The Best of 2014 (Part 2)

Welcome to Part 2 of our second annual Best of the RRP Anthology series. If you haven't already, I suggest listening to The Best of 2014 Part 1 first. Once again, this is a compendium of some of my favorite conversations of 2014. Our way of saying thanks. Our way of giving back. Our way of trying to catapult you into the new year armed with the information and inspiration required to make it your best year yet. Once again, it's worth reflecting upon the incredible year that was 2014. My blessings are many. My gratitude is overflowing. This is my way way of saying thank you. I appreciate you. Here's to an extraordinary 2015 — the year we manifest our greatest dreams into reality. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:08Speaker 01

  Be in any environment and know limits.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  And so, connect doesn't really mean disconnect and reconnect. We are nature. We were watching someone in a pure state of worship.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Time and again, I rush to judgment, and then I'm proven wrong.

• 1:19Speaker 04

  Somebody's got to run, and that's what I did with the recovery. I just took the moment and kept moving forward. Creativity, using what's on hand is the magic place.

• 1:27Speaker 05

  Asking myself, what would love do now?

• 1:31Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 122, "The Best of 2014," part two.

• 1:49Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast, to the Rich Roll Podcast, to the RRP, and to part two of this "Best of 2014" anthology mini-series that we put together for you guys. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for spreading the word on social media. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter, and thank you for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases, especially all you guys that made a bunch of holiday purchases using the banner ad. Thank you so much. That was huge, and I really appreciate it. And...

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  Happy New Year. Chances are, you might be dialing up this podcast on New Year's Day, given that I posted it late on New Year's Eve, Pacific Standard Time. And my hope is that you woke up this morning, you extended your arms, and you welcomed 2015 with everything that you are, with an excitement about the possibilities that this new year can bring into your life. So what's going on this time of year? What is it about? It's about gratitude. It's about giving back. It's about service. It's about family. It's about celebration. And maybe most importantly, it's about reflection.

• 3:08Rich Roll?

  It's about reflecting back on 2014. What didn't work for you? What did work for you? What you need to double down on? What you need to let go of? And it's about projecting forward. It's about what do you want 2015 to be? What do you want it to look like? What do you want to bring into your life over the next 12 months? And so to set the stage for that, that's kind of what this little best of anthology is all about. Well, first of all, it's about giving thanks to you guys. It's about expressing our gratitude for you guys taking this leap with us, for going on this journey with us. And it's about reflecting back on the journey that we took over the course of this show

• 3:52Rich Roll?

  over 2014. And when we went back and kind of sampled all the interviews that we did, the idea was that we were looking for little nuggets, chunks that we could pull out here and there that would help me and all of us, hopefully, reflect on the year and kind of put in the forefront of our minds, our consciousness, ideas that I think will be helpful and beneficial as we start to contemplate what we want 2015 to look like. So once again, over the course of this past year, we conversed on a wide range of topics. And as a lifestyle and wellness podcast, I really pride myself on trying to embrace and contemplate a wide variety of perspectives and opinions and attitudes.

• 4:36Rich Roll?

  And I really feel like we accomplished that. And we had extraordinary guests who just were so giving of their time.

• 4:44Rich Roll?

  Really brought so much to my life and hopefully to yours in such an interesting way, just unique people and perspectives that we've entertained. And going back and kind of listening to these interviews, once again, I just get so excited and energized for doubling down on my effort in this podcast over the course of 2015. I'm really excited with some of the guests that are going to be coming up and it's going to be awesome. So in this part two, we're just going to pick up where we left off in part one. If you've been with me all along, once again, then hopefully, listening to these guests will help bring into the forefront of your consciousness some of these ideas and insights

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  that will help you kind of project into 2015, contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams heading into the new year. And again, if you're new, then these clips should hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to some of the guests in full. And once again, I'm going to put the show notes up in the blog, so you can click through those and listen to those episodes directly. Anyway, without further ado, let's just get into it. And I'll leave you with this. Thank you, guys. I appreciate you. Happy New Year, and together, let's make all our dreams come true.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 86, with world champion freerunner and parkour artist, Timothy Sheaf.

• 6:23Rich Roll?

  Explain what freerunning is, like what parkour is.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Freerunning is kind of that thing everyone did when they were a kid and they balanced on a wall and their mother held their hand. And it's kind of like you're climbing around your environment and exploring. And it kind of evolved. It came out of Paris. It was called parkour, which means obstacle coursing, but with a C and they spelt it with a K, P-A-R-K-O-U-R. About 20 years ago, a guy called David Bell invented it. It came from his father, who trained firefighters how to get around environments efficiently. And then it came to England, maybe 10 years ago, and I saw a documentary there called Jump Britain. And it just blew my mind because it was like... This evolution of kids in the playground to adults with big muscles, climbing around

• 7:10Speaker 01

  buildings, their environment, using it in such a unique way. And I mean, a lot of people see that and they think that's dangerous and they see kind of this negative side of it straight away and they're kind of, you know, the older generation of more fear, they kind of put their own perception of if that was me climbing on that wall, that could be dangerous. But for me as a kid, I was just saw, you know, this beautiful movement and yeah, it's just moving through your environment, be it walls or through nature. I like to climb trees in a creative way. Initially, it was about efficiency. It was going from A to B as fast as possible. They say be strong to be useful. So you know, if you let yourself out your house or there's a fire, you can get away from it or go save someone. It's being able to be in any environment and know the limits of what your body can

• 7:52Speaker 01

  achieve. A lot of the things we do, sometimes people say, oh, I reckon I could do that, but I'm just scared to try it. And we're, we get to that level where we know what we can do, you know, there's no gray areas. It's black or white. I can do this or I can't do this. And it's having that confidence in any situation to know your environment.

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  A big part of your story is trying to get people to understand or embrace this inner child within, right? So tell me a little bit about.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think parkour gives too much of a label to what I do. Like people say, oh, there's skateboarding, there's parkour, there's BMXing. It's not like any of them. There's no variable. There's no alter thing that you have to do it with. It's just play. Like parkour is too, as soon as I say, we're just playing, you know, let's go out and play. We often call it training and I've started not using that word because it makes it sound like work. And it shouldn't be work. It should be, I don't feel like I've worked a day in my life. I play and I've got, you know, good physique, good muscles, good strength. And I just play and climb around it like I did on your house, you know, that's 10 minutes on this house. Imagine what I can do. You give me a whole city and you just get stronger and you get better. And whatever you practice, you get better at. And that's, that's all

• 8:58Speaker 01

  we do. And it is just looking at your environment like a kid looks at a playground. Like you give a playground some swings and a slide, they're not always going to swing and slide down the slide. They're going to start climbing on the frames, you know, kids don't do that. And that's what we have to do as adults is look at the world in this perspective of here's a walkway. Okay. But people just zone out. I've got to get to work. So I'm going to walk to work the same route. But they don't take in anything around them. And it makes you observe and it puts you in the moment because wherever I walk, I'm always looking for things to do. And so I always know my environment wherever I'm at.

• 9:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it grounds you in the present.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  And that's the key, right? And that's what everyone tries to teach, but we kind of have that in us. We just lose it as we become an adult and they say, you know, you need to go to grow up, stop doing that. Stop being childish. I remember I used to walk on my hands as 10, 11 years old from my kitchen to my living room. Get a tape measure out. How far can I walk? Try and beat that distance, be that eventually I got in and I walked around the table and I was like, yes. I went to high school, you call it here when I was like 12. Is that high school 12 years old?

• 9:56Rich Roll?

  Uh.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  That's middle school.

• 9:58Rich Roll?

  Junior high.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Middle school, yeah. And then we call it secondary school. And I did it there and the teachers told me off. They said, you can't do that. What if the kids copy you and hurt themselves? So I stopped for a few years and then, you know, I realized when I was like 15 and I wanted to break that saying, why did that stop? Like, what, who are they to tell me? Like, what I should do with my own body? This is my expression. And that was a real like realization that we were really in a society and those people don't mean to be like crushing what we do. They're just razor away, you know, they, they think that it's out of the ordinary. Don't do that. And we just need to change that and we're starting that change now.

• 10:35Rich Roll?

  Have you seen Damian Manders TED Talk?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  He's the guy.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  The big South African?

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the South African.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Amazing. That's good for like jock men, like.

• 10:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, he's like the most alpha male dude of all time, right? Like this guy. And he was, he was a, was he a, a South African or a British soldier in Afghanistan? I'm trying to remember. It's been a while since I watched it.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  He's the one that was on about conserving animals in Africa, right?

• 11:00Rich Roll?

  Right. But originally he was like this major hardcore like sniper dude.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:05Rich Roll?

  It's like special forces guy who, you know, was in the, in the muck big time and just saw more than his fair share of, you know, killing it. You know, in warfare and. Oh, he was Australian, right? Yeah. Have you watched that TED Talk? It's insane. I'll put a.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  Warrior, was it called some of the warrior?

• 11:22Rich Roll?

  I'll put a link up in the show notes.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Incredible though.

• 11:25Rich Roll?

  But then he, uh, yeah, like then he, he bought, he bought land in South Africa, right? And he started to see how the poachers were treating the big game and, and it just, it just enraged him. And he decided he was gonna take a stand against this. I think he actually was off like hunting these guys, you know, like.

• 11:43Rich Roll?

  And he gives this incredibly eloquent TED Talk about his position on animal welfare, especially big game animals. It's beautiful and it's very potent because he is such a force of masculinity.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  He is. And then that shows his transformation was his mind realized, why are these elephants more important than the cows? He'd be saving these elephants and then going back and making barbecues. And he posted a question there, he says, does a cow value its life, do I value this barbecue more than a cow values its life? And no one can ever, there's only one answer for that.

• 12:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  Obviously, the cow values its life more. And now you're getting people on Facebook, I see so many people, these, a lot of girls, I guess, posting about these animal problems, like these dolphin slaughter, or they fed a giraffe to some lions in a zoo, and, you know, again, about dogs in China, and there are all these things. And then I asked them, I say, are you vegetarian? You know, you care about these dolphins here, or you care about this giraffe, but yet you're making a choice that causes death of animals. And it's not, as humans, it's not our choice to say what animal is more important than another. How about we just don't fuck with any of them?

• 12:51Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Can I swear on this podcast?

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  You can say whatever you want.

• 12:57Rich Roll?

  And so how did the dietary shift kind of, you know, change that? Or what was the impact of that on that?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  So I tore my meniscus a few years ago, probably six or seven years ago, and had surgery on them, and it took a while to heal. And so every winter, I'd feel kind of aches in my knees, and I had Achilles tendonitis. And since being vegan, the aches in my knees went away in the winter, Achilles tendonitis went away, not come back at all. And these little changes, because you know, your digestive system gets a chance to rest. When you're eating heavy meats, there's a lot of energy going to there. And as soon as you're eating lighter foods, frees up all that energy, and your body's like, right, let's take the chance to go heal this bit that we've been waiting so long for, to go heal. And so, all these things, these little things cleared up. And it's been amazing.

• 13:39Rich Roll?

  And how did the sort of parkour community where you live?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:44Rich Roll?

  What was their reaction? I mean, I would assume that sort of the paleo diet is probably the predominant diet in the parkour community.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in the American parkour community, it is. But I've since I've spoke out openly on it because I am in a position where some of the community listen to me. Of course, some of them make jokes about, you know, the younger kids, they don't quite understand it yet. They just want to remain in their ignorance. And I would have done the same thing. I remember saying to vegetarians years ago, how about if for every animal you don't eat, I eat three? Would you eat animals then? Absolute ignorant, what an idiot like. But there's a lot of them have taken to it. I've I spoke out openly and the kids have gone, yeah, you know, that's right. Well, all we what we do is about not leaving a trace behind. And if you're leaving a trail of animal carcasses every meal that you eat, that's you're leaving a trace, you know, being strong, strength should build up, you know, it shouldn't take from anyone. It shouldn't take a life, especially shouldn't take a life. So and when you can be just as strong, if not healthier, fitter,

• 14:36Speaker 01

  you can thrive on a vegan diet. That's the ethos of parkour. It's about we flight over fight, you know, it's already about not damaging your environment and animals environment goes as far as animals because that's really the big environmental issue.

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 87 with Buddhist monk and tea master Wuda.

• 15:07Rich Roll?

  By way of background, he was born Aaron Fisher in the United States, but he was a guy who was drawn to the East from a very early age. And after studying philosophy in college, he traveled the world and ultimately settled down in Taiwan, where he currently lives and where he has since become a Buddhist monk, steeped in the sutras and wisdom of that tradition, as well as a tea master. And that's a weird thing, like, what is a tea master? And we get into that in the podcast and won't spoil it. But he's a master of not just the living tradition of harvesting tea, but the living tradition of what tea means in a sort of meta sense, like why it's important and why we should care about it. Tea is medicine. Tea is healing. Tea is life. Tea practice as Zen.

• 15:53Rich Roll?

  The easiest way to put it is that. He comes from this idea that tea is a universal, living, breathing thing, the tree of life, you could call it, that unifies us all. And as a concept, it's something that works as a foundational idea, a metaphor, basis, if you will, for a set of ancient teachings, principles, knowledge, and wisdom to glean a broader truth about health, about healing, community, the environment, life, life's meaning, and the unifying oneness or undeniable interconnectedness of everything. In Taiwan, he founded and runs an organization called Global Tea Hut, which is a school and a center that harvests tea, and it educates all comers on the traditions surrounding tea

• 16:37Rich Roll?

  and welcomes people from all over the world to come and study and practice tea preparation and meditation and tea history, tea crafting, the sutras of tea and its relevance in society, and how to cultivate this Tao of tea, if you will, as a method of spiritual cultivation.

• 16:57Rich Roll?

  What is it? It's a very specific thing with a heritage and a culture and a teaching and a lifestyle and principles around it that you've oriented your life and that you express through how you live and the teachings that you share through these kinds of events, these tea ceremonies that we'll get into in a little bit. But, you know, what is, if you could encapsulate what that means, is there a way to articulate that?

• 17:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, for sure. It's a dialogue about, I think, medicine and healing and what that means. And, you know, as individuals, I think there's not any more pertinent topic than health. And because this is the most valuable.

• 17:49Speaker 06

  The most valuable thing in the world is life, and especially, human life. And by world, I mean this earth and this planet, you know? And what it means to be alive. I had the good fortune, last year, I went and served tea to some Hopi elders. And at the end, the shaman gave me this gift, and he said to me that it was the greatest gift that he had to give, that the Hopi had to give. And these people, they don't use superlatives very often. Their language is taciturn, and kind of really clear and integral. And for him to use that great "est", that's a really strong word for him, you know? And what it turned out to be was, they have five

• 18:32Speaker 06

  they have five types of corn. You know, colors, red, purple, yellow, white, and what it turned out to be was white corn, which to them is beginnings. And I went and I held this thing, this cobal corn, it was a dried cobal corn. And I realized, you know, that's what he had given me, was life. Like, infinite future life, because this cobal corn, I could plant it, and then I could grow corn, and then I could grow more corn. So this one cobal corn could feed a whole city of my people indefinitely into the future. And also past, because the Hopi DNA was all like, built up in it as well. They had cared for this corn for so many thousands of years. And it really

• 19:09Speaker 06

  highlighted and emphasized that aspect that is in Zen Buddhism, you know? It's one of the preliminaries to practice, which is the recognition that human life is so precious. So short, so precious. And for that reason, health, this dialogue about what health means

• 19:31Speaker 06

  is so relevant to all of us. And then, as a species, as a planet, it's so relevant because of the crisis that we're facing, because of our you know, our influence on this planet and on all the other species that live here. So health isn't just about us as individuals, it's about us as a species. And I think, in the Western world especially... We have really confused notions about what health means and what that is about. Yeah, and you know, how many, you know, out of 10 people, I think that if I grabbed on the street and asked them to define, you know, what does health mean to you? I think you get back really, you know, either no definition or confused definitions.

• 20:16Speaker 06

  You know, and I think if I asked the average health practitioner in America, they're gonna say that health is the absence of disease. But that's really foolish for two reasons. One is you can't define a thing by what it's not. So if you ask me, you know, if somebody asked me who is rich? And I say, "Well, he's not George." That doesn't tell them anything about rich. And more fundamental problem with this definition is that if your definition of health is freedom from illness, then no human being that has ever lived has ever been healthy. Because there's not a single, that's, we're defining health in supernatural terms then. We're defining health in a way that is unachievable for us. What's the point in that? One of T's most ancient names is the Great Connector.

• 21:00Speaker 06

  And to me, connection is just a synonym for harmony. And there are myriad ways in which T connects us, but I like to focus on three. We can talk about them individually and you guys can share some insights maybe. The first to me is connection to nature. And this one's the trickiest one. Because it implies a disconnection, and there never was a disconnection. We are not disconnected from nature and therefore cannot be connected. A lot of times I do workshops around the world and I start them with a question, which is a trick question. I ask people, "I want you to get up and I want you to touch the nearest earth." And people get up and they like touch plants, and they touch the ground.

• 21:43Speaker 06

  And I tell them that this workshop's about re-establishing the feeling that will allow you, when someone asks you to touch the nearest earth, to touch your own face. Because I'm earth. And so what has been lost is not the connection to nature. What has been lost is the feeling of connection to nature. They're different. Yeah, conscious awareness of that. Exactly. You know, and that's because our ancestors, they grew all their own food and... They, you know, so their food came from plants and their houses were made of plants and their clothes were made of plants. And in those days, no hospitals. So when you're sick, you've got two choices, magic or plants. And so their dependence on nature was tacit and it was there and every day. And we now live in mind-made cities and take chemical

• 22:27Speaker 06

  medicine and processed food and synthetic clothes, et cetera, et cetera. And so the feeling of connection to nature is not there. And what tea does is, you know, when you're drinking tea, that tacitness returns, that feeling of connection returns because in this, in this liquor, in this brew is, is earth and minerals and, and water and mountain. You're drinking the weather. The tea from season to season is completely different. So you're literally drinking the weather. And you know, the thing, these trees aren't just connected to what's to the earth, to what's down there. They're also connected to what's out there because they're pulling in sunshine and moonshine and starshine and through photosynthesis, converting that into energies that we can synthesize. So

• 23:12Speaker 06

  through them, we communicate to the sun. And this is a, this is a very real connection and we can connect in this way. And so connect doesn't really mean disconnect and reconnect. We are nature.

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Welcome to episode 91 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Keegan Coon and Kip Anderson.

• 23:40Rich Roll?

  The inconvenient and uncomfortable truth is that whether we're talking about global warming, the deforestation of the rainforest, the overconsumption of water, the depletion of our soils, the destruction and pollution of the oceans, or the obliteration of natural wildlife habitats, there is one single industry that is destroying the planet more than any other. And it's one we really don't talk about that much. It is the elephant in the room.

• 24:09Rich Roll?

  It is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is by far the biggest offender in every single category that I just mentioned. Point blank, our industrialized system of factory livestock harvesting is just unsustainable. It's killing us and it's killing the planet and it is time to embrace this reality and redirect before it's too late. This is the subject of a new documentary. It's called Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret. And this documentary takes a look at just why the issue of animal agriculture and its impact just doesn't get the airtime that other environmental cause celebs do like fracking.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  And today I have the filmmakers here to tell us all about it, Keegan Coon and Kip Anderson.

• 24:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the film is, it's a journey first and foremost. It's about Kip, my co-director's, journey of finding out about the most destructive industry facing the planet today, which is animal agriculture. And if animal agriculture is responsible for, you know, number one cause of rainforest destruction, ocean dead zones, water pollution, topsoil erosion, climate change, you would expect the world's largest environmental organizations to talk about it. But when you go to these organizations' websites, it's nowhere. You don't see animal agriculture. They're going to be talking about fracking, or transportation, or dirty coal. So the story is the journey of finding out about this and going to these organizations and trying to find the answer.

• 25:41Speaker 07

  How do we live sustainably on the planet with 7 billion people?

• 25:44Speaker 08

  Well, it's a journey that's really personal to me where it started with, I thought I was doing everything I could for the environment and then saw a post with the United Nations' Long Shadow Report that animal agriculture is the leading cause of greenhouse gases, 18% versus 13% of all transportation put together.

• 26:04Speaker 08

  And that's when I was like, wait, there's something going on here.

• 26:07Rich Roll?

  So eighteen percent for animal agriculture, thirteen percent in that the umbrella over thirteen percent includes all transportation.

• 26:15Speaker 08

  All transportation, trains, planes, cars.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  Cars, everything, wow.

• 26:18Speaker 08

  Every single thing all put together is.

• 26:21Rich Roll?

  And this is, these are global numbers.

• 26:22Speaker 08

  Global numbers and animal agriculture was eighteen percent. And here I was riding my bike everywhere. So that's kind of where the journey starts. And then, so I take it once, do some more investigating and then find the World, uh, World Watch report in two thousand nine, they, their calculations, animal agriculture accounts to around fifty-one percent.

• 26:43Rich Roll?

  We watched KIP kind of come into this realization that, uh, that we're never going to be able to really begin to address all of these environmental concerns until we really take a hard look at what's going on with animal agriculture. And then we start to, you know, watch you as you try to contact these organizations to talk to these people about how come nobody's talking about this. We talk a lot about our fossil fuel consumption. We talk about our water consumption, but nobody's talking about the elephant in the room, which is how wasteful this system is that we've erected around how we raise animals for food. And then you go in and you, you visit these places from Sierra Club to Greenpeace and you basically get, you get nowhere with these people.

• 27:28Rich Roll?

  You can't get any kind of answers from, from them about why they're not talking about this issue, which clearly is the biggest issue when it comes to waste.

• 27:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. And when you, you know, it's, it's not only are, is it the biggest issue of say deforestation? It's the biggest issue of all of them. There's virtually no environmental ill facing the planet today that the leading cause is in animal agriculture. I mean, literally no matter what your passion is, you care about the rainforest. Well, hey, you know, upwards of ninety-one percent of all the deforestation in the Amazon was caused by animal agriculture, whether for. Clearing land to graze cows or to grow the feed crop, the soy genetically engineered, you know, corn and soybean that's fed.

• 28:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have this graphic where you use like a football field analogy and you show how much, how it's getting eaten away on a daily basis. The numbers are ridiculous. Do you remember what they are?

• 28:18Speaker 07

  It's about an acre per second of rainforest is destroyed, you know, and the vast majority of that is for animal agriculture. It's just astonishing. But again, you know, it goes way beyond just rainforest. What do you care about? You care about the oceans. Well, you know, leading cause of dead zones in the oceans is from land-based animal agriculture.

• 28:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Explain that a little bit because I didn't really know how that whole, how those two things kind of worked together. And the film did a really good job of explaining that.

• 28:45Speaker 07

  You know, I think that was one of the more surprising aspects for Kip and I both while working on this film is that, you know, I felt like I was pretty well informed on this issue. And then when we did more research and you saw that, so you have these massive fields of, again, genetically engineered corn and soybean that's been raised just to feed to livestock. They use, you know, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. And those all run off the fields. They run into the streams and rivers that lead out to the oceans. You have all this massive amount of manure and waste from factory farms and from feedlots and from lagoon pits. Those spill into rivers and streams that make their way to the ocean. This huge bloom of algae happens when you have high levels of nitrogen

• 29:27Speaker 07

  in the water. And that algae deprives the entire ecosystem of oxygen. So you have these massive areas, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, or anywhere you have.

• 29:36Rich Roll?

  Like at the Mississippi Delta, right?

• 29:37Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 29:37Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be probably the worst.

• 29:39Speaker 07

  It's one of the worst in the world. And we were talking about hundreds of square miles of areas completely devoid of life.

• 29:45Rich Roll?

  What is going on legislatively, like on Capitol Hill currently with respect to trying to address some of these animal agriculture issues that are coming up? I mean, are you versed in that?

• 29:56Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, what's, what we're facing right now, you know, there's a series of laws throughout, you know, a number of states in the country. They're called ag gag laws, which basically they criminalize exposing what farms are doing, whether that's the atrocities they're committing against the environment or against the animals themselves. And this is, you know, First Amendment protected activities, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, repression, because this industry is very threatened by undercover investigations. They're threatened by films like ours that expose the truth.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 94 with slow-mo.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  It goes to this, I mean, you know, a lot of what your life is about is dichotomies, and more specifically, the dichotomy of the zone versus the non-zone. I read your manifesto.

• 30:59Rich Roll?

  And sort of the use of this word "zone" as being expansive, you know, really encompassing what, you know, maybe in more mainstream circles would be just known as God, or the universe, or whatever word you want to place upon it, higher power. And the idea of the subjectivity that goes hand in hand with being in the zone, or being merged with the zone, versus the objectivity of the non-zone state of sort of being, you know, in the world.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  That's right. Exactly.

• 31:29Rich Roll?

  So, in the most simplistic terms, if you could sort of expand on that idea, explain, really, what you're getting at with that.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Okay. Well, in all the activities of life, this particular dualism exists, where a person can observe something in the zone, or experience the zone, and it's quite different than the non-zone. All right. If you look at all those activities, they all have a set of intelligent and wise people who discover the zone within that activity. Now, the one I like, I like to see of people experience the zone, is in the spectacular sports that we get to observe on television.

• 32:18Rich Roll?

  Well, that's where it's most readily kind of apparent to the eye, right?

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. It first occurred to me, what was happening, when I watched that movie with Chariots of Fire.

• 32:32Rich Roll?

  One of my favorites.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. You remember when the runner fell during, I think it was an 880 run, and his friends were in the audience. He fell, and then he got up and began to try to catch up with the other runners. And Van Gallus, who was doing the music, switches him into slow motion. He's going in slow motion, though he's gaining on these other runners.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  And the cameraman switches it to the crowd. And his friends are standing up and what the girl, one of the women says, "Do you see it?" Or something to that effect. And what they were seeing really interests me. Because I think that's what we saw when we watched Michael Jordan perform in the zone. We were seeing something in the way that Amazing Grace uses the word "vision." We were experiencing something attached to a vision, which was in another world.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  That is, the person who was, we were watching someone in a pure state of worship. And that's impressive. And matter of fact, that's one reason I think some of the people line the streets of Rome when the Pope goes up and down. I think he's supposed to be, and I say "supposed to be," relatively close, at least a representation of a state of worship. But the athlete, when he's hitting three pointers, say in basketball, say four or five three pointers in a row, he is almost by definition in what he calls the zone. It's the dichotomy of the non-zone and the zone.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  When you're in the zone, you never, and you can correct me if this is, if you agree with this or disagree. You never question whether there's a higher power or whether there's a God. It doesn't occur to you to question it. It doesn't occur to you to question that you exist as an entity of some kind of subjective, something that could be called a soul. Those questions and doubts only exist when the mind is in the non-zone.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  But then I was thinking like, whoa. If I just did exactly what I wanted to, what I really wanted to, really wanted to. And maybe it would guide me down a road where at the end I would be healthier and happier than I would have been if I had tried to travel down the road that I heard that you should eat this and you should do this and maybe you shouldn't do that and you shouldn't think this kind of thought and blah, blah, blah, it just goes forever.

• 35:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So, having all that knowledge of here's how you eat and live to be healthy and happy, inside, you're not happy. I mean, in the documentary, you're self-described asshole, right? And is that just in your ego and in your arrogance and driving your Ferrari around? Disdain for your patients?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of. Really, just, yeah, it was a kind of a Faustian thing. I can remember, I think I experienced the same thing that Faust did.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. But Faust didn't get a way out.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  You know, I've been meaning to check on that.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's been a while. I don't want to say I'm speaking out of school on that. Did he? No. But I think, you know, you talk about Faust, you talk about literature. When I look at the arc of your life, it really is, it really is, you could not, a great writer couldn't script these dichotomies and these, you know, sort of the character arc better. It's almost too good to be real because you have, you're starting to lose your eyesight, but that gives you the ability to see. You're a neurologist and then you suffer from this neurological disorder that you would think imprisons you as a result of your many years of being a doctor and yet that's what

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  sets you free. And you're this loner who enjoys his time alone and develops this condition which you would think would isolate you further and that's what's created greater community for yourself, you know? And this idea that... That you stared at the end of your, you were staring at the end of your career, but that's really where your life began. It's beautiful, you know, and you couldn't, you couldn't dream that up. If you wrote it down, somebody would say, well, that's fiction.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Well, you put it together mighty beautifully. I appreciate you saying it that way. Where I'm at now, I live here a half a block from the boardwalk. It's a two mile stretch of perfect skating. The feeling that I get when I skate, I know is the zone. I can get in the zone very easily that way and sustain it. My thoughts when I'm skating are superior to the type that people naturally have when they're in the zone, the way I relate to the people and what they see up and down the boardwalk. So it really is about as close to paradise.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  It's next, I live next to the zone in a way.

• 38:24Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 95 with John Joseph and Mishka Shubali.

• 38:36Rich Roll?

  Well, I mean, we were talking about this before, before we started recording, the idea of the difference between preaching to the choir and reaching the masses, right? And so when you told that story of, you know, all the other women who are meat eaters who were watching the video saying, this guy's great, the ability, your ability to tap into and connect with an audience that isn't necessarily on board with your message, that's how you change lives, right? It's not about like patting people on the back who already agree with your perspective on things.

• 39:07Speaker 09

  It's like, first of all, it's like, I don't, like you said, preaching to the choir, it's like. I don't care about the people that's already vegan or or plant-based or whatever. I mean, I do care, but the reality is over the 10,000 books that we sold independently on our own, a majority of those books were women who bought that book for their men who refused to change. And then they were like, yo, I love the way this dude talks and does things like, yo, this. And they actually, I corresponded with a lot of them and they, I mean, thousands of emails. And it was like, dude, you're the first fucking person that ever talked this shit that I'll fucking listen to that got through to me.

• 39:48Speaker 09

  We had one dude, Joe the Fireman. I gave him a cop, big fucking Jersey fireman, foot, college football player linebacker, 260 pounds. He's like, I haven't read a fucking book since 1978. Let me tell you something. After I read your book, I realized one thing. He sent me this email. He's like, I'm the biggest fucking pussy on the planet. And he fucking like, started changing his whole thing over. So now, you got all these politically correct, you know, people attacking me for the title of the book. And I really don't give a fuck because they have not been able to reach the masses. They have not been able to reach that demographic of men and whatever that,

• 40:33Speaker 09

  to them, the vegan and the whole shit is like, that's why I put the five-letter curse word in the book. That vegan is the five-letter curse word. As soon as you say that shit, dudes cringe. Because of the way that these people have presented the message. And I'm like, I come from the street. This is where I come from. This is who I am. Yeah, I eat fucking vegetables. But that's not the all-in-all, you know?

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Let's, let's talk about the title. Why this title and why is it important?

• 41:01Speaker 09

  Well, I'll tell you originally the way that it came down, because we were trying to call it something else. I was getting ready to call it the Go Green Road to Health, Longevity and Tod, fucking business plan. It was like, dude, who are you, fucking doctor? Motherfucker, you're John Bloodclot from the street. Like, so, and, and it always happened between me and, me and Todd, like, we'd be spitballing and then come. Todd's your business partner. Yeah, Todd Irwin, he was played, he's a big time, played drums in a lot of bands. He put out both the books. He's like my, he's like my fucking brother, dude. Coolest dude ever. And we've been on this whole journey together. And you know what? You gotta do the right thing. So when the book did get picked up, I gave him fucking

• 41:43Speaker 09

  half the advance. I'm like, that's how you do shit. When people do things for you and, and are there with you on the journey and spending their money to make shit happen, you don't forget people, you know? So the thing was, before we even came up with the title, I was in the gym one day and I'm telling my friend like, "Yo, you know, you gotta, you know, tell, talking about the whole plant-based thing." And some fucking like meathead overheard it and was like, "Yeah, all those motherfuckers are the fucking pussies with their fucking tofu." And I was like, "Excuse me, motherfucker?" I'm like, "Dude, I've been vegetarian and plant-based for fucking 33 fucking years,

• 42:24Speaker 09

  bro. Like, what kind of shit are you talking with your tiger stripe fucking pants and fucking like, you know, gold gym tank top and fucking weight belt?" You know, doing like, looking at himself in the fucking mirror for two hours. You know, but then Todd was like, "Dude, you, and you need to throw it..." I told him what happened. And Todd's like, "You need to throw it back in their fucking face. All these motherfuckers that are like, you know, vegans, vegetarians are fucking pussies and all this shit. Fuck that." I go, "You know what? Meat's for fucking pussies. Fuck them motherfuckers." And he was like, "Dude, that's the title. That's gotta be the title of the book. Meat is for pussies." And really, it's a catchy title, but if, even if you open up that book and read, the first

• 43:09Speaker 09

  thing I say is, is if you continue to lead these sedentary lifestyles, sedentary lifestyles, and you're sitting on your ass and eating all this genetically modified food and meat and dairy and all this shit, you'll become a pussy depending upon, you know, the drug companies to keep your ass alive. If that's what you want, put the fucking book back. It's not for you.

• 43:34Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 97 with Dan Harris.

• 43:44Rich Roll?

  This guy's impressive. He was a young, ambitious journalist. Dan joined ABC News in 2000, year 2000, and under the mentorship of legends, Peter Jennings, Diane Sawyer, he quickly rose through the ranks. And today, he's co-anchor of ABC News' Nightline and co-anchor of the Weekend Edition of Good Morning America. This guy's done it all. He's filed reports for World News with Diane Sawyer, also Good Morning America throughout the week, ABC News Digital, ABC News Radio, and for four years, he anchored World News Sunday. And along the way, this guy's covered huge stories. He reported on mass shootings in Newton, Connecticut, Aurora, Colorado, Tucson, Arizona,

• 44:28Rich Roll?

  and he's anchored natural disasters from Haiti to Miramar to Hurricane Katrina. And he's also been an overseas war correspondent, covering combat in Afghanistan, Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank. The guy has made six visits to Iraq. So I think you can gather that this job, his job, is quite the pressure cooker. His coverage of conflict-ridden areas in the Middle East started taking a serious toll on his health. And this is where kind of the story begins for us and where things get really interesting. In 2005, Dan suffered a panic attack on national television on Good Morning America in front of 5 million people.

• 45:12Rich Roll?

  We're sitting here today, and I want to talk about your book, but I can't help the fact that right off of your right shoulder, I'm staring at the cover of a book that looks remarkably like your book, except it says, instead of saying 10% happier, it says 11% happier by Ron Claiborne. And so maybe I should be sitting with Ron.

• 45:31Speaker 03

  So Ron is one of my colleagues who's on the Weekend Good Morning America show with me, and he's the news reader on the show. I'm one of the hosts. So this may be a little bit in the weeds, the positions. Anyway, he's another guy on the air on the show. And when my book came out in March, the book's called 10% Happier. He did a little bit on the show where he said, I want to congratulate my colleague, Dan Harris, for his new book, 10% Happier. No big deal, but I wrote a sequel. It's called 11% Happier. And if you're only going to buy one book, you do the math.

• 46:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  And actually, you know, that joke, I could see it. It drove my Amazon rank up significantly.

• 46:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, it did?

• 46:13Speaker 03

  I mean, like, making that joke on the air did remarkable things.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. That's very cool.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  I spent a lot of time in Iraq. And when I got home after one of those trips to Iraq in July of, or in the summer of '03, I got depressed and I did a very, very dumb thing, which was that I self-medicated with cocaine and ecstasy. And that produced a panic attack on live television on Good Morning America in June of 2004. The doctor explained to me that even though I wasn't doing it every day, and it was, you know, for a pretty short period of time, it was enough to raise the level of adrenaline in my brain. And so I was on Good Morning America, reading some headlines, and I just freaked out. I melted down. Couldn't talk anymore and had to quit right in the middle of my newscast. If you

• 47:05Speaker 03

  watch it, and I know you've seen it, and I said this, I revitalized, it's not like, I mean, it's embarrassing, but it's not like broadcast news in Albert Brooks, you know?

• 47:13Rich Roll?

  Right. It's not quite, like, if you, once you know and you watch it, you can see what's going on and you can see yourself unraveling. But if you were just casually watching it, you might not really notice. So it's not, you don't have the Albert Brooks flop sweat.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  So here's, here's why. Because I had the opportunity to just cut it short and toss it back to Diane Sawyer and Charlie Gibson, who were the anchors of the show. If, like Albert Brooks, I was stuck and marooned as the only person who was the anchor of the show, it would have been an epic disaster. So there's no question that it was worse in my head than it is on television, but it's not good on television. You can definitely tell that that's a news anchor who's struggling, which we're not supposed to do. So, I mean, that was really embarrassing and scary and raised all sorts of existential questions about whether I could keep doing the job.

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  It's this beautiful irony, though, that you got assigned to cover faith and being the skeptic that you are, just whatever your, you know, preconceived proclivities were, that catalyzed this journey that allowed you to come to this place. It's fascinating. I mean, it's, that's the stuff of novels.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Did you say it was beautiful irony? Mostly, mostly in the book, what I realize is that time and again, I'm like the anti blink. You know that Malcolm Gladwell talks about the wisdom of our subconscious minds? For me, the, the, the quick decisions that I make are almost always very stupid.

• 48:40Rich Roll?

  Right. Like pounding on your head for endless times before you're realizing like, oh, okay, this is the direction I need to go.

• 48:46Speaker 03

  Yes. Or, you know, it's just like, I reflexively write off things. You know, I reflexively wrote off faith, right? Didn't want to do it. I thought it was all just kind of dumb. And, you know, and I reflexively wrote off something like meditation. I, you know, I haven't reflexively written off a plant-based diet, but I'm somewhat against it.

• 49:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. This is the first step. This is my real agenda today.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  You do make a good case. I should tell your listeners that we talked about it before the podcast. But anyway, so it's, I mean, maybe it's a beautiful, novelistic irony, but mostly for me, the way I look at it is that time and again, I'm, I just, I, I rush to judgment and then I'm proven wrong spectacularly.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  I like that.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 99 with Robin Arzon.

• 49:47Rich Roll?

  So who's Robin? A self-proclaimed ambassador of sweat, Robin is the inspirational powerhouse behind Shut Up and Run, her blog. I love that name. She's a New York City-based urban running force of nature. She's an ultra marathoner, including that time. She ran five marathons in five days across Utah. What? She's a running coach, a cycling instructor, and she's a brand ambassador, consultant, and social media producer for some of the biggest brands out there, brands like Nike and I believe Reebok and others. And now she's a magazine publisher even. She founded the newly released Undo magazine, which can be found worldwide in places like Urban Outfitters.

• 50:33Rich Roll?

  Hailing from Cuban and Puerto Rican parents, I would call Robin a modern day warrior. She's a powerhouse of female empowerment who never sacrifices style for function. She totally brings the bling and the swagger and the fashion and the fun back into sweating and running and fitness with a vivacious energy and a personal style that's totally unique, totally her own, quintessentially urban, completely New York City, totally hip, and possibly infectious, and completely inclusive, fueled by the ethos that there is no finish line.

• 51:11Speaker 10

  I was just in a bar in the East Village with my friends and this guy walks in with a gun and happened to walk into the bar that I was in, shot this man lying on the ground. Sorry, let me backtrack. This guy walked in who had already been shot, then the man who shot him followed him in. Then he shoots him a second time, grabs me. I was just sitting on a stool by the doorway, drinking a glass of wine, a few months before my 21st birthday, but whatever, I think that's besides the point.

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  The statute of limitations.

• 51:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, whatever. And then he grabbed, he grabbed me by my hair and it was a really, really narrow, tiny wine bar. And he's just, I mean, expletives flailing, like he's, I mean, he's basically saying that people are leaving him body bags. And I really didn't, in those moments, like, time actually slows down. And you're like, what is actually happening? I mean, your body's trying to process it and then it's in shock and then it's just these really base, like, base emotions of survival kick in. And that's when he hands me garbage bag ties, or throws them at me, and he tells me to start tying people up. So I'm tying people up with these, like, slide, plastic garbage bag ties, trying to

• 52:27Speaker 10

  make it loose enough so no, so they can't, so they can get out if they need to, but not so loose that he can tell that I'm, he can tell that I'm doing that. And Then he lifts me, oh, no, then he starts spraying us with this flammable liquid. He's spraying us with kerosene. And I had literally chunks of my hair ripped out from how strongly forcefully he yanks me.

• 52:50Rich Roll?

  So he, but he, so he shot this guy outside of the bar. The guy is injured and runs into the bar. He follows him, but the guy has like spray kerosene on.

• 52:58Speaker 10

  Oh, he's got, later I found out he had multiple guns. He had swords, like full on samurai swords underneath his clothing. He had a catheter, I can't, he had a catheter on him. Cause he planned for on the, for this takeover to take days. So, I mean, that was like, it's, I, I, I, I mean, thankfully I didn't know any of that at the time. I saw the gun, felt the gun, um, and, and I, then he starts spraying us with this flammable liquid. And then bust out a barbecue lighter and starts flicking it in people's faces. It was in that moment that I was like, okay, this isn't a robbery. This is like, he wants people to die.

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this is a psychopath, straight up.

• 53:42Speaker 10

  Straight up. And he grabs me and he proceeds to use me as his main hostage, like as a human shield. Essentially right, body to body, I was right in front of him. The NYPD are now outside of the bar. It's a tiny bar, so this, I mean, this couldn't have been, I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't that many feet. Maybe like a few hundred feet away, um, if that. And, um, he wants to talk to the police outside. So then I became this like pseudo negotiator where I'm calling the nine one one on my cell phone. And then negotiating between this guy, Stephen Johnson, and the NYPD outside. And I'm asking for his demands, he has none.

• 54:27Speaker 10

  Then he starts speaking to me in Spanish. Somehow he was able to tell that I'm Hispanic, I'm Puerto Rican and Cuban. And, um, so then I'm like, all right, maybe I can humanize the situation. So in Spanish, I start talking to this guy about his son, about his family, about his life. And trying to really figure out like what it is that he was doing there and how to salvage this. And, um, you know, he really didn't have, I mean, he was just so disturbed. And the only, the only intelligible parts of the conversation were when he was talking about his kid. And, um, at the time, his son was 10 years old. And, um, his wife had just died of AIDS and.

• 55:07Speaker 10

  I just think it was, he was an unhinged racist. He wanted to kill white people. He wanted all white people to die. Very explicitly said that multiple times. And um, he, it, it was, I, I just remember, like, the refrain in my mind, I'm sure there were many things, but what I remember so distinctly was thinking, this is not my story. And it was one of the first moments that I understood um, my life as sort of the story that I was putting out into the world. I think before then, like, um, yeah, I dealt with stuff, but pretty, pretty uneventful life, I think, until then.

• 55:51Speaker 10

  And then at 20, when you're kind of dealing with your own mortality, and then the mortality of 20 other people, because you don't want to set this guy off, um, yeah, it was, I mean, I think major is an understatement.

• 56:07Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 101 with Brendan Brazier.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  The best place to start is with the food on our plate, what you put in your mouth. If you can change that vibration, you just might be amazed at what might follow. That's my story, and it's also the story of today's guest, a guy who had a passion for healthy, clean, performance-enhancing nutrition that catalyzed a pretty amazing, unexpected journey for this guy, a guy who ultimately has become recognized as one of the most prominent voices, athletes, and entrepreneurs in the health, fitness, and nutrition worlds, Brendan Brazier. For a lot of you guys out there, he needs no introduction. In many ways, he is the guy. He's the guy.

• 57:03Rich Roll?

  He's that guy. He's the guy leading the charge in the plant-based athletic performance kingdom. Recognized as one of the world's foremost authorities on plant-based nutrition and sports performance, I think it's pretty fair to say that Brendan is really, not only is he the guy, he was like the first guy who lit, or continues to light, the path for so many people who are exploring this nexus between performance and athleticism on a diet that's fueled either entirely, or at least predominantly, on plants.

• 57:37Speaker 11

  I was at a Mets game fairly recently and that was interesting. You know, it's kind of the blue collar baseball team and you get there and I was doing this thing. So the folks at Beyond Meat, I don't know if

• 57:50Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I know Ethan. Yeah, yeah.

• 57:51Speaker 11

  Yeah. So they've created this burger, this plant-based burger that's really nutrient-dense. It's not a fake meat, it's just

• 58:00Rich Roll?

  It's pea protein. Yeah, it's not that processed. It's all natural ingredients.

• 58:04Speaker 11

  Right. So yeah, I'm on the advisory board for them, the nutrition advisory board, and we're there outside giving it out to these, these blue collar baseball fans. And you know, it was really interesting because, you know, you get the kind of standard thing like, oh, if it doesn't have legs, I'm not going to eat it and that kind of thing. And then

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  I hope you guys were filming this. Do you film it?

• 58:22Speaker 11

  We actually, yeah, we did. We do have a bit of footage and it was actually reported on by the Wall Street Journal as well. And there's an article, you can, you can search that and it has a few, a few of the quotes in there from some of the people. But it was interesting because, you know, if, if they actually give you a few minutes to explain it to them, they, they're quite open, I find. But it is that initial bit of time. And what I think is interesting too, is really just taking the argument away from, or even discussion arguments may be too harsh for, but just the discussion away from what's better and just talking about transparency. And it's like, do you want to know where your food comes from? And when you buy this, what are you voting for? What are you saying that,

• 59:02Speaker 11

  that you like? Or what are you spending money on that maybe, maybe you don't know a lot about? And one thing I think Beyond Meat did that was really smart too, is they, they took the conversation away from is meat good or is meat bad or any of that? And they just made it a transparency argument. So they challenged Purdue and the other chicken producers just to put streaming video in their production facility. And they said, we'll do the same. So, right, of course.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  Like that would ever happen, you know?

• 59:31Speaker 11

  Exactly. And that was their, their point is that they're not, these companies don't want you to see what goes on, whereas they're fully open because they're just putting together these proteins from plants. So then it becomes a discussion about transparency and what ought the consumer know or be able to know when making food choices. And you got to think, if the producer of food doesn't want you to see how it's produced, then

• 59:54Rich Roll?

  What was the guiding principle that led you to sort of discovering that plant-based was an advantage as opposed to a disadvantage?

• 1:00:03Speaker 11

  Well, it really just comes down to efficiency. I found that you could spend less energy digesting and assimilating food and getting more nutrition in return. So, less energy out, more nutrition in. And I was under the impression for years, as I think a lot of people are for obvious reasons, that a calorie is a measure of food energy. So, you would assume the more calories you ate, the more energy you would have. And, of course, that's not the case, because if it were people who ate big 3,000 calorie fast food meal-

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  They have tons of energy.

• 1:00:29Speaker 11

  -have tons of energy. And the opposite's true, they fall asleep. So, there is obviously a disconnect there. And I found it had to do with net gain, so something I call high net gain nutrition in my book, whereas you want to spend the least amount of digestive energy to get the most amount of nutrition. And when I say nutrition, I'm not talking about calories, I'm talking about vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, antioxidants. So, for example, I swapped out starchy, refined carbs, pasta, white rice. These foods that had quite a lot of calories but didn't have a lot of nutrition for things like pseudo-grains, amaranth, quinoa, buckwheat, wild rice, more nutrient-dense foods. So, you spend less energy, so therefore you have more of it, because you're spending less, and you're getting more nutrition while expending less energy.

• 1:01:11Speaker 11

  So, it just really, really comes down to efficiency. And then, because you have more energy, you can use that to rebuild and repair. You know, we all have a finite amount of energy, it's not something that, it's just this endless supply. So, if we come up with efficiencies on how to spend it more wisely, such as eating foods that take less energy to digest, then it's going to be an advantage. And I wasn't hungry all the time, too. After a while, I used to just fill up on these refined foods. I was vegan, but just wasn't doing it right. So, I had a lot of calories, but not a lot of nutrition. And, you know, it's a funny time we're in today, where food is no longer synonymous with nutrition. You can eat a lot of food, doesn't mean you're well-nourished. And a lot of obese people actually show symptoms of malnourishment, which is crazy.

• 1:01:55Rich Roll?

  It's insane, right? It's like, are we starving, or are we fat?

• 1:01:57Speaker 11

  We can't decide.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  We're actually both? You know, like, it's just, it's completely mind-boggling.

• 1:02:03Speaker 11

  Yeah. So, that's one thing. And then, another thing, too, you mentioned biological debt. That's something that-

• 1:02:10Speaker 11

  You know, a lot of North Americans, I think, become caught up in a cycle where they're tired, they wake up tired, so then they crave coffee and sugar. Caffeine, of course, is a stimulant, sugar is a stimulant. So you get energy right away through stimulation, which treats the symptom of fatigue, but doesn't treat the cause. The cause is you haven't slept deeply enough, or you haven't slept enough in general. And so that is brought about by high cortisol. So cortisol is a stress hormone that whenever we're stressed, it goes up. So stress can come from, you know, traditional stress, too much work, not enough rest. It can come from breathing polluted air. It can come from worrying about things we have no control over. It can come from low-quality food. It can come from overtraining, just training more than your body can actually rebuild and repair from.

• 1:02:55Speaker 11

  So you don't want to cut back on your training, because then you slow your rate of progress. So, you know, you want to find other ways to reduce stress without reducing the ability to train a lot and improve. So you can create and find some of those efficiencies through better food. So when you eat more nutrient-dense foods, cortisol, the stress hormone, goes down. You sleep more deeply, so you wake up, you're fresh, you're rested. You don't have to wake up and borrow energy.

• 1:03:29Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich World Podcast, episode 103 with Preston Smiles.

• 1:03:40Rich Roll?

  But the Preston that I know is a pretty unlikely evolution from a very different guy not too many years ago. A guy who was raised in less-than-stellar circumstances, a hyperactive, dyslexic gang member prone to beatings and beating others, an angry, disenfranchised young man who was looking at an almost certain future of violence and drug abuse and jails and institutions. But Preston was able to escape this somewhat predetermined future.

• 1:04:11Rich Roll?

  An emotional and a spiritual transformation so profound, it produced a man who is now, you know, full of life, a man devoted to serving others and a man who's really not afraid to embrace and exude this crazy four-letter word called love, which is, you know, hardly the most popular subject among men in our society. I mean, when was the last time a group of men sat down and talked about love? You know, it's just not really hardwired into our culture as something that's kind of, I don't know, acceptable or encouraged for, you know, the masculine society to really speak about in public.

• 1:04:53Speaker 05

  It's all energy, man. You know, I'm saying a lot before I ever say anything because my energetic field is speaking before me.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  Right. That's the first thing you gauge, like when you're taking that sort of inventory of your environment. You can read that on an unconscious level.

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  Totally. So we ground everybody. Like when we met up, you know, I had everybody circle up and we talked about the intention. Why are we here? What are we up to? What is this about? Because this isn't just about screaming and being wild. This has a thing behind it. And that thing is, love is all there is. And our planet right now is in a nightmare. And it's going to take people like myself and like you and anybody else who understands that we're asleep to speak to people's listening in a way in which they can actually understand it. And for me, what I 100% understand is touch

• 1:05:52Speaker 05

  and like human connection trumps everything. You could have the biggest intellect in the world and that doesn't mean anything if you're not, if energetically you're not actually with me. So grounding everybody and why we're there and what the intention is, people feel that. So when I say up top, high five, you know, they assess it very quickly, but they see what my energy is. My energy is loving. My energy is connected. So they do it.

• 1:06:20Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  Or they don't do it and then they turn around and they kind of look back and they're like, wait. Oh, they're just like loving people. And they'll, you know, say a little something to their spouse and maybe on the way back, then they'll high five or they'll ask a question. So what is this? What is this about? You know? And then we'll tell them, you know? It's awesome.

• 1:06:37Rich Roll?

  Right. And so did you have some cool experiences with sort of passersby or?

• 1:06:41Speaker 05

  Big time.

• 1:06:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, do you have an example of that?

• 1:06:44Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, we had some, um, some, uh, Arab young kids that were there. And, uh, we start, we, we created this town, uh, town hall council meeting towards the end of it where we just had a giant circle. And then whatever you wanted to say, you step in the circle and you say it.

• 1:07:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:03Speaker 05

  And, uh, you know, a couple of us started it out and I stepped in the circle and I said, I know I appear to be this six, two, beautiful chocolate man. And everybody starts laughing. It's like, but in reality, I'm vibration and energy in a space. And I know the same for you. And I know that underneath all of our stories about white, black, gay, straight, Christian, Muslim, Israeli, Palestinian, Democrat, Republican, any of that stuff, under all of that is our truth, our humanity is who we are. And the crowd goes wild and all that stuff. And a couple of those happened and then these, uh, Arab kids jumped in the circle. And they said, I don't speak much English, but I feel what happened here and I know you see me too.

• 1:07:45Speaker 05

  And like he's saying all this broken English, but it was all exactly what our intention was.

• 1:07:50Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:51Speaker 05

  Which was to have people feel seen and feel heard, you know? And he stuck around, stuck around for hours, hours, holding signs. He joined the mob, not just him, but his crew.

• 1:08:04Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:08:05Speaker 05

  It was awesome. I was in a popular, um, copy machine place, which I will not name, so.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  You can name it.

• 1:08:12Speaker 05

  So I don't get sued.

• 1:08:13Rich Roll?

  You'd get in trouble.

• 1:08:15Speaker 05

  So I'm in a Kinko's, right? And I get there and it's one of those days where nothing is working. So I get on the, on the computer and I need to print something up.

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  Nothing ever works at Kinko's.

• 1:08:26Speaker 05

  This is true.

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  I get on there and I need to print something up and uh they, they, after like forty-five minutes, someone comes over and they're like, I'm like, can someone help me? I can't get on the Yahoo. They're like, oh yeah, you can't log on to Yahoo on these computers. I'm like, wait a minute. This is a computer with internet. Where is there a sign that says I can't get on Yahoo? Now, oh yeah, we, we just didn't put it up.

• 1:08:50Rich Roll?

  They have, well, they have some corporate deal or whatever that blocks it.

• 1:08:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  Awesome, right? So now I'm really frustrated. So I end up, you know, doing the dance and, and sending it to a Gmail account, then printing it, and then I need to go fax. So at this point, I'm really frustrated and I'm late. I walk over to the fax machine, I see this woman, and there's a line. And I'm waiting for the line, I see this woman in, on one particular fax machine, there's two machines. And she's taking forever. And her card keeps coming in and out, and she barely speaks English, and I'm like, are you serious?

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

  This is the kind of stuff that makes me insane.

• 1:09:22Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:09:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 05

  I was, I was pacing. I was like, I'm gonna choke her. I'm gonna choke, I'm gonna jump over there and choke her. So either way, it gets to my point, my turn, to, on the other fax machine. And I do my thing, and as I'm about to take my stuff away, I um I noticed that her card is saying canceled.

• 1:09:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  And she's really embarrassed, and she's trying to play it off. And the woman, the attendant, who's trying to help her, is like, well, um, maybe we'll just step over here. And in that moment, I, I came back to big questions, which is what, what good is here that I presently cannot see? And at that point, I say, well ma'am, I can, I can just send that for you.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  She looked at me and kind of paused like, wait, what? And I said, I'll just send it for you, it's no big deal. It's a couple of dollars, here, give it here. And I did it without her even saying yes or no. And what I noticed was, was that every single person that was in the line prior to that moment was completely upset. And as soon as I did that one act, it affected the entire line. Everybody started talking to each other, everybody started smiling, the energy changed in the room, just based on one act. And, and

• 1:10:37Speaker 05

  I've been playing that game all over my life, asking myself, what would love do now?

• 1:10:50Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich World Podcast, episode 107 with Tim Van Orden.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  If you're a longtime listener to the show, then you may recall my conversation with Tim back in the early days, episode 15. We talked about Tim's trajectory from relatively aimless and unhealthy junk food vegetarian into a raw food beast, a journey in food and athleticism that transformed Tim, who is then a non-athlete, into a 10-time U.S. Masters, trail-running, national champion. That's right. And we talked about his holistic approach to life and how he makes it all work on a 100% raw, plant-based diet.

• 1:11:41Speaker 12

  I realized even then, even though I wasn't talking about it yet, I realized then that this is just the first step. And I made a video recently where I talked about the gas that we put in our cars. You know, we gas up the car. I had to fill up the tank to come out here to see you. And I didn't think about the gas. As soon as I swiped the credit card, that was it. My conversation about gas ended and I got in the car and I drove. But with food, for some reason, we keep thinking about the gas. We keep talking about the gas. And people get stuck there. You know, they change their diet and then they're stuck. And they haven't moved to the next step, which is change your life now. What's important to you? What matters? Okay, you filled up the tank. Great. It's high-quality

• 1:12:26Speaker 12

  gas, but what are you going to do with it?

• 1:12:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:27Speaker 12

  What kind of life do you want? Do you want a life where you just talk about food? You know, is that what's important to you? Or do you just want to use that fuel to do things in a way that you haven't been able to before because now you're more properly nourished, you're not numbed out by the food, you've gotten rid of many degenerative diseases caused by...

• 1:12:47Speaker 12

  Malnutrition, in a sense, you know, eating a standard American diet. And, you know, now you're operating at a higher level. What are you gonna do with that?

• 1:12:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:12:55Speaker 12

  When you're really, really struggling, you've got to get present to the tools that are at hand. Really come into the moment and say, okay, I don't feel well. I don't want to get out of bed. So what can I do? Well, I'm in bed and the covers are on me. So I'm gonna pull back the covers. That's it. That's it. That's the one thing I'm gonna focus on right now. I don't have a lot of energy, but I probably have enough energy for that. So let's do that. And I do. Okay, what's next? All right, let's slide our legs over the side of the bed, put them on the floor. Sit up. Okay, how you doing? Well, I really don't feel great. I still, I'm not excited, but all right. Okay, let's get up. Find a pair of shorts. All right, put a pair of shorts on, find a shirt. All right, let's start walking towards the kitchen. And I don't have a goal yet.

• 1:13:40Speaker 12

  I'm simply now out of bed with some clothes on.

• 1:13:42Rich Roll?

  The next right action.

• 1:13:44Speaker 12

  The next right action.

• 1:13:45Rich Roll?

  You're not looking any further than what is the next action.

• 1:13:47Speaker 12

  No, because that's scary. Because a depressed person, or somebody that's really challenged, if they start thinking into the future, they start comparing themself and how they feel to that future, and the gap is too wide. Okay, if I have to be a raw foodist, or if I have to be a vegan, and that's this identity that I have to, you know, strictly hold on to, that's too much. Way too much pressure. But if I can just walk towards the kitchen, all right, well, there's no identity there. There's no real pressure there. Yeah, even though I'm depressed, I can walk towards the kitchen. I get there, all right, grab a banana. Peel it. That's it. That's all you're doing, you're peeling a banana. All right? Put it in the blender. Okay, peel another one. Get some frozen blueberries. Put them in the blender. Open the fridge, get some kale.

• 1:14:32Speaker 12

  Put it in the blender. And I just focus on the steps. I'm not telling myself anything. I don't have, okay, I've gotta do a 30-day juice challenge, or smoothie challenge, or I've gotta lose 50 pounds. You know, whatever people tell themselves, they set these big goals. Again, they're flying above the city, looking down, but they're not on the ground. So I just put myself through the steps until there I am, drinking a green smoothie, but I never told myself I had to. Because a green smoothie is a concept. You know, it's holding the banana in your hand and peeling it. That's the reality.

• 1:15:06Speaker 12

  And then when I'm done, I walk into my room, put whatever clothes on I need, one step at a time. I walk out the door, I start my watch, I pick up my foot, I take a single running step, and then, you know, off I go. Mm-hmm. I don't tell myself how far I have to go, I don't tell myself how hard I have to go. I simply focus on the tiniest of steps. And not only does it get me in action regardless of how the day started, and my days often start pretty rough, but I always get into action with that method and it's got me really present, which has changed who I am as a person. Mm-hmm. It's really caused me to just be present to my surroundings. So when I am running, or when I'm doing anything now, I'm really present to it, and I'm not

• 1:15:50Speaker 12

  thinking about these fantasies and these goals. I'm here. Mm-hmm. And it's changed everything.

• 1:15:58Speaker 12

  I published a video a week and a half ago about a fight I broke up. I biked up Mount Greylock in Massachusetts, the highest point, and there's a lot of tourists on top because it's an access road. And there was this huge fight, these guys fighting and hurting each other, and there was blood, and it was ugly, and everybody was just watching, and people are videotaping it, gonna pop it up on YouTube, I'm sure. And I'm like, this is not okay. And I really don't like conflict. Conflict makes me really, really uncomfortable. And being a shy person, conflict is the last place that I want to be. But as a compassionate man... Don't go to law school. Yeah, right, yeah.

• 1:16:40Speaker 12

  Oh, wow, I can't even imagine that. But, you know, here I am, and seeing these men fighting and bloodying each other, and I just, I couldn't stand by and let it happen, and I couldn't be one of those people that just watched. So I walked over, and I said, "Hi, I'm Tim." And they looked at me like, "What the hell?" You know, they're in the middle of a fight, and here's a guy walking, and we're saying, "Hi, I'm Tim." And it stopped them.

• 1:17:05Speaker 12

  You know, one of the things that I've started practicing, and this is a tool that I've learned from modern neuroscience studies, whenever I feel that dopamine desire coming in, I pause for a moment, and this, it takes practice. It's a muscle that you can build, you know, it's not an instant fix. But I pause, I stop, and I say, okay, what is it you're feeling right now? What are the physical sensations that you're feeling? Because I can feel myself being drawn to something. And, okay, what is it? Where is it in the body? What does it feel like? And what, what is your brain telling you right now? Like, what desire is it promising? Okay? Is it real? Have you had this thing before? And if you

• 1:17:48Speaker 12

  have had that thing, does it deliver on the desire promised? And the answer is almost always no. So, once I get present to that, first, what am I physically experiencing? So that gets me out of my thoughts for a moment and into my body. I'm now using like a mindfulness practice, like tuning in, checking in with everything. And then, okay, what is my brain telling me I'm going to be rewarded with? And is it true? And if I think about it for just a second, it's like, you know what? Yeah, I did that before, and I actually felt worse after. And then, boom, it's off.

• 1:18:27Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Ritual Podcast, episode 112 with Bryant Terry.

• 1:18:37Rich Roll?

  Bryant is an echo chef. He's a cookbook author. He's an educator. And most interesting to me, and kind of what we focus on during today's conversation, is that Bryant is a renowned social justice activist. He's a guy who's focused on promoting and creating healthy, just, and sustainable food systems to make them more widely available and affordable to all people, particularly those living in underserved urban communities. His mission is to bring awareness to people living in basically food deserts, these kind of urban locations, places where fresh, healthy, sustainable food is difficult, or maybe even impossible

• 1:19:17Rich Roll?

  to obtain. Why does he do this? Because good food should be an everyday right, and not a privilege. Eating healthy should not be an elitist ideal.

• 1:19:35Rich Roll?

  The other thing that's cool too is, I mean, going through your cookbooks, these recipes are extraordinary and amazing, but they're kind of core...

• 1:19:44Speaker 13

  Thank you.

• 1:19:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, they're phenomenal and they're unlike anything you're ever gonna find in any other cookbook, plant-based or otherwise, so thank you for putting these books out. But this idea that the recipes are supposed to be a launchpad for the reader's own creativity, like this idea that, you know, the kitchen is this place where you can experiment and be creative and kind of go off script and go off page, and I know that's how you work with food, and that's a big kind of way that my wife also comes up with her recipes. And I think it intimidates people, but I think that's where the magic happens, right?

• 1:20:20Speaker 13

  I agree. I mean, it's this tricky position, being an educator, as well as the kind of cookbook author who fashions himself as an artist, because I just have like the work that I want to put in the world, and I want these beautiful books with the recipes the way that I like them, but, you know, I do think you're right. It's just like spontaneity, creativity, using what's on hand is the magic place in the kitchen. But I realize a lot of people are kitchen novices, you know, we're so disconnected from cooking in our industrialized food system that a lot of people need those kind of rudimentary skills just to be able to feel comfortable in the kitchen, and so, you know, you just can't put a handful or a pinch. People are like, "What is a handful?"

• 1:21:01Rich Roll?

  Don't freak out.

• 1:21:02Speaker 13

  Yeah. Can you be more specific? And so, I try to just balance, just me wanting to just like have these recipes where I say, "Hey, if you're growing Swiss chard in your home and the recipe calls for kale, don't go buy kale, use the Swiss chard," but also realizing that a lot of people just need to be, for you to be very specific for them to feel comfortable. I encounter a lot of people who it's like in this culture, we fetishize food and cookbooks and food related shows, but then so many people still don't cook, you know, a lot of people are like, I don't know, I, you know, these people, they have TV shows and have their own restaurants and I just don't know if I can cook like that. And so, you know, as corny as it may sound, I really try to get people to, you know, bring out

• 1:21:45Speaker 13

  their inner chef and not get too caught up in all the hype and the corporatizing of this very exciting moment in, um, you know, food culture and thinking about all these issues.

• 1:21:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it brings up one of the most maybe compelling kind of avenues of your advocacy, which is, um, you know, combating this notion that, that eating healthy, being healthy is an elitist ideal, you know, it's the purview of, you know, the upper middle class and the upper class white people shopping at Whole Foods and it's just inaccessible to everybody else. And so I'm interested in, um, you know, the work that you do and kind of the messaging that you put out there, uh, vis a vis the socioeconomic issues that face the underclass, you know, the African American population, et cetera, and, and kind of the role that you play as a, as a, as a mouthpiece to try to change this entrenched,

• 1:22:36Rich Roll?

  you know, concept and, and get people to understand and embrace the idea that healthy eating, healthy living is accessible to all of us irrespective of what class you find yourself in.

• 1:22:48Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, you know, for me, I, I understand that our runaway food system is having a negative impact on everyone across the board. I mean, if you consider like the multinational food corporations and the, the way in which they're destroying the very foundation of a healthy food system, you know, poisoning the air, poisoning the water, poisoning the soil. I mean, in many ways you could argue they're destroying the very foundation for a habitable earth.

• 1:23:11Rich Roll?

  Right. Have you seen, uh, Cowspiracy yet?

• 1:23:14Speaker 13

  No.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  This movie, Cowspiracy, uh, get you a DVD. Ah, shit, a problem.

• 1:23:17Speaker 13

  Oh, I want to check that out.

• 1:23:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's a new documentary that, that, that speaks to all of these.

• 1:23:22Speaker 13

  Good, good.

• 1:23:23Rich Roll?

  Issues you're talking about.

• 1:23:24Speaker 13

  So, you know, at, at, at the end of the day, I'm really invested in transforming the food system for everyone.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:29Speaker 13

  And I understand that when we think about, um, community That have the least access to healthy, fresh, affordable, culturally appropriate food. I understand that so many of those communities are low-income communities of color that often don't have a voice, that often are powerless in many ways. And although, and this is something I had to come to terms with when I first started doing this work, you know, I grew up a privileged life and I can't say that I relate to all the issues that people of color living in low-income urban centers are dealing with. But I do understand the power that I have as a person of color, as an African-American man, speaking about these issues.

• 1:24:09Speaker 13

  Thug Kitchen was a blog started in fall of 2012 and it's, you know, profanity-laced memes that are kind of geared towards getting people to make plant-based recipes. So, you know, their whole tagline is eat like you give a, boop, F U C K. Can I curse on this one?

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can say whatever you want.

• 1:24:32Speaker 13

  So, eat like you give a fuck. And, you know, it was interesting because given the work that I've done, I was like, oh, wow, like this nameless thug, is this like some young person of color who lives in a low-income urban community trying to actually do some culturally and linguistically appropriate outreach to get like, you know, other young quote-unquote thugs thinking about eating more healthily? And I thought it was brilliant, you know? I'm just like, okay, yeah, like, this is a very exaggerated stereotype of African-American street vernacular, but some, some of the language that they were using in the beginning of the blog was clearly, you know, lifted from black films and black comedies and black hip-hop artists and the kind of lingo and phrases that they were using.

• 1:25:14Speaker 13

  And so, for a lot of people, especially people who are doing this work around impacting, you know, folks of color thinking about eating more healthily, there was this hope, like, okay, this, this could be interesting. This could be like a very culturally appropriate way of getting people to think differently about it. And then, fast forward to, what, a month, two, two weeks ago, a week before their book, because they got a book deal.

• 1:25:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:37Speaker 13

  So, they got, they-

• 1:25:38Rich Roll?

  The blog is hugely popular, like, a massive audience.

• 1:25:40Speaker 13

  Half a million followers on Facebook. You know, very rabbit fans and, um, and, and to be clear, they have a very diverse fan base. It's not like, okay, it's just like white folks. They have a lot of people of color who are really into the blog, even after the reveal that the, the blog, um, the people behind the blog and the book are two, a white couple living in, in Hollywood.

• 1:26:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:03Speaker 13

  And that was revealed maybe a week before the book came out.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 113 with David Clark.

• 1:26:20Rich Roll?

  I came upon photos of a guy pushing 320 pounds, a bloated face, cocktail in hand. And if I know anything, I know what an alcoholic looks like when I see one. And, and David fit the bill, top to bottom. He was a guy who looked like hell, redlining towards death and creating a wide path of destruction in his wake. I continued to poke around and then I saw a picture of a fit and slim 165 pound athlete crossing the finish line at Badwater, a 135 mile run across Death Valley, the hottest place on earth, widely considered to be the world's toughest footrace. The change was so astounding. My thought, my first

• 1:27:05Rich Roll?

  thought was like, can this be real? The 320 plus pound guy who looked like some kind of menacing Archie bunker you're scared to talk to, decades older than his biological age, bore almost no resemblance to that runner achieving something even the most accomplished runners find absolutely terrifying. But when I looked closely at the faces, I could indeed tell that this was the same guy. I needed to know more about how he did it. So I reached out. David sent me his book. It's called Out There, A Story of Ultra Recovery. And to say that I was amazed by what this man has endured, overcome, achieved, and the astounding extent to which he had transformed his life would be a complete understatement. After reading the first page of his book, I just identified so completely and I knew that

• 1:27:50Rich Roll?

  I had to have him on the show.

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that the picture that a lot of people have of the alcoholic is woefully inaccurate. Like you said, it's not the bum sitting on the street corner, drinking and sitting around in his own filth. Although, we can all end up there if we stay on long enough.

• 1:28:11Rich Roll?

  It's headed that way.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  But no, it's the guy that's doing a pretty reasonable job at creating an illusion of what his life looks like. And getting farther and farther away from that illusion as he goes, deeper and deeper in.

• 1:28:28Rich Roll?

  Right, there's this great disconnect. And there's this growing awareness that, yeah, this is a problem. You're getting into trouble. I mean, you know, you know that this is not good. You're powerless to stop. And to compensate for that, you go overtime on work and all those other things. Because that helps put the facade up that your life is actually functional.

• 1:28:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, and it gives you proof that you are okay. It's like, hey, well, at least I'm doing this, and I'm okay. When I started to write the book, I made a deal with myself that I wasn't going to hold anything back that I thought would be too embarrassing, or things I wrote about it, like driving drunk and stuff like that. I didn't want to put that in there, because I know the stigma that's attached to that, and I didn't want people chasing after me. But I was like, you know, I'm going to put what's in there, and then if it's too much, I just won't release the book. But I'll have an accurate product when I'm done. And so you go through all these moments, these low moments. And I chose a handful of thousands.

• 1:29:29Speaker 04

  And I tend to choose the ones that were, for whatever reason, I was present enough at that time to remember it. But the reality is, most of them, I didn't remember, and I had no idea what happened the night before. But of all the things that I talked about in the book, the other addicts that I talked to always point out the Christmas present story, and not some of the other ones, like, you know, it's that one. And I think because we've all just been in that place where you're so drunk, you're so out of it that you can't do this. Stupidly easy task and your brain knows you should be able to do it and it becomes more and more frustrating and more and more shameful and humiliating and everything all

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  wrapped into one and I if if I could you know if I would have written the story as a script that would have been my low you know that would have been the moment that I rose up from the ashes and created a new life because I don't know that I've ever felt less of a human being than I did that Christmas morning but I kept going.

• 1:30:36Rich Roll?

  So what was that moment in August that tipped the scale for you?

• 1:30:41Speaker 04

  You know, um, it was just, uh, I think it was, we kind of talked about before, you know, alarm bells, you know, and I kind of was aware of each time my, my drinking and my, my use was going to a new level of destruction and, and that morning, there was just something really heavy about it and I think that, um, I think that that was going to be a significant day for me one way or the other and I think I was gonna either entirely give up and just go, go about the process of, of ending it, you know, maybe slowly, maybe quickly, or I was gonna stand up and start to fight and, um, and I just felt like I had that, that

• 1:31:24Speaker 04

  one, one, one shot, that one little glimpse and, and I just jumped on before I could think about it. I, I've related it to jumping out of a car, you know, like I was driving in a car and, and I thought I was driving the car and taking it to all these nice places and one day I realized I was in the passenger side and I had no control over where the car was going and I kind of hung out there for a while too and it's like, okay, well we'll just see where this thing's going and then that, that day I just opened the door and I jumped out and before I could even think about it. Like all the times I tried to, you know, wrap it into this perfect thing that made sense and, you know, wrestle every demon out into a perfectly, you know, understandable thing and, and it never worked, obviously.

• 1:32:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:05Speaker 04

  So I had to trust the process and, you know, it's kind of just like talking about running a hundred miles or something like that. You can't get to that place where you're doing some run and trying to convince yourself why it's a good idea because it's not a good idea.

• 1:32:17Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  You just gotta run and that's, that's what I did with the recovery. I just, I just took the moment and kept moving forward and.

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  When I finally addressed the spiritual problems, what was causing me to live this way, and once I had to tackle some of those issues, I had this tremendous amount of mental energy and time available to me that I could have chosen to do anything with. I could have chosen to write music, or poetry, or go camping, or go running, and that's what I chose, but it was very much after the fact, and that's the only way it would have ever lasted for me. Because I could go to the gym, you know, how many times have I sat on a piece of equipment at the gym reeking of alcohol, you know, and still smelling like Big Macs because I vomited when I woke up in the morning, and that's real, and that wasn't gonna work.

• 1:33:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08Speaker 04

  It was never gonna work. I had to figure out a way to have a healthy relationship with food, and I had to eat. And that was really difficult, because I totally linked up losing weight with not eating, obviously, or just eating, or eating in some extreme way to trick my body, like the Atkins thing is, 100% protein is what I used like the last five or six times.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:31Speaker 04

  You know, and it's funny because...

• 1:33:33Rich Roll?

  Which is very effective at losing weight, but you know, people have a hard time staying on it.

• 1:33:38Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely, and I talk a lot about weight loss now, and whenever I have a group in front of me, I say, "How many, how many people have been on a successful diet?" And people raise their hands, and I'm like, "Good, keep it up there." So your idea of a successful diet, gaining weight, losing weight, gaining weight, losing weight, because if it's not, you should put your hand down.

• 1:33:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:57Speaker 04

  So, I mean, but...

• 1:33:58Rich Roll?

  But just the word "diet" alone, sort of, infers temporary.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Yes, absolutely. Yeah, so I changed the way that I ate, and, you know, the glycemic index to me made a lot of sense, just because I knew that there is a way that food was affecting my body outside of just calories in and calories out. I knew that there was something bigger in play. And, you know, we used to, I think, you know, in fifty, hundred years ago, whatever, or longer, that the way that you would be overweight is by being gluttonous, right? I mean, you had to just eat all the time, and certainly I was guilty of that. But it seemed like there was so much more in play now with the types of foods that we have that are causing, you know, us to crave things that we wouldn't normally crave,

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  and that we're just kind of in this cycle, you know, that our biology wasn't working for us. We were kind of working against us. And so I became a real student of the glycemic index and how my blood sugar was affected, and I became an absolute stickler on it. And, I mean, I wouldn't have anything with sugar in it at all.

• 1:35:11Rich Roll?

  And just to paint the complete picture, I mean, when you were tipping the scales at 320, not only were you overweight, you had a heart condition, you had extremely high blood pressure, and you had been diagnosed with diabetes, right? This is not just fat guy, this is like sick fat guy.

• 1:35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, when they took, the last time I was at the doctor, and my blood pressure was so high, and I wish I could remember the numbers, I'll have to go back and get them, but there was a two in there.

• 1:35:39Speaker 04

  And, but they didn't want me to leave the doctor's office. I mean, they were like, "You're going to have a stroke. I'm not telling you, you might have a stroke. You are going to have a stroke, you know, it could be in three minutes. You know, you need to be on medication, you need to be on now." And I didn't like that, you know, so I never, and my reasoning was, I never went on medication because I had read that medication is unhealthy.

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  I want to be on that blood pressure medication, then that shit'll kill you.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  Your brain, you're still perceiving the world through a warped brain, I think, at this point.

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely, so of course I left there.

• 1:36:16Rich Roll?

  The smart thing would have been, "I'm on that medication right now, I'm gonna work my way off it, but let's not have a stroke in three minutes."

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was not capable of the smart thing. In fact, I had to go, I was meeting my friend at the bar, and that's a fact. I had someone, my buddy Dan, was waiting for me at the bar while I was at the doctor's office.

• 1:36:33Rich Roll?

  You're like, "I can't hang out in this doctor's office."

• 1:36:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and of course I told him.

• 1:36:36Rich Roll?

  It's pretty gonna be done.

• 1:36:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, we sat and laughed about it, and, you know, drank ourselves silly. Because you're right, like a lot of people, you know, they have these passive, passive aggressive reach out for help kind of thing. And I did it, you know, I remember I called an AA meeting one time and I was like, you know, when is your next meeting? And they're like, I don't know, let me find someone who knows and this and that. And I was like, you know, you should be ready to take someone's fucking call when they call, you know, and I hung up and now they were just laughing their ass off at me. They're like, look at this drunk, you know. But I think a lot of people do that. They'll reach out and they expect you to be able to, you know, like, make something happen. It's like, I'll share with you every corner of my soul and everything that I've ever been through, but that's all I can do. I don't have any secret pieces of wisdom.

• 1:37:22Rich Roll?

  It's on them to actually, you know, take what's in the book or what's out there and actually implement it into their lives. And that's, that's the hard piece, right? I mean, looking back, you know, put yourself back at 320 pounds at the end of your drinking career and, and, and just imagine that you would be somebody who had not only run Badwater, done all these crazy races that you've done, have written this book, you know, be a source of inspiration to other people, be actually, you know, coaching and training other people. I mean, is that, could you have possibly imagined that?

• 1:38:04Speaker 04

  No. Well, I don't know. No.

• 1:38:06Rich Roll?

  No. I mean, where did you, you know, what, what would have your, what would your dream have been?

• 1:38:14Speaker 04

  Like, what was the farthest I could see?

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  Like, where, yeah, like, where did you, you know, what were you aspiring to?

• 1:38:18Speaker 04

  I wanted to run the New York City Marathon one day, I thought. You know, and, and it's funny because like, I remembered seeing the Ironman triathlon when I was a kid. And I couldn't quite get to the point where I could ever see myself doing that. But I had this idea like, I wonder if I could train for it. Like, not actually do it, but could I just train for it? Could I just, could I just like?

• 1:38:42Rich Roll?

  Like, what a weird thought, though.

• 1:38:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:38:45Rich Roll?

  And what do you think that's about? Like, doing the race would actually mean that you'd be accountable to other people, or?

• 1:38:53Speaker 04

  I just don't think that I could put it out there. I, I, I think that I saw that as a certain type of person that could do that. And I wasn't that person. But maybe I could be the type of person who might be able to train for it.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, interesting. Alright, so you get the marathon done, and then where does the idea of like, taking it to the ultra level start to creep into the consciousness?

• 1:39:14Speaker 04

  I read Dean's book, and actually, before that even, right after I finished the marathon, my, my ex-wife, I was sitting there, I was still like, still jacked up, you know, walking downstairs backwards and, and stuff, and I don't think I'd taken my blue Denver Marathon hoodie off yet, you know, I think it was like thirty days before I stopped wearing that every single day. And my ex came and said, "Oh yeah, there's this guy, he ran fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days." And I was like, "No he didn't." I mean, I didn't even hesitate, like-

• 1:39:43Rich Roll?

  Or you're like, "Are you trying to make me feel like shit?"

• 1:39:46Speaker 04

  I was like, "No, he did not."

• 1:39:47Rich Roll?

  "I just ran a marathon, like..."

• 1:39:48Speaker 04

  Like, "You read that wrong, there's no way." And, and I just remember being just like, there wasn't anything more insane someone could've said, you know, I mean, like, I don't even know, I don't even know how to respond to that, you know, so I, I like Googled Dean Karnassis, and, and I, I read Ultra Marathon Man, and I saw Running on the Sun, and Running on the Sun, just, man, I don't know.

• 1:40:16Rich Roll?

  It's a documentary about bad water, for people that don't know, yeah. Can, can you, is it online? Can people-

• 1:40:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's still out there, um-

• 1:40:24Rich Roll?

  If it is, I'll find a link, I'll put it in the show notes.

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry about that.

• 1:40:27Rich Roll?

  But, uh, no, go ahead.

• 1:40:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it, um, man, it just, it really, it really touched something, like, that scared me. It scared me because I thought that, um, I was probably gonna wanna do that one day, and that scared the eff- shit out of me.

• 1:40:42Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So you see this movie, and, uh, and, and you read Dean's book, you know, the, the movie is about just how insane this bad water race is, the seeds planted, and this is two thousand seven?

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, uh, no, two thousand six.

• 1:40:58Rich Roll?

  Two thousand six, still, right?

• 1:41:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:41:01Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and your first bad water is two thousand thirteen-

• 1:41:05Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  So we're talking about a seven-year span here, during which period of time you run the Leadville 100 twice-

• 1:41:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:41:13Rich Roll?

  And a bunch of other crazy stuff, too.

• 1:41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, so-

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  So you're creating this, you know, it's not, the narrative, the easy narrative is, you know, "Three hundred and twenty pounds to bad water," you know, that'll probably be the title of my blog post, but-

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  We can all subtitle.

• 1:41:29Rich Roll?

  I know, because well, that's like, you know, it's, it sounds so crazy dramatic and, and it is. But we're talking about many years of, of brick by brick, a lot of miles.

• 1:41:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I never really exercised any level of patience in my past life, so I've been trying, you know, and I didn't want to do the same thing and just say, just like with the marathon, I didn't want to go, okay, well, how can I go fake Badwater, you know? I, I didn't even know that you couldn't fake Badwater, that was really hard just to get in it.

• 1:41:59Rich Roll?

  They won't let you fake it.

• 1:42:00Speaker 04

  They'll weed you out before. How much is race day registration?

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  But yeah, and then reading about Dean's book and just reading about such a thing as an ultra marathon, I found out that the Leadville 100 was right in my backyard. And it just seemed kind of, um, kind of shitty to get on a plane and fly somewhere else to do an ultra when you have one of the most iconic ones right in your backyard.

• 1:42:22Rich Roll?

  Right. And in certain respects, maybe even, I mean, harder in a different way with that crazy elevation and thin, thin air and everything else. I mean, what was that, what was that first Leadville like?

• 1:42:36Speaker 04

  It was, you know, when I wrote the book, um, the, the finish line of my first Leadville was the finish line of the book. And, and I actually, um, I had to, it was a huge process of, um, you know, I'm getting ahead of myself, but, but, um, Badwater or Leadville, my first Leadville finish was really the, the true birth of me as, as a runner. Um, not that anything else I did before wasn't, you know, running, but it was that moment that I really accepted that I wasn't going to dismiss anything that I'd ever done, or that I, that I did and that I wasn't going to live that life anymore. But because up to that point, like I, I did the marathon and I was like, okay, what's next? And then I did, you know, started

• 1:43:21Speaker 04

  doing triathlon, like, okay, what's next? And I was, I was still searching. And, and so I, I think I stopped searching at that point. Um, I just, I decided that I, I was here and I just needed to be here as much as I could. I needed to be in that moment and, and be.

• 1:43:37Rich Roll?

  And just own it.

• 1:43:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  All right, you guys, that's it. We did it. Two parts of the Best of 2014 Anthology. What do you think? Where does that leave you guys? Has this given you some things to think about? How have these little clips of all these conversations over the course of 2014 informed or maybe changed or positively reinforced how you're perceiving and walking into 2015? So, the assignment for this week is to get out a journal, and I want you to write down what it is that you want to express in 2015. What is it that you want to welcome into your life? What is it that you want to experience?

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  And I'm not talking about material things, "Oh, I need a new car," or whatever. I'm talking about emotions. I'm talking about adventures. I'm talking about experiences. I'm talking about qualities of life. What do you want to experience in your relationships, for example? How do you want to feel throughout your day? And how have these conversations informed or maybe altered or helped define what those are for you? How's that? Anyway, I don't want to get too heavy. I just want to thank you guys. I'm so grateful to have you guys on board with what we're doing here. I'm so excited for 2015.

• 1:45:05Rich Roll?

  It's going to be an incredible year, and I'm so pumped to just get started on it. So, enjoy your New Year's break, and I will catch you next week. Peace and plants. I'm out. See you later.