Edward Norton: Thoughts On Ego, Taking Big Swings & Speaking Truth To Power

One of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, today Edward Norton graces the podcast to discuss his fascinating life and perspective on filmmaking, culture, politics and the nature of power. Over the course of his extraordinary career, Edward has reaped 3 Academy Award nominations starring in some of the greatest films of our era — Primal Fear, American History X, Fight Club, Birdman, and 25th Hour among them. The occasion for this conversation is Motherless Brooklyn — a long-gestating passion project Edward wrote, directed, produced and headlines. A period crime noir that confronts the shadowy malevolence of power in 1950's New York City, Edward stars as a twitchy tourettic detective determined to find his boss' killer. Evocative of Chinatown, it’s a towering achievement and terrific watch I implore all of you to immediately see in the theatre. Unfamiliar to most are Edward’s many off-screen interests and achievements as an entrepreneur, investor, philanthropist and environmentalist. In 2010, he co-founded CrowdRise, a crowdfunding platform which has raised over $500M for non-profits which later sold to GoFundMe. He is the co-founder of an advanced data science company called EDO which provides audience analytics to media companies. In addition, Edward is an avid pilot and founding board president of the Masai Wilderness Conservation Trust, a Kenyan conservation and community development organization. To raise awareness for the organization, in 2009 he ran the New York Marathon alongside a group of Masai, completing the race in 3:28. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this hyper-intelligent polymath. A famously private person, Edward has been uncharacteristically public as of late — making the mainstream media and podcast rounds to promote Motherless Brooklyn. If you caught his appearance on Marc Maron, Ezra Klein, Preet Bharara, Joe Rogan, Dax Shepard or Alec Baldwin’s respective podcasts (all great in their own right) — this conversation is a bit different. Today we dive into the role of ego in his profession. We dissect disenfranchisement and the implications of weaponized social media in our politically divided culture. And we talk about the state of environmental activism. On the subject of creativity, we explore the importance of gestation — distancing yourself from the noise to reboot artistic originality. We discuss balancing art against other life priorities. And how his deep interest in the nature of power underscores his latest work. Motherless Brooklyn is now playing in theaters nationwide. If you enjoy this conversation, desire to support Edward — and dig smart, mature, entertaining cinema — please make a priority of seeing this movie in the cinema pronto. They say never meet your heroes. I disagree. A pinch me moment, it was an absolute pleasure and honor to talk with a man I respect and admire tremendously. You can watch it all go down on YouTube. I sincerely hope you enjoy the exchange. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  Part of the fun of really good noir films is that you get hypnotized. They force you to experience the inability to understand what's happening. And yet, they don't alienate you because they're sexy. You get into actually like an aesthetic pleasure of listening to language and watching people and seeing clothes. But then slowly, what they do is remind you, you don't know what's going on. And in this country, no matter what anybody tells you, there's dark shit going on. And not knowing that it's going on puts you in danger. The manipulation that's taking place that's really dangerous is not a manipulation to get us to buy anything.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  It's the manipulation, literally, of how we feel about each other. This concerted effort to foment antagonism within our society to cause chaos and social unrest here, like, this is like out of a James Bond movie, like, the only agenda is not to sell us anything. It's literally to just destabilize us into rage, into like this fit of such like anger with each other that we can't function. And it's working.

• 2:17Rich Roll?

  That's Edward Norton, this week, on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:32Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. Edward Norton. Edward Norton, people. You heard me, right? Edward Norton, arguably one of the great all-time actors on the podcast today. Are you kidding me? I don't really have to introduce this guy, do I? Three Academy Award nominations. Primal Fear, American History X, Birdman. How about Fight Club? A slew of Wes Anderson movies. The list is long and incredibly impressive. As you may know, Edward has a new movie out. It's really a terrific 50s crime noir about a Tourette's gumshoe.

• 3:17Rich Roll?

  It's called Motherless Brooklyn. It's a long, gestating project that Edward wrote, directed, and stars in that took decades to make. It's an incredible achievement, and all of you guys should go out and see it immediately in the theater. What people might not know about Edward, however, in part, I think, because he's somebody who works hard to protect his privacy and doesn't generally do a ton of press, are the many impressive and impactful things that he does and has done outside of Hollywood as an entrepreneur, an investor, a philanthropist, and an environmentalist. Along with his wife, he co-founded CrowdRise, a crowdfunding platform which has raised over $500 million

• 4:01Rich Roll?

  for nonprofits, which he later sold to GoFundMe. He is also the co-founder of an advanced data science company called EDO, which provides audience analytics to media companies. And you might recall that Edward ran the New York City Marathon in 2009 in something like 328, if I'm not mistaken, which is very good, alongside a group of Maasai. Well, he did that in conjunction with his role as the founding board president of the Masai Wilderness Conservation Trust, a Kenyan conservation and community development organization. And honestly, all of that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this amazing and hyper-intelligent human. And it's all coming up in a couple few.

• 4:45Rich Roll?

  But before we dig in, let's do a little housekeeping by supporting the great organizations that make the show possible.

• 4:58Rich Roll?

  So I met Edward through some mutual friends about a year ago. It was very brief. It was a party and we had a nice exchange, but that was it. And although Edward is somebody that I definitely would put at the very top of the list of people I would love to have on the show. At that time, it honestly never occurred to me to even ask if he would do it. First, because it would just be awkward. I just met him and also predominantly because I know the guy rarely does press and is so intentional about protecting his private life. But with this new movie, Motherless Brooklyn, suddenly I noticed that he was popping up on a ton of podcasts. First on Marc Maron, which was really great, by the way.

• 5:43Rich Roll?

  Then Rogan, Ezra Klein, Tim Ferriss, Preet Bharara, Dax Shepard, Alec Baldwin's show. They're all great. I listened to all of them. And if you're a fan of Edward, I suggest you do the same, particularly because this conversation is fairly qualitatively a little bit different from those. And basically, secondarily, just because listening to Edward talk about all manner of subjects is a fascinating exercise. Anyway, and this is very LA, I realize, so apologies. But my wife and I were out trick or treating with our kids the other night and I ran into Edward with our mutual friend and this friend suggested that Edward do the show.

• 6:28Rich Roll?

  And to my absolute delight, Edward was into it, which was amazing. And the next day it happened and here we are. I would say that this one goes in a whole bunch of different directions. Our social media and marketing-driven culture. We discuss the current political climate. The state of environmental activism. We talk about the role of ego in Edward's life and work, distancing himself from the noise, the importance of gestation and living a creative life, and trying to find balance in all of it, and how his deep interest in the nature and seat of power underscores this latest work.

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  Motherless Brooklyn is now in theaters, so if you enjoy this conversation, if you want to support Edward, and you dig smart, mature, grown-up, and entertaining cinema, please make a point of checking out the movie in the theater. This is definitely a pinch-me moment. It was a real honor to talk to somebody I deeply admired and respected from afar for many years, so let's do it.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  This is good. This is an excellent book for me today.

• 7:43Rich Roll?

  You should read that.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  I have not read that one.

• 7:46Rich Roll?

  Ego is the Enemy. I think you've got it in check.

• 7:51Speaker 01

  It is. It is. Yeah, we can talk about that.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  My sense is that your ego is pretty well in check with all this kind of nonsense. And we were just talking a minute ago about trying to mute out the extrinsic noise that accompanies, you know, doing what you do.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think it's, I think ego's probably like, like the deepest addiction there is, though. You know what I mean? I mean, I think like, the fact that even the Dalai Lama is like still vying with it.

• 8:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  I'm not even joking.

• 8:24Rich Roll?

  Well, there's aspects of it that are necessary to being an actualized human, I think. It's about harnessing, you know, the power that it has in keeping, you know, its ill effects, you know, in check.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's all, I mean, also, it's a word with a lot of lateral definition in it, so it depends on what part of it, you know, which version of ego you're talking about in some ways, like, because I guess...

• 8:51Speaker 01

  I guess even altruism, even even the impulse to do good.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you have to believe that you have capabilities and capacity. I mean, for yourself, you can't, I mean, look, this movie that we're going to talk about, you you you wrote it, you directed it, you star in it. It takes a certain audaciousness to say, I can handle this. And with that comes, you know, an aspect of ego that is necessary and crucial to like getting the job done. You have to make everyone else believe that you have that capability as well.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Right, that's that, yeah, what you're what you're saying, I agree that um.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Like, if you don't have belief in your own agency, like, if you don't have, if you don't have belief that you have capacity.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  You know, you.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  I actually, I actually, by the way, this is a digression, but it's, I think it's an interesting one. I think a lot of people at their lowest, like, depression, the depression and anxiety that a lot of people feel in the modern world, and a lot of what flows from it, even in terms of like the socio-political expressions, things that go on like Brexit.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Right now, which you could say is like. Let's even forget America. I think Brexit right now is one of the most fascinating examples of an enormous collective unforced error, right, self harm, that there was no reason to have inflicted. And and I think you could argue that that sometimes these things happen when people reach a lack of faith, that they have any agency, that they matter, that they, when they feel marginalized to the degree that even the act of self harm, they know it on

• 10:40Speaker 01

  intuitive level, they know they're doing themselves damage, but the ability to do anything that causes anything to happen. Is is eluding them in so many other areas of their life that they do something sort of openly self-destructive because at least they did it.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the level of disenfranchisement has to rise to a certain threshold level. And once it tips over that, there's a vibration, a collective, you know, there's a collective ability to like tap into a certain vibration to take an action, even with the understanding that it's not in their own interest.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:17Rich Roll?

  And you see that played out time and time again. I mean, we're seeing it here.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. I and the funny thing is, is I someone was um, someone was equating it to like nihilism. That's what nihilism is. It's it's the belief that destruction has its own end or whatever, right?

• 11:34Rich Roll?

  I don't think that I think that's different.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  I just I agree. That's what I mean I'm saying. And I was kind of wincing. I was like, hmm, that's not really what I see going on. I I like, I think um, I I saw a movie recently that I thought was actually nihilistic that actually was like um, a celebration of the idea that there's a righteous heroic uh, there's a there's a heroic value to to blowing away your oppressors, you know, or or to to destroying, you know.

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What movie was that?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 12:16Rich Roll?

  I don't want to say.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I don't want to say, but it disturbed me. It it scared me. But the but but I but I don't think what people are doing in America or in in um, England is is nihilism. I think is is a is deep like desperation and like you said, sense of loss of control, loss of um, you know, marginalization, etc. And I think that that's when like, that's when you see the downside of of ego not having a healthy empowerment, right? Like, I think to your point, like.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Like, there is a part of ego that people need a healthy baseline of it to be able to act in healthy ways.

• 13:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But I think it's so, it's never been easy. Well, first of all, to your first point, I think that whole thing is exacerbated when we have vested interests who benefit from fomenting this sense of chaos that we're seeing. And media gets weaponized to people who are, you know, ill-suited to, you know, find the signal in the noise and act accordingly. And, you know, I think we're seeing that in ways that are unprecedented in human history, and it's deeply, gravely concerning.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. The amplification, intensification of, of, uh, noise is, the speed with which it's happened. I mean, because I, you know, we're about the same age. I think, I kind of think Gen X is the, is the vanguard generation in terms of, like, we're the first cradle, we're the first television-informed generation, right? And you could argue that even though it's at, it's at one one-hundredth of the speed

• 14:24Speaker 01

  of what's happening today, we still, we had the, we had the inbound global information as a part of our total experience, right? We've never not had a sense of the world. Even when I was a kid, I could see the helicopters taking people off the roof in Vietnam.

• 14:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  Right? Like, I remember that. My dad was a vet, and so I, I remember his intensity about it, but I remember the image. I actually remember seeing dislocation, disruption, being scared of, like, the Son of Sam murders, even though, like, you know, there was a whole lot of stresses coming in on us.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Remember that movie, The Day After?

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, I was just talking about this with someone the other day. It's like, how old? You know, we were like 12.

• 15:05Rich Roll?

  I was terrified by that movie.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Terrified, absolutely terrified. Like, you know, and here, and the point being, whatever it was that we, you know, had to deal with, the, um...

• 15:20Speaker 01

  It's incomparable, it's almost unmeasurable, the turbocharging of the stresses from information overload and distortion through that information now, and it's wild, it's really wild.

• 15:34Rich Roll?

  And we're also the, we're the last generation to be raised without the internet. So we have the TV, you know, we have that, that, that sort of filtering ability that came with growing up with television. But also, we know what it's like to, you know, be educated without the level of information, the influx of, of noise that young people see today, and I can't, I can't even wrap my head around what that must be like. And the downstream impact of that on the next generation and the generation after that, 10, 20 years from now.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  It's really weird too, because like, I think for all the flack he gets over this single moment that he played a negative role in some people's mind in the 2000 election. I think that, I think that Ralph Nader, for me, really articulated, almost as a philosopher, better than anybody, earlier than anybody, that we have, we have a core conundrum of corporate interest versus human interest, that this is basal to like, everything now. It's basal to our healthcare problems, it's basal to our environmental problems. That, that if we don't, if we can't separate those two things and prioritize human interest over corporate interest,

• 16:54Speaker 01

  we have some really, really serious problems metastasizing out of that. But what's weird to me is, in what you just observed, the, so I used to think to myself like, wow, man, you can really see the degree to which we're being turned into corporate copper tops, corporate consumers, like we're being fed entertainment that's really just sort of a burger and a Xanax blended together. And, and all they're really doing is priming us to buy shit.

• 17:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  And there's art leaking through and this and that, with that matrix of corporate. Corporate matrix of ultimately getting you to be a consumer. It was intense, but now what's really wild is, yes, notionally. Notionally, it's it's still about selling us stuff, right? Facebook, Instagram, their whole business model is is an ad platform. So it's indisputable that they're. But this weird thing has happened, which is because they're in the business of selling ads. What it's now turned into is something that does not have. It is not being driven. The manipulation that's taking place that's really dangerous is not a manipulation to get us to buy anything.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  It's the manipulation, literally, of how we feel about each other. You know what I mean? And the Russian GRU and this concerted effort to foment antagonism within our society to cause chaos and and social unrest here. Like, this is out of like, out of a James Bond movie, like Spectre. Like, the only agenda is not to sell us anything. It's literally to just destabilize us into rage into like this fit of of such like anger with each other that that we can't function.

• 18:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And it's working.

• 18:49Rich Roll?

  And then we become malleable and controllable.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, or at least unable to organize against it. And you think about like, these things this week, the this kind of outrageously horrific showing by, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, as people say to him, do you care at all about the dissemination of untruth in this thing you've built? And he cannot summon himself to say no.

• 19:21Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  It is it is like.

• 19:25Speaker 01

  You literally like, I just look at like, like in college, when you study like Nietzsche and will to power and you like content yourself as a 20 year old that you get what it means. But literally you get to our age and suddenly you see these moments and you go, no, that's actually it right there. That is just pure will to power. Exactly as he expressed it. It is like, it is like the drive that has no end. That says the ultimate of the ultimate objective is my maximization, period.

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  What's so interesting about that, I mean, we have Jack Dorsey basically coming out and saying, we're no longer gonna do political ads and he's kind of being championed for that right now, which tees up Zuckerberg to follow suit, which he refuses to do. And when you look at the, the spreadsheet here, the revenue coming from political ads is so de minimis compared to the rest of the ad revenue that, that, that Facebook reaps in annually. So what is, what is this, you know, this, this like battleground that he's staking his claim on here?

• 20:34Speaker 01

  It's will to power.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  It's crazy. Like how much is enough? And then you say, well, for us or a normal, you know, kind of grounded person, we wouldn't be in that position because we don't have that same will to power. Or is it that in the making of that person, your career, that's being created as you ascend? Like, does that happen to somebody? Or is it that kind of person that, that ascends in that way?

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Hard to know. Yeah. That's an interesting chicken and the egg question. I think what, what's, yeah, it's wild. Especially, you know, I call it sometimes like.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  It's like the Hosni Mubarak moment, right? In the sense that when you look at, like if you just take Mubarak, right? It's a really interesting moment in contemporary history of, of the way history can, you know, self-correct or roll and how you move within it. The, I'm saying that badly, to me, Mubarak is this fascinating contemporary example of the inability to perceive the opportunity of the moment because of the habit ingrained in him of seeing himself a certain way, right? This is a guy who, like most credible assessments are that he and his family took something

• 22:04Speaker 01

  like 30 to 50 billion out of that country over time. And, and he had the support of the US, the US intelligence community as a bulk work against originally, you know, communism and then against, you know, Islamism, Islamic fundamentalism. But you get to this to hear a square moment, right? And he has his George Washington opportunity. He has the moment that George Washington is now rightly legendary for, which is he said, at the right moment, George Washington said, no, I am not, if it works, it has to work without me, right?

• 22:45Speaker 01

  He let the republic be more important than him. And so he's forevermore essentially a humanist political saint, right? Mubarak had this moment where if he had looked around him and looked at his children and looked at his grandchildren, he could have said, we can live, we can live like kings for the next 10 generations in comfort in Switzerland and lionized by our own people if I simply go out on that balcony and say, read the tea leaves and go, in this moment...

• 23:23Speaker 01

  You know, what we've done in Egypt in the modern era to build a strong secular state, it involved things that many people think were suppressive, that were tough. It was a tough time. We did what we thought we had to do. But now, the clarion call of people saying it's time for the next phase is loud and it's clear, and I am not going to be the person who stands in the way of it. Everything I did was to set us up for this moment, and I celebrate the call of the people to say, we need to express ourselves in this way. There would be statues of him in Egypt for all eternity, no matter who, literally.

• 24:01Rich Roll?

  They just couldn't do it. And you could see it so clearly.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  He could have put the Muslim Brotherhood on tilt, literally on tilt, on their heels, unable to say, what can we say about that? Nothing. It's unassailable. And they'd have to essentially say, go off into the sunset and enjoy your life. Instead, he's in the docket. You know what I mean?

• 24:19Rich Roll?

  It's not dissimilar from the being confounded as to why certain Republican leaders won't break ranks with Trump. It's sort of like, if you could just summon the gumption to stand against what is happening right now, you would be celebrated and lionized for that. But, you know, look, I don't-

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Also, to your point about it being a rounding error, political ads, it's like, can you not see, can you not look at this in a wide lens and project even into the medium-term future and see what a negative this is for you to take a stand around something that is literally atomizing the very fabric of the democratic capitalist society that allowed you to build this company in this way? And just like, see how much of an opportunity is here for you to do what Dorsey did and essentially say, and by the way, like, you know, I think Jack's a pretty conscious guy, like, I actually do. And I think it's, but it's also just tactically wise. It's just wise. It's like, you don't want to be on the wrong side.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Of of the tension between humanist progressivism and

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  What the historical record is going to show about this.

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  You know, Jack's an interesting case because I too think he's a very conscious guy. And he did the podcast. I went to his house. I spent like the better part of a whole afternoon with him. And and, you know, I just got the impression that this is somebody who is grappling with very difficult issues with, you know, impossible solutions. He's got the world chomping at his feet to solve them. And in order to do the best that he possibly can, he has to erect these boundaries over his, his, his quietude, essentially his serenity, so that he can problem solve like with his highest consciousness.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  And I just thought, like, that's the kind of person that I want in that role. And then you see the dialogue around him because he is just the target for everybody's, you know, issues and angst over, you know, the the disease that is endemic in Twitter. But who would you rather have in that position?

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, as long, you know, look, I mean,

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I know because I was involved in starting a crowdfunding company for charity. I got to know people in that space and the pioneers that space were the guys in Kickstarter, right?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Perry Chin Ho I never knew, but Yancey Strickler I got to know a little bit. And Yancey's just put a book out

• 27:03Speaker 01

  called This Could Be Our Future, I think. And he talks about the decision they made really early on to turn that into a benefit corp, a public benefit corporation. And I think, but the book at large, it's really excellent. It posits this idea that basically the idea of financial maximization being our only value on personal levels, on corporate levels, is is an is a pernicious underlying component on all this bad decision making and social ill and all of it. And that and that. It's a variation on what Marc Benioff said recently about stakeholder values versus shareholder values. He, Yancey, sort of says, it's like a Japanese bento box.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  There needs to be, there needs to be apportionment of the values you're pursuing.

• 27:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  Not just financial maximization. And I think when you see, you know, it is going to take people saying, is, is what I'm all about, the biggest, the biggest version of the thing I've built? Or is it that I want the legacy of the thing I've built to be positive, that big enough?

• 28:17Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  That it doesn't have to be driven by like, is, is it growing, devouring? Is it like Shiva, the devourer of worlds? Or is it, or is it like, you know, something that's going to actually give back?

• 28:37Rich Roll?

  It's a difficult, it's a difficult puzzle, you know, especially in a, in a capitalistic system that, that lives and dies on quarterly profits and, you know, you know, shareholders say and what's happening. It creates a system that, that foments, you know, growth as the only metric.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  Until, you know, we're eating our own and we're at cross purposes with what the, the vision was to begin with. And, you know, when I, when I, when I kind of can, when I take a 10,000 foot look on what's happening culturally, it's, it's difficult to not cast a dystopian view or, or be pessimistic about the future. You know, and I talked to lots of interesting people who provide me with a tremendous amount of optimism, but I find myself, you know, lapsing into, you know, kind of a dark place with the whole thing.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the thing that.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Kind of buffers me about that, which I agree when I look at, I spend a lot of, I've spent years and years and years working on environmental issues, conservation issues, and sustainable development issues and things like that. And I'm certainly not like a global expert, but I don't know nothing about, you know, I've spent enough time on it to know something. And sometimes I, I, I think, you know, my dad's a career environmental conservation litigator and organization builder. You go, there's not one single signal that's not moving radically in the wrong direction. Like, not one, you know?

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Every issue of like ecological health on this planet is moving significantly in the wrong direction. If, for, for stability in terms of like the biosphere that's literally supported our evolution and our ascendance. Not that the planet won't survive, and it's not that we won't survive in some measure, but we're gonna be like going through cataclysmic shifts. And you kind of go, wow, man, it's just inevitable. Like, if not our kids, our, our grandkids, our great grandkids, it's like, what is the condition of the world they're gonna live in, gonna be? It seems really bleak in some way.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  But, but on the other hand, the other thing that's true is that within two generations, there, there are evolutions, technological and ideas, all these things, that are so profound that the notion that our grandparents, our, our grandparents could no more have imagined information technology in, it has gone beyond any of the science fiction. I mean, some of the most, most, most prescient thinking in science fiction has sort of imagined aspects of what we're going through. But what that means is we have to have the humility to know that we also just cannot possibly, the dystopian vision that we imagine.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Well, it's based on our current understanding of what's possible. Exactly. So we just don't know. We just, we just don't know. But it's within the not knowing that.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I look at it, it's sort of what some people say about, I heard like a priest one time say like, you know, Christianity is the bet you can't lose, like if faith is the bet you can't lose, because if you, if you act on the basis of it and it turns out to be true that there's a heaven and a hell, then you want, if you didn't, then all you, then you were nicer in life to people. And, and I kind of think the same about the environment, it's like, it's like you, we could be, we could be wrong, and, and there could be a turn here where we realize that we know how to plant two trillion trees a year, and that we're able to like, actually reverse these effects much faster than we thought we were, etc.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Or we'll be wrong, but at least we won't have like, we won't have to like, say to our grandkids, like, what did you do during the war? I, I drove a frigging Hummer, you know what I mean?

• 32:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, essentially, the argument is even, let's presume that all climate science is wrong, but if we go ahead and, and stop overfishing the oceans and we remove the plastic out of it and we get, you know, get better at everything, we, we start farming with regenerative principles, you know, all these things that we can do, these are all to our benefit irrespective, let's say they don't impact greenhouse gases, emissions at all, like, they're still solid practices that we should be doing.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also actually, not to, not to flip it on its head, but there's incredible economies within this great, you know, if we care about growth, if we're interested in enterprise, there's unbelievably exciting future enterprises that will crush extractive carbon intensive technologies in the marketplace, like, I mean, that's, that's the thing, is like, it's kind of happening despite all the embedded subsidies around carbon energy and everything, there's, there's, it's still actually crushing it on a price point basis. Renewables are going to destroy carbon, it's already done it to coal, but, but renewables

• 33:57Speaker 01

  are going to utterly destroy carbon based energy in the marketplace.

• 34:01Rich Roll?

  I just wish we could get there a little faster.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:10Rich Roll?

  Well, your interest in environmentalism comes from your dad, who by all accounts, sounds like, you know, he's quite an amazing guy.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  He is. He's badass.

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And you grew up in Columbia, Maryland. I'm from Bethesda.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 34:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Grew up, you know, not too far away. And what's, it's interesting, because I think, you know, people listening probably don't know, but like Columbia was this planned community, and it was developed by your grandfather, right? So this interest in urban planning, which spills into the movie, which we're going to talk about in a little bit here, is kind of this beautiful way for you to express, you know, kind of these ideas that you grew up with.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and sometimes Columbia gets called the first planned city, which arguably it is, because it's now a city of, I think, like 120, 130,000. It's not...

• 35:01Rich Roll?

  I mean, I remember hearing about it as a kid. And it was like this, oh, it's planned. And it's like, you know, this is like, this like, light dusting of utopia around it.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  It was a significant dusting of utopia. I mean, we were, it wasn't, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't like Margaret Atwood level cultish, but it was, but it was, it was a, it was a real, yeah, they'd had a halo of 60s, um, deep progressivism around it. It was, uh, it was, for my grandfather, an outgrowth of things he had become convinced of, but also, you know, he was hugely inspired by Martin Luther King and John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. And Columbia was founded in 67, but it was very much a part of his conviction

• 35:55Speaker 01

  that, that, um, the spiritual life of America was going to get corroded by, by the dissolution of the vitality of cities, which to him meant the dissolution of community.

• 36:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  And that, and that highways, he was a very early, um...

• 36:20Speaker 01

  He articulated and predicted as early as the mid 50s when he was on Eisenhower's Housing Commission, he discussed the idea that the American highway system was going to promote low-density development and that that was gonna create sprawl. I believe he was a very early, like, he was one of the early people to start using the phrase sprawl and predicting suburban sprawl, in quotes, you know, and he talked about the ways that cities, that city centers were gonna become, were gonna get denuded, you know, if people left them for these suburbs, and that these suburbs were not gonna be communities. They were seeing this by the 50s already, even with Levittown and things

• 37:04Speaker 01

  like that, they were seeing that the highway was promoting a kind of development that had no center, right? It was like, it was this thing. And he was very concerned about that. He thought that, you know, if middle-class and upper-middle-class life left the cities, you'd be left with essentially what we got, which was like, the hyper-rich and the hyper-poor.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  It's incredibly pressured. I mean, that's exactly what's played out. And here we are in, you know, living in the greatest example of that. And, you know, I don't know what your experience is like living here, but I find it to be very alienating, and it can be extremely lonely. Like, when I moved here, it took me years to, like, cultivate friendships and some kind of web of community. Whereas, I'd always lived in cities. I lived in New York, and it's like, you're just in the flow of life, and there's a connectivity there that doesn't exist here without an extreme amount of effort.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  No, and I've lived in New York since the week I moved out of college. I've been there 28 years. I'm an occasional emigre to LA, but I love, I love New York.

• 38:13Rich Roll?

  You still consider your main place of

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been a New York resident since the summer of 91. But

• 38:24Speaker 01

  You know, my grandf- I grew up around my grandfather talking about these things. And it, yeah, it had a bit, and I worked for him. My first job out of college, I worked for

• 38:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  His amazing organization called Enterprise, now called Enterprise Community Partners, which was pioneering ways of, of creating, of developing affordable housing, getting investment equity into affordable housing development by really smartly doing it in a nonprofit matrix by training community-based advocacy group to be nonprofit housing developers and managers, and then getting some equity from the city, but then, then leveraging some through the low-income housing tax credit, which he was, he was one of the, you know, intellectual fathers of this amazing program, which in our world now with all the talk

• 39:15Speaker 01

  about impact investing, right, I always say like, one of the earliest and biggest and most successful impact investment products in the history of America was the low-income housing tax credit, because it, it gave an incentive to invest in affordable housing development that paid off very handsomely.

• 39:34Speaker 01

  And so Enterprise alone has raised and invested something like 16 billion now through the syndication of the tax credits and through its programs, something like 10,000 community-based organization partners all over America, you know, like a million units of housing. It's, it's truly astonishing

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  That is amazing.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  That he built. I read an analysis by the Ford Foundation once that like, that one in every 120 families in America has lived in a unit of housing created by that organization.

• 40:06Rich Roll?

  That's, that's quite a legacy.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and

• 40:10Rich Roll?

  And in, in direct, you know, contraposition to the Alec Baldwin character

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:16Rich Roll?

  In the movie, right, who's basically the, the complete opposite of this.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's in, yeah, so in, in my film, which takes place in the 50s, Alec Baldwin plays a character who, he's not based on Robert Moses, that, that would be incorrect, because this is a fiction and there's lots of things that happen in it, from murders to all kinds of dark psychosexual secrets that have nothing to do with Robert Moses. They're completely my invention, but, but Moses is indisputably

• 40:49Speaker 01

  One of the great dark figures in American life and he is to me. Yeah, he if my granddad is Obi-Wan was Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Jedi, you know, who held with the force. Robert Moses is like the Jedi who went dark.

• 41:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because he started out as a progressive.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, he did. He absolutely was Anakin Skywalker. He he was considered by many to in that to be like the greatest, the the bright light of the modern urban progressive reform, civil service reform movement. And he went so dark. He he.

• 41:27Rich Roll?

  What was his Vader moment then?

• 41:29Speaker 01

  I'm not some I'm not some crazy Star Wars fan. I love it, but really, in an archetypal sense, to say that Robert Moses was the Darth Vader of New York in the 20th century is a completely accurate analogy. It's because he really was a Jedi knight who went dark and was so powerful, so had controlled the force.

• 41:51Rich Roll?

  For decades.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  For decades, arguably, he ran New York City and state. You couldn't do anything without his say so from the mid 30s to at least 1968. So for half of a century, really, he he, you know, for the better for the better part of the middle of the century, he controlled New York like an autocratic emperor. And and yet and yet he was masked. He had the like the Death Star. He had a literally a cloaking. His genius allowed him to cloak. Well, everyone thought he was the Parks Commissioner. And and he, in fact, literally was an uncontested imperial autocrat

• 42:36Speaker 01

  who who made every significant decision about how New York was evolving from being a 19th century city to being a 20th century city. And he baked his racism really into the infrastructure of New York in ways that we're still contending with.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  It's, uh, it's hard to fathom that level of power from this shadow figure who was able to maintain it for so long with such a heavy hand. Um, there is that great, there's, I need to read this book, I haven't read it, but Robert Caro wrote a whole book about this, right?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:07Rich Roll?

  Ken Burns like did a whole chapter in his, his New York.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  The New York documentary.

• 43:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the New York documentary.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  The New York documentary was, it's Rick Burns, I think, um, directed that one, uh, but that, that was my first encounter with, with, with him, with this idea that there was a person who was that powerful, who was never elected.

• 43:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Um, and who did so much damage. Um, a lot of good too, he was a real visionary, but, but an enormous amount of very dark damage. And the, and the thing is like, you know, um, it makes my film sound like a documentary, which is absolutely not, uh, in the sense that it's first and foremost, uh, uh, you know, an old fashioned movie. It's a, it's a, it's a detective movie. It has a, it has, um, a, a guy with Tourette's syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder at the center of it. And it, it's got like jazz clubs and, you know, it's this drift, it's a drift in, in that period in much the same way that

• 44:09Speaker 01

  LA Confidential or something like that is an atmospheric kind of, um, experience. But I've always thought that, I've always thought that, that noir films, um, when they're serious, they do something really positive, which is they, it's, they don't just acknowledge the shadow in American life. They, they dig into it. They basically say, there's, there's things going on.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Under the surface of what we call the American narrative.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  That are, that if we're not paying attention to them, they're doing us real harm, like really serious harm.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and there's a, there's a disorientation with that, with that trope, like with that narrative arc in that, in that you, you, the, the movie is always um, kind of ahead of the audience in terms of what the audience knows.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Way ahead.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  So you, you're, you're never sure, like, I've heard you talk about this, but like, you know, Chinatown is obviously the most incredible example of this, where you literally don't know what's happening.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  At all.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  The movie until the very end.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  No, and.

• 45:13Rich Roll?

  But you don't care, because you're just in for it.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they have to, to work, they have to be really good. I mean, I, it's a hard, weird thing to say, because like, a good movie has to be a good movie, of course it does, but it, but it does have to, it's very particular, because in some ways, the point of noir, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times wrote a really great thing about this recently, uh, is that, is that it, you have to have the humility to know that the unknowability of the moment you're living in, you, you do not know, you think you know what's going on, and you don't actually know what's going on. It's why that OJ Simpson documentary was pretty amazing, because to me, we were young, but we lived through it, and we had opinions, right?

• 45:58Speaker 01

  And to me, what watching that documentary did to me, talk about ego, I could see my own ego, I could hear my own ego from when I was twenty something years old, having all kinds of opinions about those events, and the certainty that he was going to get convicted and all this stuff. And when you watch the film, you're like, what an, what a moron I was, to think that I even understood two out of the six levels of what was going on here.

• 46:24Rich Roll?

  Like the social tectonic plates that were shifting.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:27Rich Roll?

  That led to the inevitability of something like that happening.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, like, like, and the, the, the episode in that, that was dedicated to the history of the relationship between the LAPD and the African American community alone, was so humbling.

• 46:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Because you're like, if you didn't know this, if you didn't know the depth of this, if you knew this, you'd have understood that there was no way he was getting convicted. But if you don't know this, you sat there in, with your opinions, thinking that you had any idea. Any real basis for understanding what was going on.

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  And and that unknowability, that idea, it's very difficult when you think about it. When you open the paper and you see what's going on and you think you know what's going on. You have an opinion, you just can't help it like. But but pausing and going.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  You know, at what, at what point do you say, well, we know enough to act, but. But we can't really know everything that's going on. It's a very, it's a very profound thing. And I think that um, these films, part of the fun of really good noir films is that. You get hypnotized, they they they force you to experience that inability to understand what's happening.

• 47:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  And and yet, they don't alienate you because they're sexy. And I really mean that word, like they're sexy, like, like LA Confidential is sexy. Chinatown is sexy, The Big Sleep is sexy.

• 47:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  And what they do is they, that that, they flick, you you go through some portal and you just go. Oh, wow, this is wild, like I'm through, I'm through the screen, I'm into the world. It's compelling, the music's great. There's things about it, they work this kind of, you get into actually like an aesthetic pleasure. Of listening to language and watching people and seeing clothes. But then slowly what they do is remind you, you don't know what's going on. And in this country, no matter what anybody tells you, there's dark shit going on. And not knowing that it's going on puts you in danger, like in big danger. And I think that's pretty healthy, actually.

• 48:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and and also clearly has its parallels as to what's going on culturally and politically right now. But I think, you know, I feel a little bit naked right now because I haven't seen the movie. And this whole thing came together last night.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Tomorrow night.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  And as like a perfectionist who uh, who prides himself on his preparation and who is somebody who's very detail oriented.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  Um, I feel like I'm gonna have like a a terroretic tic here because I, because I don't quite know what I'm talking about. But I do know enough about the um. The noir genre in general, and I certainly read up on this movie. It's, one of the reasons why we love this genre is that it's treating us like adults. It's asking a lot of us, but we're welcoming that. And it's refreshing, especially in our high fructose corn syrup, you know, kind of entertainment, where we're being spoon fed all of this stuff. It's so nice to sit in a theater and be challenged in that way. And I think that there's a real demand for that, like, it's almost like we're starving for it, at least in

• 49:43Rich Roll?

  in the movie theater. I mean, we're getting a lot of it in the streaming services right now. Like, there's tons of amazing projects that are getting made.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  But I think it speaks to a larger kind of cultural thing. Like, I've noticed that, that, you know, you're someone who, who, who, you know, feel strongly about your, your private life and you're not one to go out and do all the talk shows and all that kind of stuff. But, but you've really embraced in the, in the kind of press junket with this movie, you've embraced the podcast for it. You've done a lot of the big shows. And I think it's well suited to you because it provides space to have a nuanced, mature, adult conversation about the things that, that, that you care about. And I think that that is, you know, part and parcel is reflected in the kind of movies that, that you like to make, and certainly this movie.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Well, thanks. I mean, here's an interesting thing, though. I don't think it's a bad thing that you haven't seen the film. And maybe you'll come with our friends tomorrow night. And then we talk about it more. But I actually think it's kind of, it's nice in a funny way today because we're recording this the day that they're putting the film out.

• 50:49Rich Roll?

  Today is today's opening day.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  And, and only because, just knowing what I know about your own work and story. I think it's interesting to talk about it a little bit like this, but then, but not worry about what the film's about, per se, or even the process in making it, because I've been talking about that a fair amount, right? What's, what's more interesting today is I walk in and you've got like David Lynch catching the big fish, which I love. And Ego's the Enemy, which I haven't read. What I think is really fascinating is literally what I'm going through today that is different from any of these other conversations. And that I think, I think connects more back to things that I'm really interested in about your own,

• 51:35Speaker 01

  uh, let's call it like tipping point moment of feeling like I need to prior, I mean, I need to shift my priorities. Let's, if, if I go real basal, not I need to get fit or, but just really like, I gotta shift my priorities is that the funny thing is, is I probably have not ever, I haven't, I've threw myself into this as much as anything I've done on a creative level. By simple virtue of the fact that I wrote, I wrote, I wrote it, produced it, directed it, raised all the fun, money for it. It's 20 years in the making. Yeah, it's a long, a long gestation on this one, right? And I really, and I really couldn't get it out of my head.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  It was not, it was really not at a certain point about like the ego of, I want to play this role. It really was, it started to become for me about things that I, I wanted to get across, that I started feeling actually the very best feeling that you get about a thing, which is like, it's, and this I have talked about, but it's the Joseph Campbell transparency effect. It's like this, the people will be able to see themselves in this. They will be able to see us in this. They'll be reminded, they'll be able to see echoes of the now, but also like truths about the past and how we got where we are. And, and even just on a personal level, reconnect with empathy, which is I think

• 53:01Speaker 01

  really, really important right now. But mostly I just, it mostly I just wanted to, I, I get stubborn about not completing a thing. And I really wanted to complete it. And so I did, and so I've thrown myself out there to talk about it like way more than I generally I know. do or want to because I really do um, think it's better for people to figure stuff out on their own. However, here's the really interesting thing today, which is, I kind of was intimating this to you in the kitchen, but the funny thing is, is for all the

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Every form of cultivation, we didn't have, there's, it's not a ton of financial support behind putting it out. They've done a good job, but it's just not the kind of film that, if you throw a hundred million dollars in marketing in a film like this, you're gonna lose fifty million bucks. You know, that's just the way it is. So I don't expect that. So I've tried to lean into it. But what's really interesting is, I know for sure already today, that it's not gonna blow the doors off. It's not gonna be some, it's not only not gonna be some record weekend, it's not those kind of things. It'll be soft. Like, it'll be, it'll be less than, than people hoped it would do in an opening weekend, right?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  So this is what we're talking about is, it's, to me, in almost every framework, it's not only not relevant to what I was trying to do when I did it, but I actually know now from experience on films specifically, that the very best things I've done, and I mean literally, the stuff I've been nominated for Oscars for, the stuff that I haven't, but that people will almost ubiquitously call cultural touchstones, like Fight Club, or American History X, or The Twenty-Fifth Hour, or, none of which got any awards, or anything like that, but are generally the first things named, if people say these things, right? Every single one of those.

• 55:08Rich Roll?

  You've been down this road many times.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  When I say down this road, what I mean is, considered a financial failure in the initial assessment of the matrix of like measuring things by the amount of initial box office they do, right?

• 55:24Rich Roll?

  But not by the main metric, or the most important metric, which is, did we do what we set out to do? Did we say what we wanted to say? Are we, the team that created this thing, satisfied that we accomplished what we, you know, set out to do?

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Absolutely. But what I'm saying is, what's fascinating, to walk in and see this book is, I, I have been through it. Like, I've been through it. I've, I've actually experienced the very rare

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Satisfaction of going through the feeling of disappointment, like when Fight Club came out, we all thought we made a

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Ass kicker of a film.

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  Which did.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Right. But it came out and everybody felt stung. Everybody felt stung by that.

• 56:07Rich Roll?

  It's so hard to, to believe that that was the case.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:10Rich Roll?

  But I know it was like booed at Venice, right?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  It was booed at Venice, but also it just, it just, you know, the budget of the film was like 68 million bucks and I think its total box office in the US was under 40, which means the studio took home 20. So you're, you're into like deep in the red.

• 56:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  Not like partially in the red, like deep in the red, right? That was the era when, not to get business wonky, but the studios still owned the DVDs and the DVDs on Fight Club actually made, in my understanding, ended up making it sort of a profitable enterprise. But it's still, it was still like, wow.

• 56:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Speaker 01

  Wow. Like, we felt the kind of heat we felt from the people who loved it was like a once in a career kind of, it was like that feeling of like, people get it, they love it, they're, they're feel so connected to it, the level of passion.

• 57:01Rich Roll?

  I mean, that movie, you know, if you're Gen X, if you're a Gen X male, I mean, that movie was transcendent.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  It's one of-

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, there are few movies I go back and watch every single year and it's, it's, it's one of the most impactful movies I've ever seen in terms of like what I connect with emotionally.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  And in my opinion, it comes, it, it, and it takes you to a positive place.

• 57:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  It takes you through the sexiness of nihilism, but back out to where he grabs, he rejects that, he grabs the girl's hand and he says, let's, let's like, let's try this a healthier way.

• 57:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 57:32Rich Roll?

  But there, there's definitely an embrace of chaos and anarchy.

• 57:35Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. On the way, I think, to saving Elaine from the church and, and running, you know, it's, it's the same as the end of The Graduate, I really believe that.

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  But, but, but my point is- We went through that. We felt stunned. We came out the backside of it.

• 57:51Rich Roll?

  But you knew that was gonna happen going.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  No, we didn't. No, we didn't. We felt we felt.

• 57:54Rich Roll?

  But didn't Brad say to you, like, people aren't gonna like this?

• 57:57Speaker 01

  But you can't, like, this is what I mean about ego. You, you still go like, God, we, we thought we made a hit movie. You know, we thought we made a hit movie and it's sort of like in some matrix, it's not even the matrix that we care about. That, that matrix tagging it as a disappointment reverberates out. It hits you in the head and you go, God, like, like.

• 58:17Rich Roll?

  You question yourself.

• 58:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't, we didn't, yeah, that sucks. Like, you feel bad about something that in your heart, you feel good about, right? And I think, but my point is that even having been through it, when we talk about like the ego being one of the most pernicious addictions, it's like, I've been through it multiple times, like multiple times. You know what I mean? And this film that I've made, it's, it's as good as anything I've done. Like, just full stop. I know it is. And I also, you know, I've had people, Michael Eric Dyson, he's a sociologist at Georgetown. He just wrote a fucking essay on it that hit me out of the blue. I was crying when I read it.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  That was the Esquire piece, right?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's an Esquire.

• 58:58Rich Roll?

  It's an incredible article.

• 58:59Speaker 01

  It's, and it's partially about the film, but it's also partially about what it inspired in him to think about, about race in America. And Ken Burns wrote this essay about it that had me, I was, I was on the floor. He's a hero of mine. And I'm like, there's this whole side of me right now that's like, I did what I said.

• 59:16Rich Roll?

  He couldn't have praised the movie more highly than he did in that Medium article.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  And I, and I, and what, and there's a big part of me that's like, it's literally like Chinatown. It's like the, the psychic part of, that Jake gets in my house is, in my head is saying, is saying, how much is enough? Like, how much more do you need? Like, what more could you want? And the answer, the best part of me is for sure, nothing. Like, that's it. That's what you're going for. You're going for activation, pleasure and activation. And is that happening? It's happening. I can feel it. I can see it. And this will find its level and people will get to it and all these things. But on a day when the distribution head at Warner Brothers is calling you up and saying, it's gonna be a little softer than we want despite our best efforts. And your brain just slams you. And I don't mean like goes.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, but you know, hang in, you know, we gotta hang in there. You're saying all these things, like, it literally becomes like a Tourette's conversation.

• 1:00:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  You can, you're saying these things and you, the, there's a voice that goes, but yeah, well, we're playing, we're, this plays out on a longer horizon. This is like-

• 1:00:24Rich Roll?

  But still, there's a little-

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Daniel Kahneman thinking slow.

• 1:00:27Rich Roll?

  There's a residue from that, right?

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  But this is what's interesting to me. This is what's totally fascinating to me, is it's not a residue. It's a big, fucking, loud, frustrated side of your head that is the ego and goes, shit, I, I, I wanted, I wanted, I wanted everyone else's version of, of what we want to be fulfilled too.

• 1:01:01Rich Roll?

  I mean, there's something refreshingly human about that because the narrative that, that circles around you is somebody who's, who's, you know, who's kept the press at arm's length, who's had their brushups with, you know, kind of sketchy narratives swirling around things that may or may not have happened, and who's really carved out a private life. And with that comes the inference or the assumption like, well, this guy just doesn't give a fuck about what anybody says about him. You know, he's just doing his thing and like, that's cool. And that's like a superpower that I wish that I could have. And so when I'm scrolling or whatever, looking at, looking for feedback, like, I feel weak. You know what I mean? I feel like-

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:43Rich Roll?

  My ego has the better of me. And I think that speaks to the whole, um, kind of Tourette's thing, right? Because Tourette's, what is Tourette's but a, a very severe example of what we all kind of harbor, which is this war inside of ourselves between our, our better instincts and the behavior that we actually manifest in the world.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, and what, what, what I'm kind of fascinated about is, um-

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  It'll, you know, I, I, I'm a big believer in that sort of this too shall pass thing. You, you can let, that's like Dharma, right? That's, you, you can let, you can watch your, your base, your base, your base impulses and desires just go like, hit like, it's like someone hit a guitar string really hard and it's just going, wang, wang, wang, wang, wang, you know, but it's gonna, it's gonna settle down. Uh huh. It's gonna settle down and then the work you're doing, your life, like all these things go. And actually the long-term steadiness of the thing you've made itself and its quality and all these things. It'll be out there. Yeah, we'll find its level.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, everything will find its level and in many cases, you will be, you can have faith that like, yeah, it's gonna get to that place that is ultimately the best thing also. Um, which is just the, the quality of the thing will hold itself up and it will be all good. But, um, it's kind of fascinating is to, at one point today, I was kind of floating along, looking at the light, looking at the hills and I was sort of thinking, well, this was an interesting experiment in, I cared a lot, right? I put like more of myself into this that, you know, on multiple levels. I wasn't just an actor, working for a great director, whatever.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  I did it. So then I went out and said, well, I have to do the, the last full measure of trying to engage in the, a wide net of the very people who I know like substance, who like long-form conversations, who like rich meals. And by the way, a lot of the cheap ones too. And the thing is, you come to this thing, you go, I didn't really do anything. You go, you know, you go, wow, so. It like, it's moving the needle at all. Yeah, it doesn't move the needle at all. And this, we were kind of talking about this too in the kitchen is in the world we're in, it's like. You know, Henry Louis Gates Jr., like, who was like one of the rising rock stars of

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  history and academia when I was in college, and is like one of our elders, you know, one of our great... He wrote a beautiful thing about it today, right? And I saw like, you know, people did... Warren said, "Did you see this thing?" And retweet this and do this and these things, and you just go, "It's not doing anything." It's not doing anything, man. It feels good. It's like, but it's like, talk about pissing in the wind.

• 1:04:45Rich Roll?

  I think, I think, I think some of this stuff is doing something. You know, you did Rogan yesterday. Millions of people watched that. Like, it's, it's, I mean, you're doing everything that you can, and that's a demonstration of how much you care. And I think that, and, and I'm finding you to be like, I had this thing, like, is he gonna be all like walled off and like not wanting to talk? And it's like, that's not the experience that I'm having at all, and that's not the experience I'm getting when I tuned into those other shows as well.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Mostly, I've said this many, many times, it was not an insincere statement. I'm not like, I don't think most people who know me think that aloofness is my, is my natural state, right? I, I'm pretty engaged, but I, but my reticence around like public discourse is actually, I just really honestly think it, it screws with the quality of the experience that people have when they go in to see the kind of work I do. It's like, I don't think, like, I know Daniel Day-Lewis a little bit, I know Sean Penn

• 1:05:56Speaker 01

  a little bit, but Daniel's a better example, because he's like the warrior monk. In our tribe of Thespians, he's the true, like warrior monk. And I'm, by that, I mean, he's like in, you have no idea, no one knows where he is. He's off in the cave, he's doing anything. His whole, like-

• 1:06:13Rich Roll?

  He'll be doing anything right now.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  For such a long time, you know, and, and he's a really terrific person, he's a fascinating person, he's all these things, but he descends off the mountain and delivers these lightning bolts to me. I am in, I am just flattened by his performances. They are so visceral and so vital and deep, just deep as shit. And, but that is enhanced by the fact that I don't- See him and hear him and he goes away for a long, long time. And when he brings it back down, it's got like.

• 1:06:51Rich Roll?

  The level of excitement.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  It, it, it's just, but also anything I held from before is atomized. It's gone, it's long gone. And there's just the shock of the reincarnation. It literally like dead and gone and then it's reincarnation into yet another like, like powerful thing, right?

• 1:07:11Rich Roll?

  And it's becoming, it's, it's becoming increasingly more and more rare. The level of discipline that you have to have with the, with the kind of exposure that's available to everybody now requires, you know, a, a sense of self that is increasingly more, more difficult, I think, like, you know, I know you've, you've talked about like, you know, Dylan and Bowie and, and even like Radiohead, you know, to, is probably a decent example of that, like they, you know, like they're not, when, when you're purposely removing yourself from the public eye and you go out and you do your thing and you come back, like that's a, that's a fucking cool thing, man.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  What's interesting, that what I'm interested in, uh, really specifically is to me, this whole, the, the process of trying to, to, and some of it, I, I, I'm being totally candid, I didn't feel I had any choice in this case. I'd love to let it fly and let it be. I'd be more okay. In a way, it would sting less to me if I hadn't made such an effort. You know what I mean? Like the, the stingy part of the brain that's like, God damn, I did all this stuff and i- is it really even doing anything?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  The, the drive for me was not even the care of the thing itself, because the thing itself. Is like a child, you think you're, once you've put it out, it's on its own path. But it's more that I did, I engaged people, wonderful people who backed me in taking some risk and putting some shuckles, they put their money alongside Warner in this and I like really appreciate it, right? Like, I don't have any right to that from anybody. There's no, nothing about my work that to me automatically validates that someone should, should put, you know, like a lot of money into backing me doing this thing.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  So my view is sort of like, I owe these allies of mine, literally everything I've got, everything I've got to try to make them, make, so they can at least get a hold on it. Ironically, these are the type of people who are like, you did, because the thing is like beyond what we could have hoped. Honestly, that's the response I've gotten. It doesn't, and I feel good about that, but at the same time, I, I want to try to do right by them on, in the business of it all. And, and I don't, um, the thing, the funny thing is, is it, it, it burns you down. It just does. There's no two ways about it. And this is where I get.

• 1:09:48Rich Roll?

  Which part? The, the, all this talking about it or the?

• 1:09:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, not just talking about it, just the, it's a lot of travel. It's a lot of, um, it, it's just a lot. It, it's not emotional stress, but it's just, when, when you do anything, and this is, I am, I am really interested in asking you a question, which is you get to this point where you're sort of like, wow, I'm not doing, I'm not doing any of the things that I know are healthy for me. Like, I, I am not an uninformed person about like diet. I am not, I surf. I have lots and lots, I used to, I rode competitively in college. I've been an athlete, I've been, I've trained, I've gotten in really great shape, I've starved myself, I've gotten back down to like 137 to do the painted veil.

• 1:10:34Rich Roll?

  Ran the New York marathon.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Ran the New York. Yeah, yeah, I've done, I've done a lot of stuff. I, I, I actually have in me a certain measure of what I'd call the muscle memory of, of health and discipline, right? And when you get into this mode where you're grinding up in here, like tapping my forehead, you know?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  It's amazing. I am so amazed at how fast

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  the inertia effect, the mind just takes you to,

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  you get into, it's not even oppositional. You just don't, the speed with which discipline around what you eat and how much you move your body falls away in the face of, let's call it stress. I don't mean emotional stress, but just

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  the clinical stress of doing some, pursuing something at a high, in a high gear, right? And number one, you talk about the argument with the head. The amount of self chastising I do on a daily basis would be so much more easily resolved by just waking up and doing yoga for 40 minutes or grabbing my board and going out and paddling for 30 minutes and going into the exact day that I'm going to have anyway. It would be so much more easily resolved by fasting or doing a green juice cleanse while I'm doing this, instead of drinking three fucking coffees a day to get myself through it.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  And I'm super curious

• 1:12:13Speaker 01

  in your, because I've been hypnotized out of eating sugar, had that work for like a year, year and a half, fallen off of it.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  You know, gotten, but to me, the beta, the swings, the volatility on it is getting, I'm 50 now.

• 1:12:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  My level of frustration with the volatility is maxing out.

• 1:12:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Like, I really, really, coming out the backside of this, especially feeling like I'm feeling today, which is like deep satisfaction, short-term frustration. I'm like, I do not want to tip, right now particularly, I do not want to tip over into sort of a sigh and more indulgence of negative pattern, ill health.

• 1:12:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  I really, really, right now, want to go out the back of this into like a new level of resolve. And I'm super curious, like, I'm sure you've talked about it, but I'm super curious for you, what the tricks are of

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Like sustained discipline through phases. Like when you're like, a race is like a movie for me. It's super easy to, if you've got goal oriented things, that's the best. You can always like, set yourself like, I gotta get ready for this film, or I gotta get ready for this goal. But I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to do that many films. I don't, I don't want to do a film a year that I have to get in shape for, right? I want to like, I want to have a steady state discipline. I'm super curious, do you go through still?

• 1:13:48Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, without a doubt. I mean, the first thing I would say to you is, is, is stop chastising yourself and be a little bit more gentle on yourself. Because you're in this short term window where you're exerting a tremendous amount of will on the world for something that you care deeply about. Your values, like it, I look at it like you have, you have different values that are competing with each other right now for your attention and resources. And your priority at the moment is getting the word about, out about this movie that you worked so hard on, that you care so deeply about and trying to foment interest in getting other people to care about it in the way that you do. There is a, uh, there's an expiration date on this phase that you're going through.

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  And I think just to begin with, just recognizing that you're in a heightened period at the moment and, and being okay with the fact that you're not going to be in this super balanced state while you, while you go through this. In the same way that you would think about pushing other things aside or, or marginalizing other values because you're training for a marathon or you're in production on a movie. Like those are where you, you have to choose which value is going to take precedence in this equation. But I think, and, and I would say to you that this, there's this. Illusion that we're all striving for this perfect balance in our life. And I think it's setting people up, myself included, to feel like we're falling short

• 1:15:16Rich Roll?

  or disappointing ourselves and others because we can't meet that. Like, you know, what's your morning routine and what time are you waking up? And like, are you doing these 20 things in the morning so that you can be your best self when you navigate the world and all the other, you know, obligations that you have to meet throughout the day? And I've just found for myself that I can't necessarily meet that on a day to day basis. And it's been a journey to just being okay with that and, and looking at a couple of the things that I can do. Or what is completely unnegotiable, non-negotiable, that you're going to do no matter what is happening? Like, what is it that you feel so strongly about that actually is really crucial to your self-care? That, that you're going to create that protective boundary around?

• 1:15:58Rich Roll?

  Like, maybe it's getting out on the water and surfing for, you know, it doesn't have to be 30 minutes. What if it's 15 minutes or something that's actually doable?

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  And for you was, was getting, was going vegan, one of those threshold things where you said, this has got to be essentially part of the fundamental.

• 1:16:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I come, I, you know, I came into that first, um, you know, I have a long story of, of like addiction and recovery and went to rehab and all that kind of stuff. So I, I, I kind of, I've, I've learned how to see certain things through the lens of like 12 step. And there's a rubric with that that creates kind of a binary system that removes decision fatigue. Like, you're either drinking or doing drugs or you're sober, but you can't like drink. You know, it's like, there's a, there's a, there is a iron curtain between those two things. And when 10 years later, I had this, you know, brush with ill health and realized that I was once again facing another, you know, kind of threshold moment for myself, I approached

• 1:16:59Rich Roll?

  diet and lifestyle with the same kind of rigor and, you know, binary perspective that 12 step offered, which, you know, I played around with a lot of diets and wasn't getting anywhere. But there's something about plant-based that not only when I tried it, like I just felt amazing, but in order to sustain it, I kind of leveraged. The tools of 12 step to create a foundation as I started to learn how to do it. It's like, oh, well, you know, meat and dairy are just off the table, just like drugs and alcohol. Like that made it very easy for me and that was imperfect at first, but allowed me to kind of move forward with it as I learned how to like perfect it and make it sustainable. And, and that's something I've held, you know, I've, I've held that line for 12 years,

• 1:17:42Rich Roll?

  but my relationship with like fitness and training and exercise, like I stay connected to it, but you know, there's a big difference between how I'm living now versus when I was training for these races and it's like a job, you know, it's like being in production. You're 25 hours a week on, out on my bike or whatever. It's not a sustainable lifestyle. It's something that I can do for a period of time to achieve a certain goal and then you have to rebound back. So that pendulum, you know, in my life, my pendulum is always swinging and that, that idea, that like fantasy of balance is that, you know, that pendulum is always kind of right in the middle there. And I, it's not my life. That's not, that's not the life of almost any high performer that I know. It's more about getting comfortable with those swings and understanding that in, in

• 1:18:25Rich Roll?

  the short term, your life is out of balance, but when you telescope out like over an extended period of time, you're making sure that the important things in your life are being attended to.

• 1:18:34Speaker 01

  Right. Do you, on a pure, in the matrix of just actual training and the value of the, on, on top of like plant-based eating within, because training and exercise and all of it are, are so good, not only for your, your heart health and, you know, everything else, but, but for your wellbeing, the, the meditative quality, the mind clearing quality of exercise and the state, you know, the mood state with the serotonin that comes from it, all the,

• 1:19:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  All the good, you know, kind of keeping you even components of it. Do you, have you found that, let, let's say, training for a race for you or an event is like, like doing a film and you might say, I don't actually want to do as much of this as I've done it in the past. So the spreads between those goal driven, you know, phases get wider, right?

• 1:19:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Have you experienced though that within, within the wider spreads between the highly motivated, you know, job like things? Have you seen, have you ever gotten to a place where the baseline of what you're doing to sustain? Not for, not for job really reasons or for, but almost just like for your mental wellbeing, your health has dipped like, you know, to not to zero, but almost to like where you're like, God, I'm almost back to.

• 1:20:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 1:20:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:06Rich Roll?

  And then I'll, and then I'll beat myself up, you know, relentlessly.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Happy to hear that.

• 1:20:10Rich Roll?

  You know, um, yeah, there's this idea like I go out and oh, how much did you run today? Fifty miles. I'm like, you would laugh if you knew like, you know, like it only worked out like twice this week. I think like it's, you know, it's at a pretty low boil at the moment. And, you know, if I had my druthers, I would be, you know, hitting it every single day. And that's, that's not the reality of my situation because I'm making a conscious choice to invest my time elsewhere. You know what I mean? Like, like I wanted to spend several hours immersing myself in your world today before you came over here. So we could, I could at least have some semblance of an intelligent conversation. Um, and, and, and so, you know, ordinarily I would have done something different this morning, but I'm like totally a hundred percent okay with that.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  And I think that's, that comes a little bit, I, I think, um, maturity has helped that. Um, whereas maybe several years ago, I would be holding myself to a standard that I couldn't sustain. Like I would just wake up at a ridiculous hour to get it in and I, and I would burn myself out. And, and now it's like, it's okay, man, you know? I'm not going to get to do everything you want to do every single day. But what can I do and what are the small little habits that I can cultivate to make sure that I'm not really losing, you know, touch with or contact with those important aspects of lifestyle?

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the, the, the, even as I'm listening to it and you know, spinning on the patterns of things, it just is, it's always wild, the, the dance between.

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  The the struct- the the way that structured approach

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  to time in life can bring um actual richness, you know what I mean? It it's not even just discipline and effectiveness. Like I think effectiveness is like in a way bullshit. It's like it actually is like if you just focus on quality of life, like some structure can mean that you actually are learning music and you actually are staying a little healthier and you're you're learning new things because you're you're making time like through teachers, you know what I mean? Like through by booking it it literally or you know, and and the structure can see out seem like anal and not like um relaxed. Yeah. But the truth is is

• 1:22:34Speaker 01

  that struck more structure in the time can make can help you kind of

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  wrangle yourself into doing the things that you're actually really happy that you're learning and you're feeling good. Yeah. At the end of the day and your life feels good. But that's at odds with it's just at odds with like pure presence, right? Or like the value of like kind of just being allowing yourself to be, you know what I mean? And it's like, yeah, it's true. It's like you can overthink balance and stuff, but the but the the uh I find myself really admiring people who who somehow achieve kind of like um they they're minimizing the vol, you know what I mean?

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Cause I cause I I think um I think having sort of crossed a certain threshold where I've lost, you know, my mother died when she was fifty four and my really good friend and partner who I built a theater company with, he died at fifty six. It you know um and you just kind of go like Like, you know, the consequence of negative behavior starts to speed up a little bit, or you start to go, you know, you don't want to be eating, you don't want to be like fifty years old and eating a bunch of dairy.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  You can't get away with it anymore.

• 1:24:04Speaker 01

  You don't want to be eating dairy, you don't want to be eating sugar, you don't want to be eating like, like casein protein and, and sugar, that's just like rocket fuel for cancer, you know what I mean? And it's like, um, and every, and that's like a clinical fact. And, and, but, so like people, I feel like people who somehow tighten, bring the, the, you know, you can't be in the hyper gear all the time, but you don't want to go like, like down into, um, letting hyper gear on something else rationalize, like your health falling through the floor.

• 1:24:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 1:24:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, that's a big kind of part of the sober journey too, because you come in as this, you know, alcoholic drug addict, and those are people who are, they've just, they have really high highs and really low lows, and there's, there's, that's part of the addiction, like, that's part of the craving, can I get that hot, that high? And like, what happens when I go that low? And there's like a, there's like an affinity for the drama that comes with that as well. And what you have to learn over time is, is, is what it feels like to be in that middle place, or when that valence, you know, is, is, is shrunk so that you're in a more, um, compact range. And that's uncomfortable too, because you're like, if you, if you, you know, if you, if

• 1:25:27Rich Roll?

  you want that high high, then you have to have that low low. You can't have one without the other.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:32Rich Roll?

  And what does it feel like to navigate life where you're just keeping it a little bit more in check? And that's hard.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's funny, I, I have multiple friends, I have friends who are in recovery, who I think...

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  Um, it's really funny like I, I think in some ways I, there are friends of mine who are in recovery, who I think are in many ways heading into middle life in a better place than, than some of us who haven't gone through recovery because it's almost like the, the experience of bonding out younger got them to like, understand that middle band better and there's ways in which I, I, I don't envy it because a lot of people die too.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? That's like, you can't like, and I know a lot of people who died. Like who didn't get through that, um, which is brutal. Like it's, it's like you just like.

• 1:26:29Rich Roll?

  You were, uh, you were, uh, you were friends with Phil, right? Phil Hoffman.

• 1:26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was friends with Phil, but I was, I was more like colleagues of, I mean, we were like,

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  he, I was not like, he wasn't one of like my, my best and closest pals, but we came up in the same period together. And, um, and we had a, um,

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  we had a, a, a year where we did like two films back to back. The second one was the one we did with Spike Lee, who was, uh, who was a big figure for both of us. Um, just in terms of an inspiration, someone we both really looked up to. And I think like I bond, I kind of bonded with him more on that. He was always to me, someone, and especially he, he was someone who was like, you wanted, like, everybody admired him so much. All of us who came up in New York in that era, like Mark Ruffalo and Bobby Cannavale and even many of us. You know, Phil was.

• 1:27:35Rich Roll?

  He was the guy.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. It was, it was like, he really was, he was like one of those people you admired so much that. He was like, it's so ironic, but he was like the guy in, it's like in high school, it's like the jock or whatever, but and Phil was the furthest thing from that, but he was like the guy you wanted his approval, you know, you wanted his like, you wanted to be in the club of what Phil. And would he give it out? Uh, grudgingly, grudgingly, and I, and I think that, no, but I think. Which made it all the more special. Yeah, when I got to him a little, I think I realized like, you realize that sometimes like what you're feeling off a person doesn't have anything to do with you, it has to do with what, what they're going through or

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  maybe, but he didn't suffer fools, like he really, and some of my really good friends were super, super good friends with him. And, um, and he definitely didn't suffer fools, which is part of why you wanted the affirmation from him special, but we did, we did these two films and when we did the Spike Lee film together, I, we, we, it was kind of the dream, we rehearsed it like a play and I felt, um, I felt it was, it was one of those things that was meaningful to both of us and we bonded a little bit over the specialness of that. And then we were both doing plays kind of next door to each other for the rest of that year. So it was, it was, um, that was kind of like

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  the, no, but it's, you know, it's unfathomable to me that, that it, not even about being friends, it's just unfathomable to me that, that like we lost him. He's not here. Yeah, it's, it's, um, it, it, it kills me and, uh,

• 1:29:18Speaker 01

  and that said, from the point of view of him not having been one of my best friends, I just, I can't believe that, you know, you, that like the, the scale of the loss is really bad and I, and I, I know many others also who, you know, we all do, I mean, so it's not like you can't like, obviously romancing, romancing addiction is, that's its own cult, you know what I mean? I mean, that's its own like, like there's, there's too much of that. And I think the truth of it is it's really, there's a lot of, um,

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  There's, there's a lot of people totally lost to it that, um, but I do think that I know a lot of people in, in a weird way, I admire the, uh, I admire where they got to through it, you know, and in some ways I, I, I

• 1:30:10Speaker 01

  it, probably they would say, don't because I'm still an addict.

• 1:30:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 01

  And the danger that's there is lurks or whatever.

• 1:30:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Speaker 01

  But sometimes I, I look at him like, wow, that the, there's a discipline there that I feel like I'm it, it, it's, it's like, it's not heroin, but I, but I feel like your mind, when you feel like you're not mastering your, your balances.

• 1:30:33Rich Roll?

  There's a saying, um, in 12 step, like grateful alcoholic or grateful addict. And for a long time, I couldn't understand what that meant, but, but, you know, I've learned to really get that. And what it, basically what it means is like, listen, you have this affliction and the problem is so manifest that you're forced to confront it. And as a result of that, you're given these tools and a community of people who want to support you. And you learn how to, uh, basically be vulnerable, to develop this capacity, um, for compassion and self-inquiry and all of these things that ultimately,

• 1:31:15Rich Roll?

  if you lean into them and actually, you know, make use of them and avail yourself of, of their power, um, have this incredible potential to, to improve your lives, improve lives and, and help other people improve lives. And, and I think, you know, when you see, when you see those people out in the world, like, you know, there's a lot of people who are just living their lives reactively, who don't spend a lot of time on self-inquiry or self-improvement. And, and so, you know, yeah, I would consider myself one of those grateful people for, for, you know, short of that, I don't know that I would, you know, first of all, be alive, but secondly, be interested in these things that have helped me and so many other people.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's, um,

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  and it, and it's also like, um,

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  It's it's like this. The ebb and the flow of like the desire to. Like contribute, or let's just call it put out. Versus like to take the time to just be quiet. And in board, you know. I I kind of feel, I don't know if you feel this way, but I feel like one of the downsides. That's less discussed of. Of all this high speed. Thing is that a lot, in a lot of ways, what. That's really pernicious about this, about these platforms, about this social media, all of it is. In a lot of ways, what it does, it it goes like this constantly on the ego. And it but what it really says is. It says, there's a way for you to make your life matter.

• 1:32:48Speaker 01

  All you have to do is tell people about it. All the time, you know what I mean? Like, and and and by telling, when you tell people about it, and they give you this little hit of affirmation, you go, oh, that was that, you know. Like, my life matters, right? But but.

• 1:33:02Rich Roll?

  Until that one day that you say the thing that isn't quite right, and everyone decides to cancel you.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  But the but the. But what's fascinating to me or horrifying is sort of that. That it it creates like it turns. Everybody into. A fast food purveyor. Right, that it's like, yes, there's people writing. Pretty profound things on some of these things. But ultimately. I think that it's part of. An addiction. To the to the idea that. If I'm not putting out. If I'm not putting out, like if I'm not.

• 1:33:40Rich Roll?

  You don't exist and you don't matter.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  If I'm not telling my story, I'm not here. And and and it's like, I can't help wondering, is it like? Eradicating. The room people are making in their lives to just like be quiet. Like, just be quiet.

• 1:33:55Rich Roll?

  I think it is without a doubt. And I've noticed it in my own life.

• 1:33:58Speaker 01

  And not and not actually just scroll. The the the bite sized things, but like actually read like one of these many things, you know? The amount of frigging books that are in my house that I. I really want to read that I'd be so much happier to have read than anything in a

• 1:34:15Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:34:16Speaker 01

  friggin' scroll.

• 1:34:16Rich Roll?

  But it's so much easier to scroll. And you have to, I mean, back to discipline, like, you really have to erect these boundaries and exert a level of discipline just to, just to be bored, just to be able to, like, give yourself a little bit of a refractory period, you know,

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Rich Roll?

  in between thoughts. And I don't know where that's going, because it's, it's getting harder and harder.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:34:40Rich Roll?

  And that, and I think that's going to denigrate the, the quality of creative output, ultimately. How could it not?

• 1:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I find myself, it's sort of like Jack White's song, you know, you're sitting in your little room, you're trying to do something good, but if you do something good, you're gonna need a bigger room, you know what I mean? Like, and then you'll have a bigger room and you might not know what to do and you'll sit around, I came around the line, you sit around wondering how you got started in your little room. And, yeah, and it's like, that could be why younger people produce, like, vital stuff. I don't know, you know, I mean, I-

• 1:35:18Rich Roll?

  Well, there's always a reaction.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:35:20Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  But, but I think, there's actually Vasile Havel, the Czech president, it's, it's like a hidden little thing in his essays, but he has this essay called "Second Wind" that's basically kind of about how difficult it is to, to stop and, and in, you know, take things on again and risk, risk not, another phase of doing, of creating or whatever that does not replicate what you've been doing.

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  And that it's, that it's like the biggest dare, but that, that everything else is essentially like, you're just churning the, you're churning the same-

• 1:36:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're-

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  -thing you've already made.

• 1:36:06Rich Roll?

  Exactly. You're perpetuating what you already know works. And I've heard you talk about this. I mean, this is, you know, classic, the classic Dylan example, Bowie again.

• 1:36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:15Rich Roll?

  Like, these people who have the courage and the tenacity to, basically, when the stakes are super high, just pivot completely. And it's something your dad did in his career, right?

• 1:36:24Speaker 01

  He did, yeah, yeah. He's, he was a-

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  He's got a great tapestry, you know, like I think, or I don't even know what the right analogy is, but I definitely like the idea of looking, the idea of being older and looking back and going, you know, I, I, for all intents and purposes, like, you know, church myself off doing the same thing because it, because people told me I was good at it. That's, that's pretty depressing. Actually, like if you imagine being old and looking back and going, do I want like affirmation over and over and over and over and over again for one or two things that I figured out? Or would I like to look back and go, yeah, I, I, I, I have a rich, I have a rich, you know,

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  landscape of experiences that are more, um, you know, which, which one would you envy more if you were sitting at 50 and you said, I can live to 100, this is what I'd like to look back on. Nobody would choose, I mean.

• 1:37:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  But when I. Maybe some people would.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  When I look at your career though, I mean, even if you didn't act at all and make movies, like you, you have like, like more on your plate than most people that I meet. I mean, you're involved in all these philanthropic efforts, these environmental concerns. You've got tech companies that you're working with. I mean, you, you have your hands in like a lot of shit.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, what's interesting though, is that it to the point though is yes, but that's not the same as that's, that's like the opposite of quiet. You know what I mean? Like, and at a certain point, one of the things I think is really wild is the recognition, is recognizing that once you set certain things in motion, unwinding them takes way longer than you tell yourself it's going to when you start. And the obligation to other people and sense of responsibility, the long tail on that is, is really long. It's like, it, it's, it's, it's a lot harder to, it's a lot harder to, to give yourself.

• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Any kind of real contemplative pause.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  When you've stacked a lot of things because.

• 1:38:35Rich Roll?

  Well.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Wind one thing down.

• 1:38:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  Cause you can wind, I can finish this movie and put it out. I can say. I'm done with it. I don't want to talk about it anymore. Go enjoy it and. Um, you know, God bless. But that it doesn't, you know, that. That wouldn't mean I'm like. Automatically like surfing and, you know, fasting.

• 1:38:53Rich Roll?

  Right. There's nothing else.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot. And so it's like. You, you, it takes a little bit to unwind things.

• 1:38:59Rich Roll?

  So how do you make, I mean, you're getting. Projecting, but I imagine you're on the receiving end of like a shitload of opportunities and things that you could say yes to. What is your rubric for? What you decide to get, get involved with? Like, how do you make those kind of decisions?

• 1:39:17Speaker 01

  Hmm. Right now it's so much like. Nothing new. I mean, right now, really like. Like my determination is, is. So strong not to take on anything. Um, it's just to see through the things that have been like the, this was a. This was a determination to see it through though.

• 1:39:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:39Speaker 01

  Like, I mean, I really believed in it, but I also just was like, I, I need, I want to see this through.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  There's other things I'm engaged with. I'd rather see them through. Than add anything. New, you know, um. Because also I think when, when, when kids come into the mix, it's just sort of like.

• 1:40:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  The last thing you want to be doing is stacking some new. Thing that's pulling you even more away. Um, and, uh. Uh, so. I, I, I'm like. Not going to spin any new plays.

• 1:40:16Rich Roll?

  So when people say, what's next? You just bristle.

• 1:40:19Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:40:20Rich Roll?

  You think about like what that, what is that pivot or that reinvention?

• 1:40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, it's why I'm, I think what we should rap on is, um. You'll come see the film and I'm going to read your book. No, because I, I am like way.

• 1:40:35Rich Roll?

  All your free time.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I, cause I am completely. That pivot, the pivot. Is exactly the pivot that I am. Like most interested in right now. I, I am really interested in a. A recovery of optimal health.

• 1:40:52Rich Roll?

  Hmm, I can help you with that.

• 1:40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:54Rich Roll?

  Cool. Um, thanks for talking to me, man.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:40:57Rich Roll?

  That was super fun.

• 1:40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:59Rich Roll?

  Motherless Brooklyn.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Chris Blair has a few good ideas now and then.

• 1:41:02Rich Roll?

  Does he? Oh, I know, right? He's got a lot of energy, that guy.

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  I know, stepping from a fire hose.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  God bless him.

• 1:41:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  Motherless Brooklyn, theaters everywhere. Definitely go check it out, as will I. And Edward's pretty easy to find. If you want to hit him up on the internet at Edward Norton on Twitter. Is that the best place?

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Rich Roll?

  Wherever you want, right?

• 1:41:22Speaker 01

  Until I turn it off.

• 1:41:23Rich Roll?

  Just see the movie. Yeah. Cool, man. How do you feel?

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Good. Thanks a lot.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  Good. All right. Thanks, man. Peace.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Bless.

• 1:41:32Rich Roll?

  How about that? Edward Norton, people. That was Edward Norton. Pretty incredible. Uh, and I should mention that I did take Edward up on his invitation to attend a screening of the movie with a small group of his friends, uh, which was another pretty amazing and pinch me type moment. Uh, and the movie lives up to the hype. His performance is absolutely riveting, stunning. The cast is incredible. The execution is beautifully done. And it's just so smart and fun. Uh, I think we mentioned in the podcast that Ken Burns called it a modern masterpiece, and I may be biased, a biased fanboy, but I would second that description. So please check it out while it's still in theaters to support Edward,

• 1:42:17Rich Roll?

  of course, but also to support this kind of grown up cinema, which is a very welcome salve to our steady diet of superhero popcorn fare. For even more on Edward, check out the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com and let him know how this one landed for you by sharing your thoughts with him directly on Twitter, at Edward Norton, or on Instagram, at Edward Norton Official. If you'd like to support our work here on the show, subscribe, rate and comment on it on Apple Podcasts. That really helps new people discover this program. Tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share the show on social media. Hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify and Google.

• 1:42:58Rich Roll?

  And you can support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis. And Margot Lubin for videoing and editing the show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, the music by Anna Lima. Appreciate the love, you guys. And we'll see you back here next week with plant-powered ultra-runner Robbie Ballinger, who this year ran across the United States in 75 days. Here's a clip. Until then, be well. Peace. Plants. Namaste.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  I think it all came down to like, I desperately wanted this. I wanted it for a lot of reasons. I wanted it, one, for the outreach, for the advocacy. It meant a lot to me to start being a force for positive change. And two, I was lost. I'd come out of 15 years, more, in the restaurant industry, and it didn't feel like I wanted to do that anymore. I knew whatever I did next, I wanted it to be something that fed my soul. And moving my body does. And pushing the limits of what I can do physically. So I just kept doubling down that this is what I had to do. I had to get this together. And a lot of it was just faith that it would come together. And again, going back to that mantra that my mom instilled in me,

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  you can do anything you set your mind to. And I think that's something important for people to understand is just because something's hard in the beginning doesn't mean it's always going to be. It's amazing what we're capable of. And I think a lot of what you have to do is not get overwhelmed by the larger task at hand, whatever it is, and just start chopping away little by little at whatever you're trying to achieve. Nobody gets to something huge overnight. It's gonna take time.