Chase Jarvis: Creativity Is Our Birthright

Conventional wisdom frames creativity as the purview of a certain select few — a rare gift that eludes us mere mortals. This is a lie. We are all born creative. More birthright than blessing, creativity is a practice. A habit not unlike any other skill or discipline. A muscle that can be built and flexed. This week's guest takes the notion one step further, asserting creativity as a biological necessity — a transformative force that resides within us all that when unleashed delivers vitality to everything we do. Chase Jarvis is many things. One of the most influential and award-winning photographers of the last decade, he is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. Dubbed by Forbes as ‘the photographer everyone wants to work with', Chase has created hundreds of campaigns and commercials for the likes of Nike, Apple, Samsung, Google, and Red Bull. As a photojournalist, Chase contributed to the Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times story Snow Fall and earned an Emmy nomination for Portrait of a City, his documentary chronicling the legendary Seattle music scene. As an entrepreneur, Chase is the Founder and CEO of two influential companies. His iPhone app Best Camera earned ‘App of the Year' accolades in 2009 from Wired, the New York Times, and Macworld. The first app that allowed users to share images direct to social networks, it is widely credited with kicking off the multi-billion dollar, global photo-sharing craze. CreativeLive, Chase’s second (and current) company, is the world’s largest live-streaming education company featuring the top experts in photography, design, music and entrepreneurship. In addition to being an in demand public speaker, Chase hosts the wildly popular YouTube series and podcast The Chase Jarvis LIVE Show and has authored 2 best-selling photography books. The focus of today's exchange is Chase's latest literary offering, Creative Calling. A fantastic primer on the power of developing your innate creativity to infuse your life with greater meaning, purpose and fulfillment, I can't recommend it more highly — a book that earns it's place alongside my personal favorite practice guides, The Artist's Way and The War of Art. A long-time fan, I have been an avid consumer of Chase's high quality content dating back to the early days of the internet. A kindred spirit of sorts, I had always wanted to meet him. Today's encounter exceeds my expectations. Enjoy! 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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• 1:06Chase Jarvis?

  The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to, that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life, and they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed, and it's created. The creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill. It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. Like, if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, like, that's not how it happens.

• 1:51Chase Jarvis?

  It's the action, it's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's great to get information from the internet, or your mentor, or whomever, but learning, like, actually doing that part, is incredibly valuable. It is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe.

• 2:07Rich Roll?

  That's Chase Jarvis, and this is the Ritual Podcast.

• 2:22Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, wonderful people of planet Earth. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is my podcast. Welcome. So, let's talk about creativity. We tend to think about creativity as something that is reserved for the purview of a certain few, those blessed with some kind of innate talent or disposition, this kind of gift that eludes us mere mortals. But it's simply not true. And if you're to ask this week's guest, he will dispel that lie. Because

• 3:02Rich Roll?

  first, creativity, just like any other skill or discipline, is simply a practice. It's a habit. It's a muscle that can be built and flexed. But even more than that, creativity is a biological necessity. It is a force that lives and breathes inside all of us, that when unleashed, transforms our lives and delivers vitality to absolutely everything that we do. Chase Jarvis is many things. One of the most influential and award-winning photographers of the last decade, he is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. He was dubbed

• 3:45Rich Roll?

  by Forbes as the photographer everyone wants to work with. And he's created hundreds of campaigns and commercials for the likes of Nike, Apple, Samsung, Google, and Red Bull. In addition, Chase was a contributor to the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times story, "Snowfall," and he earned an Emmy nomination for "Portrait of a City," his documentary of the legendary Seattle music scene. As an entrepreneur, Chase is the founder and CEO of two influential companies. His iPhone app, Best Camera, earned App of the Year accolades in 2009 from Wired, The New York Times, and Macworld. And it's this amazing story that he recounts on the podcast. Basically,

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  Best Camera was the very first app that allowed users to share images direct to social networks and he's widely credited with kicking off the multi-billion dollar global photo sharing craze. Chase's second and current company is called CreativeLive and it is the world's largest live streaming education company featuring the top experts in photography, design, music, and entrepreneurship. In addition to being an in-demand public speaker, Chase hosts the wildly popular YouTube series and podcast Chase Jarvis Live and has authored two bestselling photography books. And Chase's latest offering and kind of the focus of today's conversation is his new book Creative Calling.

• 5:10Rich Roll?

  And it's this really fantastic, and I don't say that lightly. It really is a fantastic primer on the power of developing our innate creativity to infuse our lives with greater meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. Highly recommend everybody check that out. This one is great. I can't wait for you to hear it. But first.

• 5:37Rich Roll?

  Okay. Chase, Chase Jarvis. So by way of background, I've been a big fan of Chase for many years. I've followed his path and gorged on his content. I think all the way back to the early days of the internet because Chase has just been posting forever, amazing information. And I'd always wanted to meet him. I saw him as a bit of a kindred spirit and I would say that today verifies that suspicion. In addition to recounting Chase's fascinating personal story, this is a conversation about the very nature of creativity. We bust myths surrounding its mysteries.

• 6:19Rich Roll?

  We talk about why creativity is innate, our birthright, an essential aspect of being human and why establishing a creative practice is our most valuable and urgent task, as important, I think, to our well-being as exercise or nutrition. I think it's fair to say we make a bit of magic today. I might even feel a new bromance coming on. You guys decide. So let's get into it. This is me and Chase Jarvis.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  That time has arrived, my friend.

• 6:57Chase Jarvis?

  Yes.

• 6:57Rich Roll?

  You are here. It's been many years in the making.

• 7:00Chase Jarvis?

  It has been. So true.

• 7:01Rich Roll?

  I've been looking forward to this for a very long time. I'm delighted that you're here. And I want to just say, before we even do anything, this fucking book is awesome, dude. You did an amazing job. And I think it's going to inspire and help so many people. So hats off.

• 7:17Chase Jarvis?

  Thank you so much.

• 7:18Rich Roll?

  It really is an accomplishment. When people ask me, you know, what are the most influential books in your life? There's, that list is long. But generally, at or near the top of that list is always The War of Art, Turning Pro, and The Artist's Way. Like, the three primers that I return to year after year after year to stoke my creativity and, you know, refresh my perspective. Those are timeless works, but they were also written years ago, right? And I look at this book as perfectly positioned to, you know, be the modern iteration of those timeless primers.

• 7:58Chase Jarvis?

  Well, that is, that's huge. Thank you for saying that. And I will also confess that those, those books were influential in me and my crew. We talked about it on my show last year. And, and yet, I also felt like there was a gap between where those books stopped and modern culture.

• 8:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:17Chase Jarvis?

  And new tools. And it didn't talk about a lot of the, both, things that can set creators and entrepreneurs free, and also the things that trap us. There's just some, like, constraints that are out there in the world, or that we place on ourselves that didn't get brought up in some of those books. I felt like there was a little bit of a gap. And I also, like, you know, you, you wrote an amazing book. You have to go deep.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Chase Jarvis?

  You know, and it's, there's a ton of research. And the research has, takes many forms, right? The research is your own personal experiences, your own empirical experiences. You look at, see, talk to your community, all the people that have been on my show, on CreativeLive. You, in particular, like, those, that conversation impacted me. And you start to see patterns. And you start to see windows. And you start to see cracks that both need to be opened and cracks that need to be filled. And so, it, it was a fascinating process to be writing a book about creativity. And creating something?

• 9:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Chase Jarvis?

  Just go ahead and cycle on that for a second.

• 9:18Rich Roll?

  Well, meta is a big theme of your whole career, right? There is definitely a meta aspect to that. And I think you're absolutely correct. Like those other books, they are, they're timeless. Perhaps by virtue of the fact that, that you can't, you can't specify when they were written.

• 9:34Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Rich Roll?

  But our culture has shifted and changed. The gatekeepers are gone. The tools of creativity are more accessible than ever. There's a more, there's a democratization of this universe that didn't exist back then. That makes, that I think has stimulated and motivated and inspired a lot of people to think about creative, creativity more broadly.

• 9:56Chase Jarvis?

  You nailed it.

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  And, and whether that means quitting your job to be an artist or just finding a hobby or like, you know, being intentional about the images you put on Instagram.

• 10:07Chase Jarvis?

  Sure.

• 10:07Rich Roll?

  These are all aspects of creativity and, and really what you've done is broaden the aperture on what creativity means while also underscoring the importance of it in everyday life for everybody, no matter who you are.

• 10:22Chase Jarvis?

  If you took that away, I am done. I am out.

• 10:24Rich Roll?

  This podcast is over.

• 10:25Chase Jarvis?

  No, that's exactly, I mean, literally you just sort of, you know, I don't even need to introduce the book because that is the ethos behind the book. That was, you know, specifically broadening the aperture on creativity. Cause right now there's people going, well, I don't know if I'm not really identified as a creator, I'm an attorney or I'm an accountant or I'm whoever's listening. And it's like, no, no, no, this is exactly why you, and if you're, if you're a creator, you identify as that, great. This is like right in your sweet spot. But there's a whole universe of people who are what I call creative curious that understand that there's some power there that I can't kind of like the je ne sais quoi, I don't know how to grab onto it. And I want to understand that a little bit more. And when you broaden that definition of what creativity is.

• 11:05Chase Jarvis?

  Which to me is part of the challenge that we've had historically with how art and creativity have been viewed in our culture. When you broaden the aperture a little bit, you can all of a sudden sink your teeth into it and find immense and powerful meaning.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think historically, the word creative or creativity isn't necessarily pejorative, but it's exclusionary. People either identify with that, or they don't, or they're scared of it.

• 11:31Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  And in truth, it is, it is part and parcel of what makes us human. It is a universal aspect of the condition of being in one of these bodies.

• 11:44Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, literally, we are creating machines. And that's part of like, expanding the definition to understand that, wait a minute, you know, my decisions on which, how to get to your house today, do I go this way or that way? The, what I, you know, decide to do with my day and my time on a, on a minute by minute basis, but also on a life scale basis. Like, those are all wickedly wildly creative acts that have been discarded into like, you know, if you're thinking of them in neural pathways, just like the base neural pathway that you always go. But there's an opportunity for, in all of those places, to do something different. And when you start to realize that this creativity in small daily doses is the same exact muscle

• 12:27Chase Jarvis?

  that we use to create our life. It's just creativity, different scale. Your head starts to go like, okay, I need to pay attention here.

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, so then if I was to ask you how you define creativity, what is the response to that?

• 12:41Chase Jarvis?

  It's such a, the way that I approach it is so simple. It might be painful for some people, but it's the act of putting two things that might not have gone together just a moment ago, of putting those two things together to create something new and useful. So it is a very broad definition, but that's to me what actually makes the book really relevant. Because there are people like, this is not about changing your lifestyle. This is not about moving to Paris and wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  It can be about that, if that's your deal.

• 13:14Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. It can be. But it's also, it doesn't have to be about a new set of friends. Instead, it's a new way of operating. It's a new way of seeing what's in front of you. And you know, just at a super top level, it's like I operate from the principle that A, every person is creative, that it's the thing that separates us from every other species on the planet. And it is, it's fun. I'll just walk into any first grade classroom, right? Who wants to come up to the front of the room and draw me a picture? Every hand goes up. And then do the same thing with the sixth grade class and then a ninth grade class. And you see that we're, this is a thing that is innate and we're training it out of us. So if that's principle one, principle two, sorry, one is that we're, there's creativity in every person.

• 13:58Chase Jarvis?

  Two is that creativity is a muscle. It's a habit, not a skill. It's a process, not a product. It's a muscle. And I guess Maya Angelou said it well, like the more you use, the more you have.

• 14:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:12Chase Jarvis?

  Think about training or anything else, right? So it becomes more available to us. And then if you follow one and two, the simple argument, number three is, so then all these small creative acts that we do every day, yes, playing the guitar, making a meal, building a family, writing code. Yes, those things are literally the things that are going to give you the insight that you have agency over creativity with a capital C, like creating the arc of your life. So to me though, like it, from a very simple definition, you just have to make a simple three step argument and all of a sudden you're at this like, I need to pay attention.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. That creativity is a non-depleting renewable resource, that it's not something that certain people are struck with, but that they cultivate through a deliberate and intentional practice over time.

• 15:07Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Rich Roll?

  That is divorced from the results of it and all about the process of doing.

• 15:13Chase Jarvis?

  You've got it. Again, I'm out of here. This is like amazing.

• 15:16Rich Roll?

  I think you say in the book, like, um, it's not fake it till you make it, it's make it till you make it. So the process of being a maker in whatever form that is for you.

• 15:27Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:27Chase Jarvis?

  And when you think about it, like, Let's talk about it away from the sort of small C creativity of making a meal or building a business or whatever and talk about it on the life scale. The people that you are inspired by, that you moved by, that you're connected to, that you admire, their lives were created intentionally. There's all kinds of circumstances, but they created the puzzle that is their life and they're expressing themselves in a particular way. And it's intentional, it's designed and it's created. It's not just you just fell into this thing one day.

• 16:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:04Chase Jarvis?

  And so when you start to look at creativity with that sort of capital C on the life arc, you're like, who do I am? And it doesn't need to be someone famous or fancy on the internet or some well-known entrepreneur or artist. It can be your next door neighbor that lives in amazing integrity and they have a mindfulness about them that you really like. That's not on accident. That was created. That person set out with a vision for themselves and slowly but surely got there. There was no overnight. There was no, it was a creative process and that's available to you.

• 16:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We don't do, we're very good at celebrating, you know, the masters of our culture in, you know, across all disciplines, but we're not very good at peeling the layers back and really objectively examining the journey required to get to that place. And that leaves us as a culture with this false sensibility that these people just came out fully baked and they, you know, they're touched by God in a certain way that we're not.

• 17:08Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And what is your, what do your parents say? Oh, go to Harvard, then, you know, go to get this degree and then have this job and then because, and that's gonna, and you're like, wait a minute, the people that I admire, most of them didn't do any of that.

• 17:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:20Chase Jarvis?

  In fact, they led this really disjointed, like weird puzzle that they put together over time. They didn't do X, they didn't do Y, or they did it partway and then they quit or, and What parent is coaching their child to do that?

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, nobody.

• 17:35Chase Jarvis?

  Nobody.

• 17:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, very rare people are. I mean, that's very similar to, I just put up a podcast yesterday with David Epstein, who wrote this book, Range, and he deconstructs the career paths of all these amazing people to, to kind of upend the 10,000 hour rule, that basically these people weren't people that just ground themselves down, you know, to become great at what they do at the exclusion of everything, but actually live very broad lives in which they had many different kinds of experiences that ultimately inform their craft and elevate it beyond their peers.

• 18:11Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, that's so true. And to me, that is, they are crafting that. You know, they are saying, I'm taking a little bit from this and a little bit from that. And yet, to me, this is a really fundamental piece of the book. And look, right now, if you're sitting there judging your life, like, oh, my gosh, I am the person he described. I did what was prescribed. And I, don't worry, that's like, culture is designed to do that. You're not a weirdo. In fact, you're normal. And what we're trying to do here is to get you to see this framework and realize that you have some power to change it at whatever stage you're in. Take it from me, like, I did all the mistakes. I have like hundreds of thousands in debt and student loan, 10 years off course, doing everybody else's thing.

• 18:54Chase Jarvis?

  10 years, you think at the end of my life, I'm going to say like,

• 18:57Rich Roll?

  I got you beat there, but go ahead.

• 18:59Chase Jarvis?

  But I mean, honestly, but that's part of like, what, why I feel like we connect when, when we're together. It's like, there's a, there's a shared sort of like, oh, my gosh, I did the thing.

• 19:08Rich Roll?

  When you're in it, you can't see it, though.

• 19:10Chase Jarvis?

  Totally.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

  Looking back in retrospect, we look at your career and you see, oh, all these dominos line up perfectly to, you know, create this person that is Chase Jarvis. When you're working in the ski shop or what, you're not, you're not consciously aware that this is all going into the hopper and is going to pay dividends later. You know, you're like, what the hell am I doing with my life?

• 19:30Chase Jarvis?

  Right, right. And that's, so, you know, that's both, I want to be, to frame it as, hey, you might have not intended to be where you are right now, but it's never too late to sort of shift gears. And whatever you have in your backpack is going to be very valuable on your journey forward. Because especially if you can shift gears into this act of creating the next chapter of your life, rather than being the cork in the tide. And that you ended up here, wherever here is. Don't worry. Like, to me, that's a really important thing to grasp for everyone, or almost everyone. There's a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And it's just, what we need is a framework of A, thinking about it, and then B, getting there. And that's part of what I tried to bake into the book.

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And it's primarily prescriptive, but there's this kind of subplot of memoir that is threaded through it. Like, it's not overtly a memoir, but you divert from the prescription from time to time to go into these lengthy stories of pivotal moments in your life that help kind of underscore the point that you're trying to make.

• 20:37Chase Jarvis?

  And if you looked at them as a unit in themselves, they're all things that historically would be massive diversions, or things that were a part of what you shouldn't do. And so that's like, I'm trying, there's nothing more than books that are like, okay, take perfect little acorn A, and then if you take perfect acorn A and you do B, C, D, and E with it, you're going to get this great oak tree F, G, H.

• 21:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Life is messy. Creativity is even messier.

• 21:04Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And so I'm like, through my own, because like, I don't want to throw rocks at other folks, so through my own sort of messy path, I tried to deconstruct that and deconstruct the lives of people that I admire and know well, and that I've had the chance to be around or study, or create, cultivate with. And it just so happens that there's a real pattern of recognition, deciding, even think of your journey. It's the same thing. Like, we did what we did. We recognized some stuff. We made some changes. The cool part is, while we might be 10,000 hours, or 10 years, or five minutes, or eight books, or whatever, away from what we see for ourselves, the number of decisions, it can be like, single

• 21:43Chase Jarvis?

  digit. One, or two, or three decisions away from an entirely radically different life. And to me, that is exciting and powerful.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I've, you know, I'm a living example of that. You are as well. And I think, you know, one of the reasons why I also feel like we're kindred spirits is that Despite the fact that our stories and our career paths in many ways are very different and our upbringings are very different, there's a lot of similarities

• 22:15Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 22:15Rich Roll?

  in our story. And the more I dived into, you know, your path, the more I was struck by how similar they are. So like, let's, let's go back to the beginning here, man.

• 22:26Chase Jarvis?

  All right. Way back yonder.

• 22:28Rich Roll?

  The son of a cop and a mom who works in a biotech company. I mean, you grew up only child. And, and, and, you know, I don't want to project here, but perhaps

• 22:41Chase Jarvis?

  You're nailing it so far.

• 22:42Rich Roll?

  perhaps somewhat, perhaps like a sensitive and creative child who also had prowess as an athlete. And maybe the first big choice that you had to make was who am I identifying with? And what tribe do I want to belong to?

• 22:56Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And I think this is part of like, in the particular lies, the universal, right? My story is in second grade. Ms. Kelly, I'll never forget her. I loved her as a teacher. She was amazing. And I also, that was when I was second grade, I was like, I just did my first film. It was called The Sons of Zorro. We washed cars in the neighborhood. A gang of us got together. We bought eight millimeter, super eight film, you know, asked a buddy's brother to film us, wrote a little script and did costumes, recorded this film, developed it, screened it, and actually made more money than we spent.

• 23:31Rich Roll?

  Right. He made 30 bucks and it cost 15 or something like that.

• 23:33Chase Jarvis?

  Exactly.

• 23:34Rich Roll?

  Very Robert Rodriguez.

• 23:35Chase Jarvis?

  Well, there you go. And so in about that time, and then I roll into second grade, I'm like, God, this is amazing. I'm performing magic tricks for my friends at school. I had a comic strip that I did every week. My character's name was Clyde. And I took Clyde through a bunch of different like aspects of his life. And then the parent teacher conference happened. And I was around because it was also an ice cream social going on. And, and I overheard Ms. Kelly tell my parents, Chase is so much better at sports than he is at art.

• 24:08Chase Jarvis?

  And at the moment, I actually wasn't even hurt. I was like, note to self, change gears. Cause what do we want to do as an eight year old?

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  One sentence.

• 24:18Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And as eight year olds, again, we're social animals. We want acceptance. We want to fit in. We don't want to disappoint. And my story might be about Ms. Kelly in second grade. But the reality is we've always got, we got, all of us have some aspect of that story. And maybe it's not one moment, maybe it's 10 moments. And there was a bunch of other moments. But I just, I did, I ran to sports and to be crystal clear, it served me very well. Went to college on a soccer scholarship, played in the Olympic development soccer team. Like it, it did everything that culture said it was going to do. And yet, what had I, what had I turned my back on? I turned my back on and I was even incognizant of it because the thing that I chose served me well.

• 25:02Chase Jarvis?

  I didn't feel like I missed it. But when my grandfather died, whatever it was, 12, something, eight years, 10 years later, dropped dead of a heart attack when I was a week before my college graduation. I was just completely struck. He was an amateur photographer. He had taken pictures of me growing up, my soccer games, he and my father, we used to take pictures and, and the, obviously it was horrible, but the silver lining was that I was given his cameras. And it was like, I was transported back to that second grade. And like, wait a minute, what have, I've always been curious about this. Skateboard culture gave me a little hint of it as a little skater punk.

• 25:47Chase Jarvis?

  And it was like spray paint and punk rock and the DIY ethos. And I, like, I started feeling that a little bit, but then it was really like, okay, are you going to be a skateboarder? Are you going to go, you know, try out for the Olympic development soccer team? And so to me, I made a choice then. But until that moment where my grandfather died and I was given his cameras, I really had turned my back on this thing largely to fit in. And I don't think it's that unusual when I look back at other people's stories, whether it was partying, or whether it was going to the right college, or there's just so many shoulds and oughts and musts that we get in our culture.

• 26:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Chase Jarvis?

  And especially when they come from people that we love, that we respect and admire. And what do they want for us? They're not trying to get you to not be an awesome creator. They're trying to get you to be more like them, more like the images that they see on TV, which is average.

• 26:43Rich Roll?

  Well, they're afraid, you know, they just, they just want the best for you.

• 26:47Chase Jarvis?

  As long as it's in.

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  They're terrified about the uncertainty that that comes with, you know, blazing a unique path. So it's, it's well intentioned. It's not malevolent or anything like that.

• 26:58Chase Jarvis?

  And to me, this is, this is, that's worth talking about.

• 27:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Chase Jarvis?

  These people are not trying, there's no evil genius. They're not trying to repress you, nor is culture.

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  They want the best for you.

• 27:06Chase Jarvis?

  Of course.

• 27:07Rich Roll?

  In their own, in their own way.

• 27:08Chase Jarvis?

  But it manufactures a certain outcome.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  Right. It becomes more incumbent upon you to develop that sense of self that can lead you on your own unique path. And that's difficult. And, you know, for me, it came much later than it did for you. But what's interesting about that story, and I've heard you tell it before, you gloss over one aspect of it, which is this, it's what feels like an assumption, like, oh, you, so you're gifted the, these cameras from your grandfather. So obviously, this was a message from the universe. But, but, you know, it could have very easily just been like, oh, thanks. And go about your way, like.

• 27:46Chase Jarvis?

  Hack these things on eBay.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Or just put them in your closet or something like that. So to me, what I hear in that is that that creative sensibility, albeit repressed, was percolating just beneath the surface. And unconsciously or consciously, you were almost looking for an excuse to explore it.

• 28:04Chase Jarvis?

  And I think that is a very. Common paradigm. That's part of why the book exists. It to me that, you know, again, if you assume that first principle that there's creativity inside of every person and that create and that culture shapes it in a way that it does so that we fit into some boxes because that's easier to define and manage. And again, no evil genius, but the school system, the employment system, all those things have had a very specific track.

• 28:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:31Chase Jarvis?

  Until recently. Now, it was the wheels are starting to come off. Yeah. And so that's the part where I'm trying to let you know that you're not alone, that the thing that's just below the surface that you really feel about yourself or that you want to explore, but you haven't, you're not alone. Everyone's been, you know, handed a bunch of shoulds. And to be totally frank, the shoulds never go away. They change as you get older, but there's always going to be a set of expectations and your job as a human is to navigate that, to be able to develop tools, to take what is helpful and repel what is not helpful and manage your own belief for yourself. Most of this

• 29:12Chase Jarvis?

  has to do with this cool thing that I love, which is intuition and your self-awareness. And when you can start to pay attention to that, that whisper, you know, that's what I talk about being the calling. And I'm not saying as that that whisper that's at eighth grade that said you needed to be a, a hippopotamus veterinarian, but mostly that there's something in there and you don't have to know exactly, but you just know that there's something that if you start to pull on that thread, great things happen. Life starts to happen for you, not to you. And that you start to be on a path. And when you're exploring this, unfurling it, again, this is to me where you, everyone has felt this. Everyone has felt that time in their life that felt effortless, whether you call it flow, you're

• 29:56Chase Jarvis?

  with the right people, doing the things that you love. And then you kind of go, okay, great. Now we got to get practical. We got to get back to this is naive to pursue this, all these other messages. And again, no evil genius. This is just a product of mass culture and being a social species. Fine. Let's now develop some tools to manage our way out of it.

• 30:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I think practicing those tools becomes.

• 30:22Rich Roll?

  Mission critical as a pathway out because what happens is over time as we age, those intuitions and those instincts become calcified as we settle into this life that we think that we've chosen for ourselves and that we work double time to convince ourselves are good, even if we're not happy.

• 30:45Chase Jarvis?

  Totally.

• 30:46Rich Roll?

  Because shit man, I fuck this whole thing up. If I want to change course now, that's going to upend everything and my life's going to turn upside down. And that's terrifying.

• 30:56Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  And I'm sympathetic to that.

• 30:58Chase Jarvis?

  Totally.

• 30:58Rich Roll?

  I've been in that situation. You've been in that, your version of that situation. And, and, and it becomes harder and harder to connect with that little wisp that's trying to speak to you because we've constructed denial mechanisms around it to prevent it from percolating up because it is a reminder that maybe we need to course correct a little bit.

• 31:20Chase Jarvis?

  Yep. And it's always there for us. That's the thing that why if you're in that place of despair right now, or there's the big gap between where you are and where you want to be because you, and, and you know, maybe you're listening to this right now going like, damn, like they got me. They figured me out. You're not alone. And that to me, just that little moment of realizing that you're not alone, hopefully is enough to kickstart, again, the way I frame it as, as a practice. And a practice is like, it's, it's, it's intentionally called the practice because sometimes it doesn't go well. Right? And, and I don't want to paint a picture, again, go back to those books that told you exactly how to do it. You know, I take you on my journey too, which is like one of pitfalls

• 32:04Chase Jarvis?

  and of near death and of doing the wrong thing. And by wrong, I mean not accordance with who I was and my values. And it's recoverable. The thing that we need to know as a culture, and what I'm trying to prescribe is start and start small. You don't have to go from zero to a hundred miles an hour. In fact, that's going to make the wheels come off. What we need to do is listen and then start moving towards the thing.

• 32:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the call to action is that. No longer can you persist in this state of creative repression. To do so is to do so at your peril. And you open one of the chapters with that great Brene Brown quote where she basically says, like, to repress your creativity isn't benign. It's like, it's actually a dangerous thing because you're living at odds with your true makeup. And that's going to provoke all kinds of damage in your life in various ways.

• 33:02Chase Jarvis?

  So true. And just look at a culture that has repressed this key thing, a thing that differentiates us from all the other species, our ability to build tools and rocks and create. Look around, wherever you are right now, you're on a run, I'm in your ears, listening to, you know, you're running by the ocean, everything, that park bench, the car, the light post, it was all designed, all created. It was a drawing before it was ever in real life. Literally everything around you was created. And so if you start to think about creativity in that sense, you start to say, okay, great, you got my attention. Now I'll pay attention to this creative force that supposedly I've got, this is, you know, Chase and Rich telling me I've got this force.

• 33:42Chase Jarvis?

  And you start to pay attention to how valuable and how important that force is. And then think of the messages that you get from culture. Oh, you know, pursuing that whimsical thing that you want to create for your life, that's just naive and foolish. The pursuing a career around creativity, playing the guitar, how much is, you know, starving artist, you hear, there's all these mythologies that, like Brene said, when you repress those, that's your, it's like literally fundamentally your DNA to create. And when you start to, as simple as deny the words, like, oh, I'm not creative. That is really a toxic thought because it affects so many areas of your life.

• 34:24Chase Jarvis?

  I can't create my way into a good meal, or out of this relationship, or into this relationship, or create a child, or a family, or a, if you start to think about it, you're doing all of these actions, and you can acknowledge them rather than repress them. There's a sense of agency that you gain. And again, that's the Trojan horse of the book, right? It's it's creating in these small ways and recognizing acknowledging that, you know, changing up the recipe just a little bit to be a little more like what you'd want it to taste like actually helps you see that you have agency over your life.

• 34:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and create fulfillment and purpose.

• 34:59Chase Jarvis?

  For sure. That's the that's the reason to create, right?

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 35:03Chase Jarvis?

  Right? You're not creating-

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  And happiness.

• 35:05Chase Jarvis?

  For sure. And then, and I think that that it is elusive and that we have in our culture and that we have a culture that doesn't really, or as now I'll say, is on the cusp of actually starting to acknowledge our creative faculties, you know, that those things coincide is like, I get it. The fact that we're starting to acknowledge it, I think we're on the sort of the cusp of a completely new era of invention and reinvention. And there's plenty of things to be scared of, and I get all that stuff. But just like the Gutenberg press shifted literacy, I think we're on the cusp of shifting our focus to creativity as the sort of the the a complete reawakening of our culture.

• 35:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, as you've said many times, creativity is the new literacy. Yeah. The best example that I've seen lately of this Brene Brown notion is the movie in the book, Where'd You Go, Bernadette? Have you seen this yet?

• 36:04Chase Jarvis?

  No.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God. You got it. First of all, it's set in Seattle. You gotta see it. But it's this incre- no one saw this movie. I thought it was wonderful. But basically, it's a story of this-

• 36:13Chase Jarvis?

  I'm getting, I'm thinking of one friend right now who's just, they're gonna listen to this and they're just be going like, dude, I just like, there are 20 lashes with a wet noodle from this guy.

• 36:22Rich Roll?

  But basically, it's a story of this genius architect who then gets married and has a family and spends the better part of 15 years or so repressing her creative impulses to the point of lunacy. Like, she starts to lose her mind. And it's the journey back towards rediscovering what her essence is, which is to create. And the idea being like, she cannot be her best self or the person that she wants to be unless she is in the process of doing that. And I think that's a universal thing that comes across in your book, that this is what it means to be human, and we all have our version of that.

• 36:57Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, I'm perfectly said. And-

• 37:01Chase Jarvis?

  I don't want to like invoke too much drama with the like, this is toxic. Because while I believe that it's also recoverable, like we have, you know, we have a filter in our, in our bodies to take care of toxins. We also have a filter in our heart and our soul to, that knows what it's supposed to feel like when things are working. And, you know, I say, you can look backwards and connect the dots to the times when it felt right. What we're doing is we're actually trying to sort of reconnect with that. And what's the new manifestation of it? What is the, okay, great. Whether it's, you know, what does a daily practice look like for you? Well, you know, connect the dots, looking backwards to what brought you joy at some point

• 37:45Chase Jarvis?

  in your, in that, that part of your life? What would you like to do? There's a book called Play It Away by a guy named Charlie Hohn. Charlie?

• 37:52Rich Roll?

  I know Charlie.

• 37:53Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, great author. Used to work closely with Tim Ferriss, just a lovely human. And in his book Play It Away, he literally talks about finding time to play every day. And he talks in this, in the book about going, he like bought a five gallon bucket full of baseballs. And he and his buddy would go to the local like park and one guy would pitch the other guy and they'd just rope baseballs all over the place and then walk around and pick them up. And it was just such a joy and something he loved as a kid. And now he's doing it for 30 minutes as an adult. And it just like completely cracked him wide open.

• 38:28Rich Roll?

  Right. And it's not about the beret and moving to Paris.

• 38:31Chase Jarvis?

  It's all

• 38:31Rich Roll?

  Simple things like that.

• 38:32Chase Jarvis?

  Super simple things and they're available immediately. And that's the cool thing. Like, I'm not asking you to do any of that crazy stuff, move to Paris, new set of friends, anything. It's like right there.

• 38:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 38:51Rich Roll?

  So you're on the pre-med, go to medical school track. We're gonna

• 38:56Chase Jarvis?

  Hey, Mr. Lawyer.

• 38:57Rich Roll?

  Go back to the, the timeline narrative here. That was the plan. And I relate to that. That was my track as well. I was pre-med for a couple of years in college before I lost interest in that for reasons similar to your own.

• 39:11Rich Roll?

  You discover this treasure trove of cameras and then you proceed to walk, walk the earth.

• 39:16Chase Jarvis?

  Be like Kane.

• 39:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you go to, you go to Europe with your, your then girlfriend, now wife. You've been married for a long time, that college sweetheart.

• 39:24Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Rich Roll?

  And this is where you start to really deliberately explore creativity and become this self-taught photographer. So talk about that a little bit.

• 39:36Chase Jarvis?

  Well, I don't know, again, the, just if you think about the experience that I just went through as my grandfather and hearkening back to, you know, that's that moments of trauma or fear or like a big change in life, and it doesn't have to be negative. It can be the birth of a child. They cause us to reflect and they end up being really convenient milestones or markers to like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what am I doing?

• 40:00Chase Jarvis?

  I just don't want to have to wait for those. That's part of what the goal of the book is like, when we can, we can be awakened to that right now, but just so happens.

• 40:08Rich Roll?

  Why is pain and trauma, you know, so necessary? It's like, you know, this thing happened and then I realized that that realization is available to us, but for some reason it's so intangible unless we're triggered in a certain way. And you've had, like, this is not the only, I mean, you've had like three or four of these sorts of things that have like helped, you know, sort of reconfigure your trajectory.

• 40:29Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, to get back to your timeline though, so I, those things happened. No, those things happened and, and I, I did manage to create some space for myself to acknowledge that. And, and by that, I mean, my creativity and just be a little bit more thoughtful. And it's important for me to put a pin in this because the space that I did give myself, okay, great. It was in Europe. Yeah. Great. Sorry, Chase. I can't get to Europe. I'm okay. Just to be clear, I had given, been given a little money from my grandfather and grand, my grandmother gave me some money from my grandfather's passing. And it was like a 13 stop ticket with half miles and 13 legs to get to where I was going, but.

• 41:15Chase Jarvis?

  It's not required that it's Europe and it's not required to be six months and, and it literally is available to you. For me, this is what, you know, I decided to spend my money eating beans and tuna fish and sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag. In order to just give a little space to start to look inward, because that's the cool thing about all the biggest answers in life. We're chasing them out there. I want to be more like X or live the life of Y or whatever. The cool part, and this is why I keep saying it's always available to you. It's all in here. It's all intuition. It's all, what does this speak? Does this speak to me? And it, you know, the interesting thing about a calling, and this is again, not necessarily a calling to be a vet or whatever, but it starts out as a whisper and

• 41:57Chase Jarvis?

  you get better at listening to it. And over the course of days, weeks, months, or sometimes years, you start to be able to listen to that truth inside of you. For you, you know, you had a very clear experience of hearing what changes you wanted to make in your life. And I had some version of that as well. And the people listening at home, whatever your calling is, it's there. You just need to sort of tune into it.

• 42:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I would say, I agree with that, but I would add that I'm not sure it was so clear. It was that little wispy sense of like, this is not right. Like, I kind of like that thing over there. And that's about as clear as it was. It wasn't like, here's what I'm gonna do. And here's the five step plan, you know, sitting across a table from Chase Jarvis. Like, it was nothing like that, you know?

• 42:46Chase Jarvis?

  But what it was.

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  It was the tiniest, faintest whisper of an instinct.

• 42:50Chase Jarvis?

  And I liken that not to a map, because a map, right, would be like, here's the red dot, here's all the dotted lines, and then here's the red X. And you follow the map and you get to where you're going. If you had the, it's do that, it would be the equivalent of a map. For me, the whisper, that little thing, the call, it's just over there somewhere. That's what I think you used, I'm just, I think I'm parroting you. You said it's that thing over there. I'm saying that that's a compass.

• 43:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:16Chase Jarvis?

  And, and, and so it's not a map. This is the, both the cool and the terrifying thing. It's a compass. A map is reassuring because I can see what it's good. I can see the waterfall and then I can see the bridge that I got across. And I think see the saber tooth tiger and, but a compass is like, go that way. Go toward the thing in very simple, imperfect terms. You just start walking. And when you get to the top of the hill, then you can see, oh my gosh, there's a giant crevasse. I have to go around or there's a bridge. I might have to, you know, jump across this thing in order to get the thing. And it's not knowing what the path is going to bring that, that creates so much pause and inaction in people.

• 43:59Chase Jarvis?

  And I get it. I was the same way. Like you're not alone, but it is that compass rather than the map. And that is that faint call that you walk toward. I use the metaphor of a path in the book. That starts to deliver. It starts to like, make it clear that you're doing the right thing. You start to be around the people. You start to be closer to the thing. You can smell it. You can feel it a little bit. It's still not clear. To go back to yours. It's not this like gong. It's like something over there in the bushes.

• 44:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 44:31Chase Jarvis?

  I'm encouraging you to walk to the bushes.

• 44:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think, uh, uh, prefatory to that though, it's important that people's compasses are properly calibrated. I think there's a lot of people out there with broken compasses.

• 44:43Chase Jarvis?

  For sure.

• 44:44Rich Roll?

  You know, look, if you're fucked up on drugs or you're, you know, your priorities are out of whack, or you have some kind of unresolved psychological thing going on, it's, it's conceivable that your instinct, that thing that you, you might, you might misidentify a, a, a, an instinct as being one of those whispers. And yet that's not correct because you haven't done enough internal work to be, to, to be in a place where you can trust that impulse.

• 45:14Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And I think you, you get burned by the, that impulse a couple of times and it starts to easy. It gets easy to turn it off.

• 45:20Rich Roll?

  Right. The universe will give you the message.

• 45:22Chase Jarvis?

  And this is what I advocate. That's like, when you get there and it's a false idol, or it's the thing that you thought it, it's not the thing that you thought it was. Then you're like, okay, I just walked all the way here for this. And then what do you do? You gut check in, listen again, and it gets truer over time. And that's the willingness, that's the fear that we all have is that I just, I walked toward medical school, I walked toward professional soccer, I walked toward a PhD in philosophy. None of those things, all of those things were very expensive in cash and time and emotion, and none of them delivered. And yet, in a weird way, they all delivered.

• 46:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, they all informed what you do today. So they all had purpose and meaning, but they were all examples of you chasing a life that was not your own, but somebody else's idea.

• 46:18Chase Jarvis?

  And the cool thing is, after you've done that a couple of times, you start to realize, okay, that was expensive. No, no, what do I really want? And then so there's this sort of like the, I think a sensibility develops and honesty, where, again, go back, that's why moments of trauma and loss and joy, extreme joy, they can be useful.

• 46:44Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 46:45Chase Jarvis?

  Because it'll pause you just enough to go, okay, let's be real. There's an episode I talk about in the book where I basically should be dead by every, every measure I was caught in a horrible avalanche, which is a very scary thing. It's sort of like getting eaten by a shark, you know, it's not awesome. And for whatever reason, I made it out alive. And that was also one of those moments. And having already had a couple of them, I was like, damn.

• 47:13Rich Roll?

  Do I really need another one of these?

• 47:14Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 47:15Rich Roll?

  I mean, that was gnarly, reading about that in the book.

• 47:18Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 47:20Chase Jarvis?

  And I'm.

• 47:22Chase Jarvis?

  Again, they're useful, but wouldn't it be better? And what I've tried to do with the book is like, let's just pretend we don't need those things.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  I don't need that reminder.

• 47:30Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. Let's try and get there without it.

• 47:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think it's also important to underscore that there might be this idea that your mom or your dad were taskmasters saying, Chase, we want you to be a doctor, or we want you to be this. And that's what kind of propelled you onto that track. But that's not fair to them. I mean, I read an interview with your mom and she sounded like it was, it was like on your blog. It was like, you know, how to raise a creative child. And I got the sense from her that she was very aware that you were creative and was trying to support that. So it wasn't coming from them necessarily. It was more of a social thing.

• 48:11Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And this is why it's complicated.

• 48:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:15Chase Jarvis?

  You know, when your career counselor is saying something, and it can be as subtle as, do you think Miss Kelly was trying to completely throw a spanner in my plans to be a comic artist? No way. Right? But those are things that we ascribe as young, impressionable, social animals. That when I talked about earlier, we talked about, it's like, what's our toolkit now for managing that? You know, you might have something going on right now where your boss or your mentor or whatever is just really hammering on it. For one thing, and it's like, is this like, what is the purpose of this? What am I supposed to take away from here? And, and these are advanced tools. Especially as a young person, you're just like, oh geez, my uncle says I should be a doctor.

• 48:58Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And, and this is why this sort of small, this, this pattern that I keep repeating is this like, small creative acts on a regular basis, they start to, to inform you, remind you that you have agency. And so you, you, the goal is to shift gears from this sort of cork in the tide to like intention. And then there's going to be a whole new set of challenges, right? You're going to say, wait a minute, I've got a couple of kids. I got a mortgage. I got it. And then that's a new set of obstacles that you're all gonna, you're, you're going to have to manage. And as you strengthen these muscles and these tools to navigate life, to create your life.

• 49:35Chase Jarvis?

  Things again, start to happen for you rather than to you.

• 49:38Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:39Chase Jarvis?

  And sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, to be clear.

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, most of the time, you know.

• 49:43Chase Jarvis?

  Imperfect.

• 49:43Rich Roll?

  But it's, it's about living your life with intention and not living reactively.

• 49:47Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  Right? Like, take, like you said, agency. It, it's really about having the mindfulness and the presence of mind to be still long enough to ponder what it is that you really want and then take the actions that set you on that trajectory as opposed to just reacting to stimuli around you or, or being a people pleaser and just trying to, you know, assuage the people that you love.

• 50:10Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And that happens and it's, it's easy to understand why. Who wants to disappoint the people that you love the most?

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  Nobody does.

• 50:18Chase Jarvis?

  Nobody does.

• 50:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Chase Jarvis?

  And yet, what is required to live the life that you want? You're gonna have to disappoint some people because it's not their script, it's yours. And how many, how many goes do you get? Just to be clear, how many goes? You get one. So, you know, to put it in perspective, the number one regret of the dying is that they lived somebody else's prescription for their life. Number one, not number three or eight or 10. Conveniently for this discussion, it's number one. So if that's so, that's science, that's, that's, the research says, like, do we need other proof? Turns out we do. We need to go around bump, bump into a bunch of stuff before we start to figure it out. I just want us to figure out as soon as possible, rewrite the cultural narrative

• 51:02Chase Jarvis?

  a little bit about creativity and about what's possible and get us to take action.

• 51:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  In terms of you developing your own creative voice, I mean, you learned photography pre-digital, where

• 51:16Chase Jarvis?

  Not recommended.

• 51:16Rich Roll?

  And not like, you know, not in some kind of scholastic setting. You were walking the earth and keeping a journal like F8, you know, 250 shutter speed, ISO, whatever, like trying to, and then the delay that comes with developing it and then comparing it to your notes to try to figure out, like, how do you actually use a camera?

• 51:37Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And then remember when you actually forget to record one exposure and the other 18 after it are then incorrect.

• 51:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Chase Jarvis?

  I mean, it's just like little small errors, like that made learning so difficult.

• 51:48Rich Roll?

  But, but I've heard you say, yeah, it made you pay attention. Like you had to be very, you know, like. Present for what you were doing.

• 51:56Chase Jarvis?

  For sure. And that's a wonderful gift, right? And that's another thing that happens when you actually care. Speaking of lifelong learning, it's not an accident that I started CreativeLive, which is a lifelong learning platform, like, because I'm very passionate about it. And part of the way I developed that passion was from seeing how hard it could be. There's something interesting, though, when something's hard that you really want. And that's why that honesty of like, let's cut to brass tacks, like what matters? It's, it's, it has this mechanism of focusing your attention, which I love. And to me, that's cool. You know, when you can actually latch on to something and you can decide that this is something I actually want to learn. For me, it had a completely new definition of learning.

• 52:39Chase Jarvis?

  Like, I was able to go through school and like, quote, learn, get decent grades and, you know, do what I was supposed to do, check the boxes. But it wasn't until like deciding that I wanted to learn photography that my mind went to a completely different like, I don't know if, if anyone, I, I went to college and I remember there would be like 29 year old or 36 year old people in the class and they would always have read all the stuff. They were super prepared and they pissed me off so much. You're like, you're making all of us look bad. And it's because they were there because they really, really, really wanted to know about, you know, ancient Greek mythology or whatever. And I was there because I was in school.

• 53:19Rich Roll?

  Or they're just brown nosers.

• 53:20Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. It's quite a possible outcome. But the point is when, you know, you start to, to put a lens of lifelong learning on something that you actually care about is really, it's a cool way of looking at the world. And I think you, you can unpack learning in a different sense.

• 53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's when the lights go on.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  Many, I don't want to say most, but many professional photographers of your, of your caliber malign the advent of digital photography and the democratization of this art form. But you, all the way from the beginning, have celebrated it. So I'm interested in how you think about that as somebody who learned in a very tactile analog way. Now you just pick up your iPhone, you can take 10,000, you know, snaps of the same thing and just pick the one that's good and you don't really learn. You're not really learning about what you're doing. You're playing a game of chance and luck as much as anything else. So. How do you think about all of that?

• 54:22Chase Jarvis?

  Well, I think about the process of learning slowly and painfully and focusing your attention,

• 54:28Chase Jarvis?

  largely in the way we just talked about, it's useful.

• 54:32Chase Jarvis?

  I, it's true, I did look at digital photography as a mechanism to subvert the pain that I had experienced. And as much as the technology at the time was being debated, like, oh, is this going to be as good? Or, you know, it was just like such a tired conversation, two weeks into having it, when the first digital cameras started to come out, that I was, you know, that I was able to sort of see around the corner a little bit and think, okay, let's take this to its logical connection, or logical conclusion, that cameras are going to be really good, whether it's two years from now, or 10 years, or whatever. And let's, what's this thing called the internet? Okay, information is going to move, and it's going to move a lot more quickly. Like, I literally had to go

• 55:13Chase Jarvis?

  check out books from the library on the history of photography, read them, and then go take, you know, 36 exposures, and then develop, drop it off at the place to be developed, or develop it in my bathroom, my poor wife, that I turned into a darkroom.

• 55:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Chase Jarvis?

  Like,

• 55:29Rich Roll?

  Before you start breaking into that darkroom.

• 55:31Chase Jarvis?

  Oh, yeah, we'll have to go there for a second. I'm a felon.

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  What's the statute of limitations on that?

• 55:39Chase Jarvis?

  I don't know. I hope they don't, I hope they don't come after me.

• 55:41Rich Roll?

  Anyway, go ahead.

• 55:42Chase Jarvis?

  And, and so I selfishly was like, this is going to accelerate learning. And I am going to be able to take a picture, and then look at the back of the camera, and immediately know is this good, bad, or ugly, and repeat. And so, to me, it was an unlock. And you've got to remember, if you've made your life in this for the previous 20 years, and these new tools start to come out that threaten your existence, and then quote, anybody can be a photographer, what it created was a bunch of sort of acerbic, grumpy photographers, and I chronicle this in the book, that there was like a new school and the old school.

• 56:20Chase Jarvis?

  It, it, um, my end goal was just figuring it out. And so because it was beneficial, digital was beneficial to me figuring it out. And I saw where the universe was going. I just like, okay, look at, you can either put the brakes on or you can try and lean into this. And I just started celebrating it, which I turned out was, it turned out was very unpopular at the time. And so, I mean, I don't want to overdramatize it, but I literally had death threats. Like you're taking money out of my pocket, you young punk, and you put it on the table of photographers who don't deserve it and blah, blah, blah, just from sharing my experiences of trying to master digital

• 57:00Chase Jarvis?

  and, and learn photography in a way that other people hadn't because the technology didn't, didn't exist. So I ended up never assisting another photographer for a day in my life. The first time I ever got paid for my photography, it was substantial. I went from like zero to making an income and I realized, oh my gosh, this is actually possible. If I could do it once, all I need to do is like do it a couple more times and then I've actually got a thing. And I think that that was a, that both gave me perspective and underscored a really cool point that I think cements in the book. You know what? Nobody cares how you got there anymore. It's about getting there.

• 57:41Chase Jarvis?

  And the cool thing, we all, there's a million paths to get to wherever you are right now. And your path is just fine. All the trauma that you went through or that you didn't, all of the experience that you brought to the table or that you didn't, no one cares. You're at the table and, or if someone cares, it's temporary and then you move on.

• 58:03Rich Roll?

  That will fade.

• 58:03Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, that will fade. And so to, you know, this is where imposter syndrome comes from. Like I didn't earn it. I shouldn't be here. I, as an example, that my, when I arrived at my college, which was, you know, we had lost in the national championship, the division one national championship the year before. I'm like, how am I the only freshman on a scholarship at the number two school in the country for soccer? I'm clearly not supposed to be here. I'm here because there was a guy who in the class ahead of me was world-class and they just happened to see me when they saw him and oh, this is a new younger kid coming up. And like, I just told myself a whole set of stories of why I was supposed to be there. But you know what? There I was.

• 58:46Rich Roll?

  You were there.

• 58:47Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 58:47Rich Roll?

  And the same thing played out in your, your photography career. You did not, you didn't, you know, become an assistant to a famous photographer like most people do. You lep frog your way up. You hustled and you got a couple campaigns that, you know, probably

• 59:03Chase Jarvis?

  Probably didn't.

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  predated like your skill set at the time and you just, you, you made it until you made it, right? And, and you were able to establish yourself in a manner that was unconventional

• 59:13Chase Jarvis?

  Right.

• 59:13Rich Roll?

  for, for that field. But I think, you know, there's a couple of interesting things that happened in your career, which is, which are timing related in that, you know, you're, you're starting to develop your proficiency and your professionalism and at a time when the internet is starting to profligate and people are, are acclimating to this idea of free-flowing information. And rather than adhere to the paradigm of your profession, which is this is a black box and we don't share our secrets and that's how we, you know, maintain our stranglehold on this profession.

• 59:49Chase Jarvis?

  Right.

• 59:49Rich Roll?

  You go the opposite direction, pre YouTube, pre all of this stuff and start telling the secrets of the trade, which was not well received.

• 59:59Chase Jarvis?

  At all.

• 59:59Rich Roll?

  But ultimately garnered you like, you were getting like a million readers on your blog. I remember stumbling upon your blog around that time.

• 1:00:06Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  And you were doing something no one else was doing, which is basically taking people step by step through your process as a means of educating a whole new crop of young aspiring photographers, which really set the stage or prefaced what would come with Creative Life.

• 1:00:23Chase Jarvis?

  For sure. And you know what? I was terrified the whole time because I didn't do it right. I didn't do it the established way. I didn't do it. And it was only

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  You're honest with all of that.

• 1:00:33Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And that is to me, the cool thing. Cause wherever you are in your space right now, whoever's listening.

• 1:00:40Chase Jarvis?

  You're there. You're supposed to be there. That was your path. And the cool thing is the worlds of established paths and the paradigms on how we get there and that there is only one track that's largely being exploded, I would say to your benefit. And if you're looking at it from the perspective of this is to my demise that anyone can, you're in the wrong headspace.

• 1:01:02Rich Roll?

  Well, you're, yeah, you're, you're, you're looking at the world through the lens of a zero sum game.

• 1:01:06Chase Jarvis?

  Yep.

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  And that's at odds with the premise of this book, which is that creativity is not only abundant, it's infinite. And, and to explore it just creates more of it, which is an abundant perspective. It's, it's, it's an abundant mindset.

• 1:01:20Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And, you know, you characterize it accurately. I found myself maybe before I was supposed to be there at a place. And I was like, okay, I got there. And all the while I was battling the same head stuff that we all do. But somewhere in there was just enough, it was like, one click above, like bravery had one click above shame.

• 1:01:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Chase Jarvis?

  And, and it was just enough to keep going. And I guess I'm living proof that that's all you need.

• 1:01:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  So now, when you go on YouTube, I mean, there's just a billion instructional videos on every, you know, the most detailed, tiniest little aspects of not just photography, filmmaking, any creative pursuit.

• 1:02:11Chase Jarvis?

  We're using photography as the baseline, but it's anything.

• 1:02:13Rich Roll?

  Right. But when I, when I like, watch a Peter McKinnon video, for example, it's impossible for me, and I love what he's doing. I think he's brilliant and, and very engaging. But Peter McKinnon doesn't exist without the example that Chase Jarvis set. Like you created the foundation for the Peter McKinnons of the world to be able to do what they do.

• 1:02:33Chase Jarvis?

  Oh, that's a very, um, it's a very large and very-

• 1:02:40Rich Roll?

  But it was the seed, you know?

• 1:02:41Chase Jarvis?

  For sure.

• 1:02:42Rich Roll?

  I think, because, because it was, it was before YouTube even was a thing.

• 1:02:45Chase Jarvis?

  That's true. And even like-

• 1:02:49Chase Jarvis?

  Conceptualizing that is still like, oh geez. And I'm aware of it and you know, be like, oh, that's bullshit. Or even like

• 1:02:57Rich Roll?

  But in a, in a, in a proud, in a proud way, not in a

• 1:02:59Chase Jarvis?

  No, no, totally. But be also being sponsored as a photographer. That didn't exist. I brought sponsorship from action sports where I was a photographer. Watching athletes get free gear and then start to be paid a living wage. And I'm like, wait a minute, why can't I apply that here? And I remember the first time I started like pushing on this with the camera manufacturers and they're like, and I'm like, I see, you know, famous photographer X on the back of a magazine posing with a Canon camera. And then Canon would reach out or Nikon would reach out and say, hey, we see the work you're doing. We'd love to. And I'm like, okay, cool. Like, yeah, I'm willing to do that. And it's like, what do I get? Oh, you, what do you mean? What do you get? You get to pose with a camera on the back of a, on a thing. And I'm like,

• 1:03:39Rich Roll?

  We're giving you exposure.

• 1:03:41Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And I'm like, I got a million person army over my shoulder here. I think I can actually make an impact on what it is you're doing. And, you know, of course, when anytime you're ahead of the paradigm, you, the people start throwing rocks. And, you know, without a need to unpack all that, the same, as you mentioned about just sharing what was in, you know, the black box or whatever was unconventional. And it would become normalized over time to me in a very positive way. Like, information wants to be free and now we take it for granted. So it's really hard to uncork that and look backwards. The same is true for mobile photography. Like, my industry threw tons of rocks at me when I was saying this.

• 1:04:24Chase Jarvis?

  One megapixel camera was actually more interesting than my $100,000 digital Hasselblad.

• 1:04:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:29Chase Jarvis?

  And, you know, that was blasphemous, completely blasphemous. And then I was like, well, wait a minute. Instead of like fighting over the same sized pie, let's make the bigger pie with, you know, billions of photographers rather than just 20 million of us toiling in the corner. Trying to protect a small thing that's going to get out of the cage anyway. Let's, you know, and obviously, again, not popular, but

• 1:04:50Chase Jarvis?

  To me, that was just a pattern that I continue to see unfolding today in different areas of culture. Like, let's go there and let's blow this up, see if we could reinvent it in whatever image we want, let's try it.

• 1:05:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Respect for this snapshot. You know, I can't remember exactly what you said, but you put it really beautifully. Something along the lines of, you know, we can all appreciate the high art that is what is created with that Hasselblad and a lot of production value. But let's not overlook the beauty and the artistry and the authenticity that comes with the, you know, sort of downgraded snapshot of everyday life taken by somebody who's not a professional, that there is something truly valuable about that. And to the extent that now the internet is making that widely available, that's something to be celebrated and respected as a legitimate art form.

• 1:05:48Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, rather than the other way around. And again, what is it, I hang on the Bezos quote because it makes me feel better. Being willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time is sometimes required to make your way in the world. And, you know, with all these things that we're talking about here, and in photography in particular, we're using these as, again, this is sort of a metaphor, but the same is true for everybody in all their different areas of life. Like, I get, I bet you were misunderstood as a fill in the blank when you were in a band in high school and you had long hair, what you really

• 1:06:29Chase Jarvis?

  wanted was X and you were really getting Y. And so, again, in the particular lies the universal, I'm talking about my story right here. But, you know, I want, I believe that everybody can see themselves in this story, the part of being misunderstood and starting to, you know, breaking something open, even if it was just your relationship with your parents, or, or, or whatever. So, yeah, the, whether it's sponsorship in photography or learning, you know, teaching creativity on the internet.

• 1:06:59Chase Jarvis?

  Or getting people to value, you know, doing a gallery show where people could actually value the snapshot. That was a fun little, I did a show in the, in the Ace Hotel lobby, where I invited 10,000 photographers from all over the world to submit images. And I hung a fresh show every day for 30 days, using those images. And it was in, you know, and, and it attracted the curators from the Met and the MoMA, and they all came by to see this thing, because it was totally absurd, and yet really, really cool. And I remember there's a woman, who was the curator at the Met at the time for photography, Mia Feynman was her name. She's like, oh, I hear there's some really famous photographers hanging. And it was true. Some of the best photographers in the world had submitted images. Also true,

• 1:07:44Chase Jarvis?

  dogs had submitted images, and five-year-old kids had submitted images. And I hung them right next to each other.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  But that's so beautifully subversive, and, and really is your version of the people that influenced you from Warhol to Basquiat. Like, these are people who, you know, you've talked about this, were very meta in making art about art, in the way that kind of Banksy is most famously doing right now, making a statement about the art world through that kind of expression.

• 1:08:13Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. So it was fun. And, you know, my answer to her was, she's like, I hear, which, could you point out some of the, and I was like, you're the curator from the Met, why don't you tell me?

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  Put it on her, yes.

• 1:08:24Chase Jarvis?

  And it was, it actually started a nice-

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  I'm sure that got a scowl from-

• 1:08:29Chase Jarvis?

  It was, it actually was a little bit of a light bulb, and it actually created a friendship. We, we had lunch the next day.

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  That's the conversation, right?

• 1:08:36Chase Jarvis?

  Totally, yeah.

• 1:08:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:37Chase Jarvis?

  And it just underscores the point of like, doesn't matter how they got there, they were there. And which is true for all of us. Like, I don't know how you got to where you are.

• 1:08:46Rich Roll?

  In this case, you're the arbiter, you're making the decision about what's going up and what's not. But-

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  But it begs the question of like, who gets to make the decision about what is art and what isn't?

• 1:08:59Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And, you know, if you tie it back to, you know, the themes that we're exploring here in the book, it's like, it doesn't matter how you got there, you know, just claim, claim who you are, where you are, what you are, and move forward.

• 1:09:16Rich Roll?

  Right. So you sell your first photo, 94, I think, you're working in, you know, in the ski shop.

• 1:09:24Chase Jarvis?

  You've done your research.

• 1:09:25Rich Roll?

  Snapped a, snapped an awesome photo for 500 bucks and a pair of skis. And this, you know, fast forwarding all the way to, you know, commanding massive budgets and shooting with, you know, Fortune 100 companies, Nike, you know, everybody, basically Red Bull.

• 1:09:40Chase Jarvis?

  Apple, yeah.

• 1:09:41Rich Roll?

  Apple, yeah, we want to, I want to talk about that, too. One of the things that, that is kind of a hallmark of how you've established your career was to really value yourself, right? And I think we're in this disposable economy now where I don't think creativity is adequately, let alone financially appreciated. We think that, well, he took a picture, I should be able to use it wherever I want, however I want. And, and we don't think of the inherent value of, of what's entailed here. And you're somebody who's always, you know, been very deliberate in making sure that you established your own value and, and used your experience as a voice piece to encourage other people to do the same.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  And so the question that I have about that is how do you square that with kind of the, the Gary Vee message of just go out there and like, do a ton of stuff for free, like say yes to everything, you know, get in with, you know, people who can advance your career and just be a team player. Like, I think there's wisdom in both of those, but somehow you got to find a mix that works where you're still valuing your input while also trying to build your pedigree.

• 1:10:56Chase Jarvis?

  Free or cheap, never, never in between.

• 1:10:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Chase Jarvis?

  Like having-

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  That's the Seth Godin thing.

• 1:11:02Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  What he always says about public speaking, it's either full fare or free.

• 1:11:06Chase Jarvis?

  Great. I didn't know Seth had said that. He's a dear friend. I was just talking to him the other day. Great guy. We're going to do a thing in New York together on the 24th, when the book drops.

• 1:11:16Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, free or full price. And I think free is fine because free gets you portfolio, connections, experience. And those are valuable things. But what's the worst is like, hey, what's your rate? $5,000. I have 80 bucks. Okay. That's the worst because then you've, you know, you've then taken what you've posted as your value and burned it versus saying, I'm gonna do this because I'm gonna get something out of it. And here's my requirement. I will make the creative decisions. And if you don't like it, you can't use it, or whatever the paradigm that you establish for your work is. So I think they're reconcilable. I don't think it's either, you know, value yourself or don't.

• 1:11:57Chase Jarvis?

  I think it's okay to find other aspects of value to place on you and your work besides money.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think what happens with a lot of young people is they, they, they do end up, you know, doing a lot of free stuff as they should as they're learning. But they don't then also learn the skill of, of knowing when to say, okay, now's the time.

• 1:12:22Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Rich Roll?

  Pay me. Or they start at these very micro amounts and they're afraid. They don't want to alienate anybody or, or like piss anyone off. And so they end up toiling, you know, in this netherworld where, where the work isn't getting valued, even though the quality of it is, is would substantiate that.

• 1:12:41Chase Jarvis?

  Totally true. And that is a learned skill. And the only way you learn is through practice. And this is why I advocate action over intellect. Like if you're sitting around trying to figure this out and make the perfect chess move, like, that's not how it happens. You make a lot of little imperfect moves. You learn a little bit of a lesson and then you move on just trying to make the same mistake more than, you know, one or two times. Ideally, one. But it's the action, it's the doing that actually creates the learning. It's very hard to, and it's, it's great to get information from the internet or your mentor or whomever. But

• 1:13:22Chase Jarvis?

  Learning, like actually doing that part is incredibly valuable. So, you know, again, I think it is reconcilable. The, you can still value yourself and you can still work for free. And I do believe in connections and, and I would, you know, choose to use the word community. You're building a community of people who are there to teach you, to learn from you, to be supportive and for you to support. And that's all valuable. And I think that's something that's wildly overlooked in, you know, talk about it specifically through creativity.

• 1:13:55Rich Roll?

  A whole section of your book.

• 1:13:56Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, it's one, it's a quarter of the book is about the, the benefits of community and how it's wildly overlooked as key to the success in anything. Even if it's, you're a solo artist or whatever, like whole, sorry, there's a whole slew of people who make this possible, this experience that you have created possible. So, and, and I, you know, to keep that thread and maybe put a, put a period at the end of it. I think it's reconcilable. I think that experience is the only way you can navigate it. And I understand why you'd want to think about it before you entered it, which I encourage you to do. But in the end, you can't actually be paralyzed. If you're just so precious that you're not willing to do anything for free and you're getting no work,

• 1:14:41Chase Jarvis?

  that should be, that should be a sign.

• 1:14:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:44Chase Jarvis?

  And again, extrapolate this to away from photography to anything that you want to move into. That's the, that's the big conundrum, right? It's like, how do I start something in a world where I have no experience?

• 1:14:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:14:56Chase Jarvis?

  It's whether it's get a job or shift gears, or you want to go move to a new career, or like, how do I start when no one will hire me?

• 1:15:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I think the, the, this subject of preciousness is one that, that doesn't get enough attention or discourse. Like when you don't have a tremendous amount of experience, but you're overly precious about what you're doing, then you tend to overvalue yourself and you misstep, right? Cause you're not, you're not, you're not objectively judging the, the business landscape.

• 1:15:27Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Rich Roll?

  And, and one of the things you talk about in the book is like not being, like just, just make the next thing. Just keep moving on, just keep moving on. Like I have a friend who's this very successful screenwriter. And his whole thing is like, as soon as you finish a script, like it's very easy. You know, we're in Hollywood here. I know a lot of people that are in this world like they get, they're so precious about their thing and they can't move on to the next thing and they're just waiting to hear if it sells or you know, they get very caught up in all these externalities that they have no control over. So his thing is like, you just immediately start the next thing. So you're immersed in the next creative project and you're divorcing yourself very mindfully and purposefully from the results of your creative output.

• 1:16:06Chase Jarvis?

  Yep. The judgment ends up being a really toxic aspect of, of any creative output. And I do mean creative with a capital C. Like, you know, we, we start to judge too soon. Warhol had it great. Like when everyone else is busy judging your work, you go back to making the next thing.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 1:16:22Chase Jarvis?

  Let them judge it.

• 1:16:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:23Chase Jarvis?

  You move on.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  Well, on the subject of, of community building, I want to get to that because that, that is kind of an exclamation point in this second act break. That is the Chase Jarvis movie. You basically realize all of your dreams. You go from this fledgling, you know, photographer, working in a ski shop to working with these huge brands and, and like I said earlier, commanding these huge budgets and you know, like helicopters and the, you know, the craziest stuff you can imagine. Like this is your dream realized. Like you have everything that you ever aspired to, to have. You are as successful, probably beyond what you could have ever predicted for yourself.

• 1:17:05Chase Jarvis?

  Way, way, way beyond.

• 1:17:05Rich Roll?

  And then it took this other tragedy, which you, you touched on, this avalanche, to really recalibrate how it was that you were living. So maybe dig a little bit deeper into that.

• 1:17:17Chase Jarvis?

  What, uh, what I've come to know is that I feel like there's two arcs in a life. There's an arc where you're accumulating wisdom, knowledge, friends, connections, perspectives. And at some point, most of us know not what or when.

• 1:17:38Chase Jarvis?

  There is a shift. I think this is really a beautiful shift, if it's possible, to like, okay, I have enough, my fear sense, my, my biology, I can override my biology and start to think in terms beyond just me. And that is one thing as a, whether, you know, parents probably understand that, or people who used to be a one woman shop, and now you have many employees, or like, whatever the analogy or the experience is, there's a some part, you're like, wait a minute. And again, we can choose that, or things in life can choose it for us. And if you're, if you're sort of ignoring it, then you're going to get a lesson. And my lesson was, as it turns out, this avalanche.

• 1:18:22Chase Jarvis?

  And despite living, as you said, the, the, what I had carved out as my dream,

• 1:18:29Chase Jarvis?

  it's sort of like, as soon as you have something, when you don't have anything, you got nothing to lose. And then when you have something, you have everything to lose. You have a life, you have community, you have resources, money, reputation, all these things. And so this sort of fear instinct, survival mechanism, biology, whatever you want to call it, kicks in. And then you stay in that mode versus this sort of open mode that I'm, you know, trying to be in, in just being aware of our own mortality and creativity and all this stuff. And so in my universe, I got caught in this bad avalanche and somehow got out.

• 1:19:09Chase Jarvis?

  And I remember didn't sleep, maybe like 15 minutes the next night, or that, that night. And it was about just like really calling everything into question. And it sounds a little bit too movie scripty, but like, straight up, that's how it went down. And I, I just did an interview with, on my podcast with a guy named Ben, who was one of the Nike athletes that I was actually filming when it happened.

• 1:19:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. No one was hurt, by the way, right?

• 1:19:35Chase Jarvis?

  Correct, correct. Yeah, you know, minor, minor, everybody, everybody got away. And

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  Alaska.

• 1:19:42Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, Alaska. It was massive. I'm talking like entire mountain face ripped off, like enough snow to fill up multiple football fields 50 feet deep. Like, this is not a thing you walk away from. And I remember talking to Ben and we literally never talked about it. Like when I was reunited with the, the rest of the, the athletes and the guides and stuff at the bottom, we just flew off and like shut, you know, is there is skiing uncharted stuff in Alaska. This is like where all the, the films that you see are made and all the best advertisements and whatnot. And we like, we, I, there's a, actually we have the moment of me being caught in the avalanche on film. And then the person who's filming that, like they go, oh gee, and they drop the camera and they run. And it's just, it's very dramatic scene.

• 1:20:27Chase Jarvis?

  And then the next piece of footage is the person goes and picks up the camera. And you know, this is some time later because I whatever escaped. And, and then I reunited with the group and I skipped with the group and the camera's running on me. And they just say, whoa. And I'm like, do not tell my wife about that. Just, but that is literally the extent that we talked about it.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, in the moment, it's so, it was so overwhelming that you have to minimize.

• 1:20:51Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And so fast forward to that night and honestly, the next several weeks, but that night in particular, like, what am I doing? It's sort of like, as soon as you, you get there, you think that you're, it's like a false summit. You see a summit, if you're a climber, you, okay, cool. And you crest the mountain and you're like, only to realize that this is the first summit. And there's a whole nother mountain behind that. And to me, that was, um, deciding to try and paint a bigger picture of what was possible for my experience. And that was trying to help other people. I had just been given so many gifts or, or earned so many gifts through that journey that I'd been on. And I was like, wow, this is a thing that like, what if we could like, uh,

• 1:21:37Chase Jarvis?

  reproduce this and give this gift to other people? What's the, you know, the message? So I, that, that is in part what, uh, inspired me to do the, the iPhone app. That was the first iPhone app that shared photos to social networks. It was like, I started creating tools and platforms for other people to try and tap into what I had, had the chance of experiencing.

• 1:21:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, it wasn't, it wasn't a complete departure because you had been sharing, you've been blogging, you've been transparent about this journey all along, but it was more in epiphany about how to contribute at scale.

• 1:22:08Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Rich Roll?

  Right? So you create, you gotta tell this story. You, you create this iPhone app. Best camera. I know it's painful, dude, but a lot of people haven't heard it.

• 1:22:18Chase Jarvis?

  Sure.

• 1:22:20Rich Roll?

  Best Camera predates Instagram, but in many ways extremely similar to the earlier versions of Instagram. You upload a photo, there's filters, a whole scroll, you could scroll through all the filters at the bottom.

• 1:22:34Chase Jarvis?

  We created all those paradigms.

• 1:22:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it becomes the, it becomes the app of the year. It's getting written about on all the tech blogs.

• 1:22:44Chase Jarvis?

  New York Times.

• 1:22:45Rich Roll?

  The New York Times covers it. This is what, you know, the people who work at Apple are using and your position.

• 1:22:51Chase Jarvis?

  Steve Jobs, Phil Schiller, all those people quoting it, talking about it. They used the, the name of the app was Best Camera.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:57Chase Jarvis?

  After a phrase I popularized, the best camera is the one that's with you. Apple start, I have a trademark to that. Apple starts using it in their advertising.

• 1:23:04Rich Roll?

  That's part of the modern vernacular now. A lot of people say, you know, the best camera is the one that, some version of that.

• 1:23:08Chase Jarvis?

  Trademarked. Never enforced it, but be careful.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  Go ahead. No, you tell the story. Why am I telling the story?

• 1:23:16Chase Jarvis?

  Cause you're, it's, I love hearing it through your, your experience. You, you got it right. The, I think the shortest version is just created the, the first app that allowed you to take a picture, add a cool effect that we called filters, which is a term from photography. And it was the same thing. We basically decided that, oh, wouldn't it be cool if there was like a set of filters at the bottom of the app that were, it was loosely based on the dock concept of an Apple operating system that didn't exist. It used to be like a tile across all, some of the other apps had it.

• 1:23:49Rich Roll?

  Of course, now it's ubiquitous.

• 1:23:50Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, totally. And, but again, everything has a, is an origin. And then you could just, you know, press one button and submit it to as many social networks as you wanted at one time. Or there was a community at the best camera, which was the first photo feed, like the live photo feed in an app. And then just to, for context, like I remember when I originally submitted it, you know, Apple was interesting, is interested in, in the app and I was developing it and they knew about it. And I had done, I had launched some products for them. I'd, I'd done some work in the photography universe. Can't really talk about it because you get sniped sometime if I talk about it. But, and so they knew about this app and.

• 1:24:35Chase Jarvis?

  They said, no, you can't do this. What do you mean you can't do this? It's like, oh, we can't have a photo feed. The concept of just photos that you post and then are in a feed. That's just not something that we can do because, you know, we can't validate the image or, you know, might violate community or, you know, our policies or whatnot. So had to like, this is how early it was, had to work with them to literally validate the concept of a feed of photos.

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:24:59Chase Jarvis?

  Without, yeah. And, and again, this is something people don't understand how it wasn't all that long ago.

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Chase Jarvis?

  You know, because it's so ubiquitous now, but.

• 1:25:07Rich Roll?

  This is 2009?

• 1:25:08Chase Jarvis?

  2009, yes. Yeah. So the, to, to cut to the chase, bum, bum, bum.

• 1:25:15Chase Jarvis?

  Put the thing out in September that year. It went straight to number one within a matter of days and lived there for a long time. As you mentioned, we came back with a year and through a handful of weird, what I would call esoteric mistakes or missteps that were in the contract. Some of it was with, I had an external partner develop the app. I told them what I wanted. They built it. We massaged it and, and in that era, it was really hard to have an account that would allow you to submit software to the app store. Even getting the account, you didn't know how long it would take. Would it be validated? What, you know, it was like, it was a black box also because it was just so new and there were still hundreds of thousands of apps.

• 1:25:54Chase Jarvis?

  But so rather than me having my own account, I just used the developer's account and come to find out that that actually means that, so even though contractually I own the code, it was a work for hire. If I can't touch the code, I can't move the code. I don't have access to the code.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  Once it's on their account, it can't be transferred over.

• 1:26:12Chase Jarvis?

  Right. And now there are all those things are transferable, but none of that was true. So we had an app, sorry, we had a contract that stipulated that there would be 13, I think it was 13 new releases over the course of the next year. One right away if we found bugs or whatever, and then one a month for the next year because we thought that that's how long it was going to take to, they developed the app for free on the backend of, it was a 70 30 revenue split. And then when they had been paid back, it would flip 70 30 to me. Well, we had figured out that it was going to take about a year on average to pay us back. And we were paid back in six days or they were paid back in six days.

• 1:26:50Rich Roll?

  And then when that revenue share flipped, when then suddenly they're only getting 30.

• 1:26:55Chase Jarvis?

  Their desire to.

• 1:26:56Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:26:57Chase Jarvis?

  Their desire to.

• 1:26:58Rich Roll?

  And it's important, like it's still like, it seems now, looking through the lens of 2019. Well, there's still a lot of money to be made at 30%, but back then, that's not the perception of apps. These things come and go.

• 1:27:11Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:11Rich Roll?

  They have a very short shelf life. You just, it's a cash grab and you move on.

• 1:27:15Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And that was the bear down. I'm sitting there saying, no, you don't get it. These are going to be huge, multi-billion dollar companies. This is the future of software development. It's decentralized and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And of course it falls on deaf ears. So in about that time, when the app is now sort of, it's full blown, just peaking and starting to crest. And there's not a lot of updates coming up because rather than, you know, do add a friend and follow geography and all the things that we had specked out together, you can't like predict what's going to be in a software release nine months from now. And that'd be a bad contract, right? Cause you're locked in. So they would do things like, um, release it in French. That was what how they got, they managed to navigate the contract.

• 1:27:59Rich Roll?

  So they were still in alignment with the contract, but not the spirit.

• 1:28:03Chase Jarvis?

  For sure. And without going into the weeds any further than we've already gone, that obviously creates a space where you're not innovating anymore. And despite you're the, you're the, you know, number one app in the app store, um, that creates a place. So there was an app called Bourbon.

• 1:28:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's, there's a guy called Kevin.

• 1:28:20Chase Jarvis?

  Kevin Sishtam.

• 1:28:21Rich Roll?

  Hold up in an office.

• 1:28:22Chase Jarvis?

  In San Francisco.

• 1:28:23Rich Roll?

  Studying what you've created.

• 1:28:24Chase Jarvis?

  Yep. And there used to be a, a, a video on the internet where Robert Scoble was interviewing him and says, isn't this just best camera? He's like, oh yeah, well, we've looked at, you know, a lot of the apps. And, and obviously Kevin's an amazing business person. He created a billion dollar company in just a matter of months. Short story long, it is. They threw 50 million bucks at it, supplanted it and, you know, just started innovating and doing great work. And meanwhile, I didn't have access to the code. I was roughly speaking paralyzed, both conceptually, and I didn't have any way of managing code that I couldn't put my fingers on. And we just got smoked. And then, of course, when Instagram sells for a billion dollars a year later, let's just say my phone was ringing.

• 1:29:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would imagine.

• 1:29:09Chase Jarvis?

  Bro, too bad.

• 1:29:10Rich Roll?

  That was a challenging period.

• 1:29:12Chase Jarvis?

  Tough. Yeah, honestly, it took me and I was off Instagram for then, I think, almost five years.

• 1:29:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:29:19Chase Jarvis?

  Just because my lawyers wanted to preserve the right to sue because I was damaged and, you know, I'm like, just got caught it up.

• 1:29:24Rich Roll?

  You can't establish damages if you're on Instagram.

• 1:29:27Chase Jarvis?

  Totally. And it's just like lawyer stuff. And at some point, I was just like, this is useless. So after a lot of litigation, I actually did get the code back after like a number of years. And the company was purchased by Deloitte partway through this process that I had contracted. So then it wasn't just me against this other contractor. It was like me against Deloitte, which is unpleasant. So, you know, again.

• 1:29:48Rich Roll?

  So you couldn't even do any kind of exit out of that?

• 1:29:51Chase Jarvis?

  No, it just, I got a zero.

• 1:29:53Rich Roll?

  Right. That's a.

• 1:29:56Chase Jarvis?

  Well, and to be fair, there like, there is another chapter, which is not well documented. This is story is very well documented on the internet.

• 1:30:02Rich Roll?

  You did a very long blog post about it and a video. I'll link it up in the show notes.

• 1:30:06Chase Jarvis?

  And the.

• 1:30:10Rich Roll?

  And it's in the book.

• 1:30:11Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. What's, I did get the code back and I did sort of like, throw some cycles at it and revived it. And I did have an opportunity to sell it to some other companies. But at that point, it was just like, it was still like never work again money, but my ego was so smashed. And my soul was like, no, I think I'd rather take it's sort of like for your full price. Taking my own advice, which I would regret now. It'd be nice to not have to work, but.

• 1:30:40Chase Jarvis?

  I just leveraged everything that I had learned in that experience from not having venture capital, being a cap table of one and a team of just a small, hardworking team that I'll never forget at my photo studio, who really put the zhuzh into this and just leveraged it into CreativeLive. So I learned a lot of lessons along the way.

• 1:30:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it all went into the hopper. It goes back to the dominoes all lining up. Like, would CreativeLive had occurred? Well, listen, if you'd become Instagram, you're done.

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  But it provided the fuel and the experience that birthed this amazing platform that you're now running. So tell people what CreativeLive is for those that don't know.

• 1:31:21Chase Jarvis?

  Sure, happy to do it. CreativeLive is a platform, largest platform focused specifically for creators and entrepreneurs. It's where, you know, 10 million people have gone to learn photography, design, filmmaking, entrepreneurship. It has the Pulitzer Prize winners, New York Times bestsellers, the best of the best in each best of the best in each of those disciplines. And there's, we've given away billions and billions of minutes of free video. There's always something free playing. You can go learn about any of those things from those types of people. And there's also a subscription. And if you want to buy an individual class, you can go there to learn. So it was, yeah, it definitely came out of the ashes of my

• 1:32:01Chase Jarvis?

  best camera experience. And today, it affects way more people than best camera ever did. Not unfortunately than Instagram. But no, it's, you know, we're basically a decade in now. And it's cool. It's cool. I've gotten, I've gotten a lot out of it personally, just to be on the journey. And I love to see that it's impacted a lot of people. And that's the part that I wish I could share. And I wish I could package it up and put it in the book. And I struggled. I tried a bunch of different ways to. You know, in part, that's what made me want to write the book, honestly, because, you know, I think about being the second grader and being told that I wasn't really shouldn't pay

• 1:32:44Chase Jarvis?

  attention to this creativity stuff, and then figuring it out in a very imperfect, messy, crappy way, and then starting to acknowledge that creativity, building a living and a life for myself, then starting, basically becoming the creator that I was denied. I look at that as refusing to betray myself. So acknowledging that, then starting to develop tools for creators, like the iPhone app, or first of all, I guess, the community around creativity and the photography community, and then tools like the iPhone app, and then platform for learning. You can see this like progression a little bit, and you know, now there's a platform there. And what was missing in all this is the why. Like, why is this

• 1:33:29Chase Jarvis?

  valuable? Is it just for photographers? Is it? And that was what has been sort of lingering for me for 10 years is, wait a minute, I have come to know creativity is this ubiquitous, incredibly powerful force, arguably like creativity and love are the things that are that are human beings' superpowers. And yet, there's the, you know, we can talk about love, and I think if I say love is a superpower of human beings, no one goes like, hmm, everyone go, yeah, I guess you're right. And yet, creativity has been sort of left out of that conversation. So for me, you know, writing the book was a little bit about, I need to sort of put my arms around this whole process. It's the best work I've ever done, and it's in a package that I didn't want to write a book. I'll just, I wanted to make an internet

• 1:34:12Chase Jarvis?

  video and call it good, but it wasn't the right format.

• 1:34:16Rich Roll?

  How did it come about then?

• 1:34:19Chase Jarvis?

  In a very reluctant manner.

• 1:34:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22Chase Jarvis?

  I am a visual artist. I am fast at that, and it's natural to me. And I have written a thousand blog posts on my blog, you know, in graduate school.

• 1:34:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're a graduate, I mean, you're a graduate student in philosophy. You're no stranger to writing.

• 1:34:36Chase Jarvis?

  Sure. But when it comes, it comes to.

• 1:34:41Chase Jarvis?

  Deciding to write a book, I was an unwilling, unwitting author. But I knew it had to be a book because of the potential, the vehicle, it's the right package to get into popular culture. Because if there are people who identify as creators who are listening to this, they're like, right on dude, like this is representing my tribe, my identity, I get it, go. There's a whole other cross section of the universe that I call creative curious. People who are stringent, like I'm, there's no way I'm not creative, I don't want to be, I don't want art, I want fill in the blank, I don't know what you want if you don't want that. But there's a huge population of people who I think can, their lives can be transformed. And even for the creators, like if you start to get out of the creativity, the small c,

• 1:35:26Chase Jarvis?

  like art, and you get into like, oh wow, this is actually an architecture for life. That needed to be in a book, that's not an internet video.

• 1:35:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Chase Jarvis?

  And so I have an amazing-

• 1:35:37Rich Roll?

  This is a great creative horizon for you though, right? Like tackle something like this is new.

• 1:35:42Chase Jarvis?

  Totally, and it was my own medicine, big time.

• 1:35:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:46Chase Jarvis?

  Like here's-

• 1:35:47Rich Roll?

  You had to rely on, on the book that you were writing that was not yet written in order to write the book.

• 1:35:52Chase Jarvis?

  So many times, I literally had to go back-

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Like an Ouroboros.

• 1:35:54Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, I had to go back, like I just see page 37, or see this sticky note on the corner of my desk that I wrote a year ago.

• 1:36:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:01Chase Jarvis?

  That said this one thing, and you're like, God, I gotta take my own advice. So it was both a beautiful, incredibly painful, but also beautiful experience to feel the process actually work.

• 1:36:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:12Chase Jarvis?

  And it was a little bit of a litmus test while you're doing it, it's sort of like doing your subtraction to check your addition, or whatever, like writing a book about creativity and being neck deep in it, and having to just continually extract yourself, go look at the rules that you'd set out in the previous chapter, follow them, and that it worked, I think is in part a testament. But it was also really humbling, and I think that's, you know, I've talked a lot in this conversation about the cultural shoulds and inputs from all the people that you love, and learning to navigate those. It's also really important to know that A, those never go away, but nor do a lot of

• 1:36:52Chase Jarvis?

  the fears around creativity and the struggles and that it never becomes just this easy, greasy path, which I hope it doesn't turn anyone off because that's where the best

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  stuff is. I think it's super important to point that out. Somebody who's, who is as creatively productive as you are to acknowledge that you still struggle with that, I think gives people encouragement and permission to feel like they can then be included.

• 1:37:21Chase Jarvis?

  Good. Well, yeah, I lived it. And that's what these dark circles under my eyes are from. And there's that torture between when, you know, you send it off to the publisher and when you get to start talking about it. And I'm, you know, so I'm over the moon to be sharing this with you and, and your community here. Long appreciated it. And, you know, we've had a lot of inspiring discussions. You've been on my show and like, I just, I love the approach and to be able to be, I'm like, right now, I'm using my own medicine to, to be creating the, the first experience or the first impression of this book on the world. So also clearly struggling, looking for words, not knowing what I'm talking about. But

• 1:38:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think you've, you've said it all in the book and I think it's beautiful. And then another, another aspect of it that I want to address is another, another myth

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  of conventional wisdom, which is that creativity and financial wellbeing are mutually exclusive. Like a huge part of your adventure isn't just becoming creatively literate, it's becoming a successful business person and entrepreneur and learning how to grow into this idea that these two worlds can, are not mutually exclusive and can coincide and, and support each other.

• 1:38:48Chase Jarvis?

  And I will get an endless array of shit for putting those two sentences or those two words in the same book, creativity and money. And that's, you know,

• 1:38:58Rich Roll?

  But they, they don't, they, they can't exist without each other.

• 1:39:01Chase Jarvis?

  Bingo. Okay. So this is, you opened with some of your favorite books, you know, The War of Art, um, Artist's Way, like be damned if they talk about sort of money and those things because it's so pure, it's art. And to me, that was the thing that I needed to put in the book was this, you know, there's one section called the big three and one of the big three is the, is the, is money. And it either comes in, in like, oh, you'd need some money to get started, or you, at some point, if you do this, someone will say, I like your work, or, and you just have to have an opinion on it. And I'm, um, I'm, part of the mission is to dispel this idea, this toxic myth of the starving artist, which as it turns out, just comes back from this, you know, the period in the early part of

• 1:39:46Chase Jarvis?

  the last century where these French people were hanging out. It's basically La Boheme, the musical. Um, you get Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre hanging out at this Café Le Dume Go and they, starving artists, they, they hang pride on this because it's how they identify and, and just comes to find out that's a really toxic myth because it's the reason that so many of us are not hearing how powerful creativity is until now, because there is a myth of the starving artist and who wants to pursue art when you realize that you're going to starve. And sadly, it's stuck, right? It's, this is a powerful vision that we are narrative based creatures, you know, we learn through story and that

• 1:40:28Chase Jarvis?

  sad, toxic story has been, you know, responsible for uncorking many a creative life because of the woods and the shoulds and the, and understandably, like, do your parents want you to be starving? No. If they hear this myth, they, and I'm, I'm oversimplifying it, but the reality is that creativity and money, creativity is also, you can tell this to whoever's telling you otherwise, it is the, it is a vehicle for creating the most impressive, you know, opportunities for access to wealth that the world knows. The same, we were just, you know, joking about Kevin Systrom and Instagram.

• 1:41:10Chase Jarvis?

  Dude created a billion dollar company that had either nine or 13 people in it.

• 1:41:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:41:15Chase Jarvis?

  And did it in two years. It's insane. So, you know, and that's a wildly creative

• 1:41:23Chase Jarvis?

  experience that they went through in order to to pull that off. So I like to marry those things in an unpleasant, messy way and just, you know, we can talk about it. But that's they they they do have to be in relationship to one another. If you're gonna move through an actual life.

• 1:41:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, art doesn't exist without commerce. And and with that, there is, there is a healthy tension also because, you know, look, if you look at the movie business, like there's the artistic vision of the filmmakers and there's what the marketplace will tolerate. And those two, the the tension that exists between those two things sometimes produces a work of great genius, depending upon the people involved, or it craters the whole thing and turns it into a disaster. You know, and and you never know what you're gonna get. Nobody goes into making a movie thinking they're gonna make a bad movie.

• 1:42:20Chase Jarvis?

  Totally.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  But how you balance that tension and navigate the vicissitudes of commerce with respect to how it informs or does not inform art ultimately is, you know, an essential discussion and component of any of any creation.

• 1:42:36Chase Jarvis?

  So true. And I like that little move that you made there at the end of that phrase was like at any creation. Because we're talking about art and commerce, but the same thing is true with life, right? When you're creating something, you can create it. Money can be part of what you desire because you're trying to create the ability to sustain the thing you're doing. And there's nothing wrong with that, whether that's baking a cake, making a family, writing code, whatever the thing that you're doing, whatever you're engaged in. And that should be okay. Like money is not a dirty word. Money, you know, facilitates, especially if you can do some good things with that.

• 1:43:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but we're so afraid to bring it up.

• 1:43:12Chase Jarvis?

  I know. And again, that's like I'm trying to the same thing with creativity. Like you just picture the beret, the cigarettes, the painting. That's not the time, that's not what I'm talking about at all. Sure, it'll supercharge those things if that's what you're into. And I hope that folks who identify as that or with that will get a ton of value. But I'm trying to make this like more accessible, draw a bigger pie, put our arms around a bigger population and include these things that have historically been like, oh, no, he didn't just say the M word, did he?

• 1:43:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  And let's, let's deconstruct that wall of fear that is preventing you from trying something new. And the truth is, all of those excuses are now of no merit in a time and a day when almost everybody has a smartphone in their pocket. So whether it's photography or writing or filmmaking, like you have a 4K camera. Like I made a short film that did the, the festival circuit back in 2005. We shot on 35 film and the process of post-production to get it into like 1080p was the most ridiculous protract. I had to go to this fancy post house and it was like teams of people working on all this kind of thing.

• 1:44:27Rich Roll?

  Now you have 4K in your pocket and an editing app that you can use to make a movie. And Steven Soderbergh is making features, you know, high quality features with movie stars with his iPhone.

• 1:44:38Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  Those excuses are gone.

• 1:44:41Chase Jarvis?

  Bingo.

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  So now we're confronted with ourselves.

• 1:44:44Chase Jarvis?

  It's just you and you're surrounded by these tools.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:48Chase Jarvis?

  You know, and, and to me, that's another thing. If you go back to early in the conversation that I love is it's almost, it's, you have to avoid it. If you, if you really don't want it, you have to try and get away from it.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  Have to run away quickly from this.

• 1:45:02Chase Jarvis?

  Right. And, and now I like to tell a story of my mom who, when I did that app in 2009, I think she was 65 at the time. And, you know, you mentioned earlier, she was an administrator of biotech. I was raised sort of middle, lower middle class and, and yet still hadn't, you know, that I had, I was never, never wanted for much. And yet she's always very precise and like also very frugal. The heat never got above like 58. You were cold, put on a sweater and, and she took pride in that and was very practical. And because of that, had not thought of herself as creative and really didn't care. And

• 1:45:45Chase Jarvis?

  When I did that iPhone app and I got her an iPhone, put that $3 app in her hand, in no extra time, she didn't have to go buy a set of paints, she didn't have to go to the art supply store, didn't have to take a woodworking class, or she didn't have to like get a new set of friends. She just started using the phone when she would take her daily walk and started taking pictures, add an effect and share it with her friends. She would occasionally post to a social network. And I watched her both recognize her own creativity. And this is not over months either. This is like, and it's not days, it's somewhere like weeks. Recognize her own creativity. It almost was like confronted

• 1:46:27Chase Jarvis?

  with it because it was so obvious. And her friend's like, oh my God, Joy, you're so creative. And I watched it change how she approached cooking. I watched it change how she dressed. I watched it change the kinds of vacations she wanted to take. She wanted to go explore. Just from learning that she was creative by taking pictures every day with her phone. No extra time. This was on a walk that she did every day. And it was transformative. And so I think this like, again, you have, these tools are now are all around us, right? The ability to publish and to avoid the gatekeepers and all of the things that we used to have to think really clearly of like, now you really have to try and avoid it. So to the person who's listening to this and you are avoiding it, what are

• 1:47:09Chase Jarvis?

  you scared of? Ask yourself the question. And the ability to step into that fear is a pretty low barrier. And I think there might be, if you're anything like my mom or a lot of other people who've picked this up, like the barrier is so low, you can trip over it. Yeah. Like, give it a shot. And I think you'll be surprised.

• 1:47:32Rich Roll?

  And I think you'll be, you'll find yourself empowered too, I think. And on the subject of, of, you know, creativity being the new literacy, I think that's a sensibility that is second nature to Generation Z that's coming up, who are born and raised with these tools. They've never known a world without them. It's very different. And they're pursuing lives that are premised on creativity in a way that was not accessible to you and I. I'm a little bit older than you, but you know, just wasn't even part of the conversation when we were young people. And I think it's really. Going to be cool to see what that produces 10 years, 20 years down the line.

• 1:48:16Chase Jarvis?

  So true.

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  With people that their literacy is creativity, like it's, it's, it's just so hardwired into them that the idea of not being creative or not being a creative person is something that wouldn't even occur to them.

• 1:48:31Chase Jarvis?

  Right. And words matter. Like, that's one of the things that I talk about in, in, in the book that I think escapes people sometimes. Like, when you say, "Oh, I'm not very creative," like, a little damage there. And, you know, go back to the Brene quote that you mentioned. And, and what I'm encouraged by is when you've grown up with these tools, and, or if you haven't grown up with them, but you're willing to step into them and encourage, incur a little bit of fear, you'll find that the, the barrier is so small, you just step over that thing and then you can start, start creating, that I'm encouraged by that. And honestly, that's one of the reasons that I, I had to do the book. It was just like, like, "Oh my God, it's happening. It's happening. The thing I've been thinking about for virtually my entire adult life." And it happened to me and I'm like, "Oh, gosh."

• 1:49:16Chase Jarvis?

  And so, you know, that's what ultimately I, I called it my eighth grade book report. My agent is like, "Yeah, you gotta do the book. You get a site." And I'm like, "Yeah." And then one day I was like, I took a weekend, I wrote what I lovingly refer to my eighth grade book report. And it was literally like 10 pages, sent it to my agent Steve, and he was like, "This is it." And then we were off to the races.

• 1:49:40Rich Roll?

  So in other words, saying, "This is my eighth grade book report," was a way of lowering the stakes for you. So it didn't seem so intimidating.

• 1:49:47Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And I just, again, I just did the work because I was afraid, you know, there's a lot of, you start to see culture moving in the direction that you're talking about, as I had a couple, that's my gift, right? Is to be able to see around the corner and some, some technologies or culture. And I was like, "Oh my God, it's like happening again." And like, let's change the vehicle. If it was an app or if it was a platform, I was like, let's, that's why a book had to, I had to write the book.

• 1:50:12Chase Jarvis?

  But what a cool time. That's part of like, what needs to be the takeaway from this talk is whether you are all in on this or you're just deciding if you're going to put your toe in the water. Amazing time. And it just so happens that this corresponds with, "It is the riskiest time in the world to play it safe." Because whatever you were sold a safe, now that's beige, it's vanilla. It is you. It's not like you'll blend in in a good way. It's you're leaving so much on the table in terms of identity, earning power, connection with other people, vulnerability, authenticity.

• 1:50:57Chase Jarvis?

  Like if you're not sort of participate, it's the equivalent of not participating.

• 1:51:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, especially as we we progress towards this AI, you know, society that's going to commandeer a lot of those jobs.

• 1:51:09Chase Jarvis?

  Sure. And then just listen to Jack Ma, who's the founder of Alibaba, which arguably the most data centric, one of the most data centric companies in the world that retails, basically like super Amazon retail in China, whatever mega, mega company. His kids, if you he may gave a speech at the World Economic Forum. Oh, my kids. No, no, they're not worried about coding. No, no, that's computers are coding and computers are teaching other computers to code. My kids, creativity, painting, connection, sports, human movement, everything that machines are not. And if that's not a clue from the guy who basically roadmap to the future of AI and, you know, all that kind of stuff, like wake up call.

• 1:51:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:51:52Chase Jarvis?

  And and again, you can look at that as fear, or let's flip the script and say, what a cool time to experiment. What a cool time to try a thing that I haven't done before. And, you know, go back to, as I mentioned a second ago, the the line that you bought as a young person where we were fed or sold or whatever the mechanism or transaction, it it truly is risky, not in the sense of only an economic prosperity, but as in leaving your.

• 1:52:25Chase Jarvis?

  Who you are on the, you know, back on the desk like that is, that'd be a very heavy price to pay to not be able to express yourself in the way that you were capable of and to, to leave with that on the shelf over there.

• 1:52:42Rich Roll?

  And it robs you of that opportunity to be more fulfilled and to live a more purpose driven life. I mean, if there is a theme to this show that I do, it's, it's how can we live more authentically? How can we create a life for ourselves that is more in tune with our natural blueprint? And that's a journey of discovery that will last you your entire life. But the more that you can kind of connect with that and explore that, not at the behest of leaving your job necessarily, but just to bring more of that experience into your life, I think will gird it with meaning and will lead you on an incredible, you know, journey of discovery of yourself. And I think will brighten the, the palette of the world.

• 1:53:23Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. So well said. I'm going to use that. Will you come on tour with me? Carry you around on my, no, but that's the subhead, you know, the book is like establish a daily practice, infuse your world of meaning, because that's what this does. And it just so happens that this helps you like find success in life.

• 1:53:38Rich Roll?

  As talented as you are behind the lens, I really do think your, your, your superpower is being able to see around the bend. And when you look back on these pivotal moments in your life and these decisions that you've made, you've always been just a little bit ahead, you know, like at times, maybe a little bit too early, but always prefacing what ultimately comes. And we're seeing this now with, with CreativeLive. I mean, CreativeLive has been around a decade, that long. I mean, it's crazy. And now you can't watch a YouTube video without seeing an ad for MasterClass. Like it's a crowded space now. People are moving in. There's a lot of high quality stuff going on, but you were a first mover here. I don't know if you were

• 1:54:18Rich Roll?

  the first, but you were the first to really, truly establish a, a, you know, a very popular platform. So how do you continue? For, this is a two-part question. First, how do you continue to iterate on CreativeLive to make sure that you're in lockstep with what's happening culturally? And secondarily, as this visionary, what is the next thing around the bend that you're seeing right now?

• 1:54:46Chase Jarvis?

  Step one is I don't think that I'm, I let the pop culture be my guide so much as my intuition. And surely pop culture is, is one of the inputs.

• 1:55:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's transitory and ephemeral.

• 1:55:02Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And so it's a little bit more of a feeling. And what I find is that if you're chasing market opportunities, you're always behind. And I've been willing, like, again, just go back to like taking pictures with your phone. I was taking pictures of the Palm Trio, the head point three megapixel camera. My friends and I was totally insane. And I was like, you know what? That's, that's kind of cool because you know, the money thing that I mentioned earlier, maybe it doesn't have a role here. That's just, that's actually a relief. And I just kept doing it. And lo and behold, the market comes.

• 1:55:34Chase Jarvis?

  Market intersects with your ideas. That's when cool things happen. The same thing with CreativeLive, like online learning was so like, it was so ephemeral and wispy and known like, of course, you're going to learn more on the internet. That's like, you can see the internet shaping up to that, but it wasn't really about schools and about all this other kind of stuff that it is now. And same thing, but I wasn't saying like, is this a good idea? Should I do this? No, I just kind of like, what would be cool? And so I'm trying to, maybe if it's a superpower, but I got that information just from being a part of the world and letting the things that are inspiring me, inspire me. And then I tried to make something out of it, which is, to me, that's the takeaway.

• 1:56:17Chase Jarvis?

  And right now you might be saying, well, wait a minute, I'm not quite in tune with that. But that's starting to listen. All I'm doing is getting much better at listening to all these inputs that are hitting me and I'm able to literally create something or put something out in the world that is a manifestation of all those feelings. So what I feel like is I'm, and there's a hundred mistakes along the way that don't get, that aren't sort of in the news or aren't going to, you know, be a book or whatever. And we don't talk about those, but this is like, I hope that I'm living proof of, of basically screwing up in so many different ways before, losing so much money and time and all those things that but I'm just now kind of getting into the like, okay, cool, it's working. So I advocate not to be looking to your left and to your right.

• 1:57:02Chase Jarvis?

  You know, because otherwise, if you're looking behind you, you're not going to know where you're going and just, you know, you do you go back to one of the core missions of your show is authenticity. I'm just making things that resonate with me that I would want to see in the world. Just so happens that every once in a while, the market hits one of those things at the right time. So, you know, that's sort of how I think about not to dodge the question about how do you keep Creative Life relevant, but Creative Life is going to keep doing its thing and that's its own ecosystem in life and it's going to keep evolving and changing and growing as, as companies that are like people they may become.

• 1:57:35Rich Roll?

  But behind that, sorry to interject, but behind that, I think, look, we've sort of set it up as, as your opportunity to give back and to contribute and cultivate community around these subject matters that are important to you. But, but I think that overlooks the broader intention here and, and understanding, which is that fundamentally, education needs a reboot, right? Like we're, we're stuck in an archaic setup that isn't necessarily serving young people for the world in which we now live.

• 1:58:07Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, very true. And again, there's no evil genius. No one is trying to keep you down. But part of a mass culture is that you need to create a system that can manage the most people the most efficiently. And we've done a very good job of that. And in the means of production world, it's called the factory. And in the education world, it's called a school. And we put raw material in one end and we move it down the assembly line at the same time when we inject the same things into the same molds at the same moment. And then at the end, what do we create in the factory? It's a widget. In the school, it is a person who went through the school system. And the reality is that school system,

• 1:58:49Chase Jarvis?

  and sadly, the persons or people that we're making in those systems are woefully unprepared for what the future has because this system, both the system, the means of production in a factory and the means of education in a school are very slow to adopt. They're de-incentivized. And in fact, the government makes a huge sum of money on giving you easy access to student loans. It's student loans, 1.5 trillion is the debt in student loans in our country, which is higher than credit card debt. Just.

• 1:59:23Chase Jarvis?

  Grab on to that for a second.

• 1:59:24Rich Roll?

  And will never go away.

• 1:59:25Chase Jarvis?

  And will never go away. It's unforgivable from.

• 1:59:27Rich Roll?

  You file bankruptcy, it doesn't matter.

• 1:59:29Chase Jarvis?

  Right. So, and again, I'm not throwing rocks at our government or at the school system or the, but it's just an awareness that we have to realize that we need to now supplement all of these things, both our career. If our parents had one job, you and I are going to have five. The next generation is going to have five at the same time. Is a building covered with Ivy on a hill that you have to pay 60 grand a year gonna prepare you for that? No. And my wife is a public school teacher for years. I rummaged around in the boiler room of the school to find enough desks to put them in her class. We paid for all the materials on the walls of her classroom because we cared, but it's just, and I don't, again,

• 2:00:11Chase Jarvis?

  the goal is not to throw rocks at the school system because it does a very good job of a very simple foundational deal. But what I'm trying to emphasize here is that's not enough. I do, I am very excited to share. I've, this is the second time I've put this out in the world and I'm gonna, so I'm gonna do it here, that I'm trying to gather for people who want to contribute, I'm trying to gather, there are 3,200 teachers in the Seattle school district and I want to get 3,200 books. There's 113 schools. I've found someone who'll drop ship boxes to all of these schools. So if I can find a way to

• 2:00:50Chase Jarvis?

  get enough 3,200 books, I'm going to give a book to every school teacher in the Seattle Public Schools.

• 2:00:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:00:58Chase Jarvis?

  And as a mechanism for both just connecting with them and helping them understand the sort of where I think the future is and the role of creativity in it.

• 2:01:06Rich Roll?

  If somebody's listening to this and they want to help you with that, what's the best way for them to do that?

• 2:01:11Chase Jarvis?

  First of all, thank you. Go to creativecalling.com. And there's some bonus with purchase if you bought the book. One bonus is you can get into a class at CreativeLive for free. It's a special class. Another one is if you want to like buy 10 books, then I don't remember what you get. You get something else and then

• 2:01:29Rich Roll?

  Some goody bag.

• 2:01:30Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah. And then there's another one that says, make me an offer. And that is like, if you want me to come speak or whatever. And what I, again, I just mentioned this and I've already had two people contribute here. You can just send me an email and say, I want to contribute this much. And we have a mechanism. I'll handle these in a one-off manner.

• 2:01:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:01:49Chase Jarvis?

  And I was just on a show and someone came through with boom, 100 books. But you know, it's like, to me, this is what the cool part of the internet and the time we're living in right now is that we can put a dream out there in the world. And you just wanted to talk about the school system. And we can acknowledge simultaneously, like acknowledge the shortcomings and do something about it, which is super exciting for me. So that's a little aside, but I would love it if you want to join and help in that mission. I think it's, and the aspiration is to do it in Seattle. And then if it works, like

• 2:02:24Rich Roll?

  Right. Make it a program.

• 2:02:25Chase Jarvis?

  Yeah, make it a program. Totally. But to go back to the analogy and the school system that you were, I think, appropriately calling out, no evil genius, but we have to take our education to our own hands. And that is why things like books, podcasts, learning platforms are an essential part of any person's learning experience going forward. This is true about, true with your kids. It's true with us. I don't know why learning should stop at age 18 or 21 or whenever you finish high school or college or whatever. It shouldn't. That's a myth.

• 2:03:00Rich Roll?

  That's when you're supposed to go into the factory.

• 2:03:02Chase Jarvis?

  Literally. And, and again, there's like, we can both acknowledge that and decide to take different action. And that's what I'm asking.

• 2:03:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it's really cool what you created. And I'm not going to let you off the hook on the one, on the one thing about what's around the bend.

• 2:03:22Chase Jarvis?

  Dang.

• 2:03:27Chase Jarvis?

  I think, um, do you mean in terms of in sort of

• 2:03:33Rich Roll?

  I'm talking about like trends, like

• 2:03:34Chase Jarvis?

  Okay, cool.

• 2:03:35Rich Roll?

  You, because you're immersed in

• 2:03:37Chase Jarvis?

  Sure.

• 2:03:37Rich Roll?

  Internet culture, or you pay attention to, you, you have a way of canvassing kind of what's happening and have developed the acumen for a little bit of foresight of what's to come. So my question is really like, what do you see like just around the bend that you think is going to be, um, something we should be thinking about now?

• 2:03:58Chase Jarvis?

  Radical decentralization of lots of different things. Radical decentralization. So let's just take two things. Yeah, so money is happening. Let's take two things that we've just been talking about. Let's talk about education and then we're talking about workforce. So education, we just described the radical decentralization of education. It's not happening in a building covered with ivy on a hill where they have billions of dollars with the real estate in the middle of Boston. Your education is not happening there. Your education is out in the world with all these radical dynamic inputs and your learning is going to be a lot more tied to those inputs and where you want to go.

• 2:04:40Chase Jarvis?

  In the workforce, the factory is a myth. The knowledge workers are, and that's not to say that we don't need a factory. Great. And there are people for whom a factory is the perfect thing. And I'm a huge advocate of the trades and not everyone should go to college. And it isn't really about, it doesn't define who we are. The reality though, is that 50 million Americans, I think it's by 2020, are going to have a side hustle. That means half of the working population of the United States will be making money outside of what would they would typically call their job. And to me, that opened, that is like a massive world of opportunity. And now I want to go step, one step removed and say, what role does creativity play in those two things?

• 2:05:25Rich Roll?

  Everything.

• 2:05:26Chase Jarvis?

  Critically central, right? Critically central. It means everything. Like, you have to create your own educational arc. You have to create a way to learn in the world that you're moving through today. You have to, you know, I don't need to be pedantic, but, and if you look at the trend that I see in this radical decentralization is opportunity. I think we mentioned Seth Godin earlier. Seth has a quote in the book about, it's just about like preparing us for the new opportunities. And that's the way I think about, you know, the timing of this book, the guts of the book is fulfillment. All those things are there at the core, but it's also

• 2:06:11Chase Jarvis?

  like, if everyone says like, oh, like creativity is so whimsical and playful and naive, it's the most practical thing we've got.

• 2:06:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I think you nailed it completely. You know, we're seeing this explosion of the freelance workforce. The whole notion of career has been upended. Young people go from gig to gig to gig, multiple gigs at a time, as you said. The workplace is now the WeWorks and the co-working spaces.

• 2:06:42Chase Jarvis?

  And remote.

• 2:06:42Rich Roll?

  Or the Starbucks.

• 2:06:43Chase Jarvis?

  Here we are.

• 2:06:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Everything is decentralized. You know, we could, you know, from Bitcoin to office space, which means the individual, it's incumbent upon the individual to take control and responsibility for what that arc is going to look like. And that's the space in which creativity can make the difference between a, you know, a sort of reactive path versus a very intentional path that would, you know, flourish into the life that you aspire to have.

• 2:07:17Chase Jarvis?

  I cannot say, I will add nothing to that.

• 2:07:20Rich Roll?

  And on top of that, I would put, I would put a veneer on top of that of this increase we're seeing in, in how we think about ownership. Young people, they're not angling to, it used to be like the house and the car, the, you know, front yard and all that. It's like, they don't care about any of that. It's about, you know, maybe a tiny house or living in a van or, or just being a, um, like a digital nomad, um, all the way down to, you know, ride sharing, everything is, is rental based or impermanent. Like now we're seeing the growth of renting clothes, like

• 2:08:00Chase Jarvis?

  Totally.

• 2:08:00Rich Roll?

  You're gonna buy clothes.

• 2:08:01Chase Jarvis?

  Friends of mine started a company called Omni, where you don't have to own anything, golf clubs, skis, backpack.

• 2:08:07Rich Roll?

  So the whole idea of how you navigate the world and what you need for self-sufficiency is completely changed. And I don't think that we're in a place yet to fully appreciate how that's going to play out. But psychically, mentally, you know, how does that inform the choices that the next generation is going to make about how they want to live their lives?

• 2:08:27Chase Jarvis?

  Or that you should make, starting

• 2:08:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right now, exactly. Like, I'm an old man, but like, I, I, you know, I don't, yeah, back to the word calcified, like, you know, I'm always trying to prevent myself from, from getting set in my ways, you know, so that I can be nimble in this regard. But I think you're, you totally nailed it.

• 2:08:44Chase Jarvis?

  Well, if you're calcified, then I'm like, I don't know what I am. And I'm just, I'm like, sitting over here pouting in the corner.

• 2:08:52Rich Roll?

  No, no, no. Dude.

• 2:08:54Chase Jarvis?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:08:55Rich Roll?

  All right, we're gonna wrap this up. Um, the book, as I said at the very outset, is, is brilliant. Uh, super proud of you. And I'm super excited for people to, um, not only experience it, but put the wisdom to work in their own lives. And, and let's see a lot of lives changed.

• 2:09:11Chase Jarvis?

  Thank you so much. It means the world to be able to be on the show. Love what you've built, love the community. Um, and, uh, just, just a treat. So thanks for having me, bud.

• 2:09:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, likewise. As I said on, on your show, um, your, uh, your legacy and your example was inspirational and me wrapping my head around trying to do something in this space. Um, so thank you for that. On a personal level, I've always had such tremendous respect for, um,

• 2:09:40Rich Roll?

  Not just the quality of the work that you put out in the world, but like the way that you share it in that transparent and authentic manner. And it's a beautiful thing, and I wish you only beauty, success, and love, my friend.

• 2:09:54Chase Jarvis?

  Amazing. Thanks, bud. Appreciate it.

• 2:09:56Rich Roll?

  So if people want to pick up the book, obviously, Amazon, your favorite independent bookseller, but creativecalling.com is the website where you can learn more about all the perks and bells and whistles, right?

• 2:10:06Chase Jarvis?

  Yep. Yep. And that, or yeah, that's a great place to go. Creative, creativelive.com/creativecalling is where they have special classes. If you've already bought the book, you can enter your receipt there and get access to some cool stuff. But yeah, and I'm just at Chase Jarvis.

• 2:10:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. If you start typing Chase into Google, it'll pull his name up and you'll be able to find all his stuff. But you're basically Chase Jarvis everywhere.

• 2:10:27Chase Jarvis?

  Yep.

• 2:10:28Rich Roll?

  The Chase Jarvis Live Show, Chase Jarvis Raw, your YouTube channel, all your good stuff, right?

• 2:10:34Chase Jarvis?

  Thanks for, yeah, all the shouts out. I appreciate it. And thanks for, thanks for everything. Having me on the show. It means a ton to me.

• 2:10:39Rich Roll?

  Of course, man. It means a lot that you came out here. So appreciate it, brother.

• 2:10:43Chase Jarvis?

  Sweet.

• 2:10:43Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:10:47Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. How'd that mind meld go for you guys? I really dig that guy. Can't wait for more subsequent conversations with him. If you want to learn more about Chase and his world, please check out the show notes on the episode page at ritual.com. Let him know how this one landed for you directly by sharing your thoughts with him on Twitter or Instagram at Chase Jarvis. And please do me a favor. Pick up his new book, Creative Calling. It really is great. I meant everything I said in the course of the podcast. It's an incredibly powerful and helpful book that I think will really help you reconnect with your creativity, think about it differently, and put it into practice. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, subscribe, rate, and comment on the show on Apple Podcasts. That really helps new people discover what we're doing here. You

• 2:11:32Rich Roll?

  could tell your friends about your favorite episode. Share the show on social media. Tag me. I like resharing that stuff. Subscribe to my YouTube channel. You can watch my conversation with Chase there or Spotify, Google Podcasts, all those places. And you can support us on Patreon at ritual.com/donate.

• 2:11:50Rich Roll?

  I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and many more things. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for filming the whole experience and uploading it to YouTube for your enjoyment. Jessica Miranda for her graphic wizardry. Ally Rogers for her beautiful portraits. And DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And as always, theme music by Analemma. Appreciate all of you guys. I love you. And for all of you that were not able to attend my recent live event in Los Angeles with environmentalist, activist, author, and entrepreneur Paul Hawken, you, my friends, are in luck because next week I share that experience.

• 2:12:33Rich Roll?

  And I'm going to leave you with a little taste of that. But until then, remember, we are all infinitely creative beings, so act accordingly. Peace, plants, namaste.

• 2:12:49Speaker 02

  I feel like this situation we're in, the most gnarly, super wicked problem humanity has ever described and may ever face, is actually a blessing. And if we look at it from the point of view, it's feedback and from, actually from the whole of the earth, because you can't really separate the atmosphere from plants and forests and water. If you're looking at it from that way, then it's a gift, it's feedback, and you take 100% responsibility for your actions, who you are, and then you begin to imagine, innovate. You do things that make sense to you, that help you connect more to this beautiful, extraordinary miracle we call the living world.

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  And that's the gift of climate change. The gift is the transformation of self and of the world. And the solutions are transformative. So we can either accept the offering and the gift, or we can... Go into self pity.