the kids. Well, listen, man, I'm, uh, I'm so excited to have you here. I've wanted to talk to you and meet you for a really long time, so thank you for coming out. I appreciate it, man.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Man, my pleasure.

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  Um, this morning I woke up and I opened up Twitter and I went, hit the, the discover tab to just see what the news was. And the number one trending story this morning was a shark attack on the Gold Coast. Did you see that?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  No, I was about to make a couple of jokes in my head. I was like, you know, political jokes were just going off firing.

• 9:36Rich Roll?

  But that actually makes my point even more strong, which is that, you know, the shark attack will always be the number one story. Despite all the craziness going on in the world right now, that's the number one story. And what got buried in that, cause I was reading about it, um, surfer, you know, attacked, lost his life, but it was the first shark attack like on that whole coastline in like over a decade.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Well, it was like the one a couple of weeks ago. Cause I was just like, I went to the Hamptons a couple of weeks on the East Coast and that everyone was talking about, cause the woman, you know, uh, got killed a couple of weeks back.

• 10:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  First time ever a shark attack. You know, this guy that you're talking about got attacked, lost his life or whatever. But if you look, you know, it's the first time in 10 years, probably before that, that might've been the first one, like the numbers are so.

• 10:27Rich Roll?

  Right. Out of whack. So one thing you always say is like, yeah, when you, we were all terrified of shark attacks. I swim in the ocean all the time, open water swimming and everyone is always like, what about sharks? What about sharks? Yeah, you have to bear it in mind, but the thing that you always say is there, that we're killing a hundred, something like a hundred million sharks a year.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's probably.

• 10:50Rich Roll?

  And then how many shark attacks are there a year?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, there's five deaths worldwide on average.

• 10:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  Five.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  Five.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  And you think about the probably trillions of people that are in the ocean in that year. Trillions, not, you know. What I do, cause I'll, I'll be out surfing, you know, out here in Point Dume, especially if it's like a gray cloudy day by myself or, you know, only one other guy out. And I'll get the heebie jeebies. Cause I'm playing, you know, when you're under, when I'm diving, I can see the sharks. Like I know my environment, I'm not here. When you're on the surface.

• 11:24Rich Roll?

  You don't know what's going on.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  That's, that's when they hit.

• 11:26Rich Roll?

  That's the fear because you can't see anything.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  And that deep, which is what led me to sharks to begin with, that deep, you know, ingrained fear that I have of this animal coming and attacking me. I'm like, oh, I can feel like I'll have the heebie jeebies. Like I can feel a shark in the area. I'm going to get attacked. It's going to bite my leg right now. And what I've learned to do, this is my trick to get that to go away is I go, okay, I am more likely to win the super lotto twice this month, not once, twice. More likely for that to happen and for a shark to attack me right now. And when I do those, those facts, it goes away. And I'm like, okay, it's, you know, it's not going to happen.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but jaws.

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Well, and if it does, you know what I mean? Like if a shark does attack me and if I die so be, I'd much rather die by great white death than by cancer or any of the other, seriously. I mean, you know what I mean? Like it's going to be quick and.

• 12:21Rich Roll?

  They'll be a good story.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  You just sort of let go and let the thing chomp and I'm going to help the circle of life and I'm going to feed this animal that's, I don't know, just acceptance of if that's the way to go. It actually is not that bad of a way to go. I don't think comparatively, comparatively speaking.

• 12:34Rich Roll?

  Do you know Paul DeGelder?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've had him on the show. He's a buddy. And it's just so cool that somebody who literally almost lost his life as a result of that has now devoted it to the preservation of the animal that almost killed him.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Mike Koots, Bethany, you can go down the list of shark attack victims, pretty much 99% of them. Are always in a, it seemed to always come out the other side, supporting the sharks, conservation, you know, I'm not, I'm not, you know, I don't blame the shark.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Rarely do you see someone that like lost their leg and they're like, I hate sharks. I want to kill them all. I haven't seen that yet on the news when you see these.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  It's a weird thing, right? That somebody who was almost killed by this animal then develops like a love affair with it.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Well, how many dogs, how many people died by, you know, dogs this year?

• 13:22Rich Roll?

  I guess, yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  Seriously. Icicles, icicles kill 670 people a year.

• 13:27Rich Roll?

  Kid out.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Icicles, not kidding you, falling from, mostly in Russia, but 670 people die from icicle death.

• 13:34Rich Roll?

  An exponentially higher number than shark deaths.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Way higher. There's, there's soda machine stats too. You know how many people die by soda machines?

• 13:43Rich Roll?

  That's a weird one. I'd heard that recently. They tip over on people.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. More than, more than sharks. So you should be scared when you're getting a soda, much more than Jaws.

• 13:53Rich Roll?

  So you mentioned the fear. Was that like a conscious thing? Like I'm afraid of sharks? So I'm going to move towards this?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  It was, you know, Jaws. It was a combination of Jaws, growing up surfing in Northern California, where the waters are populated by great whites. I mean, they would attack a seal with surfers out and everyone would go in and watch the shark and the blood in the water and two hours later, you know, go back out and surf again.

• 14:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  So I just had that fear and about 15, 16 years ago, I'm like, you know what? I want to, I want to see a great white. I want to photograph one. I want to go see, like I want to face it. Like I'm, and started saying.

• 14:28Rich Roll?

  Because of the fear or was that like the adventure impulse?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  It was sort of both, you know? I started diving at 10 years old in the Persian Gulf. I grew up in Saudi Arabia for four years and it was like untouched reefs. Actually, the first sort of photograph, when I saw the power of photography, I took a picture of a picture of a shark with my waterproof camera at like 11 and developed the film and then showed my buddies and told them I had taken it.

• 14:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  And they were like, no way. And then I had to like say, all right, it wasn't me. It was Nat Geo, but I saw their reaction.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  But the power of the image to inspire.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so.

• 15:04Rich Roll?

  Came early.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  You know, I started talking about my wife for my birthday, got me one of those cards, good for one shark trip, you know, which previously I'd never collected the, the race car or anything. And the next day I went down and signed up. Went down to Guadalupe, first one in the water, six in the morning. Still dark out.

• 15:20Rich Roll?

  Was that the IWC campaign? Or was that was prior to that?

• 15:24Speaker 01

  First trip, I was by myself and I was the first one in the cage and that shark came up five minutes in the water, comes up out of the darkness, swims by and where you are about that far from me and we locked eyes, just like I'm doing with you and my life changed. I was like, oh, I see you, you see me, you're not this mindless killing machine. Like it just from that moment. And on that trip, I was like hanging out of the cage by my waist and you know, which is like, God, I'd love to be out there, but I still, you know, had a fear. And at the same time I was shooting Michael Phelps and all the Olympians, I was doing the Speedo campaign, which I did for like nine years in a row. And a sort of combination of the two things,

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I was like, I wanna, I wanna light a shark like I do Iron Man. Like I wanna edge light it and studio light it. Well, I can't bring the shark to the studio. I gotta bring the studio the sharks. So I went online, figuring there would be lights. They didn't exist. It was 400 watt and then big movie lights. So, long story short, and then I could also do that with the swimmers and you know, surfing and all types of stuff. They didn't exist. So I set out to invent them. I'm like, well, I'm gonna have to make them. And you know, that's where fear comes in, in that place too. Like who are you to make a light? How are you, you're not gonna be able to make, you know, all that chatter starts happening. But you know, one thing led to another, met one guy who, you know, met a guy, actually got ripped off and I almost gave up. And then I met this guy who looked at me and was like,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I can do it. And I believed that he believed he could. And I'm like, all right, well, I'll give you a little bit of the money and then when you deliver, I'll pay you at all. We got a guy from NASA, a guy from JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratories, and we actually made the most powerful underwater strobe light. It's a pro photo, basically. And I received four or five patents on them. And I W C, the president was in town and I was putting their watches on celebrities. And so they came up to my house and I had showed him that one shark trip, the one trip that I'd done. And I told him about these lights that I'm making. And he gave me their Aqua Timer campaign on the spot, which was like nine months ahead.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And all of his employees looked at him like, you're giving this Hollywood portrait guy our underwater campaign. And, you know, at the time, I'm not David Dubilay or one of these award winning underwater guys. And I'm like, I'm gonna crush this. I'm gonna have these lights and everything. Mind you, the lights didn't exist at that point.

• 17:47Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  The day before we left to the Galapagos, the lights arrived. I jumped in my pool, fired them, they worked. And I went down to the Galapagos, very naive. I had done one shark trip, didn't really know any of the statistics. And we were with UNESCO and the Charles Darwin Foundation. And that's where I got educated on what was happening to our planet. And this is, you know, 15 years ago that we were killing 100 million sharks. Half the Great Barrier Reef was gone at the time. Now it's 60%, so we've already lost 10% in the last 15 years and all the other things.

• 18:18Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Yeah, it's so interesting. I mean, this is clearly your, you do lots of stuff, but this is, you know, your primary passion. And it seems, you know, in contrast to the other work that you do, but when you understand your full story, like looking backwards, you know, vision is always 2020. It seems to make perfect sense, right? You're taking all of this studio cred and all the acumen that you've developed over the years, like working with celebrities and these movie campaigns and commercial campaigns, and then bringing that to the natural environment to like light these sharks underwater, to create these images that are truly like iconic. I mean, I was just looking at your book right now. It's just stunning.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Well, that's sort of, on that trip, I went up to the roof of the boat one night and the stars were out. And I said to myself, I have three daughters and I looked, I said, I don't think my kids are gonna be able to see some of this stuff, you know, the whale sharks I was seeing and the schools, the hammerhead. And, you know, I still had that fear, right? So I went from one cage dive with great whites down with no cages and hundreds of hammerhead sharks and Galapagos sharks, you know, and like, I sort of got thrown into it. But I said, you know, I don't think they're gonna see this. So I made a decision. And that's, I think, anything in life, it starts with that decision, you know, I'm gonna start biking or whatever it is, I'm gonna, you know, create an app that's gonna change the world, right? So I made this decision that I'm gonna do everything

• 19:41Speaker 01

  I could to help sharks. That was the, of all the issues in the ocean, I'm gonna help sharks and do everything I can to raise as much awareness, as much money, to help this animal that's been so misconstrued by movies and news. And the idea for that book hit me that, on that trip at that same time, I'm like, I'm gonna do a book. And I saw the sharks coming out of light, because I hadn't taken the lights yet and gone to do great whites or anything. And I'm like, if people see a shark in a way they've never seen them before, it's gonna make them stop and look. And then I can educate them. And I'm like, I want to do a Taschen book, you know, this is 10 years before I got the Taschen deal. But, you know, the idea, that seed, at least in my life, I see it. So I'm

• 20:24Speaker 01

  like, all right, I'm gonna do a book, and it's gonna come in a cage, and all this stuff. And it might take a decade, but as long as I'm walking towards that vision, it usually manifests. It's amazing how powerful our minds are to, you know, bend reality and manifest, you know, what we want in our lives, which, in my, in my opinion, or, you know, for me, it was to help our planet and help, help this next generation.

• 20:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And by picking a very specific thing to focus on, you can have more impact than just being like, hey, I'm an environmentalist at large, right? Like, what does that actually mean? Whereas this is very directed, and is pointing people in a specific direction to really reframe How they think about like their relationship to this animal that we fear that is a, you know, the apex predator of the planet.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, and it also takes an amazing wife and daughters that supported me because I did 36 expeditions, you know, that are self-funded. So I'm spending my own money on these trips. You know, it's not cheap to charter boats and bring film crews. But, you know, thank God for Marvel because I was, you know, shooting all these big movie campaigns.

• 21:31Rich Roll?

  They underwrite the whole thing for you.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Well, they were paying me well and I would take that money instead of buying a bigger home or more cars and go do shark trips.

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So when you have that first experience with that shark and your eye to eye, like you said, your life changed. Like, what was it about that? Like, what did you see there that shifted you? Like, I want to know, I want to understand that better.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Which you will shortly.

• 21:53Rich Roll?

  That's the moment, right?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  You will shortly when I jack you into that VR.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Because it's the closest thing to being there without getting wet you'll ever do. That was the problem I had was how do I change people's perceptions? Because that's what it is. It's a perception shift. With photos, it's extremely difficult because you look at that photo of the shark and you're like, yeah, that's cool and it's beautiful, but it doesn't really help shift the fear. Even you might hear my experience.

• 22:19Rich Roll?

  It might make me more afraid.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Might make you more afraid, right? TV, little bit better. You might have a little bit more of a chance changing people's perceptions watching a box. But what I found happened, and it's the most powerful, was every year I've taken, not every year, but quite a few trips, I've taken out friends, a lot of them sort of influencer types, actors and athletes, to Guadalupe, put them on a boat, actually in different parts of the world, and brought them to see the sharks. My wife's a perfect example. So I brought her out with Philippe and Ashlyn Cousteau and his organization. We went out to Guadalupe and my wife, it's an 18-hour boat trip, cried almost the whole way. I'm gonna die. I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm so irresponsible. You know, of course, it's going to be the wife of Mike that dies, you know?

• 23:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  And I'm just like, okay, babe. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second dive, I think it was she was not out of the cage with her flippers on, but standing on top of the cage, holding the chain. I thought she was going to jump on the back of the shark and swim away. That's how fast. Her perception shifted and that goes for pretty much everyone that I'd bring out. They would go out.

• 23:24Rich Roll?

  So what's happening though? What causes that shift? Like what is, what is transpiring that defies the, the preset in the mind?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think one is you're not seeing what we've seen so many times in the movies, which is this, you know, shark that just wants to kill you and, you know? And they're watching me and my team out of the cage, interacting with these animals. And you can clearly see that these great whites really aren't, you know, trying to kill us. They're, they're incredibly smart. They are apex predators. You have to have a tremendous amount of respect because, you know, they will kill you if you're, if you, if you're scared or act like prey. Yeah. But I, I can't tell you what's happening. What, what's happening, all I can give you is my experience is that I saw this animal in a different light than I did, you know, watching the movies.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, it's not what I was projected.

• 24:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You had mentioned in something that I read that, that you can clearly see a difference in personalities across, like every shark has its own personality and you start to individuate and notice that.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yep. And, and genders, you know, the females versus the males, you know? Females are always a lot bigger. They're more chill. They're more, you know, in, in, inquisitive, whereas the boys are aggressive and just sort of like, swimming around fast and, and just sort of like people, but they all are a little different and you, you really assess the animals when, when they come up. And, you know, here's, here's all other sharks. Here's tiger sharks and hammerhead, like, you know, tiger sharks, we have to like bait them to come in because they don't want anything really usually to do with us. You know, in Hawaii, different parts, they will, they'll come right up. But for the most part, sharks swim the other way when they see people. You know, we're chumming the water and putting fish out so they'll come in.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  So that's pretty much every other shark. And then there's great whites, right? So great whites are ambush predators. So when you swim with great whites outside of the protection of a cage. It's not the shark that you see, because I'll be out of the cage and there'll be a twenty, fifteen foot, whatever, seventeen foot, where the wall is, that far, like, right there. And I look over, as long as we have eye contact, I'm not even thinking about, I mean, I am, but I'm not. My head's like this, on a swivel, looking around, because eventually, I'm gonna usually look down, and I'm gonna see that tail going, two and a half tons, going about twenty miles an hour, coming up at me, like a missile. So they're coming, which I then have to turn

• 25:57Speaker 01

  and swim head on at the shark coming at me at twenty miles an hour. And the minute I start swimming towards it, it really, it looks at me and says, I don't like you, you're a potential predator, and banks off.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  Wow. But that takes some serious balls. So

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Now, how do you learn?

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  If it's charging you, you gotta charge at it.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is, you know, and that's the thing, there isn't like, learn to swim with great white school, you know, and this isn't, um, this is, you know, years and hundreds and thousands of hours underwater with all different types of other sharks. And my mentor, this, this man, Mornay Hardenberg, who's in South Africa, he's the one that taught me the skills of swimming with white sharks out of the cage. And how I learned that was about six years ago, I was out of the cage and my flippers were down, I was like this with my camera, and I see a shark coming at me, like, full speed. And I grabbed my camera, and I remember in my head going like, alright, rubber meets the road, here we go. Like, I'm ready, holding my camera, I'm looking down. And off this shoulder, Mornay goes head on at it, holding his red camera with the two arms and the lights, and goes straight on at it. And I

• 27:02Speaker 01

  watched the shark bank off, and the first thought was, that's the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. Second thought was, he just saved my life. Third thought was, looks like that's what you do. And when we got up to the surface, he said, okay, listen, when they come at you, you have to turn and swim head on at them, right? Which goes against everything in your, you know, especially after spending five, six years with them from the cage, watching those teeth and how fat, I'm like, okay. The next day, we were out of the cage, and we had two of them come at us, one at him, one at me. I had no choice. So I did it. I'm like, alright, here we go.

• 27:35Rich Roll?

  If you freeze your prey.

• 27:37Speaker 01

  If you freeze, you're done. So here's what happens. So everything in the ocean, besides orcas, swim away from that animal. So everything, like, freaks out, everything. So the minute you start swimming towards it, That's not something they're used to seeing.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, nothing touches that animal. So if you go up and even give it a little pinch, it's just gone.

• 27:58Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Gone.

• 27:59Rich Roll?

  What about the, you always hear, you're supposed to punch them in the nose. Is that a myth?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, urban myth.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Well, here's what happens if you punch them in the nose. Punch.

• 28:09Rich Roll?

  Your hand's going.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  No, that mouth opens up, which is really wide. So one of the things I do is before I have a, an expedition where I know I want to be, you know, outside of the cage with white sharks. For the weeks leading up, in my mind, sort of like baseball players visualize, I visualize that shark not turning and what I'm going to do and how I'm going to twist my body and hit my, you know, use my camera to bump the side of its gills on the sides, which I've only had to do one time. And, and all of the, the diving and all the times I've spent with great white sharks, one time a shark came by and he looked like he was going this way. And at the last minute, his head went like that. My daughter, my 10 year old was in the cage watching behind me. So I was not taking any chances. I just gave it a little tap right when its head moved and swam off.

• 28:55Rich Roll?

  But never been bit? I mean, is that the closest call?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Never even been really close to being bit.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  Right. Wow.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  But you do have to be, you know, with the chum in the water, you have to be really aware of your, of your surroundings because, you know, a piece of fish can float by your arm.

• 29:10Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  You know, and the shark's going for that fish and, you know, catches your arm. Um, and, you know, for years, people would ask me like, why do you do this? Are you an adrenaline junkie? Was usually the common tag that would go with why I was doing this. And I couldn't really, I couldn't quantify, I couldn't answer them why I was doing it. And I'd be like, no, no, it's not an adrenaline junkie thing. And then a couple of years ago, I don't know, four or five years ago, I was underwater. I was with the sharks and it hit me. I mean, it hit me like a bolt of lightning. I'm like, oh my God. This is why I do this, because it was really the only time in my life that I felt like I was really in the moment, like in the moment, truly. You know, nothing else is going on. And I was like, oh, my God. And the hairs on my arms stood up in my

• 29:55Speaker 01

  wet suit. And I was like, wait, I don't want to have to swim with sharks to have this, this experience. I want this on land, too, which led me down a path of mindfulness and meditation and seeking that, that experience out, which I, it's a practice that I try to do daily of as much as I can of being right here, right now, in the moment, and not up here in the future in fear. Yeah. Because I, once I started this project, I thought I was sort of a fearless guy. And I really had no idea how much fear, you know, ran my life. But smaller things like, you know, jobs and work and little things, and then how much I would react on it. Just robotically, send an email, do this, try to do stuff, try to make the headset work.

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Instead of just being like, it's all cool.

• 30:43Rich Roll?

  And finding, finding presence in the most treacherous environment. Like, we think of mindfulness in the context of, you know, a calm, quiet environment. But it's fear that brings us into the moment.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  More than anything, right?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I gotta say, for me, the more chaos and like, when I'm on my shoots and there's a hundred people and people are, what do you want? And that's the most calm.

• 31:07Rich Roll?

  You're like a Jedi?

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'm like, who, when I'm at home and my daughter starts having some emotional meltdown or whatever, that's when I'm just like, ah, right, too.

• 31:18Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's crazy. How old was your daughter when she first swam with sharks?

• 31:22Speaker 01

  So I have, I have three girls. I have a 16 year old and twin 13 year olds. Clara, the eldest, she started doing Great White Chasm at nine and a half. I got them certified at like nine and a half, 10, sort of fudge their birthdays. And she's done four Great White expeditions with me. And she literally asked me last year, she's like, I want to go out of the cage. And I was like, I bet you do. Well, we'll talk in 10 years after you put in all the time with all the other sharks. You have to earn that, even though there's a part of me that so badly wants to take her out of the cage.

• 31:54Rich Roll?

  I mean, my daughters are the same age. I got two daughters, 16 and 13, and I'm trying to visualize them doing something like, I'm trying to visualize myself doing something like that. Like, that's, it's just, that's super cool.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I grew up, my father, you know, we, I lived, like I said earlier, I lived in Saudi Arabia for four years and traveled to 60 countries before I started high school. And, um, and it was one of the best. So when you're there, when you live in Saudi Arabia, they pay you three times your salary, free homes and all that. Most people just bank a bunch of money. And my dad was like, uh-uh, like this is the one and only time we're going to travel and see the world. And every three months, we had a big wall map. We're like, oh, let's go to India. Let's try to travel.

• 32:33Rich Roll?

  So you had gone to like 50 countries by the time you were in high school.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I think that's, you know, what planted that seed. As a photographer, I travel a lot, you know, now since been to close to 200 countries, but it's something I try to do with my, my family a lot and show them the world, sort of open their eyes to how good we have it here. So there's a lot of countries that, you know, people I think really take it for granted in America, like how, how blessed we are. I mean, we have our fair share of issues. And in recent days and months and years, they're, they're growing by the day. But we have an amazing country here and it's just cool to see the world and all the different cultures out there.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  How old were you when you moved to Saudi Arabia?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Third grade.

• 33:28Rich Roll?

  Third grade. What, what city did you move to?

• 33:30Speaker 01

  My dad built, was building a city called Jubail. It was at the time the world's largest construction project. He worked for a company called Bechtel, a big construction, you know, one of the, it's like Bechtel or Ramcon floor. And he was the project manager. It was like, you know, building a massive, massive city. So.

• 33:46Rich Roll?

  I've traveled throughout Saudi Arabia, been to a bunch of cities there and spent some time in Bahrain.

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:54Rich Roll?

  And what I didn't realize that I learned when I was there was that at one time Bahrain had some of the most amazing coral reefs anywhere and the oil trade has just devastated it.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  That's where I grew up. So Bahrain was right off Jubail.

• 34:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  We would take Dow boat, you know, the Dow, the wooden boats. So we'd take Dow boats out to Bahrain.

• 34:14Rich Roll?

  Right. Before the bridge was built or was the bridge?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, before. This is, this is like late seventies, early eighties, right? Before Sinon let all the oil into the Persian Gulf before this oil trade. And to this day, I can see those reefs. They're, they were the most untouched gorgeous reefs I've ever seen to this day.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's what I've heard. And they're gone.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  They're gone. And I remember when.

• 34:36Rich Roll?

  The tanker, they had to, didn't they have to troll it so that it was deep enough for the tankers? I don't know exactly what.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know all, there's probably a bunch of different reasons why it's gone. I just remember Desert Storm and the war, what affected me the most. I remember CNN showing the beach with the waves crashing, the oil waves. And I just saw those reefs wiped out and I just was, it crushed me. I was like, oh my God, those reefs are all gone.

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  That's where you learned to scuba dive though.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's where I learned to scuba dive and, you know, grew up watching Cousteau and that sort of also planted.

• 35:09Rich Roll?

  Right. So the, so dad had the adventure gene.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And photography was his hobby. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he had all the Nycromats and Nicons and the glass and gave me my first F4. And I moved back to the United States in seventh grade and started shooting snowboarding. It was just starting. Like literally it was the inception of the smart and started shooting snowboarding when I was like 15 and getting published. And me and my best friend at the time, who was from Europe, so his parents sort of thought gave him his college tuition. And we started the first snowboarding calendar, which the first year we lost our shirts. Second year broke even, then started actually making- When you were in high school? Yeah. So you were in like, where were you, but you were living in Lafayette, right? Yeah. So like traveled to Europe at 16, just the two of us, shooting pro snowboarders.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And we'd drive to Colorado. So growing up overseas, because we would get to like Hong Kong, and I'm 12 years old, and I would leave for two hours and come back and tell my parents, like, okay, the market's over here and this is there. Right. It's just a different time. Do that now, yeah. My heck, no. That's crazy. Yeah. And then, at some point, you become this like unbelievable triathlete. Yeah, yeah. This part of the story gets lost, but like, this is crazy. Yeah. You were like a champion triathlete, biathlete. It was at the same time. So in high school, you know, I, like 7th grade was the worst year of my life. Like, I mean, coming back from Saudi Arabia, all the other kids knew each other. I knew no one, had to like socially claw my way up, you know, the ladder. And

• 36:40Speaker 01

  sports wise, I started water polo, but a year behind all the other guys. I was as good as that, as the other guys, but wasn't getting played. And I was at swim team and this guy started telling me he was doing triathlons, swim, bike and run. And I was like, oh, I want to try that. And I went home and told my parents, like, are you serious? I'm like, yeah, I'm dead serious. And they got me a bike and I started riding. And we lived in the Berkeley Hills, so it was like a lot of hills. Good riding. And I would ride 50 miles a day and I was doing water pull and swimming. And I went and did my first triathlon, which was a half Ironman, the wildflower, which is- Yeah, I've done that race. It's a, that's a hard course. Frickin' gnarly. I didn't know any better though. So my first race is a half Ironman. And I get in 500 people start, there were 700 people start to swim. And I can, I remember

• 37:25Speaker 01

  to this day, this guy grabbing my shoulder to pull me back. And I'm coming out of water pull and I look back and just kicked him in the face. So I come out of the, I come out of the swim in fifth place overall pros and everything. My dad was like, what the F is going on? Like, no, there must be some problem, you know, some, my sons in fifth, go out on the bike, come back from the bike in ninth place. So literally, and this is out of everyone.

• 37:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  And then went out on the run and hot. Go out on the run, walk half of the, you know, 13 mile run and finish 99th overall and first in my age group and I was hooked. That was it.

• 38:01Rich Roll?

  That was it.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  I started doing them, you know, 15 to 20 of them every summer, which was the season. I had 19, 20 sponsors, you know, Revo sunglasses, Domino's pizza, side out sport. And, you know, placed fifth in the world at the world championships. Probably would have done a lot better, but I was heartbroken.

• 38:18Rich Roll?

  Wow. At Olympic distance?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Olympic distance and racing against Lance Armstrong a bunch. Cause that's when he started doing triathlons before bike racing. And yeah, so I would do triathlons in the summer and do photography.

• 38:31Rich Roll?

  And then did you, when did you, you moved to San Diego for a spell, right?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  So right when I graduated.

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  Tap into that community there?

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Senior year in high school, I would get out of school at 11 because of my triathlon to go train. So, uh, you know, when I graduated high school, the day after I graduated, like, you know, June 15th, I packed my car up, moved to San Diego, cause the two meccas of triathlon at the time were Boulder and San Diego. And went down there and had a triathlon team at the time. It was, I've always been a bit of an entrepreneur and, you know, like I said, all the sponsors I got myself, I'd go write, you know, and then I was also shooting, snowboarding and rock and roll. So the other thing I did in high school was I would write the labels and say that I was shooting for the local paper, the Contra Costa Times, the Contra Costa Sun to get the press pass.

• 39:19Rich Roll?

  Pass, right.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So I just go into rolling, you name the concert?

• 39:22Rich Roll?

  Like backstage at Shoreline and all those places?

• 39:25Speaker 01

  So I'm shooting rock and roll and I'm shooting, snowboarding, and then I'm doing my triathlons and I go to San Diego and, you know, I moved down to the beach and it's just party central. And I'm looking around at these guys that are like 21. I know I'm 17, 18 and I'm like, if I don't get out of here, I'm gonna end up a loser like these guys. And I'm like, what do I want to do? Swim, bike and run for 10 more years? And then what?

• 39:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of bandwidth for rock and roll when you're living that triathlon lifestyle. And you want to compete at that level.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  No, it was opposite. There wasn't a lot of bandwidth for triathlon because I was planning my life. I'm like, what am I gonna swim, bike and run for 10 years? And then what? So what do I want to do? I didn't do well in school. Like, I wasn't like going to Stanford or anything. So I'm like, photography, that's what I'm gonna do. So I packed up, went with my buddy from high school. We did the calendar, moved to Boulder, Colorado for a season. And I was just heartbroken from my high school sweetheart ripping my heart out and doing what they do at that first, that first love, you know? And then was in Boulder. He got a girlfriend, was doing his thing. And my best, one of my other best friends was in LA. He was a musician. He said, come to LA, come to LA. I packed up, moved here. I was 18.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  And the rest is sort of history. Started shooting, you know, model friends and actor friends and that sort of.

• 40:42Rich Roll?

  So you fell in pretty quickly into like the Leo and Balthazar crowd, right?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Balthazar.

• 40:49Rich Roll?

  When they were prowling.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  He was the first, first non-snowboarder. He was the first actor I shot. So I got here, Scott was really good friends with Balt and Davey. So I shot Balthazar and David Arquette. And then just friends, like we all went to the Formosa, all the under, it was the only part that was sort of the underage. But yeah, it was like Leo and Drew and, you know, and at that time, this is before the internet. And we filmed, you know, we just went, let's go take pictures, go shoot pictures, no publicists. Publicists only came about when the internet came about. And then bands, because I knew all those labels, right? From shooting the things. So when I got to LA, they were like, oh yeah, come on in. So I went and then I started shooting Spin. And I remember Spin called me to shoot some band called Green Day. And I'm like, Green Day? What is Green Day?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  I went up to Berkeley and we became like, you know, I shot all their stuff, shot their wedding, shot Millie Joe's wedding. I was the punk photographer when punks were the blue and rancid and all those boys.

• 41:46Rich Roll?

  That's crazy. It seems like it happened really seamlessly and quickly.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it did. It's like. You have to have the talent. I think I, you know, I never went to school, so I didn't learn the rules, you know. I also, because I was like, how am I going to learn to shoot people, right? I was shooting and snowboarding and I found out about testing models, right? Because I was like, I don't ever want to assist. I don't want to watch you doing something I want to do to learn how to take. But no, I can do this. So I figured that models need portfolios, right, to go and get jobs. So I started testing models and I did a few for free and then I started charging 50 a roll, you know, and then 100 a roll and 150. But every one of those shoots, I treated like it was the cover of Vogue or the cover.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  And I would be like, okay, I got to do six different looks within a three block radius and I would dress them. And then I was shooting my actor friends, which were, you know, it was like Leo before Titanic and Drew and then.

• 42:44Rich Roll?

  But you're on the inside. You have their trust. So you could, you could.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  No, I didn't have their trust.

• 42:49Rich Roll?

  Go to their house parties and all that kind of stuff.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  I earned their trust because I would get, I would have photos that I could have made a lot of money with the National Enquirer, but I didn't because you do that once, you might get a good payday, but you're never gonna, you know, people aren't gonna trust you. So I was their friends. So I would, you know, shoot stuff and shoot at parties and do stuff, but I would, you know, I would obviously have that compass of knowing.

• 43:10Rich Roll?

  Right. There's a boundary there.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Well, there is. Yeah. And, yeah. And then I got agents and started shooting, you know, the rest, sort of.

• 43:18Rich Roll?

  And never like technically trained, never apprenticed.

• 43:21Speaker 01

  No, I went to Otis Parsons for one semester. They gave me advanced placement because of my snowboarding work as a junior or whatever.

• 43:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  And I was like, what do I need a diploma for? Do I need to show this to jobs? And they're like, no, just if you want to be a teacher. And I'm like, okay. And I got paid to learn by these models, you know, because I was trying new films and doing different things like that.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  And how does the studio work start to happen? I mean, didn't that begin with you starting to photograph like the superheroes outside of the Chinese theater?

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Studio work started happening in the second lifetime of my career.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  So

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  I'm in my twenties. I'm shooting Young Hollywood. I'm shooting all the rock and roll. This is early nineties Nirvana and you know, young kids in Hollywood with money and success. And you know, I like everyone I knew at the time started doing drugs. Had a big ego that like, cause I was triathlon mental, like I would, you know, nothing's gonna, I'm never gonna have a problem. And, and you know, formed a drug habit that you know, got me by the back.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  What was the, what was the drug choice?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  L A is the problem. I'm gonna move to New York.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The geographic.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  That was great. The geographic. Yeah. You know, this is the problem. I'm not realizing that I'm taking the problem everywhere I go because Michael's the problem. That took years to learn that.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So that played itself out over a while, a long, long, how many years?

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was like, you know, four or five years. I was smart enough to go like, okay, I've got a drug problem here. If I don't put my camera down, I'm gonna burn every bridge. And I made a conscious decision to like, be like, okay, if I'm gonna be a drug addict, I'm gonna be a professional drug addict. And that sort of happened in New York.

• 45:12Rich Roll?

  Same triathlon mindset.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 45:14Rich Roll?

  All in.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. But in the back of my head, I sort of knew, I just knew I was gonna find my way to the other side. You know, my dad was got cancer, diagnosed with cancer. So he started to, you know, die from cancer. That was sort of the end of my using. And when he, you know, passed away, I moved back to Northern California. You know, got arrested one last time and he passed away and I got out and that was sort of it. I, you know, started going to 12 step program.

• 45:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So that was the, the bottoming out was just your dad passing? Was that the moment?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, that was a really pivotal moment. I think I had so much shame and guilt that what I had let happen to me that, you know, I, I felt like, I don't know if I would have ever gotten sober if he hadn't passed. Because it was so bearing on me. You know, I had this great career and this life that I'd built and I, you know, sort of flushed it all down the toilet. And, you know, when I remember like got sort of got my, started this second, got sober, whatever, the new part of my life in Sacramento. And I remember going there. I'm like, I, I'm, I'm staying here six months and I'm moving back to L A. Like this is the armpit of California. Don't you know who I am? And I've shot Leo and Drew and.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  And I ended up staying, I remember two years, because when six months came, I was like, I'm not ready to go back to LA. But I milked Sacramento for all it was worth.

• 46:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, did you go there for treatment? Or why'd you go to Sacramento?

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sort of. I went there, I went there under the tutelage of like a spiritual advisor, and then got introduced to 12 step stuff. So got into all that and then started shooting, and started shooting all the local bands, and was, and then started slowly making trips down to LA and went into Von Dutch, because I was shooting all these bands and I loved their clothes. The owner saw my portfolio, took me to lunch.

• 47:01Rich Roll?

  Tony?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Huh?

• 47:02Rich Roll?

  Tony?

• 47:03Speaker 01

  Tony?

• 47:03Rich Roll?

  No, Tony isn't Tony. Oh, who is, there's a guy named Tony that I thought was running.

• 47:08Speaker 01

  There was a guy named Mike Cassell, and then this Taekwondo Swedish guy named Tony, who were the two owners of Von Dutch.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, that's the guy.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  There's a lot of politics, and then Tony kicked Mike out and brought in Christian Adjulair, or whatever, and the Tom Hardy, all that good stuff. But the Von Dutch campaign came out, I mean, like Paris Hilton came in for it. But that campaign launched and sort of put me back on the map, and the ad agencies started calling, and I started doing these like big course campaigns, with giving me the money to come back. So I moved back to LA, and I remember I was like, you know, two years into this new life of mine. And when I was up in Sacramento, I was, you know, dating, just dating a lot of girls. But being really honest, this is, I'd be like, listen, I'm not emotionally available. I'll take out on dates, we'll have fun, but that's all I can give you. And they're like, yeah, yeah, cool. And then like six weeks or a couple.

• 48:00Rich Roll?

  Chaos ensues.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  They'd be like, I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry, I have feelings for you, but you told me. But I'll tell you, my guy, the one thing my spiritual advisor gave me, which saved my life in a lot of regards, was he looked at me, he says, do you know what you're looking for in a wife? And I'm like, yeah, yeah. He's like, what? And I gave him the generic, you know, I don't know, funny, he's like, no, no, no, you're gonna go home tonight, you're gonna write down the 10 core principal things you want in a wife. And I was like, okay. And I did. And I was like, you know, good relationship with dad, no kids, I want to create a family, not marry into one, you know, has her own life, spiritual, made all these things. And I shortly thereafter met this girl who was like a hairstylist and a porn girl, and I was like, oh, she might be the one.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  She had two kids on my list. I'm like, you're not the one. So I moved back to LA. Two months into moving back, I met my wife to this, you know, who's my wife now. And it was like, check, check, check, check, check.

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  And that was it.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Altazar and his wife Rosita were actually the

• 49:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  The ones who I met. But that list, because I look back in retrospect, you can never, like you just said earlier.

• 49:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, my God, if I hadn't made that list and what would that I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you right now.

• 49:12Rich Roll?

  Who's that spiritual advisor?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Just to

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  You're being cryptic about that, but like, I want to know about that guy.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  No one knowing you would know. I've had, I've had many of those over the years. And I'll tell you, those are the, those mentors that have, you know, there's, there's been a dozen, you know, there's been a bunch that have given me those, and, you know, it's just a matter of being open and seeking, you know, it's like the, the Kabbalists say, the, the darker, the darker you are, the more opportunity of light to reveal, right? So I went really dark, which means on this new path, I'm seeking the light like no other.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but the darkness is the teacher. You know what I mean? When I think of a photographer of your caliber, I think of a particular kind of lifestyle. Lots of women, lots of parties, and you did all that. You had your moment with that. And now you have this kind of spiritual path where you're into all this holistic stuff and the environmentalism. And I know you're part of like the Laird and Gabby morning workout with the Wim Hof breathing and the ice baths and like all the stuff that you do to, you know, be this, you know, be the most authentic, best version of who you are. So you can express yourself and share your, your gift and raise your family and, you know, be the man that, you know, you're meant to be.

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, one of the, one of the sort of aha moments was the realizing the PTSD that I had that I didn't know. I used to

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's talk about that. I mean, I, you know, I've read that you've had that and that you deal with that. But what is the origin of that?

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Well, I thought you had to go to Vietnam to have PTSD. You know, I was naive, like PTSD. I don't have PTSD. I remember when I first, the first time I started doing, you know, therapeutic work with my, you know, with the counselor, I was looking at my trauma egg. And I'm like, yeah, it's not that bad. He looked at me and was like, Michael. I work with like soldiers that come right off Afghanistan and you've seen more shit than 95% of them. Like, don't think for a second that you don't have some serious issues. So, you know, when you have PTSD, there's big P and small p, um, which I've learned a lot from Andrew Huberman and

• 51:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  different people about fear and just different things. But, um, uh, when you, when you see anything that's perceived death, death, or near death experiences imprint you, right? And I have a different emotional reaction than, say, a normal person or a person that doesn't. So like, when my wife yells, it, like, I, I feel like I'm dying. Like, it's crazy, this emotional reaction. And if you don't deal with those emotions, it's like a pressure cooker, stuff, stuff, stuff, explode, right? Or medicate, right? You know, which I think if you look at the, the core reason why people abuse drugs, they're medicating pain. Uh, I'd say probably 95% of them.

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Speaker 01

  That's why they're taking drugs. They want to medicate, they want to numb that pain. Now, that's one way of, of going through this life. You can numb the pain, right? And then you're numbing all the joy, you're numbing all the happiness, you're numbing everything. Uh, or you can realize those wounds, right? Bandage, patch, let them heal, look at them as scars. Like, I have a scar on my face that I see every time I look in the mirror. It's there, but do I still feel that fence ripping open? Mm-mm. Doesn't affect me. Uh, but that takes work. That takes looking at those wounds. Uh, where the origins, I had a lot of childhood trauma, um, you know, from emotional, physical abuse, uh, you know, uh, and then, uh, those

• 52:39Speaker 01

  dark years that I was, you know, abusing the drugs, I saw and did a lot of things that were just dark, just.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  One of the things you do, uh, in the trauma therapy I did is, is a trauma egg, and you start from your first, you know, your first memory of any near death or, you know, and had a big piece of paper, about half the size of this table, and started with a circle down here, circles, and I literally almost filled the egg up with these, you know, near or death that I'd seen, people being killed, whatever it might be. And you know, I still looked at that, like I was saying, and was like, eh, it's not that bad. You know, I didn't, it's not that bad.

• 53:14Rich Roll?

  You didn't drive your Humvee over and, you know, an IED.

• 53:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:17Rich Roll?

  It's more like death by a thousand cuts, right? Like these just, these incidences that would recur in your life that accumulate over time to create this situation.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  And everyone, everyone has them. You, life, you have these experiences in life, right? That are traumatic and that are.

• 53:35Rich Roll?

  Who helped you realize this? Were you working with a therapist or?

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, like I said, all those different, you know, different spiritual people or mentors over the years that have guided me. How did I find out about trauma? I, I had a guy that I was working with in a 12 step program, come over to my house, looked at me and he was like, listen, Michael, I don't think I can help you. And this guy had worked with like Mike Tyson and different people. And he said, you have something that's beyond, which took a lot for him because the ego said, I can help, you know, and he had the humility to look at me and said, I can't help you. I think you have something that's beyond my skill set.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  Was it, was it Howard?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Well, this person, I'm going to remain nameless, but he said, I want you to call this guy. So I cold called this guy, West, and he was a guy who was 25 years sober with a gun in his mouth. He also had, you know, PTSD that he didn't know about. And he told me this story and he's like, Michael, it changed my life. And then he gave me the number of my first trauma therapist named Ryan Suave, who I called Ryan. And he actually flew out here and we spent four days together out in Malibu, 24 hours a day, doing therapeutic work.

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And it was one of the gnarliest experiences of my life. Like it was extremely tough, you know, for breath work, meditating, like hour and a half long sessions a day. Like it was hardcore. And that was my first. And, you know, now I do some EMDR work, which is another form of trauma therapy where you're looking at a, a thing, your eyes going back and forth.

• 55:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  And it's, it's been really cool because I, I talk about it and there's been, you know, a number of people that have come up to me and said, I can't thank you enough. I didn't know anything about it and I actually had it and I've addressed it and I can't tell you my life is, you know, and that's, that's what it's all about. And when you can really sort of pass on what was sort of so freely given to me.

• 55:32Rich Roll?

  And so how, how is it for you now? Does it still show up? Like, is it something that you just unconsciously have, you know, sort of resort to these tools to manage it? Or is it quelled and kind of in your past?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Daily practice.

• 55:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 01

  No, man, I'm stuck with Michael till, till I, till I'm off to the next one.

• 55:50Rich Roll?

  When the wife yells, the bells still go off.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  They, they do. And, you know, I, something I'm working on, like literally today is not reacting, not taking it personal, not like realizing it's her thing. It's not mine. It's, it's just me. I want to take it. Oh my God. And when I do that, when I don't react, it's freaking amazing what happens because I don't know about your wife, but wives like to pull the pin and throw a grenade, right? An emotional grenade that just blows up. You're like, where did that come from? Why are you blowing me up? And when I react, it just, it lasts all night, right? And when I don't, it's crazy because she'll throw the grenade or she'll say the things and then two minutes later she's like, hey, love, come over here. And I'm just like, what?

• 56:34Rich Roll?

  You're uninstalling the buttons.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 56:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:39Rich Roll?

  That's powerful.

• 56:40Speaker 01

  And, and you know, one of the things as being a parent is this, you feel this need to protect your kids from any of those traumatic experiences. Like, oh, I don't want them to feel that. I, I don't want them, you know, or at least sometimes my wife will do it. And I'm more like, they need to go through these things. The only way to learn is for their friends to diss them and not invite them to that party. So they realize what it feels like when they don't invite people to things.

• 57:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's a conundrum because the most interesting people that I know have had those dark moments of the soul and have figured out for themselves how to, you know, repair their lives. And they come out of it and become these incredibly interesting, amazing. Productive people. And then, you know, you sort of have some success and you're able to provide for your kids in a certain way that maybe you weren't able to have. And by doing that, you're depriving them of certain life experiences that can be formative in the most positive way.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then you also, I know I have to own the things that I've passed on that I go, oh my God. Cause I think in my head, I had that illusion like, I'm never gonna do the things my parents did. I'm gonna be this great dad. And then, you know, in retrospect, I'm like, fuck, I wasn't perfect. You know?

• 57:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. My daughters let me know every day.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. But what the beautiful thing is, I do have today, you know, I have this moment to either undo or do things differently and, you know, try to fix. I have, you know, pretty good, amazing relationships with my daughters. I hear from other fathers that get the hand or whatever, get the door slammed, which would suck. I don't, but I've, you know, that was a choice. I remember when Clara was six months old, a couple of studio heads, different people told me, they were like, they had missed, they were working all the time. They missed their kids growing up and they were getting remarried and they had their new baby and they're like, Michael, don't do it. And I've made a conscious decision. I did a job when Clara was six months, a Nike gig in Greece, whatever, and missed the vacation or left for part of it.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And I was like, eh, it sort of sucked. From that moment on, I've made a decision that when I'm on vacation, like no matter what comes up, I'm with my kids. And probably passed on some of the biggest jobs of my life doing that. Also going to all my kids' games when I'm in town, but what I have today is a relationship with my daughter. I don't get the hand, I don't get the door slammed. I mean, are they perfect? By no means.

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  That's beautiful, man.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  We should, uh, we should jack you into some VR.

• 59:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, let's do the VR. We'll take a quick break and report back.

• 59:22Rich Roll?

  We're back. I just had the VR experience. That was insane.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 59:26Rich Roll?

  That's my first legitimate VR experience, period. But then to have it be your work and just to have that experience of being underwater, immersed, surrounded by these creatures. I mean, it was magical, man.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:42Rich Roll?

  It's crazy. Is that publicly available? Like, what is the?

• 59:46Speaker 01

  It's going to be, you know, it's, it was a year and a half crisscrossing the planet, capturing all that, you know, that bait ball, the sardine run is like the holy grail of

• 59:57Rich Roll?

  And where was that?

• 59:58Speaker 01

  Port St. John, like the armpit of Africa. Port St. John's, it's, it's one of these, you know, you see it on like Blue Planet and stuff.

• 1:00:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  It is so hard to actually get on one because it's 20 miles of ocean, right? And, you know, you'll see the birds funneling down, but if the, if the bait ball is moving, right, you can't do it. So you need the bait ball to stay static. You need the dolphins. You need the, you need everything to come together. So it's taken me three years, multiple trips, right? 12 hours at sea in a Zodiac all day long, looking for it, right? Because you'll see, and then you'll race over, we have a spotter plane, but the plane's like seeing it happen. It takes you a half hour to get there in a Zodiac. Anyways, and with this new technology, so the only way to shoot VR was with GoPros underwater VR, right?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  Which is GoPros. And I'm like, I am not making the Blue Planet a VR on GoPros. So I had these, I met this company Virtue who had figured out how to do stereoscopic, but this is like the first iteration of it. 120 pounds, the camera was this big with 14 black magic cameras. And it was sort of a science experiment, right? So if one camera went down, you lost the whole, you lost it all.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  Right, because then you don't have the stereo.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Which happened on a number of dives, right? So on the sardine run, I was just so many, so stressed. I'm like, that can't happen. Like, I don't get a second chance with this. And I just remember we were, we were in the boat and I saw some birds starting to drop. And it wasn't like a big amount. It wasn't like the one where you're like, that's the one. And Mornay was like, I don't really, I'm like, well, I'm going like, I don't care. I'm gonna, he's like, okay, two, I'm gonna, and we came up and came up on it, which the Brewster whale hit, we had a thirty six minute bait ball, like just the two of us, one of the best dives of my life. The Brewster whale came like three feet from me and hit the bait ball. We hadn't seen Brewster whales in eight years. It was like the cherry on top. And I remember putting the camera up, I'm like, please tell me, please tell me that they're all running. And they were like,

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  they're all working. I'm like, ah, because to this day, it would, I would have, it would bug me to show you that and be like, oh, I wish you had seen.

• 1:02:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. And you're a pilot too?

• 1:02:11Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:02:12Rich Roll?

  Who's flying that little sea plane?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  The, the MicroLite, like I was more scared to get in that than to not kidding you than any shark thing. Dude, it's like an iPhone for your GPS. I sent my producer up in it. I sent like four people up before I went up in the thing. And then of course I told the pod, I'm like, dude, don't try to impress me. Like you don't need to fly two feet off the water and do any, I don't need that.

• 1:02:35Rich Roll?

  It's like a go kart.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Of course he did it because if you go down there, there's no coast guard in this part of Africa. Like you're done. Like, and it is the most shark infested. Like he's up there and he sees great whites on the surface. Like there's sharks all over the place there. So we spent a year and a half doing that. And then, uh, you know, VR is such, I'm like a couple of years ahead of like, it's just, it's in its infancy.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  And we just didn't know what, we knew we're sitting, I'm sitting on this mountain of footage and this mountain of IP, but you know, the, the outlets for it are just sort of discovering themselves.

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Until everybody has an Oculus, like how are you supposed to enjoy it? I mean, you can watch it on your phone and move your phone around, but that's not the experience that

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  No, but that is a cool experience. So that's one of the things that most of the VR haven't done. So we're putting it out on mobile. So everyone will be able to watch it on your phone, which is cool because not everyone has a headset. But since COVID started, you can't buy headsets. They're sold out everywhere.

• 1:03:32Rich Roll?

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  And everyone's, I think, just sort of sick of Netflix and all the shows that they've seen. So they're grabbing their headset. Well, let me see what's on here. So we have, it's done. We're talking with, and I don't know if, we're in the talks with a huge brand to sponsor the series. They're a little bit, or the middle, it's a little bit dragging its feet, so I might just have to release it without them attached. I really want them attached, but it's going to come out in the next month or two.

• 1:04:02Rich Roll?

  Right. So it's not publicly available right now?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  But soon.

• 1:04:05Rich Roll?

  So there's an entertainment component to it. It is like the, you know, the blue planet of VR experiences underwater. But there's a therapeutic component to this as well, which is where Dr. Andrew Huberman enters, right? So when he was on the podcast, he was sharing a little bit about it, and he was doing it in the context of explaining how he was using this modality to help people confront and work through their fears. We were talking about David Goggins and his fear of sharks, and he was, you know, basically had an experience with your work. But how did you connect with Andrew? And what is the, that aspect of this whole VR thing all about?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  That was like the universe transpiring is what that was. Because I had the idea for this about four years ago. I was sitting at LAX on my way to Antigua, and I was sort of done with sharks. I'd spent 15 years. I sort of did the book. I did some TV shows. I just was like, I don't know what else I can do, really. And it's so hard to change people's perceptions. That's I can bring, and I can't bring everyone, you know, and I'll still do a trip a year or whatever, but I'm not going to do what I've been doing. And I'm going to start my horse project, which I, my next book with Tashin is a horse book. And I'm sitting at LAX, and I'm like, VR, that's the future. And I'd never put a headset on, never tried it. I just was in my head going, that's the future. Where

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  do people want to explore? Space, NASA owns that, underwater, I own that. And I started... In my head, I'm like, it's a camera that has, it's a ball of cameras. So cameras pointing everywhere. So if I put that camera on a stick and it's pointing everywhere, I'm taking you with me. Hold on, I can take you on all the dives with me. And I picked up the phone before we boarded and I called my media company. I said, I want to make the Blue Planet VR, but I want to do it for Nat Geo or Discovery. I want to own it. Will you call the top five production companies and see if they're interested? I'm going into you, I'll call you in three weeks when I'm back. I get back, I land literally in like Miami and my phone's like, and he's like, they all want to meet you. I'm like, oh, great. That means it's a good idea.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  So I get home on a Wednesday, start making those calls. Two days later, Saturday, I get a phone call out of the blue from Andrew Huberman, who knew Ryan Suave, my trauma, you know, guy. And he said, hey, I'm interested in your shark work. And I'm like, yeah, okay. And he's like, this is Andrew Huberman, head of neuroscience, Stanford. He's like, were you scared of sharks? And I said, yeah, I was petrified of them. And he's like, okay, and now you swim with gray whites with no metal suit, no protection, just your camera. And I'm like, yeah. He said, well, what you've done in the neurology is like the free climbing of neurology. And you've rewired your brain. And I want to bring you up here so we can start working with you and studying with you. Because I want to use VR technology to help people overcome PTSD and anxiety.

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  And he didn't know about your interest in VR.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  I'm starting a VR project right now. And I have PTSD. And he's like, no way. And I'm like, yeah. We ended up talking for like two hours that night.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  You guys are kind of cut from the same cloth.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Totally, but I didn't know. I'm thinking of scientists with the white lab coat and the, and I ended up flying up to Stanford and we met. And like, of course, when I met him, I'm like, we're too, you know, he's like, not your typical scientist. Like he's into rock and roll and, you know, all the things. So I do remember the first thing he did say to me, because I'm going to tell your listeners something. Some of them might enjoy hearing this. He's like, do you smoke? And I'm like, no, but I chew Nicorette. Cause when my daughter was born, I stopped smoking and I started chewing Nicorette. And at that time, my daughters and my wife and everyone was on me to quit. And I really didn't want to, but I, you know, I was like, ah, whatever. And I'm like, no, but I chew Nicorette. He's like, oh. It's actually good for you, sort of. Well, he didn't say that. He said, we actually, that's

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  the first thing we give Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients is Nicorette to chew. It's the perfect delivery because nicotine's a stimulant and helps their memory and it helps their focus. And it doesn't work with smoking or chewing tobacco, just Nicorette. And I'm like, yes, no wonder. That's why I love it. Well, then I'm not stopping.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  Tell an addict that.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  I don't want Parkinson's or Alzheimer's. And then I was with a big actor buddy of mine whose doctor told him the exact same thing because he chooses it. So I'm like, yes, I'm not chewing. Anyways, we started, you know, we, he built his VR lab. At the time, you know, he had nothing. So, you know, he'd started building lab. I brought five of his scientists out to Guadalupe because I'm like, so the first thing I was like, I need to make a proof of concept, right? To raise money. I needed to raise money, right? To make a VR, the blue panel VR, I need money. And I didn't know I needed cameras at the time, but I got the GoPros, went out to Guadalupe with him and four of his scientists. And that year, I don't know if you ever saw the great white that got caught in the cage?

• 1:08:51Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  It went viral. It was on every news, CNN. So a great white got, they pulled the bait and there's little windows for cameras in the cages. And this little juvenile great white, you know, its tail went and it squeezed through and it's thrashing around inside the cage. Someone's filming all this. And they're watching in like 45 seconds, 30 seconds in there, they pull up the top and the shark, you know, jumps out and swims out. And then a person pops up and there was someone in the cage the whole time. And there's a whole politics with that. Anyways, that went viral. So there's a lot of pressure at that time on all the boats and the Mexican government. Everyone was pissed and like, you guys look like you're irresponsible. So here I am asking to go out of the cage, which is illegal and,

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  you know, whatever, with a big VR ball camera. And they said, we're going to let you do it because you're doing it for PTSD. Like, we're going to turn, turn, we're going to turn the way of the other and let you do. So I made it and my takeaway coming back was, all right, I need to raise millions of dollars and I need to build a whole new camera system that doesn't exist because I'm not using GoPros. And I need to do both of those things in like three months because animals are migratory. So if I don't get it done in three months, I have to wait a whole other year. And I went up to Facebook and I started, cause Blue Planet took six years and sixty million dollars, somewhere in that, five years and fifty million, whatever, a lot to get done. And I was like, I'm gonna do this in a year and I need, you know, not that much money, but of, you know, whatever, ten percent of that, a lot.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  And no one was putting money into VR, especially this type of VR, like, you know, Face was like, yeah, it's really cool, cause when I cut it, when I put it together, I was like, holy shit, this is like, this is amazing. Um, and I wanted it to be stereoscopic, anyways, long story short, and this is sort of how I know the universe transpired with the whole thing. So I met Andrew doing that, which we got a permission to exit the cage, cause of the scientific work with, with Mauricio Hoyas, so we were allowed legally to leave the cage and film when we were down there. My chiropractor, of all people, has this book in his office signed, and he does, you know, he does the clippers and, you know, who's who in Hollywood or whatever, right? Rihanna's walking out, Bieber's walking out, you know, he's that guy.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  And he calls me, he's like, hey, one of my clients wants to meet you, he saw your book. And I'm like, yeah, dude, anything for you, sure. Uh, tomorrow, Peninsula Hotel, I'm like, great, hang up. I call him back, like, and I'm like, who, who am I meeting?

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  You didn't ask him who?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  No, but I called him back, I'm like, who am I meeting? Cause this could be, he said, oh, it's a great guy, he's a diaver, he's like a billionaire and he loves the ocean. I'm like, okay, great. So I go down the next morning, I bring the VR with the little two-minute sizzle thing, show it to him and he's like, oh, you know, he takes it off and he's like, holy shit, like, wow, that is amazing. I'm like, I'm looking for an investor, he's like, well, you have a business plan? I'm like, yeah, he's like, oh, send it to me, you know, maybe I'll do it, do it. I'm like, great, send it to him. Radio silence for three weeks. So I remember laying down, like, three weeks later in bed, I'm like, that guy is, you know, flaking. Alright, I'm gonna put out the Great White thing and I'll try to sell that, raise the money, do the rest. The next morning, I get a text from him, he's like, so sorry, I was in the Cayman Islands, I wanna invest, can you be in Texas tomorrow?

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'll be in Texas tomorrow. So I went out and I sat across from him, I said, listen, we don't have the time to, like, Do a month long negotiation. I need the money. I need like tomorrow or we're gonna miss. And we hammered out a deal and he was like the dream investor, sort of blank check.

• 1:12:17Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  With his only, his goal was to go on some cool dives with me. That was all he wanted out of the deal. He didn't expect like anything special to be made or whatever. He just wanted to go on some cool dives, which he got to go on, some dives of his life, I gotta say. And we cut that film that you saw, brought it to trade back a film festival and it blew up and the Cannes Film Festival called and I brought it there. And then, you know, we decided to just put it out ourselves and instead of making like four films, of course, the addict, as you say, and me, I'm like, all right, I'm gonna do all of them at once. And editing nine different films and it's taken me a good year and a half and I have amazing Academy Award winning composers and rock, paper, scissors, like one of the best

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  editing, just amazing, you know, people around me and it's been a, it's been a really amazing experience.

• 1:13:07Rich Roll?

  So the full series is what, like nine hours long or something like that?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It's, it's, it's almost two hours. So there's nine films that range between five minutes and 10 minutes. And I had like Eli Roth do the VO on one of them because I was like, I don't want to hear my voice on every single one. And then like Laird and his daughters and my daughters came on a trip. So the Great White Trip, sort of from the eyes of the kids and their dads, you know, being me and Laird and Laird talking. So, and there's orcas, like sort of rays and manatees and ocean crocodile, saltwater crocodiles. It's, it's cool.

• 1:13:43Rich Roll?

  That's super cool. So coming to your Oculus soon.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Yes, coming to your Oculus, coming to every, your Oculus or your HTC, coming to any headset and then coming to your mobile phones and pricing it so that in a way that everyone will buy, no one has an excuse. Cause most of the VR out there that's priced, in my opinion, is too much. People aren't into paying, but if it's.

• 1:14:06Rich Roll?

  And what aspect?

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  A couple bucks for the whole series?

• 1:14:09Rich Roll?

  What about the work that you're doing with Andrew specifically, though? Like, taking this footage and using it in a way that's helping people overcome their fears or dealing with their PTSD?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Well, I know he's in the process there, you know, doing some, writing some papers. So I don't know what I'm really allowed to talk about. I know they've had some amazing successes up there with the reduction in stress, doing breathwork protocol, different things to help people relieve their stress. And what he created was like a VR space where they go in, because how do you face a near-death experience? You know what I mean? Like, a realistic one? Like, if you go to the front lines of Afghanistan and bring a VR camera, why people are shooting at you? Like, going out of a cage with a shark is sort of a near-death experience in a way that I can sort of film it and control it.

• 1:14:59Rich Roll?

  But you could see it being used in various ways. Like, you could go cave diving, or you could just, all these

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  The claustrophobia.

• 1:15:06Rich Roll?

  Things that create fear in people, yeah.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  And they're monitoring pupil imagery, sweat glands, like, everything going on.

• 1:15:13Rich Roll?

  So when you're wired up in your, in the lab, in the video, you see you in Andrew's lab, what are they monitoring? And like, what did they figure out?

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  You'd have to ask him, because I asked him and they wouldn't tell me, because it will, it would affect. He did tell me one thing. So one of the first tests they did is where you put on the headset and you basically are on a high wire in between buildings, or you're a plank, so to speak. And they say,

• 1:15:37Rich Roll?

  That's terrifying.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Take four steps out, which I do, turn to your right, and then they're like, step, you know, take a step forward. And I'm like, in my mind, I'm in my headset, I'm like, okay, well, this is, you know, this is what it's like to kill yourself, so I'm gonna enjoy it. And I jump off, and then I hear them outside of the headphones, like, mumbling, reboot. They're like, okay, we're gonna have you do it again. So I did it again. And this time, I'm like, well, I'm gonna look down this time to see what it's like with the ground coming, like, if you're gonna jump off a building to, like, watch it come up at you, which I did. So after that, he said, I can't tell you about all your other results, but I will tell you this, you were the first and only person that's ever done that experience that sort

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  of didn't like tiptoe out, like you just jumped off. No one does that. And he said, we thought you messed up, so we had you do it again, and you did it again, both times. And he just was like,

• 1:16:33Rich Roll?

  And that means what? That you've worked through your fear response and a

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  He wouldn't tell me what that means, but it was interesting. I was, when you watch like the documentary Free Solo with Alex Honnold, and he's doing the MRI and his, you know, the front part of his brain isn't lighting up. So one of the things, so me and

• 1:16:50Rich Roll?

  I talked to him about that. I had him on the podcast. We talked all about that.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually just saw Jimmy Chen, like, he's a really good friend of mine.

• 1:16:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool. He's been on the show too.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's the best. I love Jimmy. You know, me and Alex, I mean, me and Andrew have a trip we're planning on going in two months, you know, we think that they'll allow us because of the scientific work out to Guadalupe because it's closed because of COVID, everything's closed. But one of the things, you know, we really want to study is when we're out of the cage, so like if we take you out of the cage, it's never done it, what's going on, your reaction compared to what's going on in my reaction, what's lighting up? Like, eventually, we'd love to be able to look at our brains while out of the cage and see, you know, what's lighting up and what's not lighting up. So stuff like that.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  And, you know, one of the things I have been doing is like human guinea pig testing colors, like do sharks see colors? So I had Patagonia, which is a company that I work with, make me different colored wetsuits to see the reactions of the sharks, which sure enough, from the small study that I've done, they definitely are attracted to yellow. Not any other color, but the yellow, they were just like, choo, choo, choo, coming at me.

• 1:18:04Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  And then I found out Mick Fanning, when he got attacked in J Bay, his, the bottom of his board was yellow. So I'm like, ah. So that's good knowledge to have because you can tell divers and you can tell, you know, people that are in shark populated waters, avoid yellow. Not that I've seen, but there's a, you know, there's those companies that make supposed shark repellent wetsuits that are striped and what have you. I didn't have, so that's, I'd like to get my hands on one of those to sort of show that it works or doesn't work. My guess is, at least with great whites, it's not going to work.

• 1:18:38Rich Roll?

  That's interesting about yellow.

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had some funny, I had a company call me up and say they were making stickers for the bottom of surfboards. This is, this is true story. And they were like, well, you put on, so it's like two eyeballs and like a scary mouth to make your surfboard look like a monster. And this guy really thought that it would, he literally was dead serious. I want you to go out in Guadalupe and paddle on a surfboard to show that this will scare away. And I'm like, have you ever seen a great white? And he's like, no. I'm like, yeah, I didn't think so. Why don't you go out on a surfboard and paddle your little stickers on the board? Because I am not going to do that. And I can't even believe that you're asking me to, like, you're insane. So people, there's some, there's some ones out there.

• 1:19:22Rich Roll?

  It always struck me as odd that, that most wet suits are black, though, because then you just look like a seal.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Look like a seal, right? Yeah. Well, you gotta think, when, when you, and I'm sure you've seen those on Shark Week, so whatever, when they show a seal and a surfer up at the surface, it wouldn't matter what color your wet suit, because you're silhouetted against the light. So you're just a black.

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  You're always gonna look black.

• 1:19:42Speaker 01

  You're looking like a seal. But sharks are so smart. We've put cameras and decoys. So in South Africa, we, we tow fake seals behind the boat to get them to breach on them, to take photos of them and see, et cetera, right? So we've put cameras and literally nine times out of 10, the shark realizes it's fake before and it turns off. You know, I was actually able, and you'll see in the book, to capture the first great white breaching at nighttime, which no one, the scientists, I was like, does it breach at night? Because I had my lights.

• 1:20:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the light, the strobe doesn't work during the day, right?

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:20:19Rich Roll?

  So you want to go back at night.

• 1:20:20Speaker 01

  So I went back at night and we had one and it, and it hit. And I took the photo too quick. I got too excited because all you got to see is whitewater exploding and it's night and you're in the back of the boat. I'm like, huh? Because I got the head, not the body out. And I put the camera back and they never, never breached twice on a, on a, on a decoy, ever. And I, for whatever reason, put my camera back and like 10 seconds later, the shark hit it again and I waited a tenth of a second and then hit it and got the first ever, which ran in the New York Times Magazine. It was, it was really cool to be able to show scientists a behavior that had never been captured before.

• 1:20:54Rich Roll?

  That's the god shot.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a proud.

• 1:20:57Rich Roll?

  So in the book, there's, you have both, right? There's one where that you just see the head kind of coming out and then you have the full breach, right? So that was the first one and then, right. So that's the same shark.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little one, but it was, it was really cool to, to see.

• 1:21:11Rich Roll?

  All lit up like that. Crazy.

• 1:21:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's neat having those, you know, I mean, it's, it's, when I would go down to Quaterloop, I had, you know, six assistants holding lights in different places. And historically, you can't talk, right? But I did get an OTS system so I could talk in my assistants. Cause, you know, otherwise they're looking over at me.

• 1:21:30Rich Roll?

  How are you coordinating all of this?

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  We try, you know, hand signals. I'm like, and all they're seeing is bubbles and me doing this. You know, it's frustrating. I never yell at my guys, like when I'm shooting in the studio, whatever. There's, I'm not that guy. There's a lot of photographers are, I guess. But I don't. But I've never yelled at them more than underwater. Of course, none of them heard it. It's just me going, bubbles.

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're also in a situation where all you can do is set the stage. You can't control what transpires on that stage. You can't tell them, hey, you gotta swim back over here.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  I mean, when we'd come up, I'd be like, hey, next time, will you try to do this? And, you know, but these guys are like, they're holding lights and they're seeing shark. They're not like, at the end of the day, they're like, oh my God, that shark's cool and the light's going down.

• 1:22:14Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be wild though. Like you just mentioned the photograph of the shark running in the New York Times. Like when you see your work out in the wild, like your work's everywhere. We didn't even talk about all the studio work that you do. I mean, you've photographed the posters for every blockbuster, essentially, at least all the Marvel stuff. Like everywhere you turn, your work is like omnipresent in the world.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I've, I've done a lot of, a lot of, you know, out campaign, a lot of images people have seen that, you know, I'm, people have joked or called me like the most famous photographer you've never heard of.

• 1:22:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You're kind of aw shucks about the whole thing, but it's pretty fucking awesome.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  I learned, I learned a while, I was guilty of having that like, I want to shoot the cover of Vanity Fair. I want to do this. And I did realize like, none of that stuff fulfills you. Like, the minute you get that, you're like, okay, what's next? Well, I want to do this. Like, it's never going to be enough. And I remember, it was sort of around the same time that like Herbert, Helmut Newton, and I think it was Irving, three master photographers died within a year. And then I watched the photographer world not miss a beat. And I remember just going like, it really doesn't matter what pictures, like, if I was to die today, like,

• 1:23:28Rich Roll?

  There's another guy.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just gonna miss on, yeah, they're gonna, like, it's, it's gonna go. And then, when my time comes, I'm not gonna say, oh, bring me, bring me that photo of that Marvel Avengers thing. No, I'm gonna want my family and the people I love around me, right? So what are my priorities? And I just sort of stopped. I mean, I do have the once, like, when Kobe passed, the cover of Time Magazine, I thought that was cool, just because he was, he was such an amazing guy. He was a huge Shark fan, and, you know, he's an icon. And that was an honor. It was more of an honor, I was humbled at that.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:24:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we should just say, for people that are watching or listening who don't know, you're the person who photographed that iconic image of Kobe that ended up on Time Magazine.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Well, the bow, he was bowing.

• 1:24:13Rich Roll?

  He was bow, right, bowing. And that has become the definitive, most iconic photograph of Kobe, that in his passing, has kind of resurfaced as, you know, the emblem of who this individual was.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it was, uh, yeah, it was, you know, that's, those are the bitter sweet.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  Time Magazine cover.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but like, there's a part of me that's like, really? Like, this is how I'm getting Time Magazine? Because Kobe, like, I don't want Kobe to pass to get the cover of Time. At the same time, I know Kobe would want the coolest shot of him on the cover of Time Magazine, you know what I mean? So, you know, it was, it was, I thought that photo, that was the last ad campaign he did for Nike before he retired as a Laker. So it was like his last shoot. But what people might not know is that Kobe was a huge shark freak. Like he had a photo, a print in his locker to fire him up. And he, we talked, cause I've shot him quite a few times.

• 1:25:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you hear about the mamba, but you don't hear about the sharks.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  I know. That's why I'm, I'm, I'm giving you a little, a little backstory. So he, he really wanted to go see great whites, right? And he was like, well, can you, can I take a helicopter out there? Cause it's an 18 hour boat trip to Guadalupe. And I've tried over the years, cause I have some sort of high profile friends who don't have the time to go do it. So like, well, can I get a, you know, a jet out? Can I take a plane? So I've looked into all those and there's like a seaplane where I, but he was like, can I do a helicopter? I'm like, no. But then I stopped and I'm like, well, if there's any way to figure out a helicopter out there, it's you. So I'm not going to say no, but I don't think you can. Maybe nine months later, he came in, I think it was for Turkish air. I don't know what it was, but he comes up, literally there's, you know, 80 people on the set.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  And people are like, hey, and he, he, I could see him lasering on me and he comes right out. He's like, hey, I did it. I did it. And I was like, you took, you got the helicopter? He's like, no, no, I went on the shark trip. I'm like, oh, how did you get there? He's like, I had to take the boat. I'm like, ah, I knew it. But uh.

• 1:26:12Rich Roll?

  He did it without you though.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. He did it. Yeah. He did do it without me.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  Wow. So you spent quite a bit of time with him?

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, not, I didn't spend, I mean, I just shot him quite a few times over the years. He was one of my, uh, when I first shot him, I was doing a lot of work with ESPN magazine. And the editor, I gave her my like, I really want to shoot Kobe. Cause I had Laker season seats for six years. Me and my daughters would go to all the, the games when they won their championships. And, um, he was on my list. It was him, Muhammad Ali. It was like two others. And I remember when she calls, she's like, okay, I'm getting you here. And I was like, no way. And I did my, you know, first shoot with him. Then I, you know, ended up shooting for the other stuff. But yeah, I just, you know, it's, there's a lot. I, I feel like, um, most of the higher profile celebrities, actors and a lot of music, they, they have a fascination with sharks.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  They, people love guys especially, but there's some.

• 1:27:07Rich Roll?

  Is that like part of the alpha mentality? What is that?

• 1:27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's that. And, and they're the apex predator over the oceans. You know what I mean? They're, you know, they're great white sharks. Like, you know, everyone watches Shark Week, I feel like, and you know. People love sharks, love to hate them, love, you know, it's that fear fascination thing.

• 1:27:26Rich Roll?

  When you look at that image of Kobe and it, you know, given that it's, it's become so iconic, like to you, what is the, what makes the difference between like a good photograph and a timeless photograph like that?

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Well, I know that every time I'm shooting, I'm trying, I'm aiming for iconic, you know, I'm aiming for Thomas. I'm aiming to show something or someone in a way that you haven't seen before. That's my goal. So whenever I'm shooting people, I'm trying to pull out of them also their real, like take the mask off, so to speak, and give me that emotion, show me who you really are. And I do that in a way that I usually shoot very quickly and I direct so that the person, because in my experience, no one really likes getting their photo taken. It's a very vulnerable, their insecurities come out, right? Like, oh my God, my double chin, oh, I'm balding. Like when you show anyone 90 photos of themselves, they're not looking at the one and being like, God, I look amazing.

• 1:28:27Speaker 01

  Look at that shot. Look how good I look. They're going right to the one that they're like, oh my God, I'm so fat, I need to, you know what I mean? Like, well, I don't know if you know what I mean, but that's what happens when you show people. And if 99 of them are good and one's like whatever, they're going to the one. So I try to, you know, I, I go for that and, you know, with the Kobe, obviously it was circumstances and, you know, the positioning and the shots and what have you, but, um, you know, it's, it's something I don't look at photography. I don't go down a magazine racks. I don't look online. I don't want to be influenced by anyone else.

• 1:29:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  I really shoot in the moment and go for what, what I'm going for, you know, so.

• 1:29:08Rich Roll?

  But it is Hollywood, right? So it's that, it's that, that trope of like, that's why they're hiring you because they want your unique perspective, your specific look, but then there's a whole committee of people that like, I would imagine if you're shooting like a Marvel campaign, they want it to be a very specific way, right? So there's got to be some kind of tension, creative tension there.

• 1:29:32Speaker 01

  No, not. Well, yes and no. Like, you know, Marvel, I started with Iron Man one from the beginning.

• 1:29:40Rich Roll?

  So you created the look then?

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  I didn't create the look, but I helped create the look. I played a part in it. And I think they respect that, my, my experience and my talent. So it's a collaboration. It's me, it's the actors, it's the studio, it's the marketing people. You know, I'm one part of the machine. It's definitely by no means me, but I do play a part. And they, they look for, for my input. And that's why I think they come to me because I've never, you can approach those like, oh, it's just another job and go in and do the routine. Like put the white singles up, shoot things, do the lights.

• 1:30:18Rich Roll?

  The hero shot.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  But I am, and I think my clients see that, always trying to raise the bar. So like, I remember on one of the Avengers, you know, I brought in bands, uh, cause we were gonna do a big battle scene. So instead of having them sort of pose like fight things, I had those elastic bands so that they could really get into, you know, the things.

• 1:30:37Rich Roll?

  They're flexing.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  And their veins and their neck, cause I want it to feel real. I want it to be a real moment. You know, and when I'm shooting, uh, actors or a person and I wanna laugh, uh, you can't be like, hey, laugh. Cause then they're like, ha, ha, ha. And you, it's, there's nothing resonate. So I will say something to make myself look like an idiot or something to get them to laugh. Or if someone says something and they laugh, my finger is always on the trigger. So I'm like, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And I get that real, ha, ha, ha. And, and when you look at the photo, it resonates through, you know?

• 1:31:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So in shooting these, all the, the quote unquote, like superheroes, like what is your, what do you think is your strength or your superpower? Because like you said, there's tons of talented photographers out there. But there's a reason why you're the guy who gets selected to shoot all these massive campaigns. Like what is, and it's, it's gotta be more than like, well, I, I have a unique, you know, angle on it, or I try to make it real. Like what is it about you that you're the guy?

• 1:31:40Speaker 01

  I think it's a combination of things. I think it's a combination of my, my ability to light. I, I've mastered lighting, you know, that's what photography is, is lighting. How you light and, and I can light things in a variety of ways. My relationship with talent and how I can disarm people and get actors to maybe do things that they don't want to, or like give us the extra time that are willing to do that. Because I respect them, I respect their time and I respect their opinions, what they're comfortable and not comfortable doing. I never force someone to do something they don't want or try to trick them or, um, so there's that respect level.

• 1:32:24Speaker 01

  There's the creativity that I bring to, uh, to my jobs. And like I've said, I'm always, I'm, I guess I have a bit of people pleasing in me and I'm always trying to raise the bar and I'm trying to make my clients happy. And at the end of the day, when it comes to the big movies, these things are $300 million investment, they know that I'm going to deliver no matter what happens. And when you've got actors, and I'm, I can't tell you how many films, like I remember on a, a few of the Wolverines or whatever, you know, we had Hugh for eight minutes because they're, they're making a movie, right? And we're like the illegitimate stepchild that like, you know, all right, here you can have them for 10 minutes, even though it's the biggest, it's what gets butts.

• 1:33:04Rich Roll?

  It's the most forward facing aspect of the whole movie.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  Man, people go to movies because of the trailer on TV and because of those billboards. And you look up and you go, oh, that looks dope and you're going to go, or that looks so bad and you're probably not going to see it. An incredibly important part of it, but for some reason does not get the priority that it, in my opinion, should. And so I, no matter what happens, will get those shots. And, and you know, I've had Hugh for eight minutes and done three different lighting setups and gotten them everything from the intense portraits to the fighting to the this and that. And I think they know that and they're not going to try, you know, it's like, do you want to try this new guy?

• 1:33:43Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  You know, and have Downey, and have Robert be like, uh, yeah, you know, so. And then, you know, I've had that. I remember, I remember Robert on Iron Man two.

• 1:33:56Speaker 01

  Uh, the first Iron Man, the, the suit was like up to, he had like half of his body or whatever. Right. That's, things are not comfortable to act in.

• 1:34:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:04Speaker 01

  The real suits and what have you. And on Iron Man two, um, we were at the, we had the studio and whatever. He's not going to care if I talk about this. Studio people are probably, I don't.

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  They're not listening.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  They were like, um, will you, uh, he won't put the suit on. He won't put the, the headpiece on, the shoulder piece. And he won't do it. We've all asked him. Will you ask him? And I'm like, are you kidding? You're, you want me to go ask him? You, he said, no.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:34:30Speaker 01

  Please, cause he likes you. He'll do, I'm like, oh my God. So I go over and I'm like, Robert, listen. I know I can Photoshop your face in, but it's, it's not the same. It's not the same organic. Cause I mean, he's like, he literally looked, there was like six of them and he's like, I'll bleed them. And he went like that. He's like, listen, for you, I'll do it. 10 minutes. All right. Great. Start this up. I'm like, no, no, no, no. 10 minutes of shooting. Like I need 10 minutes. He's like, yeah, that's fair. That's fair. All right. So he sat down, fixed. He's like, all right, start the stopwatch. They started it. I shot 580 frames in 10 minutes. And I got it all, like the hand did it all. And that was it. Iron Man three had a black with green dot. Like he's never put the suit on again. And I would never ask him again.

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Right. But you had that trust. You'd engendered enough goodwill with a guy like that.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I have that. And, and, and I think I, I have that with, uh, with, with the, the actors, you know? Listen, I've been shooting for 35 years in this town. I've pretty much shot them all. Like they either, I've either shot them or, you know, I think they're going to know coming in my, my pedigree and, and respect that I know what I'm doing.

• 1:35:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  Um, but at the end of the day, they want to get in and out and, and actors are used to being directed. I think everyone wants direction, like tell me what to do. And I tell them, you know what I mean? And it's, and you know, it's an interesting position when you're a photographer and you have some of the most powerful people on the planet. And you're like, you know, Brockhamon, like, look here, like, I need you to write, look, you're telling people what to do. It's a, it's a little exhilarating. They're doing what you tell.

• 1:36:04Rich Roll?

  It doesn't matter who they are. You get to be in charge of them.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  I am, and when you walk on my set, I am in charge. And it starts with me, from the, from the stylist, the hair, everyone. And if there's any indecision, if there's any fear, any of that, it's like a virus.

• 1:36:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  So no matter what's happening, I can be in a studio and 12 of my 13 lights blow up, and I'll still be fine. I'll be like, cool as a cucumber. Take that one light, bring it over here, get that bounce board. I'll never show fear. Cause it's just like, what's the solution?

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  They feel secure and safe that you're in control and you know what you're doing.

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the motto, and my motto, and I think it's with life is what's the solution? Not what's the problem? What's the solution? What are we gonna do? What do we need to do? You know, and I think approach that with life too, you know?

• 1:36:50Rich Roll?

  What's, what is, what is your relationship with creativity? Like, how do you think about that as an energy?

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  We talked about earlier, that moment, you know, like when you're meditating, when you quiet everything down, and that channel, cause I don't think great ideas come from me. I think they're given to me from the universe. I think they come down. And I truly do believe if you have a good idea, like 10 people are getting that at the same time. And it's who's first to implement.

• 1:37:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  I don't feel like I'm some terminally unique, that I'm the only one getting ideas. But really-

• 1:37:25Rich Roll?

  Did you read Elizabeth Gilbert's book, Big Magic? It's all about that. It's all about the, the idea that, that like, great ideas are out there, and it's about honing your antenna. And there's a reason why people kind of have those ideas at the same time. And it's about who's the right receiver for that.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I started reading Buddha and the Badass, which is really implementing the, the same type of thing, bending reality and manifesting. He gave me words to things I've been doing my whole life, but I never had a word for it. And there's like a little step process in there about getting the right team around you. Because when you have an idea, which I believe is really true, and the universe will give you all the things really quickly to get it done, if you believe in you're in the right place. And like a bus, you need the right people in the right seats to get things done, especially bigger projects.

• 1:38:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:38:21Speaker 01

  Which I know I've shared with you a couple. I'm working on a- I'm working, I'm a founder in a company. We have a new material that looks, acts, feels like plastic, but dissolves in water in five to 10 minutes. It's a game changer.

• 1:38:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you showed me some stuff about this.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  It's a great example of, you know, starting a company, starting a project and having the right people around and, you know, the right people coming in to then implement it. And then only in the future will I be able to look back and see the dots that connected, you know, to, to, to get us to where we're going. But you have to be open for those. Anyways, Boot on the Badass is a great book.

• 1:38:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you're going to solve the plastic problem.

• 1:39:00Speaker 01

  I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to help because I'll tell you diving the amount I do, the plow, the amount of plastics that are in our ocean is just mind boggling. And the microplastics, you go look at the beach and you see all those little pieces of plastic, well, that the fish are eating and then we're eating the fish, which means plastic is going into us. And it's nine million tons enter our ocean every year.

• 1:39:25Rich Roll?

  It's a nightmare.

• 1:39:26Speaker 01

  So to have a, a, a solution for single use plastic that's going to, about to come out and I think it'll be, it'll be revolutionary and it'll be, it's exciting to be part of it.

• 1:39:36Rich Roll?

  When you hear a hundred million sharks are killed every year, what, where, what is, what is going on? Why are they being, I mean, you hear about shark fin and all of that, but is it at that scale? A hundred million sharks for that?

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's, it's, it's been gut wrenching to look at, um, there's 2,500, I think, fishing vessels off Ecuador right now. Sorry to say, but they're all from China. Uh, that you can see them on satellites because of COVID, right? There's no, they're not out, people aren't out protecting. And literally, I remember when I was in the Galapagos a year and a half ago, they had captured an illegal fishing vessel that had 10,000, 10,000 tons, just some obscene amount, number of dead sharks. They had a dead pregnant whale shark in there. And they're just, you know, they go and they just drop net and they just kill everything in its path. And then there's longlining where they're killing everything to get a certain fish,

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  but like they're killing dolphin and turtles, which what I don't understand is if you went to any country and you put a line of hooks out in a forest and you killed all the bears and squirrels and raccoons and you killed animals at that level, people would be up in arms, up in arms. But we do it in the ocean. And when you kill the top predator of a very fragile, well, the top of the very fragile ecosystem, which the sharks are, they keep the oceans healthy, they, it's like a domino effect that's gonna happen.

• 1:41:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, makes the whole ecosystem unstable.

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Seven of eight people on our planet live off the ocean, you know, that's where they get their substance. And when you start having no fish, then when you go to, you know, Africa, these, they're gonna, they keep having to go farther and farther to try to find a fish. Like they may catch one shark in a month where they used to catch one every day.

• 1:41:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, isn't that part of why the Somali pirate thing started to happen? Because the fishing dried up.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Right. Well, in these countries, certain countries will go in and say, we'll build you a power plant. We want all the fishing rights, right? Like give them a power plant and then they just pillage the whole ocean till there's nothing left. They throw dynamite out onto the reefs to just blow up and kill all the fish, you know? It's, it's insane the way we treat our planet. You know, I do believe though, that mother, I've just seen mother nature, I've seen the power that, you know, and I think we see it now more and more with the fires and they're like, if we don't solve it, mother nature will for us, you know, and swat us off her back like fleas off a dog, you know?

• 1:42:04Rich Roll?

  On that tip, you're like really good friends with Joaquin Phoenix, right? Who's really, you know, at the forefront of getting the animal welfare message out to the mainstream.

• 1:42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Rich Roll?

  So where did that kind of come together? How did that, you go way back with him, right?

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  We do. He is, he is a really good friend. I will say he, I'm gonna keep it really brief because I respect his privacy, which is why we're really good friends. He, he's been an amazing inspiration to me, the way he leads his life, the roles he takes with his work, with his creative work, the roles he takes with our planet and how he lives his life. He lives by example. And he's been an amazing example to me and an amazing friend, one of, just an amazing. I keep saying the word amazing, but just a really big heart. I love him and I'll leave it at that.

• 1:42:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Have you been to any of the cow vigils?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:43:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you should, you should shoot those.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  I did. I wanted to make a VR. Do you know Sean Monson?

• 1:43:09Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 1:43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. He just actually texted me on the way here. Um, I went down with him and a couple of people, but I was thinking about making a VR of it. You know, like, so you could see, I mean, it's, it's gut wrenching.

• 1:43:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Seeing those poor cows and people spraying the water. And yeah, it's, uh, in fact, I just got a text from the guy who did Game Changers. You see that?

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  James. Yeah.

• 1:43:33Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it's cool to see movies like that take an impact, you know? I think that's what I made this series for, isn't our generation? Like I've written off our generation. It's this next one, you know, these kids, they're the ones we've got too. And I am excited. And I don't know if it's just an LA thing. I live in LA, so I see young people in LA. I don't know if this is how they are in Kentucky or Ohio. But like, a lot of them are vegan, like, uh, they're really pissed off at the climate, you know, that they're inheriting. And they're sort of like activists. I feel like they, they're, they're pissed. I mean, you have that, it's like one or the other. They're either really lazy and don't want to do shit and expect, you know, they want to be a millionaire by the time they're 21, but not really do anything to get the millionaire.

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  And then at the flip side, you see these activists, these young, you know, it's like Greta, like you see these kids and they're, and they're like, hey, F you, man. You're really giving us a planet that's this messed up, which boggles my mind. And, you know, I go like, how does the owner of Shell or Mobil, they have to have kids and grandkids, like, don't you care about our planet? Like?

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  I think there's such a, a level of, of denial and a distribution of responsibility in those massive organizations that allows them to, you know, lay their head on the pillow at night and feel like they're not as culpable as they really are. And I think the accumulation of that has created this next generation who are so hip to like what's going on and so committed to change and so open to these new ideas. And that really gives me hope. I mean, our generation, you know, it's like trying to get people to change their minds, especially right now about anything. Good luck with that. Right. But.

• 1:45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like the sharks, you know, people are scared of sharks from jaws and stuff. You know, I think our movies and TV and we have promoted this like money makes you happy. Like you have to have a lot of money and success. And, and it's when you look at the facts that like you have a baseline of 50% happiness and no happiness comes from any type of financial. Forty percent of happiness comes from giving. So when you give is where you get your joy and happiness from. It's not making a bunch of money. And you get the same effect of if you got, if I handed you $25,000, what you would feel, right, 25,000 cash. And if you also do this and you smile, the same feeling.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  Like you get the same neuro.

• 1:46:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  From smiling.

• 1:46:04Rich Roll?

  Straight from Huberman's mouth?

• 1:46:06Speaker 01

  Straight from scientific, not Huberman, but I did hear from scientific. So it's like, you know, giving like it's like, you know, just, and that's been, that's been the law. I have my peers ask me, how do you work so many, you work more than anyone I know. And I look at them, every single person that asks me, and I say the same thing because I give, I'm a UN global advocate. I go to Africa and all over the, and document refugees and then I try to help with the sharks. Like I constantly, and it's a universal law. It's a law. If you give, it comes back. Like it does, and it comes back tenfold.

• 1:46:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  People just, but they're afraid, you know, so I don't need the next.

• 1:46:43Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, I mean, I've experienced that in my life a thousand times over and I've seen it happen in so many other people's lives. And it's something that, you know, we hear and we can intellectually kind of understand, but on some level we feel like it doesn't really apply to us. Like I can imagine somebody listening to this saying, that's all great because you're so successful, but you know, if I got that billboard or if I got that job, then you know, it would be different for me. And it's just not the case. There is a spiritual law.

• 1:47:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:12Rich Roll?

  That takes place. And actually you can use it selfishly. Like if you're desiring to advance your life in a certain way, just start giving more, even if it's not coming from a place of heart purity and it's coming from a place. Of like personal, a personal desire to advance your life. It doesn't matter.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:30Rich Roll?

  It still will work.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  It's still totally worse.

• 1:47:33Rich Roll?

  You know, I don't know why.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Neither do I, but I love, and you know, it's sort of like, you know, Greg owns Side Show.

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  One of the most giving people I've ever met.

• 1:47:41Speaker 01

  That's why I'm bringing them up as an example. When the Kobe image, you know, I knew people wanted, they're going to want that image, a print of that image. And as an artist, you know, I make gallery, I make additions. I sell shark prints, right? So the first thing I did was I made that Kobe print available, like eight by 10, a sort of smaller size for a very affordable, like 30, $40. I called Greg. Well, he had called me and we both talked and I was like, I want to give a hundred percent of it away. And he's like, great, cool. I'm like, yes, because most business, well, what about 50%? You know, people are like, I want to give it all away, which we did. And we gave to this amazing organization called Genesis.

• 1:48:21Speaker 01

  And she actually just called and was like, I cannot tell you how much that money like chain, you know, just opened up a ton of doors. But, you know, look at his business, you know, I just love meeting people that they use that in their life and you get to see.

• 1:48:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the largess of their own life.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:38Rich Roll?

  You know, expands, you know, to a degree that's exponential in proportion to the amount of giving.

• 1:48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Rich Roll?

  And you see it time and time again. And I think that print, you could buy it on the Side Show website right now.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  You can buy it on Side Show and then I made an addition of 24, much larger, fine art prints than I'm selling at a site called Plastic Gallery. That's on Artsy as well. And we are also giving to Genesis and those are color and black and white. And then there's like 16 other images, I think, or 17, but all addition of 24. And once the 24 are sold, I'll never make that Kobe Bow image again.

• 1:49:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's great, man. That's great. All right. Well, we can, we can wrap this up. What else? You have any other projects that are going on right now? Like new books? You're working on the horse book?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  I'm doing a horse book for, for Tashin. You know, I'm getting ready to release the VR series.

• 1:49:33Speaker 01

  I have, I have my, you know, other. Uh, business with the material that I'm doing. And then I am working on an app, uh, which we are gonna put out. It's sort of augmented reality, which I've heard about for four years and never have been impressed with any of it. And then I saw something that just blew me away. So we have the developers working on that. And, uh,

• 1:49:59Rich Roll?

  That's all you're gonna say about that?

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  That's all I'm gonna say about that.

• 1:50:02Rich Roll?

  Wait, what? Like, I don't even know what you're talking about, but all right.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think it'll blow your mind, too.

• 1:50:07Rich Roll?

  Okay, man. Final thing, uh, advice to the young creative out there, the young photographer who's just starting out, or the young activist who's seeking to make an impact in the world. What do you say to that person?

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  I mean, the first thing I'd say is what I sort of write in every book, which is there is nothing to fear but fear itself. So do not let fear control your life. You're either in fear or you're in faith, one or two. And I think if you just try having some faith, trust the universe, follow your dreams, you'll start to see results. Uh, but you just gotta have that trust. Um, and the second thing is the young creatives like, please, please, please follow your dream. Do your creative. Don't chase the money. Because I, in 35 years, have never once woken up and been like, ugh, I gotta go to work today. Not once. I've get paid and made a living doing something I love to do. I wake up every day and be like,

• 1:51:05Speaker 01

  oh, I'm so excited to go create. That's a, it's just-

• 1:51:08Rich Roll?

  It's a gift.

• 1:51:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's such a gift. And it's, you know, we only get one life. Well, I don't know, might get a bunch, but this is the only life I have. And I definitely don't wanna be 78 going like, oh, I wish I always wanted to go here or do this. I always wanted to take picture. Do it. Life's so short. It's precious. You have today. Forget about all your yesterdays. What are you gonna do today? That's it.

• 1:51:32Rich Roll?

  Good talking to you, man.

• 1:51:33Speaker 01

  Good talking to you, man.

• 1:51:33Rich Roll?

  Thank you, man. I appreciate it. That was powerful. If you're digging on Michael, you're easy to find on the internet. Instagram, keep sharing those ice bath stories.

• 1:51:43Speaker 01

  At MichaelMuller7.

• 1:51:44Rich Roll?

  Michael Muller, what's the seven about?

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  Because someone, you know, it's, what is that? Like, someone had Michael Muller, but they don't post, there's like one, two posts, they took my name.

• 1:51:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:53Speaker 01

  The ice, I love the, man, from traveling, the ice and heat changed my, like, when I get off a plane after 16 hours, it resets my body, all the inflammation out. It's phenomenal. So, right from ice up to my neck, two to four minutes into the sauna, and then back in the ice, back into the sauna.

• 1:52:11Rich Roll?

  Darren was telling me you always show up at the workout with like the big cupping marks on your back.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I get a lot of cupping done. I do a lot of, I mean, my body, I'm like an old beaten up gladiator. So, to keep this 50-year-old machine working, it requires a lot of, like, Thai massage with them walking on me, or, you know, and then a lot of, like, just, it's almost sadistic what they do to me, but my body's like Kevlar, it's like knotted Kevlar. Yeah. But, yeah, cupping's great.

• 1:52:43Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 1:52:43Speaker 01

  Except when they take the cup and go like that.

• 1:52:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Well, come back and talk to me again. When the, when the VR thing is out in the world, we can back and share about that a little bit more.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  For sure, for sure. When the VR is out, when Cam's out, yeah, we'll definitely come back. For sure. Anytime. This was great.

• 1:52:57Rich Roll?

  All right. Thank you, brother.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, everyone.

• 1:52:59Rich Roll?

  Plans.

• 1:53:04Rich Roll?

  Holy shit, man. Wasn't that unbelievable? Isn't Michael Muller incredible? Probably one of the most badass people I've ever met. So delighted to have him on the show today. Hope you guys enjoyed that. If you dig what he's about, give him a follow on the socials, at MichaelMuller7 on Instagram and at MichaelMuller77 on Twitter. Also, check out his website, mullerphoto.com for some insanely gorgeous photography that will absolutely blow your mind. As always, check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. We've got tons of links to immerse yourself in the life experience of Michael and all the

• 1:53:44Rich Roll?

  amazing work that he has done and is doing. We have another Roll On AMA edition of the podcast coming up soon. If you'd like your question considered and answered on the show, leave me a voicemail at 424-235.

• 1:53:59Rich Roll?

  4626. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube and on Spotify. Hitting those subscribe buttons is super important. If you haven't done that yet, please do me a favor and do that. Very helpful. Only takes a second. Thank you. Also, please share the show and your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. I love seeing all the screen grabs on Instagram and you can support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. Thanks to everyone who worked very hard to produce today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing and editing today's program for YouTube. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Davey Greenberg for portraits.

• 1:54:43Rich Roll?

  DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships and theme music as always by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate you guys. I love you. How good was that today? That was so good. Setting the bar high. See you back here soon with another great episode. Until then, face your fears. Move towards them. Don't be afraid. Inch towards it. Leap towards it and see what happens. Peace. Plants. Namaste.