Sid Garza-Hillman On Approaching The Natural

Musician, author & health philosopher king Sid Garza-Hillman joins the podcast to chat about all things PlantPower, including his new book, Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto*. More than just another book about plant-based nutrition, “Approaching the Natural” is a passionate and insightful primer on how we can achieve a more grounded, holistic, happy & gratifying existence — physically, mentally & spiritually — by connecting better with ourselves and the natural environment that surrounds us all. Sid is a breath of fresh air and it was a pleasure to have him on the show. Hope you enjoy the episode. SHOW NOTES + MORE Thanks for listening and enjoy the Program! Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:08Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, people? It's the podcast. We're back. Today, episode 20, we have Sid Garza-Hillman coming on the show. Who is Sid Garza-Hillman? Sid's a very cool guy, a very diverse individual, multi-talented. He's a musician, he's an actor, he's a nutritionist, he's a philosopher king, and he is the author of the recently released manifesto called Approaching the Natural. It's actually called Approaching the Natural: A Health Manifesto. And it's a cool little book that actually looks like a manifesto. It's a little paperback that you can stick in your back pocket.

• 1:52Rich Roll?

  It's only like 160 pages, and it's sort of a plant-based nutrition primer, but more than that, it's a sort of comprehensive approach to living more in harmony with yourself and with your environment, hence the title, Approaching the Natural. So it hits on nutrition, but it also hits on the body in its physical sense, how to move the body. How to be more in tune with your environment, how to dial yourself in mentally and spiritually so that you can live a more fulfilling and happy existence. It's a cool little book.

• 2:33Rich Roll?

  I was lucky enough to get an advanced galley copy of it and just loved it. It's very straightforward. It's easy to read. You can read it in a day and it's chock full of very helpful, insightful information from Sid. So it was my honor to give him a blurb, which you can find on the back cover of the book. So that's, hey, that's worth checking out the book right there just for that. Because in addition to my blurb, it also has a foreword by Biz Stone, who is a co-founder of Twitter, also a plant-based nutrition guy who wrote the foreword and also gave Sid a blurb, which is pretty cool. So he's in good company with

• 3:17Rich Roll?

  Biz Stone. And again, I was proud to give him a blurb. I stand behind the book 100%. It's a cool book. And so when he was coming down here to do some book related stuff, coming down to LA, because he lives up in Mendocino, he runs the, he's head of the Wellness Center at the Stanford Inn. Actually, I think it's called, it's called the Mendocino Center for Living Well at the Stanford Inn. So he doesn't live in LA. But I told him, you know, when you come to LA, you definitely got to do the podcast. So he's here, we're actually doing an event together on Wednesday night and we talk about that in the interview.

• 3:57Rich Roll?

  But I'm glad to have him here today, to have him talk about his journey. I found it very insightful and it's so much more than just plant-based nutrition. He's got a very refreshing and interesting perspective on life and happiness in its holistic sense.

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  I hope you enjoyed the interview. And without further ado, Sid Garza Hillman. All right, man. Thanks for making the trip up to the garage.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  You're welcome.

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  How's it going Sid?

• 4:38Speaker 01

  It's going well.

• 4:39Rich Roll?

  Sid Garza Hillman in the podcast HQ, the music garage turned, I guess, leaned to sort of temporary podcasting village situation.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Surrounded by instruments.

• 4:54Rich Roll?

  That's right, man.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  So this could erupt at any second into a-

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  It's a vault of creativity coming out of here, which is good. You gotta stoke that all the time.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  Definitely.

• 5:03Rich Roll?

  You're a musician, right?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  I am.

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  What's the, what's the story there? The Sid Garza Hillman Quartet.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  Well, it was a Sid Hillman.

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  The Sid Hillman.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Sid Hillman Quartet, Garza-

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  Well, I know Garza for that.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  That was because the Sid Hillman existed before I was married and then my wife is Garza, so we both became Garza Hillman.

• 5:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, I see.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I was musician Sid Hillman prior to being married in 95.

• 5:28Rich Roll?

  Oh, okay. That's very progressive.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, ahead of its time. I suffered from sexism early on because my wife and I got married and she went to the DMV and said, you know, I just got married and I want to change my name, you know, to from Garza to Garza Hillman. They were like, great, just, you know, sign here, boop. And so then I went in and did the same thing. They're like, oh, you need to-

• 5:48Rich Roll?

  Different story for you, yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  And I was like, well, I just got married with my wife. Well, you need to file, you know, because I was a man, so that's interesting.

• 5:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, you can't, you know, men don't have a maiden name. I don't know if I've ever met any guy who changed his last name to put his wife's name in there.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  I have a friend in Mendocino who did the exact, that exact, his last name is, is her name. So, but, you know.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  Did you, were you reared by a progressive parents? I mean, did you grow up in a, I have this, I have this image of you, well, you live in Mendocino and you've written this pretty progressive book. So I'm like, maybe he grew up in a commune, you know, Northern California.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  I was like an air force, was an air force fighter pilot and, you know, a pilot has come for continental for 27 years. And, you know, I mean, not, not conservative, but not progressive by any stretch of the imagination.

• 6:36Rich Roll?

  So did you guys move around a lot?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  A little bit, born in LA and then San Diego, Houston. And then I, at that point was 18 and moved back to start UCLA and my parents moved again to Atlanta, but I was already out of the house.

• 6:49Rich Roll?

  I see. So California mess at the time.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:52Rich Roll?

  But your dad, your dad's a military guy?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  He was, yeah. He was 20 years in the air force, but he was, you know, post-active duty. He was a liaison officer and then he worked as a pilot for continental and then into management there. But he was with them for 27 years.

• 7:05Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Continental Airlines.

• 7:07Rich Roll?

  So unlikely to spawn a vegan child.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Now he's a vegan.

• 7:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Oh, he is? Really?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  He was raised, yeah. He was raised by a progressive son. I'll put it that way.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  Interesting. So how does that, yeah, I mean, you know, with everything that I've been doing and I still can't get my parents on board, although my sister just started doing it this week. It's like, oh, I had to write a book and wait, wait a full year.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. My dad was like, you know, what do I, and my mom eats extremely well. I don't think she's, you know, 100% vegan, but she's doing it really, really well. And, but he's a chronic asthmatic and, and that's where I came to the whole picture of nutrition in 92 is because I'm a chronic, was a chronic asthmatic and my asthma went away then and his went away three years ago and he's 75 and he's off prescription medication for the first time in 35 years. So.

• 7:56Rich Roll?

  Wow. So.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  35 mile bike rates, three days a week, you know, it's like.

• 8:00Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  You know, unbelievable.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  So did you make this switch to a plant-based diet as a, as a response to trying to address your asthma?

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  I was handed a book, I was a personal assistant back in call it during UCLA, during my time at UCLA to Woody Harrelson and his now wife, whose name is Laura Lewian. I had just graduated in 91 and was playing out as a musician and working in the audio visual department of UCLA.

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And they handed me a book and it was called Fit for Life. I'm sure you've heard of it.

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  I don't know. And I read it and I went, oh, what's going on there? And so I changed my diet then. Removed dairy was the first thing I did. My asthma went away almost, you know, it was like overnight in a way. It was within a month, you know, and I stopped using the inhaler and I haven't used it since. And I wasn't even 100% vegan back then, but then just over the years, it kind of, we'd cheat and, you know, go out for Mexican food at El Caudy and we would take like a prescription medication before dinner for allergies.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:04Speaker 01

  You know, it was finally, it's like, this is, this is the dumbest thing in the world, you know?

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  Right, because you know the impact of the foods you're eating are gonna, are gonna cause this asthmatic reaction in you and you're doing it anyway.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  And congratulations, you're a human being.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  I know, right? And the healthier you get, the more of a reaction you get, you know, like when you're eating it all crappy all the time, you sort of set that bar for yourself.

• 9:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  And then you start eating healthier, a little bit of dairy would just totally set me and Lisa off, you know, we'd wake up just feeling like we were, you know, got hit in the face.

• 9:35Rich Roll?

  That's definitely the experience that I've, that I've had. Yeah, when you're eating like crap all the time, it doesn't really matter. You're just kind of on this low burn of not feeling so great all the time that you acclimate yourself to. The cleaner and cleaner you eat, then yeah, it's, you have this like hair trigger response to eating something that's like not quite right. I mean, I see it with Julie all the time. She'll, she'll have one taste of something and then she'll be like laying on the couch, you know, like, I can't handle that or whatever. It's, you know.

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:04Rich Roll?

  It's kind of interesting that way.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  It is.

• 10:06Rich Roll?

  But don't think that, that we're just gonna gloss over the fact that you work for Woody Harrelson. Like I did, that was not lost on me and I'm not gonna let you leave here without telling me at least one or two Woody Harrelson stories.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:19Rich Roll?

  Because then I would not be doing my job.

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you one right now. I bought $450 worth of underwear for him.

• 10:25Rich Roll?

  Made out of hemp?

• 10:27Speaker 01

  I'm sure he's, no, this was like pre hemp. I was, I was, I was like his, he was on Cheers at the time and I was a.

• 10:33Rich Roll?

  So this is way back.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in 91. I was a sophomore in college and my sister was friends with Laura, his wife, and they needed somebody in the office to help out and, you know, put. Autograph photos into envelopes and you know grunt work kind of stuff.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  And so he would, I'd go on errands, you know, and, and, and so one of them was to go to Nordstrom's because he had gotten a hold of boxer briefs and liked them. And so, you know, I went there and, and called like, are these the ones? Yeah, buy them, buy everything they got. So I bought everything they got. And then it turned out it was the wrong stuff and, and he kept them anyway. And

• 11:10Speaker 01

  so I was like, in fact, he was, I was trying to send the book to him. I couldn't get, I couldn't get, they were traveling around. And she was like, I'm so sorry we're on the road. But I kept saying to my sister, you know, I bought his damn underwear, like the least he could do.

• 11:23Rich Roll?

  He's like, read my book. Yeah, exactly. Or give me a blurb or whatever. Did you say 450 pairs?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  No, $450 worth.

• 11:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, $450 worth?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:32Rich Roll?

  Gotcha.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Which, you know, back then.

• 11:33Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, I would see him show up from time to time in the, in a yoga class I would go to in Santa Monica. But I haven't been in that class in a long, I haven't seen him around in a long time.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  They live in Hawaii full time.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think so. On Maui, right? Like on the eastern side of the island?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't been to the house. I haven't seen either of them in years.

• 11:52Rich Roll?

  Interesting.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  My sister still talks to Laura.

• 11:55Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that, like, all the way back in the Cheers days, he was, he was, you know, rocking the vegan vibe.

• 12:00Speaker 01

  I gotta tell you, like, they had their first kid. And I was, you know, one of these people who were like, oh, my God, like, they can't do this vegan, like, you know, they're gonna kill their child.

• 12:11Rich Roll?

  You gotta talk into the mic a little bit. Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  They're gonna, you know, kill their child, you know, kill their child. I still get that with my kids. They can be standing right next to me, looking perfectly healthy. And people act like I'm torturing them by not feeding them animal protein, you know. You gotta be really careful, you know, that kind of thing. And

• 12:26Rich Roll?

  Everybody's a nutritionist.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Right. And, but I, back then, I remember going just like, oh, my God, that's shocking. You know, how can you have a, you're pregnant, you know, and

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  Take them to McDonald's and give them a Happy Meal.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, or something. And, and, well, at least a McD L T. But, and, and so, because the cool stays cool and hot stays hot. And then, but they were the first reason why, I mean, they were my first introduction into plant, plant based. I mean, they handed me the book, you know, and that was 20 years, 20 years ago, you know, and I've been reading nutrition ever since. And I wouldn't just become a nutritionist until years later.

• 13:00Rich Roll?

  Right. So you're in LA, you graduate from UCLA, you're an assistant to Woody and his wife, and you're pursuing a musical career. I mean, was that the focus at the time?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  It was. I mean, I was assistant to them during college. Once I graduated, I worked in the audiovisual department there at UCLA. And my whole goal was music. And I was a philosophy major, which that's pretty much going to be what you do if you're a philosophy major.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Loved it. I mean, I love what I studied. And I'm convinced to this day that it kept me in school because I just was completely attached to that major. And that was the third major I declared. It was political science, then English, then philosophy, and absolutely fell in love with it. Yeah, graduated and was playing. I mean, I just started playing. I was a, you know, we audiovisual services was kind of this funky department at UCLA, public sector kind of job, bunch of artists and musicians and writers and songwriters and actors. And it was just this great little, you know, mecca of art and creativity. It was a great place to be. And, you know, decent job and allowed me to do what I needed to do. And I did that until 95, when I started

• 14:13Speaker 01

  acting, just kind of fell into it, but then started making a living at it. So then I quit at UCLA in 96. And I became a full-time actor after that.

• 14:22Rich Roll?

  So what, tell me about the transition to acting. Like, how did that occur? What happened?

• 14:27Speaker 01

  This buddy of mine, Peter Murnick, who's still an actor in LA, and he gave my photo to his agent and my music photo. And they called me in for a meeting and signed me.

• 14:38Rich Roll?

  And that doesn't, for people who are listening out there, that's not the way Hollywood works.

• 14:43Speaker 01

  I know.

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  So I don't know what's going on. I mean, did the guy want to sleep with you?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  No, I maybe. I never asked, actually, but I would have. Because he hooked me up with his agent.

• 14:53Rich Roll?

  Of course you would, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  But he, yeah, he did that. And he's a commercial actor. And he actually does, you know, film and TV too. But at the time, he was, that was his commercial actor. And they signed me. You know, I'd been performing for a few years and comfortable in front of a camera. They called me, I got some calls on auditions and, and I had actually had my Screen Actors Guild card by that time because another buddy had done an indie film and I'd done the music for it and he put me in a scene. And, and so I just get these auditions and I start booking, you know, like, kind of effortlessly.

• 15:26Rich Roll?

  Like, commercial booking?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:28Rich Roll?

  Or like television?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Commercial at this point, just commercials, Twix, you know, Zuzu, like all of a sudden. And then I go, that's kind of cool, you know. And I remember the first commercial I booked was a Twix commercial and, you know, got paid less for the day than it cost me to join Screen Actors Guild, you know, so this is going to be the worst investment ever, you know, if I never work again. But then it started airing, I started getting residuals and I started booking more jobs, booking more jobs and all of a sudden making a living, you know. And I got home one day and said to my wife, who had just quit her job as a producer for a motion graphics company, to be, to start her graphic design firm, like, she had, like, a month before and I said, I think I'm gonna quit, you know, UCLA, this

• 16:10Speaker 01

  like, safe, totally secure job. I'm, you know, making a living acting, I want to pursue music and, and this is where I want to go. And, and to this day, just was such a blessing because she just, without a hesitation, she just said, we'll figure it out.

• 16:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  And I was like, wasn't like, well, you should keep your job or anything. She was like, we'll figure it out. And I put in my notice and that was that.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  So it was pretty amazing.

• 16:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's cool. I mean, I think that that is, you know, taking that leap of faith is a, is kind of a theme of, of my book and this podcast as well, sort of stepping out into the void and, and trusting that you're on the right path or you will be taken care of if you're kind of expressing yourself authentically and embracing the journey as sort of uncertain as it may be, as opposed to sort of contracting in fear and doing the safe thing. So what do you think it is about your wife that allowed her to be comfortable making that move?

• 17:17Speaker 01

  You know, probably her upbringing, you know, and I will say that it was, if I, if I could tell you how opposite that was to my personality, to, I mean, I-

• 17:29Speaker 01

  You know, my parents were, I mean, I had a happy childhood. There's no, but they were conservative. My dad was with the same company for 27 years. I mean, that was unheard of in my brain.

• 17:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Of not knowing where my paycheck was gonna come. I mean, I cannot, looking back, I can't even believe that I did that.

• 17:46Rich Roll?

  But yet you were still pursuing the creative arts. I mean, you know, being a musician and an actor are hardly, you know, being in the, you know, being in the union in the traditional sense.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:59Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? So you are already kind of more out on a limb than somebody who is taking a job where they get a paycheck every two weeks.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  But I was working full-time UCLA.

• 18:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's right.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  So it was sort of like, and I mean the move of quitting that job.

• 18:12Rich Roll?

  Completely, right.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, the whole idea was like, I'm just gonna, you know, I'll have this safe kind of arrangement while I'm pursuing music and acting.

• 18:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  And I remember when I quit the full-time UCLA job, I had three months of money. I knew I had three months. Basically, three months I would be out of money, you know, and that's not, was not my personality. I mean, at all. I remember calling my actor, Peter Murnick, you know, that guy who got me into it and going, he'd been acting for years by the time. And I was like, how do you like negotiate? He goes, I just figured it's gonna, you know, I'll get something. I just, to this day.

• 18:44Rich Roll?

  It's like, how can you live your life that way?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  I know. And to this day, it's, it's, I still, it's a struggle for me, you know, just ingrained in me, but I did it anyway. And that's a, a big lesson for me as a, as a, just a human being and, and learning not how to not be afraid, but learning how to be afraid and still do the things that are important to you. And there's, it's never a point where you just stop being afraid of something, but it's just kind of.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

  It's your response to the fear. It's whether you're, you're, you're modifying your behavior as a fear reaction. It's not whether you're not afraid.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 19:18Rich Roll?

  And I think it's, it gets mistaken as.

• 19:23Rich Roll?

  Well, you're just different, or you're, you know, I don't know why you're not afraid and I am. Or that it's just easy for you, or something like that, or you're wired differently. But that's not what it is. It's a warrior path and it can, it's hard.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  It is.

• 19:35Rich Roll?

  It's hard as shit sometimes, you know? But what I think what happens is, and this has been my experience over the last, you know, eight or nine years of, you know, many, many times I've been in that place where I was like, I don't know where the, where the next money, the next dollar is going to come from. And we're coming near the end here.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  And, you know, if it's just me living it, you know, Ted Kaczynski style in a cabin, I could probably deal with that. But when you're married and you have kids and, you know, all these responsibilities, it's very stressful.

• 20:10Rich Roll?

  But something always does occur, you know, something always happens. And I've strung together so many examples of being provided for, maybe not the way that I thought it would happen, or wanted it to happen, or at the moment that I wanted it to happen, but the needs are always met. You know, as long as I'm sort of checking myself and going, all right, is this, is this the path I'm supposed to be walking? Should I be walking it slower or faster? Should I modify it? What is authentic to me? What is the mission here? And, you know, as long as I'm doing, constantly doing an inventory of that and getting right with myself on that, I feel like it will work out.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:50Rich Roll?

  Cause it has too many times. Like I can't, I can't deny it.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  For me too.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  So.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  And it's not like I have this win, ever had like a wind, you know, windfall or anything like that.

• 20:58Rich Roll?

  No, it's not like, you know.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  I got the, I, you know, I envisioned the, I envisioned the beamer and I, it manifested, you know?

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:08Rich Roll?

  Well, I just imagined it and it happened.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, no.

• 21:11Rich Roll?

  Not it at all.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  No, it's healthy relationship and healthy body and healthy mind and, and. What that entails and realizing that, you know, people who have, and myself included, you know, grapple with a choice, oftentimes, there's really no choice at all, you know, and it's kind of moving through the the information to get to the point where you knew the answer all along, and you knew the direction you were gonna go, you know, and it's like, I don't know whether to move here, move there, it's like, you know, already, you know, sometimes you need somebody to kick in the ass and go, you're turning left, because you know you're turning left, so just turn left, you know, just turn left, you're done, you know, I don't care how afraid you are of what left looks like, but that's where you're gonna go.

• 21:50Rich Roll?

  Right, sometimes the indecision is more comfortable than the decision, whether it's left or right.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:55Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:57Rich Roll?

  And I think that dovetails pretty beautifully into the themes of your book, and so I want to get into that, I mean, I, first of all, you sent me a Galley copy of your book, so I was privileged to read it before it came out, and I love the book. It's, what's really cool about Approaching the Natural is that what you find out there are diet books that are very specific to diet, and then you have fitness books that are about, here's the workout plan for you, and then you have spirituality books, which are all about the ethereal.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:37Rich Roll?

  But but there really aren't very many books that sort of take this holistic approach to wellness and say, well, all of these things comprise health.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  It's mental, it's spiritual, it's physical, and if any one of these elements is out of balance, then you're not healthy.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 22:56Rich Roll?

  And so, and so you've sort of, you've done this, you've tackled this Herculean subject and woven it into, you know, a very easy to read and easy to implement kind of primer for taking your own health to the next level in all of these these categories. So, it's really cool, you did a great job with the book.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 23:18Rich Roll?

  So, you know, what, we haven't, we haven't finished going through your, your biological history here, you know, but I wanted to get into the book. So, I mean, what's, what spawned the idea for it? It just seemed like a natural launching point because you were getting into the ideas behind it.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, part of it was just my own thinking over the years. Part of it was a practical sort of, you know, becoming a nutritionist finally and a wellness coach and, you know, going back to school and doing, you know, becoming that and, and starting to work with clients and, and coming up against a lot of issues, you know, and food related in the beginning. And because, you know, people come and they go, hey, I want to work with a nutritionist and, and put me on a plan. And I go, okay, here's your plan, you know, and, and they wouldn't stick with it. And I went, what the hell? You know, like I had asthma and I changed my diet and, and, and I am not tooting my own horn. It's just I got tired. I'm a long distance runner. I got tired of having asthma, you know, I got tired of going, why, why am I carrying an inhaler? Why am I, you know, that was just

• 24:16Speaker 01

  my thing. But I wanted to figure out the nut to crack and, and, you know, how to crack that nut of like, how do I get somebody to kind of really either, and this is, it sounds horrible, but sometimes it takes somebody to have a heart attack before they make a change. And I hate that that's the case.

• 24:34Rich Roll?

  Pain is a great motivator.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hate that that's the case. Yeah. And I, yeah. And I want to, I would love to, I, I'm hoping that the book gets to, to people in a way that catches it before it gets to that point. And, and, and that the picture of health, like you said, is, is that whole picture. And I think a lot of people mistake thin for healthy or, or fit for healthy even, you know, and sometimes people are fit, but they're not mentally healthy or they're not spiritually healthy. And, and what is it to be that as a human being? And I drew on looking at health of the human being in the context of us as a species, instead of us as a modern world animal or a modern world non-animal is the case maybe. I really wanted to look at us and still do in my practice and the way that

• 25:20Speaker 01

  I approach health is as, how do I compare it to us as a species? Is this something that, that is even remotely what our species would be open to or doing if we were still living in the wild, knowing that we're not going to go live in the wild. But we wouldn't be sitting here, besides the fact that there's microphones and stuff, we wouldn't be talking about healthy food if we lived in the wild because we'd be eating it.

• 25:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Every day, there's no other choice. I mean, you just, whatever food you find in the wild is healthy. It's gonna be even. Animals. I mean, that's what blows my mind about the paleo diet, you know, as people go, oh, the paleo diet is fantastic. It's ridiculous, you know, and it's because, you know, Jeff Stanford, I work at the Stanford Inn up in Mendocino and he has a gift shop and, you know, I run the wellness center up there. He gets this catalog and on the cover is a paleo cookbook and it's got a picture of fried chicken on the front. Cause you know, the paleo they're eating.

• 26:11Rich Roll?

  Right. They were, yeah, they had lots of, lots of oils up back then.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Oh my God. And so, but the point is, is that paleo, you know, regardless of what you know about what they're.

• 26:24Rich Roll?

  Well, I want to talk, I do want to talk about this a little bit and, and roll our sleeves up on the paleo thing. Um, because that's a recurring thing that comes up on the podcast. And I've had a couple of guests recently that kind of are from that low carb and/or paleo camp. And like I keep saying, you know, these folks really have the microphone right now in a big way. I mean, there's definitely an ascension of plant-based eating as a healthy way of being like never before. I mean, it's certainly more in the mainstream than ever. But, but it's still, you know, pretty marginalized when compared to how popular paleo and low

• 27:04Rich Roll?

  carb eating is. And I've had a couple of guys on espousing the benefits of, of, you know, eating lots of fat and going into ketosis.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:15Rich Roll?

  As a means to, I think there's confusion about losing weight and long-term health.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Those are mutually exclusive, for sure.

• 27:22Rich Roll?

  And I've had a, I had a guy on the other day who is a CrossFit, CrossFit coach, pretty outspoken, well-known guy. Uh, and not the first to come on the show and say, everything we know about saturated fat, dietary fat is wrong. There's no connection between that and, and arthrosclerosis. Did I say that right? Heart disease, et cetera. And we've all been duped and you shouldn't worry about, you know, the dietary saturated fat that you're eating every day. And I. Have to keep saying like, I cannot, I'm not down with that. I just cannot believe that that's true. And on some level, they'll cite Gary Taubes or, you know, these other resources.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  And I'm not spending all day long pouring through clinical research to figure out who's right and who's wrong. And trying to poke holes in this peer reviewed research versus that. So I'm interested in hearing what your response is to that. Because I've just heard too many doctors and cardiologists and people that I respect say, you know, you got, you cannot eat saturated fat in your diet and expect to, you know, not develop plaques in your arteries.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I'll first say that even if you did spend all your day pouring through research, you still can't maybe figure out who's right and who's wrong. And, and, and I've, I can find research to support pretty much anything I want to say, you know? And, um, and that's kind of what that is and just how it goes. I will say that that's part of the reason why sometimes I defer to the natural state of the human being. And that's why the book's called Approaching the Natural, because it's the premise is that the closer we get by degrees to what's most natural for our species, the better we're going to be. And that goes for mental, spiritual and physical. With regards to paleo, paleo, I mean, just to finish that, that thought was, you know,

• 29:19Speaker 01

  in the wild, in the Paleolithic era, we would be moving around to find the animal. The animal would be moving around to escape predator and to find its own food. And the food the animal would be eating would be wild nourishing food. We wouldn't be cooking it. We wouldn't be storing it. We wouldn't be moving it, transporting it in a refrigerated thing. We wouldn't be shooting it with antibiotics and hormones. We wouldn't be feeding it unnatural food like corn to a cow. It's insane. So if you're gonna talk about paleo, let's talk about paleo. Go get a bow and go in the, in the forest.

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  On a persistent hunt.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, and, and kill an animal. You don't need to. The thing about it is, it's not that we can't survive on that. We, we could. I, I can envision myself being healthy by eating mostly plants. Oh, another thing we didn't do is milk it. Right? We didn't catch the antelope and milk it real quick before we killed it. You know, it was, we just killed it and eat the meat. We ate, by all accounts, most accounts, about 5% of our diet from animal. And usually what I've read is, is it had to do more with needing a caloric boost when plants were in scarcity. I mean, there's, I was talking to Jeff Stanford, an anthropologist, and, and he was telling me about the 50,000 years ago,

• 30:43Speaker 01

  they found sites that showed that they were, that they were growing in an agricultural setting, not, and then they, you know, the, the conventional wisdom is 10,000 B.C. was when we started doing agriculture. Well, they found 50,000 year old sites where they're planting potatoes and, and planting and growing and eating porridge and things like that. If I were, if plants were scarce, the next best thing would be a wild animal. But I still maintain that as much as we need carbs and we need fat and we need protein, healthy versions of all three of those. And I wish carbs was just not a word. I wish people would just say carbohydrates, because they just, carbs is like such a loaded word now. It drives me nuts.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  But we need those things. The question isn't that we need them. The question is, where do we get them? What is the source of those things? And as much as anybody wants to tell me that I need protein, and I will debate, and I won't debate with you, because you and I agree on this, that people eat way too much protein. But the question for me isn't that we need protein or how much, it's where we get it. What comes with the protein? What, what is packaged with it? How much micronutrients? And when you compare whole plants. The vitamin and mineral content of whole plants versus animals, there's just no comparison. There's just no comparison. And if you were gonna eat animal, of course, a wild animal is gonna be better than a farmed animal, period, end of story. I just don't need to go killing deer because I can get all the plants I need at the corner market.

• 32:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  You know, and that's why I go on the paleo thing. It's like, just because the paleo people, you know, our ancestors ate whatever they ate, doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best or that there was a lot of, maybe they were short on plants. Maybe they were living in an area where they couldn't get plants that they were edibles. And so they had to eat the animals that could eat the plants, you know? Cows can digest grasses that we can't. And that's why, you know, we would have to eat them if we couldn't, if all there was was grass for us to eat.

• 32:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  You know, that kind of thing.

• 32:39Rich Roll?

  And also, it seems to me, and I think you probably have, you know, no more than I on this subject, but when we talk about paleo, there's so much focus on the hunting aspect of it, because there's a sort of machismo component to the paleo lifestyle, this caveman idea. And, and the hunt is a big part of that. But it overlooks the gatherer aspect of what was going on and the balance between the plant foods, like you said, and the hunting. And it, and, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but my understanding is that, that the animals that were hunted, they're few and far between. I mean, that was almost like a luxury, right? Or a delicacy.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  We're like gather hunters.

• 33:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  I mean, not hunter-gatherers.

• 33:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  You know, we predominantly gathered.

• 33:26Rich Roll?

  And the hunt was the persistent hunt of running after these animals, sometimes for days until they were exhausted.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:33Rich Roll?

  And you can read about that in Born to Run, they talk a lot about that.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:37Rich Roll?

  So there's a lot of exercise involved, a lot of energy spent. If you look at net calories.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:42Rich Roll?

  How many calories were, were exerted to get the calories gained by the animal that was hunted?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And how lean was the animal? Because I'm not talking about saturated fat.

• 33:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:53Rich Roll?

  And, and to be fair to the paleo folks, I mean, there's a lot of... Good qualities to that diet in comparison to the standard American diet, for sure. And I think that if you're doing it sort of as prescribed, there are a lot of vegetables in that diet.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:09Rich Roll?

  And that gets overlooked because people just talk about bacon for breakfast.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Well, they want an excuse like Atkins to go, who came on? You know, I can do, I can have fried chicken, fried chicken on a paleo diet, you know?

• 34:20Rich Roll?

  And there's a distinction, I think, between paleo and low carb, because low carb is all about no carb, basically, or, you know, no grains and let's all get into ketosis until we have bad breath and we're destroying our kidneys.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  That sounds good.

• 34:38Rich Roll?

  And, uh, and I have people on that are athletes and telling me how great they feel and all this sort of thing. And, and I'm like, all right, well, there's a performance aspect to this. There's a weight loss aspect to this, but what is the long-term, down the line, 20-year thing? You know what I mean?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Like, I do.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  What happens?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I'm not totally not, I mean, I tell people, if it were, I have clients, I've said, if you want me to have you lose weight as fast as possible, I'll put you on Atkins. But I'm not, that's not my job. I'm a, well, I'm wellness, I'm health, I'm not, it has nothing, I can put you on a thousand diets. Go eat sand for a week, you'll lose weight. It's like, there's a million things you can do to lose weight, but I like weight loss as a side effect of health. That's my thing about weight loss. It's one of the things, you know, and, um, like, good skin, you know? And, and when you focus just on weight loss, you're gonna be, most chances, most, by most accounts, you're not gonna be successful, which is why most diets fail. But why, but at the same time, why people like Atkins, you know, sell millions and millions of books?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Because it's a, you probably do feel better in the short term, you know? If you're eating junk food and snicker bars and crap and you go to Atkins and, and you switch over to. Whatever that is and and give up some of the white flour kind of you probably do feel better in the short term, but again, I'm not interested in the short term, you know, and that doesn't do us justice. If Atkins worked, if meat worked.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  Well, Atkins Atkins himself would not be six feet under.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:08Rich Roll?

  Right now.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  You know, of heart disease, you know, so it's just, it's just that kind of like common sense, like, okay, you know, let's all take a deep breath and and it's really not that I try to get across that it's not that complicated really, which is my book is only 160 pages long, you know, I didn't want to write a another book with charts and blah, blah, blah about, you know, food, because I think people's brains explode when they're given 21 day, this and that.

• 36:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  You know, and it doesn't work.

• 36:36Rich Roll?

  It's confusing with people because on the one hand, the the flip side of that is they want to be told exactly what to do. And if they see a bunch of charts, they're like, oh, this guy knows what he's talking about.

• 36:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:47Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? But it's almost like not genuine, you know, or inauthentic because it's really more elementary than that.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  And you don't really need to get into all that stuff. So what do you say to somebody when they come to you and they say, I want to get healthy and I'm ready, you know, how do I, how do I start? I mean, are you a guy who's going to say, all right, jump all the way in? Or can you lean into it gradually? Or what, you know, what would be kind of the first words of wisdom to get somebody going in this lifestyle?

• 37:16Speaker 01

  It would depend on the client, because, you know, I get the call of I have stage four cancer. That's a different conversation than, hey, I just want to learn about nutrition and maybe I think I could probably start eating better, you know, and the just want to start eating better, I ease them in. Because what I found is that when I, when I just focus on adding things in, I always talk about how we're kind of all children at heart. And if we're told we can't do something, we're going to do it anyway, you know, and you can't tell me what to do kind of thing. And and so I go, okay, you know, hey, just, you know, got cream in your coffee, like, have cream in your coffee. But maybe on your way to the restaurant to have prime rib, you bring some cucumber and celery with you and you chomp on that in the car in the way.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  I think you could probably do that, a stalk of celery, a cucumber, a couple of slices of cucumber. That's probably something you could do. And, and just, oh yeah, I can do that. Okay, cool. Why don't we start there? And, and that little step to me is so profound because it makes you, it makes people start thinking about what they put in their bodies. And it starts making them think about how they take care of themselves. And I think we are so programmed, and by we, I mean, you know.

• 38:26Rich Roll?

  Well, hey, Ty.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  Come on in.

• 38:29Rich Roll?

  Podcast, podcast is interrupt us.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  I feel like having a cigarette. And, but, but just, you know, how to add little things in. Because we're so programmed to be, to do the things that we're, that we've done our whole lives. The foods that we're used to taste wise, the, the foods that give us comfort, the actions that we are rely on and the, the relationships that even if they're not healthy, we stay in because that's just, it's the idea of not having those things is kind of weird to us. And I think it's effective to kind of ease people in and, and insert a little bit of mindfulness into their day to day lives. And, and what happens is that like me, when I took a little tweak of my diet and then it made me start thinking about things.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  And then over time I've gradually moved all the way because I just kept feeling better and better. And that's a better, to me, that's a better thing than telling somebody you can't ever smoke again.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And rather say, keep smoking. But why don't right, right now, work on your diet and this? And then eventually they don't feel like having a cigarette because it just doesn't taste good and it makes them feel like crap. And they've got to a level where they feel so good that a cigarette doesn't make them feel well. They don't feel like having it anymore. That, that's lifelong.

• 39:46Rich Roll?

  Well, it's getting to a place where they're willing to take greater responsibility themselves.

• 39:53Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  And when that desire is self-generated as opposed to externally generated, because you're telling them to do it, that has a completely different effect on the human psyche.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  You know, and I think you're right. I mean, I do that. I say the same thing. Don't focus on what you can't have. Focus on what you can have.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:10Rich Roll?

  And put all the attention on, you know, this new food or try something new and have fun with it. And don't take it so seriously and learn to enjoy it. And the more you do that, it also creates a momentum, you know?

• 40:25Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 40:26Rich Roll?

  You can't underestimate how powerful that momentum is. I mean, once you kind of, that train starts to pull out of the station and slowly, slowly, slowly picks up speed.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:37Rich Roll?

  It becomes very difficult to slow down.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's exactly the experience I've had, you know? And recently I had a client, I just, you know, she came to me with a bunch of serious issues, you know? So I was like, game on, but I completely misread it because she wasn't ready, you know? And it was like, whoa, and then she's like, I can't do this, you know? And it was like, I totally just didn't, I needed to gauge it better to say, you're, let's add in a little bit. But, you know, the seriousness of the stuff that she came to me with was enough for me to come back and say, let's go all the way here. This is like heavy duty. But we're so mentally attached to the nostalgia of food and the things that we're used to with food that you gotta wade through that minefield, you know?

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's so emotional and everybody is different, you know? For me, I can't do it grudge. I had to do it one, you know, I had to go extreme. Because if I dabbled here and there, I just know myself well enough. And that's based on my sort of personality defect of, you know, having an addictive personality and struggling with addiction, that I really had to apply a recovery model to it and treat it like drugs and say, I'm crossing this line and I'm not going back.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Rich Roll?

  And that created its own kind of momentum, you know? And sort of parameters that work for me. But you know, that doesn't work for everybody and I'm aware of that.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's the difficulty of my job is to figure out.

• 42:04Rich Roll?

  Figure out what's gonna work for which person.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I mean, that's what I want to do because it's too easy for me to do what most dieticians that I've come across do, which is give a little plan of, you know, measure a cup of this at 10:30 and a, you know, ounce of that and blah, blah, blah. And the people go, oh my God, this is great. I'm on a plan, you know, and they do it. And then two months later they burn out and, and you know, and that's that. And I just, it's so not interesting to me to do that. It never was.

• 42:30Rich Roll?

  It's also very in vogue right now to, to have this negative reinforcement strategy in place. Like there are people who are sending, you know, before pictures of them looking terrible and say, if I don't lose this much weight or get to this place by this date, then you're gonna, then you have that picture and you put it up on my Facebook page or, you know, I was like sort of, you know, putting your hand to the fire a little bit. As opposed to the flip side of the positive, you know, keep going and that kind of gentle reinforcement that you probably give your clients.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Well, and I remove, and to me, it's, it's, it goes back to the, what is health in my mind? And health is, is, is co-existent with happiness. And so if you just make it on, here's my before picture and I better be this weight after, I think you're missing the whole point, you know, that it's not going to deliver you what you ultimately want, which is, is an experience of life that is full and open and, and, and allows you to, to relate to people and do all the things that human beings are, I would argue, designed to do. We are tribal, we're, we're creative, we're, we're rational and, and wonderful.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  And when we close our bodies off to nourishment, when we close our minds off to creativity, it all has the same effect on us and our, and our quality of life. And so making it just about a before and after picture is to me completely missing the point. I don't have anything to do with it.

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  So where did this idea come of this more holistic approach that that really embraces the spiritual and the mental? I mean, was that your perspective from the beginning? Or how has that evolved?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I don't think it was. I think that when I gave up dairy in 92 and because of an asthmatic kind of thing, it was physical. It was just like, I got asthma and oh, hey, look at this book. I'm gonna, okay, my asthma's gone. Right on, you know, I'm gonna go for a run. But just that act alone of paying attention to what I was putting in my body made me more open to other, reading other things about diet. And then that led to reading, eventually coming across the effect of of animals and food production on the environment and also the treatment of animals that we that we fence up and brutalize, you know? And it was like this progression of of starting with my body. It really, that's how it's happened.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  And that's why in the book I talk about holistic self-interest, because I think we're designed to physically, if you remove the the mind from the picture, our bodies are designed to procreate and survive and thrive. Our bodies are dying literally for nourishing food. That's just what they want. And, and if we get out of the way and want to watch into the forest, that's what we'd get. But we have to use our minds because we're next door to the McDonald's. So we got to kind of negotiate that whole thing. But, but just the act of taking care of my body, I think naturally progressed me, I look back on it and think for sure naturally progressed me into just a, an openness that allowed other information about the way I was living into my mind and definitely some spiritual

• 45:38Speaker 01

  aspects of that. And I don't mean religious, because I think those two things are very different, but more of a mindfulness, a paying attention of what that is. And, and I wanted to bring that into the idea of the book that. You know, when you start paying attention to yourself, and I know that sounds like we got to pay attention to other people. I work with people who are the caregivers, you know, like the traditional caregivers. And I'll still make that argument. Like, if you don't take care of yourself, you can't take care of others. That's pretty common knowledge now, you know, but people don't. What that means, if you're a mother taking care of a sick parent or a sick child, the healthier you are. But I think people feel like I can't attend to myself because I need to be attending.

• 46:20Rich Roll?

  That would be selfish.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Right. And I think the best thing you can do is be selfish. The best thing you can do is be selfish. I think that it makes you a better parent, a better spouse, a better sibling to take care of yourself and make yourself happy. Lisa and I have a good, been married 18 years. We have a good marriage, a great marriage, because, you know, things like when I said, I want to quit my job, she said, fine. And when I wanted to pursue music, she was never like, well, it's not really practical. You know, she's like, great. And still, to this day, my biggest supporter, you know, and likewise, you know, she's a poet and, and I want her to do those things. I want her to do all the things that make her happy because the happier she is, the happier we are and vice versa.

• 46:59Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I mean, when you talk about the natural, approaching the natural, I mean, it's, it's really quite profound. And it brings up one of my favorite quotes, the throw quote of the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and what is considered resignation is confirmed desperation. I think that's how it goes. And it was true then in 18 whenever, when he wrote it. And it's, I think it's more true now because as society progresses and we become more and more kind of disconnected from our neighbors and our

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  friends and ourselves, and we dupe ourselves into thinking we're more connected because of technology, but actually, we're becoming more separate in many ways, particularly, it's, it's very noticeable in Los Angeles because you spend all your time in a car and you don't really interact with anybody except on the phone. And this is not the natural state of the human being in his natural environment.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:05Rich Roll?

  And I think that it is a huge.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  Causation or contributing factor to all of these sort of, you know, mental disorders that plague us, you know, from depression to whatever, because we're not meant to live this way in many ways. And so, but at the same time, technology is not going away and, you know, we have the lives that we have. So what are the, what are some of the ways that we can recapture a more natural state that is harmonious with the way that we're meant to live that could contribute to elevating our happiness on some level?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  I would say, you know, reading a book.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  Well, go on the internet and go on Facebook.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, go on Facebook. Tweet, tweet me your problems and I will tweet you back. No, I think that, that, and this is the truth, this is why I did write the book, because I do think that taking even the most minute of steps, it has a profound difference. I think that, that, that, that I'm not the smartest guy in the room, well, in this room, no, I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but not the dumbest either.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  But I think that even the smallest of steps is profound in the sense that, like I said before, just paying attention is, is really, to me, a solution. And what I mean by that is, I know that we're not going to go, that's why it's called approaching the natural. It's not called living the natural.

• 49:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  It's just not going to happen.

• 49:42Rich Roll?

  You're not going to be a prepper and go move into the woods.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  No, not gonna, and nor should you, no. But, but, but at the same time, I think little things make a huge, huge difference in the modern world. And I think would make a huge difference. So like I said, you know, eating at once, if all you can do right now is eating a stalk of celery per day, if that's literally, you're so busy and you have a family that, and your husband eats junk food and that's what days in the house, but you can squeak of one stalk of celery, that makes you a thinking person, number one. And number two, it makes you somebody who, who takes care of themselves. And that means, is it at the degree that, that is going to make you necessarily healthy? Maybe not. But if all you can do on a given day is walk across the room, because otherwise you're sitting on a couch all day, every day, because you're

• 50:29Speaker 01

  totally stagnant, but you can get up and walk across the room and get back. And that's the step you can do every day, you become a person who exercises over time.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Enough, probably not, but you establish that as right away. And I actually argue that technology, when used in conjunction with mindfulness, can be useful. I know that I have friends I haven't seen, and I don't have time. I have three kids and we're both working full time and busy. And I don't have time for a 45 minute conversation. Sometimes all I have time for is a tweet. I mean, not a tweet, but like a text, you know? And while, of course, it's not as good as sitting with somebody over a coffee face to face, sometimes that's what I can do, but I think that's better than nothing. I think reaching out to somebody that you haven't talked to, to bring them back into your lives, however, whatever it takes, however it takes, I think is fantastic.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  I think what happens is that we trade, we think that that's the real deal. It's not the real deal. Sometimes it's the best we can muster. And ideally, you know, I can get on an airplane and go to see my friends in New York. That'd be great. I don't have that luxury right now. And so sometimes it's an email. And then there's steps in that direction. But I think with an intention behind it of understanding that having a social network, a real one, is important and it's natural to us. And doing whatever you can in the moment to foster that makes a difference.

• 51:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Same thing with food.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Whatever you can do.

• 51:57Rich Roll?

  Micro steps of anchoring yourself more in the present and elevating your consciousness and directing your attention on that.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 52:07Rich Roll?

  And not being distracted.

• 52:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Because I think, you know, if you could just define mindfulness for somebody who might not be familiar with what that term means.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  For me, it means being aware in the moment. It means paying attention. So when you sit down to, you know, some fried chicken, you know, or whatever it is, because that's what we're raised on and that's what makes you feel good. And you had a crappy day and you get home and you pop the TV dinner in the microwave and you eat it. Because it makes you, in that moment, makes you feel good. It's like, oh God, what a crappy day. I'm gonna have some fried chicken and mashed potatoes, because that's comfort food. And that's an unthinking position in terms of who we are as a species naturally. That is an addictive, pleasure-centered act.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Juxtaposed to a healthy act of eating food that truly nourishes you, that when your body is under stress because of emotional stress or anything, the one thing you need is nourishing food. Your body is craving nourishment. So when you eat that fried chicken, you're creating conflict for yourself. You're putting something in your body that is the exact opposite of what your body needs in that moment. It needs caring. It needs love and it needs fostering of health and to thrive.

• 53:34Rich Roll?

  But I think also, you know, most people would, I would argue, grab the fried chicken without even being consciously aware that that is their medicine to solve whatever emotional discomfort they're feeling at that moment. So the first step in mindfulness is having an awareness that that's what you're doing before you even change the habit.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Exactly right.

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  Saying, "I'm going to get the fried chicken because I don't feel this, I don't feel good right now. I have this emotional, you know, issue that's coming up that's recurrent for me. And I know that it's my pattern to get greasy food and it'll make me feel better and I'm gonna go do that right now." Just that alone, like knowing that that's what you're doing is mindfulness in and of itself before there's any behavior modification.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Because the next step, of course, is to then, when you kind of cop that position of awareness, the next step is to say, "Hey, you know what? This isn't really making me feel better. It's giving me five minutes of pleasure, but in an hour from now, I'm gonna still, that stress ain't going away."

• 54:37Rich Roll?

  Then I have five hours of shame spiral.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  Or that and also the emotional problem I had at work. Yeah, exactly.

• 54:42Rich Roll?

  And the, yeah, and whatever problem I was trying to solve is still there and I'm not dealing with it directly. So which means it's probably getting worse.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  I've been quoting Louis C.K. Do you know he is a comedian?

• 54:53Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  And he has this thing, a bit where he goes, "I just now found out recently that food, eating, eating is supposed to make you feel good. Like, the purpose of food is to make you feel good." And he just does this thing where he's like, "Usually it's just like, ugh."

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Like he just, he never got that like the act of eating is supposed to be, you're supposed, in theory, naturally, we would eat and feel nourished, you know? And that's such a foreign thing for people.

• 55:17Rich Roll?

  But like classic Louis, like to say something so elementary and, and kind of profound at the same time. Cause I think that's, that is the public consciousness.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 55:26Rich Roll?

  Oh yeah, there, oh yeah, really? It's supposed to do that?

• 55:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's so foreign to, to people and including me. I mean, there's things I can't have in the house, you know? And I'm thin. I have a flat stomach at 44. I'm in better shape than I was at 24, but there's stuff that I can't have in the house because if I, if it's there, I will overeat it, you know? And that's because I battle whatever human being battles, which is a pleasure center thing, you know? There's crazy foods that we have created for ourselves that, that mess with our natural drives. And numinos do that for me, you know?

• 56:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and we're all human beings and I don't care, you know, who's behind what diet and is telling you this and that and the other. The person behind it is a human being and they, that person comes with, you know, their frailties and, and their weaknesses and their faults and, and all of that. And I think it's human to project some sort of idealistic picture on top of that person. And, you know, you, everybody wants to aspire to this or that, but it's, it's sort of being aware, being mindful, having a mindfulness that, that we're, nobody escapes the human condition.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 56:34Rich Roll?

  And of course, you know, I've been walking this sort of plant-based lifestyle for a while, but that doesn't mean that I'm free of these cravings or, or what have you. It's like, you know, in a weak moment, man, the potato chips, you know? It's like, you know, I'll go there and it's a practice, you know? It's not something you transcend and is in your past.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  No, I'm totally the same, exactly the same kind of thing. And I drink coffee, you know, things I know aren't healthy. I have a scotch now and then, you know? I can't, I know that they're not healthy for me. I'm aware of that. And if I weren't healthy or as healthy as I want to be, which I am, if I weren't, I would know where to, you know, what to get out of my life. That would be that. I also have to be mindful. And so you're talking, I'll talk about mindfulness. Mindfulness is not putting the numinos in the house. Right. That's how we can use our brains in a way that is, you know, not putting ourselves in a position to fail, you know, doing things and, and helping other people. I'm astounded.

• 57:33Speaker 01

  That, that, you know, people are walking around obese, morbidly, many, and, and people aren't rushing them into rehab. I mean, if, if, if they were as addicted to heroin as they are to food, I'm assuming there's, somebody would take them and put them into rehab.

• 57:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  But we're letting people walk around that are literally killing themselves. And it's because it's food somehow. It's exempt from the addictive model. And it has all exactly the same effects on their lives. It's ruining them emotionally. It's ruining them physically. It's ruining their relationships. It's all the same thing. It's because they're not eating for nourishment at all. That went bye bye years ago. You know, they're killing themselves. And it just have food as their drug. Like, oh, they're just overeating too much. It's like, no, man, it's a desperate act.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  Well, we've made these weird, you know, social agreements about what's acceptable and what's not. And, you know, we've, our sort of resistance to obesity has been eroded and has changed our cultural mores. And now, you know, somebody who's tremendously overweight is seen as normal. And, and I think that, you know, there's a more kind of Rubenesque notion of beauty that is ascending right now as a result of this, where, you know, when we were kids, it's like, maybe there was one overweight kid in every class. And now it's like half of them.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  The t-shirt of the beach.

• 58:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  The t-shirt of the beach kids.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's everywhere now. And that's, that's the norm. And it's tweaked our, our, our kind of, what's the word I'm looking for? Our perception of, of what's appropriate or normal, I suppose.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  Right. And, and again, to come back to sort of why I approach health in terms of, in the context of us as a species is because regardless of cultural norms and, and, you know, cultural, cultural relativity, you know, and what beauty is, I still would make the argument that the human body, like other wild animals, isn't designed to carry extra fat. And, and we're the only Species that's that carries too much weight, every other species in the wild anyway, is exactly the how heavy they're supposed to be because they they self-regulate, not because of willpower, they self-regulate because their bodies are right in tune with nature and they finish eating when they're done eating. And the only animals other than than humans that become overweight are the ones that we domesticate, you know, dogs and cats and cows and pigs and

• 59:57Rich Roll?

  That force feed them.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And we're messing up, yeah. But in the wild, we wouldn't be battling with weight. We do exactly what the gorillas do. You don't see a gorilla with a beer gut. They they eat the amount of calories and the quality of calories. It's perfect and perfect balance with the amount of energy that they expend in their activities. That's it. It ain't complicated.

• 1:00:15Rich Roll?

  And just as an example of of Sid's mindfulness, I was I told him to meet meet a meet meet me here at the house at 3 o'clock and I was a couple of minutes late. I'm pulling into the driveway and and he's walking around our our driveway is gravel and it's it's very rough on a barefoot. Walk around and kind of hurts your feet if you're not wearing shoes. And he's walking around the driveway in his in his bare feet. So I'm like, he's walking his walk, literally and figuratively, of being in contact with the earth and having a tactile experience with his environment, which is a classic example of mindfulness. He had a choice. He could put his shoes on. Maybe it would be more comfortable. But he's like, Okay, I'm going to connect with this place. I've never been before. I mean, I'm

• 1:00:57Rich Roll?

  projecting this on to you, of course. But but I mean, I'm I'm assuming that that's part of your, you know, part of your trip. This is this is part of your way of being.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  Oh, 100%. I mean, it's and just for people who are listening, I don't have dreadlocks.

• 1:01:12Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's the thing about it is, and

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about the hippie thing.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I want to get in that a little bit because I'm like the not the I mean, I'm there's no judgment against hippies. I'm just not a hippie, never have been. I'm an indie rock musician.

• 1:01:26Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  You know, you look more like a hippie than I do.

• 1:01:28Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, my hair's long. I think I'm gonna cut it all off soon.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Okay. The cool people, that's what the cool people are. That's what the kids are doing. Anyhow, but yeah, so. I'd love to talk about the hippie thing.

• 1:01:39Rich Roll?

  Right, well, let's talk about labels in general. I mean, there's the vegan label and there's the paleo label and the low carb label and, you know, every, these labels, and I talk about this a lot, you know, carry with them. They're loaded, you know, in many ways. And my sort of take on the whole word vegan is that it's complicated. And I think when you call yourself vegan, for a lot of people, that conjures up an image of somebody that they have a preconceived judgment about good or bad. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not so good.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:19Rich Roll?

  Oftentimes, there's a political agenda associated with that. There is a, an assumed level of activism that's associated with that.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:29Rich Roll?

  So it's beyond a food choice and it's, it ventures into the realm of politics, maybe even religion for some.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Environment.

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  Environment, for sure. And, and so sometimes, you know, if you're in a position where you're kind of carrying this message of healthy lifestyle, not just diet, but like a healthy, balanced, holistic way of living, sometimes the word vegan fits and works for, for whoever you're talking to, and sometimes it doesn't. So, you know, labels, like, I prefer to not use the label just because I'd rather be neutral and, and I'm not, you know, I'm not waving a flag and trying to convince somebody or recruit, you know, I'm trying to share my experience to somebody who's interested

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  in hearing that, but that's different from a bully pulpit. And I think the word vegan kind of gets more associated with a bully pulpit point of view.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  I would agree with that.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, I don't even mention the word vegan in my book. I am, as a nutritionist, interested in the healthiest foods you can put in your body, and how to put more of those in your body. And I'm interested in, as a wellness coach, because my, you know, one chapter in my book is nutrition and the rest aren't.

• 1:04:07Rich Roll?

  Right, this whole, but it, just so to be clear, it's not a whole book about eating a plant-based diet. It's just one, you know, one of however many, eight chapters, I think, you, how many?

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, six, yeah, six chapters. And I think I do make the, yeah, I, the thing, I mean, I'm, I'm not even technically vegan because I have raw honey now and then.

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  I actually eat honey as well.

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so I just, I was like, you know, I started reading all this crap about agave nectar and was not good, you know, and, and I started at the same time reading a bunch of stuff on raw honey, and I was like, this is kind of cool, but what about the this and that? And I picked up the phone and called the local beekeeper up in Mendocino County, and lover's laying honey, and I just picked up the phone, and I was like, tell me about what you do and how you treat your, your bees and what's your, what's your practice of doing? And he goes, explained it to me, and he goes, if you're ever in the area, I'll put a suit on you and take you into the bee, you know, take you into the bees, you can see what I do. It's local and it's clean and it's well cared for, and that was a choice I made. And in doing that, gave up the label vegan, big whoop. And I was like, it's so not the point of what I do or how I live.

• 1:05:15Speaker 01

  The whole point is, is to live in a way that is in minimal conflict to myself and to the world, that, if I had to sum that up. And that's really what the book is about, too. It's when you remove the conflicts that you, I mean, I think a lot of people... Know conceptually what goes on environmentally in food production and that not only is animals, but that's also just the processing of food, you know? And also the treatment of the animals and the human workers that are involved in that industry. It's horrific. I think people understand that they, a lot of people do anyway. They get it. They've read it. They've seen it. Then they go, I can't even deal with this. I don't even wanna like think about this.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  And so they compartmentalize. They don't wanna think about it. Why? Cause it's troubling. It's troubling. I'm sure you've seen the videos I've seen. That's conflict. When you know something and you have information about something and then you continue to act in a way that is promoting that, that's in conflict. And so I couldn't write a book about health without addressing how our actions affect the world as a whole. And when you shut something of violence and that you're doing, that you have a part in, you shut that away. I don't believe you can shut that away effectively. I think that what you're doing is closing yourself off to that. And in doing so, closing yourself off to a more full experience of life and to a more open

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  relationship with your family and friends. I think you can't just say, well, I'm just not gonna think about this thing, but then I'm gonna think about, I'm still cool with all these other things. I think you need to let it all out and remove the, any kind of conflicts that exist for you. So in that sense-

• 1:06:59Rich Roll?

  It's like a low-grade disharmony to be aware of those issues and have a, like you said, like some court be conflicted over it, but to do it anyway and participate in a system that's rigged to kind of prevent you from really looking at it or really understanding what's going on.

• 1:07:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  When you go to the supermarket, it's a total disconnect.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you don't see it.

• 1:07:18Rich Roll?

  But there is that kind of low-grade, you know, kind of-

• 1:07:23Rich Roll?

  Lack of alignment there. That is like, it's almost like a thing that that is like in the back of your head. It's kind of bugging you, but isn't important enough to do anything about it.

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:32Rich Roll?

  And in my experience, and this is like my experience in recovery, it's been a process of looking at all those things in my life that are that are not in alignment or lack lack of certain harmony and addressing them, resolving them.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:07:45Rich Roll?

  And moving on. I mean, that's a huge premise of like the 12 step program.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  And the more that I can.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Rich Roll?

  You you free yourself of those things and then you become more empowered. You become more holistically well, and you're able to look people in the eye and function and know who you are as a human being.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  You become a more actualized, authentic version of yourself.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Right. And you don't have to be a new agey.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  No, it has nothing to do with that at all.

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  You know, I think people think like, that all sounds good, you know, or, or, you know, I'm just, that's not my world, or especially in the terms of like food, people think, you know, I know animals are harmed. I know it's bad for the environment, but, you know, I, at the end of the day, I need my protein, you know, and like I'm raising kids. And so, you know, I'm willing to kind of make that. And so that's why I've got chapter on food is to say, well, not only do you not need that much protein, but you can get plenty of protein from plants because I have for over 10 years, you know, and spirulina has got twice as much protein in it than beef does, you know, broccoli is more protein than beef, you know, so sort of like to remove those kinds of like, well, here you go, you know, and whether you act on it or not is is profound. It has a profound effect on

• 1:08:58Speaker 01

  your quality of life.

• 1:09:00Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:09:00Speaker 01

  And that it's totally okay to be concerned with your quality of life, like every human being should be 100% concerned, maybe not 100, but a huge percentage of their concern should be their own quality of life, because it speaks to the quality of the lives of the people that they affect and live with and interact with in the world. And that goes for people you don't even know. That goes for people on the freeway, stuck in traffic, and you're pissed off because partly because you don't like your job and because you feed your body junk food and you have no ability or little ability to deal with the stresses of living in Los Angeles. And so you decided to get, you decide to get violent, or you don't decide, but you become violent because you're. You haven't equipped yourself, you know, that it affects people. That's real for me. I see

• 1:09:43Speaker 01

  that that way. I see that putting that Big Mac in your mouth affects how violent you are. I completely make that argument and I will make that argument that what people I look at Congress and I go, gee, I wonder if they took care of themselves, you know, what what our country would look like, you know, if people would feed themselves well.

• 1:10:01Rich Roll?

  What the laws would look like.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  What the laws would look like, what the wars would look like, you know, what would it be if people took a little time to pay attention to what they put in their bodies and how well they take care of themselves, how that would go, because they've linked, you know, anger and violence and stress in general, anxiety and fear to food they have. And that's why a diet is such an important part of mental health and, you know, to me is a fundamental necessity with regards to mental health. Not that psychiatry or psychology or anything else doesn't have its validity, but if you're not feeding your body what it needs to function and survive, well, boy.

• 1:10:39Rich Roll?

  It is the preventive medicine.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  To me.

• 1:10:41Rich Roll?

  That data.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Movement, you know, the things like we move and we nourish, you know, we do those things. That's number one.

• 1:10:49Rich Roll?

  And then getting into the getting into the mental and the spiritual, let's talk a little bit, you know, kind of launching off from mindfulness into, you know, a more, you know, spiritual practice, whether it's meditation or how you can kind of enhance that other side of the equation outside of food.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  I'll, you know, I'm gonna sound like a broken record and for people who are listening, a record is, my first album was on vinyl. So just to date to date me.

• 1:11:21Rich Roll?

  I think our demo is in our age group.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, I know, totally. But I would say that, you know, mindfulness applied to all parts of life, you know, and that's going to be the spiritual, I don't want to say awakening, but it's that kind of experience of life to pay to be attention, to pay attention and to be open in your day to day. And that that's just something that is. You, you as a human being, as it applies to all the things that you do. So it's like, I just, you know, I've been reading a lot of, I'll mention Jeff Stanford again, because it's like all these, at the Stanford, like all these conversations, we're just like talking all the time. And he introduced me to Krishnamurti, who's a philosopher.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And, and his thing is like, you know, going into a room and, and meditating, you know, he doesn't even see that as meditation. His, his argument and his, his whole approach is meditation is watching the everyday. It's how you cook, how you talk, how you walk, watching, being aware, being in the moment. Because it in truly in the moment, it's not even like a watcher of stance, but it's like just being a watch, you know, watching your, just what we're doing, being aware in the moment.

• 1:12:36Rich Roll?

  That's more like an Eckhart Tolle approach to just being present and not being distracted. And being hyper-conscious of your thoughts, your environment. And then it's like, there's not a lot of choice. You're talking to and not thinking about, you know, I gotta call that guy back. And all the other things that enter into our minds.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  Being present. And then you don't have, like, the choices are really not there as much in that moment. The where to go and what to do is there. If you're present in the moment, truly, and, and most people, it's hard to, it takes practice. Like you said, it's a practice, you know, but, but in the moment, you're not going to eat, if you were truly present and truly aware, you wouldn't eat a Twinkie. You know, you would eat something that was good for you, nourishing, because you know that, that you want to be a healthy person, no matter what you want to do in your life. You want to be somebody who lives a long time and, and more importantly than that, lives feeling good every day.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  And you would, you would, you wouldn't, you know, abuse somebody or, or treat somebody badly in the moment. You wouldn't get violent on the freeway because you would realize that's not who I am. That's not who I want to be. It's, but you, if you're not present, you just do that. It's a reaction instead of an action.

• 1:13:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  So spirituality.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  You know, I don't know, I, there's a lot of unknown, but I think that getting more in touch with the, um, the, the present, the energy, if you will, which most of the time I won't, but, um, you know, the energy of the earth and, and, and all the beings in it, um, how to get in touch with that whole seeing things like that. I look at people, for instance, that are morbidly obese, and I used to kind of look at them, go, God, and now I, I feel compassion and I feel like I want to help them and I, and I, it's frustrating when I can't, because most people I can't, because I'm not going to go up to somebody and give them advice if they didn't ask for it. But I see, I see people who are addicts, I see people who are in pain. I don't see somebody who's a pain in the ass because they have to buy two seats on Southwest. I see that as somebody who's suffering from

• 1:14:36Speaker 01

  immense pain and needs help, like any, any addict. And it's, um, just a way of looking at that and being present to that moment. It's not like, you know, criticism.

• 1:14:47Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think it's, it's drawing a distinction between somebody's, you can call it higher self, and, and then behaviors that are not in that person's interest, that sort of run amok because of addictive patterns, or habit, or what have you. It's sort of like, when you're in a road rage incident, and that's not your normal, that's not kind of who you are, but you just react and you yell at somebody and you go, oh my God, that's not me, why did I do that? You know, your higher self is saying, well, the real me, or the real me, I guess, you know, wouldn't do that. And yes, I'm, I'm lacking control or self-control over my behaviors because of X, Y, and Z.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:29Rich Roll?

  And just having knee jerk reactions to things is a good barometer of how present you are. Because if you're present, you can say, oh, it's interesting that I'm feeling angrier right now, and I have a choi, I have a choice. Like, am I going to go crazy right now? Or am I going to kind of pause and just observe it and make a different choice? And that's a mastery, you know, it's a mastery over your domain, and it's understanding that You can draw a distinction between your thoughts and who you are. They're just thoughts, or they're just emotions.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:16:00Rich Roll?

  But my consciousness, or my better self, or my higher self, or whatever you want to call it, it gets back into words and phrases that that really trip people up because it triggers this kind of new age resistance, or whatever. But just, but everybody knows, like, oh, yeah, you know, I thought that, but it wasn't that weird that I thought that, because that's not the way I usually think.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:20Rich Roll?

  And you can kind of analyze your own thoughts. So, right in there, you can see a dichotomy between consciousness and thought, or consciousness and emotion.

• 1:16:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  And there is a starting point, um, from which you can grow into having control over those things, I think. At least, that's what I've learned, and I'm trying to continue to learn. But for somebody who, who might be listening, and these are brand new concepts for them, or they're having a resistance to even hearing this, I mean, what are, are there some sort of simple, entry level, elementary tools, or things that somebody could carry with them, uh, to start working on this? I mean, one thing that my wife always tells me to do, which I should probably do more of, and I don't, is to have a rubber band around my wrist, and every time I think a

• 1:17:11Rich Roll?

  negative thought, or I react to something without being mindful, yeah, I snap it. And it's a, it's like a Pavlovian, you know, reminder of, you know, I, I could, I have a choice.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:17:22Rich Roll?

  I don't have to perceive this as negative. I can make a different choice.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I'd say two things. One is, I, I actually would say, in the moment of, of mindfulness, in that example you said, where, you know, you're feeling the anger, and I would almost go so far as to say, there's really not even a choice there, because at the point where you're so-

• 1:17:40Rich Roll?

  Well, it's become so over-consuming.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. At the point where you're so mindful that you are aware of the anger, you've made your choice. You're not going to act on it. I mean, you're there, you're in the place. You know, you're in the place of just, well, that's that, and here I am, and you're not acting on it, because you're, you're, you're watching, you're paying attention already, so you, you're there, which is a great thing. For people who, it sounds next level, it sounds weird, in a way, but so does eating plants, to most people, you know? And that's why it's like, what? That's just like crazy. And I think that, you know, that's, it's going to take me, I'm not there, you know? And it's like, well, you can put a cucumber in your mouth, you know? In the mindfulness thing, I'm a big journaling fan.

• 1:18:19Rich Roll?

  They could just pretend it's something else.

• 1:18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a cucumber mac. And, but I think journaling is a great thing and I talk about in the book. So to me, I always break it down in the book into the littlest steps. And I think journaling is powerful. And I say, if it's, if it's about putting a, you know, a sticky pad and a pencil in your pocket today, because that's all you can do, do, do that and don't even write on it. You know, just have it in your pocket because when you feel it in your pocket, you are aware. In that moment, you go, whoa, I got that sticky pad on it. And eventually you might pull it out and you might write a word on there, you know, angry. Or you might write a word that says blue, who, whatever, whatever it is. And that just might start the process of writing things down or of thinking about writing things down.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  And then all of a sudden, you're a person who maybe texts one last time that day because you had a thought and that you wanted to get on paper. And then you realize that your thoughts are, are as wonderful as anybody else's thoughts. And, and, or maybe you use that paper to draw a little picture with a pencil, you know? You don't have to, I think people get, they wanna, I'm totally guilty of this too. In the past, I've totally done this where I find some exercise program and I just go balls out. You know, get all the gear and the whole thing and then burn out again. And it's, I think that's our inclination is we want that high of that excitement of a diet or a, or a exercise plan, but sometimes.

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Or if I'm going to write something down, I better be, you know, I better be Norman Mailer. When I write it down.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:47Rich Roll?

  It's gotta be brilliant and witty.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Laptop, first of all, right? You need it. Yeah. And it's gotta be awesome, you know? And there's the judgment, you know? But sometimes, not sometimes, it is the process, you know? And you have to start and, and to get to that point. And so, so in answer to your question, anybody looking, listening to this right now. Get up, go get a piece of paper and stuff in your pocket. Don't even worry about a pen. And that's a, that's a step because that's just something that you're gonna do. An act of taking care of yourself because it's the intent of I'm gonna start expressing myself in this way. And the more I express myself over time, if I build on this, the more I express myself, the more I get things that are in my mind out

• 1:20:27Speaker 01

  onto paper in a way that I can look at them and kind of see where conflict, conflict exists that maybe I didn't even know. Maybe I hate my job and I didn't even realize it. I've just been doing it for so damn long and maybe I realize I'm not happy in my relationship and I need to, to work on that in a real way. Maybe I, how do you know, you know, but start today to little, little things. And this is really, I can't stress enough, it is not, you know, hippie dippy. This is being a human being in the modern world. This is, if we're gonna work as a species in the, in the world that we have created for ourselves, we have better figure out a way

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  to coexist in a, in a, in a better manner, in a more respectful manner, in a more coexistent manner than we do currently. And it ain't getting better. And so I think part of it is how can, instead of, you know, writing a letter to your congressman, which I'm not opposed to, but I do think it starts in your body and your mind. And I think that, that the act of taking care of yourself is gonna eventually lead to, you know, my dad is asthma free. He did that because I started taking care of myself, plain and simple, because finally he was like, all right, what do I do? But he wouldn't have said, all right, what do I do? My mom wouldn't be, you know, in the best shape she's been in years. If I didn't do what I did, I didn't call them and go, here's what you guys should do.

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  You know, I just said, I'm doing this, you know, and I, my asthma went away and he had asthma too. And he was like, all right, what do I do three years ago?

• 1:21:56Rich Roll?

  It's the difference between attraction and promotion and standing in the light and attracting those people into you that are kind of on the, you know, they're, they're, they're ready to resonate in the way that you are. And you will bring those people into your life at the, at the opportune time.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  But if you go and say, you know, I think there's an inclination, it's very human to, and I've seen this a lot with people that have. Embraced this way of living or eating and have experienced dramatic turnarounds in their health and their perspective of the world. And you want to share that, right? And then you want, and then you're frustrated when everyone's not on board. And then you, you start to get, you get, you get hardened and then you get angry and then it, and then you become entrenched. And then you resentful and all these, you know, you can see the cycle going on and on and on as opposed to, hey, man, I'm just over here doing my thing. If you're into it, that's cool. I'm happy to talk to you about it. If not, like, hey, man, good. That's great. You know,

• 1:22:53Speaker 01

  I'm totally, I mean, I've done, I've gone through that exact thing, you know, and it's hard. And that's something that I work on for myself to be aware of that in the moment. I interviewed this guy, Gene Bauer, who started the farm sanctuary. Yeah. I did a little radio interview series and, and, and I asked him, I was like, how do you, you know, knowing what you know about what's going on right now as we're talking, you know, in the industry and all the good that you've done, but how do you get up every day and just go like, like, I know, how do you not go bomb a, you know what I mean? It's like, how can that? And he goes, I just wake up and I go focus on the good that we're doing and how much better things are than they were.

• 1:23:35Speaker 01

  And that's all I can do because otherwise, if I think about all the stuff that's going on at this moment, I would never get out of bed kind of thing, you know? And so you, he just does what he does, you know, he can't, there's only so much you can do. And as much as I'd love everybody to start eating really well and feeling really good for my own sake, because I'd love to live in that world. And I'd love my kids to grow up in that world. I can't, you know?

• 1:23:59Rich Roll?

  No. And it's also recognizing the ego component in that. Like, I'm going to be the guy who's going to get all, you know what I mean? And it's just share your experience and somebody comes to you and they want to help and you're able to help them, then hey, man, if that's all that it is, then that's, that's fantastic. You know what I mean?

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  And I'm happy in that, you know, but, but I have moments, you know, of course, the love of God, you know, your kid is overweight and you're, you know, and you know, better, you know, especially when it comes to kids, it breaks my heart sometimes, you know, but I gotta, I, I shut my mouth.

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  You pull your journal out and start writing.

• 1:24:34Speaker 01

  Pull my damn sticky pad out of my.

• 1:24:35Rich Roll?

  Sticky pad. Well, I want to talk about that a little bit more. I'm always advocating on the podcast journaling and I talk a lot about the artist way. And that's.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Which is so funny. I have to interrupt you because there were so many times when I read your book. That I was like this, my, and even my wife was like, this is eerie because there was literally things you said like potato chips and french fries are vegan. And that's another reason why I don't mention vegan because vegan and healthy don't necessarily mean the same.

• 1:24:59Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  And then, and then the artist way, I quote that in my book too. When I was, you know, we're doing the band full time. I was, I used the artist way. I mean, I was doing three pages every morning for years, you know? And it was so funny when you, when you went, I was like, Lisa, look at this like.

• 1:25:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I can't, I can't over emphasize the impact that that program has had on my life.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:25:21Rich Roll?

  And again, it's not a hippie dippy thing. It's like you get up in the morning and you write three pages, no matter what, you journal it. Even if all you write is, I don't want to write right now and I have nothing in my mind. And you just repeat that like, like a kid who's in trouble on the chalkboard. Then you fulfilled that duty for the day. But it has been remarkable in kind of unlocking my unconscious mind. And I don't know that I ever would have written a book had I not done the artist way. Or I don't know that I would have ever made these kind of life changes that I've made without doing the artist way. So it's not about being an artist or being creative. And again, it gets back to labels. It's like, well, I'm not a creative person. I'm not an artist. That's not for me.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Bad drawer.

• 1:26:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And you know, Julie was talking about that on the podcast the other day. So it's about understanding that we are all, you know, expressing creativity in our lives, artists or not.

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  And I think that we can live a more fulfilling, happier, more balanced life. If we are more expressive of what that natural creativity is.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Totally agree.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Again, releasing yourself from the strict definition of those terms. What, you know, no matter what your job is or what have you. So the simple practice of, of doing this writing.

• 1:26:38Rich Roll?

  You know, no computer, we're not talking about a keyboard, get rid of that. But the tactile experience of pencil on paper unlocks something and you will find, you know, when you're on page two and a half of those three pages that you got to write in the morning, you start writing about something, just like you said, that you weren't even aware of that comes out. And then you're like, oh, my God, I didn't even think about that. And that's exciting. And then that creates a little bit of momentum that sets you on a tiny little bit of a trajectory tweak in your life. And when you start doing that consistently, your life changes in huge ways.

• 1:27:13Speaker 01

  I agree. And if you don't have time for three pages, one paragraph. I mean, honestly, right?

• 1:27:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because it's better to do it than to not do it at all.

• 1:27:21Speaker 01

  And sometimes I advocate also that once in a while, do it with the intent that you're going to throw away the paper or burn the paper afterwards. Talk about powerful. You know, nobody will ever read that ever, period. And you burn it afterwards, the stuff that will come out on that paper. Man, you know, and I did that when, you know, back in, when I was living in Los Angeles and, you know, doing the band, you know, the band was active and, and, you know, being in my studio, I would just, I'd always go in when I do my writing, first thing I do is three pages. And I would just kind of get the juices flowing, get everything kind of moving and moving and moving. And sometimes that would just lead into a song, lead into something, you know? It was just like, and I dabbled in short story writing and not because I was good or bad or what.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it was like, I want to do this exercise of creativity. I want to just see what that goes. I was, I basically became open to more creativity. And I guess that's what I advocate for, that it's not a good or bad, any, anything like that. It's just when you, when you understand that creative creativity is, is natural to us as a species. And I would argue that for sure, the way our minds work is very creative, the way that we can just figure things out, the way that we can to add more of that in, in whatever medium is going to be excellent for you. Look at kids, look what kids naturally do.

• 1:28:41Rich Roll?

  Of course, before the filters are imposed.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:44Rich Roll?

  And I think to be clear, I mean, you're somebody who, you know, I think a listener might say, yeah, but you know, he's a musician and he's an actor, he's a naturally creative person. And, you know, I'm a triathlete and an investment banker and, you know, I read spreadsheets all day long and that's just not for me. So again, it goes back to the label, it's sort of. Regardless of what your avocation is or your interest, and I've said this before, and I apologize if you heard me say it because I don't, I don't want to be a broken vinyl record. But, but, you know, your life is the expression of your art, no matter what it is. If you're reading spreadsheets all day, then how are you doing that in a mindful

• 1:29:28Rich Roll?

  way that is, you know, the most expressive, authentic way of doing that for you? If you're riding a bike, you know, whatever it is. And, and I think that the journaling is a way to connect with yourself in a different way and learn something about yourself and maybe unlock or discover an interest you didn't know that you have, that you could then explore, that you didn't even know was missing, that will make your life more fulfilling.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I would say if you're crunching numbers and doing all that, and it's, it's a, you know, mind numbing exercise, you know, getting home and, and taking, if it's just one minute to write something before you pop on the television because you're exhausted, but if you can do one minute of just writing a sentence down and expressing something, you know, and I think I always come back to that because I think taking, people think that taking on something like that is just too momentous and we, we're tired. I'm tired, you know, I, I'm dizzy, you know, we don't have childcare. We're, we're raising a family, you know, and taking care of a family and working full time at the same time. It's, it's a lot of busyness, you know, and sometimes it's, you know, my

• 1:30:36Speaker 01

  wife just talked about the other day, she never was a runner, ever. Couldn't stand it. But one day I got home from work, like about, what, four or five, six months ago, and she goes, I ran down the driveway to get the mail and back. I was like, you what? She goes, I ran down the driveway to, and I just got, I just, I was going to get the mail and I just ran. And it felt really good. And that's just where she started. It was like, he was going to get the mail anyway. Right? So it didn't take any more time out of her day.

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  It took less time.

• 1:31:05Speaker 01

  It took less. Exactly. And, and, and that's where it started. And six, she'd been running for six months now. You know, never, I've been married 18 years. She couldn't stand running. She'd try it now and then, just never liked it. You know, it's always yoga. And she loves yoga, and she still does, but we don't have the time. She doesn't have the time to go to an hour and a half yoga class, right? So she runs. And now she, and she did that. She goes, I basically did exactly what you, what you advocate, which is I just, I started with like this minute thing, but it just planted the seed.

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  And seed, right?

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  And the seed. And bringing creativity to whatever you do is such a life enhancing act. I don't care if you're a construction worker, a lawyer, or an accountant, or whatever. You can be creative. You have time. You can take a minute to do whatever.

• 1:31:49Rich Roll?

  Right. What if you're a self loathing couch potato unemployed?

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Then you probably have some awesome paintings that are in your head right now. And you should get them out.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  That's true. Self loathing is a good place to start, right?

• 1:32:03Speaker 01

  Some of the best arts come from self.

• 1:32:04Rich Roll?

  The bigger the pain body.

• 1:32:05Speaker 01

  Our entire first record was self, self lover.

• 1:32:10Rich Roll?

  I want to hear that.

• 1:32:13Rich Roll?

  Cool, man.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Self titled.

• 1:32:15Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, I think we did it.

• 1:32:17Speaker 01

  Did we do it?

• 1:32:18Rich Roll?

  What else you want to talk about? We don't, we can keep going, man.

• 1:32:21Speaker 01

  No, I've got nothing. Do I have anything? No.

• 1:32:24Rich Roll?

  We gotta save something for Wednesday night.

• 1:32:27Speaker 01

  That's right. We should announce that.

• 1:32:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we should. Well, I'll put this up Wednesday. This will probably, yeah, this is going to go up on Wednesday. So the day of. So if you're listening to this right when it came out and you're in Los Angeles, Sid and I are going to be doing an event called Book Plates at the Park La Brea Theater, where we're just gonna sit on a stage and talk about book stuff, right?

• 1:32:49Speaker 01

  I guess I have actually no idea.

• 1:32:50Rich Roll?

  I don't know. And there was a very impressive sounding moderator, whose name escapes me right now, who's gonna, who's supposed to be moderating this.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  So are we going, are you and I arguing?

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  Sound, I don't think so. No, but I, this guy sounds like he's smarter than both of us together.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  That doesn't surprise me.

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  Well, and I guess we should say, we met through this guy Tyson Cornell, who's an amazing guy here in Los Angeles, who, correct me if I'm wrong, but he worked at Book Soup for years and years and years, which if you're in LA, you're aware of because it is the, you know, the spot for book lovers in Los Angeles and kind of the epicenter for the literary culture of Southern California. And he curated these sort of parlor evenings where amazing literary talent would come to Book Soup and they would have these sort of roundtable discussions

• 1:33:50Rich Roll?

  and what have you. And as a result of that, he's sort of integrated himself into that culture and he's since moved on and he started a literary agency called Rare Bird Lit, where he represents writers and does publicity for them and helps them get out there. And I met Tyson through our mutual friend, Anna David, last year. And he's been very gracious in trying to help me, you know, get my book out and giving me great advice. And he's working with Sid. So he suggested that we get together and then I did your radio show.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:34:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then he's put us together on this panel thing for Wednesday night, which should be fun. So anything that Tyson does, who's also, who's also a musician.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  I know, I saw him play.

• 1:34:34Rich Roll?

  Who rocks out.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  He totally rocked out. God.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  He's cool.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:34:38Speaker 01

  Super cool. Yeah. Cool. Talk about, you know, pushes books and publicity and all the guests, but he's also a musician, you know, and he's.

• 1:34:45Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 1:34:47Rich Roll?

  Fascinating, very smart guy with a really cool personal life story. Actually, I should have him on the podcast.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  I know, seriously.

• 1:34:55Rich Roll?

  He'd be really cool.

• 1:34:56Speaker 01

  He would be. He's done a lot of stuff.

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  Can I mention one last thing?

• 1:34:59Rich Roll?

  No, we're gonna, we're gonna, I want you to promote all your stuff.

• 1:35:01Speaker 01

  Well, okay.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  Talk about all your stuff.

• 1:35:02Speaker 01

  I was just gonna do that real quick, just to kind of.

• 1:35:04Rich Roll?

  But while you're in LA, what else are you doing? Do you have anything, any other? Just for people out there, wherever you're traveling over the next couple of weeks.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  I will be probably in the west side. Tyson's got some bookstores lined up for me to visit and pop in. I don't have anything formal, so best thing to do would be to check my.

• 1:35:21Speaker 01

  Either follow me on Twitter at Sid Garza-Hillman or go to my website, which is transitioningtohealth.net. And I'll have anything added, but otherwise I'm kind of, I had, I had a thing last, yes, Saturday down in Redonda Beach, and then I have the thing with you and me on Wednesday.

• 1:35:37Rich Roll?

  And if you have any links for any of that stuff, just email to me and I'll put them in the show notes for the podcast.

• 1:35:43Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:43Rich Roll?

  So when I put it up tomorrow.

• 1:35:45Speaker 01

  I guess if somebody was interested in the music, it's the, the SHQ.com that it stands for the Sid Hillman Quartet.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  Ah, I haven't checked that out. I have to check that out.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  It actually just got redone. And so it's kind of interesting, the writing of the book. I've been off music for a couple of years, just kind of got burnt after being in LA for so many years. But now it's, I'm kind of back, you know, the band's got a new album that we've finished and mastered. And we're going to probably put it out in this year, which is interesting. So kind of like it was, I wrote, I wrote a health book and then I, now I'm thinking about music again.

• 1:36:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, my music again, totally weird the way that that is.

• 1:36:20Rich Roll?

  Life sounds.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  And I run a, I'm the programs director for a wellness center up in Mendocino called the Mendocino Center for Living Well at the Stanford Inn. And so if anybody's up that way, Mendocino County is a great, I want to get you up there. So we'll talk off.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would like to.

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  But I want to get you up there and talk about maybe doing a retreat or something like.

• 1:36:38Rich Roll?

  That'd be great.

• 1:36:39Speaker 01

  I think would be super cool. It's, talk about getting back to the natural. There's a bunch of great trail running and all sorts of cool stuff. It's a, the Stanford is a vegan resort, the only one in the country, I think. And there's a restaurant, whole plant restaurant there, which is phenomenal. So.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  Called Ravens.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  And so that's it.

• 1:36:58Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool.

• 1:36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:59Rich Roll?

  So it's interesting. So what I like about, one of the many things I like about you is that you're doing all the, you're pursuing the music. You wrote a book, you were an actor, you are, you know, a nutritionist and you're, you're at this wellness center, you're doing all these things. So if somebody says to you, hey Sid, nice to meet you. Like, what do you do? Like, who are you? You know, you're not kind of like my wife is similar. She's doing all sorts of different things. Transcending this idea of, you know, you do one thing, I'm a lawyer and that's who I am. And my job is my identity and all of that. So I'm interested in your perspective on that. Like, again, it gets back to this theme of labels that we're talking about.

• 1:37:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:42Speaker 01

  First, I just want to be clear that I do all those things and still live paycheck to paycheck. So that's the first thing.

• 1:37:50Speaker 01

  And secondly.

• 1:37:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you're doing, you're pursuing things that interest you and you're finding a way to, move through life with those being, you know, that being your kind of bifurcated vocation.

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think what happened is early on, like I said, I, I think, you know, working at UCLA and having the safe job. And it was that sort of break where I, I quit and became a full-time actor that really opened me up to, I just became, it was a, I look back now and go, well, that was the moment because I became this person who was open to just about anything. You know, and I was, and, and so acting, okay, I had never acted before and I was like, this is, this seems fun. You know, and it was nerve wracking and scary and I did it anyway and, and, and music. And, and then all of a sudden I was, I started, you know, found the Stanford Inn and was like, I think I want to be a nutritionist. You know, I was like, all right, fine, go, you know, be a nutritionist.

• 1:38:45Rich Roll?

  Right. We didn't even talk about that, like where, where this leap suddenly occurred.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Well, I was vegan when I moved to Mendocino. We found the Ravens restaurant. My wife's like, we have, there's a vegan restaurant in Mendocino. I was like, oh God, we gotta check that out, you know? And so we went down there and I was like, this place is awesome. And, and we actually moved up there. I'm also a letterpress printer. Like we moved up, my wife's a graphic designer. We started a letterpress company and left from LA so that I could, we could print up there.

• 1:39:10Rich Roll?

  That's very hipster.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. And I still, I can still do that, you know? And, and, and so, um, yeah, so we found this restaurant and I, and this is gonna, this is like so, it's so funny. My life is so hilarious in, to me, but I thought, I gotta work at this restaurant. This is awesome. And so what I did is I went back, this is six years ago, went back to school and became a bartender. Became a certified bartender.

• 1:39:33Rich Roll?

  Just so you could work at this restaurant?

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  Cause I loved, I was like, this is the coolest place ever. It's like an eco resort and awesome. And they had a beautiful.

• 1:39:39Rich Roll?

  But you were living in LA at the time and you would just visit or you had moved?

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Had moved.

• 1:39:43Rich Roll?

  But you had moved, you, you had already, you had already left acting then?

• 1:39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:48Rich Roll?

  So you were, you were gonna be.

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  But I was, I, we, I was out, out of.

• 1:39:52Rich Roll?

  You're like, I'm out of LA.

• 1:39:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:54Rich Roll?

  And what was that about? Like, why were you?

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  I just, we got.

• 1:39:57Rich Roll?

  Just done with it?

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  Done with it. Done with it. 20 years, hadn't really played in LA much, toured, you know, done tours and I got burnt on playing LA. So the band was like, what are we doing? I was like, I don't know. I just don't want to play in LA. It's too stressful. I don't, I don't like it, you know? And then acting. The work started to slow down to where I was just doing commercials only. And I was like, this is not, you know, talk about the grass is always greener. I'm making a living as an actor and I'm happy because I'm doing a FedEx commercial, you know, and, and we're calling back on one. And that's a funny, do I have time for a quick story?

• 1:40:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  Well, there was the last.

• 1:40:31Rich Roll?

  This is in radio.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  One of the last.

• 1:40:32Rich Roll?

  I know, really.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Ridgeway, cutting in four seconds. The one of the last.

• 1:40:36Rich Roll?

  Acc you with her.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  One of the last, one of the last auditions I ever did, we were thinking about moving and I, it was a FedEx callback. I didn't actually get the commercial and I went there and never before I'd been acting full time for over 10 years at that point, never before had there been a wardrobe stylist at an audition, but there was on this one, it was a callback for a caveman part. And so there I show up and I, and I walk in and I check in and she goes, okay, there's a wardrobe stylist, you gotta get into wardrobe. And I was like, this is an audition. She was, yeah, I know, but the client wants to see everybody in, in, you know.

• 1:41:07Rich Roll?

  They look like.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  Right. They couldn't imagine apparently. And so there I walk over.

• 1:41:11Rich Roll?

  They weren't doing their morning pages.

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And so I walk over to this wardrobe stylist and they have a full wardrobe stylist there with racks of clothes and I'm putting, and I, by this point, like, I think we, we, we had started looking like we were getting ready to move, like I couldn't take it.

• 1:41:26Rich Roll?

  This is like, but you're like.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we, so I'm, there I am and I'm putting on a caveman outfit, like a Fred Flintstone, like a thing with a, with a wig, you know, and.

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  Right, like the Geico commercial guy, whatever.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  It's, yes, it's predated that. I mean, this was in 2006 and, and, and I'm putting this thing on for a callback and I, in my head involuntarily, I said to myself, I heard my voice say, I am so fucking out of here. And that was the last audition I did. I said, I can't, I just can't do it. It was like, I can't do it. And so we put the house up for sale and then that was that and we, and we left. And, and I like being down here now, but for the first couple of years, I didn't even want to come to LA. I was just so burnt on the whole.

• 1:42:08Rich Roll?

  Right. But this was before you were pursuing nutrition.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  But yeah, so I started working at the restaurant as a server bartender.

• 1:42:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:17Speaker 01

  But being in, talk about just being open to weird stuff.

• 1:42:20Rich Roll?

  Being in that environment, starting to get interested in that.

• 1:42:22Speaker 01

  Yes, and then I met the owner, we became friends, we're talking blah, blah, blah, and I'm learning, and I've been reading on nutrition for 20 years, just wasn't a nutritionist, but ever since 92, reading book after book after book, so he and I read the same books. And I thought, I'm going back to school, I'm doing this. So I did. And that was that.

• 1:42:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  So what's next? I have no idea.

• 1:42:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  Maybe a, you know, trapeze or something.

• 1:42:43Rich Roll?

  You can't, don't, don't limit your, yeah, don't, don't limit it. It will be something you can't imagine, I'm sure.

• 1:42:48Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:49Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:42:49Speaker 01

  But I like being open to whatever happens.

• 1:42:51Rich Roll?

  That's what it's about.

• 1:42:52Speaker 01

  And that's what it's about, it's not about what you do, but just being open to that kind of.

• 1:42:55Rich Roll?

  And again, that's not easy. That, that is the warrior path, man. You know?

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  But.

• 1:43:01Speaker 01

  But I wanted to thank you, Rich, because you've been really supportive of the book from even before we met.

• 1:43:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. Well, I love the book.

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  I really appreciate that because it's, it was such a huge, it's a little indie squirt, you know? So it's nice to, it was really nice that you.

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  Did you do the, the letter pressing on it yourself?

• 1:43:17Speaker 01

  No, that's my, no, it's, no, it's not letterpress. I wish I could have letterpressed that.

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  Did your wife do the graphic design for that?

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Graphic design, she's my wife's partner.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:43:25Speaker 01

  And so they, they work together and they have a design firm and so she designed the. But it's supposed to be, I mean, it's, the publisher wanted it, he, when we were talking about how the book would look, he said, you know, I've got this reissue of the Communist Manifesto on my desk. And it's little, and he sent me the measurements and my book is exactly those measurements. Like he, we, he envisioned and I was like, loved it. Having a little manifesto, a little, approaching the natural health manifesto, you know, it's a hip pocket.

• 1:43:51Rich Roll?

  Right, you put it in your pocket, because it is a different, yeah, it has different dimensions than a typical book.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't want it to be this diet book with a picture of a squash on the cover, you know? And seven days to, you know, blue skin or whatever.

• 1:44:03Rich Roll?

  It's sticking out of your back pocket as you're walking across the campus of Kent State.

• 1:44:08Speaker 01

  That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is.

• 1:44:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How has your experience been in the world of publishing?

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  Talk about, you know, in some ways, it's a lot like music, you know, because I was always a, you know, we had very independent labels put out our records and, and so the, you know, the mystique of going on tour is dispelled when you're on tour. You're just like, I'm just driving to the next show. It just happens to be a longer drive, you know, but it's not as, it's not as glamorous as you are, you know, when you haven't toured, you go, I'm gonna go on tour, you know, and there I was on tour going, God, I really want to get home, you know, and as much as, and it was also fun too, but still, but, you know, I did this thing on Saturday at this bookstore and it was like an author meet and greet. There's like six authors, you know, and I'm walking in with my box of books and I see another dude five feet from me walking in with his box of books. And I'm like, you know, we're like published authors.

• 1:45:00Rich Roll?

  Like Willy Lowman.

• 1:45:01Speaker 01

  It's like, it is. It's, I was like door to door salesman, you know, like here I am, I'm walking and selling my wares, you know, so that's kind of a, it's only just when you get behind the veil. Yeah. I don't know if you've ever read Tom Robbins?

• 1:45:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:13Speaker 01

  The skinny legs and all, it's like the veils, you know, you remove that veil and it's like, oh, this is, there's no glamour here. It's cool. I'm glad I wrote the book and I'm, you know, proud of it, but it's just, you know, you gotta hustle.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  It is interesting. And, you know, my book is with a big publishing house and I had certain, you know, projections of, of what I thought the kind of release would look like and what I'd be doing and, and, and those met up in, in certain ways, but I completely underestimated the Willy Lowman aspect of it, you know, I was like, all right, well, they're gonna send me my itinerary of all the bookstores that I'm gonna be going to and I'm gonna get on a jet plane and I'm gonna fly around the country and shake a bunch of hands and like you see in the movies, the guy who's signing books and there's a big line, you know?

• 1:45:58Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, out the door.

• 1:46:01Rich Roll?

  And, and not to discredit Crown, because they did a great job and they had marketing people that were helping me and, and who are really nice people. And in the grand scheme of things, I had a very good experience in the world of publishing, but. You have to take responsibility for it yourself. And I had to, you know, and my publicist was great too. But, but I had to, you know, really take the initiative and go, hey, I want to go here. Like, and then start calling people and make it happen myself. And go to bookstores where six people showed up and one person bought a book and do all that. You don't, you don't realize that that's really part of it. And, and you have to buy the books.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:42Rich Roll?

  And then go and sell them, you know?

• 1:46:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's the same thing as music. You know, the label show up and give me records on tour and I'd buy them. Yeah. My records, but I bought them and then I'd sell them and then whatever's left.

• 1:46:55Rich Roll?

  Right. And you think, well, the publisher bought the book. They technically, they own the book. It's their book. So it's sort of like, well, well, no, I mean, I did a deal with a, I signed a contract with Crown. So they, you know, like the copyright is mine, but it's like, it's their book. They paid me in advance. So they want to recoup that advance, then there is an incentive for me to get out and hustle. Right? So it's sort of like, all right, well, help me sell your book. And they're like, no, actually that's your job.

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:23Rich Roll?

  You know, like for the most part.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. And I mean, luckily I had that experience as an indie musician. I mean, I was like, I'm not sitting here.

• 1:47:30Rich Roll?

  And also, you know, I, and you go to those bookstore, bookstores and only a couple of people show up. And you're like, oh, well, this is why publishing, you know, like, what are they going to do? Spend thousands and thousands of dollars to fly you all over the place and put you up in hotels. So like four people can show up and it doesn't make business sense. So I understand why they don't do that. And I'm not a guy who shows up at book signings. So I'm like, you know, I can't like begrudge, you know, other people for not showing up unless they're good friends of mine.

• 1:47:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Rich Roll?

  I mean, calling all your friends. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's, it's, you have to get out there.

• 1:48:04Rich Roll?

  You really do. And it's, and it's hard and it's, it's work, you know? I put as much work into the marketing as I did into the writing, you know? It becomes a job and, and it's fun. It's great, you know? And you have to be.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  There are worse jobs.

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  Shameless.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are worse jobs.

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  Very shameless about it.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You do, but that's why it's great having guys like Tyson, because he's, he's not a slick.

• 1:48:24Rich Roll?

  Not at all.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Deal maker. You know, he's just like, yeah, let's have some good ideas. And I mean, he was like, do a radio thing where you're the host. I was like, well, how's that promote the book? He's like, because you're, you're, it's your name. You're out there and that'll promote the book by virtue of you being out there. You know, I never would have thought of that in a million years, you know? So. Pretty interesting.

• 1:48:42Rich Roll?

  What do you think I'm doing this podcast for?

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Finding Ultra.

• 1:48:47Rich Roll?

  The Finding Ultra Podcast.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Let's talk about you and how much you like me.

• 1:48:53Rich Roll?

  Anyway, all right, man. Well, I'm looking forward to getting together again with you on Wednesday.

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, me too.

• 1:48:59Rich Roll?

  So it should be good.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:49:00Rich Roll?

  So if you happen to listen to this immediately upon it being uploaded to iTunes and you live in Los Angeles, Park La Brea Theater, I'll put a link to the event. I tweeted it today, which is Monday. But if you didn't see that, I'll put a link in the show notes and the book is Approaching the Natural. What's the subtitle again?

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Colon, A Health Manifesto.

• 1:49:22Rich Roll?

  A Health Manifesto.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  That's a tongue in cheek.

• 1:49:26Rich Roll?

  Needs to check it out. Yeah, check out the book and it's cheap on Amazon.

• 1:49:30Speaker 01

  Nine ninety-five.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  It's nine ninety-five.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wanted, I mean, I just wanted it to be accessible.

• 1:49:37Rich Roll?

  It's very, yeah. And it is accessible. It's really easy to read. You know, in addition to being short, it's very clear, plain English. Yeah. And it, it hits on a lot of important areas of life that you're not going to find in a typical plant-based nutrition book or any plant-based nutrition book, really. So it's unique in that regard. I can't recommend it enough, but I would say that if you are going to go to Amazon, which you will, because I'm telling you to go to Amazon, first go to richroll.com on the blog page. You want to click on that Amazon, Amazon banner there, don't you?

• 1:50:13Speaker 01

  That goes through you.

• 1:50:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. Right. You're going to click on it.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  I'm gonna. Yeah.

• 1:50:19Rich Roll?

  Heck, yeah. I didn't even know that. And because you're going to buy stuff on Amazon anyway.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Rich Roll?

  You're going to buy Sid's book, but you're probably going to buy other stuff too. Yeah, like toothbrushes and.

• 1:50:27Speaker 01

  Goji berries.

• 1:50:27Rich Roll?

  If you're, if you're an Amazon Prime member, you could buy like, you know, one, you know, sort of 12 ounce can of orange juice.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Ship for free.

• 1:50:36Rich Roll?

  Which is, yeah, which is not really very sustainable.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  By ten, by ten.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  This is, this is not thematically consistent with the message of Approaching the Natural.

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  This is called Approaching the Amazon.

• 1:50:48Rich Roll?

  Approaching the Amazon. A manifesto for never leaving your house and living the good life.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:50:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, Amazon, we love you. Yes. But anyway, it won't cost you a cent extra and it'll throw a couple pennies in our jar to keep the bandwidth going so I can keep doing the podcast and have Tyson on. Okay, yeah, I think you should. All right, cool. Well, thank you, Rich. All right, man. Thanks for being here, Sid. All right, thanks. All right. See ya. Peace. Plants.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  The.

• 1:55:16Rich Roll?

  The.