On Addiction, Recovery & Achieving Happiness Through Service

If you know my story, you know it involves a descent into alcoholism, followed by a hard fought battle to achieve and maintain sobriety. Recovery saved my life, straight up, no exaggeration. To this day it remains — and will always remain — my number one priority. I don't talk it about it often on the podcast, but I think it's an important subject to raise and discuss, particularly as we head into the holidays — an acutely perilous time for the millions who, alone, isolated and ashamed, privately battle these demons. Meet Khalil Rafati, founder of Sunlife Organics– friend, fellow recovery warrior and amazing living example of the profound resiliency of the human body, mind and spirit. Not only has Khalil overcome unimaginable obstacles to survive, he has defied all odds and miraculously repaired his life wholesale. A soul now devoted to the service of others, his primary focus on giving back what was so freely given him. Prepare to have your mind blown. Khalil's tale is nothing short of astounding. From the depths of absolute despair, homeless & hopelessly gripped by heroin addiction, Khalil was hell bent on dying. And yet somehow, by way of a grace outside himself, Khalil came out the other side. Not just intact, but repaired. He didn't just find sobriety. He found his true life purpose. Today I am so proud to share my friend's journey. Behind all the raw intensity and earnest honesty and vulnerability, it is a story I think we can all celebrate. A story of the impossible. And at its heart, the story of true redemptive power of the human condition. Open your mind and heart and let Khalil inspire you. I can guarantee that after listening to this profound and at times extremely intense conversation, you will understand that all the illusory excuses that imprison and prevent you from growth, health and self-actualization will seem trivial. For those that are suffering, this one's for you. Please know that all is not lost. There is a solution. And there is hope. Always hope. NOTE: In addition to the extreme intensity of the subject matter discussed, this episode also contains a few instances of explicit language. So if you're listening with the wee ones or at work, pop in the ear buds. Nothing to crazy, just a head's up for the more sensitive members of the audience. And should you find yourself in Los Angeles, do me a solid. Drop by one of Khalil's Sunlife Organics juice bars (on Pt. Dume in Malibu and in Thousand Oaks at The Lakes), order a green juice (or the Wolverine smoothie — my favorite) and give Khalil a high five. I sincerely hope you enjoy the show. I'm really proud of this one. Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:05Rich Roll?

  Welcome to episode 61 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Khalil Rafati.

• 1:20Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:24Rich Roll?

  Plant Power.

• 1:31Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Rich Roll here. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. What do we do here? Each week, I bring to you the best and the brightest minds in health, wellness, fitness, nutrition, and just generally living your best life. I have one goal with this show, which is to help you unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self. So I've had world-class athletes on. I've had doctors, nutritionists, world-class athletes. Did I already say that? All kinds of people, entrepreneurs, artists, spiritualists.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  Uh, what else? Anyway, I cast a wide net, lots of people. The only requirement is if you are an example of living your best life. And if you have information that I feel is important to share with you guys, so that you can take that information and use what works for you, discard the rest, so that you can make the best decisions about how to live your life, how to be the healthiest you can, the most fit you can, the most present, the most dialed in, actualized version of yourself. So today on the show, I have an amazing guest, a man that I am very proud to call my friend. His name is Khalil Rafati. Who is Khalil Rafati?

• 2:49Rich Roll?

  I've never heard of this guy. Of course you haven't. He's not a celebrity. He's not anybody famous, but he is a guy with an amazing, remarkable story. Somebody who has sunk to the depths of despair and has risen like a phoenix from the ashes to be an incredible example of the resiliency of the human body and the human spirit, as well as a remarkable example of living a healthy, actualized, tapped in life. And somebody who is of extraordinary service to his fellow man. I love this guy. I'm really a better person for having him in my life. And I've been wanting to share his story so badly on this show for quite some time.

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  He's a super busy guy, almost impossible to pin down. And I just literally harassed him over the last week until I just compelled him to sit down for five minutes so I could talk to him. He is the proprietor, the founder, the CEO, or the, I don't know, chairman of the board. I don't know what you would call it, of Some Life Organics. What is Some Life Organics? It is an organic juice bar in Malibu, in the Point Dume section of Malibu. And you might be asking yourself, well, some guy owns a juice bar, he's going to be on the podcast. What can, what can this guy possibly have to offer? But please reserve judgment because I guarantee you, his story is going to blow your mind. And Some Life Organics is much more than just a juice bar.

• 4:18Rich Roll?

  In Malibu, it has really become the epicenter of all things healthy in our community. It's become a place of congregation where everybody who's kind of interested in living healthy, getting better, tapping into a better version of themselves seems to congregate, and Khalil is sort of the host with the most. He's the ringleader. He has a very dynamic, contagious personality, very infectious. And what he's been able to create, the community that he's been able to create around his organization is nothing

• 4:54Rich Roll?

  short of remarkable. And his story is extraordinary. On the show, we have talked in the past about addiction and recovery. It hasn't been a big focus of the show. But I think the last time we really kind of dug into it is when I had my friend Mishka Shabali on the show, and that was a really popular episode where we kind of tapped into kind of the demons of addiction and the process of recovery and kind of what it entails. And I thought I'd bring Khalil on to kind of share his version of this story. His story is so astounding,

• 5:30Rich Roll?

  it makes my story seem like peanuts. His journey to the dark side and back will inspire you and amaze you. The fact that he has been able to come back from what he has had to endure in his life to repair, not just repair his life, but to really thrive and be an example of healthy living. And the extent to which he shares his knowledge and his enthusiasm for his new lease in life is quite infectious. Again, it speaks to the incredible power of the resiliency of the human mind and the human spirit, and the inherent power

• 6:14Rich Roll?

  within all of us to change at any given moment, to improve ourselves, which is another obvious, obviously huge theme of this show. One note I wanted to mention is that if anybody is listening to this show, and they are currently suffering from a drug and alcohol addiction, and feel like there's no hope, or don't know how to climb out of the despair that you are experiencing, I want you to know that there is help. You don't have to sink to the depths that Khalil did. You don't have to drink or use anymore. You do have a choice. You have the power inherent within you to change. All it takes is a little bit of willingness and a decision.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  And I want you to know that if you need help, that you should, and I hope that you will, reach out to me or reach out to Khalil. You can reach me through my website at richroll.com through the contact section. And at the end of the interview, Khalil shares his contact information too. So Khalil and I are both always ready, willing, and able to help anybody who is in this predicament. It's my number one priority, and I know it is for Khalil as well. So please know that. Thanks. And last week on the show, Julie and I sat down and talked about how to weather the holidays,

• 7:39Rich Roll?

  how to sort of navigate the pitfalls that come with this holiday season that is now upon us. All the anxiety, all the pressure to spend money, all the social obligations, and all the kind of complicated family, interpersonal, and professional relationships that we kind of have to deal with at this time of year that can create a lot of stress for us. And I hope you guys found that episode helpful. Julie also posted on richroll.com in the blog section, a supplemental blog post with some additional kind of tips for how she deals with these situations. So I hope you guys check that out and find that helpful.

• 8:20Rich Roll?

  Also, we've been posting throughout the week recipes, plant-powered cooking recipes, one a day, to give you guys some healthy alternatives when it comes to preparing your holiday meal. So we all want to stay healthy during the holidays, and inevitably, so many people end up in January with an extra, you know, 10 pounds around the waist, wondering how did it get there? And kind of the shame spiral that ensues, well, let's do it a different way. So Julie and I thought we would post up a bunch of recipes, sort of alternatives to the traditional holiday meal that are still delicious, easy to prepare, family-friendly. We've put up recipes for...

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  Vegan stuffing, cauliflower mashed potatoes, vegan mushroom gravy. An outstanding recipe for almost raw pumpkin pie that I just posted today. Today's Saturday. I'm going to be putting up another post for a tempeh meatloaf and also a blended green holiday drink for you. So check out those posts. People love recipes, what can I say? So I hope that you guys test those out and let me know what you think in the comments section. If you want to know more about how to cook right, stay healthy, fuel your body, nourish your body so that you can perform as a human being, perform as an athlete, feed your family, whatever.

• 9:45Rich Roll?

  You can check out our Jai Seed eCookbook. It's a simple download, downloads right to your iPad, your computer. It's just $9.99, 77 pages of awesome recipes. If you want to take it one step further, go the whole nine yards, the whole enchilada. You can check out our, our online plant-based nutrition course at Mind Body Green, The Ultimate Guide to Plant-Based Nutrition, which is something I'm very proud of. It's three and a half hours of online streaming video content, broken up into five to 10 minute little pieces, chunks. Delightful little morsels of information, broken down into specific subject headings. You know, I get a lot of questions, how do I do this? How do I do that? What about when I travel?

• 10:30Rich Roll?

  How do you get your kids to eat healthy? All of those kind of typical issues that arise around the idea of improving your diet or incorporating more plants into your diet. All of those are addressed topic by topic in the course. There's also an online community for support. It's really cool. So check that out. Both the cookbook and the course make great holiday gifts as well. So that would be a good thing to make a great gift, right? And also if it's, if it's time for you to start buying those presents. For Christmas, for Hanukkah, for the holiday season, you're probably going to be on Amazon, right? Well, if you're going to shop on Amazon, which you probably are, because that's where all the cheap stuff is, more affordable stuff, do us a solid and click on the Amazon banner

• 11:15Rich Roll?

  ad at richroll.com. We also have one for the UK listeners, an Amazon UK banner. Click that first, takes you to Amazon, will not cost you one cent extra on your purchases, like if you're going to purchase Finding Ultra, for example. But Amazon kicks us a referral fee and helps keep the lights on, keeps the bandwidth flowing. We appreciate very, very much, everybody who's been using it. It's really been amazing. And so, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for doing that. Also, you can support the show by donating. There's donate button also at richroll.com. You can throw us a few dollars if you like. We appreciate you very much.

• 12:02Rich Roll?

  Let's get into the interview. I'm so proud to call this guy my friend, and he is a true inspiration. And please prepare yourself, because this interview is going to blow your mind. There's a little bit of explicit language in here, so if you're driving in the car with your kids listening, or you're at work, or something like that, you might want to put on the earbuds, or just a, you know, just a couple, sort of, off-color words here and there. Nothing too crazy, but this is a very intense story. And again, there is a little bit of off-color language, so just bear that in mind. But please, please, give this a listen

• 12:42Rich Roll?

  with an open mind and an open heart, and let Khalil inspire you. Ladies and gentlemen, my friend Khalil Rafati, enjoy the show.

• 13:11Rich Roll?

  Alright dude, we're rolling.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Nice, nice.

• 13:15Rich Roll?

  So, uh, so the other day I'm looking at your Instagram feed, and you show this picture, you're getting ready to do the Tough Mudder. Where was that? Down in Orange County?

• 13:25Speaker 01

  In Temecula, yeah.

• 13:26Rich Roll?

  In Temecula, with your crew, your staff, breeding, uh, employee loyalty.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Yes, building a lot of camaraderie.

• 13:32Rich Roll?

  You're good to your staff!

• 13:34Speaker 01

  I am good to my staff. Um, I took, uh, I took four of my top guys to Panama three weeks ago, for eight days. And it was absolutely amazing. And then Haley, my girlfriend, and my business partner, she took four of our top girls to Kauai, um, about six weeks ago. Just to reward them and show them how much we love them and care about them.

• 13:54Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's awesome. You're always doing really fun stuff with the people you work with, which I think that's a big part of your success equation. There's no, but I mean, it's an extension of who you are.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  It's your personality.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  I, I wouldn't want to do it any other way. I mean, I wouldn't, and, and also, there's a flip side of that. I get to be around people that are smiling all the time and happy and sharing their amazing energy with me, so, you know, it's a win-win.

• 14:18Rich Roll?

  Right. And, uh, and so I'm looking at this picture, and then in the comments below, I see that Pamela Anderson is giving you a shout-out, and she's like, "Go for it!", and I was like, "Whoa!", and I, I'm sitting with Julie and I show it to her, I go, "Check it out!", like Khalil's doing this Tough Mudder with his employees, and you know, Pam Anderson's giving him a, giving him a shout-out. And right at that exact moment, you called me, like this weird synchronicity occurring.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and you told me this amazing story about how Gerard Butler, Gerard Butler, the movie star, had just been in some life and you had given him a book.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:53Rich Roll?

  Which I greatly appreciate. You're like my pimp, you're always handing out, you, you, you, uh, keep, keep my book on hand for people to buy, and you're always handing it out to cool people, so, thank you for that.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, you, I wouldn't have been doing the Tough Mudder had it not been for you, because I read your book and I was so incredibly inspired by it, and, um, decided to take up my friend on his offer to, you know, to do the first Tough Mudder, which was last year. And, um, and yeah, and Pam's a dear friend of mine, and, uh, and just an amazing person, and... She's also a vegan and an animal lover and animal rights activist and all that stuff. And she had just done a marathon, which is pretty incredible.

• 15:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Um, and so I had been commenting on her thing, like, you know, congratulations and, and thank you so much. And, you know, for everything you've done. And, um, and then so she was commenting on mine. And, and then with the Gerard, you know, with, with Gerard, I just, I just thought that, and, and not just with him, with, with probably 50 different people who I've given your book to. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I finished reading that book, which was totally inspired.

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, thanks, man.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. He's a good dude, really good dude.

• 16:11Rich Roll?

  Good. Well, I look forward to possibly meeting him at some point.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  You will.

• 16:15Rich Roll?

  But then the funny thing was the paparazzi took a picture of him leaving Sun Life.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  And he's carrying my book.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:22Rich Roll?

  And so that it ends up like all over the internet the next day. I didn't even know. Like I, I knew you had called me and you told me like, hey, I gave him your book.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:29Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's cool. And then I, you know, I opened up my Twitter the next day and it like exploded because the, whatever website it was on, you know, they, they had said, oh, Gerard Butler, leave Sun Life, carrying a copy of Rich Roll's book.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  That was pretty funny.

• 16:42Rich Roll?

  So I was like, wow, that's so cool. Like, you know, don't think I didn't post that all over my, my pages, you know?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  It's a pretty cool, pretty great guy to be, you know, to be carrying your book around.

• 16:52Rich Roll?

  Right. So, yeah, thanks again. You're like my pimp. I'm gonna have to find a super awesome Christmas gift for you.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  For spreading the word.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Just keep doing what you're doing and keep inspiring people. And, um, I think it's really, I think, I don't think, I know that, that moving towards a plant-based diet is what's going to, is gonna be one of the major shifts that's gonna have to take place in this planet. And I want to say first and foremost, I am not a vegan. I'm not even a, a vegetarian of any sorts. But I do incorporate a lot of plant-based food into my diet. I feel amazing results. And it's really because of people like you and because of people like Brendan Brazier and because of people, um, that show me how to live instead of telling me how to live. Um, what, what really rubs me the wrong way about.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  You know, ninety percent of the people who I know that are vegans is they wanna tell me how to eat. They wanna tell me why I should feel horrible about what I'm eating. Pam never does that, ever. She's so kind and she's so loving and she never, you'd never even know that she's a vegan. Um, because I've eaten meat in front of her many times. Now, if I ask her about it, she'll go on and on and on about how cruelty to animals and this and that. And, and same thing with you. I was very open and honest with you about not being a vegan and you never said a word.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  Instead of telling me how to eat, you showed me.

• 18:20Rich Roll?

  I never tell anybody what to do.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  Well, but we learned that in recovery.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 18:25Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? That comes from, that comes from getting sober and maintaining sobriety. And what you learn very early on is you stick to sharing your experience. You know, you live your life, you share your experience, you stand where you stand. And if people are interested in that, you, you, you remain open and available to that. But it's never, it never comes from a place of, um, talking, sort of talk, either talking down to people or preaching or basically, you know, for lack of a better word, telling people what to do or what not to do.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:57Rich Roll?

  That doesn't work anyway.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  And you, and you, you model what happens to someone when they switch to a plant-based diet. You, you, you know, you, you, first of all, I can look at you and go, wow, I wanna look like that. And then I can read your book and I can go, wow, maybe I don't necessarily wanna run an Ultraman, but I do wanna do some, some physical things. I'd like to run a marathon. I'd like to maybe even, um, build up to doing an Ironman. And most people in the sports world would tell me, well, you've gotta eat a hundred and fifty grams of protein a day. If you're gonna do that and you need to eat chicken and you need to eat fish and this and that. And you are an iconoclast in the sense that you are changing that perception and you're, you're totally proving them wrong.

• 19:39Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And. I have friends, you know, I have one of, one of my best friends who is constantly shaming me over, over eating meat and, and sending me pictures. When I used to be on Facebook, she would send me pictures of. Not on Facebook anymore? No. What happened? Uh. I don't know. All right, we don't know. It got weird. We don't have to talk about it. No, it just, it just got weird. I, I'm, I'm on Instagram and, and I'm, and I'm a private Instagram, you know, people can request me. Um, Sunlight Organics has a, a Facebook thing and I, I will engage on some of that, but, um. I, I just got to the point where like, how many shirtless pictures of myself can I put up that are in, you know, that are taken in exotic locations around the world?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Uh, at what point is this going to satisfy my ego and it, and, and how is this serving people? How is this serving humanity? You know, there's a lot of people back in Ohio where I came from that are struggling, um, financially because of, you know, what went on with the whole economic crisis. And I just found myself, I found myself using Facebook as a medium to brag and to build myself up and puff myself up and not really, I didn't, I wasn't really helping anybody by doing that. So it just got weird and I just, I made a decision to go off of it for six months and I challenged myself to, um. Instead of going on Facebook three hours a day to, you know, maybe read a book a month. Um. Radical.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So anyway, but back to what I was saying, you know, I have, I have a friend that used to send me these pictures of, you know, animals, you know, faces being torn off and blah, blah, blah. And that, and that was, uh, you know, supposed to inspire me to be a vegan. Uh, and in the meantime, they're walking around with the latest calf skin bag, you know, from Prada. And it's like, what do you think that means? Calf skin? Like, that's the skin of a calf.

• 21:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there is a weird kind of disconnect between the food part of it and the sort of the rest of your life and the garments that you wear.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And where do you think?

• 21:41Rich Roll?

  Where in Malibu, every woman's wearing Uggs, you know, but they're, but they're coming into Sun Life for their green juice.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I'm, and I'm not faulting them. I think that that's whatever I wear Uggs and, and I eat meat, but I'm not gonna, you know, flip out on a vegan and tell them that they should eat a steak. I think that the way that we're gonna move forward and evolve as a planet, like you said, with recovery, I can tell somebody all day why they should be sober and how they should be sober and this and that, but what's much more effective is how about I just model what a healthy relationship looks like, or how about I model what, um, a business owner who's not a hundred percent obsessed with the bottom line, but a business owner that's willing to use cups that are made from vegetables, or hire kids from the local community and pay them a fair wage. I would much rather do that, show people

• 22:30Speaker 01

  who I am, rather than tell people who I am, or even worse, tell people how they should be.

• 22:35Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that's the, that's, that's the way to go. And you said something a moment ago that I think really kind of defines your ethos, which is, you know, how is this of service? How am I being of service? And when I see you and I see the way that you behave and, and, and how you interact with people and, and how you choose to spend your time throughout the day, it always boils down to service. Like, you're constantly in service of other people, whether it's with your employees, or the, the customers that come through the door, or the work that you do in, in recovery. I mean, you really are an example of someone who has devoted their life to service and, you know, are a shining example of what happens when somebody is doing that for the right reasons and coming from the heart. Like, your life becomes enriched. Not only do you become a happier person, a more

• 23:20Rich Roll?

  productive person, but you bring richness into your life, and that sort of infuses everything that you do. And I, I have no, there's no doubt in my mind that the success that you're having with Sun Life is a direct result, um, to the level of service that you do on a daily basis.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and, and thank you, and thank you for saying that. Um, but, you know, let's keep in mind that I spent the thirty, first thirty-three years of my life being an absolute taker.

• 23:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're gonna get into that.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, 'cause I'm not, it wasn't like... It wasn't like I was some virtuous person that woke up one day and was like, oh, I'm gonna treat everyone nice and open this juice bar and walk people's dogs and pick up trash off the ground. It was, you know, falling down face first and, and being miserable and depressed and, and having to find another way to live. And, and I am incredibly happy today, um, which is a complete contradiction of what my, you know, psychological makeup was for the first three and a half decades almost of my life.

• 24:19Rich Roll?

  Right, I mean, you say to me that, you know, my story inspires you, but, you know, my sort of, um, fall from grace and struggles with addiction and really pale in comparison to what you endured. So, I wanna, I wanna go back and hear about how it all started and what happened.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, yeah. Um, and, and mine wasn't so much addiction as I wanted to die. I mean, that was my goal, was to die, and I was too scared to, you know, to take my own life, so putting a needle in my arm, you know, every fifteen minutes or every thirty minutes just was much easier and it took the pain away.

• 24:53Rich Roll?

  But how did it get to that place? Like, let's go back to the beginning.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man, uh, the beginning, well, uh, I had, I had a couple of parents who, who probably shouldn't have been parents. Um, they were both immigrants to this country. My father was born in Palestine, right outside of Bethlehem, and, um, in nineteen thirty-five, and my mother was born in Poland, in, I think it's called Jodena or J- I don't know how to pronounce it actually, but-

• 25:22Rich Roll?

  Gdansk?

• 25:23Speaker 01

  No, near there, but, uh, she was abandoned on a doorstep, you know, had one of those horrible childhoods where she was abandoned on a doorstep, taken in by this family and then eventually put into a work camp at a very young age, um, and went through all sorts of, you know, horrible stuff.

• 25:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  And, and never, and never really talks about any of that, but, um, and then my father was there, my father was twelve years old when the United Nations came in and decided that, um, Palestine was now gonna be Israel. So, he sort of went through his own, you know, went from living on an olive orchard to sleeping in a tent.

• 26:00Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Um, becoming a, becoming a- Becoming a refugee in the land that he grew up in, so um really, really, you know, they went through really challenging childhoods and they never learned how to be um how to be parents.

• 26:17Rich Roll?

  They're just trying to survive.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  They were trying to sur- survive and my dad comes from a really weird culture. I mean, I can say that. Can I say that?

• 26:25Rich Roll?

  You could say whatever you want.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, I mean, it's a it, he comes from the Middle Eastern culture to me is a very, very strange. It was a very strange culture to grow up around. Um, there was a lot of violence, a lot of anger, and I'm not saying that, you know, I don't want to make a blanket statement about a, a, a, a culture of people and offend anybody, but my own personal experience, you know, my uncles and my relatives and my father, they, they seemed pretty angry. Um, and you know, it's funny, sometimes I'll hear my dad, we have a great relationship now, but he met another kid here in the juice bar who happens to be Arabic as well, and they started talking. I thought they were flipping out on each other.

• 27:01Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  They were having the most pleasant conversation ever.

• 27:03Rich Roll?

  But it just sounds for.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Even their language sounds angry, so anyway, um.

• 27:09Rich Roll?

  So maybe you're misinterpreting this all along.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  I could have missed the whole boat. Maybe he was a really loving nurturing dad and he sounded angry because I didn't speak his language.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  So how did they end up in the United States?

• 27:20Speaker 01

  She came looking for her mom, her real mom, her birth mother, and like three days before uh my mom, my grandmother was living in Ohio, um and three days before my mom got to her, she had taken her own life or she she parked the car in the garage and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  Three days before your mom arrived to find her?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  Oh my goodness.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  And um so my mom stayed and worked for that family as a housekeeper and uh my father was on his way from Orange, Texas to New York, got lost in a really horrible storm, wound up in Toledo, Ohio, ended up staying in Toledo. He went to University of Toledo, she went to University of Toledo. He was incredibly handsome and she was incredibly.

• 28:02Rich Roll?

  Just like you, my friend.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and she was incredibly beautiful and, and they fell in love, um.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  I don't wanna say they shouldn't have had a kid because I wouldn't be here speaking, so I'm glad they had a kid. They just didn't know how to parent.

• 28:15Rich Roll?

  Your only child?

• 28:16Speaker 01

  I was an only child from that, from that marriage. Um, she had a much older son, um, he was eight years older than me and um, he had, uh, let's just say a handful of kids from other marriages.

• 28:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Elsewhere.

• 28:34Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so really, you know, really, um, really, really tough childhood. I mean, really just, um, not even the whole like, you know, anger and violence and stuff like that, but just, uh, I, I went through some pretty, some pretty bad abuse.

• 28:53Rich Roll?

  So like psychological and physical abuse?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Sexual abuse.

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  Sexual abuse.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a good, there was a good deal of sexual abuse. Um, and, uh, and just, you know, left me scarred, left me really, really scarred, left me feeling very dirty and, and full of shame. And so I started to act out and when I acted out, I got attention. And so I learned the way to get attention is to act out.

• 29:16Rich Roll?

  So this is like junior high or elementary school or?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  That's when I started to really act out. I mean, by the time I was eleven, I was arrested, I think fourteen, I was arrested and then fifteen, I was arrested. So I was arrested three times before I was sixteen years old.

• 29:30Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  The last time was for aggravated menacing, which.

• 29:33Rich Roll?

  What does that even mean? Aggravated menacing?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Aggravated menacing is, you know, I, I pulled a, a gun on some people.

• 29:41Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did, okay. Wow, isn't that assault? I guess, uh, assault with a deadly weapon?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  I, I didn't do anything. I just pulled, uh, it was an altercation with, with three guys and, you know, they said they were gonna beat me up or something and, I, so I pulled a gun on them and they didn't beat me up, but a lot of cops showed up.

• 29:58Rich Roll?

  Gotcha.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  And you're ele- you're eleven?

• 30:00Speaker 01

  No, I was fifteen.

• 30:01Rich Roll?

  Fifteen at that time. And were you, did you grow up in the city or like in the suburbs?

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Toledo's a small town. There's about three hundred thousand people.

• 30:08Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Um, it's, you know, it's a, it's a great, it's a great little town. Um, it wasn't great if both your parents were immigrants because everyone's family.

• 30:18Rich Roll?

  Pretty white bread, you know, Midwest, we're talking like early seventies?

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Early seventies, most families looked like the Brady Bunch and I didn't. I was dark and I had a weird name and.

• 30:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're not, it's not like you're living in Brooklyn. I mean, you're, you're in the middle of America.

• 30:35Speaker 01

  I was in the middle of America.

• 30:36Rich Roll?

  That had to be very isolating, I would imagine.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  It was tough. And then, and also because it's a small town, once you become a bad kid, then you're the bad kid. And once you develop kind of that reputation, I mean, it, it, it got even worse and worse in high school. Where, oh, there's that guy, you know, I became sort of infamous in a, in a sense.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  Right. And then it becomes a self-perpetuating thing.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  It did. You, you drink and you blackout and um, you start fights and I mean, I mean, that, that's just what I did. I would, I would drink and blackout and wake up in Bowling Green, or I would drink and blackout and wake up in Perrysburg, or I would, you know, I just.

• 31:11Rich Roll?

  Do you remember, are you one of those guys who can distinctly remember the first time that you got drunk or got high?

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yeah. Oh, yeah, I was 11 years old.

• 31:19Rich Roll?

  Transformative experience where you think all your problems are suddenly solved.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  I was 11 years old. I was with my best friend Teddy Papenhagen. Um, we walked to a liquor store. I convinced the guy behind the counter that I was buying Mad Dog 2020 for my mother. We bought three bottles. Um, we made it through.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  He let you buy?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:41Rich Roll?

  It's so funny, cause you just could never do that now, you know?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  No, but back.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  Maybe in certain places, but back then, you know?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  Back then, it's Ohio. My mom wants me to buy cigarettes, so they would give you cigarettes. My dad told me to get a six pack of beer, they would give you a six pack of beer. I mean, I remember even 13, 14 years old, driving around with the older kids and they would have a six pack on their dashboard while they drove. I mean, that's how we lived in Ohio.

• 32:06Rich Roll?

  No seatbelts?

• 32:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 32:08Rich Roll?

  In the Cutlass?

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. In the Oldsmobile.

• 32:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:12Speaker 01

  The Oldsmobile, yeah. So, um, yeah, we got blind drunk. Uh, Teddy became violently ill, probably got alcohol poisoning, I'm guessing. Um, I kept drinking. I kept drinking and I just thought, this is remarkable. And that, that moment, that crystallization of thought happened many, many more times throughout my life as well. So it wasn't like I got drunk and it, and I got that warm feeling all over my body. Yes, I did. And yes, I thought, this is wonderful. But I gotta tell you, the first time I took MDMA in my mid twenties was another one of those moments. Where I thought, I'm gonna feel like this for the rest of my life. First time I did heroin. You know, at 27, I thought, my God, I'm gonna do this for the rest of my life. So first time I shot up.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  I mean, there were many, there were many moments where. I was.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I had the epiphany that the way to experience life, because I was always so suicidal, I just wanted to kill myself. But the way to cope with life was to, you know, drink. Yeah, drink or do drugs.

• 33:15Rich Roll?

  So there was never any moment where, you know, you thought maybe I should go talk to a therapist or a counselor at the school or? That was never kind of an option or a possibility?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  You know, I went to a Catholic Jesuit school, so there was a lot of shaming and I was, I was, you know, at.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  You're already feeling shame and then you just get pounded with more shame and telling you to, you should feel worse than you feel.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I was in fourth grade, they made me eat lunch in the janitor's room at St. Patrick's of Heatherdowns. They, they stuck me in the janitor's room and um.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  Because you were just, you were a rabble rouser?

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I would break, I would have kids surround me and then I would break a glass bottle on the playground and we would all laugh and fall on the ground laughing and I thought it was really cool. Um, and the lunch mothers didn't think it was cool, so they.

• 34:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  They stuck.

• 34:02Rich Roll?

  And there's no, I mean, it's such a different time. I mean, now if a kid starts doing that, they go, hey, you know, this kid's in trouble. There's something going on at home. Let's like, let's find out what's happening, see if we can be of help, but. You know, nineteen seventy-three, two, you know, whatever, whatever it was. I mean, you know, that's.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  That was nineteen eighty-one and it was nuns and priests for the most part and some other, you know, some other teachers.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Most of my teachers made me feel absolute shame and made me feel even more ostracized than I already felt. So keep in mind. Eleven was the last time I was sexually abused. So I'm eleven years old.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  And you never told anyone, you're just holding a secret down.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  You didn't, you didn't tell people back then. Especially, yeah, I mean, I guess it would be different now, or maybe it's not different now. I think. I think maybe a lot more people were, were molested than actually talk about it. But um. And the last time was the worst because it was my swim coach who I loved. I mean, I really, really loved him. I mean, I looked up to him. He was. In his late thirties, um, he had a beautiful girlfriend and a couple of kids together. They weren't married, but it just seemed like the ideal. Relationship and I wanted to be just like this guy. His name was Brian and um, took me camping, you know, and um. Yeah, it was horrible.

• 35:17Rich Roll?

  Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't. I can't even fathom it. I mean, I have a little bit of indirect. Experience with that. And, you know, I don't know what it is with swim coaches, but, you know, it's, it's literally epidemic in the swimming world with swim coaches.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  I watched that documentary on that woman last night.

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  Which, what's, which one's that?

• 35:40Speaker 01

  The Cuba, the woman that swam from Cuba.

• 35:42Rich Roll?

  Diane Nyad.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Yes, I watched that last night. I was crying. I was by myself and I was crying. I'm like, how did she, she went through the exact same thing.

• 35:50Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 35:51Speaker 01

  That I went through.

• 35:52Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  And it was her swim coach and I just, and Haley came home and she's like, you okay? I'm like, yeah, I'm fine. I was really, really shaken up last night.

• 35:58Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Um, kind of brought that trauma back. But, um, so.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  Let me just, I'll, I'll just interject with one quick story that's, that's sort of related. My swim coach, uh, Rick Curl, who was a big time swim coach in the Washington DC area, he was like the guy and I talk about him in my book. Um, he really was the guy who helped develop me from just an average swimmer into like a swimmer who was getting recruited at all these colleges. And so in many ways, this guy was like a father figure to me, you know, I wrote about him in my college essays, you know, about how he had mentored me. And my first girlfriend in high school was Kelly Davies and she was the star. She was ranked, I think, I think by the time she was a senior in high school, she was ranked number one in the world in the 200 fly. She'd won the Goodwill Games. I believe she won, won at the Goodwill Games. And she was going into

• 36:50Rich Roll?

  the 1988 Olympic Trials as basically one of the top contenders to make the Olympic team in the 200 meter butterfly. Anyway, she was like the favorite of Rick, right?

• 37:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  And we all would joke, you know, oh, she gets special treatment and, and like, I'm dating her. I was a senior in high school and she was two years younger than me. And she was my first, like, real girlfriend.

• 37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  And there was no Dr. Drew on the radio to like, listen to Love Line and kind of clue into,

• 37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  This, the, kind of, to be attuned to the signs when there's some abuse going on. And in retrospect now, it's so clear, but essentially, Rick had been sexually abusing her since she was 13.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 37:29Rich Roll?

  But it wasn't just a one time thing. It was like, they were in like a quote unquote, relationship where he would. Psychologically abuse her by saying, you know, someday you're gonna have my children and

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  All this sort of stuff. So in her mind, she's having a love affair with her coach.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:43Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and by the time I went off to Stanford, then the rumors came out that her parents had, essentially Kelly started suffering from anorexia and bulimia and all these problems. She had to go into a rehab facility. She went to the Olympic trials and did horribly, performed horribly. And her parents were like, what is going on?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:02Rich Roll?

  Her dad found her diary, read it.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 38:04Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and it kind of told the tale of what was going on and he freaked out.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:10Rich Roll?

  Then they, you know, basically went after him and sued him and settled out of court for like a pittance.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 38:15Rich Roll?

  And it was kind of Kelly wanted to move on with her life and she was living in Texas at the time and wanted to put it behind her. And, and all of my friends that were on the team at the time, we all kind of knew something had happened, but we didn't really know.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:28Rich Roll?

  And I'd never seen anything up close and personal. Like I had no direct evidence of anything, but none of us were, I guess, all that surprised. And, and essentially what happened was this past Olympics, she just, she was, she saw Rick Curl on the deck at Olympic trials on, in the television broadcast. And she, it just brought it all back. And she's like,

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 38:51Rich Roll?

  I can't like, I need to, you know, like she, she's still living with all of this.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:55Rich Roll?

  Because it never really had been fully processed.

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:58Rich Roll?

  And so it all finally came out in the open. It was a front page news story in the Washington Post. He got prosecuted and he's in jail now. But it took, I mean, this was going on in 1984, 83. And only this past year did he kind of have to deal with it. And it creates a lot of weird emotions, even though I was not the subject of the abuse.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:20Rich Roll?

  Here's a guy who in many ways was like a father figure to me.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 39:24Rich Roll?

  And under my nose, while I'm dating my first girlfriend.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  He's doing this horrific thing to her. You know, like it's just a bizarre thing. But anyway, nothing like what you suffered through.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  No, but but related and and it's sad. It's sad when an adult would do something like that to a child. I mean, I don't for the life of me, I I it doesn't register. It wasn't. And for me, the thing that I struggled with in early recovery was like. It's not like I was some, you know, hot seventeen year old girl and he was this thirty five year old guy. You know, I was a little boy, you know, and not that it would be okay if I was some hot seventeen year old girl. But at least I could somehow understand like, wow, he had a weak moment or whatever. But no, this guy was really, really sick. And.

• 40:13Rich Roll?

  What happened to him?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Um, you know, who who knows? He's out there somewhere. He's probably. He was thirty eight, I believe, at that time. That was nineteen eighty one. I can't do math, but I'm guessing he's probably. In his seventies or eighties or something. And how sad, how sad that he had to. Carry that with him. And by the way. When we got older, when we were in high school, I think we were seniors in high school. There's a few of us that used to be on the swim team at at uh at our country club back in Toledo. Um, randomly, it just came up. This one guy, Andy. Um, and my buddy Teddy, you know, they said like, you know, that guy really, you know, grab your dick or whatever and. I was like, yeah. That's an interesting way of putting it because.

• 40:59Speaker 01

  I don't know, maybe maybe to them it wasn't as traumatizing or whatever, but um. I wasn't the only one. So this is something this this I'm I I'm, you know, this is somebody that was. A sexual predator that, you know, sexually molested young boys, maybe young girls as well and um and had to live with that for the rest of his life. So. When it came time for me to. Let that resentment go, I literally just had to like. Picture him as an old man sitting by himself, living with all of that guilt and all of that shame. And I just had, you know, I cried and I just had to say like. Hey, man, I forgive you, you know, whoever you are, if he's still alive, um.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I forgive him and and it's it's horrible and go make some sort of amends to society, you know.

• 41:45Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Cause otherwise it'll eat you alive.

• 41:47Rich Roll?

  But the journey to get to that place where you can truly from your heart forgive somebody for doing that is gotta be. Quite the mountain to climb.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and seemed insurmountable in early recovery. I mean, when they said, uh, you know, they showed me the steps on the wall or whatever in rehab. I was just like, yeah, right. Not doing any of that shit. I wanna put some weight on and go get high properly.

• 42:13Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  You know, in the end, the wheels fell fell off. I mean, the end, last eighteen months of my using, I was homeless. And I don't mean homeless like I was sleeping on some girl's sa- how are some girl's sofa or sleeping in a car like I was homeless homeless.

• 42:26Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  So.

• 42:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you were down on Skid Row.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  I was down on Skid Row.

• 42:29Rich Roll?

  But let's back it up a little bit. So, so you're still in high school. You have this experience, but you know, what, what, where, how does it build from there?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Oh, God, uh, I ended up getting kicked out of Saint Pat's, that school. I think I was in eighth grade. I got kicked out of there. Went to this public junior high, almost got kicked out of there my third day.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Ended up going to a school called Saint John's, which is another Jesuit school, and ended up getting kicked out of there. Um, tried.

• 43:01Rich Roll?

  Academic career just skyrocketing.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Didn't, I didn't end up at U of M. Uh, I, um,

• 43:09Speaker 01

  I kind of got enrolled in another school called Mommy Valley Country Day School, but I ended up getting into an altercation somewhere and they ended up sending a letter saying, sorry, you're not welcome. Last ditch effort, I went to public school. I went to a place called Bowser High School, um, and ended up dropping out there. So.

• 43:25Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, your parent, what are your parents thinking? Like, what's, you know, what's the home front? Or are they just checked out or?

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, my dad pretty much left when I was seven and was gone for eight years, was living all over the world. Came back when I was fifteen, tried to be a parent, but by that time,

• 43:42Speaker 01

  I was so combative that I was impossible to deal with. And not that he was like Mister, you know, like great dad or anything, but he came back in like, okay, son, now you're gonna get good grades and I'm like.

• 43:53Rich Roll?

  Been a rambling man for the last, you know.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  And I was like, you know, fuck this. I'm not having any of it. So. Um, job to job, school to school, you know, just failing my way through life, everything failed. Ruined every relationship I was ever in, ruined every job I was ever in, got fired, um, got kicked out or dropped out of every school I ever went to. And really was just kind of a, a, a fucking loser. I mean, um.

• 44:18Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, the drinking and the, the drug use is escalating, I assume.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  It's escalating. I would try to control it, but um, I gotta tell you, when I would finally fold and give in, it was the greatest. There was nothing better. I mean, when I would finally just fold and go for the bottle or go for some pills or some weed or whatever. The relief was, oh man, it was so good. It was so good. But it really, it really didn't take over. I didn't cross the invisible line. I left Ohio, I came out to California.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  And did okay for a while.

• 44:52Rich Roll?

  What brought you out here?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  I just, I had to get out of there. I knew I was gonna die if I stayed there. I was getting in more and more and more trouble. I started doing some really just stupid shit and I knew I was gonna die if I stayed there. So. I got really drunk one night up in Detroit in Greek town. I got into a big argument with my buddies that I was with and. I was just like, are you allowed to swear in this thing?

• 45:14Rich Roll?

  Say whatever you.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Alright, I feel weird. I, I literally jumped up on a car and I was like, you know, fuck you guys, you're gonna die here. You're never gonna get out of this shitty little town and. And you're gonna die here and I wasn't counting on the response back, which was, well, what are you gonna do?

• 45:32Speaker 01

  And I was just stunned. I was like, what do you mean? I'm going to California. And they're like, you've been talking that shit for five years.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  And I said, I'm leaving tomorrow. And they said bullshit. And I was so drunk and I had so much false pride that. I flipped out and I was like, fuck you, I'm leaving. I'm leaving tomorrow. And you know, none of you guys have the balls to come with me. And like four of them said, I'll come with you. Woke up the next morning, so hungover. I don't even know how we got home. I drove, but I didn't remember that. And you know that feeling where you wanna like shave your tongue, cause it's so like dirty and swollen from the cigarettes and the booze. Yeah, so. I had that feeling, face was swollen, um, had about eight hundred dollars to my name and

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I packed my car and I had this brilliant idea, I'm gonna drive to my dad's restaurant and he'll stop me. Cause my dad was like still trying to be a disciplinarian and a stern Muslim father. So, um, that was my out. I knew that I'd go to his restaurant and he'd flip out and then I could tell everybody like, yeah, my fucking dad went crazy and so I have to stay for a little while longer. I packed the car up, I like literally put a pillow in the back window just to show how serious I was. And I drove to his restaurant. My dad's very punctual. And I got there like five minutes till five, cause I knew at five o'clock on the dot, he would be walking up.

• 46:56Rich Roll?

  What kind of restaurant was it?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Um, it was called Mac and Tongs, it was kind of like a, um, uh, just everything, steaks and salads and my stepmom made some Korean food. My stepmother is from Korea.

• 47:09Rich Roll?

  Uh huh, okay.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  So, mother from Poland, father from Palestine, stepmother from Korea.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  That's confusing.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Confusing and yeah.

• 47:17Rich Roll?

  So anyway, alright, so you're hoping for the intervention from, from big, big level.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, good old Mac's gonna come up and, and flip out and tell me I gotta stay. So I'm sitting in my car, car's running. He walks up, he walks right past the car. So I roll down the window and I go, dad. And he turns around, he goes, yeah? And I said, I'm moving to California. And he looks at the car and he looks inside the car and he looks at me and he goes, good luck.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  And walks away. And I sobbed, I sobbed, I cried. I got on the turnpike. And I drove and I cried. I probably cried through three states. I just drove and I drove and I drove and I cried and I cried and I cried.

• 48:00Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  I knew, I knew it was done. I knew it was over. I didn't know what was coming and I was terribly afraid of the unknown, but. I just kept driving until I could no longer drive. I probably drove like sixteen hours. And eventually went to a motel six and woke up the next day and I was in, you know, I got.

• 48:19Rich Roll?

  You're like, I'm committed.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna show those guys.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  So you had, you had enough pocket money to get you through?

• 48:26Speaker 01

  I had eight hundred bucks and there was a guy named Dean Carr who was living on Fourth and Mul- Molino in downtown LA, right by the Fourth Street Bridge. It's a hip area now.

• 48:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Twenty-three years ago.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  So shooting gallery.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Oh, my god. It was beyond. I mean, it just, you know, crazy. But anyway, this guy Dean Carr, who didn't really know me, let me stay at his place.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  He was the one guy that you knew that lived out here?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  I didn't know him. I knew his roommate and his roommate said, yeah, man, come out anytime, which I thought in Ohio, if you say, you know, come out, that means, you know, come out and stay and we'll help you get a job and this and that. Well, in LA, come out means come out for a couple of days and then hit the road.

• 49:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  And so, no, I met Dean through this other guy Kenny and I was pleading with Kenny. I was like, dude, I have nowhere to go. I don't have any money. And Dean came downstairs. He's like, you can crash up in my place. Let me stay with him. So I got a job and made a little bit of money.

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  How old were you at the time?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  I was twenty-one, turning twenty-two. I turned twenty-two while living upstairs at Dean's, like, four days later.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  And Dean was an art student at Pasadena School of Art and Design. He was broke too.

• 49:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  But we just kinda, we hung out. Dean is a great success today. He's a huge director. He's done, you know, videos and movies and all that. And we've remained friends all throughout the years. But, um, yeah, it was a crazy, crazy beginning. And, um, but I, as I said before, I did okay. I mean, I, I, because I'm Polish and Arab, I'm a worker.

• 50:06Rich Roll?

  Did you have that thing where, you know, in recovery, they call it pulling a geographic, where you thought, you know, if I can just get out of Ohio?

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 50:13Rich Roll?

  Or get out of Michigan, then, you know, I can put all this, this crazy lifestyle habits he's using and all of that behind me and I'll start fresh.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  For sure. Yeah, for sure. And it worked.

• 50:25Rich Roll?

  It did, it worked.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  It worked temporarily.

• 50:27Rich Roll?

  It worked for a little while.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  It worked temporarily. I mean, within, within...

• 50:31Rich Roll?

  Until you realize you brought yourself with you.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  That, yeah, once I got over the ocean, once the novelty of the warm weather wore off, I will tell you something interesting that did happen. The panic and anxiety attacks that I had suffered through for my whole life, the like debilitating panic attacks, they started to really go away once I got out into the sunlight and started exercising.

• 50:52Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that was good. Got a job working for Elizabeth Taylor, which was amazing.

• 50:58Rich Roll?

  How does that happen? That's like one of those crazy Hollywood stories. Like I arrived and the next day I'm like, you know, hanging out with a movie star.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  It wasn't, it wasn't the next day, it was, it was six months later and I was so naive that I took like a bucket and a chamois and a rag and some cards and I like went around to car dealerships and said like, "I'm a car detailer, you know, and please hire me." And they all just, they pretty much all laughed me away. Except BMW of Santa Monica called me a few months later. And by the way, most people, like when I would go to their house in the Santa Monica Canyon, they would either like threaten to call the police or they'd invite me in and make me lunch.

• 51:37Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're literally knocking on doors, saying you want your car detailed?

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  You are a worker.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  I'm a worker, man. Polish and Arab.

• 51:46Rich Roll?

  So, all right, so Elizabeth Taylor, like how does that happen?

• 51:49Speaker 01

  So BMW of Santa Monica called and they said, um... We have a customer that just bought a car from us and they want you to go to their house. Can you do that? And I was like, of course I can. And they said, okay, here's the address, seven hundred Neams, you know? Go to the house and went to the house, detailed the car. Um, got some, you know, check, uh, I don't know what the name on it was, but like some Jewish accountant's name on a check and hundred and twenty-five bucks and I left. And they called me the next week, can you come back up and detail the car? And I'm like, oh, well, you're not supposed to detail cars every week. You're supposed to do them like every three months. And they're like, okay, so can you come up and detail the car? And I'm like, well, I mean, I can, but you know, you're really not supposed to detail them. They're like, do you, do you want to do this or not? And I'm like,

• 52:35Speaker 01

  so I went back up again, I detailed the car. And then while I was up there, they were like, can you, you know, do the motorcycles? Can you do this? Can you do that? So?

• 52:43Rich Roll?

  You're up at some mansion.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  I'm up at some mansion, I'm just, I'm just working. And so, I'm in the garage and I'm detailing, if I remember correctly, uh, a nineteen seventy-eight Aston Martin Lagonda and a couple of, and a couple of motorcycles. And this will show you how, I'd like to call it naive, but it's probably more like stupid. One of the motorcycles literally said purple passion on it.

• 53:08Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  That was her perfume back then. You probably don't remember, but.

• 53:11Rich Roll?

  No, I, I remember that.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  So I'm, I'm detailing the, the motorcycles, I'm detailing the, the, uh, Lagonda and this two, this dude came out with a V-neck, dirty white t-shirt on and like yellow stains under his armpits and he's smoking a cigarette. And he's kind of eyeballing me and I'm, I'm from Ohio. I'm still young, full of piss and vinegar. So I start eyeballing him. And then he comes in and he goes to open the refrigerator and I was like, hey, man, you can't do that. And he's like, I can't do what? And I'm like, you can't do that. I'm working in here. This is my space. You just, you just back off, okay? Cause I'm responsible for everything in here. And he is like, looked at me, stepped back, lit another cigarette, just staring at me the whole time. And he said, you want a cigarette? And I said, I do.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And so I smoked a cigarette, he smoked a cigarette and he just walked away.

• 53:59Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  So.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Three days later, I get a phone call from the guy.

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  Come back in detail.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  No, no, Larry.

• 54:09Rich Roll?

  I was gonna say, is it, was it Larry?

• 54:11Speaker 01

  Larry.

• 54:12Rich Roll?

  What was that guy's last name?

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Fortensky.

• 54:14Rich Roll?

  Fortensky, that's right. So he, he's the guy that she met in rehab.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Betty Ford, yeah.

• 54:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  So Larry and Elizabeth would like to know if you would be their houseboy. And I'm like, who's Larry and Elizabeth?

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had no idea. So yeah, it was like one of those movies because I went up there and signed all these, you know.

• 54:35Rich Roll?

  Non disclosures.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:37Rich Roll?

  So that means you, you can't talk about it here. You can't, you can't tell me any good stories?

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Um, I don't know. I don't know. I think, I think because she died or whatever, maybe I can, or I don't know. Someone gonna get mad as I said, I, you know, petted her dog or pet her dog.

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  Of course not.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, it was what it was. It was incredible job, but, um,

• 54:58Speaker 01

  you know, drinking and, and drugs and, and back then it was like, I think the Garden of Eden was the big nightclub. And, you know, hanging out with Love and Rockets and all these cool fancy people that I had grown up listening to. That took precedence over, you know, having a good job and making money. I very quickly found trouble and this trouble was different. These people.

• 55:21Rich Roll?

  It's not Toledo.

• 55:21Speaker 01

  It's not Toledo. These people like didn't go to the Blind Pig. You know, the local bar called the Blind Pig and, and drink too many beers and throw up on themselves and go home. These people drank and did drugs like professionals. These people were armed to the teeth with cash and fame and, and drugs. And I started, you know, dating some C-list actresses and a couple of models and hanging out with some of the right people slash wrong people and it really turned into something. I mean, it really, really turned into something and, you know, and there's a million stories in there and I don't wanna, I don't wanna bore you with them, but, um, I, I became a, a professional partier very quickly.

• 56:04Rich Roll?

  How long did that take from, you know, kind of? You know, when you're working at Elizabeth House to the real like descent into the real darkness.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  I I went, I went from hero to zero pretty quick. I mean, I was like calling my folks back home and like, oh, yeah, I'm working Elizabeth Taylor's or I'm detailing, you know, Axl Rose's car, whatever, and um to like, hey, can you send me a couple hundred dollars? I mean, it happened pretty quickly. And I went through periods of prosperity. I would find a way to buy a thousand hits of ecstasy and, you know, go to a rave and and sell them and have people selling with me and I was pretty industrious and I was a worker like, you know, like we joked about, but um.

• 56:51Rich Roll?

  That combination with a with a strong drug habit, though, can take you down pretty quick.

• 56:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:56Rich Roll?

  That industriousness, you know, that's that's what allows you to be able to continue to find the drugs that you need without any money and hustle and, you know.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  Right. And and I, once I opened Pandora's box, I mean, once I unleashed the seed of self destruction, there was no turning back because I could go for five days and then I'd wake up two days later and I would be like, wow, you're a piece of shit. You should just kill yourself.

• 57:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  And then I'd get high and I would wake up three days later like, wow, you're really a piece of shit. And slowly but surely, I destroyed my credit. I destroyed my relationships. I destroyed my, you know, my job. Eventually I was fired from that job.

• 57:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I mean, in, you know, in Toledo, you go out and, you know, you might find yourself in the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, but in LA there's a big, you know, dark side that you

• 57:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, in in LA.

• 57:46Rich Roll?

  You can tap into and you can find yourself in some pretty gnarly, dark circumstances.

• 57:51Speaker 01

  I was like literally at a gym, working out, met a guy who was the roommates with I think his his roommate's name.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Was Roger, Roger happened to be the manager of Porno for Pyros. We went over to meet Perry at Perry's house and then, yeah, and then a week later, I'm like, wow, I'm smoking crack. I didn't even know.

• 58:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you're young and you get, you, you have stars in your eyes and suddenly you're hanging out with a rock star and you wanna look cool and you're doing something you never thought you would ever do.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, going to score crack at three o'clock in the morning in a really bad neighborhood that I shouldn't have been in.

• 58:27Rich Roll?

  And, and just thinking, oh, it's so cool, because I'm hanging out with Perry Farrell.

• 58:30Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  So, um, so you're on this slide and then, you know, how does it occur that suddenly you're, you're down on Skid Row?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Um, because going downtown and scoring for people became how I was supporting myself and.

• 58:47Rich Roll?

  Right, so for people that are listening that don't know, in Los Angeles, um, you know, if you, if you wanna score hard drugs, I mean, basically, you go down to MacArthur Park or somewhere in the vicinity of that, which is downtown LA, most people in Los Angeles don't live in downtown LA. That's a trek across town to do that. That takes a little effort.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  It's also incredibly dangerous.

• 59:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  I mean, you don't wanna, you can get your drugs during the day, but for people like me and the people I was hanging with, there is no day, you know, like the book Permanent Midnight, that's what, that's what he meant, I would imagine, I don't know the guy, but my life became permanent midnight. It was always midnight, you know, and the one thing that this guy said to me as he was teaching me how to shoot up, he was literally like needle in my arm, he looks at me and he goes, there's no Christmas for junkies. And I'm like, okay, can you just, can you finish here? He's like, I just want you to know that there's no Christmas for junkies.

• 59:40Rich Roll?

  Was that the first time that you, he said that to you?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  First time I shot up, yeah.

• 59:43Rich Roll?

  Had you been smoking heroin before that? And so there was a lead up before you started, you started shooting.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  I was smoking massive amounts of black tar heroin and it just stopped working. I mean, I was buying three or four grams a day.

• 59:54Rich Roll?

  That becomes a full-time job, just feeding the habit.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Yes, and, uh, that, that, what he said to me, I, I remember the day that I understood what he meant. I remember Christmas Day, downtown LA, no one's out and I'm dope sick. And I'm, I'm like violently ill, like shitting my pants, throwing up, trying to find someone to sell me dope and, uh, and that faraway laughter like Pink Floyd talked about starts to, starts to creep in and, uh, and, you know, I just. It was horrible. It was really, really bad, really dark.

• 1:00:32Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  It's, there's an element of spiritual warfare, I think, to, to drugs and alcohol that most people don't ever consider, but.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  Explain, explain that a little bit.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  There's, there's forces. There's forces. There's, there's, there's dark and, and first of all, there's light. Light is everything. God is light. Light is everything, but there is the absence of light as well.

• 1:00:54Rich Roll?

  I think that there's a sort of this sense, maybe it's like a new age thing where if you're like spiritual, then it's all like bliss and love and happiness. And it's like, I agree with you. I think that, you know, there are very dark forces at play. There is the light and there is the bliss and there is the love, but there's also the dark forces and the, you know, the sort of things that are pulling you in a direction that doesn't serve you. I mean, there's, there is that polarity in spirituality that I think doesn't get talked about enough.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  And remember what my intentions were. My intentions were to die. So I was indulging in that darkness. If you, if you call to that darkness, it's gonna answer. If you begin to, you know, romance that darkness, it's gonna romance you right back. There's gonna be some incredible honeymoon period, you know? I mean, I had quite a dance with the devil and I don't mean that literally. I'm not some, you know, religious person, but um, I had quite a dance. And um, and there were some very, very glamorous moments. There was some big, you know, like Oprah says aha moments. I had, I had some of those moments.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  And then it gets dark. And then it gets darker. And then it gets darker. And they talk about hitting a bottom and there's certain people, some are sicker than others, they say in 12-step programs. I was one of those people that I hit the bottom and, and, you know, I just kept digging and uh, he said I could say anything, so I'm gonna just say it because it's been on my mind for the last few days. I was listening to a woman share about how.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  You know, oh my god, it got so bad in the end. I was with all these professional hockey players and they all wanted to sleep with me and you know, that was my last drink of wine and I'm sitting in the back of the room and I'm like, holy shit, that that was it? That was her bottom? That was her?

• 1:02:44Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  That was like her darkness? And not that

• 1:02:47Rich Roll?

  Right, it's all relative. It sounds like that that sounds like a quality problem for somebody else.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  For her.

• 1:02:53Rich Roll?

  But for her, everybody has their moment.

• 1:02:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was devastating and thank god it drove her to sobriety, you know?

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  I'm in the back of the room going like, I had a homeless crack dealer playing with my feet while he was jacking off and I'm thinking, this isn't that bad.

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  I'm not having sex with the guy.

• 1:03:12Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  You know, I mean, that

• 1:03:14Rich Roll?

  I mean, you're you're you're definitely a low bottom drunk, for sure.

• 1:03:17Speaker 01

  I am a low bottom drunk.

• 1:03:18Rich Roll?

  You know, and I never, I never, I don't think I ever consciously thought like I want to kill myself. I I never really entertained suicidal thoughts for more than like, you know, glimpsing moments, but I can remember very distinctly when I watched Leaving Las Vegas, that movie. And watching it and just thinking, that looks good. You know, like I'm I'm right with him. I'm like, this just looks like a guy who's having a good time. You know, like I, I'm like, I could do that. I can see myself doing that.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  Whereas, you know, I went with a buddy of mine and uh, you know, this is when I was still drinking, obviously, when that movie came out. And he was horrified. You know, he's like, I can't, you know, he was like, he was ill from seeing that movie. Like, he couldn't relate at all. And I'm like, I'm right with him.

• 1:04:02Speaker 01

  And for me

• 1:04:03Rich Roll?

  Cage, you know, seeing that.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  And for me, it was less than zero. At the end, when Robert Downey Jr. dies, or his character dies, I was like, oh my god, that's amazing. I thought that was great. I I I loved watching his friends cry for him. Like, that warmed my heart.

• 1:04:20Rich Roll?

  Right. This is the final chapter that I want.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  That was my objective, is like, I'm gonna maybe write some songs, because I was doing some music, which which I didn't mention, I don't even know if it's worth mentioning. But I was in a band and I had some amazing moments with that as well and wrote some really cool stuff. Um, but my plan was to finish up the record and die. And then I could have some sort of legacy to leave behind.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Martyrdom.

• 1:04:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and in fact, when Kurt Cobain, you know, died or was murdered or whatever happened with that, um, I was horrified. I was pissed. I was like, oh my god, that, but wait, that's my plan.

• 1:04:54Rich Roll?

  He stole your plan.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  He stole my plan, but the, but the, but the one thing he had that I didn't was talent and fame.

• 1:05:03Rich Roll?

  Yes, but don't underestimate the aptitude for the addict or alcoholic to have that megalomania about.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  Grandiose.

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that grandiose idea of where you fit into that, you know.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  How dare he? I was pissed. And I was a fan, but I was pissed. He took my idea.

• 1:05:21Rich Roll?

  I got news for you. It's not the most novel idea.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:05:24Rich Roll?

  So, so, all right, so you're down on Skid Row. So, so where is the bottom then? I mean, eventually, you know, you have to reach this moment where you make this decision that you can't go on.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  There was, you know, again, the bottom, I mean, that, that's, that's a whole book in itself. I mean, that's some sad, dark, you know, bizarre, almost unbelievable moments that I am still haunted by, you know, to this day. I mean, and, and just an example, county jail. You know, LA County Jail is worse than most prisons in this country. Um, and I spent many days kicking and, and, and, you know, soiling myself.

• 1:06:03Rich Roll?

  You were in gen pop?

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  No, I was on the fourth floor, which was the pill pod, which was for crazy people.

• 1:06:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, gone in and done panels down there.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was with the crazies. I was with, I was, I think we had the bright yellow outfits on. Everyone else had orange.

• 1:06:19Rich Roll?

  It's a frightening place to be.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Frightening and, and you never quite get over the smell and, um, you don't shower because of what would happen to you if you did, um, at the hands of others. And, um, you know, so county jail, there was many overdoses. Um, went to just about every hospital, you know, around. Um, had, had some things happen to me on the streets, which happened to people that live on the streets. Um, and, uh, started having seizures when I would shoot coke. I would shoot too much coke and I would have seizures and.

• 1:06:55Rich Roll?

  You're doing like speedballs?

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  I was doing mostly speedballs, but I would shoot coke or smoke crack. I would do anything, but mostly, mostly speedballs. Um, what happens to someone like me when you're dealing drugs on a street corner and you're not affiliated with a gang? Things happen to you that. You know, are are not are not good. And uh, yeah, it was really, really dark and I I had a a series of events that just led me to just saying, I can't do this anymore.

• 1:07:23Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  Just really can't do this anymore. And I had.

• 1:07:27Rich Roll?

  So it wasn't one like moment or

• 1:07:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  Really dramatic event. It was just the accumulation of this slide that finally one day.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  It was, yeah.

• 1:07:35Rich Roll?

  It was not like unlike many other days.

• 1:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:38Rich Roll?

  You had you had that. You woke up with a sense of willingness.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  I had a bad seizure, um, was in a gully. Um, I had made my way back out to Malibu because that there was this these people that let me stay on their property sometimes and shower up and, you know, get a fresh change of clothes. And I was on my way to that property and I shot too much coke and wound up having a seizure, lost my vision for a while, lost the use of my legs, laid in a gully, had bugs crawling all over me. Um, and spent hours and hours praying for my sight to return and for my legs to start working again. And I just I made a pact with whatever it is that created me that um, that that was it. That I just I just wanted out. I didn't want to I didn't want to do it anymore. And then I would do anything. And um, guy named Bob Forrest.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  I know Bob.

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Okay, a guy named Bob Forrest. He just dropped me off.

• 1:08:27Rich Roll?

  Oh, he did?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  He's amazing. And and for the listener out there, you might know him because he's Dr. Drew's like main man.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:35Rich Roll?

  And all the and all those uh, what are those shows called?

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Celebrity Rehab.

• 1:08:38Rich Roll?

  Celebrity Rehab shows.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39Rich Roll?

  But Bob's a real deal.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Bob, Bob lied to a guy named Buddy Arnold, who was in charge of an organization called Musicians Assistance Program.

• 1:08:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  Lied to Buddy Buddy and told him that I was a uh, an accomplished musician, which I wasn't.

• 1:08:54Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  And uh, that I was a published musician, which I wasn't. And then I desperately needed treatment. And he convinced Buddy to send me to Pasadena Recovery Center.

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  So you were able to get into that program under that under the Musicians Assistance Program?

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Gotcha.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  They paid for me.

• 1:09:08Rich Roll?

  Had you met Bob before? Did you you knew him or?

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  No, I I was I was shooting up with some woman named Penny who claimed to be Penny Lane, that that song was written about her.

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

  Only in Hollywood.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  And she knew Bob Forrest and uh and everyone knows Bob, right? I mean, everyone cool knows Bob. And so Penny called Bob and um yeah, they got me in and I didn't. I didn't sleep for about three and a half weeks and I don't mean I had broken sleep. I mean, I didn't sleep. Um, I turned all kinds of different colors and um, yeah, it was horrible.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  Wow. And had, was that your fir- you'd been in detoxes before, I just never took?

• 1:09:48Speaker 01

  I detoxed in county jail, I detoxed at home. Um, I, I tried going through a couple of outpatients when I still had money. Um, my, my ex-girlfriend's dad stuck me and her in a treatment center maybe a few years earlier and I ended up jumping out of the third story window to the next building and running away. So.

• 1:10:06Rich Roll?

  That industriousness.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I had never, I had never gone through treatment. That was my first time through treatment and I haven't gone through treatment since. That was June 18th, 2003. Um, it was about 10 years ago. They paid for me to go to sober living after that. Um, and they gave me $40 a week to live on. And that was my life and so.

• 1:10:26Rich Roll?

  Where did, where was the sober living house?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Oh, God, um, Roscoe in White Oak. Um, hell.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Um, and uh, you know, end of summer, 117 degrees outside. I mean, just really, really tough.

• 1:10:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  $40 a week to live on.

• 1:10:43Rich Roll?

  But when you, you end up in uh, in the recovery house, I mean, are you, you're, are you ready to sort of do something different? You're ready, you're, you have a willingness to kind of move in a different direction? Or did that take, were you stubborn and still fighting this? Or you had made this pact, right? So I presume that you had had some, there was something inside of you that was like ready to turn the page.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know what? Uh, my third day when I was in treatment, I, I fell on my knees and I was crying. I was in so much pain, emotional pain and everything was coming out and I was just crying and crying and crying and crying. And I was on my knees and I went to Catholic school, so I just like folded my hands like this. Um, cause I guess that's what I was taught when I was a kid. If you're gonna talk to God, you have to fold your hands. So I folded my hands and um, I closed my eyes and I said. Whoever you are, whatever you are, if you're there, please take this hell away from me. Those are my exact words. It doesn't even make sense when I say it now, but as I was sobbing, those are the words that came out. Whoever you are, whatever you are, please take this hell away from me.

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Why doesn't that make sense? I mean, that's pretty, pretty clear.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was clear, but I don't know. I suppose I could have worded it better if I were in better condition, but that's what came out. And, and the moment I said that, when I said, please take this hell away from me, there was a, there was a lifting. It was just a lifting. I can't really describe it other than a heavy heaviness, a darkness. My cravings didn't go away. And I, I always forget to say that. My cravings definitely did not go away for a year. Um, but there was a lifting. There was a darkness that left me in that moment, and there was a light that came into my heart. And, um, there was no burning bush, or there was no, you know, clear message at that time, but there was just this lifting.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  That's definitely, you know, this, you hear it a lot, like that spiritual experience that you have, where suddenly things look a little bit different.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. I knew, I knew in that moment that God existed. I knew in that moment that God existed. It wasn't about faith. It was a knowing in my heart that God existed. I decided in that moment that I was gonna give this whole thing a shot.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  What?

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Oh, I said, I have to pee.

• 1:12:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, you have to pee?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:59Rich Roll?

  Go pee, man. We'll pause it.

• 1:13:00Speaker 01

  Oh, great. Okay, cool.

• 1:13:02Rich Roll?

  We'll be back in a second.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  I didn't know if that was legal.

• 1:13:06Speaker 01

  Too much veggie juice.

• 1:13:26Rich Roll?

  Alright, we're back. You feel better?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  I feel so much better. I didn't know what to do. I'm like, how do I have to pee?

• 1:13:31Rich Roll?

  I've done that before with my own podcast. I'm, I'm the one interviewing and I go, I gotta, I gotta pee, man. We gotta pause it.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  Oh, good. So now I know.

• 1:13:39Rich Roll?

  No problem.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:13:40Rich Roll?

  Um, so we were talking about, uh, the, you know, having this spiritual experience and, and kind of having this knowingness that, you know. God exists in your life and and this is the beginning of kind of turning the you know turning this uh this train around. So what is that? I mean, you're in the sober, you you go through the rehab, you're in the sober living and I assume you're starting to go to meetings and kind of uh you know, get situated in the recovery community in LA like what does that you know, what does that look like? Like what's going on in your life?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  Well, they made us go to meetings. So I mean, and I went to meetings.

• 1:14:16Rich Roll?

  You weren't happy about it.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't go inside.

• 1:14:18Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Oh, you stood outside and smoked cigarettes?

• 1:14:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And hid on newcomers.

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  Like outside the log cabin or something?

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  Yes, log cabin and and and Melrose and Mansfield and the tar pits.

• 1:14:30Rich Roll?

  So all the cool Hollywood meetings?

• 1:14:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:14:32Rich Roll?

  Sundowners, tar pits.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Anything.

• 1:14:35Rich Roll?

  Rodeo.

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  And then eventually started to, I started to go inside. Um, but still, I just, I I looked so bad. I mean, I didn't, you know, I didn't mention I was a hundred, hundred and nine pounds when I went to treatment. Um, I never showed you that picture?

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  No, no, I'd like to see that.

• 1:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a picture of myself at a hundred and nine pounds with big like abscesses on my face and neck and.

• 1:14:57Rich Roll?

  I mean, did you, you know, when they did kind of blood work on you, like where where were things?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  They didn't do blood work on me. I wouldn't know. I was a hundred percent. I didn't think I had AIDS. I thought for, you know, like knew.

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  You were certain that you had it?

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was certain I had AIDS because I had shared needles with a guy that he wasn't even HIV, he was like had full blown AIDS.

• 1:15:18Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  And so I was like.

• 1:15:19Rich Roll?

  That's like the depths of the where the addiction will take you, that that in complete insanity that like, you know, that you would that you would engage in that kind of behavior. And while you're doing it, probably know like, well, this is what this means.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  You know what? I just, I just wanted to die.

• 1:15:33Rich Roll?

  You just had to get, yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  I just wanted to die. I didn't care. I wanted to die. Um, and.

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Um, no, it wasn't until. God, it wasn't until four or five months after I went to treatment and went to sober living while I was in sober living. One of the kids kind of tricked me to go to um Tarzana Treatment Center had a mobile like a bus or. Mobile home that once a month would go there and offer free testing. So he didn't tell me we were good, you know, we were just driving around. He was like, you know, have you ever been tested before? I'm like, yeah. And he's like, are you you clean? I'm like, yeah. And he's looking at me. I mean, I looked like I was dying of AIDS and he's like, you know. When's the last time you've been tested? And I'm like, I had never been tested. I was just lying out my ass because I was scared of saying like, hey. I'm scared I'm dying. And um he pulled in.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  I'm like, what are you doing? He goes, oh, they do it here for free. We can we can do it right now. Oh, man, you know.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  Terrifying.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, he he called my bluff. He knew. He knew.

• 1:16:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  So we went in.

• 1:16:36Rich Roll?

  It's that thing when you're when you're lying, when you're when you're in your disease and you're doing all that lying and you convince yourself that you're getting over on people. And it's not until you have some recovery under your belt that you realize like how ridiculous that is. Everybody can see through all of that nonsense.

• 1:16:53Speaker 01

  So they did the test. You had to wait a week. You were supposed to come back. I think. Come back the following Wednesday or Friday. And that that Tuesday night, I couldn't sleep all night. Just couldn't sleep. And so that afternoon.

• 1:17:11Rich Roll?

  That that sort of presupposes that you're starting to appreciate your life a little bit.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that afternoon, when I was supposed to go, I fell asleep. And when I woke up, it was like six o'clock in the evening. It was too late. So then I had to wait another two day. Yeah, I had to wait till Friday. Went in on Friday, walked in. It all kind of happened very quickly. Come in, give them the name, get their paperwork, look at the thing. And then it doesn't say like, no, you don't have AIDS. It says something like. Zero antibodies or some, I don't know what it said, but basically I'm looking at this thing and I'm shaking, I'm shaking. And the guy looks at me and he goes, he goes, man, you you gotta clean up, man. And I'm like, I'm like, I'm I'm like, what? And he goes, you gotta stop using. And I'm like, I'm not fucking using. And he's like.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Why are you shaking? And I'm like, cause I I can't read this thing. I wanna know what it says. He's like, oh, man. He's like, you're good. You ain't got it. And I just fell out of the chair, fell on the ground sobbing, sobbing, sobbing, sobbing. Because I thought for sure, I really was convinced that I had it.

• 1:18:15Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  Um, went back again, I think eight months later, um, to, to do another one. This time, I didn't have money to do a test and I was dating this girl and she wouldn't have sex with me unless I got tested. And my sponsor.

• 1:18:34Rich Roll?

  The ultimate incentive?

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  Yes, my sponsor, um, sponsored a guy who was in the porn industry. And he was like, oh, tell him to go to blah, blah, blah on Ventura Boulevard and just say his name is, make up a porn name and just say that you just got cast into one of his movies. And they did.

• 1:18:55Rich Roll?

  This is another one of those like, only in LA.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  Only in LA. And, and check it out. They did DNA testing. So they could, there was no incubation period or anything like.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  They could tell you right away.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Right away. You go in and within twenty-four hours, they test for everything and that's when I found out I didn't have Hep C or H.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:12Speaker 01

  And, and again, I just, I remember getting back on.

• 1:19:16Rich Roll?

  Someone's looking out for you.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  Dude, I remember getting back on the one oh one and thinking, oh god, I can't wait to sleep with this girl, but also.

• 1:19:24Rich Roll?

  That's the first thing you're.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  No, but also.

• 1:19:27Rich Roll?

  I got the green light.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also, like, I gotta do something now. I gotta do something, like.

• 1:19:35Rich Roll?

  With my life, like in a bigger way.

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I don't, I don't deserve this. I don't, there's, there's thousands of people that are dying in a hospital bed right now that, that love their life and cared about their life. And I, I threw my life away, willingly threw my life away. Willingly shared needles with somebody. And so, I knew that I had to do something big and do something cool. And, you know, what that was gonna be, I had no idea because I wasn't working and I was broke.

• 1:20:02Rich Roll?

  How long have you been sober at that point?

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Um, god, it's hard to say, maybe a year.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  Wow, was that when I was dating? Little over a year.

• 1:20:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, a little over a year. And that was at that point where, you know, where you start going to the gym and you start to get tan and you start to look good.

• 1:20:21Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  You know, um.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Well, because the first, you know, depending upon where you're at in your life, I mean, you know, the first year of sobriety is just trying to understand what's going on around you. And there's so much wreckage and damage in your life that you have to address and, and walk through. And it's so uncomfortable and you're like this live wire, like this, this raw nerve ending.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Rich Roll?

  You're super sensitive to everything and you don't have any tools or, you know, coping mechanisms for handling all these emotions that you're so used to just numbing and checking out from. And then you, you have to like confront them.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, it's true. Yeah.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Anyway, I, you know, I, I felt I needed to do something big and do something profound. Um, but again, what, what is a thirty four? I think I was about thirty four at that time. What's a thirty four year old, high school dropout, convicted felon? Loser. What's he gonna do?

• 1:21:24Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  There's nothing. You can't do anything. You're, you're a bum. You can't, no one's gonna hire me. Um, and even when they did hire me, even when I did get jobs in, in treatment centers, cause you know, treatment centers will hire anybody. So when I did get job in those treatment centers, I just, I got a mouth on me. I got no filter. I have to speak my truth. I'm really, my heart's virtue is, is expressing myself authentically. And, uh, that's not good for work.

• 1:21:52Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  You, you know, especially in an environment like that.

• 1:21:55Rich Roll?

  Being a worker among workers.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Yes, and, and there's a pecking order and there's, you know. And so I, I was getting in all kinds of trouble with my mouth and, um.

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  Uh, again, God has a sense of humor, cause here's the guy that's a loser, that's homeless, that's kind of existing in this very affluent community like Malibu. I'm, I'm like sleeping on the floor in this guy's big ass mansion. And his wife doesn't even know, the house was so big, his wife didn't know I was living there for eight months. Eight months.

• 1:22:24Rich Roll?

  How's that even possible?

• 1:22:25Speaker 01

  Cause it was a seven thousand square foot house and I was way off in the left wing.

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  That's yet another like only in LA kinda thing.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, right on Zumares.

• 1:22:34Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  And then when she did find out I was living there, she was thrilled and she wanted to move, he didn't. She wanted to sell, he didn't. And it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, can I rent this place from you and can you give me two months free rent? And um, I'm gonna turn it into a sober living and I'm gonna help a bunch of people and I'm gonna make a bunch of money, but you know, and she's like, sure.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you could never have planned that.

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  There's no way and talk about divine, you know.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:23:04Speaker 01

  Grace. I mean, now I've got this seven thousand square foot house. And you know, I have no idea what I'm doing, but um, it just worked.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  But at the same time, you could have had when you're, when you're driving down the freeway with this tremendous relief that you're not sick and realizing I have to do something big with my life. You know, how come the rock and roll dream doesn't crop up? You know, like, hey, I was a musician and I was making a record. Like, I could see you going back into that, but you had some instinct that drove you towards something that was in service and giving back to this gift that you had been given, this gift of sobriety.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and not that that didn't ever creep up, cause you know, some of the guys I was making music with were pretty famous in their own right and some of them were living off of big second generation fame. So there was still, you know, sort of that opportunity there, but they were all still getting high.

• 1:24:02Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  And rock and roll was just a very self-indulgent, dark place for me to act out this fantasy of I want to become famous so I can punish everyone because I'm short or because I'm wasn't born into a wealthy family or because my parents were immigrants or because what, you know, for me, it was about, it was about fame. It wasn't about um, making beautiful music and, and not that it, some part of me wanted to make beautiful music because we did. But most of you wanted, I was like one of those short guys that comes to LA that wants to become famous to punish people.

• 1:24:37Rich Roll?

  Right, and so you get sober and you you're starting to sort your shit out a little bit and that becomes not a, that's not important.

• 1:24:43Speaker 01

  It it was, it was a cool dream in the, in the, in the back of my head and I'll be honest with you, I don't, you know, I don't think it would be unheard of to go in, in, in two years from now, get back together some of my old bandmates who by the way are all sober now.

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  They have to, they either have to get sober or it's going the other direction, yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, um, but yes, helping people was paramount. Um, to being able to live a life with meaning and to have any type of lasting recovery or sobriety. You know, do you know how many times, I mean countless times, hundreds of times, where I wanted to get high? In the beginning, those first like four or five years, I couldn't. Because I had clients that depended on me. I had staff that depended on me. I had people who, you know, I had to make payroll and they had kids and I mean it, it really, I know they say if you work in recovery, you're thirty percent more likely to relapse. That's statistics that,

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  I think Hazelton or somebody did.

• 1:25:48Rich Roll?

  I didn't even know that, really, is that right?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Rich Roll?

  Cause it just wears you out.

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  Well, you stop going to meetings because you're taking the clients to meetings and you think that counts.

• 1:25:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  And, uh, and you are around toxic people so much that you yourself just start to become toxic. That may be true for many people. For me, I was so, invested in people's outcomes in such an unhealthy way. I want to clarify that. Again, this isn't about being a virtuous good guy. I was obsessed with people making it so I could feel good. You know, I needed them to stay sober so I could have.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  That's an Al-Anon thing.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  Of course it is. Oh my god, I'm, I'm one of the most codependent. Unhealthy people you can meet when it comes to that stuff. My first sponsee, I stalked him. I used to drive by his house at eleven o'clock at night like. You know, hey, where are you, you know?

• 1:26:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:42Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 1:26:43Rich Roll?

  And you're just bringing heartbreak and frustration into your life because peo- most people, you know, don't get it or don't stay sober.

• 1:26:49Speaker 01

  It's true, but the ones that did. We we developed such amazing relationships and friendships, um, which. Because I'm not a doctor, because if you're a doctor, you're not allowed to be friends with somebody that that you're working with, but I didn't have any initials in front of my name or initials behind my name. So I was allowed to have any type of. Uh, you know, friendship that I wanted to and the people that made it. Um. They made it and they never went back.

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  I mean, I could rattle off, you know, twenty different names of people that I worked with. Nine years ago, eight years ago, five years ago, four years ago, you know, up until I sold the place, um. I just did the Tough Mudder with a kid, one of my last clients.

• 1:27:32Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Over at Riviera Recovery.

• 1:27:34Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  By the way, by the way, Riviera Recovery. Is now owned and operated and running out of the same house as it was before. And just a strange. You know, series of events.

• 1:27:45Rich Roll?

  So wait a minute, so the house that you uh rent rented and turned into this recovery, it was called Riviera, is that what you called it?

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  Riviera Recovery, yeah.

• 1:27:52Rich Roll?

  So, yeah, and you've since sold that, right? But it still continues on?

• 1:27:55Speaker 01

  I sold it, but the kids I sold it to. Um, one of my other best friends bought the house and let them rent it from him.

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, I see. Oh, I saw it's a similar kind of thing.

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  Well, it's the same thing. It's the same thing, except it's run much better. And they're much more professional than I ever was. They have appropriate boundaries and they have, you know, they go to they. They go home at night, whereas I was living there.

• 1:28:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:28:18Speaker 01

  So like if you came in and you wanted to get better. There was nothing I wouldn't do. I I would, in fact, that's how Sunlight Organics came about because I would make them. Vegetable juice and I would make them wheatgrass juice and I would do the um, arise and shine cleanses with them quarterly. We would do arise and shine cleanses every three months. Um, I would make them smoothies, I would. I would make them juices, I would do all of that and. People would spontaneously quit smoking. People would spontaneously go off all of their medication, some of them pretty heavy medication. I mean, there was a girl named Sarah. You know, who was on all of it, the Wellbutrin and the Lexapro and all that stuff and and smoked cigarettes.

• 1:29:01Speaker 01

  And she started juicing and she started drinking smoothies and she did a couple of cleanses and one day she just said. I'm not taking any of this shit anymore. And. January eleventh, she'll have five years.

• 1:29:16Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  And she she takes nothing.

• 1:29:19Rich Roll?

  And that was it, yeah, so it's it started, well, I mean, there's sobriety, but then there's the other, so you start to get interested in this other part of it. This other part of wellness and getting healthy.

• 1:29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, what what happened, what happened was I accidentally stumbled into a yoga class. I was supposed to take a client to yoga class and she never showed up. And I ended up, the girl teaching it, this woman named Lydia from Canada, who was an ex ballerina. Was one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen in my life. And so I stayed and tried to take her level three class. And five minutes in, I was shaking and I was a puddle and she came over and she put her hand on the small of my back. Then she pushed me down on the ground and she said, just stay, stop, you gotta stop. Cause I was shaking and you know, puddle of sweat around me, I was smoking cigarettes at the time, I smoked for twenty years.

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  I haven't smoked a cigarette in over seven years now. And um, I went back because I wanted to be in this woman's presence, I mean, she was so incredibly beautiful. Um, and so I got into yoga, I started getting into juicing pretty early on in into my own recovery. Um, I had a buddy named Sean who was a yoga teacher and he would make me these drinks out of like. He would literally juice burdock root and he would, he would juice um nettles, stinging nettles. He would juice them and he kept giving me all these concoctions that he would make in these jars, he would bring them over and he would give them to me. Most of them taste. Like the worst thing I'd ever tasted in my life, but something really weird happened. I would drink them.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  I'd go to the bathroom a lot, um, and pee a lot. And then the next morning I'd wake up and I would be like, wow, A, I slept last night, which I was a total insomniac. But B, I would look at my face in the mirror and I would be like, oh, my God, I remember you. I started to actually look younger. And the more that I did the wheatgrass and the, and the juices and the ginseng and the goji berries and all of the superfoods. I literally could see, see years falling off of my face. Now, obviously, when I quit smoking in conjunction with that. The far infrared sauna, the ozone therapy, all the other crazy things I got into. Things started to speed up very quickly.

• 1:31:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  And I started to resemble what I looked like in my mid twenties.

• 1:31:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, with the, you know, ten miles of bad road that you've put on your machine, you know, and all the things that you've done and all the self abuse. I mean, you look incredible, you know, you look super healthy and fit, you know, and. I think it, you know, one of the things I always talk about and talk about on the podcast a lot is just the incredible resiliency of the human body.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  And when you start to tap into these things, whether it's juicing or what have you, um, and you can see these really dramatic. Turnarounds incredibly short periods of time.

• 1:32:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:15Rich Roll?

  And you realize, wow, you know, like, how could I be this junkie living on, you know, on Skid Row, hoping to die?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  And, you know, lesions all over my body.

• 1:32:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, scabies, ringworm.

• 1:32:26Rich Roll?

  To where you're sitting right now. It's like, it's a miracle.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  It, it is a miracle. It is definitely the grace of God. You know, I, I never wanna get to the point where I think like, well, I did the footwork and I did this and it, it doesn't matter. There's a lot of people that do the footwork that die. You know, it's the grace of God and, and I don't know what that means. I wish I could tell you or your listeners what that means. I don't know. To this day, I pray before every meal. I pray every morning. I pray every night. I don't know who I'm praying to. I don't, I don't know if it's a thing or it's a, I don't know, I just know it that it's there and I know that. If I reach out to God, and I just use that word God because I don't have a better word, but if I reach out to God, um.

• 1:33:10Speaker 01

  If I knock on the door, I think it says that in in some religion, if you knock on the door, then the door gets answered. And it does for me, not always in the way that I want it to. Um, and a lot of times I don't wanna listen to the truth. But um, yeah, my where I'm at now at forty-four years old. I just ran an eleven mile obstacle course. Where I was tasered, where I was cut by barbed wire, where I swam through ice water, literally ice water. It was like eighty percent ice and they added some water to it. I ran that with guys who work for me, they're half my age. And I ran it side by side with them and it was just, it was incredible to think that.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  Here I am at a hundred and sixty-two pounds. You know, very low body fat and to think that ten years ago was a hundred and nine pounds and I was dying. I was literally falling apart, so um. It it's it's it's amazing what the body can do, how the body can recover, but what's even more amazing is. I don't, you know, I was prescribed trazodone, Lexapro, Seracel, Wellbutrin, Xanax. All these different things that the doctors, the psychiatrist gave me. Many of whom said, you're gonna have to be on this Wellbutrin for the rest of your life, you're gonna have to be on this Lexapro for the rest of your life, you're gonna have to be on this. You know, whatever Ambien or sleeping pill for the rest of your life.

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  I don't take any of that stuff, nothing, and I haven't taken any of that stuff.

• 1:34:41Rich Roll?

  Did you, you took it for a while though?

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I took it for years. I took it for years, but when I went into Pasadena Recovery Center, I said to Doctor Bloom, who. Was such an amazing guy, he's no longer with us, but um, I said to Doctor Bloom. I don't wanna take any of this stuff. I know you guys want me to and it's probably smart that I do, cuz the way that I'm wired, I probably need it. But I know myself and I know if I take your pills, eventually I'm gonna take my pills. And that's just my truth and I'm not telling anybody to not take their psych meds, but. For me, it was a matter of life and death. And so I would, I, at that time, I would rather live with depression than to risk going back to shooting speedballs, because it was for sure gonna end my life.

• 1:35:26Speaker 01

  And um, that was, I think, my fifth day in there. That was after my sort of, you know, my white light experience with God, where I kind of, you know, as I unleash a seed of self-destruction in my mid twenties, I, I watered the seed of self-preservation that third day when I was in treatment. Something inside of me, there was a spark, there was a tiny little spark that has since, you know, turned into a forest fire.

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Right. And those sparks, you know, I think that, I think that we all have them. It's just a question of how tuned in we are to ourselves to recognize them when they happen and whether or not we can respond and like, excuse me, like, respect the gravity.

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  Sorry, something might throw out. Respect the gravity of that situation and the power that it is, that it, that it can hold for, for transformation.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  And not take it for granted.

• 1:36:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  Because, uh, you know, I see a lot of people take it for granted.

• 1:36:26Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And it's easy to, yeah, just, or just to not understand what's happening and let it pass, because they're very precise short moments of time, like these little spurts where a door opens.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:40Rich Roll?

  You know, and you have this limited opportunity to make a shift and you're either gonna do it in that timeframe or it's gonna pass.

• 1:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and let's, I mean, you know, and let's also point out the fact that most people don't wanna change.

• 1:36:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:54Speaker 01

  Most people want their toys back.

• 1:36:55Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I don't wanna change, you know, like, I mean, cha- pay, I, I change when I'm in pain. You know what I mean? That's the way that I'm wired. And I try to make, you know, I try to.

• 1:37:07Rich Roll?

  Be always improving myself, but it's not my nature.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think you're, I don't think I'm much different from you in the fact that you changed habits. Because I really think it's about habits and you, you, you engage in your habits the same way I engage in my habits. And, and our habits are similar in some areas and they're not so similar in other areas. And there's a lot of other people out there that are just like us and they engage in their habits. The difference is the result that they're getting from their habits. You know?

• 1:37:40Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  You, you can engage in a habit and it's going to bring you really shitty results. And you can engage in a habit and it's going to bring you really, I, I work like crazy. I work seven days a week. And people tell me a lot like.

• 1:37:53Rich Roll?

  I know, Matt, I've been ch- chased you down to do this podcast for like eight months.

• 1:37:57Speaker 01

  Well.

• 1:37:58Rich Roll?

  I can't, you can't give me a day.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  I.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  I was like relentless. It's like, I was like, I'm gonna get that guy in the studio if it kills me.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  I, my, one of my favorite things in the world is to hear my own voice.

• 1:38:11Speaker 01

  I love to speak, but I feel, I feel now a responsibility to my employees. To my community, to my girlfriend and I, I work like crazy and you know. Sometimes to the point of failure, but look at the difference. I used to do, I used to do drugs to the point of failure. And I wound up in hospitals and sharing needles with people with AIDS and county jail. And now I work like crazy and sometimes I'll get the flu and sometimes I'll whatever, but. The byproduct of what I've done, working like crazy in this, engaging in this habit is. I got to go back to Ohio and buy my mom a house.

• 1:38:51Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:38:52Speaker 01

  You know, I get to help support my mom financially. I don't, I don't make a lot of money, but the money that I do make, I take care of my girl and I take care of my mom. And those two things give me meaning. They make me feel like I'm a human being.

• 1:39:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  And I spent most of my life. You know, three and a half decades of my life, feeling subhuman, not feeling a part of the human race. Being morbidly depressed and suicidally depressed and absolutely miserable and not having any meaning in my life. And today, I, I can get up and watch the sunrise and cry like a child. You know, I watched that documentary on whatever her name was, the swimmer.

• 1:39:29Rich Roll?

  Diane Nyad.

• 1:39:30Speaker 01

  Diane, yeah, and I, I wept, I wept three or four times throughout that documentary. I feel life today. I, I, I feel a part of life today. And, um, you know, I opened this little juice bar with my girl and I thought that we were gonna, our goal was, our absolute goal was, if we could serve a hundred people a day, which seemed a pretty lofty goal. And I remember my landlord, cause there were six vacancies here, my, my, I remember my landlord said, "How do you plan on pulling that off?" And I said, "I'll do it, man. I'll do it. I will, I will get to the point where I'm serving a hundred people a day." I can take you downstairs, actually I can turn on my phone right now and show you. Today, we've served almost six hundred people.

• 1:40:15Rich Roll?

  Wow. Yeah, we haven't even gotten to, you know, the sort of part in the story where you decide running a recovery house is not for you and you embark on this entrepreneurial journey to open up Sun Life, Sun Life Organics here in Malibu. Um, and this has really become, I mean, you, you're, you're sort of selling yourself short when you say, "Oh, this little juice bar." Because, yeah, in some respects, yeah, it's a juice bar in Malibu. But it really has become like this hub of social activity for the Malibu, Malibu community. I mean, everybody comes in here in the morning or in the afternoon, you know, to get their morning green juice or their smoothie or whatever and go about their day. And like, you know, it's funny, people, people come to LA, they wanna see like a celebrity, you know.

• 1:41:00Rich Roll?

  So they, what do they do? They go to Rodeo Drive, right? Something like that, you know, like thinking they're, they're gonna see somebody. It's like, you wanna see a celebrity? Come to Some Life Organics, and this is where they're all coming to get their their green juice, the Hoy Peloy of Malibu. But it's what you've built here is so much more than a restaurant or a juice bar. You've really, because because what it is, is it is it's catalyzed community around healthy living. And there's a lot of people in this community that are interested in that.

• 1:41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Rich Roll?

  And it's given people a place to kind of congregate. And that's created kind of a like a foothold for discussion around these topics, whether it's GMO labeling, or you know, juicing and detoxing, or just healthy living, or fitness, or whatever. And you're living it on a daily basis. You're a living example of it, and so is your your staff, you know. And you walk in the door, it's immediately apparent. So I'm not surprised that you're serving, you know, 600 odd people a day.

• 1:41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:55Rich Roll?

  It's great, you know. And I think that, you know, you should continue. I know you just opened your second one.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  In Thousand Oaks, yeah.

• 1:42:02Rich Roll?

  In Thousand Oaks. And so, and so, you know, I could see these things all over the place.

• 1:42:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, and, you know, I mean, that's, that's the dream. That's a vision is to have 100 of these. I mean, we opened up in Thousand Oaks. Everyone told me not to open there. I mean, everyone said that.

• 1:42:19Rich Roll?

  What was the reason for not opening there?

• 1:42:21Speaker 01

  Because they said that that center was a graveyard, that it was cursed, that nobody would ever go there.

• 1:42:26Rich Roll?

  That mall where it is.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, that's, who cares? Well, so let's change it. Why take no for an answer? Why, why not? Let's go there and let's prove them wrong. We're serving 150 to 250 people a day there.

• 1:42:38Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  That is huge. I mean, it's absolutely huge. And we're changing people's lives. We're having people walk in there, you know, telling us now, you know, man, I've lost 35 pounds since I started coming in here. And like, you know, wow, that's incredible.

• 1:42:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  And, and we don't tell people, you should be a vegetarian, or you should be a vegan, or you should be this. We say to people that moving towards a plant-based diet has incredibly and radically altered our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual beings. And that's the truth. You can talk to anyone in my employees down there, most who were not into juicing or superfoods or anything, how their lives have changed as a result of.

• 1:43:22Speaker 01

  You know, just being around juice all day, you start drinking juice. Being around smoothies all day, you start making smoothies. We have these incredible salads, these incredible soups. So they stopped going to Subway and, you know, grabbing pizza or whatever, and they started having vegan soup or having a vegan salad and. Um, it's amazing. It's really, really amazing. And Thousand Oaks is doing great. Uh, I, I think we're gonna be opening up in downtown LA soon. We're also gonna open up down in Cross Creek, cause there's a big demand for it down in Cross Creek. Yeah, and I. I just love it and not, not that I don't, you know, the reason that I was late coming here is because I was doing an intervention in the Palisades.

• 1:44:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, so we were, we were gonna try to hook up today to do this and you texted me and said, you know, I think I can make it, but I gotta go down and do an intervention first. And it's like, wow, you know, like. In recovery, they always say, you know, sobriety comes first, sobriety comes first. And what happens, and I've experienced this is. You know, you come in and you're suffering and your life is broken. And you'll do anything to get it back and you work hard and you do make sobriety first and, and if you do, you get sober and you start to get those things back into your life. You repair your relationships, you're able to become a responsible member of society, you're able to look people in the eye and tell the truth and show up when you say you're gonna show up. And then you start to forget.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Rich Roll?

  You start to forget what it was that you did that got you to that place and you start to take sobriety for granted. Or you just take your foot off the gas pedal a little bit and you're like, yeah, I know sobriety's supposed to be first, but you know, like I gotta call this guy and I gotta go to this meeting. And you're a guy, when I look at you, you're a guy who lives it every day, like you understand and get that sobriety always comes first.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  I, I appreciate you saying that and, and again, I have to point out for my own self-preservation, it ain't because I'm a good guy. It's because I want, I wanna live, you know, when, when Bob called me up and said. Hey, man, I got this nineteen year old kid who's pacing around his house who thinks his parents are trying to kill him cause he's in a psychotic state. You know, I don't, I don't wanna go deal with that.

• 1:45:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  I wanna go to the beach. I wanna, you know, I wanna. Feel good. I wanna like get on a podcast and talk about myself cuz I'm my favorite topic, but.

• 1:45:42Rich Roll?

  If you wanna keep what you have, you've gotta give it back.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  Yes, if I wanna stay alive and if I wanna keep the little ounce of humility that I managed to to collect over the last ten years in sobriety. I gotta go help that kid and guess what? We got there and he was like fuck you.

• 1:45:59Speaker 01

  I'm like, alright, well, so you know, I I'm I'm just here to help you and he's like, I don't give a fuck, get out of my yard. I'm like, alright, and I walked away and then I turn around, I said. Hey, I'm not being paid to be here. And he looked at me and he's like, did my dad send you? And I said, no, your dad sent him. And he dragged me into this. So he might be employed by your father, but I'm not employed by your father. I'm here for fun and for free. And I'm here to help you out if you want some help. And I I wish in that moment it went really, really well. He ended up running away and then we had to leave and then we got. But let me tell you something, the third time we came back. And he had disappeared.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  And it's two hours in now and I'm just like, this sucks. I got I got businesses to run. I'm sitting there and the mom's almost in tears and the dad's almost in tears. And all of a sudden, the kid walks in. And he comes over and he sits on the arm of the sofa and he like eyeballs me like he's like sizing me up, you know? And he looks at Bob, who's quite obviously there. He recognized him from TV to do this intervention. He's looking at Bob and he's looking at me. And um, but I said, hey, and he goes, what's up? I'm like, nothing. I'm still here to help you if you want help. And he goes, well, I don't wanna make any decisions right now. And I said, and nor do I. I do not want you to make a decision right now, but what I do want you to know, is that if you want help.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  I can help you. I'll help you for fun and for free. And he was like, I appreciate that. And I said, I appreciate you listening. And I looked at the dad and I looked at the mom. I said, I think our time here is up. And they're like, well, what do you mean? I said, just let it be. You got my number, you got his number. And we got up and we all hugged, even the kid hugged me. Yeah, and we let, and this is a kid, you know, two hours earlier saying, fuck you, get out of my yard. And he knew because the truth is the truth is the truth. He knew I was being honest. I'm not getting paid for that shit. I got dragged into it. Bob Forrest, who saved my life, calls him and says, hey, I got a kid, you know, blah, blah, blah. That's how this thing works. It's not about being a great guy. It's not about being a virtuous guy. It's not about being a humble guy. It's about being a sensible guy. I know.

• 1:48:10Speaker 01

  That I have to give back because so much was given to me freely. Now, in the juice bar, it's a different story. I give a lot in the juice bar. If you come in, I don't know you and you're my customer and. You gotta run and your dog's here or whatever. I'll walk your dog. I'll. Follow you to the car dealership and drive your car. I'm, I'm all about that and I'll tell you why, because it makes me feel high. I get up in the morning and I'm so excited to go be near my coworkers. And to be near my customers. And yes. I would be an idiot and a liar to not mention. Of course, it's exciting when it's guys like Gerard Butler walking in the door and high fiving you. Of course, it's exciting to get sweet.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  You know, uh, Instagram messages from Pamela Anderson. I'm from Ohio. I grew up in Ohio. That's a big deal to me. I'm not, I'm not gonna lie. I love it. I, I'm. I'm short of breath every time I have one of those interactions with those people. But those people wanna get loved up too. Those people want, those people wanna feel like they're a part of something too. And so, um, whether it is an A-list actor or a rock star. Um, you know, texting from the Thousand Oaks, like, hey, I'm at your other store now. This is really cool. I'm, I'm, I'm dying on the inside, you know, I'm like. You know, this, this, this is pretty cool, but. What's just as cool is when the day laborer comes in or the housekeeper comes in, they can't speak English.

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  And we get to work it out between the two of us speaking Spanglish. You know, as to what smoothie or what juice that they should get. Or when a, when a little six-year-old kid comes running in yelling my name and runs up to me and gives me a hug and says, I want, I wanna get my juice. You know, or when, when parents are holding their kid that can't even talk, can't even formulate sentences yet. Says, you know, when we drive by here, my kid points and says, juice. I'm like, are you kidding me? This is the greatest thing, this is the greatest high, this is the greatest experience I've ever had. And I wanna bring this to everybody's neighborhood if I can. I mean, I know a lot of neighborhoods can't afford it yet. But um, I wanna bring this to as many neighborhoods as I can.

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  That's a beautiful thing. You know, you were talking, we were talking earlier about change and, you know, most people don't wanna change and. And you know, how do you change and, and certainly every day I get emails from people like, I wanna change, but I'm just stuck and I can't and. And it's very easy to like tweet a platitude, like, hey, you can change at any given mo- and it's like. That doesn't mean anything. Like, it sounds good, you'll get a lot of like clicks on it or something like that, but like, is that really helping anybody? You know, and, and so I'm always thinking about like, what is it that I can do to help people to change when they're stuck? And you know, one of the things I always say is, is, you know, just think of one small thing that you could change.

• 1:51:09Rich Roll?

  That you could repeat on a daily basis that seems like doable, you know? It's sort of like that example of, uh, you know, if, if a, if a rocket is taking off from Cape Canaveral to the moon. And it's off by one micrometer or something, you know, it's gonna miss the moon by a thousand miles, but if you can just make that one little tiny micrometer shift. You'll end up in a completely different place, right? So if all you did, forget about vegan, paleo, whatever, like if all you did is. Had a green juice for breakfast every morning as opposed to having like, you know, bacon or something like that, or just whatever it is you're used to eating. Um, and then you just repeat that on a daily basis, like where's that gonna take you, you know, six weeks from now, six months from now?

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  You know, cause it'll, it'll set you on your own journey and you'll start to connect with yourself in a different way. You have to respect people. And give them enough credit that they'll be taken care of and on their right journey. Like, just give them a little tool and send them on their way. And then they'll have their own experience. It's gonna take them wherever it's gonna take them.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. We have people in Thousand Oaks, people in Malibu are pretty forward-thinking and very advanced. And, you know, obviously have the means to get a lot of what's great that's out there and have access to a lot of what's great. But, you know, we have people in Thousand Oaks that are landscapers or plumbers or whatever that come in.

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  And they don't even know what it is, you know, they just, they just, they see the sign or they see the lotus flower. They see the people walking in and walking out as they're at Umami Burger. They look over and they see this thing and they walk in. And there's this kid, Alex, that works there who looks like Tarzan. And he's the greatest-looking kid you've ever seen. Just gorgeous, tall, fit, beautiful. And he says just that, just get a juice. That's it. And they're like, what about this? And what about paleo? And what about vegan?

• 1:53:04Rich Roll?

  Everyone wants to overcomplicate it. Just make it simple.

• 1:53:07Speaker 01

  He says, get a juice. So these dudes, they get a juice. There's some guy that goes to Disney, which we always talk about, or works at Disney that we always talk about is an executive. He randomly stopped in there for his wife, right? So Alex said, get a juice. He got a juice. Came back the next day. I felt pretty good, man. Well, you know, what else can I get? Alex said, I don't, why don't you try a turmeric shot? So you do turmeric, however you say it, you know, so he did a turmeric shot. Then he comes in, you know, a few, you know, a few days later and, you know, is there anything I could take with me? And he says, yeah, why don't you grab a couple of the pressed juices over there? We have pressed juices. You can take them. We'll give you a little bag of ice or whatever. So the dude comes in now, five days out of seven, every single week.

• 1:53:49Speaker 01

  He's lost all of this weight. He looks incredible and he can't stop asking questions. He just comes in and he's just lit up and he's excited and he's telling his neighbors about it. And that, I believe, is how we're gonna change the world.

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  That's how you change, yeah. I agree with you completely.

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Sending me pictures of cows getting their face ripped off on Facebook and telling me that I'm a bad person for eating meat is not gonna make me change. But, but becoming...

• 1:54:17Speaker 01

  A vegetarian, then becoming a vegan, then going on a little run, then going on a little bike, then getting back into swimming and then eventually, you know, doing an Ultraman a couple of years later and writing a book about it, inspiring me, that's what's gonna make me change.

• 1:54:30Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:31Speaker 01

  You know, and, and, I don't know, it, it couldn't get any cooler. And by the way, I was much more excited to see you pedaling down PCH as I chased you in my car. You must have thought I was a lunatic.

• 1:54:42Rich Roll?

  No, man.

• 1:54:43Speaker 01

  I'm that guy.

• 1:54:45Rich Roll?

  No, it's funny, cause uh, sorry, I got like a frog in my throat today, um. Yeah, I think you had sent me a couple of Facebook messages or emailed me and it's like, and, and I'd heard like, oh, this guy started this, you know, this juice bar over in, in Malibu, you should check it out. So when I got the messages, I was like, oh, this is the juice guy, like, why does he keep emailing me? He wants to hook, he wants to meet me, he wants to hook up.

• 1:55:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:06Rich Roll?

  And I had, like, I had emailed you back and said, hey, let's, yeah, definitely, let's do it or whatever, but we still hadn't met.

• 1:55:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:13Rich Roll?

  And I was out riding, yeah, I was riding down PCH and you recognized me somehow.

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  I chased you down.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  Driving by me in your car.

• 1:55:19Speaker 01

  Chased you down, I was yelling at you.

• 1:55:21Rich Roll?

  That was right before we went to Kauai for three months. That was right before we moved to Hawaii for three months last year, yeah.

• 1:55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:28Rich Roll?

  Well, good, man.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Pretty amazing.

• 1:55:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's been an amazing year for you.

• 1:55:32Speaker 01

  Amazing year and, um, and I'm really looking forward to, uh, we're opening up a yoga studio next door, literally right next door.

• 1:55:40Rich Roll?

  When is that gonna open?

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Um, it could be a month, it could be three months, I don't know. I've learned, you know, that I'm at the mercy of the powers that be, but I, I just keep, I keep putting one foot in front of the other. But, um, we're opening up Malibu Beach Yoga, right upstairs from Sun Life Organics Malibu. Um, Sun Life, Sun Life Organics Thousand Oaks has now got some traction and we've got, like I said, a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty people a day going through there. Um, and we're just, we're looking at what our options are. We just bought our partner out and, um, Haley and I now own a hundred percent

• 1:56:12Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:56:12Speaker 01

  of Sun Life Organics together. Um, we just celebrated seven years together and

• 1:56:17Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:56:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so cool, it's so cool. I'm, I'm so in love and, and happy and I never thought I'd get to say that. And I really never did. I mean, even in my early recovery, I used to walk around, look at couples and go, I'll never have that. I'll never have that. No, I have it. God, God has blessed me.

• 1:56:37Rich Roll?

  You're living an amazing life. You're living the dream. You truly are.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  I really am.

• 1:56:42Rich Roll?

  And you're an inspiration. You inspire me to be better. So I appreciate having you in my life, man, and being my friend.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:56:50Rich Roll?

  So, uh, yeah, you're changing lives, man.

• 1:56:52Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:56:53Rich Roll?

  You really are. And it's beautiful to see, and I'm so glad that this is all successful for you.

• 1:56:58Speaker 01

  Thank you. Well, my, my next goal is to, is to do what you did, is to write a book. And I've got a pretty, I got a pretty good foundation for it. Um, I just need to edit it and I need to, um, take some of the sensationalism, sensationalism out of it because as I was writing it, I'm so insecure and I so want people to like me that I think I went too over the top in terms of shock value. Not, I didn't embellish. I, I just, I told stories that probably didn't need to get told, you know? The story is what it is. I, I had a sad childhood. I was a morbidly depressed person. I got on heavy booze and drugs. I,

• 1:57:38Speaker 01

  by the grace of God, recovered from that and have an incredible life today. And it's pretty simple, but you know, I like to complicate things.

• 1:57:46Rich Roll?

  Right. So before we sign off, I just thought it would be good for the listeners, if you could like share maybe one or two things that, that you find helpful on a daily basis to try to sort of keep you on track or, or, you know, on that trajectory towards always being conscious of improving your, the quality of your, of your life.

• 1:58:04Speaker 01

  I'm gonna just say something really simple, and I was talking about this yesterday with somebody. Um, just do, do kind things for other people and don't get caught. That was probably the most helpful advice I've ever been given is by, by a man, a man named Bill Galvin. Um, and, uh, and he said, when you see trash on the ground, pick it up. And when you're finished with your grocery cart, return it to the front and don't be looking around at everybody to see if they're noticing you do it. Just put the grocery cart back where you got it from. And when someone asks you for money, that's not your money. God gave you that money, share that money, don't worry about what they're gonna go do with that money.

• 1:58:45Speaker 01

  And he said, and when you hand him that money, don't stand around and wait for them to say, God bless you, man, and this and that, don't shame them. Hand them the money and walk away right away. And do kind things for people where they won't even know that it was you that did it. And he said, and don't tell anybody about it. Do kind things for people, don't get caught and don't discuss it with people. And I started doing that and, and my God, it. Talk about the greatest antidepressant you can ever put into your body. Do something amazing for somebody, even if it's dumb, like putting in a quarter and a meter that just expired. When no one's looking and just walk away. And know that you just saved that person thirty-five bucks or fifty bucks or whatever it is today.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  That, that's all I wanna say about that. That's the best advice I can give to someone.

• 1:59:31Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good, man, I like it.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:59:33Rich Roll?

  Cool, beautiful.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:59:35Rich Roll?

  Alright man, so if, uh, if people wanna know a little bit more about Sun Life Organics, the website is.

• 1:59:40Speaker 01

  We don't have a website.

• 1:59:42Rich Roll?

  Website, no.

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  Come on, man. We don't have a website.

• 1:59:44Rich Roll?

  It's one thing to get off Facebook, you gotta, you gotta have a website.

• 1:59:47Speaker 01

  We don't have a website, we have Sun Life Organics Facebook page. I think it, I think it's just Sun Life Organics, or it might be Sun Life Organics Malibu. We're gonna get a website eventually, we'll probably. Do all that stuff, but we just, honest to God, we, we really thought we were gonna open the doors and have like thirty or forty customers. We opened the doors, there was two hundred and fifty people that walked in that day. That was the first day. People need this.

• 2:00:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I remember you, you, uh, you Instagrammed a picture of the, the opening day out in, uh, Thousand Oaks too, and I think there was like a line out the door.

• 2:00:18Speaker 01

  Oh my God, it was unbelievable.

• 2:00:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So the people have spoken, man, the demand is there. People wanna get well, they want good food, good juice.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  If you wanna check us out, you know, go to our Sun Life Organics Facebook page, or come out to Malibu and let me make you a juice. Or let me walk your dog or wash your car.

• 2:00:35Rich Roll?

  Watch out, man.

• 2:00:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I'll be trouble now.

• 2:00:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're mean to detailing cars.

• 2:00:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, or come to Thousand Oaks and support us out there, we could use the support, or um, or I don't know, you could always, uh, my email's on, on all of those things, it's just my first and last name at hotmail.com.

• 2:00:51Rich Roll?

  Cool.

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:00:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, man, so if you're in LA, definitely drop in, say hello to Khalil, give him a shout out, man, and uh, thanks for taking the time, brother.

• 2:00:59Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 2:01:00Rich Roll?

  Alright, dude. Peace.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 2:01:02Rich Roll?

  Plants.