Preservation, Purpose & Pursuit of the Pacific Crest Trail with Environmentalist Jared Blumenfeld

The theme of this podcast is conversations that matter with thought leaders making a difference. My conversation with today's guest perfectly embodies the best of this ethos. A man who has spent the last two decades fighting to create tangible benefits for communities and ecosystems alike, Jared Blumenfeld is a former U. C. Berkeley-trained international environmental lawyer with an impressive resume that includes stints at the Natural Resource Defense Council (NRDC) as well as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) before running one of San Francisco’s first city Departments focused entirely on the environment, where he was instrumental in helping transform San Francisco into the “greenest city” in America. In 2009, President Obama appointed Jared to serve as Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator for the Pacific Southwest (Region 9), which includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands, and 148 tribal nations. During his 7-year tenure at EPA, Jared diligently pursued environmental justice and enforcement, focusing on climate change, recycling, tribes, and drinking water. Along the way his team made massive strides in combating corporate polluters, protecting coastal waters, accelerating clean vehicle adoption and advancing tribal community environmental well being. Then, in 2016, he decided to walk away from his career to pursue a life-long dream of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – an effort to embrace first hand the environment he has spent his life protecting. Jared has appeared frequently in The New York Times, BBC, Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, Los Angeles Times, NPR and recently launched his own podcast entitled, Podship Earth. As you might imagine, this is a wide-ranging conversation about planetary preservation and ecological conservation. It's a gut check on the current status of global climate change — what is contributing to it, the challenges faced in combating it, and the responsibility we all share to steward our precious planet towards a greener future. It’s also a very frank redress of our current administration’s attempt to deny reality. Right now, we're facing an indisputably massive and ever growing threat to planetary health. Yet current EPA chief Scott Pruitt's reversal of long-standing environmental policy buttressed by his refusal to embrace scientifically irrefutable facts related to global climate change, poses a very real threat to the long-term well-being of this spaceship we all share called Earth. It's a conversation about what’s required, both on a policy and personal level, to correct past wrongs and steward a healthier, more sustainable path forward. And finally, it’s the story of one man’s remarkable life and his commitment to ensure a better future for us all (plus awesome stories about his four month quest to conquer the Pacific Crest Trail, and how it made him a better human). I really enjoyed this one. I hope you do too. For the visually inclined, you can watch the podcast on YouTube here. 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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• 1:25Rich Roll?

  It's super next level, incredible photography, 125 entirely new and, of course, delicious plant-based Italian recipes. And it's available for preorder now from all your favorite online booksellers. You can learn more at richroll.com. Preorders are very important to the book's viability, and so it would mean a great deal to us if you reserved your copy today. Thank you so much. I greatly appreciate it. And now, on to the show.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  We're not here to make sure that industry can make more money by polluting. We're here to make sure that industry knows the rules and regulations that are set to protect public health and the environment. The planet is incredibly special and unique, and it's a gift. And we can't act firstly as if we're different than the rest of the planet. I mean, to me, this myth of human superiority is kind of the beginning of the end. Once we think we're better than and different than everything else on the planet, we then have, as you described, this belief in our capacity to have dominion over nature, which is insane.

• 2:38Rich Roll?

  That's Jared Blumenfeld, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. The theme of this podcast is Conversations That Matter with Thought Leaders Making a Difference. And today, we embrace that theme with a person who thoroughly embodies and exemplifies this, a man who has spent his life, his career, fighting for environmental change and ecosystem preservation. My name is Rich Roll, and today, I sit down with Jared Blumenfeld, a former international environmental lawyer with a resume that includes stints at the NRDC and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, before running one of San Francisco's first city departments

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  focused on the environment, where he was instrumental in helping transform San Francisco into the greenest city in America. From 2009 to 2016, Jared served as EPA Regional Administrator for the Pacific Southwest, which is called Region 9. It includes California, Arizona, Hawaii, Nevada, the Pacific Islands, as well as 148 tribal nations. And when he was there, he focused on many things: climate change, recycling, environmental justice, clean drinking water. And he made massive strides in combating corporate polluters, protecting coastal waters, accelerating clean vehicle adoption, and advancing tribal, community, environmental wellbeing.

• 4:17Rich Roll?

  And then, in 2016, he decided to walk away from his career to...

• 4:24Rich Roll?

  Hike the Pacific Crest Trail to really embrace the environment that he had spent his life protecting. Jared has appeared frequently in The New York Times, the BBC, The Economist, The San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, The Los Angeles Times, NPR, and he recently launched a brand new podcast, his podcast. It's called Podship Earth, which you can find on Apple Podcasts or at podshipearth.com. This is a really cool one, and there's a few more things I want to say about it before we launch into it, but first.

• 5:02Rich Roll?

  Okay, Jared. So, in the broader sense, this is a conversation about global climate change, what's contributing to it, the challenges faced in combating it, and the responsibility that I think we all share to steward our precious planet towards a greener, better, brighter future. It's about the current administration's attempt to deny reality, how Scott Pruitt's efforts as EPA head to reverse longstanding environmental policy, as well as his refusal to embrace scientifically irrefutable facts related to global climate change, pose this massive threat to planetary health. And it's about what is required,

• 5:42Rich Roll?

  both on a policy level, as well as a personal level, to right the ship and ensure a better tomorrow. Beyond that, this is also the story of one man's remarkable life and his commitment to ensure a better future for all of us. Plus, we have awesome stories about his four-month quest to conquer the Pacific Crest Trail and how it made him a better human. So, without further ado, I give you Jared Blumenfeld.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  All right, man, you ready to do it? Ready to roll. Let's do it. We were just saying before hitting record that it's a tricky challenge to try to figure out how to embrace the fact and enjoy the fact that it's like 85 degrees out on November, or no, February 5th.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's insane.

• 6:32Rich Roll?

  And at the same time, recognize the fact that it's bananas.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, trying to be present to the moment and at the same time, recognize that the moment is kind of fucked up is is like a dynamic tension. So if you I'm trying to be in the moment and not be too conscious of what's causing this moment. And yet, if you don't, if you it kind of feels like I have my head in the sand if I'm doing that. So it's yeah, it's it's it's an odd tension.

• 7:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  And we're living it most aspects of our lives.

• 7:06Rich Roll?

  So maybe we can canvas exactly what is going on that is contributing to this. Assume somebody who's listening has only the most rudimentary, basic sense of global climate change. And and perhaps we could do like a laundry list of of what exactly is going on and contributing to this situation that we currently face.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  So human civilization, we like to think of as progress and and much of it has led to incredible technological revolutions. It really has transformed the way that we live, that we relate to each other. But about 200 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution started, we found that there was this incredible resource, this energy in a liquid form gasoline that basically is very, very condensed, organic matter that from the time of the dinosaurs has been sitting there gaining more and more energy. And when you put it in a car or a factory, it runs things. It's like a miracle, incredible, right? So it's pretty cool. It

• 8:12Speaker 01

  runs nearly everything that that we think of, the the ships that are coming across from China, bringing goods, the trains, the buses, the cars, the homes, the factories, all run on fossil fuels. The reason they're called fossils is because

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  That's what they are.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. So when you burn them, they produce carbon dioxide and and we breathe out carbon dioxide. So people who are cynical or don't believe in climate change often say, well, this has happened for For millennia, we've had changes in the climate, and that's true. What's different now is that we're causing the change in the climate, which is, sits uncomfortably with people, especially people who have faith, because they think, how could we insignificant humans really be changing our climate? But we are. Really, the most monumental aspect is the pace of change.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  When we've had climate variations in the last hundred thousand years, they've happened very slowly. This is happening very dramatically. So the release of greenhouse gases, they're not just, they're not just carbon. There are other things, like your refrigerator has Freon and other coolants that also, actually, they do it much, much quicker. They're about seventy to a hundred times more potent than CO2. So all these gases are going into the atmosphere, and they trap heat. So when you think about the rays of the sun coming to us right now, nice and warm in this room, when it bounces back up, what used to happen is it would bounce back up into space,

• 9:53Speaker 01

  and a lot of that heat would dissipate into space. Now what happens, because these gases trap the heat, is that it's getting warmer and warmer. And it's leading not just to global warming, which it used to be called, but climate change, a lot of variability. You see the hurricanes that we had, Hurricane Irma. You see what's happened from Dallas to Puerto Rico, but also leads to a lot colder weather. So weather variability is going to become the new norm, very much hotter summers, and in some places, colder winters.

• 10:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's the frequency of these crazy climatic, climatic, you know, weather-related events that we're seeing with just more and more regularity.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  These crazy storms and the impact that they're having on cities. And we're putting Band-Aids on these problems, by my observation.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Well, the thing is, Rich, people don't, we don't want to confront, one of the biggest things in our own lives we don't want to confront is death, right? People don't talk about death. It's not, you know, even my parents who are in their eighties, we're talking to them about doing a will and they were like, why would we do a will? We've got years to go. So no one wants to confront their own death. So if we're not willing to confront our own death, it's hard to confront something as big as the death of the planet or the death of our ability to live on the planet. So it's a scare, it's a scary thing, right? So I understand why people don't want to talk about it. We also don't want to believe that we have that level of control over our planet. And that

• 11:36Speaker 01

  if we did have that level of control, that would mean we'd have to take responsibility. And taking responsibility is tough for many people.

• 11:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And, and we're in the midst of a political climate where there's never been less political will to really wrestle with this in a meaningful way. So like, what is going on at the EPA right now with Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration and the rollback of all these initiatives that you were integral in, in sort of, you know, fostering and working on during your tenure?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  So it's a dark time at EPA. I really want to give a shout out to all the people who are still there in the trenches, day after day, doing amazing work. We need to send them our, our support and love.

• 12:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like that thing where, do you stay in and work for change? Or does that make you, you know, part of the problem? Like, it's a difficult thing. Like, I have compassion for somebody who's got to be working there right now, thinking, why am I, you know, employed by this administration that stands for everything that I've devoted my life to combat? And yet, leaving isn't the solution either.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's about temperament. You know, people need to enjoy what they do. There are people that I talk to that like staying and fighting and doing their job, which to me is an act of resistance. And there are people who are just so depressed, they want to curl up in a ball and, you know, hibernate for the next three years. So depending on your disposition, if, if you're a fighter and believe that you can make a difference and stay, you should stay. If you're just miserable, you should probably move on.

• 13:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  But what's happening on a larger scale is that There's been this fight that the Republicans started way before Trump. Within the years of the Obama administration, the Republican Congress had already cut EPA's budget by 25%. So huge, huge budget cuts. So by the time Trump took over, they were already at, at kind of a very minimal budget, and he now wants to cut it back to, to really nothing. So the budget is one. The next, which you pointed out, which is even more troubling, is the rollback of standards. So more than 50 different standards have been rolled back.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Some of them, it's just a press headline, and they're not going to actually materialize because the courts and the legal system is going to stop Trump in his tracks. But he's definitely pandering to his base. His base feel like, but for the EPA, but for environmental regulations, everything would be good. We have jobs, we'd have all this burgeoning manufacturing. You know, unfortunately, what's been ignored is automation, which is the number one job killer in our country. And then the second which Trump has focused on is outsourcing that manufacturing to other places. The environment and environmental regulations has had a net huge positive on the American

• 14:38Speaker 01

  economy because worker productivity is one of the number one things that you look at in terms of the health of the economy. We're sitting here in California. California has the strongest environmental regulations of any state in the Union. It also has the strongest economy of any state in the Union. So this kind of bullshit argument that, you know what, environmental regulations are killing jobs. We're like a 4.3% unemployment rate right now.

• 15:03Rich Roll?

  But it's this, it's this sense that, I mean, Pruitt has said sort of famously that the bounty of the earth is here to feed us and fuel us, and anything that stands in the way of that needs to be eradicated. And it's really a default to this situation in which, you know, he would like to see the industries that are meant to be policed by the EPA self-regulating each other. We'll defer to them, and we'll let them decide, you know, what's right in our best interest. And it's just amazing to me that we're, that this is, this is sort of, you know, getting by right now.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It's a wake up call. I think we sat on our laurels too long. We had an abundance of confidence that the system was working. And the fact that you could have someone like Pruitt, which is really the fox guarding the chicken house, be the head of EPA, I think, was shocking enough. He's very, very skilled. He's like you and I. He's an attorney. He knows what he's doing. He's like a trained assassin. He isn't a bungling fool.

• 16:05Rich Roll?

  Like in Oklahoma, he spent a lot of time suing the EPA, right? Like, he's very well versed in the mechanics of how it functions and.

• 16:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he sued EPA 14 times over numerous different regulations. Yeah, the state that we're at is that people, when you poll them, when you do public opinion surveys, they say, yes, we want more environmental protection. We want our air to be cleaner. We want our water to be cleaner. We want the land to be free of toxins. When you then ask them, do you think it's government's role to put more regulations in place? They say, no, absolutely not. Rich, we don't want that. So you've got this bizarre dichotomy between, on the one hand, you want more protection. On the other hand, there's a complete lack of trust in government institutions. So he's, you would think that the person in the role that he

• 16:55Speaker 01

  is in would care more about the institutions and the rule of law. So, you know, this has become a very partisan issue. Unfortunately, I have a lot of Republican friends that don't agree with what he's doing. There's a lot of fishermen. There's a lot of hunters that are like, you know what? We need national parks. Why are we shrinking national parks as Trump has proposed to do? So the whole litany of things that are happening, I think, is going to lead to a backlash. It hasn't happened yet. I would have predicted it would have happened a little sooner. But I don't, we're kind of in uncharted territory when it comes to. To this administration.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  Right. What's interesting is that the history of environmentalism was initially a Republican idea. I mean, it was Nixon who created the EPA. And my sense is that it was sort of born out of perhaps an elitist idea, like, we want to preserve where we fly fish. And, you know, we like the views out of our windows, where the liberals were coming from a place of thinking, look, we need to use this land for, you know, building lower income housing for poor people. So it was really a Republican ideal that initiated this. And it's interesting how that's flipped. And maybe that has to do with, you know, when did that occur? Like, was that when Al Gore became vice president?

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I think it's when Al Gore came out with an inconvenient truth.

• 18:26Rich Roll?

  And then it became politicized.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Originally, I was looking at this, he was originally slated to do the movie with John McCain. And at some point, it became just about Al Gore.

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  Politically untenable for John McCain to do that.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, if you remember back in the day, even when McCain ran for president, it was still a fairly bipartisan issue. So I think we have a lot of work to do as a movement. And I actually, I blame myself and the movement, in no small measure, for getting Trump elected. I think the tone of the environmental movement's real kind of shaming of people, especially in the Rust Belt, for those people's roles in environmental pollution, which they really have, you know, as an individual, people in Michigan, for instance, or Pennsylvania, I think felt like, we're being patronized, we're being talked down to by these elites

• 19:25Speaker 01

  from these environmental groups. If we don't have a Prius, if we don't live in a green home, if we don't, you know, eat a vegan diet, then we're not good people. And we think we are good people. And so inspiring people, as you do.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to do around health. This is about health. This isn't about telling someone they should be doing it for a greater cause. Let's start with individual people and what they care about. And we need to just change the tone.

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the elitist veneer that washes over notions related to wellness, environmentalism, you know, living green and all of that is not serving the greater good.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  No, I agree.

• 20:11Rich Roll?

  And it's the people in the Rust Belt. It's the blue collar, you know, workers that are well intentioned and just trying to live their lives that ultimately, you know, sort of need these ideas the most or are suffering the most as a result of a lack of understanding or policies that could enhance their day to day, you know, sort of general well being.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, this whole vote against self-interest is a bizarre place that we're in. I mean, many of the people who voted for Trump, it's not in their self-interest in any way, shape or form. And yet they did it because of a belief that the current system was not helping them.

• 20:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the idea that he was going to look out for them, that he was going to bring jobs back from these old sort of outdated sectors was pushing a button that, you know, they needed to hear. And I don't begrudge them for that. Like, they're suffering and they're having a hard time and somebody comes along who's breaking ranks and, and someone who they feel is speaking to them directly, that's going to activate that, you know, that sector for sure.

• 21:17Speaker 01

  To me, it's about getting back to grassroots. That's where, that's where politics and environment and all this needs to happen. It's been so focused on Washington DC that it's become an abstraction. When we were talking at the beginning of the, the hour about. What climate change is, to most people, it's only real when you equate it back to their situation. If their kid has asthma, if they're, you know, subject to hurricanes that hit more frequently. But making it this big concept of global climate change, that doesn't really mean anything.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  So we've abstracted notions of the environment to such a degree that it doesn't mean anything to any person. And we need to get back down to a place where people care about the hills in Malibu because they hike there. People care about Santa Monica Bay because they fish there, not some abstracted notion. And I think EPA is partly to blame. We've become so specialized as a society that individual scientists understand individual parts of much bigger problems. No one's sitting there explaining, this is what's going on, this is how we need to move forward.

• 22:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they're not necessarily communicators in the broadest sense. That's not, that's not their job. And it seems like there needs to be a new way or a reframing of the vernacular around these ideas so that people can understand and embrace them outside the context of partisan politics.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  And I think you're right. And to a large extent, that is happening. Boy Scout groups still collect bottles and cans and get their redemption value. Community groups still clean up pollution in rivers, lakes and streams in their parks. So at the grassroots level, there's an enormous amount of good stuff happening. And I would encourage people, that's to me, in all, in all my life adventures, that's what I've gone back down to, which is this is about you, each of us as individuals. And the more it's about large policies that are driven by science that people don't understand.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  That that could work for a while while there's a reverence and respect for science. I still have that reverence and respect, but most people would put, you know, a Nobel laureate scientist on the same pedestal as Kim Kardashian.

• 23:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But what's interesting about that is, you know, this notion of personal responsibility, that's a conservative, a traditional conservative ideal, like, take responsive, make your own bed, you know, and the the greater good is elevated by the result of you, you know, sort of minding your own Ps and Qs.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  I don't believe in in minding my own Ps and Qs in that I think what we've lost is people knowing who their neighbors are, people building community and valuing community as opposed to the individuality that exists with my relationship with my iPhone. That's not community. Watching TV is not community. So getting, I was just gardening the other day, and I met every single one of my neighbors because I was out on the street talking to people as opposed to in my home and just sitting on a stoop. People don't do that. So we may never get back to that place. But I'm not suggesting that

• 24:50Speaker 01

  this this ideal of retreating into oneself. But but basically, if we we are, we are the way that we experience the planet. The planet is incredibly special and unique, and it's a gift. And we can't act firstly as if we're different than the rest of the planet. I mean, to me, this myth of human superiority is kind of the beginning of the end. Once we think we're better than and different than everything else on the planet, we then have, as you described, this belief in our capacity to have dominion over nature, which is insane.

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  Well, and history tells us well that every time we try to outwit nature, nature ultimately, in the long run, gets the best of us.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  And rich.

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  How much longer do we have to before? Yeah, exactly. Like, when are we going to finally get that and try to, you know, live in a way that's more copacetic with the ebbs and flows of what the planet requires?

• 25:53Speaker 01

  I don't think we will. And I don't mean that in a doom and doom scenario.

• 25:58Rich Roll?

  Are you pessimistic? That speaks to your overall perspective on whether we can win this war or not.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  I mean, I like to think of myself as an optimist. I now, I mean, both those terms, optimist and pessimist, kind of have a inherent in them a belief in a eventuality, that something either positive will happen or negative. For me, I don't see a lot of evidence that, you know, I started doing international environmental law. So I thought the way forward was these big treaties, like the one that Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement. Right. So when you look at those agreements, most of the countries, we had one. We had the Kyoto Protocol, which was meant to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  It had strict criteria and reduction targets. They weren't met. When you look at nearly any treaty of its kind, they, you know, they're not that, they don't have a good track record. So I'm looking for what other, the signs of positive growth for me are areas like the organic food movement, for instance, where it relates to people's own individual health and wellbeing, where there's a direct nexus between them and the environment. That's where I see improvement. That's where I want to focus.

• 27:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it seems like changing habits and human nature or attitudes around these issues are going to be best driven by changes in people's specific environments that contribute to making the better choice, as opposed to the easy lazy choice that is creating harm.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, I saw that your wife did a book on dairy-free cheese. Like, I'm lactose intolerant, so when I eat or consume milk, I feel crap. I feel terrible. So it isn't, you know, I became kind of an accidental vegan because my wife, when we moved in together, was a vegetarian and...

• 28:09Speaker 01

  I just started not eating meat. If you try and eat meat five years later, it really, your system can't do it, right?

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  I never made any particular choice to go down this path. My daughter then became gluten free. So now I'm like, wow, how did I, how did I end up doing all this?

• 28:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But these are, these are decisions that are consistent with your values, though, because when you look at the impact of animal agriculture on planetary health, it's pretty dire.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  But so Rich, this is exactly the conversation that, so if we analyze this conversation, I don't think you're gonna convince more than 5% of the population to stop eating meat because of the massive impacts that dairy and other agriculture have on, you know, just industrial agriculture generally have a devastating impact on the planet. That's not gonna convince anyone. But if you say, look how good Rich looks, you know, look how good I feel, and you help someone do that, I think they're gonna change and, and keep that change. Like, I'm not gonna ever go back to drinking milk because it makes me feel terrible now. I'm not supposed to drink milk. So allowing people to, one, understand how they feel. And I, I think many people have

• 29:20Speaker 01

  lost touch, have just become numb, cynical, unable to understand and really value how they feel. And then you start eating fried food with that knowledge, and it just tastes fucking nasty.

• 29:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  So they don't do it anymore, as opposed to you should not eat meat because it's bad for the planet.

• 29:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that. I get that distinction. But I think environmentally, we can create, you know, how do we, how do we foster the organic food movement so that it can impact more people? And the people that need it the most, which is the lower socioeconomic class that either can't afford it or access it right now. And to me, that happens through, you know, local urban gardening and programs that start with kids in schools and education and all of these things that get people interested. And, and, and in a communal sense, you were talking about like being gardening in your front yard, like. You know, it seems like every city, you know, every urban landscape should proliferate with urban gardens where people can grow their own food and have access to

• 30:28Rich Roll?

  organic produce and create an opportunity for their kids to learn about that connection between the foods they're eating and health. Because these are the people that are suffering the greatest from these chronic ailments that are just killing millions of people.

• 30:43Speaker 01

  Hundred percent agree. Huge advocate of community agriculture. And I once had the cool job of being the director of the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department. And the number one thing that people came up to me thanking me for was not how great Golden Gate Park looked. It was, thank you so much for having that community garden. I was sitting six years on a waitlist. Now I'm in. Just getting your hands in the dirt, all those microbes, just the feeling of being out and doing what we're supposed to do, which is be connected to nature and then being able to show the kids that connection. The green schools movement is an amazing positive example of what can be done.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Tearing out the asphalt and putting in community gardens for flowers, for food. In my kid's public school in San Francisco, they did that at rooftop and they had a garden teacher. And she was amazing. And it just motivated the kids to, to, even though they're in the middle of a dense city, to think about nature in a different way. So for all the people out there who are doing that, keep doing it. You're awesome.

• 31:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing. But the, the idea that you would have to be on a waitlist for six years, that's insane, right? It should be something that's accessible to everybody, especially in densely populated areas. I, I know there's some cool stuff happening in, in Oakland with this.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  There's cool stuff, yeah, in LA, in Oakland, all, all over, all over the country. Cool stuff is happening. But it takes, okay, so this, this is exactly the emphasis that I think is important, which is we are so frigging distracted by Trump and national politics, which does not bear really on how many community gardens there are going to be. And yet you go to these meetings, as I did, to suggest that there be more community gardens in poorer communities. No, no one from national environmental groups shows up, no one. Five or six members of the community show up. Because they're all watching Trump on some, you know, crazy Fox News thing. They're not there in the community.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  So we need people to put down their TVs, their phones. Give up this idea that they're going to be able to change Trump. Get less anxiety in their life by doing so and go to these community meetings and say, yeah, we can transform our community. One of the great ways of doing it is by putting in community gardens.

• 33:12Rich Roll?

  Right. In other words, stop spending so much of your time and resources and energy in things you can't control.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 33:21Rich Roll?

  And let's take a look at what we can actually change.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 33:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So how did you get interested in the environment to begin with?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  I grew up in a small village in England called Granchester with two American parents. So I, my number one question is, how could you be an EPA if you have an English accent?

• 33:40Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  Okay, you can, you can grow up in another country and be a US citizen. And every morning the cows would go in front of our house to the meadows. And for me, the most liberating thing was the bicycle. So it's a very flat part of England. Me and my friends from like six years old would just go out into the fields on our bikes on these farm roads and go for miles and miles. And that sense of liberation and freedom connected to the environment was really important.

• 34:15Rich Roll?

  And so that, that triggered something like, did you know then, like, this is what I want my life to be about? Or when did it, when did the lights go on? Like, this is, this is a career that I could pursue.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So the next thing that I did was take photographs of trees. So that was my passion when I was maybe 11 through 16. And then my grandmother was this very, very boisterous, feisty lady and she, I would argue all the time. And she was like, Jared, you should go to law school. I'd never even thought about being a lawyer. She was a child psychologist, so maybe she was just kind of pushing me, thinking reverse psychology. But I ended up going to law school and doing human rights law.

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  You went to Berkeley for law school?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And at Berkeley.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  At the time, it was just leading up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, which was the first time, the largest gathering at its time of heads of state that had ever happened in human history to come together for the environment. And George Bush Senior was there and even signed the Climate Change Convention at the time. So it just shows how much has changed even since 92. Anyway, they asked me and this friend Laurie to do a report for the Sierra Global Legal Defense Fund on the relationship between human rights and the environment. If your environment is so destroyed by an oil company or logging, do you have a cause in an international court to say that your human rights have been violated?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  And what it showed was that every constitution, new constitution that has either been written or changed since 1976 included this clause of a right to a healthy environment. So ours is one of the few constitutions that doesn't have any rights to a healthy environment.

• 36:08Rich Roll?

  So interesting.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:16Rich Roll?

  So that leads you into ultimately into city politics in San Francisco then?

• 36:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I never thought I'd become a city bureaucrat. I'm kind of accidental vegan and an accidental bureaucrat. So, no, I ran-

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  An accidental podcaster now.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. Now you're forcing me, Rich. Rich has me tied down. I've been in this cabin for four weeks. The only way I could get out was to do a podcast. No. So I started, just in terms of people listening, I wouldn't recommend going right into city government. If you care about the environment, think about what you can do locally. I worked for environmental groups. The first one was this group called the Natural Resources Defense Council, and then this group called the International Fund for Animal Welfare. And the funnest- Biggest campaign that we ran, well, actually, the last time I was in Malibu was with Pierce Brosnan in like ninety-eight or something. We ran this campaign to stop Mitsubishi

• 37:16Speaker 01

  from building a salt factory twice the size of Washington DC in this beautiful place called Laguna San Ignacio. So, fighting corporate evils was how I kind of got my teeth sharpened.

• 37:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  And then I got this job in San Francisco with Willie Brown.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a character, that guy. I mean, he's got, that guy's got a lot of swagger.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  He's amazing. And if you shake his hand, I saw him a few days ago, he's got a hand of steel. He works out every day, two or three hours, he told me. He, uh, he's, he's, keeps a very strict diet. I mean, he's in his early eighties, but he looks in his late sixties, so.

• 37:54Rich Roll?

  He's sort of a man born out of time, too. I feel like he would have flourished in, you know, the nineteen twenties. He's a very much a bon vivant, you know?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  I love Willie. He's a classic.

• 38:04Rich Roll?

  So he appoints you and you got to work, like you made a pretty significant impact on a lot of measures in San Francisco. Like I read, like recycling went from forty-six percent to somewhere in the high seventies or something like that.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So, yeah, when you think about, um, environment, so cities. So, um, in two thousand and five, for the first time in human history, the majority of people on the planet live in urban areas. So, as a civilization, as a species, we spent most of our time as farmers in wild places, um, then in farms. Now we live in cities. So fifty percent of the world's humanity lives in cities. Eighty-five percent of the world's pollution comes from cities. So some of these legal instruments that I had kind of looked at and studied in law school, they don't really apply to cities. And yet cities are where the action is at. So in San Francisco, we basically came up with this theory that.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  If we can't come up with environmental ordinances and regulations in San Francisco, where else in the world are they going to be able to do it?

• 39:12Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, it's got to start there, right? Of all places.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  An obligation, rather. Like, so we were kind of zany. So we came out with this goal in 2001 to get to zero waste by 2020. The people, the people who were implementing it phoned me the other day. They're like, Jared, what the fuck? How could you come out zero waste by 2020? Were you nuts? Like, we needed a goal, right? We shouldn't be sending stuff to landfill or incineration. Waste, to me, is a design flaw. Like, why do we have waste as a society? We don't need to if we design things better. So we did, we were the first city to do curbside collection of food scraps to turn into compost.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  So more than 500 tons a day of food scraps are turned into organic compost in San Francisco.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Didn't composting become like a legal mandate?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, once you set a goal, which I'd encourage everyone in their life, in their business, in their cities to do, so zero waste to landfill by 2020 means you need to work with everyone, the businesses, the recycling companies, and come up with a plan, how are you going to do this? So what we realized is at some point voluntary efforts, they'll get you pretty far. They got us to 70% recycling. You're not going to get to 80%. So we went to Gavin Newsom, who then became the mayor, said, Gavin, we need to get to 80, 90% in the next 10 years. We can only do it if we make these things mandatory. And people kind of freaked out.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  We also then looked at what is the stuff that's still going to landfill that can't be recycled? So, plastic bags, styrofoam, we like, we need to ban that. And I'm not, you know, you don't, there's a lot of things that don't need to be banned, but some things do. Plastic bags are one of them. We had a huge fight with the plastic bag industry, but it kind of inspired people to, if we can do this, Rich, in these communities and now as a state, then the rest of the nation can say, you know what, it is possible. We actually can do it. The same has been true with solar power. The same has been true with many different initiatives. If California can do it and make it affordable, the rest of the nation will follow. It's been true of electric vehicles.

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  Well, it's certainly true of plastic bags. I mean, as audacious as that may have sounded at the time, I mean, you guys were the first to put that in motion and now there's a cascading effect of that. Like that's now everyone sort of understands and accepts that plastic bags are bad and, you know, I don't know how the laws look across the country, but you know, you see fewer and fewer of them for sure.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  And it, people always say, you know what, Jared, this is absurd. Why focus on one little thing like the plastic bag? But we want to be able to show that we can make a difference. No one needs plastic bags. And it's important to have those victories. As an environmental community, we've very, very focused on, these are the problems. The victories, we also need to savor and realize, you know, for instance, in San Francisco, we had legislation that all buildings, every single building, have to now be LEED, which is a green building standard, gold.

• 42:29Rich Roll?

  Wow. You mean every new building that's built or all buildings that exist?

• 42:33Speaker 01

  All new buildings that are built. And if you level the playing field, people sign up. They say, you know what? We want to build green and we have to build green, so we will. So people are just looking. When it, back to the Pruitt example, you know what, we're not here to make sure that industry can make more money by polluting. We're here to make sure that industry knows the rules and regulations that are set to protect public health and the environment. And that balance has coexisted for a long time. And, and I met with industry upon industry when I was at EPA and most of them, I would say 90 to 95% want to do the right thing. But if you come to them and say, Rich, we can cut all these environmental regulations. Are you in? They'll be like, sure.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're going to make a bit more money, but it's not sustainable in the long term. And, and the sustainability movement in large corporations, even large corporations like Walmart and Apple.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  They're here to stay and they, when Trump was suggesting that we pull out of Paris, like, why would you do that? Are you crazy? So industry, by and large, is for environmental protection.

• 43:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's in their long-term interest. I mean, you can make short-term profits, short-term gains by cutting corners, but, you know, I think we're in this very transparent culture now. The internet has afforded us the tools to really understand how, you know, corporate America functions in a way that wasn't possible, you know, 10, 15 years ago even. And I think we have a maturing generation of millennials who care very much about these things. And they're, they want to patronize the companies that they know are paying attention to these sorts of things. So to the extent that a company can be a little bit more profitable in the short run, ultimately, you know, we can trust

• 44:21Rich Roll?

  on the flow of information to let people know who's doing well, who isn't. And I think we have a groundswell of interest in the consumer base that, that really wants to patronize the companies that are doing well and reward them. So I think it is in, you know, it is, it is very much in, in a, in an entity's capitalistic, long-term interest to get on board with these ideals.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  A great example of that is the no GMO label or the fair trade label, which haven't been legislated.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  No, it's voluntary.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is voluntary, but when you read it, one, do people really want to eat food that has GMOs in it? Not really. You know, the labeling, I think, has actually gone beyond most people's expectations. It would have been great if we could have outlawed some GMOs and really given a boost to fair trade, but those labels are doing a great job. And consumers, as you said, they want to buy into those values and know that the products that they are consuming. Have a value proposition that they can buy into.

• 45:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Back to the plastic bag thing. The plastic bag to me is sort of symbolic. It's as a representative of single use items in general. And this seems to be, you know, really one of the biggest problems. Our sort of disposable culture, whether it's a bottled water or a plastic bag or, you know, a cup at Starbucks, whatever. Whether they're recyclable or not, plastic, paper, whatever. We're just indoctrinated that we can just buy something, use it once and throw it away. And we're just sitting on top of just inconceivable amounts of waste. So how are we, you know, how can we move forward from this gigantic problem?

• 46:09Rich Roll?

  I mean, the bag thing is a huge victory and you're seeing that. But like, what about bottled water, for example? Or what are the other things that are contributing to this problem? And, you know, the gigantic Pacific garbage patch and, you know, all of these issues that we now have to contend with.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of insurmountable, but the way to do it is small piece at a time. So back in the 1970s, the environmental movement was kind of founded on the three Rs. Reduce, reuse, recycle. We focus a lot of our attention on recycling. So when you go and meet with Arrowhead or Nestle, they'll tell you the single use bottles, Rich, they're recyclable. And the problem is that a billion of them a year end up in landfill and beaches in California. So they're not, they may be recyclable, but do you need them in the first place? So we kind of have become slaves to this concept of convenience.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  If, you know, if you get takeout food, you're going to get the straw, you're going to get the cutlery, you're going to get all these things. You really don't need, because you have them in your house. And yet they keep coming. So I think the next big trend is for ordinances. Alameda County, which is where Berkeley and Oakland are up in Northern California, just passed an ordinance. To have an opt in for straws. So rather than getting a straw that's plastic with a wrapper on it, you have to ask someone for a straw. And just that single act of rather than being giving it, given it automatically, asking someone is, is actually, I think, a really

• 47:53Speaker 01

  positive move. The other thing that San Francisco is looking at is both fees. If you want to get a Starbucks cup and you can't be bothered to bring your own, you should maybe pay more.

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  And then the last thing is requiring some kind of reuse option. So if you're getting food for a delivery service like Caviar, they should probably provide an option. One, you have to opt in for the straws, the cutlery and all that stuff. But more importantly, that there's an option for a tray that you put the food in that they take back.

• 48:28Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, that would be great. I mean, and it doesn't seem like that big of a deal to kind of put that in motion.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  I'm working on it.

• 48:38Rich Roll?

  You are. That's good. So there's some really cool things happening with the zero waste movement right now. I was meant to just last week have this woman on who's, who goes by Trashes for Tossers on the internet. And

• 48:53Speaker 01

  I like it.

• 48:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, she's cool. She's a

• 48:55Speaker 01

  You have to know, you have to have grown up in England to know why that's funny.

• 48:58Rich Roll?

  Although I don't think she's not British, though. She lives in New York and she's got four years of her waste in one mason jar.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  You could also have wasters for wankers.

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  No, that would be good, too. That would be the male version of her. Exactly. Yeah. So she like has four years going and all of her waste is in one mason jar. And, you know, she sort of blogs and vlogs about like how to live a zero waste lifestyle and opened this store in Brooklyn called Package Free Shop where you need to bring your own, you just, everything is in bulk and in bins, right? So you bring in your own stuff and you can refill and, you know, all of that. And she shows you how to make your own shampoo and all that kind of stuff. And that's another thing that I think.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  It's awesome. I love that.

• 49:42Rich Roll?

  It's very cool and it's very much a millennial thing, I think. But it's also goes back to that point you referenced earlier, which is to expect that. I mean, it's inspiring to see that you can do that and it makes you think more about the ways that you generate. But how many people are actually going to adopt that lifestyle, which most people would look at as very aesthetic and challenging versus creating, whether it's regulations or just simply an environment that's more conducive to creating less waste and disposing of less waste?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, regulations have gotten a bad name. I just think of them as standards or rules that that help reduce pollution. I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at the Pacific Garbage Patch. I flew out to Midway Island. I've, you know, talked to scientists in Hawaii. It's twice the size of Texas between here and Hawaii.

• 50:36Rich Roll?

  Now it's twice the size. I heard it was the size of Texas. Now it's twice the size.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Twice the size of Texas. And, you know, the plastic gets smaller and smaller and smaller and it ends up in teeny little beads that that replicate plankton. The fish then eat the plastic. The plastic not only is just there, which is bad, but within the ocean, it creates kind of a magnified impact and sucks in toxins within the ocean. So they become very toxic. The fish, when you do the liver samples, it looks like, you know, they've been drinking whiskey for the last 60 years. I mean, they're in really bad shape. And for what? So that we can have a straw in our Pepsi? Could we just not drink it in a glass that can go into a dishwasher?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, I agree with you. We're not, the movement needs people like the no packaging store in Brooklyn because we need to understand what is possible, but it isn't going to be the whole answer.

• 51:40Rich Roll?

  Right. Have you seen the the patch yourself? Have you flown above it or?

• 51:46Speaker 01

  So it's a bit of a myth in that.

• 51:48Rich Roll?

  It's like a goo, right? It's not like floating garbage.

• 51:51Speaker 01

  It's very, very different sized pieces of plastic. If you can imagine a Tide bottle, you know, the first year you have a Tide bottle, it's going to look pretty much like that. The next year it's going to go into a few pieces. Ten years from now, it's going to be a lot of small, red-orange pieces of plastic. And it's going to continue going down into the water column. So you can find pieces of plastic sixty feet down in the water column, all the way to the surface. So it isn't a blanket surface of plastic that you can see. I worked with NASA and this guy Pete Warden, who ran Ames.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  To, is there a way of flying over and getting UV or other infrared and bouncing it to see where the plastic is, and you can't? The way that they measure it is by, on boats, they have a pole, basically a sieve that they drag along behind them, and you can see where the concentration levels are. And that's how they came up with Twice the Size of Texas.

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  Is there any strategy for dealing with this thing?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  So there's basically three strategies. One is upstream. So if you think about how we design products, we were just talking about it. How you design products that have less waste, less waste inherently in them. Like, we've all received those little SIM cards in blister packs that are huge. Like, what happens to all that plastic? Why do we need all that plastic? So, design stuff with zero waste in mind. Then second, actually, LA is a world leader on, which is stopping the plastic from going in, from the streets into the storm drains, into the ocean. That, that's kind of the number one inflection point. If you don't stop it going down the drain, it's going to end up in the ocean.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  So LA has put in all kinds of cool devices to capture the plastic. And then the third is to go out and actually collect it. And there's some noble efforts going on. There's a young Dutchman who's working on this. So there's some cool efforts. There's a lot more money, unfortunately, being spent on the idea of cleanup than there is.

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  Prevention.

• 54:06Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 54:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Wasn't, isn't there some really young kid I was just reading about? Like sixteen-year-old kid who figured out, some wizard who figured out how to decompose this in a...

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, we love, we love inventions and cool stuff. And so he's attracting a lot of Bjorn Borg, I think his name is. Anyway, it's very cool. I wish him all the best luck. We, there's about 10 million tons of plastic a year that's being added to the Pacific garbage patch. So our main goal should be doing all three. It's like an all of the above strategy. If we just focus on cleanup, you know, a terrifying thing that I found when I was in Taiwan is that they built all their landfills right on the oceanfront. And now with rising sea levels because of climate change, these huge landfills are being washed into the ocean. So another thing,

• 54:59Speaker 01

  which I think is fairly commonsensical is maybe we should have an international agreement to not build landfills within a mile of the ocean.

• 55:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How does that even happen? That's amazing. Well, I think, you know, in a broader sense, it speaks to human beings kind of default.

• 55:22Rich Roll?

  Default kind of expectation that that technology is going to innovate us out of all the problems that we create for ourselves. Whether it's Elon Musk getting us to Mars so we can just punt on this planet, like, like the idea of terraforming Mars, like, oh, that's awesome. Well, why don't we terraform the earth? Like, if we have that technology, can't we use that here and like, protect what we're actually doing? Rather than saying, well, we're just gonna, we're just gonna rifle through all of this and we'll figure it out later. It's like, you know, it's, this is not working for us.

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a very complex relationship with technology in that, for instance, if you look at solar cells, back in 1979, it cost $80 to produce a watt of energy. Now it's about 55 cents.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  So technology has allowed us to capture this renewable resource, the sun and wind and

• 56:16Speaker 01

  battery storage is going to allow us to to keep it in our homes and use it when we need it. So there are, there are elements of technology which are really useful. Electric cars, for instance, are a complex one. I live in San Francisco. We can't have any more cars. It doesn't matter what, you know, if it's a hydrogen fuel cell car or a hybrid, it doesn't make any difference. There's no room for cars and those cars take a lot of energy to produce, a lot of energy to deconstruct, and they kill a lot of people. So maybe walking, like, I was always like, why, why is no one promoting walking and bicycling and and cities?

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  Because that's not as sexy as a Tesla S.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Exactly, it isn't. But you get sexier by doing them.

• 56:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And you, I, I read you walk five miles, you or you were walking five miles to and from work every day.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  When I, yeah, I decided to do this, to leave work and do the Pacific Crest Trail, I, I needed to practice.

• 57:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Practice your walking.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do. I mean, we were designed to walk.

• 57:19Speaker 01

  Right? I mean, we're not designed to sit on our ass and get fat. We're designed to walk. That, basically, that's why we stand on two feet, unlike other animals. So we're designed to walk. I love walking.

• 57:34Rich Roll?

  Why isn't solar more ubiquitous?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  There's, I was reading yesterday that there's a hundred trillion dollars of stranded assets that the old status quo energy companies have, namely, they built power plants that are running on coal, even natural gas, that solar, if it were as ubiquitous as you and I would like, would mean they are paying for a stranded asset that doesn't get money in. So these big utilities that you hear saying lots of good things, even in our state, they have a very strong interest to continue their power plants going. So, you know, the price, the price of, of new power, I don't think anyone's in the United States, no matter what Trump says, is going to build

• 58:24Speaker 01

  a new coal-fired power plant. Coal is just too expensive.

• 58:29Speaker 01

  And the reason it's too expensive, unfortunately, is fracking. So fracking, you know, the upside of fracking is that it put coal out of business. The bad side is that it has very significant environmental impact. So solar now is competitive. And that's a fantastic thing. Unfortunately, Trump put tariffs

• 58:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  on Chinese imports of solar panels. There are more people involved in installing solar now in America than there are coal miners.

• 59:00Rich Roll?

  So irrespective of regulations, I mean, this is, this has to be the future.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  It is the future.

• 59:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Whether, whether the coal and gas companies like it or not, solar is the future, as with other renewable energy like wind.

• 59:15Rich Roll?

  And I would imagine with the, the advances in the batteries that we're seeing right now, that it's gotta be even way more effective now what they're capable of doing even compared to a couple of years ago.

• 59:28Speaker 01

  I was just in a new Chevy Bolt. They have the Volt and the Jolt and the Bolt.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  They get kind of confusing. It's actually a cool little car and it has a 320 mile range.

• 59:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:41Speaker 01

  A few years ago, the, the first one, the Volt, had like a 60 mile range. So the battery technology is taking.

• 59:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's crazy. It, it doesn't make sense to me at all, like why anybody would build combustion engine cars at all anymore. It just doesn't seem to be, it's, it's not the future.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the head of GM went to China. I think she was expecting to be able to convince them that internal combustion engines, the normal gasoline engines were still part of a future mix. She came back and said, no.

• 1:00:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, electric vehicles for GM, everyone else is, is here to stay. It's our future.

• 1:00:19Rich Roll?

  It seems that in certain respects, China is sort of leading the way.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  They are and they aren't. I mean, they have a very disciplined central command government. So when they decide to do something like high-speed rail.

• 1:00:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Just gets done. When we decide we're going to do high-speed rail, as we did 10 years ago in California, nothing gets done very quickly.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  Fifty years later, we're still talking about it.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Exactly, which is unfortunate. I wish I could have taken the train down here in two hours. So the thing that they're doing right is they're moving in the right direction. They still have a very, very high reliance on old, cheap coal, which burns, you know, very dirtily. Most of that coal is in manufacturing products that we buy. So one of the things I thought would be cool at some point is to have a label that shows you the energy source of the product that you're buying. So, you know, we kind of buy it blindfolded and think, oh, you know what, I'm not exactly sure where this is made, but I'm sure if I bought it on Amazon, it must be good.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  It's probably coming from China, made in a factory with a lot of coal energy shipped here. You know, a huge amount of California's pollution still is from cargo ships coming from China.

• 1:01:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  That has very, very high sulfur fuel.

• 1:01:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it seems like there should be the equivalent of a nutrition fax panel on every consumer product that explains to you the carbon footprint of the creation and distribution, the shipping of that product.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Let's do it, Rich.

• 1:01:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  I mean, the cool thing about California, so we have Jerry Brown, an amazing guy. I love our current governor. I think we're likely to have Gavin Newsom as our next governor.

• 1:02:07Rich Roll?

  Most likely.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  And if you put those standards in place in California, a state with 40 million people and the fifth largest economy on the planet, it doesn't really matter what Washington DC says. It doesn't really matter what Trump says. If you can get it done in Sacramento, it's going to happen around the country because they're not going to put that, they're not going to take that panel with all that environmental information off it on the ones that they sell in Nevada or North Dakota or Massachusetts. It's going to be the same, same exact product. So. I think a lot of thinking needs to be done about how we leverage California even more than we have already to get environmental change in the entire country.

• 1:02:47Rich Roll?

  Right, because California really is the ultimate test case for not just the rest of the country, but the rest of the world, because there is so much sensibility around these issues.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and I mean, people live in this state because they like the outdoors, because they want to spend time nearly year-round, being able to run and hike and swim, and so that's a certain group of people. Those people vote. Those people are gonna vote for more environmental protections, and that's why you have the state. People often ask me, "Why is California so green?" It's a self-selecting group of people that live here, and, you know, I love living here.

• 1:03:36Rich Roll?

  So you, after your tenure with the city, you're appointed to the EPA by Obama to basically run, what is it called, Region 9, Section 9?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, District 9.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  District 9.

• 1:03:50Speaker 01

  Movie about South African with a claw.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the dystopian future.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes. That's what I told close friends and family.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  It's District 9.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  It's Region 9.

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was California, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Pacific Islands.

• 1:04:06Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, and what was your charge? Like, what was that job all about?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  So that job, if you go back to something you mentioned earlier, so back in the 70s, Richard Nixon, unbelievably, created the Environmental Protection Agency.

• 1:04:21Rich Roll?

  It is wild that it was Nixon, isn't it?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Rich Roll?

  What was going on? What motivated him to do that?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  A lot of it. Also reflecting back on what we just said, came from California. So California was going ahead and saying, particularly LA, the air is so bad. We need to do something about this. And people around the country, it was a grassroots movement. They're like, screw this. Like unless DC does something, we're gonna do it ourselves. And they were doing it themselves. And it got to this point where the president, you know, we had the first Earth Day rally in April 22nd, 1970. There were demonstrations around the country. This was a big, big political issue. And actually, it's kind of relates to China. In China, this is a very big political issue. People cannot breathe. And the middle class is growing and growing and growing.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  And they're like, this will become such a big issue that the Chinese politicians are worried that it will topple them. So that's why they're tackling it. And the same was true in the US in the 1970s. So the job really was to implement the big environmental statutes that Congress passed. So Congress and the president passed the Clean Air Act. It's then up to EPA, working with, in this case, the state of California, or Nevada, or Arizona, to implement it. And that means, you know, one of the most important things is getting the science right. So science is not a belief system, right? It is the world outside that can be measured, and that measurement can be repeated. You'll get the same answer. So

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  science is incredibly important to the environmental protection of our planet. We need to know exactly how good is the air? How good is the water? If there are contaminants going into the air and water that we can't see, doesn't mean they're not gonna hurt us. A lot of what we can't see hurts us very badly. So we would do enforcement actions. We would take actions against polluting companies. We're involved, for instance, in the big case against VW, who had a whole scandal of, you know, their emissions testing requirements.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  You know, so we we kept people honest. I always saw us as the environmental cop on the beat. And that cop is no longer on the beat. And that that's something that worries me. So whether it's a big oil refinery in Torrance that might blow up, has blown up. If it's, you know, the the big gas leak that you had, just a few years ago in Southern California, EPA and other agencies are there to, one, stop it, two, clean it up, and then three, hold those polluters accountable. So the rule of law, science and transparency were kind of the most important things to me. And that's when you asked if I had heartburn.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  That's what gives me heartburn now. We have no idea what EPA is doing. It's all behind closed doors. They're not talking to the scientists, the people with real knowledge. There was recently a pesticide that had gone through years and years of review, chlorpyrifos, and the staff brought it up to Pruitt and said, we should de-list this. And he's like, no, we're going to keep it on the shelves.

• 1:07:37Rich Roll?

  Right. It had been established that it was harming children.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. But and not, I mean, people need to realize that by science, we're talking about peer reviewed science. This isn't one study that one person did. This is academic studies that have been done, replicated, in many cases, by very prestigious universities, and then are reviewed by an independent federal panel, and then go to EPA. So by the time we got them, this wasn't

• 1:08:07Rich Roll?

  So vetted.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's not conjecture at this point. It's not, I never saw it as really any discretion. I wasn't there to say, I'm a better scientist than they are. I mean, Pruitt is not a scientist, by his own admission. And yet, to just throw that science away and say, yeah, hmm, yeah, maybe hurting kids, maybe hurting kids rich, but we really need to look out for the chemical companies. I mean, what about them? I mean, it was so

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  It's absolutely insane.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Hideous.

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, he built like, he built this crazy, soundproof office for $25,000. I mean, this guy's bananas.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he also spent $200,000 on a contract to go through EPA employees' emails to look at those that were disloyal to Trump.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  I mean, if you read about it in a In a dystopian, you know, novel, you'd be like, no, I mean, they get, no one's gonna do that kind of shit. So yeah, it's crazy town. So thank God we're here in Malibu.

• 1:09:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So anyway, all right. So you're at EPA and you're, you're very much, from what I understand, like a boots on the ground guy, like you're, you're showing up at the wetlands with your boots on, you're, you know, at these mines, you know, firsthand.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  I love being outside, yeah.

• 1:09:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  I didn't want to be in the office.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  What was the, the, the sort of, you know, craziest thing that you saw that even you thought like, I can't even believe this is happening?

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  There's so much, oh my God. Actually, I spent a lot of time at the US Mexico border. And because we're Americans, we generally think that things run from north to south. But all the rivers on the US Mexico border run from south to north. And I was in, there's this border town, Calexico and Mexicali. So Mexicali is about town of a million people. There, they had abattoirs having pure blood affluent going into rivers that then went into the US, then went into the Salton Sea. Just, I have these pictures of these flows of blood and.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  Like, like animal blood, like we, just from their cattle industry or from runoff from slaughterhouses?

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  It was a slaughterhouse, yeah. So a slaughterhouse. So this is a big flow of, just imagine like putrid blood coming out of a pipe, going to a river, and then talking to the congresspeople on the US side and saying, you know what, we need a joint task force to look at how we can do this. They're like, why would, why would we care about what's happening in Mexico? Well, the Mexican pollution is coming into the US. But, you know, the other, the other big things, just looking at mining, the, the mining operations, that gold ring that we have on our fingers, takes tons and tons and tons and tons of digging

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  and ore, just the footprints, the, the scale of these mining operations is just mind boggling.

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, what about the, the minerals in our iPhone?

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, God, you don't even want to go there because they come from like the Congo and, you know, places where if you ever saw the Blood Diamond movie.

• 1:11:26Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a pretty picture. And frankly, you know, to me, if you if you look at San Diego and then Tijuana, that is the difference that environmental regulation makes.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  That's the most graphic example that I've ever seen. There's a border. The thing that makes America great is partly our environmental protections. That's what the quality of life that we enjoy, that we can breathe the air, that you can turn on the faucet and get water that you drink. We have spent billions of dollars to allow that. So back to the earlier point, if you can drink this incredible water out of the tap, why are we buying a bottle of water covered in plastic that's sitting in a shelf? That water quality is terrible.

• 1:12:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because we've been led to believe through some very convincing marketing tactics that it's pure, that it has a special mineral content that's better for us, or any number of factors that would lead us to purchase a bottle of water that's in a plastic bottle that comes from some Polynesian island that had to travel, you know, 5,500 miles to get here.

• 1:12:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. So just realize it's

• 1:12:45Rich Roll?

  Can we trust that? But there's, I think there's a, there's a public mistrust of tap water. You probably know more about tap water than than almost anyone.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  I know a lot about tap water.

• 1:12:54Rich Roll?

  So let's talk about tap water.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Okay, tap water, other than federal highway system, the second number, the second largest investment of federal dollars is in our drinking water infrastructure. So the standards for drinking water are set scientifically, they are very, very rigorous. And there are communities that don't meet them, and EPA takes action against those. And the state of California and other states also take action. So it's very highly monitored. The standards are very high. When it comes to bottled water, that isn't true. So unfortunately,

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  Tests have been done and the Food and Drug Administration oversees bottled water, not EPA, and the standards that they use are much lower. So the phthalates, the PCBs, all the issues that we would of plastic that we wouldn't want to leach in our drinking water, if it sits there for a long time, can become an issue, BPA. So I I am always much more comfortable drinking tap water than I am bottled water. And we've paid for that system. If someone told you that you could get a glass of water for a fraction of one cent, or you could pay $2 for that same glass, just from a fiscal responsibility, you know, the drinking water companies want to sell you on this.

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Like 20 years ago, people would have frigging laughed in your face, Rich. Rich, I'm gonna sell you this bottle of water. You'd be like, what? A bottle of water? You're trying to sell this to me?

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  But I think it speaks to an erosion of trust in government. And when I see what Pruitt is up to, and I see how he just sort of allowed this pesticide that's been established to harm children, he's he's made it permissible for for use. Well, those pesticides, you know, are are in our farmland, and then there's runoff. And then, you know, that runoff leads to our our water table and our rivers and ultimately our drinking water. I just had a guy here on the podcast last week who was talking about the extent to which glyphosate is is basically ubiquitous everywhere because its use is so profligate that it's it's in our it's in our rain.

• 1:15:13Rich Roll?

  And then it rain even on organic farms, it's raining into the soil. And then this ends up in our drinking water. And so there's a like, and me not knowing anything, I'm like, all right, well, how much of these pesticides are actually ending up in our drinking water? Is is my drinking water laced with glyphosate, even, you know, to the smallest extent or some other cocktail of pesticides? And that lack of knowing and distrust that's compounded by, you know, what I'm seeing going on in government right now, that motivates me to buy bottled water. Right?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's a lot of people pushing you in that direction just from a marketing perspective. I mean, there's billions of dollars that are spent on marketing beverages and none that's spent on telling you the benefits of drinking water. So it's not an even playing field. And I completely agree with you that the erosion of trust in government has made people think, you know what, we had Flint, Michigan. Government was there and that drinking water was completely contaminated and it was-

• 1:16:13Rich Roll?

  And that problem's still not solved.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  No, it's still not solved. And in California, a million people today will go without access to water that meets federal drinking water standards. They're mainly in the San Joaquin Valley and the Coachella Valley, but those people deserve the same level of drinking water that all of us deserve. So, yeah, there's a lot of, it's complex being alive in 2018 because there's so many confounding and often contradictory pieces of information and no one knows what to do with it. And to me, the only answer is to just live more simply.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  You know, from a drinking water perspective, you do need to know what's in it and you can find out because we live in a country where that data is available. So you can find out from your local water utility, are there any issues of concern that I should be aware of? And they will tell you. And if, you know, your water utility is doing a good job, they should be telling you anyway.

• 1:17:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So what were some of the victories that you had during your time at EPA?

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  I think the main victories were getting people to believe that the system was there for them, especially poorer people. There's this concept, unfortunately, of environmental injustice. So when you do a search by zip code of where people live, where poor minority people live in our country is where all the worst environmental contamination is. And- Really, the only ways to address that is, one, focus on enforcement. Make sure the companies clean up their act. And secondly, give money to those communities to help them become the next solar leaders.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  So there's a belief that's kind of compounded unfortunately by the facts that if you're poor and you want to get into solar or you want to get a job at Tesla, you're going to be the last one to do it.

• 1:18:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  And so helping the next generation of people who need the help most get it first was really, I think, the biggest victory of helping empower those communities.

• 1:18:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know you worked a lot with various tribal communities, right? So what was that about?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  So, under the federal, under our constitution, tribes are separate sovereign nations. We, you know, the first and probably worst genocide that's happened in our country before settlers came on the Mayflower, there's 100 million Native Americans living in North America. Now, there's about 1.5 million. So that genocide was really brutal. It led to people being herded into reservations. Those reservations were then given rights. It basically means that tribes don't need to and don't are not subject to state jurisdiction.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  So in many states, that's why they can have casinos. Those states do have to apply federal environmental laws. So we were basically there to support those sovereign nations. Do, they had community gardens, they had water treatment systems. So I decided to go and meet with all 135 tribes and go to their

• 1:19:48Rich Roll?

  Every single one of them?

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Every single one.

• 1:19:49Rich Roll?

  Individually?

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Individually, yeah. So I got in, I rented vehicles and crisscrossed over seven years, met with all 135, amazing, amazing experience. When you think about resiliency and what it means to be human and to keep a language intact, to keep ceremonies and a sense of self.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  When you're barraged, killed, you know, annihilated by incoming unfriendly community, it's incredible to think that in 2018, we still have that. So it was, it was a pretty, it was a profound experience meeting with them.

• 1:20:34Rich Roll?

  I would imagine, you know, delicate as well. Like you're coming in as a representative of the United States government into territory that is theirs. And, you know, without knowing more or who you are specifically, there's going to be a reticence like, oh, this guy's going to come in and tell us what we can and can't do. You have to overcome that.

• 1:20:56Speaker 01

  First of all, I had to overcome it personally because that legacy is hideous and it isn't a distant history. I spoke to, I was recently hiking down in the Havasupai Reservation and I met with this guy Clay Bravo, who's a member of the Wallopai tribe. And he was like, his parents were taken to what he called concentration camps 50 years ago. So this isn't like ancient history. So yeah, it was, it felt really weird to be a representative of, from their perspective and his history, historical perspective of an occupying force. I'm Jewish,

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  so I kind of always thought, you know, if the Nazis had won, that's me knocking on the Jewish home store. Like, wow, this is intense. So yeah, there's a lot of suspicion, which is healthy and warranted and on their part. And, you know, of all the agencies, EPA was the most trusted, had the best relationship with the tribes, I think. There's some other great agencies and then some other less good agencies. So yes, it was always, it was always, I never took it for granted that I would be welcome. And, you know, it took time to build trust.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  And what are the fruits of those meetings, those encounters? Like, did that translate into progressive reform or anything like that?

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  So I think as a movement, I certainly don't take credit for this, but as a movement, what you saw at the Dakota Access Pipeline was a coming together of different tribes. And that hadn't really happened to that extent before. The last time it happened was in Alcatraz in 1969, when tribes came together and you had the American Indian Movement. So the Dakota Access Pipeline battle, which had a horrible end with Trump, but the positive part of that was really people realizing, exactly, that cohesion and sense of community and shared destiny amongst different tribes.

• 1:23:11Rich Roll?

  Right. So you ultimately decide to part ways with the EPA. You had like seven months left on your term or something like that. Why did you decide to leave?

• 1:23:23Speaker 01

  So at the time, I thought that Hillary Clinton would win, as many of us did. And I knew that I didn't want to get reappointed, that I'd done my job. And as I said earlier, I kind of, I never, I never felt like a bureaucrat, and yet I was becoming one. And so I knew I just needed to kind of get out. And I didn't really know what that escape hatch looked like. But when I, I'd always dreamed of doing the Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico to Canada. And so when I talked to my wife about doing it, about me doing it, she was

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  like, I want, if you're gonna do it, you need to do it this year, in the year that I left, as opposed to after Obama leaves. So I was like, okay. And I did really want to do it. So it was kind of a, for me, a kind of difficult act of...

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Just jumping off the precipice and saying, you know what, I'm not, I don't have another job. I don't have anything lined up, but I know that I'm pretty far away from who I used to be and think I still am.

• 1:24:37Rich Roll?

  So you decide you're going to do this. I mean, that's a monumental undertaking. I can't begin to understand the intricacies of what it would require to tackle something like that. My only, my main frame of reference is probably like everybody, you know, the Wild Book and the movie that followed. But what was it like to prepare for that and undertake it?

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  Well, I was saying to David earlier, um, you know, ultimately, I think I must have been, and still kind of harbored this like an accomplishment junkie. Because why couldn't I have just taken a nice walk in Yosemite? Like, why did I need to go and do?

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  Listen, who do you think they're talking to here? Like, I get it.

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  That's why I was so excited to talk to you, Rich. I was like, why did Rich need to do five Ironmans in a row?

• 1:25:22Rich Roll?

  Because it had to be done.

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I'm not, it, maybe it did, maybe it didn't. Like, yeah, it beat the shit out of me to do the Pacific Crest Trail. And I know that I needed that. I needed to like the baptism by fire. I, I was kind of in a rut and I think I judged success according to very narrow parameters. And those parameters told me, you know, an ever, basically that the more scale that you had in a job, if you had more people to help do more good things, you would get more good things done. And it was a little bit of a myth that I perpetrated against myself.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  So I, um, yeah, the main thing, I, I became a planner. So planning for the Pacific Crest Trail, so it's 2,600 miles. Um, basically a marathon every day for a hundred days. And that requires a lot of logistics around food, especially being vegan. You're not going to get it at a 7-Eleven, um, at a Chevron station, you know, in the middle of nowhere. So you have to send it to yourself. Um, I became pretty, pretty much a gearhead and, um,

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  The goal was to get the gear as light as possible.

• 1:26:46Rich Roll?

  And how many, like, what are the intervals at which you could mail stuff to yourself to pick up along the way?

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  I had thirty one.

• 1:26:55Rich Roll?

  Thirty one different drops?

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  So other people had, there are people who did it and had six. If you don't care what you eat.

• 1:27:02Rich Roll?

  So how many days would you have to pack out for?

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  So that whole planning, it's really bizarre because you don't, you basically have to work out how many miles you're going to walk. And then you can see how far the drop places are between. So for instance, if it's a hundred miles apart between A and B, and I'm only walking ten miles a day, that would take me ten days. So then I'd need to pack ten days of food to get there.

• 1:27:33Rich Roll?

  But you're looking at four or five days, maybe?

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:36Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. At intervals. So you had to have enough, that's the amount of food that you had to be able to carry with you at all times?

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:27:43Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. And so what was the food that you brought?

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  So the food that I brought, I read this old school book that was written in the seventies. And I kind of very intentionally didn't want to be inundated by other people's adventures. So the book that I read.

• 1:28:01Rich Roll?

  So you didn't read Wild?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  No, I didn't read Wild. I read this book by Ray Jardine, called like A Guide to the Pacific Crest Trail. He was like the first person that really had done it. And he suggested that I only bring corn pasta, which turned out to be a very bad idea. One, I didn't like corn pasta. Two, the, unfortunately, the learning experience, the first seven hundred miles of the Pacific Crest Trail is the desert. So there's not a lot of water. And the water that you cook the pasta in, you have to throw away.

• 1:28:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:37Speaker 01

  So it was a complete, the worst possible thing. So I immediately switched to ramen, which isn't super healthy. I ended up eating like the mountaineering food.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  Backpackers pantry and those kind of foods, they actually have some really good vegan options amazingly. And my favorite on ended up being pad thai, really just tastes so good. I'd have peanut butter, a lot of peanut butter, a lot of trail mix that I made for myself, that probably was the lifeblood.

• 1:29:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  But I

• 1:29:15Rich Roll?

  And bars.

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  Ridiculous number of bars that I then could never eat again. They're so

• 1:29:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:29:21Speaker 01

  revolting. I like, just look at them. I have a reaction.

• 1:29:24Rich Roll?

  I can't eat, I can barely eat bars anymore for that same reason.

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Disgusting. Yeah. So, yeah, you get to a point, you're just like, please do not show. So there are people who do the Pacific Crest Trail that eat out of the hiker boxes. So there are these boxes. So at post offices or wherever you get them, there's a box and you put the stuff that you don't want. So as the trail went on.

• 1:29:48Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 1:29:49Speaker 01

  I put more and more of the bars in and people were just like, you're throwing those away.

• 1:29:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I, I probably, I think I, I ate about two and a half thousand calories a day and I burnt about five and a half.

• 1:30:06Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So you must have dropped quite a bit of weight.

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Rich Roll?

  Wow. And so you'd have to bring five days of water with you.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  No, you, you get the water as you go.

• 1:30:16Rich Roll?

  Oh, you do.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  You take it from the streams, you take it from horse troughs, whatever's there, you clean it. Yeah. Amazing. There's a thing called a Sawyer filter.

• 1:30:26Rich Roll?

  The filter thing. Yeah.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  Incredible. I mean, this thing has revolutionized it. It weighs maybe three ounces and you have a little plastic bag, you collect the water and then you squeeze it into your bottle.

• 1:30:38Rich Roll?

  Right. So all told, this took you how long?

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  It took me a month and five days, uh, uh, four months and five days.

• 1:30:48Rich Roll?

  Say a month. Oh, my God.

• 1:30:49Speaker 01

  No, that would be a world record.

• 1:30:51Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that you were like running, you know, three hour marathons every day.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Rich Roll?

  Wow. And, and.

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  I have sort of two things I want to know. The first thing is the obvious question, which is, you know, what was the hardest part or did you have a breaking point with it? Or did you, you know, have any kind of hair raising, you know, scenarios that arose?

• 1:31:14Speaker 01

  Every day I had both.

• 1:31:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Like, just to know that the, it was an emotional, much more emotional roller coaster than a physical one. So the physical stuff really happened in the first two weeks. So your feet.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  You're getting used to it.

• 1:31:30Speaker 01

  My feet went from a size 10 to a size 11. They'll never go back. And unfortunately, like the shoe sizes, so I lost toenails and all kinds of stuff. But really, after two weeks, you're, you're pretty good physically, unless you have joint issues, which a lot of people did. But I was very fortunate not to have those. So the main, the main thing is that, you know, our brains have this homing device and we're not used to being away in, in wilderness. And so it was a challenge every day, every day at around five o'clock. I was just like, I want to fucking go home. I hate this. And it was mainly around food.

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Food becomes, was my, the thing I thought about the most, the biggest distraction. It wasn't missing family. It wasn't, I wish it was. I wish I could say, I just miss my kids and wife so much. I do love them, but I didn't miss them on the trail. I missed food. Like, I wanted scrambled eggs. I wanted French toast. And I wanted pancakes with blueberries. And I could eat, like, like when the PCT hikers come to town, to these teeny little towns, where we got the resupply. So you'd, I didn't, I'm not sure how I miss this, Rich, but. So you have thirty one drops and most of them are about ten miles from the trail. So you have to hitchhike.

• 1:33:00Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did like sixty two hitches and in very, very, very rural parts of the state, of the three states, California, Oregon and Washington and universally the nicest people. I never waited more than ten minutes.

• 1:33:17Rich Roll?

  I'm sure they're used to it because everyone's doing that all the time there, right?

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  It was still really.

• 1:33:21Rich Roll?

  But but aren't you in towns where you could go to a restaurant?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:25Rich Roll?

  So you could eat, you could like.

• 1:33:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, but that's every seven days.

• 1:33:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's when I would, but then the rest of the time that you you would just dream of the next time you're gonna eat food.

• 1:33:35Rich Roll?

  But what about like contending with weather and wild animals and all of that? It was all fine?

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  So the weather, the worst weather was in Washington and in Southern California. So I'm just not used to dealing with like a hundred and ten degree heat. So I had an umbrella, a UV umbrella that for me was a lifesaver. If there's one piece of equipment other than, you know, my shoes and and the usual things, umbrella and walking sticks.

• 1:34:05Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. So did you you hold an umbrella or did it attach to your head?

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  Neither, so I kind of jerry rigged it into the breast pocket on my, I had a shirt with a breast pocket on the right and and then I pulled the backpack, the top backpack strap over it. So I kind of.

• 1:34:25Rich Roll?

  I got a canopy over yourself.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  But anyone who's hiking in the desert, there was a number, the number one issue of, I I saw maybe five or six helicopter rescues. It was all from being overexposed to the sun and dehydration. So when you're out there, it's serious. The sun is so powerful, places like the Mojave Desert, you need an umbrella.

• 1:34:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no mountain lions or anything like that?

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are all kinds of, a lot of snake, a lot of rattlesnakes, bears, they're coyotes, a few mountain lions, but you know, they generally want to leave you alone.

• 1:35:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, on a bigger issue, I think I'm interested in hearing a little bit about what it's like to spend that much time alone, like the self-reflection, like especially you being at this point in your life where you've left this one career, you're trying to figure out what you want to do with yourself next. Like, how did that that rumination like kind of impact your life and sense of self?

• 1:35:31Speaker 01

  I mean, at first I thought I was going crazy because there's all these voices in my head. And I felt completely schizophrenic. I had like the Jared I thought was normal Jared. And then I had like teenage Jared and, you know, I had like 15 voices in my head the first week. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm never going to make it through because you're spending all this time by yourself. And my only practice was to work out what I was thinking about. And they they would go on in loops. So I'd be thinking about just the most bizarre shit like,

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  you know, things that I I would never think I thought about and wouldn't want to admit to like my competitive side. Like, am I walking more miles than the person I started with? And like, that that was kind of an early obsession, like, how many miles am I doing? You know, you get given a trail name. What's my trail name going to be? And they all revolved early on in the hike around like how strangers saw me. And I thought of myself as someone that didn't give a shit about what other people thought. And I suddenly realized I care a lot about what people think. And these aren't people I know. These are just random people. And I'm thinking about it all day long.

• 1:36:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  Why? So I had to answer that question, kind of. So that's how I kind of proceeded on the hike is I would work out what the hell I was thinking about because it would just be driving me bonkers. And then I'd try and analyze why I thought about it. And so, like, I realized that, you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about expectations, guilt and disappointment, and how expectations are kind of the the parent of both guilt and disappointment. And I got to this place where

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  I realize, you know, society has very strong expectations of us. We have expectations of ourselves and they're generally unspoken and different from a goal or an ambition. They're the things that we we don't check in again regularly with ourselves and say, am I equipped to even meet this expectation? You know, do I want to? Is this something that I care about? Or is it just something that a TV commercial thinks I should care about? And so, you know, I realize that for me, it sounds kind of bizarre, but like, in order to get to my true nature, I could only do it in nature. And and nature is very, very non judgmental, but at the same time brutal, right? It doesn't give a shit about

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  death. Nature does not care about my whining, doesn't care about where the next water is. It just is. So as a partner, walking with nature, um, yeah, it was tough. At the beginning, it really, it kind of broke me and I needed, frankly, I don't know if this is similar for you, but I just, I didn't, I would never have admitted this to myself, but I needed to be broken. I needed to reach that breaking point where I was just desperate and then I needed to keep going. Because basically, I think my issue psychologically, neurotically,

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  was I was afraid of being abandoned, right? And what you realize by being in nature is that you're going to be okay. I'm completely by myself with nothing and I'm fine. I'm fine. And that teacher taught me that that was kind of like a childhood. Yeah, in childhood, you can be abandoned because you need other people's help. But now I'm actually going to be fine. So that that was like lesson number one.

• 1:39:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's profound. I mean, I think the idea is almost like you're on this four month silent meditation retreat, right? And and initially, the looping, you know, patterns of the thinking brain are attacking you because you're so acclimated to living however you were living and ultimately creating some awareness around that and becoming the observer of that and engaging with it, you know, on a subject specific matter to get to a point where you then kind of graduate to a greater awareness of your pitfalls and your hangups, et cetera, to kind of Culminate in a more meta, you know, perspective of what's important and what's not.

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  It's beautiful. It's like this, it's this sort of compacted hero's journey.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, it didn't, it felt like Survivor designed by, by the Jung or Freud. I was like, what the fuck? I didn't sign up for this, Rich.

• 1:40:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you did.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  I did, but not knowingly.

• 1:40:20Rich Roll?

  On some level unconsciously or not, like this is what you wanted, right? You were seeking this like, and on some level, perhaps you needed it. You're at a crossroads in your life and there was something beckoning you to do this. And you had to know that, that this was going to be part of the deal, right? That you were going to be meeting your maker, so to speak, along the way. And that's part of the allure as much as it is, you know, the fear that surrounds doing something like that.

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  I wish I could say that that was true, but for me, I think I was so fucking oblivious to where I was at and so numb and frankly just cynical that I don't think I was self-aware enough to realize what it was that I was engaged in. And somehow I, I think there was a deeper level that must have known that.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there must have been a compulsion to at least cultivate a deeper level of self-awareness.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Well, I knew I didn't feel comfortable in my own skin. I didn't feel comfortable being the person I was. And, and, and I knew that I needed to go through some kind of cathartic process. I thought it would be physical. So that, that's kind of, that's the part that surprised me is that I thought, you know, and I, I looked at everything. I did have these little matrix, matrices that I gauge different aspects of the walk along just because you have nothing else to do apart from make this shit up. So one of them,

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  One of them was around, for instance, journey versus destination. Am I thinking about getting to the next food? Or am I actually present right now? Another was physical, mental. And I think I thought it would be about eighty percent physical, twenty percent mental, and it was completely the opposite.

• 1:42:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  It was definitely eighty percent mental. And it definitely tested me. And I hadn't done meditation before. And the meditation practice that I do now really is to get me back to the peace and being present that I felt on the hike.

• 1:42:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  And really, it's like ready-made being present. Like, just add nature and you get present because it is so grounding. You know, just sleeping outdoors every day, seeing the stars, breathing the air. I mean, it gets back to the earlier point of that's where we come from. We are part of nature. Nature is part of us. That was kind of the epiphany I had was really around if we had a creation, if we created a creation myth, it would be very different now than it is in the Bibles that we read. And it would be about actually facts.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  And the facts are, you know, eleven and a half billion years ago, there was an infinitesimally dense atom that expanded and created time and space. And so stardust is in us and we are in stardust. We are all part of this same endeavor, which is life and the universe.

• 1:43:35Rich Roll?

  That's beautifully put. I like that. So armed with that, when you return, how do you then reframe your life and figure out what the next chapter is for you? Like, what about that experience then colored the decisions that you've made about what you're going to do next?

• 1:43:55Speaker 01

  It was really, really, really hard coming back. Much harder than the acclimatization process of going from civilization to nature. Going from nature, I'd be really fascinated. I've talked to other people who've done these long-distance hikes and none of them have really ever acclimatized back. I've done a lot of more hiking since. Because, so if you if you imagine the process is we we experience the world through our five senses. That's it. That is, the reality we call reality is only through our five senses. And in nature, you are allowed to open up your senses.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  So the most shocking one was smell, because smell is so beautiful and natural and harmonious in it. It's like a blanket, you go from one smell to another, whereas in cities, the smell is really nasty, and the same is true of sound. So here, it's very quiet, but I live right in the middle of the city. And so, so in nature, I'd opened up all my senses. That was the progress I'd made, is to allow myself to be vulnerable and open up the senses. The city required me to shut it all down.

• 1:45:14Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  And I didn't want to shut it down. And so I'd get headaches from the sirens and the noise and the smell, and it's really bright, the lights at night.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  Like, almost like a synesthesia.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:26Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  So it was really, and I don't think I've still recovered, and I'm not sure I want to fully recover, because living in a manufactured, we live in a manufactured environment. I don't want to be in a, I I realized from the hike, I never want to rush again. I don't want to be in a rush. Like, life is here to savor, and I don't want to be in a place where I'm, you know, in a, in a building where the air is piped in, where I'm looking at a screen all day. I don't, I don't want my relationship with this precious life to be through a computer, an object. So, um, yeah, it it has taken me remarkably longer than I ever would have imagined.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  I actually hired a, I love life coaches, and I I hired a coach to help me when I got back. Think about, I want to do my job now, I want to do the next job. And three months into it, her name was Mona, she was like, Jared, have you ever thought about the fact you might just not be ready? And I was like, hmm, yeah, I'm not ready. I'm absolutely not ready, so.

• 1:46:34Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, your wife's like, all right, so what are we doing here? What's going on?

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  So what we're doing is spending my 401k.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  So I spent like,

• 1:46:43Rich Roll?

  Don't worry.

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I've spent it all. I have like 75 grand left in my 401k and it will all go, I'm sure. And, you know, Oscar Wilde said that youth is wasted on the young, while retirement is wasted on the old. So my retirement savings would be wasted on the old. So I was like, yeah. So for all of you, those, those people who are out there like, how the fuck, you just can't do this? Yeah, you can. You can absolutely do it. You just, there's some sacrifices and trade offs. And I love getting those checks from Prudential. I'm like, I didn't even know I had this money. Now I can use it. So, so, um, yeah.

• 1:47:22Rich Roll?

  Well, what I love about that is that you didn't technically experience some kind of crazy,

• 1:47:34Rich Roll?

  you know, life crisis or even professional crisis. Like you seem to have been fulfilled in what you were, what you were doing professionally. It's not like, oh my God, you know, my life is going down the tubes. I need to like hit pause now. Like it was, you know, you were on a trajectory that, that was, that was good that you were enjoying. And yet you still had the awareness to recognize like, I need to take a break here and connect in a different way in order to really understand myself well enough to figure out what the next, you know, couple of decades are going to look like.

• 1:48:08Speaker 01

  I was pretty lost. I was fulfilled. I loved doing the work at EPA. But at the same time, I mean, how can we do these jobs of protecting the environment that we care and love? With never being in the environment that we care and love. So I felt really detached and unconnected from this world.

• 1:48:29Rich Roll?

  It becomes an academic enterprise. Despite the fact you were this boots on the ground guy, like from what I understand, your predecessor wasn't doing that kind of stuff, like showing up actually on all these, at all these sites.

• 1:48:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I love, I, I'm going to bring that emphasis and, and I wanted to meet the people. I wanted to see the places, but even, even that it, it, um, yeah, I definitely felt

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  the, the cynicism part and the calcification and the numbness to life definitely.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Felt very tangible and

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  and just being judgmental and it felt very heavy. Like the biggest, before I left on the trail, the biggest kind of

• 1:49:19Speaker 01

  thing that I looked at was the the difference between letting go and holding on. So with nearly anything that you look at in life, you could put it through that lens and

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  you know, I think I was whole, I was like white knuckling it and holding on so tight.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  And even to the people that we love, I think we have this concept that if we hold them, they'll stay. But really what we do is suffocate them. So I just, I came to a place where I was like, I just need to let go and just be happy, free falling. And actually I did jump out of a plane. It was terrifying. But no, but literally just allow myself, and that's what the Pacific Crest Trail did for me, was just allow me to get back to a place where I was realizing this is who Jared is. And really, the epiphany is this is my life and I'm living it.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  And a lot of times I realized, looking back, I couldn't say yes to both those things. Sometimes it didn't feel like my life and I wasn't always sure that I was living it. So now that's basically the mantra that I live by is like, this is my life and I want to live it.

• 1:50:39Rich Roll?

  And you've been able to hang on to that.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:50:41Rich Roll?

  Sensibility.

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  I'm never going to let go of that.

• 1:50:43Rich Roll?

  That's cool. That's cool. And you've started a podcast.

• 1:50:47Speaker 01

  I have.

• 1:50:48Rich Roll?

  See, there's, there's one thing that you've done.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  I've, I've done a few things.

• 1:50:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, well, you have this consulting practice now, right?

• 1:50:55Speaker 01

  That, yes. So but that, both of those again, were just kind of letting the universe, you know, being receptive to things that felt close to my heart and

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  You know, so for instance, the consulting thing with people that had, so for instance, there's this guy who wants to, you can, you can, you'd like this guy, he, he wants to stop microfibers from like Patagonia and other kind of fleeces. He's come up with a device that you could put in washing machines. And it basically be like a lint trap for microfibers. So cool idea. And he wants me to help him. Like, how do we make this into a statewide initiative? So those are the kind of things that I love doing.

• 1:51:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:51:47Speaker 01

  Or how do you ban straws? When people come to me and say, we'd like to pay you to do that. I'm like, I'd love to do that. That's fun. And the podcast came through my cousin David, just saying, Jared, no one's really talking about environmental issues. And to a large extent, everyone's talking about environmental issues because the world around us is, is a big sphere. But like, I like exploring these issues. And as, you know, I spent a huge amount of time by myself. And so for me, getting to, to talk to people and be in conversation and experience their wisdom is a gift. I love doing it. So when

• 1:52:30Speaker 01

  someone said, you could actually do this, like hanging out, talking with you, I, there's nothing I'd rather be doing. This is so cool.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. It's cool. And we were talking before the, before the, we hit record, you know, I don't, I don't know that anybody, yeah, we all kind of generally talk about the environment. But there's nobody with your experience and pedigree who's doing, you know, an actual podcast around these ideas. And, and these are ideas that can be spoken about both broadly and very specifically. And you're in a, you know, the perfect, you're sort of the perfect cipher for those kinds of conversations. So I think it's cool.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  It's called Podship Earth.

• 1:53:10Rich Roll?

  Podship Earth.

• 1:53:11Speaker 01

  And so Podship Earth came from Buckminster Fuller's book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. And

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  I had this wacky great uncle called Milton, who late in life, you know, he was a jock. He was not a reader. I'm not sure what happened, but like in his mid eighties, he discovered Buckminster Fuller. And he, unlike me, he didn't do the Pacific Crest Trail, but he turned his savings in as meager as they were and bought hundreds of copies of Bucky's book called Critical Path.

• 1:53:46Rich Roll?

  I thought you were gonna say he bought a dome.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  I wish, you know, unfortunately, he kind of ended up in really seedy motels in Miami Beach, but no, he should have.

• 1:53:58Rich Roll?

  That's a different story then, okay.

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  He should have bought a dome. He would have been much, much happier in a geodesic dome. But he did buy hundreds of copies of the book and he handed me one as, and my memory at the time was like, what the fuck? He used to give me hundred dollar bills for Christmas and now I'm getting a Critical Path by Buckminster Fuller. But I eventually got around to reading it and had a big impact on kind of systems thinking. And so I was like, podge, Spaceship Earth? Podship Earth? So we are, we are this teeny little dot. My kids, I'd invite every, every single listener to look up, there's a YouTube video of this guy talking about the Virgo supercluster, which our galaxy is in. And when you see the scale of the galaxy

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  that we're in, and then this Virgo supercluster, we are a teeny little spaceship.

• 1:54:50Rich Roll?

  Is it that one that, that starts with the earth and then slowly progressively zooms out? Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah. I'll put a link in the show notes to it. It's pretty cool. That's cool. That's awesome, man. So the first episode drops late February?

• 1:55:03Speaker 01

  February 19th. It's gonna have Gina McCarthy. She was my boss at EPA. She was the head of EPA. She's now at the Kennedy School. She's, she's been her whole life a fighter. She was ridiculously optimistic about our prospects of turning this around, which I liked. I'm looking for optimism.

• 1:55:24Rich Roll?

  That's cool. Good. All right. Well, we gotta wrap this up, but I don't want to let you go without two remaining questions. The first is, if people are listening and they're inspired to get more environmentally conscious and active in their own lives, like what are some of the, the most impactful things that the average consumer can put into motion?

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  The most important thing is yourself and your family. That's the most important unit we have. And then your community, but within your family, little things like, you know, being consumer minded, environmentally minded when it comes to choices. I was helping my son buy a pillow the other day. You don't want a pillow with brominated flame retardants. You want a pillow that's made out of organic things. You're putting your head on it. When it comes to, you know, getting chocolate, if it has fair trade, why not get the fair trade one? You know that it's coming from a place where there's not slave labor used in the chocolate. When it comes to making a decision about buying a case of plastic bottles

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  for your kid's soccer game, or, you know, maybe buying five or six stainless steel bottles that can be refilled, you know, make the smart choice. Those things will last forever. Even just, you know, kids' birthday parties or your own birthday parties, those Styrofoam plates. People, it's so much classier and nicer to use actual ceramics and cutlery. People love it. So like, enjoy life, but be conscious that you can really make some pretty profound choices. You could put solar on your roof. You can decide, you know what? I, I'm not going to go to the gym. I don't have the money, but I live five miles away from where I work. I'm going to walk every day. You will be amazed.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  I walked every day and I, it was so eye opening. I got to know people on the street. I got to a lot fitter. And I didn't have to be cooped up in a car, which, you know, the air is bad. You get stressed. So if you choose a life that is simple and honest to your values, and, and that really just means looking after your health and your health of your family. The next thing is your community. Things like tree plantings, community gardens. The whole focus on public policy and the things that really, I don't think matter quite as much as the individual action at the local level. So I would say act locally, resist nationally.

• 1:58:02Rich Roll?

  I like that. But on the subject of policy, and this leads me to my final question. If you did find yourself in some parallel universe where you had been appointed to run the EPA and you're in Washington in your nice office, what do you do first? What is the, what is the policy agenda look like if you were in charge?

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  So we kind of know what the policies need to be in order to get out of the mess that we're in. They need to be driven by science. So with climate change, there's already a finding that greenhouse gases are a pollutant. It's called the endangerment finding. That can't be changed because the science hasn't changed. So really let science be our guide. And then secondly, the laws are pretty clear that we need to protect human health and the environment. Let's do that. So with climate change, we had a common sense plan called the Clean Power Plan that was in place. We got four and a half million public comments. Now they're saying there probably wasn't enough public comment. I mean, so yeah, there's a lot of public comment. It was a great plan.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  The energy companies bought into it and realized they needed certainty. So moving very quickly to renewable energy. And in some cases, I think the state of California can have a goal of 100% renewable energy. Cities need to move in that direction. So energy is move as fast. And now it's, you know, from a fiscal perspective, we have an obligation to do it because it's cheaper. With water, there's a huge amount of savings. We're going to get into another drought in the West, no doubt, soon. We need to think about the whole system of turning wastewater into water that can be

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  used for other purposes from irrigation to washing our laundry. So water is really important. Chemicals, there's 80,000 chemicals in place that have no regulation whatsoever. We need to drastically reduce the number of chemicals that are allowed into our environment until we know what the hell it is they're going to do. We need to make sure that communities of color and low income communities aren't left behind, that they aren't the, you know, bearing the brunt of the pollution that makes our lives easier. And, you know, we need as Quick an acceleration towards policies like organic agriculture.

• 2:00:34Speaker 01

  You know, the subsidies have been helping large scale, commercial, petrochemical ag for a long time. So we need to get governments money, which you and I pay, all of us pay. We pay taxes, those taxes need to go towards doing the right thing as opposed to continually paying for the polluters.

• 2:00:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly. If we could shift some of the focus away from farm bill type legislation towards incentivizing the organic farming community and the local farming communities. I think that would be a step in the right direction.

• 2:01:11Speaker 01

  I have a question for you.

• 2:01:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  So I had a difficult time readjusting. You're sleeping in a tent.

• 2:01:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  So I'm jealous, like, tell me.

• 2:01:21Rich Roll?

  Well, you can sleep in a tent.

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  I could, it's hard in San Francisco.

• 2:01:24Rich Roll?

  Do you have a backyard?

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:01:25Rich Roll?

  No.

• 2:01:25Speaker 01

  So I was thinking the roof.

• 2:01:27Rich Roll?

  You have a flat roof?

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, well, my tent was on the flat roof, but the wind was crazy lately. So I moved it down to current to ground level. But yeah, I've been sleeping in a roof, in a, in a tent for about a year and a half. Before that, kind of periodically on and off. And I love it, you know, I love it. It's a, it was motivated initially by struggles with sleep that I was having. And I like it cold, like the colder, the better, you know, get under a bunch of blankets and I just sleep phenomenally well. And my wife likes it warm. And so we would argue, people are like, is your, is your marriage okay? But it's like, it's actually better now because she gets it the way she likes it and I get it the way I like it. And I can't do anything if I don't sleep well.

• 2:02:11Rich Roll?

  And so A, my sleep quality improved like tenfold, like, I don't know how you were sleeping on the trail, but you know, just being in the open air. Yeah, it's amazing. And I love it for that alone. But I also think it speaks to, you know, I have it right adjacent to this container space out there that I have my office and like my little world is like that tent and that container. And I happen to live in a beautiful home and I'm extremely grateful and lucky and you know, I have, my life is an embarrassment of riches, but on some level, it's sort of a, it's a, it's a practice in Stoicism because if everything went to shit and I lost everything, like I'm

• 2:02:50Rich Roll?

  cool. Like I, it's reframed my relationship with the material world in a way that allows me to really embrace and understand like, I don't need that much. Like, and my happiness and sense of self is not dictated by those externalities. And it's, it's, and, and then there was a, you know, I was doing it for a while and then I, I wasn't saying anything publicly about it. I'm like, well, what would people think? They're gonna think I'm a weird, and then I'm like, I don't care. You know, I don't care.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  They'll love it.

• 2:03:17Rich Roll?

  Think whatever you want to think, but you know, I've, I like it and, and it's been a cool thing. So put that tent on your roof.

• 2:03:24Speaker 01

  I like it. Just final point. I have never been happier than when I was on the Pacific Crest Trail and I had everything that I needed in my backpack.

• 2:03:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah. So happiness is not a function of the material possessions that you lug around with you. It's more a function of the experience that you choose to bring into your life and the people that you surround yourself with and your relationship to that environment and those people.

• 2:03:53Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for inviting me today.

• 2:03:55Rich Roll?

  Thank you. It was a pleasure, man. Come back anytime. Good luck with the podcast.

• 2:03:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'm gonna invite you. I need you as a guest.

• 2:04:01Rich Roll?

  Happy to come. I don't know what I could say on, on the environmental issues, but anytime you want to have me.

• 2:04:06Speaker 01

  No, you've, I want to hear all about your lawyering and how you made the transformation and what you felt like when you did your fifth Iron Man in five days and like, this is a promo for the show you're gonna, you've already heard it because he's, he's talked about it on this show.

• 2:04:20Rich Roll?

  Anytime. Yeah. Cool, man. All right. Well, awesome. So if people want to connect with you or hook up with you, what's, where's the best place for them to do that?

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  PodshipEarth.com.

• 2:04:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. The new website. Awesome. And subscribe on iTunes. Check it out. All that kind of stuff. All right, Jared.

• 2:04:36Speaker 01

  Thank you, Rich.

• 2:04:37Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:04:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Rich Roll?

  Plants.

• 2:04:41Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. It's over. It's fini. It's complete. How did it go for you? I felt like we knocked that one out pretty good. I enjoyed it. I hope you did too. Be sure to check out the show notes at ritual.com for plenty of additional links and resources to expand your experience of this conversation beyond the earbuds. And do me a personal favor and give Jared's brand new podcast, Podship Earth, a listen with open ears and open heart and open mind. Again, Plant Power Way Italia is available now for pre-order, so reserve your copy today. It would mean a lot to me. And if you would like to support my work, please subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts or on whatever platform you enjoy this content. It only takes a second, but it really does help us out significantly with show visibility

• 2:05:25Rich Roll?

  and reach and audience and all that kind of good stuff. You can also support the show on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. If you need help with your diet and nutrition, I highly suggest and recommend you check out our meal planner. It's got thousands of custom tailored, plant-based recipes, grocery lists, even grocery delivery in almost every US metropolitan area. Everything you need right at your fingertips so that you can eat the way that you deserve for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. To learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or simply click on Meal Planner on the top menu at ritual.com. Thank you to everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, interstitial music.

• 2:06:07Rich Roll?

  Also, you can catch Jason in a Super Bowl commercial that he did with Alice Cooper. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to that. You guys should check that out. I forgot to mention that the other day. It's pretty great. He plays a drummer. He's all kitted out, looking like a heavy metal dude. It's pretty awesome. Also, Sean Patterson for help on graphics, Michael Gibson for videoing today's podcast, which you can enjoy on YouTube, youtube.com/ritual. Please give me a subscribe there as well. And theme music, as always, by Analema. Thanks for the love you guys. Perhaps you will think a little bit more deeply, a little bit more profoundly and meaningfully into your impact on planet Earth and perhaps change a few behaviors here and there. Just little things that you can do

• 2:06:52Rich Roll?

  to help you walk a little bit more gracefully on our precious planet. And I'll see you guys back here soon. Peace, plants. No, stay.