How One Man Reinvented Himself Wholesale — Ruminations On Simplicity, Life In the Zone & The Great Iceberg of Consciousness

I started this show because I truly believe that too many of us are wasting our lives in a reflexive daze. Disconnected from who we are, what makes our hearts beat and what we truly need to be happy. Just trying to make it through the day intact. Pay the bills. And make ends meet so we can numb out to Dancing With The Stars. Living for the weekend, we celebrate by getting drunk and then do it all over again. You know what I’m talking about. It's no way to live. Believe me, I tried. Remember when you were a kid? No older than 11 when the world was wide open. Everything was amazing. Even the tiniest of things could provoke endless fascination. Pure joy in the simplest of activities like running around in the yard with a garden hose; jumping off a diving board into a pool or riding your bike around the neighborhood with friends. The effortless ability to be truly present in the world. Gifted with an innate sense of wonder – and a moral compass that naturally understood right from wrong, good from bad. Then we grow up. That child falls by the wayside. Drops away. Or simply becomes repressed as we morph out of that natural state of what it is to be fundamentally alive, only to step into the objective, material fear-based world of ego, status, and comparison that leaves us obsessed with the past and maniacally pre-occupied with the future yet never fully present in the now. This is the chronic collective human condition today's guest calls being lost in the rational world. A state of being that all too often leaves us anxious, afraid, depressed, isolated, lonely and sometimes even desperate – resigned to a life we're not sure we ever really even signed up for. I know what that’s like. I've been there. And so has today’s guest. But there is a way out. Because that inner child is still there – lurking deep down. We just have to find a way to access it. Tap in. Find a way to bring it to the surface. Unlock and unleash it. This is the path to the authentic self. This is the path to wholeness. This is what it means to be alive. And happy – not in a blissed out unicorns kind of way but in the sense that your life has directed meaning – a purpose that brings true satisfaction. SLOMO. That’s right people. Slomo. What the hell is a Slomo? It's not what. It's who. I first became aware of this world class character when an award-winning short documentary about a very strange man by an enterprising young filmmaker named Josh Izenberg landed on the home page of the New York Times at the end of March. What followed was 16 minutes of pure unadulterated awe-inspiring beauty about a man going boldly where most men fear to venture – letting go of all the trappings of his comfortable, previous existence to instead to pursue the simplest of lives. A life based on faith, purity, movement and the pursuit of what he calls “The Zone” – in his own highly unique and incredibly peculiar way. I implore you – before listening to this episode, please watch this short documentary. The experience of our conversation just won't be complete without it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Rich Roll?

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

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the show. How's it going? My name is Rich Roll. This is the Rich Roll Podcast. Thanks for stopping by. Today, we have a super amazing interview for you guys. This is definitely a very special episode of the RRP, so I'm so glad that you dialed it up. And today's guest really has me thinking a lot about my own life, my own choices, and a lot about why I do this show and why I started this show. And I think that, in reflecting upon that... A big part of why I do this show is because I truly believe that too many of us, too many people out there are walking around through their lives in kind of a daze.

• 2:07Rich Roll?

  We're just trying to simply get through the day, make ends meet, pay the bills, so we can numb out in front of the TV and live for the weekend. You know what I'm talking about. And it's no way to live. And it has me thinking about what it was like when I was a kid. And I want you to think about that yourself. What was it like when you were no older than, say, 10, maybe 11 years old at most? When the world was wide open, everything was wondrous, everything was amazing. And there was endless joy in the simplest of things, just like running around in the yard with a garden hose, or jumping off a diving board into a pool, or riding your bike around the neighborhood with friends and the freedom that that gave you.

• 2:51Rich Roll?

  And the ability to be truly present in the world with this innate sense of wonder and a moral compass that naturally understood the difference between right and wrong and good from bad. But what happens? We turn 12, we turn 13, 14, 15, and we grow up, right? That child slowly fades away and falls by the wayside, or it simply becomes repressed as we morph out of that world of subjectivity, that natural state of what it is to be fundamentally alive, and step into the objective, material, fear-based world of ego and status and comparison

• 3:32Rich Roll?

  that leaves us obsessed with the past and preoccupied all the time with the future, but almost never really fully present in what we're doing in the moment, present in the now. And so what happens? We become anxious, we become afraid, sometimes depressed, isolated, lonely, and in many cases even desperate, and resign to a life that, upon reflection, we're not even sure we ever really consciously chose.

• 3:59Rich Roll?

  Believe me, I know what it's like. I used to live my life that way, and so did today's guest. But there is a way out of this. And again, that's what this show is all about, because that inner child is still there. It's lurking deep down inside of you. And we just have to find a way to access it, to tap into it, to find a way to bring it more to the surface, to, as I'm fond of saying, unlock and unleash it. And this is a big part of this path towards actualizing your authentic self. I mean, this is the path to wholeness. This is what it means to be alive and happy, not in a blissed-out unicorns

• 4:42Rich Roll?

  kind of a way, but in that sense that your life has directed meaning, that it has purpose that brings true satisfaction to your day. So, slow-mo. That's right. Slow-mo. What is a slow-mo? Who is slow-mo? Well, I first became aware of this world-class character when an award-winning short documentary about a very strange man by a young, enterprising San Francisco filmmaker named Josh Eisenberg landed on the homepage of the New York Times at the end of March. I watched it, and I was amazed by this film. It's 16 minutes

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  of pure, unadulterated, awe-inspiring beauty about a man transformed, about a man going boldly where most men feared adventure, letting go of all the trappings of his previous, highly materialistic, successful existence, to instead pursue the simplest of lives in his own highly unique and extremely peculiar way. And so, please, I implore you, before listening to this episode, really, you gotta watch this documentary. It's embedded on my website, on the episode page for this episode, or just Google "slow-mo" or "Google slow-mo New York Times," you'll find it, it'll pop right up. But if you're already on the treadmill, or you're on the track, or you're on the trail, or you're in the

• 6:04Rich Roll?

  car, of course, you know, just continue to listen. But when you're Back at your computer, at your desk, or at your work, or what have you, please dial it up and give it a watch, because the experience of this conversation really isn't going to be complete without you watching this documentary and getting a visual sense of who this guy is all about. So, what is he all about? Who is this guy? Well, born John Kitchen, Slomo is a very spry, vigorous, 71-year-old dude, who was raised by a pretty politically prominent family. They didn't have money, they weren't wealthy, but the name Kitchen goes back, I

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  understand, generations, back in the Wake Forest area of North Carolina, and so his family name was of some note, I'm told. But anyway, he grew up in a dairy farm in North Carolina, he was a top student at Duke University, and he went on to medical school at Wake Forest, and then got to work building this incredibly successful neurology practice in Southern California. And it was the kind of wild success that he gets BMWs and Ferraris and multiple mansions, and even a Neverland Ranch-esque exotic animal farm, if you can believe it. It's the kind of success that can, in the words of Slomo, "make you an asshole." And by his own admission, that's exactly what John Kitchen was: an asshole.

• 7:30Rich Roll?

  But then something very interesting happened. A strange confluence of events that included a random encounter with a 91-year-old patient, and then, quite ironically, the onset of his own neurological disorder. A rare and strange condition that's called prosopagnosia, you might have heard of it. It's that weird thing that happens when suddenly you lose the ability to recognize faces. They just become a blur, and suddenly you can't distinguish one person from another. You're not sure if you met that person before, or what have you. It's a condition that was made famous by Dr. Oliver Sacks, who suffered from this and wrote about it, and it's also shared by other interesting people, like Kurt Vonnegut

• 8:12Rich Roll?

  or Tom Stoppard, and the artist Chuck Close, one of my favorite artists. But what's interesting about this is that then the neurology doctor suddenly became the neurology patient.

• 8:26Rich Roll?

  And what he could have perceived as a disastrous turn of events in his life and in his career and profession, instead became his opportunity, a moment that he seized as a very specific moment in time where he could change, not just little things about his life, but change everything, to completely become an entirely new person, soup to nuts. To live his life in accordance with a brand-new theme, and that theme is, was, and is to do what you love. So what did he do? Well, he quit his job right away. He sold everything.

• 9:04Rich Roll?

  And he moved to a tiny, one-room studio apartment, a half a block from the beach in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego. It's a really cool, kind of idyllic beach community in San Diego. And then he started to skate. That's right, skate, rollerblading. Not just here and there, not just a little bit of rollerblading, all day, every day. And what he did, and it's really fascinating, is that he developed, he didn't just rollerblade randomly up and down this boardwalk. He developed this unique, slow-motion gliding

• 9:46Rich Roll?

  style that almost looks like a moving Warrior 3 yoga pose. He's up on one leg, his arms are spread in front of himself. And this very specific technique that he developed allows him to tap into what he calls "the zone." And the zone is his term for a deep meditative state that's catalyzed by the lateral motion of his body moving sideways, you know, sort of like when a surfer is surfing a wave, or skateboarding, or slalom skiing, that lateral, side-to-side motion that creates that kind of G-force feeling. And that force impacts the tiny bones of his inner ear.

• 10:28Rich Roll?

  And gives himself a sense of being anchored to the center of the earth. It's this self-styled moving meditation technique that I guess allows him to tap into the beauty of the now. It allows him to fall deep into the present moment, and it's a practice that ultimately has allowed him to overcome his asshole-ness and become happy, like truly happy, and some might even stay ecstatically happy. So 15 years later, Slow-Mo is a Pacific Beach fixture. Everybody in the neighborhood knows who he is. Everybody loves the guy. And until this documentary came out, which kind of went viral, and so a lot of people

• 11:12Rich Roll?

  now know his backstory, but before that, most people likely assumed that he was some kind of crazy homeless guy, or somebody with a mental disorder, or possibly somebody who escaped from a VA hospital or something. But definitely a little nuts, if not altogether nuts. But what Slow-Mo really is, is a treasure of this idyllic community. He's like communal property for the neighborhood, protected and beloved by everybody that lives there. And I like to think of him as like a modern-day beachside monk version of the sadhus that inhabit the caves high in the Himalayas, practicing his version of what it means to pursue a

• 11:54Rich Roll?

  higher state of consciousness, or what some might call even enlightenment. It sounds crazy, I know, maybe it's completely nuts, but according to Slow-Mo, he's not crazy. It's society that's crazy. And John Lennon agreed to quote from the famous Beatle, "I think our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're run by maniacs for maniacal ends. I think they're all insane, but I am liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it." It's an honor and a pleasure to bring you Slow-Mo's story, so let's spin this wheel and see where it leads.

• 12:44Rich Roll?

  So do you like going by John or slow-mo? What should I call you?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Call me slow-mo.

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  Slow-mo? All right. Why not, right?

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Exactly. Why not? Well, there's a difference.

• 12:55Rich Roll?

  Tell me the difference.

• 12:57Speaker 01

  You know, take the American Indian.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And actually, people in our culture before, say, 2,000 years ago, they were given names according to some aspect of their personality.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  And, you know, we're not used to that now. But the nickname is much more meaningful because it applies to the person.

• 13:28Rich Roll?

  You earned it.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you could say you earned it, but it's from a different part of your family. It's from the world of strangers. It's given to you by people who were not, in all likelihood, not family members. And they're relating to you, they begin to relate to you first as an unknown. And then they identified you as an abstract, which is more in the category of a person. So to me,

• 14:03Speaker 01

  it's a stage of development in a person. It's to separate him from his, the objective, credentialed, sort of legal side.

• 14:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the moniker that is placed upon you without your involvement at birth versus sort of the true, kind of actualized self that the world recognized you as being.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  And it's parallel

• 14:29Speaker 01

  to the dichotomy of experiencing yourself during the first phase of your life as an object. Even though you're subjective, you experience yourself as an object in the world. But as you evolve in the latter half of the life, you begin to experience yourself as a subjective entity in a world which is objective and separated.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  And these sports...

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Which are in a special category, nine-team sports, sports which are individual, activities which are individual, evolve during that lifetime. So that as a person ages, what appears to be an activity in the objective world becomes a type of activity in a subjective world, which this person spends his time more and more in a state of mind which is similar to worship, as opposed to the state

• 15:50Speaker 01

  of mind that he would have had in the earlier phase of his life when participating in action. He would be in an aggressive state of mind fixed on the external world.

• 16:02Rich Roll?

  It goes to this, I mean, you know, a lot of what your life is about is dichotomies, and more specifically, the dichotomy of the zone versus the non-zone. I read your manifesto. And sort of the use of this word zone as being expansive, you know, really encompassing what, you know, maybe in more mainstream circles would be just known as God, or the universe, or whatever word you want to place upon it, higher power, and the idea of the subjectivity that goes hand in hand with being in the zone, or being merged with the zone, versus the objectivity of the non-zone state of sort of being, you know, in the world.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:45Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 16:46Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

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

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, in all the activities of life, this particular dualism exists, where a person can observe something in the zone, or experience the zone, and it's quite different than the non-zone.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  If you look at all those activities, they all have a set of intelligent and wise people who discover the zone within that activity. Mm-hmm. Now, the one I like, I like to see of people experience the zone is in the spectacular sports that we get to observe on television. Well, that's where it's most readily kind of apparent to the eye, right? Yeah. It first occurred to me at what was happening when I watched that movie with Chariots of Fire. One of my favorites. Yeah. You remember when the runner fell during, I think it was an 880 run and his friends

• 17:58Speaker 01

  were in the audience. He fell and then he got up and began to try to catch up with the other runners. And Van Gallus, who was doing the music, switches him into slow motion. He's going in slow motion, though he's gaining on these other runners. And the cameraman switches it to the crowd and his friends are standing up and what the girl, one of the women says, "Do you see it?" Or something to that effect. And what they were seeing really interests me because I think that's what we saw when we watched Michael Jordan perform in the zone.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  We were seeing something in the way that Amazing Grace uses the word "vision." We were experiencing something attached to a vision, which was in another world. That is, the person who was, we were watching someone in a pure state of worship. And that's impressive. And matter of fact, that's one of the reasons, I think, some of the people line the streets of Rome when the Pope goes up and down. I think he's supposed to be... And I say supposed to be.

• 19:19Rich Roll?

  A representation.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Relatively close, at least a representation of a state of worship. But the athlete, when he's hitting three pointers, say in basketball, say four or five three pointers in a row, he is almost by definition in what he calls the zone.

• 19:36Rich Roll?

  Right, and the subjectivity aspect of it is that time is not a linear construct. Time is more an elastic idea and it's an expansive place for the present where past and future are no longer. Whereas in the non-zone, the sort of logical thinking brain and the way we kind of carry ourselves through the world, we're basically spending all of our time thinking about the past or projecting onto the future, right?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:03Rich Roll?

  So it's really, it's kind of come into vogue lately, like it's sort of been captured now. Now it's called the flow state.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 20:12Rich Roll?

  There's a book out about it.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:14Rich Roll?

  And a lot of scientists studying it from a non-zone perspective, I would imagine. But the idea being like, how can we access more of this zone-like state in our own daily life? But it's a spiritual practice. It's not something that can be accessed through the thinking mind.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  You know, I think that any of us, and correct me because I haven't really tested the idea, but we could say, what is the purpose of our life? The first thing, the first purpose is to achieve some method to experience the zone. And then try to do everything you can from within the zone because the zone is a superior state of mind and it will produce the best athletics, the best behavior. For instance, the problems that we're having in our country is that we're, we've almost divorced the zone entirely from international and national politics.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  That there's no zone. Okay.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  We're living in a country that's passed into the non-zone.

• 21:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:29Speaker 01

  And in a way, the people, the great athletes, of which I would include you and the other people that are in their own way experiencing tremendous feats of athletic prowess, they are obviously a new, to me, the manifestation of a new type of worship that's taking place as they've been pushed a little bit to the edge of the society. In other words, they're not dominating, the zone's not dominating, people in the zone, we watch it in athletics and all, but it's not the idea of people. So it's left a lot of people zoneless, so to speak.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  There, I mean, if you think about it, there's, absent Mandela, there's not a single exemplary person in the world that we all would agree and can, you know, in our individual lives, sure. But to think that the world has been in our lifetime bereft of really a lot of great people.

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. From a leadership perspective.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:40Rich Roll?

  I mean, I think that, yeah, on the fringes, well, there's the athletes, of course, but I would expand, you know, the zone idea to anybody who has, who has created any, a great creative expression, like the art, any, any great artist will tell you that their painting or their sculpture doesn't come from the intellectual part of their mind, they're channeling it from something else and that thinking mind goes away and they're definitely in a zone-like state to produce whatever it is that they're trying to master.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Right. I reckon the, yeah, I agree totally with what you said. I reckon the point I'm trying to, to make is that the practice of life, the practice of living.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  Is performed in some way, which is either falling into the non-zone or the zone. And if you take a society, you can look at the society itself and see where the dominant part of the society resides, on that spectrum. And if there is something that you could apply this knowledge to, not only to your personal life, but to the way we analyze any part of this life.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  For instance, if you went to a country, you could say, well, how good is their music? And how well, you could use any criteria, but what about, how close are they as a society? So that everybody can experience his own advancement into the zone? How zony is a society? In other words, I think if you use some of these, if you think of societies, there are societies that you can point to that had no zone. They had very little zone.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  In other words, almost by definition, a Nazi society decides to perform totally in the world of objectivity. And probably the opposite, whatever the opposite is, you would think, would say that the society, I would say, like an ancient Japanese society or something like that, the idea was peace and harmony, so people could advance themselves spiritually. That was the goal. You could tell that the thing was set up to advance that goal. And probably considering the depth...

• 25:23Speaker 01

  Of poverty and all the rest of it during the Dark Ages. It was also, uh, the society was set up to give the main structure to the individual who could pursue a spiritual existence. That is, a zoni existence, okay? I mean, with, they didn't have the wherewithal to experience it that we do now, but you could see with what they had, religion and spirituality and the state of worship was held as the highest form of being.

• 25:55Rich Roll?

  Right, it was a cultural prerogative.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  It was a cultural prerogative.

• 25:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in modern times, I mean, you know, what are we left with? I suppose in some respects, the, you know, the Tibetan monks or

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  Certain, you know, removed cultures that have been, remained untouched by the gestalt of, you know, us sort of exporting our Western way of life across the globe, but it's only small pockets now. And, and, well, I guess in certain respects, in Indian culture, it's still, spiritual advancement is still regarded as, as a high form of

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:32Rich Roll?

  Living, whereas it's really not here. I mean, we talk about religion, but that's a different beast altogether.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  All right, now, think in terms of that we're all doing it, but we're doing it in our way. And our way is the athletics of the single person, the person who's experiencing the zone. Now, you can extend that into art, dance, or whatever, or maybe just getting in the state of mind by any method. But if you take that whole group that is dedicated to experiencing the state of mind of the zone and put them together, you could say that that same group is the group that put that same thing

• 27:21Speaker 01

  As a priority in other societies and in other times. It's one group and it's going through it change through time, the last few thousand years, it changed, it started somewhere in Greece or Troy, out in that area, maybe in India. And it's moved across, it went through Rome and it went through, it went up into Europe and it came across, okay? This, the state of the, it's, this is a, some sort of phenomenon which has been, it's

• 27:59Speaker 01

  a state of mind, the shrinks would call it a state of mind, that's been carried by human beings through this carter over thousands, several thousand years. And it just changes form, sometimes it's inside of cathedrals and churches, worshiping that way. Sometimes it's, it will, in a lot of the Dark Ages, it was manifested in building, beautiful buildings. The aughtists now are doing it, the ones that are contributing to the, that are making, that are actually where the zone produces the aught.

• 28:42Speaker 01

  And that, that might be an interesting topic, there's a lot that's, that's, you don't, I mean, I could paint a picture and not be in the zone.

• 28:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Okay, in other words, I might want to make money, which is, but anyway, that's a whole nother subject.

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  Right, but the, this idea of tapping into a oneness and a greater, and a power that's greater than, than yourself. As an athlete, you know, I've certainly experienced that and there's, there's no way that, you know, I know for a fact that the things that I've been able to do as an athlete don't come from my power and it's, it's only by tapping into something larger than myself. You know, I'm, I'm very, very in touch with that. And I think that's a, if you start to talk about that, then you start to get maligned as some sort of insane.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  No, no, no, but you shouldn't, you shouldn't, because that's what I mean, right now, the pressure. Of the social conventions is totally in favor of the non-zone. In other words, when George Bush said that he'd learned more from, they asked him what single man that he learned the most from, he said, "Jesus Christ." Half the people responded with a nod that that's absolutely the correct answer. For anybody that really has spent time reading the New Testament and then thought in terms of other people looked at his head, that would have to stand out. But the other half thought that it was a cheated answer because it was using religion. Okay?

• 30:16Speaker 01

  And so, anytime a person, even if he starts talking about Buddha nowadays, you know, you can't even talk about Buddha. Buddha's out of style, even in California, think of that. I mean, this like, but the same group is pursuing the worship. They don't care about what you call it. They don't care if you call it the Christ, the fundamental man, the force, the spirit, whatever it is, they call it the soul. Generically, it's what people call the soul. And the scientists that dominate the non-zone have declared for a long time now that there is absolutely no existence of the soul, that this is a myth.

• 30:58Speaker 01

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

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  And so, why is this so difficult for us as a culture to grasp? I mean, we're so focused on, you know, our cultural priorities are to, you know, sort of move up the corporate ladder and accumulate these material goods and, you know, keep up with the Joneses and all of these sorts of things. These are the ideas and the thoughts and the mindset that we walk around with on a daily basis. And this sort of greater truth is staring us in the face and yet it's so difficult to access for most people.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I think it's like playing golf. Everybody's playing the same course and everybody has to get through the same set of traps, you know? And frankly, if you look at the big traps, the big traps are fame, that's one of them, and money or power, and all the subdivisions of those and all that. But those are the... If you use an old way of thinking that we evolved ontologically, each of us, we go through an evolutionary involvement, like we start out close to, say, chimpanzee behavior

• 33:07Speaker 01

  or something like that, and we gradually advance through the king, and you get to the top, and the top has some sort of benign wise personality, okay, that's nonviolent. Well, in that way of looking at it, um... Hell, I lost track of this idea.

• 33:33Rich Roll?

  All right, we can get back to it, but I want to get into your story a little bit because you weren't always the philosopher king that you are now, right? So, let's take it back. I mean, I want to hear, you know, I want to get into the evolution of what forged this identity known as slow mo. So, you know, back in the South, growing up on the dairy farm and going to medical school and, you know, what your life was like as a practicing... You were a neurologist, right? So, I want to hear about that.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Well, it has, I started out on a little farm, but it was, looking back on it, it was the ideal place for a child to grow up on. As a matter of fact, it was so ideal, where I was born and the family into which I was born, and my childhood was so ideal from my perspective now of what's meaningful, is that I almost thought that maybe this is a circumstantial proof for the existence of some prior existence where I chose to be born.

• 34:50Rich Roll?

  In the sense that it's perfectly unfolded?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, and it was just, the farm had a nice woods where you could run. My parents were very benevolent people with no meanness or hatred. My older brother and younger brother were just as athletic as me. My sister was healthy and nice looking. I mean, the whole thing. And the, and the, and the fact that we didn't have money, we like, pretty much had two, at the most, three calls. Most of the time, it was one call. That is, during the whole period.

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  Right, right. I got you.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  The first one lasted, I mean, it was not like, it was, I think, looking back on it, the fact that we were poor, like, really, you had to have a hole in your shoe to get another pair of shoes. I remember that it was, it really was fun being that way. But on the other hand, my father and his, well, my mother, had come from intellectual families. So we had all the books around and that type of thing.

• 36:08Rich Roll?

  I mean, from what I understand, so, sort of a prominent family, they come from in Wake Forest area, right?

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Right. And that area, it was like, we were the poorest of the kitchens, but the kitchens, then nobody was wealthy. There wasn't a, as far as I know, there were no, that...

• 36:25Rich Roll?

  Wasn't spilling downhill your way, whatever was going on the rest of the kitchen family?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I don't think anybody was very wealthy in those days. You know, matter even.

• 36:37Rich Roll?

  But it was a name people knew.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, because we had contributed a lot in the way of politics. Um, various places and all that, but.

• 36:45Rich Roll?

  So, so was your, uh, drive to, you know, succeed as a doctor? Did that derive from not wanting to be poor anymore? Or where did that kind of ambition come from?

• 36:56Speaker 01

  I think that the fact, I think some of my life can be explained for the fact that I thought I experienced myself as being poor as a child. And I wanted to see what it was like to, to see, um, you know, where people were. I at least wanted to get close to experiencing what I thought was wealthy. I think that that's what everybody, there's a temptation. That's the reason, you know, you can almost see this person driving a car, particular car, if he's able to eventually buy the car that he really wants. It's the one he saw when he was, uh, younger.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  When he was a kid, yeah.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  In which he had some money to back off. But anyway, um, yeah, uh, the, um, no, no, I, my grandfather had been president of Wake Forest and was a extraordinary, um, prominent kind of person. So I always had that to kind of fall back on. My father was a.

• 38:02Rich Roll?

  If everything blows up.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:04Rich Roll?

  You can only go back, go back to grandpa.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, my father was a gentle kind of, uh, just a very kind, soft spoken, uh, man with, um, the ambition to be a farmer and nothing much more than that.

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  Southern gentleman.

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Well, he had, he had proven he could at least get through law school, but he just didn't take a liking to it and he quit. So, and.

• 38:29Rich Roll?

  And in some respects, that, his evolution predates your own. It's a similar cycle, right?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  It is. It's very similar. And of all the children, I look like him and have a lot of the same little characteristics, uh, for what that's worth. Even though I had the usual conflicts with my father, I wasn't like I was a more, I was closer to him than the other two, three.

• 38:57Rich Roll?

  So, so you ship off to Duke?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Went to Duke, yeah. The first year, I was first in my class.

• 39:03Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  And I was thinking like, geez, I must be some sort of genius, you know?

• 39:09Rich Roll?

  (laughing)

• 39:12Speaker 01

  And then I joined a fraternity and I started drinking beer. For about three or four years, I'd call it my beer drinking years. I think those are the best years anybody can have, frankly.

• 39:26Rich Roll?

  I know what that's like.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, drinking beers with your friends at night and talking whatever it is, politics or sports or whatever, just that kind of fellowship is about as good as it ever gets. But anyway, I enjoyed that part, but my grades dropped to about half where I...

• 39:44Rich Roll?

  (laughing) Yeah, that'll happen.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  But...

• 39:48Rich Roll?

  I know what that's like, too.

• 39:49Speaker 01

  You know, and looking back on it, my hero was Nietzsche, okay? I was planning to be some sort of mad intellectual, you know, with books all around me. That was my goal. But after being in the fraternity and all that, and kind of leveling out a little bit, I thought that being a doctor was a reasonable choice. And in a way, it was a choice out of cowardice, in my case, because I could... I was smart enough to do it, but it was a safe way to go through life.

• 40:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  Almost like, a lot of things that look like the dangerous things, for instance, the military, it really is the safe choice. But I made the safe choice. I can remember, I just didn't know what I wanted to do. And geez, it's like somebody staying in graduate school. That's what I did.

• 40:44Rich Roll?

  It's the burden of being intelligent and well-educated. You have...

• 40:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:47Rich Roll?

  You almost feel like, oh, well, you know, I can't go be an actor. I've gotta go.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  I'm too, you know, I need to go do the thing that I am capable of doing.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  The other thing is...

• 40:56Rich Roll?

  Society will smile upon me.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Vietnam was raging at the time.

• 41:00Rich Roll?

  Ah.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  So that was also in the... People were... They were going and getting killed. I had some fraternity brothers that were killed the first year that they went.

• 41:12Speaker 01

  So...

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  Stay in school.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  I figured I'm not gonna... You know, I'd already decided I'm not gonna run to Canada. And it's about a 10% chance that I'm gonna get shot.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  So probably it makes sense just if you get drafted just to go. But I didn't like the way they were prosecuting that war. And I really don't like the way we prosecuted these other wars since Vietnam. And I really, as a child, didn't like the way that we prosecuted the Korean War. I was watching all this, my whole life I've been watching this stuff. It is absolutely disgraceful.

• 41:52Rich Roll?

  So stay in school, become a doctor.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 41:56Rich Roll?

  It's an easy way to bow out of that equation.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  You don't have to, to, to do it, but it's not a bad way of life. Particularly nowadays, the way our society is, the military is a very good choice of a way to live.

• 42:11Rich Roll?

  Well, I think we could, we could do a little bit better with taking care of the troops when they come home. You know, we're not doing such a good, good job of that. Other than bumper stickers that say, "Support your troops." You know, the level of PTSD and the level of care that these people deserve far outweighs what they're getting.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  You know, it's well known by anybody that reads history. And that might not include a lot of our politicians. But the troops, sometimes they come back from these wars where the politicians don't do so good. And they wreck the society. Now, the troops came back from Vietnam after they had been, to some extent, stabbed in the back. And they didn't do anything. The same thing happened after they drew a drawl there with the first Iraq thing. Now, the same thing is happening with these other two recent wars.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  And you wonder, the reason the VA is being in such bad repair is that these politicians are not under any threat from the returning soldiers like they have been in other societies, and I'm thinking Germany. That the politicians here get away with this kind of stuff, the troops come back and they just tolerate it.

• 43:36Rich Roll?

  Well, it's, yeah, it's a tricky situation. I mean, the VA is such a massive bureaucratic organization that even the

• 43:44Speaker 01

  But you would think that the troops, having the weapons, would have some power. Why did they let themselves be taken advantage of like that by people who have, maybe they have paper power, but they don't have any guns?

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that the transparency of the internet is starting to change that. I mean, you're starting to see articles and people speaking out, and I think there's a greater awareness of that situation than maybe there was, you know, even a couple of years ago. So, you know.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Good.

• 44:13Rich Roll?

  I hope that

• 44:14Speaker 01

  I probably went off on a little political thing there.

• 44:16Rich Roll?

  That's all right, but I want to get to the doctor part.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sorry about that.

• 44:21Rich Roll?

  That's all right. Hey, man, I got all day. I just don't want to keep you too long from your skating.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  No, no, it's a good, actually, I like, I like your interview. I, I, it's, I like the questions. Yeah, and I went to, I was at Wake Forest Medical School, Bowman Gray is the name of it. And they were the, again, it was a fabulous time. It was a great bunch of people, fantastic people, student, fellow students, and fantastic, just general, and a lot of heroic types. I had several mentors that were just, and still are, the top as far as human beings, the quality of the human being, and just, matter of fact, when you

• 45:07Speaker 01

  came, you showed up right on time. And I, I always watch that with a new person, to see how close to the time it is, okay? And I can tell you a lot about it because we used to watch one of the, the head of the neurologic department, a guy named James Tool, and literally, he would walk from his house, which was two miles away, and get on the elevator and do all that, and get through the hospital into the chamber where he was gonna lecture, and would walk in right as the The hand came to the exact time. And we used to notice he always did that, you know.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  So and then and then you'll know you can notice who's before and after and how long and like that and you see that there's a span, but the the some of the other people I remember. Um, there's the dean, eventually the dean Jane, uh, uh, Janeway, Dean, um, Dick Janeway had been in the movies as a child and he was just a spectacular person to watch and um, to listen to and so I just, I mean, that.

• 46:24Rich Roll?

  The dean of the medical school had been in the movies? Was it actor?

• 46:29Speaker 01

  He was one of the little rascals.

• 46:31Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  You know, and that was a big thing in the South. We had no, we had no, see California and Hollywood and all like that would be like, um, I don't know if the kids have anywhere like that now, you know, because the world it seems so accessible.

• 46:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was a lot more mystique.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would be way, way exotic and way out with exotic people.

• 46:55Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's just downright bizarre that one of the little rascals was the dean of the medical school.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  He ended up being the dean of the medical school extraordinarily prominent, but he was just a, um, just a unique and cool person, you know, and anyway, it influenced me and and some other people, um, here and there. Uh, so I stayed in neurology, you know, these two had been in neurology and, um, it was an academic thing, like it was indoors work and no heavy lifting is.

• 47:28Rich Roll?

  Not like on the dairy farm.

• 47:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 47:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  I'd learned that there's indoors and outdoors work.

• 47:35Rich Roll?

  By the way, I've done almost a hundred, I've done almost a hundred episodes of this podcast and I can't tell you how many people that I've interviewed grew up on a dairy farm.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  This theme that is running through this, I think you're like the fifth or the sixth.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Really?

• 47:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  That is interesting.

• 47:52Rich Roll?

  I digress.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's gotta be something.

• 47:55Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  There's gotta be, maybe, yeah, you can do one of those meta studies.

• 47:59Rich Roll?

  Right, I'm going to, I think. So, so then you, so you hang out a shingle and start practicing?

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, I hit it. So I had to, I went the, I finished my residency. I did two years at Emory. And then three years of neurology at University of Miami. And then I was in the Navy for two years. I had, I had signed a contract.

• 48:24Rich Roll?

  Post Vietnam?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Vietnam had come to an end. Yeah.

• 48:27Rich Roll?

  So were you ROTC then, or they put you through medical school?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  No, it was a, a kind of a special plan called the Berry Plan where you, you signed a contract in medical school. They'd let you finish your training, then you'd give them two years later when you finished your training. And I was assigned to the hospital in Long Beach where Betty Ford and some of the others made famous. Years later, it was a two-story, either two or four, I can't remember. But I, I were, I was there for two years and then I, that's all I had to do. Which to me, it was just fabulous experience. I mean, really being in the military.

• 49:10Rich Roll?

  You liked being in the Navy?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  I liked it.

• 49:13Rich Roll?

  Out on the boats or the shore leave part?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  It was just the, you, you ran out of the camaraderie. I mean, it really is worth it just from the camaraderie.

• 49:22Rich Roll?

  You were, were you practicing medicine?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, I was, I was the neurologist that saw all neurological patients between El Centro, which, I mean, El Toro, which is about halfway up the road here to LA, and then all the way up to Oakland. So I, I saw a lot of Marines and people like that, you know.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  The hospital was, I'd say.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  It was a real, real good, medium-sized hospital with surgery and that type of thing, but nothing real exceptional.

• 50:04Rich Roll?

  When you say you're the main neurologist, I mean, were you surgery as well?

• 50:12Speaker 01

  No, no, no, just neurology, which is mainly things like seizures and strokes.

• 50:18Rich Roll?

  But not operating on spines or brain surgery?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  The reason it was really cool is I had a little office and I had two medics that were working. It was like a little... Having been, you know, in training my whole life and then coming to this, it was just fabulous. It was a lot of fun. I just had to remember what, you know, when to wear the white.

• 50:43Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, so after that two years, do you stay in California?

• 50:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was living in Long Beach, which is close to there, where I was in the Navy. And I'd worked up there for three years in private practice with another man, another neurologist at one of the hospitals in Long Beach. And I would say at that time, I had almost lived the American dream. I had a house, and I had a car, and I had clothes for the first time, I mean, nice clothes. And I had some prominence, and I drove to work and

• 51:31Speaker 01

  had a white coat, and I did all that. So I kind of, I got a good taste of what it was like to be a doctor in Long Beach. And I was still kind of a loner. That's something that, I've always been kind of a loner. I've had normal relationships along the way, but I was still living alone and this type of thing.

• 51:57Speaker 01

  So, anyway, I reckon, you know, it's funny, I'm kind of thinking of the listeners, you know, at this point, like.

• 52:06Rich Roll?

  No, I don't think about them. No, just tell your story, man.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  But I was alone and I started, well, I started smoking a little marijuana here and there. And began to have a few epiphanies.

• 52:23Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Up until then, I'd been absolutely straight, you know, like, I mean, I was like an eagle. Matter of fact, I was the youngest eagle scout in the country.

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:39Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 52:40Speaker 01

  I got it in the minimum amount of time. I was 11, I think, or 12.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  Wow, when you got your eagle scout. How many badges? It's like a ridiculous number.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Well, it's just that you got, you've got to really work on it all the time to advance it. You can only advance it so fast. So it was a matter of seeing I could do it and be the first one that, at least at that time.

• 53:03Rich Roll?

  So clearly, you're this focused guy. I mean, when you set your mind to something, first in your class, you know, until you start drinking beer with your buddies, but, you know, you scout and all this sort of thing. You're able to channel that side of your, you're able to channel the non-zone when need be.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I'll tell you, looking back, I can see how, which, by the way, that was the part that I had to block on. As you get older, you advance, kind of evolutionarily, okay? And I could see that in my past, I could have easily been a soldier or a military type, not a sort, some sort of killing person.

• 53:44Rich Roll?

  You're very regimented.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Kind of regimented, where it's just the world, you ignore the inside. And I can also see how I could have been a clerk in a clerk variety, the same mind state and this and that.

• 54:01Rich Roll?

  Right, checking the boxes.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And as I've gotten older, I've gotten closer to being a...

• 54:09Speaker 01

  You know, it would almost, it might be, the little bit I know about Geronimo's life is that he started out kind of a hothead and ended up being more rational and reasonable and wise at the end, but I might be wrong on that, but, um, anyway, um, where was I?

• 54:31Rich Roll?

  So you were talking about, uh, basically that your, your medical profession is progressing, you're starting to have a good living and then, uh, and then you start, you start, uh, you start smoking pot once in a while and things are expanding or changing, your perspective is starting to shift.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was, see, yeah, I was, um, what I would say about is not, I was at least a prominent doctor at the second biggest hospital there in Long Beach. And, um, I can remember driving to work and parking my car and looking back at the hood and thinking like, why don't I paint some flowers on the hood?

• 55:11Rich Roll?

  Of your car?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  Now, I didn't do it, but I could just, I, I got into that mindset where I, um, that young people get into when they get exposed to marijuana. I had never before that ever noticed cats. I'd never looked at jewelry.

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  I never thought about, um, I never thought about the visual field in front of me as being a visual field as opposed to, I always thought it was a concrete world, you know? In other words, I, I was, I sort of could see how as a, and by then I was credentialed and well thought of and everything as a doctor and a neurologist, I was thinking like, wow, all that time I thought as a neurologist, I knew about the mind. I didn't know anything. And I was thinking like, wow, all of that education, I was an English major at Duke

• 56:15Speaker 01

  and I read lots and lots of books and all along the way and all that.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  I never had any insight into this way of looking at the world. And, and so the first thing I did was get in touch with the Indian, the Hindus that were working at the hospital. And they're pretty aware that there's another way of experiencing the world. But they, they converted, they had converted over to our way. So I was thinking like, wow, that might be what is going on with the mental institutions. You know, a lot of the people that have mental problems and whatnot. Why don't I just quit and go into psychiatry and see if I can find out for my own interests, really, because I, I wasn't married.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  I had no responsibilities except myself. What some of them are experiencing. And I, I got in the program down here, so I just quit my job up there and I came down here.

• 57:21Rich Roll?

  Wow, you just, oh wow, so it's just like that?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I did it pretty quick. I mean, I have a friend down here that was able, that was kind of connected and he helped, but they had a position.

• 57:33Rich Roll?

  Down here being San Diego?

• 57:35Speaker 01

  UCSD, yeah. And I did, I knew if I did two years, I could be credentialed in psychiatry.

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, so you had to do a residency all over again?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I had to go back, so here I am, a little bit of an older guy in the class, you know, but.

• 57:50Rich Roll?

  Right, how old were you at this point?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Well, I'd gone through the Navy in two, three years, so I was probably about thirty.

• 57:58Rich Roll?

  Okay, so not that old.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Thirty-one, maybe thirty-two, somewhere in there. And I did two more years as a psychiatry resident down here, which again, was just fantastic because of good people, friends and the environment in San Diego, it was such a nice place. But, so all that, and then I figured halfway through that, I'd stopped marijuana, coal, okay, so I'd gone.

• 58:27Rich Roll?

  Why'd you do that? You're, you're starting to have all these epiphanies, you're gonna paint the hood of your car and it's changing your career. There must have been a dark side to that too, to make you want to stop.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  You know what? That's probably the most intelligent question you've asked. Looking back on it, that's where I made my big mistake.

• 58:46Rich Roll?

  You should have kept going.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  But I was a loner. See, I didn't smoke with anybody. I didn't have any, I didn't.

• 58:53Rich Roll?

  But this is not what responsible doctors do, John. We know that's right. Is that your fear of like?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  That was the other thing, like it was a felony to be caught.

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  Not like it is now.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, yeah. So, but everybody, you know, it wasn't really, I mean, I didn't do anything that was harmful. I mean, it would be like having an extra drink at the weekend.

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  I got you. I got you.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  But, but anyway, I got down here, I'd stopped cold and I was straight again, you know, real straight. And, um,

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I decided to start a practice in neurology and psychiatry because no one down here was double credentialed that way.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an interesting, I mean, it seems a natural nexus between these two things.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  And it was, so I started a practice in downtown Well Open Hillcrest, which is Pill Hill.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  And, um, by myself, I had, I built up a nice little practice doing the, um, pretty much standard neurology.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  And, um,

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  I got married, had a son, got divorced about a little short of two years later after getting married. And I kept working and my practice kind of changed over to a lot of evaluations for disability and personal injury and things like that. So the quality of it changed. I began to make what I thought was a lot of money. And I bought up a, you know, bought an extra house and went through that, you know, where I was kind of experiencing what it was like to have really good cause and all that.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You got the, the, the V12 BMW, right? Did you get the, you got a Ferrari?

• 1:00:46Speaker 01

  I got a, I had a, I had a Mondeal Ferrari, which it was the only one of its type. I mean, I thought it was a big deal. That was the first thing. Then that 12 cylinder, which is the worst car I ever had.

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  Why is that?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  I can tell you. Listen, I know.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  And I do, I don't think I'm not a journal manophile, but this be everything that they say about BMW is a lot of it's true, some of it's not true. But what I've I find out with this 12 cylinder, you'd be flying along it at say 45 miles an hour going down the street and then suddenly it would just turn off and go on, it would go on some sort of maybe two cylinders and and come to a stop. And there were a lot of glitches, other glitches like that and the wheels and it was.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  I think they figured all that stuff out now, but all right, but at the time, not so good, right? But at least it looked good, right? So you got the money out.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:45Rich Roll?

  And then you get this exotic animal farm? What is the story with that?

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, I bought this place out in Ramona, up on top of a mountain, looking down on everything. And it was a big house, a 6,000 square foot house, three stories. And it had this big window looking down on everything. I was thinking like, whoa, this is really like, I'm really turning into some sort of Faustian character.

• 1:02:11Rich Roll?

  You're a baller.

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  I'm driving Ferrari and doing all this. I got this thing. So I started buying all these damn, I got a couple of people working there for me, like foreman. And so I started buying all these damn exotic damn birds and yeah, and seriously, looking back on it's kind of funny. I would even, I even dressed like you can tell people that go through this phenomenon, whatever it is of having more money, like a lot of the celebrities, you see them go through this.

• 1:02:45Rich Roll?

  Well, they don't have anybody around them to tell them to cut it out, right? Like just a bunch of yes people? Yeah.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  Well, I started like, I felt like the rest of y'all can wear a tie and a jacket like that, but I'm gonna wear a special kind of jumpsuit.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  You're having like your own Michael Jackson Neverland Ranch situation?

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And this was, you know, I don't know if I did it before Michael Jackson or did it.

• 1:03:12Rich Roll?

  He got the idea from you?

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  Or he got the idea from me. But I did, I did see a connection there, you know? Anyway, you know, it was a nice animal farm. We had almost every kind of farm animal there. And I had the best thing I had was a two hump. Backed in camel, which we gave eventually to the zoo. And we smuggled him a couple of.

• 1:03:39Rich Roll?

  How do you even do that?

• 1:03:40Speaker 01

  That's a story, that's a story in it.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  This is an interesting story. I had, the guy working for me was from Oklahoma. He had grown up on the farms and whatnot back there. And so I put out a, I had enough money where I could put out a notice that I was looking to, for a camel, you know, and I'd pay anybody that came up. Well, he.

• 1:04:17Rich Roll?

  You put out the, how do you put out the notice for that? Like, how does that work?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  I didn't do it.

• 1:04:21Rich Roll?

  It's like a rich guy thing, right?

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  I know, exactly, exactly. Yeah, listen, that's the part I was playing like, for instance, when I would go to an auction, I would sit on the front like J.R. Ewing. I was trying to be kind of like J.R. Ewing. And my foreman, who would dress down from me, so I was the prominent one, he would sit there and do the bidding. Okay, I would kind of, like, I tried to do the whole thing, a little bit like, you know, I was, in a way, I was experimenting with the whole image thing, I reckon, you know? The funniest, you gotta get a chuckle out of this. I was putting together a small clinic, which never came, but it was in Vista.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  And I had some workers there, real nice people and educated people. And I drove over to see how it was coming in my Ferrari, okay? And I drove up to the building that we had bought. It was a little building, but it was, and it's two stories. They're standing outside and I'm kind of dressed like in some sort of special jumpsuit, like my own version of Elvis.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  And they're standing there just thinking, what a cool, he's our boss, he's just the coolest. And they're standing there, so I said a few things, kinda like, you know, kind of super sillishly. And then I get back in the Ferrari and back up and slam right into a post.

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  The universe is knocking on your door already.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, that was the beginning of it.

• 1:05:55Rich Roll?

  The zone is saying, enough, how much longer are we gonna play this game?

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Well, now, it, it kinda taught me that, you're talking about earlier, the way you referred to this bigger, uh, something, uh, takes over yourself during sports, something like that. Like there's a higher creative self, whatever you call it. Well, it's taught me that, that there is a self like that. But there's another little man that's guarding a door that he comes through. And that little guy won't open the door if he doesn't totally approve of what he sees you doing, okay? It's like he, and, and so I was totally, I was willing to, so to speak, well, if there is a God, I'll go to hell.

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  You know, I was, I'd already kinda, it was a little bit like, well, I'm gonna play it this way.

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  In a way, in an analogy that, um, I think in terms of now is how to bet, if you had one, uh, roulette wheel roll with ten, and you had, uh, you had ten chips.

• 1:07:05Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  Um, I think I was putting all my chips on black. But now, I'm splitting my chips, five on red and five on black.

• 1:07:19Rich Roll?

  Meaning what? Explain that.

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Um, all right, thanks for asking me that. Um, I am absolutely a thousand percent devoted to the idea that there is a higher being of some kind that would make sense of this world that we're living in as humans. You could call that whatever it is, God, okay? I'm totally devoted to the idea and the fact that mankind should strive in this direction, as if he's an image and, and built in that image.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  I totally disdain the other way of thinking, that it's just a fluke. This is what science would tell us, this is a fluke. And what people, it's just now to get what you can and you're out of here. There's no afterlife, anything like that. On that side, it seems to me that the left hemisphere, which is the analytical hemisphere, comes to that conclusion. And it will always come to that conclusion.

• 1:08:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Um, Hawken just made a very good TV series, uh, program about why I don't believe in God. And he can, and by reason, he gives the most elegant argument.

• 1:08:52Rich Roll?

  Who is this?

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Stephen Hawken.

• 1:08:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, Hawking.

• 1:08:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's recent too. It's, um, so it's at the end, so to speak, his final words on what...

• 1:09:02Rich Roll?

  Analysis.

• 1:09:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  So, basically, if you think this way, and if you're trained this way, and then you know the psychology of denial and repression and all that kind of thing, and how we're all tempted to fool ourselves, um, you cannot ignore this whole part. And to me, it, that means that if you're balanced yourself on two feet, you will have about half doubt and about half devotion.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  I see, so that's, that's the idea of half on black and half on white?

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. The scientists, um, and the, the typical sci- the pure scientist is putting all his chips on black.

• 1:09:57Rich Roll?

  It's an interesting thing because it seems to me that the most brilliant of the scientists have to engage the right hemisphere of the brain because it requires some level of imagination and creativity. And to me, it's bizarre because if you really drill down to, say, quantum physics and you really begin to understand how matter acts at the subatomic particle level, it's so baffling and so extraordinary. For example, I don't, you know, I'll botch it, but subatomic particles that are, they're like mirror images of each other that could be, you know, on the opposite end of the earth that when one moves, the other one moves the same way and all these kinds of crazy, it's crazy, right?

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  So for me, when I look at that, that just gives me more room to believe that there's something greater, not less, you know? It's interesting.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  I agree totally with what you've said because if you follow quantum physics or any of it down to it, if you really follow it down, it does that for me too. And probably I ought to back up and say that, yeah, that the intelligent scientist, the intelligent scientist must see, for instance, these paradoxes in quantum physics, he must see that quantum physics that he believes, has been taught to believe in is no more than a temporary imagination of the human mind. It's no further than the human mind.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  If you take the brain that produces the mind, at least according to what we think, you can hold it in your hand like this. Now, so the scientist has got to say, if that's the fundamental level, if he's really understanding it at that level and it's not just a temporary looking, a temporary imagination of the mind, because it's, then he must be thinking that something that that size and that looks like a cabbage can comprehend.

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  The, the, the, under, the, underpinning of the universe, now think what, how that diminishes the extent to which the universe, in other words, you would think that if a brain could comprehend the true quantum physics, that it really exists. I mean, if it could really, I mean, way beyond the mathematics that we know now and all that, just way, way, way, so it really is right on it. That brain would have to be extraordinary.

• 1:12:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, well, what it, what it says to me is that, is that we as human beings are extremely arrogant in this idea that we believe, you know, we're at the top of the food chain and that we're capable of understanding everything. And it's, and it's that, it's that mindset that pushes us forward to continually expand and develop technologies and all of this. But I think that it bears, you know, it bears recognizing that we may never be able to understand these things in the same way that you could pick up a snake and try to teach that snake how to understand the human language for the rest of your life. And that the brain in that snake is not, it's just not advanced enough to understand that no matter what you do.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  And so I think we need to understand that we're quite possibly missing that extra lobe or two that would, that would allow us to comprehend these things. I mean, our ability to perceive is so limited from the, you know, the auditory frequencies that we're able to pick up on through the visual spectrum that we're able to perceive. All these sorts of things are extremely limiting. And so for us to say, oh, well, you know, it's, it's this or that, and that's the definitive yes or no, I think is extremely arrogant. And, and I think it, it, it hamstrings us from being able to be in that place of, of

• 1:14:04Rich Roll?

  wonder, where we can allow that imagination to flow and to really contemplate and embrace the idea that there is more out there and to be okay with that. That's not a threat to our, you know, time on the mortal coil.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I like, I like everything you just said. I agree totally.

• 1:14:22Rich Roll?

  So, all right. So, so, so you're driving the Ferrari, you got the crazy ranch with all the animals and everything's going good. I mean, what's going on spiritually at this time in your life or emotionally? I mean, are you starting to kind of? Question what's going on? Or are you having that rich guy thing where you're thinking, why am I not as happy as I thought this would make me? Or what is going on with you?

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Well, I believe that I, the next thing that started to happen was gradual, and that was a loss of my vision.

• 1:14:55Rich Roll?

  So how long after this, this sort of, you know, collecting the crazy animals, did that start to creep in?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Probably, oh boy, I don't know. It just, back in the 90s, I can, I can tell you that I can remember for about a year, when I would look, it seemed like everything was real dim. And I'd seen an ophthalmologist a few times to correct my glasses before ski season. And he, he told me that I was almost blind, that according to the way they define

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  it. Not according, and I was thinking to myself, and I even told him, I think it was during the Clinton administration, I was just thinking that the Democrats are making too many advances.

• 1:15:58Rich Roll?

  You thought that helicopter was coming after you?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It's really kind of funny, it's coincidental, because I really did think, well, golly, if I'm disabled, then, and legally blind, that means that Clinton and the Democrats have really made a lot of advances in Congress.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  You're starting to lose it.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I was thinking that they've lowered the threshold for disability so far.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  But it was kind of a joke, because I enjoyed skiing so much.

• 1:16:35Rich Roll?

  You're driving around, and you're living your life, and you're able to function.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  But then, when I was practicing this forensic neurology, I started noticing that I couldn't really tell if I'd seen somebody before or not. So.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  I got my eyes checked by a bunch of doctors and they all kind of agreed that there was a problem with optic atrophy resulting from a severe case of Drusen crystals, which is some kind of condition that people get occasionally. And so I said, well, gosh, my business is going down and I'm, I qualify, you know, I'm kind of getting older anyway. I'm unmarried. I got, I don't have any mortgages. So I just put it all together and figured like, well, I'll just change, you know, and I like-

• 1:17:38Rich Roll?

  There had to be some level of profound unhappiness or dissatisfaction going on with you concurrently with that to, to really make you want to change that drastically though at the time.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  It must have been.

• 1:17:56Rich Roll?

  Because it's almost, on some level, okay, you know, you're going to have trouble practicing medicine with this condition. I mean, is it, was it really prosopagnosia? Is that, is that how they-

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  That's, that's what they, you call it.

• 1:18:10Rich Roll?

  Which is the condition where you can't, you have difficulty-

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  I think I could have, I think I could have continued, but-

• 1:18:16Rich Roll?

  So there had to be some, there, there was a momentum going on where this, this, this opportu, it's almost an opportunity presented itself where it said, now I can finally-

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  His, his, I don't know if you saw this documentary they made on this, but the, the turning point that I can identify was an old man that I saw in the cafeteria in the hospital when I was at the, kind of at the top part of working hard as a regular doctor. And I had mouthed off to him about how does a young, good-looking, strapping guy like me get to be some old gnarly character like he is?

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  Right. He's like 91 years old, right?

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  He was nice, um, yeah. And he just, he turned and shouted at me, "Do what you want to." Now-

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  That was in the setting of me knowing almost everything that an average doctor should know about what's a good diet, what's the right thing to do for this medicine, I mean, this particular disease, what, how much do you do this, what, I'd gone through a society where everything was given to me of what to do. And it was the first time in my life that I'd ever thought, gosh, if a person just does what he wants to, for instance, maybe bacon, if I really like to eat bacon, maybe in my case, it's what I should be eating, you know?

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  And I was thinking, it changed the whole direction. I was thinking like, there's all this, as you know, the kind of philosophic agreement that, man, there's a certain set of categorical imperatives inside of us. And instead of, and I saw medicine as being like a bell-shaped curve where they were taking everybody to be the same. And for instance, and it was just so obvious in neurology because we expect this nerve to innervate that particular finger and so on. But then I was thinking like, whoa, if I just did exactly what I wanted to, what I

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:20:59Rich Roll?

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

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of, really just, um, yeah, it was a kind of a Faustian thing. I can remember,

• 1:21:32Speaker 01

  I think I experienced the same thing that Faust did.

• 1:21:37Rich Roll?

  But Faust didn't get a way out.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:21:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's been a while. I don't want to, am I speaking out of school on that? Did he?

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  But I think, you know, you talk about Faust, you talk about literature. When I look at your, the arc of your life, it really is, it really is, you could not, a great writer couldn't script these dichotomies and these, uh, these, you know, sort of the character arc better. It's almost too good to be real because you have, you're starting to lose your eyesight, but that gives you the ability to see. You're a neurologist and then you suffer from this neurological disorder that you would think imprisons you as a result of your many years of being a doctor and yet that's what sets you free. And you're this loner who enjoys

• 1:22:33Rich Roll?

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

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Well, you put it together mighty beautifully. I appreciate you saying it that way. Where I'm at now, um, I live here a half a block from the boardwalk. There's a two mile stretch of perfect skating.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  The feeling that I get when I skate, I know is a zone. I can get in the zone very easily that way and sustain it. My thoughts when I'm skating are the type that people naturally have when they're in the zone, the way I relate to the people and what they see up and down the boardwalk. So it really is about as close to paradise. It's next, I live next to the zone in a way.

• 1:23:48Rich Roll?

  But the paradise isn't geographical for you. The paradise is, is your ability to live within this zone-like state that you're able to access through what you do every day, which is get out and skate and high five people and listen to music and tap into, you know, that more primal part of who you are that allows you to connect with, you know, your higher state of consciousness.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. I call it, um, the way I visualize it, and I can tell you, you understand all this type of stuff, is that the ego is in a room that has a little door, and in front of that door is a very small little soldier who is you when you were five years old, before the left hemisphere began to take over. He knows right and wrong. He knows, uh, when a person's arrogant and when they're not. He knows a person, uh, the way everything should be.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  And he watches you. Now, you have to please him, otherwise he won't open the door. Now, when he opens the door, you just call it the primal, uh, part of ourselves. I call it, the Christians call it the Christ. I think that's what they mean by the Christ. Um, the, um, I call it, because I don't want to restrict it. I think the Christ is a good name for it, but so that people don't get hung up on whether or not that's correct, is the fundamental man, because I think the spirit is the same thing that exists.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  If there is a man that's equal, if we are equal, it's the fundamental man is the thing, okay? And if he's in us equally, I guarantee you he's in the birds and in the animals. And he, but he only comes out and manifests himself in the, when a person's in the zone. And that's when that little guy agrees to let him, to it's safe. And he comes into the, the fundamental Christians would probably say that this is, you have to invite Christ into your life.

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  This is the, the idea is that you have to behave in such a way that this happens to you.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that, that, uh, that that sense of higher consciousness is always there. Um, but, but you have to do something active to tap into it, whether it's skating or meditation or any variety of things.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:46Rich Roll?

  You know, it's sort of that idea that, that, you know, God never leaves you. You leave God, it's, it's always there. And whatever your concept of, of that higher power is for yourself, um, you found a very specific and unique way of accessing it, your own personal, you know, brand of tapping into it, which is fascinating. Uh, but in many ways, it's, it's your version of accessing a meditative state that allows you to be a more actualized version of yourself. And, you know, the biggest theme of this podcast is how to unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self. So you call it the fundamental man. I sort of, I generally refer to it as the, as a more actualized version of, of yourself. But I think it involves that regression of tapping into that childlike nature

• 1:27:30Rich Roll?

  that exists within all of us that gets worn away over the years.

• 1:27:35Speaker 01

  All right, let me inject right here.

• 1:27:37Rich Roll?

  Please do.

• 1:27:39Speaker 01

  The way you do it is you do what you want to. In other words, that, that self will find its way, like water, unless you restrict it. And if there's some barrier, for instance, um,

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  If you get to a, you have to learn what you really want to do. How much do you really want to eat? How much do you really want to sleep? How much do you really want to be this person or that person or be this and that? And just gradually cone down on it. And what that will do is prepare you. It will open.

• 1:28:23Rich Roll?

  That path will unfold for you. Well, I have a couple of observations on that. And the first thing is that I might write down a note because I don't want to forget. But the first idea is that most people are so disconnected from themselves that when you sort of beckon them to ask themselves what it is that they want or sort of tell them, go do what you want. Most people don't even know what that is. And it's not their fault. It's because, it's because this, the non-zone, as you call it, or our culture,

• 1:29:02Rich Roll?

  has created a situation where we're, we are disincentivized from tapping into that part of our life. And it's not considered acceptable or okay. And we're like, you know, in all honesty, most people are just trying to get through the day. They're trying to put food on the table. They're trying to take care of their kids. I gotta pay the bills. And who has time to entertain this notion of, of, you know, what makes me happy or what it is that I, that I want to do? And so I think that pushes buttons when you say, just do what you want to do. I think the knee jerk kind of reaction is, well, good for you, slow mo. You know, you had a, you had a nest egg and, you know, it's all fine and dandy. But like, I don't have a nest egg, you know? I don't have that luxury.

• 1:29:45Rich Roll?

  And, you know, my, my story arc isn't as dramatic as yours, but it has been a journey towards that, trying to, you know, tap into the fundamental man and doing, you know, what I want to do. And I walked away from a law career, you know? It's not, it's not, in certain respects, the themes are the same. And my response to that is generally, you know, I'm not, I'm not telling people to go out and be irresponsible, but you've got to find a way to connect with yourself and start to cultivate a better relationship, a healthier relationship with yourself, so that those ideas of what you may want to be, or may want to express more fully, start to percolate up. And then your life can be about trying to find, at first, subtle ways of expressing

• 1:30:30Rich Roll?

  that more. And as you walk that path, as we just said, you know, that path will get laid out and those bricks will start to fall in front of you. And it's a matter of following that lead.

• 1:30:42Speaker 01

  I think you've spoken it very well, but I want to-

• 1:30:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, please, go ahead.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  For someone listening right now saying, because I'd be the first to say that Beavis was very wise when he told Budhead, "There's always a catch."

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  All right. That's your soundbite.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  But I want to say something to the people that might be listening on this idea that you should, you have to be responsible and make money and go and put food on the table. One of the things that surprised me personally is how much people liked me more when I was pleasing myself than when I was trying to please them.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  It's that, it's that Buddhist idea of the best way to heal the world is to heal yourself.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  Heal yourself, exactly.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  It sounds selfish and self-indulgent, but there's a great truth in that.

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  Let's, let's take an example, like, I can visualize someone listening to one of your broadcast, this broadcast, is struggling to make enough money to put, say, give his family some stuff or something. But-

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  If he doesn't really want to do that, okay? If there's something else that he really wants to do and he does it instead, has the courage to do it instead, then what'll happen is his family will be happier because he's happier doing something that he really wants to do. Now, the problem is, he may think he wants to do one thing and he really doesn't. You've gotta know what you really want to do because society has programmed you in such a way that you figure like, "Well, if I really want to do that, it's gotta be wrong." Okay?

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  You've gotta be careful to really know what you want to do. A lot of people, Ezra Pound said that if you were honest, the only things you'd really want to do is make love and lie around.

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  Well, but the point of that, extrapolating on that point really, is that the things that make us happy are incredibly simple that you think, "Well, that can't be it." Like, for me, I like, you know, the sun is coming out right now. I feel the sun on my cheek and that makes me happy. Or being out on a trail with the sun on my back and being able to connect with my breath or being, you know, in the ocean swimming. These are the things that make me genuinely happy. And I remember as I started to engage those more, I thought, "That's kinda great. This is what kids do. This can't be, you know, what it is." But, you know, we're hardwired with millions of years of DNA to, you know, live in a more primal state than we've created for ourselves.

• 1:33:44Rich Roll?

  And I think that, you know, you're an example of what happens when you can connect with that kind of primal urge and the direction that that can lead you in. But I think it does go back to exactly what you said, which is, you gotta get right with yourself. You know, we're so bombarded with signals and distractions and information that it's impossible to be silent with yourself, to be able to tap into the frequency of that.

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  That higher consciousness that is trying to speak to you and it's work. You know, that doesn't happen just because or you can't just flick a switch. Like you have to put energy and time into that in order to ensure that whatever decision you do make about where you're going to invest your time in the future in a way that will make you happy is indeed the appropriate path for you.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Hmm hmm.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  Does that resonate with what where you're coming from?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  It's all in the word want. What does, you know, it's interesting like because the words are applying to

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  something that's very hard to to know, really. What does a person really want?

• 1:35:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that's it's subjective.

• 1:35:06Speaker 01

  It's very, yeah, yeah, I reckon.

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  You're talking about that we're wired a certain way.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  One way you could say that this thing may be working is that biologic tissue has to it get to a certain stage of development to create a mind, like to have a brain with a mind. And then the mind has to get to a certain a stage of of involvement or evolution to produce what we would call the zone. Okay. And the zone is a natural, the result of a natural evolution so that.

• 1:36:00Speaker 01

  Well, give me an example. In the TV series, it's excellent called The Vikings. I don't know if you've seen that.

• 1:36:06Rich Roll?

  I have a friend on that show, actually.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  Oh, really? Well, good for him. Which one is he?

• 1:36:11Rich Roll?

  Uh, his name's Donald Logue. I don't know the name of his character. He's a bearded guy with long hair, but they all are, right? I don't know which guy. I haven't watched the show yet. But sorry, Donald.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  Well, according to the archaeology and whatnot, it's very accurate. It's a good program. And you can tell that they're hierarchy. They first off, there's and and this would be true of the Nordic cultures that they were extremely. Loyal to law, that they really were, they were societies that believed in the law.

• 1:36:45Rich Roll?

  The law of nature?

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  No, no, their law.

• 1:36:47Rich Roll?

  Their law, okay.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  It wasn't, they weren't societies of men, all right, below the, I mean, even the chief and people like that had to obey the law. And then, in the hierarchy, there was a chieftain, that we're all, the warlord, that we're all familiar with, but above the warlord was the mystic. And the mystic was the only one that there was no reprisal against. You couldn't kill the mystic. I mean, warlords had to defend themselves.

• 1:37:20Rich Roll?

  Mystic had tenure.

• 1:37:22Speaker 01

  Exactly, the mystic. All right, so, if you look at the Bible, the hierarchy is the mystic, the top. If you look at, um, something like-

• 1:37:35Rich Roll?

  Well, Native American cultures.

• 1:37:37Speaker 01

  Native American culture, that's right. The mystic, so the mystical part of the personality, we think, is the top, and we care less about animals that we think don't have that. If we think a dog's got it, we don't eat dogs over here, because we think that, a lot of people think that there's a heaven for humans, there's gonna be dogs in there, because they're not any less divine than we are. And so, basically, the idea is, um, that the mystic, whatever his desires are, and whatever he thinks, this is the top.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  And I don't mean the epileptic, I'm talking about the true mystic. And that, those things are very consistent with what all the biblical and ancient writings have said, even Marcus Aurelius and people like that. And that is, what we really want, most of us, is peace of mind. Aggression and revenge are attractive, as are the deadly sins, the seven deadly sins, all of them are attractive to all of us. But, a state of peace and goodwill and love-

• 1:39:07Speaker 01

  Is preferred. That's the one we want.

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And I think that we're all chasing it, but we're chasing it in the wrong way. Because we're in a world where we think that the way to get that is to sort of, you know, succeed in our modern definition of the term. And then we get there and then we think, what happened? Or what's wrong? Or why aren't I not feeling the way that I thought that I would feel when I got here? And then you feel ripped off. And then you feel resentful. And that can lead you down a very dark path of despair.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  So, you found a way out.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Found a way out.

• 1:39:53Rich Roll?

  So I want to know, did you just have this epiphany and literally overnight sell all your stuff? I mean, what was the logistics of how that all went down?

• 1:40:01Speaker 01

  Um, well, I quit. And I started doing exactly what I wanted. I mean, that was my thing. Every day, everything fell into place so nicely. It seemed like to me like it was a gift from God to get me out of my medical state.

• 1:40:22Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:40:23Speaker 01

  My, um...

• 1:40:24Rich Roll?

  I mean, did, so you had, this 91-year-old gentleman says, "Do what you want." And did you kind of ruminate on that for a while? Or how long was it before you just decided?

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I mean, I started doing it immediately. I started doing what I want. I would, um, of course, I felt guilty as I'll get out. For the first few years, I remember when I would wake up, I could hear the freeway and thinking like I should be on the freeway. You know, after a while, you don't hear the freeway anymore. The distant sound of the freeway.

• 1:40:52Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Um... And what are your, uh, your peers, your colleagues, your extended family members chirping into your ears around this time?

• 1:41:04Speaker 01

  Um, well, almost everybody thought I was probably nuts, or sort of semi-nuts.

• 1:41:11Speaker 01

  Some of my family members kind of politely came out and visited me.

• 1:41:16Rich Roll?

  They're gonna do an intervention?

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that type of thing.

• 1:41:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  The, I mean, it never really came to the surface and I never could tell at a point like that, there's always you have a streak of paranoia, so you don't know for sure, you know, just how, how much a person is sort of evaluating your, the level of your mental faculties.

• 1:41:40Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a tricky thing because I think the dividing line between dementia and expansion or the quest for enlightenment, those, it's like a Venn diagram that perhaps could overlap, and especially the way that we perceive somebody who makes a counterculture decision to be, you know, for lack of a better term, a seeker. That's not something that's going to be embraced. That's something that's going to be marginalized and, and, and kind of the words that would come out of the mouth of that person can sound crazy to somebody else when, in fact, maybe these are the, the words that we should all be eating.

• 1:42:20Speaker 01

  Well, to me, I know both sides. I think it's like combat. You've got in the middle third of life, you, you cannot always do what you want to.

• 1:42:33Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  You have to make a living. And there's some realities there. I mean, we have to survive. And, but if you get a chance, as much as you can, I think you ought to stay in contact with the other side, the zone of what I think Christ called the kingdom of God. It's inside you. And you should get, try to call back some small part of the day or week to be in touch with that, so that later...

• 1:43:06Speaker 01

  You can get, you can just dive right into it and be in that state as much as possible when you're older.

• 1:43:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, in the documentary, you say that you were lost in a rational world.

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  It's a rational world.

• 1:43:18Rich Roll?

  And the question that you were asking yourself is, on a daily basis, how much of your life was devoted to spirituality and how much of your life was devoted to financial gain? And when that balance tipped too far in the wrong direction, that's really when you started asking yourself these questions. And the universe, I guess you could say in certain respects, really conspired to answer that question for you.

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  It did. I feel like I'm in therapy sometimes. You summarize these things so perfectly. I mean, this is really helping me understand myself.

• 1:43:52Rich Roll?

  Good, I'm glad. But we haven't even gotten to the skating part, right? Like, in the top 50 things of, you know, like, what makes me happy? Like, where does the, how do you, you know, how does it boil down to putting on the rollerblades? I mean, at some point, you must have been doing this already, where you realize this is something that made you happy. But where does it, where does the, the sort of dawning realization come in that this is literally what you want to just basically do all day, every day?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, there's a song where the lyric is, "If I were a rich man, I would pray all day."

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:25Speaker 01

  That's in "A Fiddle on the Roof." If I were a rich man, I'd spend all day praying. Well, I had identified that the best state of mind, and we're all, no, different states of mind.

• 1:44:38Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:44:39Speaker 01

  But the best for me was what I call the top spiritual state of mind, or the zone. And that I discovered when I was skiing.

• 1:44:48Rich Roll?

  I'm taking a picture.

• 1:44:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:50Rich Roll?

  Hold on.

• 1:44:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. I discovered when I was skiing, I would go skiing every winter.

• 1:44:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, whoops. Hold on, do that one more time. Sorry.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do film there.

• 1:45:05Rich Roll?

  I gotta take a Polaroid of all my guests.

• 1:45:06Speaker 01

  I'd done enough skiing over the years that I knew that the sliding, and I'd investigated this, lateral acceleration or momentum gives a certain feeling that the reason people get the feeling of exhilaration on carnival rides or racing around a corner in a car is that acceleration, it spans the inner, the experience of, the inner ear experience of balance.

• 1:45:38Rich Roll?

  It's the side, so it's the side to side motion, really?

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gotta be a force, that's right. It's gotta be a force. Neurologically, it activates a whole nother set of receptors, okay? Anyway, I'd experimented with this over the years with skiing, so that at the top of the hill, I would get as close as I could meditatively by standing there, and then I would, I'd kinda gauge the size and the extent of this, and then I would, when I was carving turns, I would see that it got

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  much larger and more intense, okay? So it dawned on me that this was the source of, for instance, when Hillary, they asked Hillary why he climbed mountains.

• 1:46:31Rich Roll?

  Sir Edmund Hillary?

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:33Rich Roll?

  Not Hillary Clinton?

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  No. Sir...

• 1:46:40Rich Roll?

  Sir Edmund Hillary, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  As you know, he said because they're there. But there's a real answer to that question. The real reason has to do with balance. When a person is in a precarious situation, for instance, climbing the wall of a mountain or something like that, their sense of balance, it spans. And what that is, it's, at least in my own judgment, the identical thing which the...

• 1:47:16Speaker 01

  Moses and the other people that wrote the first part of the whole Bible called the I Am Experience.

• 1:47:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  In other words, the soul and the sense of balance are identical to each other. That's what I'm saying.

• 1:47:33Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the meditator, what he's doing is he's concentrating on part of the sentry apparatus for balance, which wants to plumb itself with the sun of the earth.

• 1:47:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's, there's, well, this idea of I Am kind of hearkens back to Hindu texts and the idea of self and oneness.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  And being present and meditation techniques that, that revolve around doing, doing just that, anchoring yourself, like envisioning that, that anchor dropping down from the base of your spine when you're in that lowest position.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  All the way to the center of the earth, so.

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so Buddha could do that really, assume that he could really do it well.

• 1:48:25Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:26Speaker 01

  Now.

• 1:48:27Rich Roll?

  He's got his inner, he's got his inner ear dialed in, right?

• 1:48:29Speaker 01

  He's got it dialed in to the sun of the earth. Now suppose he'd had inline skates or a teacup at Disneyland. See what I'm saying? His meditative experience would have gotten larger. That's what happens to all the people that are, that get addicted to these sliding sports. For instance, the surfer.

• 1:48:50Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  The skateboarder.

• 1:48:52Rich Roll?

  Skateboarding, surfing.

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Skiing, on and on. It's the exhilaration of the I Am Experience which results from adding the acceleration component, that is the force component.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  To the, um, the stable component that's plumb to the sun of the earth.

• 1:49:13Rich Roll?

  So what is it neurologically that's going on in the inner ear that allows you to kind of experience that, like neurologically?

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Um, okay, here's what I, the way, from my knowledge of, of the anatomy and so on, and it's incredibly, a lot of details.

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  Right, just for the layperson.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  But the layperson, if you look at the brain, you can remember that a big part of the brain is the lower part, the cerebellum. It's about a third of the size of the, of the rest of the brain, the major part of the brain. The cerebellum is wired primarily into, uh, the inner ear, okay? And to some extent, to a large extent, into a sort of a parallel system which is at the tip of the nerves. That is the proprioceptive sense. All right.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  The, um, that part of the brain, uh, picks up information from the inner ear, from the, um, semicircular canals, and from the otoliths, which are plumb to the sun of the earth, on both sides. And there's a background feeling, which we call the sense of balance. It's the sixth sense. It's the same sense that the ancients would call, thought existed in the pineal gland. The neurologists don't make any identity of the sense of balance with the I am experience.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  But meditatively, if you watch it from the inside, while you change your sense of balance, and you know that this is what they're doing, or at least it's consistent with what they're doing when they meditate, and then how much of our sports have to do with acceleration? And then the feeling of the zone, and you put it all together. It's a state of epiphany. It's a state of I exist as a subjective entity. I am what I am, which is this. Now, what this is, is the result, at least if we go back to a scientific way of looking

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  at it, of these receptors stimulating part of the brain, which as a result of curved space, or gravity, or gravity waves. And these waves, obviously, most of them are coming from the sun of the earth, from the gravity of the earth. But most, but a certain number come from the sun and the moon. And it has a constant background, it's a little bit like micro background act of the mind. That's where we have six senses, you can count them.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Sight is a predominant one. When you see something, this sixth sense is just there.

• 1:52:31Rich Roll?

  Right, it's on low hum.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Right, it's on low hum. You hear something, it's on low hum.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:37Speaker 01

  You smell and eat something, it's on low hum. You go through life as if it didn't exist.

• 1:52:44Rich Roll?

  Well, it doesn't, the sense of balance never really gets lumped in with the other senses.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:52:49Rich Roll?

  We don't really, we don't really acknowledge it as one of our senses.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  That's right, because it is identical to us. That's what I'm thinking, is that what we've taken-

• 1:52:59Rich Roll?

  Right, because you wouldn't know what it would be like to be, you can't be born without a sense of balance.

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:05Rich Roll?

  I mean, you can have a tweaked sense of balance, I suppose, but you couldn't be born without what it feels like to feel gravity, right? So, we wouldn't know what that would be like.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  And there's no place in the universe where there's no, absolutely no gravity. I think that you can tell that it will accommodate to itself. Like, if you go, spin in a circle after a certain period, you'll come, it'll come, balance out.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  By what I can experience and watch is that there's sort of a limit of time of how long a person can literally stay glued in the zone, in an epiphanous state, like from acceleration, okay, and it's a matter of a few minutes, probably.

• 1:53:57Rich Roll?

  But in essence, what you're saying is that, is that by, by engaging your body in these lateral movements that you, you can access through rollerblading, or surfing, or skateboarding, or what have you, it's really just a means to access a state of higher consciousness that would be a little bit more work if you were just meditating. So it's almost like it, it does the work for you, so you're not fighting your mind, trying to get into that state. It's just a natural result of the motion that you're putting your body through.

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:54:29Rich Roll?

  And that allows, so it's, it's a moving meditation for you.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  That's right. And that, that takes us back to the idea that, that the athletes are fundamentally the same group of people that were worshiping in other forms, in other, in other words, they are, what they're doing, when they get addicted and they do it fanatically, it's a type of worship. It's identical to the same feeling that a person would get on Sunday if he went and sat quietly in a church, or synagogue, or something like that. It's that, fundamentally, that's, that's, it's, that's gotta be the unifying, if there's

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  anything that unifies religions, and gets any following whatsoever, it would have to have, a component of it would have to be the same state of mind.

• 1:55:25Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, it's, that is definitely the unifying thread through, through every, you know, aspiration.

• 1:55:30Speaker 01

  The athlete here is finding, and he is also, and that, that's what I'm saying, is in that, he doesn't think of himself as being a worshiper. But if you really look at it, and thinking, that's what he's doing, he's a monk. When you, the-

• 1:55:44Rich Roll?

  That's what I was just gonna say. I was gonna say, you, you're actually, you, you live a very monk-like existence, incredibly simple, and you're, you wake up and your day is about devotion.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  It is, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:56Rich Roll?

  By engaging in this meditative state of higher consciousness.

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  I, I live for it. And when I'm not in it- I'm literally just waiting to die. Like, I can see what the average doctor I observed that I knew that retired, lived two years and then died. Usually because, at least the way doctors have been up until recently, maybe they still are, they really didn't have much of a life other than just working away as a doctor. That was their whole thing. So they were totally unprepared to be anything except maybe to drink, you know, at the last. I, I think that, I think marijuana is a better choice than drinking. You know, frankly.

• 1:56:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  I think you can, I think, what I found out, and I'll put in a plug for this, if anybody's still listening to this podcast.

• 1:56:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, they're listening.

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  I've, I've experienced life to, I'm 71, and I've seen this right and wrong and what's sin and what's ethical. I can, I've taken a good look at all that. And I can, wait a minute.

• 1:57:16Rich Roll?

  What, jog your memory?

• 1:57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, jog my memory.

• 1:57:18Rich Roll?

  So you were talking about accessing a higher state of consciousness.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, back on, here's the ethical system. Assuming that this model of the mind is right. Okay, generally right. The ethical system is that everybody should, if they can, maintain and, and take care of one sin. I think we were meant to have one sin or one vice. For instance, smoking cigarettes would be considered a vice. Smoking marijuana is a vice. Indiscriminate sex, frequent sex is a vice. All, gluttony is a vice. On and on and on. All these people that have lived before us, they were right.

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  These are vices. Now, part of us does well if we have one vice. We cherish it. We take care of it.

• 1:58:17Rich Roll?

  So I'm getting an idea of what your vice is.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  Your life will fall apart if you add a second vice or a third vice. As a physician, I've never seen an alcoholic who had only one vice have any problem. I've never seen a smoker that had only that vice have a problem. I've never even seen a heroin addict or an amphetamine addict that had only that particular thing. The point is, I think that we can all live longer if we have one vice and we perfect it, but not add two. Now, if you don't need a vice, you can be judgmental, and that counts as a vice.

• 1:59:07Rich Roll?

  I don't think anybody's without vice on some level.

• 1:59:10Speaker 01

  My point is to have only one and perfect it.

• 1:59:14Rich Roll?

  But why not, why not work to try to overcome all your vices? Imperfectly, of course, we're human beings, we're gonna err, we're gonna, you know, screw up and all these sorts of things, but why not commit yourself to always be trying to be better?

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Well, I see, there's no reason not to, if that's what you wanna do. But I, um, there's a couple of things in favor of having one vice. Mark Twain identified the first one, that is, you have something to stop.

• 1:59:45Speaker 01

  If you start feeling too bad, okay, or if the doctor tells you, you've gotta stop.

• 1:59:48Rich Roll?

  There's always that one last thing.

• 1:59:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, one last thing you can do. Now, it also gives you something to do in the last part of your life. You can think to yourself, do I have enough time left that would justify changing my vice? And this is a worthy topic of your own existential. In other words, the question you ask to stop a vice is a lot more interesting than to be a person who doesn't have a vice that decides maybe to start one.

• 2:00:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, that, like I said, I think we all have, we all have our vices in one form or another that are, you know, ramped up to whatever volume they're at. But I don't think there's anyone walking the planet who's, who's vice-free, you know, completely. And I think the people that are the most judgmental about other people's vices are probably harboring secret vices of their own that they don't want other people to know about.

• 2:00:51Rich Roll?

  I don't know how we got down this tangent.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  I think that having one, the main thing I tell the young people out here, I try to get through them seriously, the point is, because they're drinking, smoking,

• 2:01:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  doing everything, what they need to do is come down on one vice, and just do one, because the person, so their own life won't deteriorate.

• 2:01:13Rich Roll?

  Right, but I think that, I mean, what if your one vice is crack cocaine? You know, that's not gonna end well.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  I bet.

• 2:01:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think that's a purely hypothetical. I don't think there's ever been a person who had only that particular vice. He probably had several vices, and there may be an exception to this, but I think that, for instance, there have been people that function quite well on amphetamines, but they use, the ones who get in trouble drank and use amphetamines.

• 2:01:45Rich Roll?

  Well, if you're, yeah, I mean, if you're an addict, you're an addict, and the addict in, well, I'm in recovery, I have been for years, but I know, you know, one truth, which is that, you know, just because I'm not drinking doesn't mean that the addict isn't alive and well, looking for something else to latch on to. So, that's where the work is.

• 2:02:04Speaker 01

  All right, now, my question to you, and that would be, if you don't have any vices at this time, would you be happier to select another vice that was not maybe destructive as alcohol, and then have that, in other words, and I'm not asking if you have any vices.

• 2:02:28Rich Roll?

  I have plenty, but, go ahead.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  But, well, anyway, so, I think that, in other words, I'm putting a plug in for one vice. Everybody should take it consider, because if you have no vices, you are isolated from the best part of humanity.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  You have a tendency to be judgmental, which is the worst possible, as I said, you turn into an asshole.

• 2:02:56Rich Roll?

  Well, I think another way of putting that really is just to say to embrace the imperfections of what it means to be human.

• 2:03:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:03:04Rich Roll?

  And to understand that none of us are perfect and to not be hard on yourself because you're not perfect, or holding yourself up to some kind of impossible standard and to, you know, really just try to enjoy your life a little bit more.

• 2:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Rich Roll?

  I mean, but getting back to the skating, right? So we gotta talk about that a little bit more. So what I want to know is, I want to know, like, what's a typical day in a life?

• 2:03:31Speaker 01

  Well, I get up about nine, nine o'clock or something like that. Have, drink coffee, watch the news.

• 2:03:40Rich Roll?

  Why are you doing that? That's not monk-like. You shouldn't be watching the news. It's poisoning your brain.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  I know. I've always been addicted to, I'm one of those people and I know the virtue of stopping, paying attention to all that. But I still, I love history and I love the, frankly, it comes under the heading that I can't see, when people say God loves man, I always thought that might be a stretch in it. Like, there's nothing that lovable about man. But I could see God being fond of us because there are things about man, first instance, politics, that I'm fond of watching.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  I like to listen to it. I like the idea of the historical, the way man has been the last few thousand, a couple of thousand years and being a part of that. And the whole thing, even if I was God and had nothing to do but watch it, I would probably enjoy watching it. I enjoy Fox News. I enjoy watching the other networks, just the playoff. I enjoy the propaganda. I enjoy Putin. I enjoy Assad.

• 2:05:05Rich Roll?

  No wonder you gotta skate all day, clear your brain of all that nonsense.

• 2:05:10Speaker 01

  I enjoy the whole fact that the human beings have involved.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  To this extent and then I got to to watch it and be a part of it. I think it's just exciting and interesting. Now, as far as evolving, using it for involvement, no, it's not at all. It's not at all meditative and it's very different. No, as soon as I leave that and start skating, I'm in a whole nother situation.

• 2:05:42Rich Roll?

  So when you start to skate, how long does it take you to access that's that zone like?

• 2:05:47Speaker 01

  Right, it right now I can do it like in a second or two because I've I've worked at it.

• 2:05:52Rich Roll?

  Facility.

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  I just as soon as I call it right, it's right up here. It's at the top of the hill. I'll take a left turn and start down the hill. And as soon as I do, I will drop into a state of mind, which is just infinitely different than and it. But it took me a couple of years, like the the first trick is to get in the zone. You have to find what I call a gate that is something to help you get in it, whatever it is you're doing. Then the key is as soon as you get in it, to stay in it. And I just worked at it for the first few years I was skating. I had this every day and night to work.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  And so now I can drop right into it. It'll be like when I was in Navy, I did some research on hypnosis. And one time I had seven different Marines as in the hospital as patients with this studying this phenomenon. Because there were a lot of people feigning and having syncable episodes in the young people. And I found out that some people you can hypnotize very quickly, like in a moment. Other people takes a long process. Okay, so there's a lot of variation of how quick a person can get into the zone.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  Some people naturally can do it very quickly and others can't. I was sort of in between it. I could get in it, but to stay in it more than say a thirty seconds or a minute.

• 2:07:31Rich Roll?

  It's a practice, right?

• 2:07:32Speaker 01

  It's a practice, yeah.

• 2:07:33Rich Roll?

  They say with meditation, you're sitting there and then a thought pops up and you go down that train for a while and then you go, "Oh yeah, I'm not supposed to be doing that."

• 2:07:41Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right, right.

• 2:07:42Rich Roll?

  You bring it back and then, you know, when you start off, you can't sit still for five minutes and it's just, you have to work at it, so...

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  It's, it's, that's the whole trick. And what I can tell is that the zone, in Amazing Grace, they make a distinction between sight and vision.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  And all religious types do. Sight and vision.

• 2:08:08Rich Roll?

  And there's, that distinction exists in your own life.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Rich Roll?

  Right? The sight, the sight that you lost, that gave you the vision.

• 2:08:15Speaker 01

  Right, right. When I'm skating, I'm not seeing anything. I'm seeing the vision. I see, it's like I'm not looking at anything, but the, the, the whole picture is, it's in the world of the unseen, which by the way, you said something about space stretching. It does stretch. It changes. The thing that makes us think that it doesn't change is that we rely on vision. Once you begin to study space, when you're not looking at it, you learn that it does change size according to movement, just like Einstein and them

• 2:08:54Speaker 01

  said, even though it's very small, but we are a lot smaller than we think. In other words, the visual world we live in, which includes us, has given us a false idea of size and also where things are relative to each other. And, and when you skate in and out and around people, you learn that there's a lot more space than you thought there was, than your mind is seeing. And you learn that there's a, a kind of a super throughness of space which is added to by acceleration. For instance, it's a lot harder to, to hit a person, if he's in one state of acceleration, that is plumb to the earth, say standing still,

• 2:09:39Speaker 01

  and you're in another state of acceleration, which is rotating, say, in a pendulum, which would be carving a turn back and forth. So... You can change the space. You have to believe that you, in the vision that you

• 2:09:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:09:57Speaker 01

  That you're seeing with your mind's eye.

• 2:10:00Rich Roll?

  And what is, and what is it about your specific technique where you have one leg up and your arms in front of you that enhances you accessing that zone-like state?

• 2:10:10Speaker 01

  This. That, I don't have the final answer to that question. It's been, I, I was asked that a bunch of times. All I can say is, there's some advantage. The feeling is maximized by being on one foot in that position. It seems like, like if, if I try to maximize the feeling of, of, um, of acceleration or this feeling of the zone of being meditative, which is the feeling I'm

• 2:10:48Speaker 01

  trying to get, not acceleration, uh, per se, but the feeling, is that I will naturally go into certain positions. Number one is, I think that the hands, I've noticed that the hands and the fingers will naturally fall into certain positions in meditation. The positions, you can see it in the ancient religious paintings, that they will often have the two fingers like this, you know? And then the Buddha position is, is very common too, in people that are deeply meditating.

• 2:11:20Rich Roll?

  Thumb and forefinger touching each other.

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  These are, these are automatic positions that have to do with the body language and so on, of, of being meditative. And all I can say is, a lot of birds seem to be meditating, standing on one foot.

• 2:11:38Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a, it's a single anchor to the center of the earth, right? If you have both feet down, they're moving around, which one's the anchor, right? One, one leg down, and it's a straight, it's a straight shot down, right?

• 2:11:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it could be. You know, I think of it that way, even though, you know.

• 2:11:54Rich Roll?

  It's kind of like a, a moving yoga pose, though. It's like warrior three.

• 2:11:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. That's what, that is exactly, that's exactly what it is. And it adds to the meditative experience. Once you get, now, because you have to, uh, go in and out of people.

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  If you meditate, usually you're alone, right? Think about this, to get meditative and to be right next to your fellow man of all types, of all ages, and close enough that you could touch him, and you're moving by so that nothing is harmful gonna happen. That what I've experienced, being that close to strangers continually, and I'm in the zone, completely in the zone, me of meditative, like, it'd be like Buddha walks out of his zone and asleep walks right into the crowd of people and begins to experience them in their normal state. To me, it's a type of anthropology that's, it's just unreal.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  What I've learned about mankind by being in this world of strangers, next to them and among them, in a state of meditation.

• 2:13:07Rich Roll?

  It's sort of like taking the red pill in The Matrix and being able to see through the Maya, the illusion. And so what is your, you know, when you look out upon mankind or you're watching the news in the morning, you know, what is it that you're seeing that we're not seeing?

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  Good, I love your questions, Charlie. When I'm in the best state of mind, the best, the ultimate meditative state of mind that I've so far gotten is I feel that everything, exactly the way it is, is the best possible. In other words, I wouldn't want to change anything, like even a death or somebody getting cancer or something like that. I would, in other words, I see the whole thing and I get close enough, I can see it, like, wow, it already is the best. The in, like, for instance, the dialectic of trying to figure out whether we should do this or this in politics or something like that. The fact that we don't do this or this,

• 2:14:11Speaker 01

  but somehow or another, kind of waver in between with a lot of argument. I think could conceivably, if we would contest it, would be the best. In other words, we only know that the world can be one way. It ends up whatever, this way or that, it ends up one way. So in a way, we have a choice whether we believe that that's the ultimate way it could have been, or whether it had gone off in some other way, that it would have ended up worse. So I sort of say that in the best stakes of meditation, that I wouldn't want to change anything. Not even a man's hostility to each other.

• 2:14:54Speaker 01

  I wouldn't go around saying, "I love you, brother," and all that. Or I wouldn't cure the poor or the alcoholic. I would, I would see the whole thing as an absolute perfect kind of subjective organism that's evolving and growing, like a plant or something like that. And that everything, people in different stages of this involvement, if you look at the individuals, but the whole thing is on some sort of path where it's feeling its way into the future, and it knows what it's doing, okay?

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  That it, it's even in small ways, that there, that you can't second guess God. I sort of feel that. Now, I can, when I feel a little less meditative and petty, I can think of all sorts of ways that I would improve the world and do this and that. But every, every one of those times, it seems to me I've fallen back into the non-zone, as if I would know, for instance.

• 2:16:12Rich Roll?

  Right, you're, you're placing your judgment on something that you're not, you don't have all the information.

• 2:16:19Speaker 01

  Take, take this situation we've got here with the immigration, okay?

• 2:16:24Rich Roll?

  Uh-oh, we're gonna get political here.

• 2:16:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's just an example. Say what to do with the children, okay, that have come to our border. This is a good example. You could take either one, one direction or the other direction. You can justify either direction. And you could probably say, well, it's gonna fall somewhere, just kinda in the middle and it'll just kinda ends up out there somewhere where you could, the historians can write both sides as if they knew that it happened this way or that way and you'll never really, because it's just gonna all kinda disappear. Instead of being, well, we do this and this, we keep our country, the integrity of our country, that's the definition of a country. Or no, I'm gonna prove what a good person

• 2:17:10Speaker 01

  I am, you know, so like somebody up in San Francisco, you know, who's gonna let everybody in, you know, to show what a wonderful person she is.

• 2:17:19Rich Roll?

  A good person up in San Francisco, a bleeding heart liberal.

• 2:17:22Speaker 01

  I mean, you can see that-

• 2:17:23Rich Roll?

  You're a conservative guy.

• 2:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. You can see the justification for both positions. And, and I, I personally kinda see that, that this is, it, it's not something that I personally know the answer to. And, um, I, it, though, I was tempted, I grew up in a society, see, I was born in nineteen forty-three. We were born in the middle of a patriotic time, I was. And there was a country here, called America. We, we called it America, the United States. Us, US.

• 2:18:01Rich Roll?

  We still, we still call it that, don't we?

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  They'll stop being a country, though. During the, uh, what, what you've got now is kind of a territory, okay? Because there's, uh, they're not treating it strictly as a country. They're not, I mean, the government has taken on another relationship to this area of the continent. And so, I can see, I grew up thinking we had a country, but I've been able to see, well, if nobody else wants a coun- or if half of them don't want a country in the old fashioned sense, where, you know, we're really in it for our country.

• 2:18:43Speaker 01

  I can go either way. I can see the advantage of going either way. The, um, I can see that you can justify yourself believing either side. Um, there's no, nothing specifically more correct about, um, globalism than there is about, um, provincialism.

• 2:19:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, like you say, I could come down and just care about this right here. Or I could care about whether there's life on other planets. I mean, in a way, it's, I've just, I kinda see that it doesn't really, you, this is a thing that's in the hands of, of the people and, and history, not in my hands, yeah.

• 2:19:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I mean, essentially what you're saying is it's not for you to, to judge.

• 2:19:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:19:38Rich Roll?

  You're sort of in this observer, in this observer role of what's going on.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. If I can, I think the, I have to say, I think that

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  there's two sides. I, I personally am tilted to thinking that if, if you were in politics and you have the responsibility for your fellow man, uh, the fiduciary responsibility, then it's your responsibility to be a patriot. Okay? And that, I think, is a responsibility that is being not taken seriously by a lot of our leaders. True patriotism.

• 2:20:16Rich Roll?

  Well, it depends on your definition of patriotism.

• 2:20:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. It does.

• 2:20:19Rich Roll?

  We don't want to go too far down a, uh, political, uh, black hole here.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:20:25Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:20:25Speaker 01

  It gets blacker and blacker.

• 2:20:26Rich Roll?

  No, I know.

• 2:20:27Speaker 01

  Well, you go down it.

• 2:20:28Rich Roll?

  So, uh, yeah, we should probably wrap it up. We've been going for over two hours.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  That's good. Well, you're a good conversationalist.

• 2:20:34Rich Roll?

  Thank you. Um, but I wanted to wrap it up kind of with one, uh, final thought. Which is something you've said in the, in the beautiful documentary, which we didn't even really talk about, but I thought Josh Eisenberg did an amazing job with that movie. And I was so touched by it. And, uh, and after I watched it, I was like, I've, I gotta find this guy. I gotta talk to him. So I'm so happy that we're sitting here and doing this. And it was, it was, uh, I can't imagine the result of that film being at South by Southwest. And I heard you went to the screening, right? That must've been something. And then for it to be in the New York Times, how has that changed your life? Or has it?

• 2:21:12Speaker 01

  Well, it hadn't changed my life at all, but I've, I've gotten just absolutely amazing feedback from all corners. Um, it seems to me that almost everybody that saw it really liked it. Now, I wouldn't have necessarily expected that, even though it was a nice little documentary, but for some reason, almost everybody, and I mean, I personally, I've heard from hundreds and maybe thousands, and it's coming from all over Europe and South America and, um, not just here, Ireland, there were some people from Ireland yesterday

• 2:21:56Speaker 01

  that came, that, you know, Germany.

• 2:21:58Rich Roll?

  People knocking on your door all the time now? Or just out on the boardwalk looking for you?

• 2:22:01Speaker 01

  No, no, you know, I think of that little place there is gonna one day end up like, when you're in Amsterdam, you go look at where Van Gogh lived and it's like a little place like that. Like I had a photography here the other day, taking a picture of where I lived, but nobody bothers me. As a matter of fact, you know, like, I feel that I'm in a protected company.

• 2:22:25Rich Roll?

  Well, you're, you're, uh, you're an institution down here. There's nobody in this community that doesn't know who you are. And I would imagine that they, you know, I don't know, like, it's probably cool for them that you got this exposure, but they probably also feel protective of you.

• 2:22:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:40Rich Roll?

  He's ours, like, don't get too close or don't mess with them.

• 2:22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. You know, I remember, um, thinking that, let's say the guy that up in San Francisco that, um,

• 2:22:52Speaker 01

  Tony Bennett. Uh, he's walked, he, he tries to live a normal life is what I, I saw on TV one time and goes to the grocery store and that type of thing. I thought at the time when I saw it, I was thinking like, that's what a person ought to do is really just stay simple and like they are and still be who they are. Now, that's all I do. I don't change, I, I, I'm in this state of mind, but frankly, um, it doesn't, it hadn't changed my, I think I'm old enough where it has not affected my ego. I had a guy, um, I used to have an ego.

• 2:23:31Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Now, I got that part.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  But, but I, but now, um, you know, one of the interviews, this lady was saying, Slomo has life figured out, Slomo has life figured out. She said it about three or four times and I'm standing there going like, gosh, that's a disappointment because if I've got it figured out, it can be all that.

• 2:23:49Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, that, that grabs headline, you know, that's a catchy headline that will get people to listen or go to that website or what have you, but you know.

• 2:23:57Speaker 01

  But I'm very modest about the Slomo, the, I feel that I'm on a mission from God is, as they would have said in the Blues Brothers. I've not done anything to commercialize it, uh, which if I was early in my life.

• 2:24:11Rich Roll?

  You're wearing, just so people listening, if you've watched the documentary, you're wearing the same shirt, the same hat and the same cargo shorts that you were wearing in the documentary right now.

• 2:24:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I'm just, um, no, my, my whole existence now is, um, is the world of subjectivity and what, um, what we really are on the, on the side of subjectivity and.

• 2:24:37Rich Roll?

  And you said in the documentary, and this is probably a great place to close it, um, that you felt, you feel that you're on the tip of a great iceberg of consciousness. So maybe you can just expand on that a little bit.

• 2:24:50Speaker 01

  Um, the image, the meta, thanks again for a great question, but the, to me, the metaphor of, um, an iceberg is the perfect metaphor for a lot of things. Um, the main thing is the human being himself. Um, the tip of the iceberg.

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  Is usually, we think of it as being the part that's the tips of various nearby icebergs, say they're talking to each other. And one of them knows that this one is so and so, the specifics. But the major part of the iceberg is generic. It's under the sea.

• 2:25:32Speaker 01

  And it doesn't fit the tip of the iceberg, but when I'm skating, I feel like I'm at the tip of what is the human mind. It's the top, the very peak. And, but what I see when I relate to other people now is all below. It's all generic. For instance, with all due respect to your individual person, I see you as one more of these. And you've been here before, before, before, before.

• 2:26:14Speaker 01

  And you've had other capacities, other lives, the generic. And this is the tip of the iceberg at this moment, you know? And you're carrying the consciousness, which is you're obviously very much aware of, your self-awareness. And it's part of the iceberg. But it's always been there and it came from under the sea. And it'll pop back up like another tip. Another tip, and so on.

• 2:26:48Rich Roll?

  I like that. Thanks for talking to me, Slomo.

• 2:26:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks for talking to me.

• 2:26:59Rich Roll?

  All right, well, wow. Well, that was something, right? Holy smokes. That was some heavy stuff. I hope you enjoyed it. It was interesting to hear how fundamentally conservative Slomo can be on certain issues. I'm not sure I expected that. I tried to keep it out of politics, but hey, it veered off a bit here and there on a few tangents, but that's okay. I'm pretty sure you got the full Slomo experience, and that's what I was going for. So, mission accomplished. When it was all over, Slomo and I continued to talk for, I don't know, another 45 minutes, and it was pretty cool. I almost felt like

• 2:27:41Rich Roll?

  I should have kept it recording because he shared a couple more really fascinating insights about his life. And at the end of it all, he said to me, he turned to me and he said, "Well, Rich, I hope you don't mind, but I would like to now consider you my friend." And so that was pretty cool. A final anecdote. After our interview, I decided I was gonna go for a run along the boardwalk. I'm like, "Hey, I'm in San Diego. I'm right here. I'm at the beach. I gotta take advantage of this. I'm gonna go for a run." And Slomo was getting ready to go for his second long skate of the day. So, I put on my running shoes, he put on his skates, and we both went in our respective directions, said goodbye to each other. And I did an

• 2:28:23Rich Roll?

  out and back on the boardwalk, and as I was circling back and coming back towards where I'd parked my car in front of his apartment, here he comes. Slomo coming right at me in full Warrior 3 yoga pose glide mode, up on one leg, his hands extended in front of each other, wild-eyed, totally present, and yet in a world completely his own. I waved at him, I smiled, and not only did he fail to recognize me, it was like nobody was home. So I can attest that his condition is real. And by that, I don't just mean his prosopagnosia. I mean, his altered state of consciousness.

• 2:29:08Rich Roll?

  So again, if you have not yet seen the short doc on his life, please do it. Embed it on my site. Google it. Google "slow mo." You'll find it. And if you want to learn more about slow mo, he actually has a website. Who'd have thunk, right? It's iamslomo.com. And on his website, the most interesting part of his website is that he has this treatise on there, or I should, it's probably more aptly titled "A Manifesto," on the subject of the zone and the non-zone, the subject that we kind of opened the podcast with talking about. It's super dense. It's super long, but it's also kind of awesome. So you should check that out. You should definitely read that. And he also has a Facebook page.

• 2:29:50Rich Roll?

  It's not him, but there's lots of stuff about about him on this page. And I think it's facebook.com/slowmofan. If you're inspired by slow mo and trying to unlock your own version of a more authentic life, but not sure how to start, well, you can always check out my new course at Mind Body Green. It's called "The Art of Living with Purpose." It's all about how to set and achieve goals and really begin that process of unlocking a better version of yourself, restructure your life, et cetera. You can find that on the homepage of mindbodygreen.com. It's good stuff. Two hours of streaming video content and online community, downloadable tools, all sorts of good stuff. Of course, there's also my Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition course, also on Mind Body Green.

• 2:30:35Rich Roll?

  Similar, or less structured, a little bit longer in terms of video content, a little over three hours. All good stuff for your plant power provisions. Go to richroll.com. We have nutritional products. We have garments. We have signed copies of Finding Ultra. We have our digital cookbook. We have our meditation program, Jai Release. So go check that out. You know what to do. If you want to support the show, best way to do that is to tell a friend. And thank you so much for spreading the word. That's how we are building this plant power revolution. That's how we're getting the word out there. So thank you, guys, also for those moments when you're going to buy something on Amazon.

• 2:31:15Rich Roll?

  Click on the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com, right there on the homepage or any of the blog pages, or bookmark it to your browser, better yet, so you don't have to always go to my site. And then, when you're getting something on Amazon, use that link, get what you're gonna get, doesn't cost you a cent extra, and Amazon kicks us some commission change, and that helps us keep going. You can also donate to the show at richroll.com, there's a donate button, and thank you so much for everybody who's doing that. A great way to show the love is to Instagram, an image of you listening to the show, whether you're out exercising, or commuting, or at work, or whatever you're doing. I love that stuff, thanks. A lot of great ones came in this week. I tried to comment on all of them and share them, so

• 2:32:00Rich Roll?

  tag them with my name, it's @richroll. You can follow me on Instagram, and Facebook, Twitter, all those kind of places. I'm @richroll pretty much everywhere. Also, and finally, if you are in New York City on July 9th, you can join me in Brooklyn at the Powerhouse Arena, 7pm, in the Dumbo neighborhood, for the book release party for John Joseph's new book, Meat is for Pussies. John Joseph is a big time favorite on the RRP, he's been on the show twice. I'm gonna try to sit down with him again when I'm in New York City. His book is coming out on July 8th, he's having a big party for the release, and I'm gonna get up and say a few words. I'm pretty excited to help him launch this book, and

• 2:32:39Rich Roll?

  also really proud of the fact that I wrote the foreword to the book. So, you can preorder it now on Amazon, check that out. Really happy with the words that I was able to put in his book, and so glad that it made it into the final edit. And I hope to see you at the event, again, July 9th, Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. For more information on that event, you can go to the link on my website, or go to powerhousearena.com for details into RSVP. So, you might want to do that soon, though, because space is limited. Okay, that's it. This week's assignment, find your own version of the slow-mo zone. Maybe it's taking a walk in the woods, maybe it's a swim in the lake, or maybe it's just

• 2:33:24Rich Roll?

  20 minutes silent with yourself shortly after you wake up in the morning. But engage that side of who you are, and lean into it. It's not selfish, it's self-care, and there's a big difference. See you next week. Peace. Plants.