The Best of 2014 (Part 1)

This is the time of year for celebration. This is the time of year for giving back. This is the time of year for gratitude. This is the time of year for reflection. So let's do all those things. Welcome to the second annual Best of the RRP Anthology. This is our way of reflecting back. Our way of expressing gratitude. Our way of giving thanks for taking this journey with us. I pride myself on bringing a wide variety of personalities, opinions and attitudes to the show. When I look back over 2014, even I am surprised by how many incredibly interesting and unique people and perspectives I was honored to entertain and share with you. Second listens brought new insights. Another reminder of what a gift this show has been to me. A gift that gives and keeps on giving. A compendium of some of my favorite conversations of 2014, the next two episodes of the podcast are certain to catapult you into the new year inspired. If you’ve been with me all along, these offerings will bring certain insights back into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your trajectory heading into the new year. If you're new to the show, then these episodes will definitely inspire you to peruse the catalog and listen in full to some of the guests and or episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology are enumerated below. It has been an incredible year. My blessings are many. My gratitude is overflowing. This is my way way of saying thank you. I appreciate you. Here's to an extraordinary 2015 — the year we manifest our greatest dreams into reality. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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

• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 121, The Best of 2014, Part 1.

• 1:23Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. My name's Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast, the Rich Roll Podcast, the RRP. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for spreading the word. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. And thank you for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases, especially all you guys that use the banner ad for your holiday purchases. That helped us out big time. So I so appreciate all of you guys. Happy holidays. Happy New Year. It's that time of year. What do we do at this time of year? What is it about? Well, It's about gratitude. It's about giving back. It's about family. It's a time for celebration and it's a time for reflection.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  And this week on the show, we do all these things. We're here to give thanks to you guys to express our gratitude for you taking this leap with me, for embarking on this journey with me. And this is an effort, it's a two-part effort to reflect back on this journey that we've taken together. It's been an amazing year. I've had so many amazing guests and you guys, the audience, have been with me throughout. And the audience continues to grow exponentially. I'm so grateful for that and for your support and for everything that I've had the good fortune of experiencing as a result of going on this podcast journey. And I really hope that you guys are too.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  Over 2014, we conversed on a wide variety of topics and subject matters. And as a lifestyle wellness podcast, I really pride myself on trying to embrace and contemplate a wide range of perspectives and opinions and attitudes. And as you listen to this episode and to part two later in the week, I think you'll see that we really accomplished that. When I look back, even I'm surprised at what we were able to do and how many interesting and unique people and perspectives we have entertained over the course of the year. And it's something that I'm really looking forward to continuing and expanding on into 2015 and beyond.

• 3:35Rich Roll?

  And so these next two episodes are really about excerpting some of these insights. It's really a snapshot of the year, if you will, a little inspiration capsule. And if you've been with me all along, then this will hopefully help bring some of these insights back into the forefront of your mind as you contemplate your trajectory. You start to think about what your hopes and your dreams and your goals are heading into the new year. And hopefully it will help crystallize what that journey is going to look like for you. And if you're new to the show, then these clips should really inspire you, hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to some of the guests that you might have missed throughout the year. And I'll put show notes up to the specific episodes up on the blog, so it makes it easy for you to find it.

• 4:18Rich Roll?

  Anyway, this is a long way of me saying, "Thank you. I appreciate you."

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  Happy Holidays. Happy New Year. Welcome to episode 67 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Charlie Engel. What is really kind of distinctive and amazing about Charlie are these incredible high highs and low lows of his personal life. Everything from, you know, suffering from crack addiction and, you know, essentially living in his truck and getting shot at to the high highs of crossing the Sahara or,

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  you know, winning some crazy ultra marathon to then being incarcerated, being convicted of mortgage fraud and going to prison for 16 months, federal prison. It's fascinating to hear him talk about what it was like to be incarcerated and how he navigated that experience while keeping his head high and retaining a positive attitude. Not just retaining a positive attitude, but exuding it to the extent that he was able to inspire his fellow inmates. He continued his running. He even did his own self-styled bad water race, running around the prison yard until he had completed 135 miles.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  And in so doing, getting some of his fellow inmates out and running themselves and some of the personal sort of stories of some of his friends in prison is quite touching and interesting in its own right. So, a remarkable epic life story, a very dynamic personality, someone who definitely knows how to spin a yarn. As talented as he is running, his greater talent may be his compelling and dynamic personality. But anyway, he is a great guy. Again, I am grateful that he took the time to sit down with me to share with you guys

• 6:36Rich Roll?

  his story and I find it to be very inspiring and a great way to kick off 2014. So, I hope you enjoy it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, introducing Charlie Engel.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  You know, yeah, I, this crazy thing happened a couple of years ago and I end up in prison. And initially, there was a part of me that thought, you know, wow, this is, you know, yeah, I think everybody, certainly anyone who knew me or knew of me at that point seemed to know that this thing had happened to me.

• 7:10Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  But then very quickly, there

• 7:13Rich Roll?

  Well, it's like giant articles in the New York Times about it.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And in a way, that was cool. I didn't have to be the one to step up and say

• 7:21Rich Roll?

  Defend yourself.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  This was, yeah, wrong or right. I let other people do it and I'm happy to say that, you know, they did it, they did it well, you know, there's always going to be, it's really funny that, you know, because Running the Sahara is such an interesting movie and it's 500 hours of film boiled down to 90 minutes of documentary. So people who see that film have a tendency to think that they know me, like that is me, like every, if I yelled at someone or if I

• 7:52Rich Roll?

  It was definitely edited so that you come off on the dickish.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  No doubt, exactly. And I don't deny that I am sometimes, you know, I mean, the thing is that I think it's fair to say that I have my, you know, I have my moments. I'll be the first one to say I am, I am not an easy person to, you know, to be around sometimes. I'm not fair. I'm, I'm driven in ways that are occasionally embarrassing to me, but certainly as a, you know, as a human being that I, you know, I say things I wish I hadn't said and, you know, and all that. But I, I think that through recovery and through a lot of things, I'm, I'm pretty quick also to apologize for my shortcomings, but not

• 8:36Speaker 01

  for being who I am. You know, this is, this is the, this is the package that there is and it makes me really good at a few things and it, I suck at some other things and, uh, you know, it was, it was very refreshing though, is it, is a strange way to put it, to be in prison and knowing, seeing so many things being written and printed and talked about out there about how You know, how unfair it was and how wrong it was and, and, you know, I didn't need to say a thing.

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  Right. And I want to get into, into that, into that part of the story a little bit. But to kind of backtrack, I mean, I first, the first time I heard an interview with you, it must've been like 2007, maybe. It was before I'd ever done any of this stuff, any of the Ultraman kind of things. And I think it was, it was either Bob Babbitt, or it was, you know, that guy Kevin at Endurance Planet, maybe? I'm not sure. And, and the question was something like, you must get this all the time, that, you know, all this, the ultra running and all of that is just, you've just transferred your addiction onto your running. And, you know, what do you say to somebody who, who,

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  who accuses you of that? And you had a really, I don't know if you remember, but you had a really fascinating answer to that question that really stuck with me because it's something that I struggle with and, and I feel that same question all the time. Do you remember what you said?

• 10:10Speaker 01

  I know what I would say now, so no, I don't remember what I was doing.

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  I'd be interested to hear what you say.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  What I would say now is, you know, is that drugs and alcohol absolutely masked everything that I ever was. No matter what that was. It was, it was a mask. It was my way of hiding from anything. And running and adventure actually shines this huge bright light on exactly who I am. You know, there's no, there's no, there's no way to mask that when you're running 100 miles. Eventually during 100 miles, you will become exactly who you are, you know, for better or for worse.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  You, you touched on why, like, do these things? And, and one of the other reasons why is simply because my, my hope is that... I do, in fact, become, that I become better, that without making myself better, I certainly don't have the capability of ever truly helping someone else. And that's in running and recovery and any other part of my life. If I'm not, if I'm focused on other people all the time,

• 11:17Speaker 01

  how does that make, you know, that can't necessarily make me better. I can do both things in conjunction, but I use the example of, like, most of my big runs, I've had some cause attached. Water for Africa, you know, I played a part in raising $6 million to build wells. And I'm, I'm eminently proud of that. You know, what I helped to build there grew into water.org, which is Matt Damon and my friend Gary White. And I introduced the two of them. I fought to bring them together. In fact, when, when they actually, you know, sort of refused to work together for a while and I worked that, and I'm, I'm proud of that. You know, with Running America, the first time in 2008,

• 12:02Speaker 01

  it was, you know, the United Way and some other nonprofits. And I, I love attaching something because if I'm going to do something, why not try to also do some good? But I'm also honest enough to say that I'm selfish. You know, I'm really doing this as much as anything because I, as a human being, want to see if I can do it. And what happens, I see very often, is that people run for charity all the time and, and are for nonprofits and such, and I totally, you know, I'm, I'm supportive of that. I admire it and all of that. But here's the, here's the conversation I hear in offices. Like, the runner is in the office there where they work, and the runner's telling other people, you know, yeah, I'm going to run this marathon. And people are looking at him who are non-runners and saying,

• 12:46Speaker 01

  why would you, I don't even drive my car that far. That old say, oh yeah, why would you do something like that? And that person is then pinned into a corner and they say, well, I'm doing it for cancer or diabetes or for-

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  It's a disingenuous response because it's not really true. I mean, it's great that they're raising money for that and they're trying to make it somewhat about something other than themselves. But yeah, it's not, there, there is a level of, you know, not being completely frank about the motivations.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  It's okay to do something just because you want to see if you can do it. And I would hope that anybody who ever toes the line of a marathon or an ultra or, or any race for that matter. Is at least partially driven by this desire to see how good they can be and what they can accomplish. And at the same time, if they can, absolutely, if they can honor something that's important to them, or raise money for it, or whatever it is they might do, I completely support that. But I'm always telling people, try to acknowledge the fact that you're accomplishing something big, and you should be proud of that, just for you.

• 13:50Rich Roll?

  You know, I've been following you on Twitter for a long time, and I remember, you know, you would send out these tweets, and I'm thinking, is he allowed to tweet from jail, or is his son doing it for him? Like, how is this even, I'm like fascinated by the, like, just the pure logistics of how that happened, but persistently putting out, you know, this positive message, this refusal to allow this experience to control you, or to lapse into some kind of victimhood. And then to read subsequently, or during the latter stages of your tenure there, the impact that you're having on your fellow inmates, and these guys that are starting to run, and are losing tremendous amounts of weight, and are kind of rediscovering their lives in a new way.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, that part of the experience was fascinating, and it is the, you know, one of the basic tenets of addiction recovery, which is attraction rather than promotion. I certainly didn't go into prison and say, hey, all you, all you fat guys over there, you guys should come run with me, you know, it would've been a great way to get my ass kicked.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  Get shanked.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Right. And so instead, I simply just did what I do. I just went, and I ran, and I worked out, and I actually found people, there was no AA in prison, if you can believe it.

• 15:08Rich Roll?

  Really?

• 15:08Speaker 01

  It was shocking.

• 15:09Rich Roll?

  That's amazing.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  In federal prison.

• 15:11Rich Roll?

  I can't believe that. I mean, I've done tons of panels in jails and stuff.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  In state, and in jails, and those places, absolutely, they have pretty active programs.

• 15:21Rich Roll?

  But federal?

• 15:22Speaker 01

  Nope. No formal AA.

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  Is there a reason for that?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Well, I ended up teaching, which is funny, addiction recovery. Classes and they were well attended, but guys got certificates. You know, you were sort of required to do a certain amount of that kind of work while you're there, which is good. It's good and healthy, but most of the guys sitting in there were there to get the certificate. And like any AA meeting, though, I would absolutely, you know, I just did what I would do and hope that somebody maybe got something out of it. But it's a, it's a, it's an interesting thing. So I was in Beckley Federal Prison and there is, it is actually ironically, a drug education prison, meaning that they have a program

• 16:09Speaker 01

  where guys who, I mean, 90% of the people there are there for drugs anyway, mostly for selling, not for using, but you know, they were required if they wanted, they had a chance to get time off of their sentence if they completed this very long nine-month, you know, drug education program.

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  But basically the, and I'm sure the, I'm sure the, the prison and the, the program would argue with this viewpoint. My viewpoint was that the program basically said, you're bad. You have destroyed your family. You've destroyed your lives. Don't do drugs. Like that was, that was the extent of the education, you know?

• 16:48Rich Roll?

  So it wasn't really recovery oriented. It was more of a sort of a nine-month shaming process.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  No, it's your piece of shit. Don't do drugs, you know? And, and so stop doing that. And, and while a lot of people would probably think that's a good approach somehow.

• 17:02Rich Roll?

  The Nancy Reagan.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:03Rich Roll?

  Just say no approach.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  The fact is that can be, that's all well and good. People can be, you know, feel strongly about how they view people who, who do drugs or have gotten in trouble with the law for doing drugs. But the reality is if the goal is to actually turn out people when they come out of prison who are better than when they went in and more likely to make a contribution to society, then shaming them is certainly not the way, you know, to do it.

• 17:39Rich Roll?

  Welcome to episode 73 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Casey Neistat.

• 17:49Rich Roll?

  There's an undeniable authenticity and level of honesty in your work. Like, you're just sort of, I mean, on a surface level, you're just this guy. You're gonna go out and you're gonna tell this story, whether it's this sort of sweeping narrative with Nike traveling the world, or, you know, your issue with the microphone on your, on your favorite camera. It doesn't matter how pedestrian it is, or how large it is. There's this emotional vein, because you're, you're being honest and authentic to who you are, and I think people recognize that. And that is like, that's what, that's what resonates, at least for me. I mean, I mean, is that fair to say?

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I talk about this idea of the bullshit detector. And it's something I talk about a lot. What I think the bullshit detector is, and your son probably understands this, or maybe don't, maybe you don't understand it, but I think you're more conscious of the bullshit detector than we are. My 15-year-old son is definitely more, has a much more in tune sort of acute bullshit detector than I do. And what the bullshit detector is, is that, you know, when you and I grew up, Rich, like, we watched TV after school, or whatever it might be, and we were forced to watch these 30-second commercials, and then get back to like, "You can't do that on television," or "Saved by the Bell," or whatever you watch. We were forced to watch those 30-second spots, and we just dealt with it.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  But now, you look at my 15-year-old, or you look at, you know, me to a lesser extent, and it's like, everywhere. We are just inundated with media. It's not these 30-second clips that are in between, you know, five minutes of "Saved by the Bell." It's, it's a constant, constant, overwhelming inundation. It's Facebook, it's on our phones, everywhere we go on the internet, it's relentless. And what that sort of relentless media marketing, nonstop, in your face has done, is, it's made your, your ability to figure out what's truthful and honest, and what's bullshit, much more quickly and much more effectively. So you dismiss 99% of what you see. You just see, you dismiss it.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  You were on Facebook this morning, tell me one banner ad you saw running across the side of your Facebook profile.

• 19:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I can't, I can't remember seeing one.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, name one commercial that played in front of your last YouTube video, like, you can't. There's, it's invisible. And that's because your bullshit detector just dismisses it. So how do you penetrate that? How do you get through that sort of level of bullshit? And that's by being authentic. And I think for me, authenticity is just inherent to what I do. Um, I think that if Nike had come to me and they said, hey, we need to sell this exact product and want you to discuss the attributes of it and want you to sell it and explain how it works and all that, like, I wouldn't know what to do with that. I'd have no idea. But I can definitely represent the big idea behind that because that big idea is truthful to me. It's this idea of like, you know, making it count, getting out there and mixing it up. Like, yeah, I can talk to that ad nauseam.

• 20:40Rich Roll?

  Um, I was watching your newest little opus this morning about the Jeep getting stuck in the pond.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  And it's funny because it's, on some level, it's a silly little movie. You're like, hey, I wanted to drive my Jeep across the pond. This is what happened. It's like stuck in the ice and all that kind of stuff. And you're trying to back out of it. Um, but you have this cool little, um, kind of graphic, you know, voiceover that goes across it and you say, um, you know, when I was a kid, I made a lot of really bad decisions. I guess I just forgot. I just, I guess I just thought I would grow out of that. And then you say, uh, not considering the consequences of your actions is something kids do and I'm okay with that. And I think that that's kind of a profound statement. That really kind of encapsulates a big part of your ethos as a filmmaker, like sort of

• 21:28Rich Roll?

  retaining that childlike, you know, kid mentality, you know, whether it's the aesthetic of your, your studio here or even the, the small little movies that you make that are very personal.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's kind of become a mantra of mine, but if I had like a mission statement in life, it would be to realize all the promises I made to myself as a kid.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Because when you're a kid, or at least when I was a kid, I was really frustrated all the time, sort of always getting like, you know, held back by adults and not being allowed to do this, not being allowed to do that and just always being in trouble. And it was like, well, when I grow up, that inner dialogue was always when I grew up, when I grew up. I remember in fifth grade, I was either suspended, might've been thrown out of school for skateboarding in the hallways. And the vice principal, as he's screaming at me, was like, you think when you grow up, you're gonna have an office that you can build a skateboard in? And I had a half pipe in my office here for two and a half years.

• 22:25Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Did you ever take a picture and send it to him?

• 22:28Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm not one for vendettas.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  But in a fun kind of way, not in a mean way.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I will tell you that the high school that I dropped out of or was kicked out of sophomore year has invited me to come speak to the entire, you know, body. So all the administrators, the teachers and students in April. So it's a little bit of validation.

• 22:51Rich Roll?

  It's important to understand, I want to talk about this, like you look around the studio and it's so, you probably have people that want to come in here and do tours all the time. I see the sign that, you know, please no solicitors or no, no drop-ins or whatever. But you are not to the man or born, you know, this is, this is a hard fought, you know, long road that got you to this place and a lot of work and not knowing where it was going to head. I mean, when you were 15, you dropped out of high school. At 17, you had a kid. You were living in a trailer, washing dishes and, you know, trying to raise a child and on welfare, right? I mean.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, that's totally right.

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  And to get from that place to, you know, dinner with the president and making commercials for Nike and, and, you know, being in demand to the extent that you are is, is quite an extraordinary journey.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's, in retrospect, I don't know that it makes any sense. And it's like, one thing you realize when you get older is that it's like, it's, it's a whole bunch of tiny decisions that, you know, that lead you to where you are. And two things that I always say is like, whenever anybody asks me advice via email, which is great, because I can always dismiss it with like four words, which I always do. But I mean these four words. It's like, work hard and be brave. And I literally think if you sort of distill life or any career path down to that.

• 24:14Speaker 02

  You'll find success. It's gonna be scary and who knows what the outcome might be, but working hard is something that most people are scared to do. They think it's their right or they're entitled to have a job that gives them free time and things like that. And yeah, you're probably right, but you know, don't complain and don't make an issue of it when you haven't achieved all of your dreams or accomplished everything you set out to do, you know, if you want to be home at six o'clock every night. And then being brave is just about taking chances, like taking huge chances. You know, there's only two decisions in my entire life that I look back on and just have no idea what I was thinking when I made those decisions.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  And one was moving to New York City. My only experience in life was working in a restaurant in a kitchen. No education, no resume, no career experience, no work experience, no friends. I knew one person in the city, it was my older brother. And I had no money. Eight hundred bucks and a three-month sublet and a two-year-old. Terrifying. What I was thinking then, I just, I can't figure it out. I can't. I remember so vividly on a cigarette break with one of the cooks at the restaurant that I was working in, standing up back and he's like, "Well, you know, the good thing about this place is that you can, you always have a job here when you come back." When you come back. Yeah, I was like eighteen years old. I turned to him and I was like, "I'm never

• 25:40Speaker 02

  coming back." And I think it was that kind of conviction that, you know, that made me stick it out. And the second decision was like quitting my, three years after moving to New York, I had like a really great job. I was managing an artist's studio and I don't know what, how much money I was making, but it was like sixty grand a year. It was like a good job. I had a lot of responsibilities as a boss, had a lot of like people working under me and it was exciting. And I got the opportunity to like direct some really shitty TV commercial with a tiny budget of like ten grand. But in order to do it, I would have had to quit my job and without any hesitation or, you know, batting an eye, I immediately quit my job. That's the second decision. I have no idea what I was thinking.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York City and I met for the first time in my life, rich kids. Kids with like trust funds, like the Hilton sisters when they were 20, like, meeting these guys and just like, it was sort of unfathomable to me, this idea of, you know, them having everything in the world, monetarily anyways. And I remember sort of like, you know, there was a level of jealousy about that. I always wished that I was able to live a life like they did when I was in my early twenties. And, you know, now, I definitely like, am so happy and so lucky to have been on welfare. I'm so fortunate to have lived in a trailer park.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  I feel so bad for these rich kids that they'll never get to experience that. Because the truth is, like, why would I quit my job, why would I move to New York? I mean, I still make sweeping, terrible decisions that just have no foresight whatsoever. But the truth is, like, when it comes to your career, if I were to lose everything, I mean, everything, if everything were to fail, if it were to go as tits up as it could possibly go, like, what's the worst that could possibly happen? Like, I'd probably be back in that trailer park, maybe even on welfare, but like, I had TV then, I had cable, I had Playstation 1, like, it wasn't that bad. It wasn't, like, you know, I was in Uganda earlier this year, delivering morphine to

• 27:54Speaker 02

  late-term AIDS patients. That's bad. You know, I was in Afghanistan and, you know, saw some gnarly shit, like, that's bad. You know, in Taklaabon, those people, they literally lost everything and they're sleeping in, you know, they're sleeping in the dirt, that's bad. This, like, really polished, American version of what the, you know, what the sort of end of the line is, or what rock bottom is, is, you know, luxurious compared to 99% of the population of this planet.

• 28:26Speaker 02

  I pretend to know a lot about parenting because I've got like this great kid who gets like who's on the honor roll and like no trouble and runs track and cross-country and indoor. I mean, the kid's my hero, but I don't, I can't really take credit for him turning out so good. I think it's just dumb luck. But my feelings on parenting have always sort of been, they all fall back to one very basic principle, which is like, as a parent, it is not your job to raise a well-behaved kid. It's your job to raise a human being that will contribute to society in a positive way. And I think that's something that most parents lose sight of. I think that's why now more than ever, we're raising an entire

• 29:08Speaker 02

  generation of pussies, wimpy men, raised by sort of their helicopter parents. Is that the right term, helicopter parents?

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  Hovering.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Hovering parents, yeah. You know, Purell, it's like the downfall of manhood. I just think that like, there's real risk in that. There's risk and, you know, not to pick on anybody, but you know, I like, no friends that, whose kids want to go to college that are 15 minutes away from their parents' house, they can come home for a meal anytime they want. Like, that's, you know, that's, I don't think that's okay. I think you need to like push your children out there, teach them to take chances. Like, how can you raise them to contribute to society in a meaningful way? You know, teaching your kids to always be obedient and always to say yes and never to question authority. Like, so what? So they can get fired from their job at age 44 after 12 years at the company and like, get six

• 30:03Speaker 02

  months pension or six months severance package, rather, and then they're pissed off?

• 30:07Rich Roll?

  I mean, that doesn't even exist as a real reality anymore. So, yeah, I mean, how do you, I mean, so you have this great kid and he's, he's thriving within this system that in some ways you kind of were reared on the outside of. And you have all this sort of counterculture, question of authority, you know, DIY aesthetic that is very different from, you know, sort of being the good boy. Like, how does that reconcile?

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Well, I think that, you know, very quickly, very, very young in his upbringing, he realized that it's like, it's up to him to sort of define boundaries. And I remember his mother and I like, we'd never let him get hurt. We'd never let him put himself in harm's way. But short of that, we'd let him do whatever he wanted to do. He wasn't allowed to be rude, wasn't allowed to be mean. But again, like, whatever you want to do.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  You're a runner. I'm a runner. You're a much better runner than me.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Not much.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  But I always say like, I celebrate when people show up at the starting line, not what happens at the finish line. Because to show up at the starting line of a race means you did it. It means you're there. And that's the hard part. And that's how I feel about ideas, whether it's movies, or art, or spaceships, or anything. I think it's really easy to talk about, and they're really easy to share. But to show up, to actually do it, is what separates the... I'll always watch somebody's video when they email it to me. If it's garbage, I'll watch the first five seconds, but I'll always watch it.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  They follow through.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  Right. But when somebody sends me their idea for me, I just sort of delete the email, because I don't care.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Because one person put the effort in, whether it's good or not, they did the work. Whether it takes them seven hours to cross the marathon finish line, or two and a half, they did the work. Versus just talking about it, which is, you know, it's basic.

• 32:00Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 77, with Dr. Michael Clapper.

• 32:10Rich Roll?

  For the listener out there, we're sitting on a cruise ship, locked in a cabin, when we could be outside enjoying the sunshine, the ocean breeze, but we're gonna bring a podcast to you today. The thing that's funny, there seems to be this epidemic of plant-based focused doctors who are raised on dairy farms, and you're not an exception to that rule.

• 32:36Rich Roll?

  You grew up in Wisconsin, yeah?

• 32:37Speaker 03

  I did. I spent my first 16 summers on my uncle's dairy farm in northern Wisconsin. And I went to school in Chicago during the winter time. During the summers, back in the 50s and 60s, 50s actually, the polio epidemics would come through the big cities, through Chicago, Detroit, etc. And as I said, my uncle had a dairy farm up in northern Wisconsin, so my parents would... And the first day of school was out, the next day we were up on the farm. And spent my first 16 summers driving tractors and milking cows and slinging hay bales, and living on a farm, and getting exposed to the natural world.

• 33:13Rich Roll?

  How does that, how did that experience inform your perspective on nutrition and health today?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm, you know, again, this was from my young years to mid teens. What it really did was expose me and imbue me with the realities of the natural world. My summers were filled with nature, with, with early dawn, working on with the morning dew on your boots, thunderstorms, rolling clouds coming in, full of animals, hawks and frogs and deer, and then of course, all the animals on the farm. And the life force was so vital and full, I got to see it in all its complexity, everything

• 34:04Speaker 03

  from the animal, birds eating, you know, the snakes, to, to the birth of the various animals on the farm. And the rhythm became so natural and plus the, the solace, the healing when I was upset or needed to think, boy, I knew just where the path through the forest was. And I spent hours walking through our lovely Beech and Maple Forest up in northern Wisconsin. And it became very at home in the forest, and it was a place I would go for, for comfort. And so, everything made just inherent sense to me, the way the waters ran, the way the winds blew. And it might be in my genes a little bit, my father was a dentist, my brother's a biology

• 34:47Speaker 03

  teacher, we had the affinity for the natural world. But it was there that, you know, tried to say, you know, I became a natural man, but I guess in a way that happened as opposed to spending my time in, in, under stainless steel rooms and fluorescent lights. So nutrition came way down, down the road there, the awareness of that. But, but the biological forces have been in my awareness since I can remember. Right.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  I had a very wise professor in medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I said, "You know, if you just shut up and listen to the patient, ninety percent of the time, they're telling you the diagnosis, and if you keep listening, they'll tell you a treatment they need very often as well. But doctors don't listen. You know, what is it now, the average eighteen seconds into a visit, the doctor's already pulling out his prescription pen. If you just be quiet, just listening to the patient is healing in itself." I mean, it's one of the major affronts to the human spirit these days. "Nobody listens to me. I ain't got no respect." You know, the very fact that the physician

• 36:01Speaker 03

  put the book down, leaned across the table and say, "Tell me, what do you feel? What is this? What's happening? What can I want to help with? When did this start? Tell me what you're feeling about this." That alone, the patient walks out of the room, "The doctor listened to me. He heard what I was saying." That alone is a gift to the patient, and it starts the healing.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  I did much of my surgical training over at Big Bad Old Cook County Hospital in Chicago, up in the trauma unit, and it was almost world famous, or at least nationwide famous, for being one of the roughest, toughest, bloodiest emergency rooms going. The Cook County Trauma Unit on a Saturday night was just a scene of carnage, just constant gunshot wounds and shotgun blasts and knife wounds. And I saw the violence, I saw the family fabric rendered apart. I saw the personal suffering, the huge expense, just a disconnection from humanity. And I knew I wanted to get that out of my life. And I was reading Gandhi

• 37:03Speaker 03

  and Satipananda and people saying, "Violence is not necessary. Talk and love and talk and love and work it out." And so I took that to heart and I'm the kind of guy that if there's a spider in the room, I'll put a little cup over the spider and slide a little paper under the thunder and then take him outside and let him go in the grass there. I'm that kind of guy. And so one evening in Vancouver where I'd gone into practice, I was pontificating over to a friend over a steak dinner about my desire to eliminate the violence out of my life.

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  While you're eating your sirloin.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  Well, I'm eating my sirloin. And he said, well, that's all very nice, Michael, but if you really want to get the violence out of your life, you might want to start with that piece of dead flesh on your own plate. Because the truth is, your desire for that piece of meat in your mouth, you are paying for the death of that animal. You are paying the butcher. Yes, kill another one. You are doing that. And as much as I wanted to object and negate that, I couldn't. And I heard a little voice in my shoulders saying, you know, he's right. Truth is, you're paying for the death of the animal. You're paying to keep that scene of violence and carnage going. And at that point, I could not do that any longer. The act of taking my wallet out of my pocket and taking dollar bills

• 38:23Speaker 03

  out and paying for that became a soiled act. It became an act of complicity and violence. And I just couldn't. So I became a de facto vegan for ethical reasons. It wasn't long after I stopped eating meat that I looked at my leather shoes, my leather wallet.

• 38:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't want to wear them.

• 38:42Speaker 03

  But those are my body.

• 38:43Rich Roll?

  It's interesting, being a doctor, that you didn't come into it initially for health reasons. That was almost a byproduct of spiritual exploration, I suppose.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But what that did was then open the door to, it reframed what I was seeing. Because at the same time, I was, I had gone back to finish my residency in anesthesiology in Vancouver General. And day after day, I'm in the operating room, especially on the cardiovascular anesthesia service, and day after day, I'm putting patients to sleep, opening up and watching the surgeons open their chest. And from their arteries, they're pulling out this yellow, greasy gout called atherosclerosis.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  And I'm looking down in there. This is what's causing their heart attacks and their strokes and their blue feet and renal failure, lack of blood flow. And it's a stunning thing to see. It's so clear. You seldom see the cause of a disease so evident as when it's pulled out of an artery. And one day I was looking and this particular fellow, his fatty deposits had a bit of a yellow cast to it. And I remember my mother making chicken soup and I said, you know, that stuff looks like chicken fat. And a little voice again said, there's good reason why, doctor. It looks like chicken

• 40:03Speaker 03

  fat. It is chicken fat. And cow fat and pig fat and all the fat of any of the slow animals. He was walking past his table when he had a fork in his hand. And I realized it's from what these people are eating and they're paying for the death of those animals and they are eating the flesh of those animals and without being outrageously symbolic here, you know, we kill the animals, but in a way they get revenge. They kill us from the inside. I never thought of it that way. It goes around and around and I just had to disconnect from that in all forms. When I adopted a vegan diet, a totally plant-based diet, within six weeks, a 20-pound spare tire

• 40:44Speaker 03

  of fat around my waist melted away. My borderline high blood pressure slipped down to 11070. That was like 250 or something like that? It was officially high. And I felt great waking up in a nice, light, lean body. And I found myself a healthy man. So then the wheel goes full circle. I find myself in my general practice office, I'd moved to Florida by that time, and who walks in my office but those middle-aged, overweight, high-blood-pressure diabetic guys that I had dreaded coming in to see me before. Now I knew what to tell them. I knew why. I knew what they were doing to their bloodstream.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  After every bacon and egg breakfast, every cheeseburger lunch, every fried chicken dinner, they send wave after wave of fat and sugar and animal protein through their bloodstream and it hurts their arteries and they clog up. And so I said,

• 41:43Speaker 03

  I had a professor in med school said, you know, medicine is 10% science and 90% common sense. You know, and if you're doing something, if I have a patient complaining of headaches, I say, when do you get headaches? Oh, every time I hit myself with, in the head with a hammer. I said, well, maybe you don't want to do that. Well, same thing, a doctor, I keep running all this fat and then further in my bloodstream, I keep putting on this weight, my diabetes getting worse, what do you think I should do? I guess after 40 plus years in medicine, you get a little philosophical, I suppose, but it's a real head scratcher for me to work in a profession whose technology is so powerful and so precise that the smart guys and girls in the white coats in a laboratory can identify

• 42:28Speaker 03

  the most subtle of genetic malfunctions on gene number A21, on chromosome 13 that puts an enzyme defect on this amino, this they can identify. But the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of type 2 diabetes, the cause of cloud arteries, let's spend another 100 billion and I should find the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of cloud arteries. It makes me want to get the biggest soapbox I can find, go down to Washington DC, stand on it and yell as loudly as I can, you want the cause of childhood obesity?

• 43:08Speaker 03

  It's the food, it's the food, well, the cause of high blood pressure and the cloud arteries, it's the food, it's the burgers and the fries and the fried chicken and the pizza and the olive oil and the chicken and the cheese, all this tsunami of fat and animal proteins that are sent through their bloodstream and vegetable oils, day after day, hour after hour, that's what's going on, how can you not see that? And yet, my colleagues, oh, they want to look at that, oh, I don't know anything about nutrition, oh, people will never change their diet, oh, it's none of my business, talk to them about that, and they don't. And but oh, but but a um, but but statins will will will pound down their cholesterol. So so they'll just it's easy to give them a pill. And and that's what's

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  And they'll take it, but they may not take my dietary advice.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Oh, they won't take my dietary advice.

• 43:57Rich Roll?

  So why bother?

• 43:58Speaker 03

  Exactly. And the reason that they don't and human nature is human nature and and I'm not clucking my tongue or wagging my finger because I when I was eating animal flesh, I didn't see it either. If you don't want to until you see it, you don't see it. But there's a lot of resistance. One, you know, we weren't trained in it as physicians, but also I hope it's not casting any aspersions, but the truth is most doctors, they don't want to tell their patient to adopt a plant based diet because that means they've got to stop eating their filet mignon and their lobster thermidor and their brie cheeses. And they don't want to do that themselves. So they so they'd rather just not open that door. It's easier to give them a prescription for statins.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  A state of ketosis is not a natural state of being for your physiology. That is, it's it's you're driving your car and the red light comes on the dashboard. You know, there's distress happening in that engine. Well, the same thing in ketosis. You have run out of glucose, of of of muscle fuel, and you are now dipping into your emergency fat stores as as emergency fueled, you know, the the red lights come on and and as burning that emergency fuel, you're in a state of ketosis. And the body can handle that for a day or two or three or five, I suppose. But in no way is this the natural state of of human beings. We've always been grazing on on carbohydrate containing foods.

• 45:25Speaker 03

  That's why we have taste buds for sweet on our tongue because we like to go for those fruits and and high calorie plant foods. To to to say that we've got a natural taste for animal flesh and to that we want to stay in the state of ketosis, it's it's stunning to me that that medical physicians can say this is a good and natural state to keep the body.

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  It's a crisis state.

• 45:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. It's like being at the at the stoplight in your car and and at a red light and you put the car in neutral and you you put hold the accelerator down on the on the engine and down to the floor. And you run it on, you know, on a high octane fuel, you know, you're going to overheat the engine. I mean, it's not gentle with the metabolic.

• 46:12Rich Roll?

  So, yeah, so what would happen if somebody is in a persistent state of ketosis or in this, you know, sort of on this ketogenic diet? I mean, what are the long-term ramifications of that? Or have you seen any result? Have you dealt with patients that are experimenting with this?

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, I'm sure there are many and they don't come to me though, because they know what they're going to hear. But the beautiful thing about running on plant foods from the biochemical point of view is that when you metabolize sugars, it breaks down basically to carbon dioxide and water. And you breathe off the carbon dioxide and you eliminate the water through your kidneys. And that's a clean burning fuel, doesn't follow the metabolic spark plug, so to speak. But when you run on animal flesh as your, excuse me, primary fuel, these are dirty fuels. And in a way, they're metabolically dirty in that they leave residue. While you burn fats, you're going to generate ketones. And ketones

• 47:09Speaker 03

  by their nature are acidic. We're talking about acetone, beta hydroxybutyric acid, these are acidic molecules. And to keep yourself in a state of low-grade metabolic acidosis day after day, week after week, this is not a healthy state to be in.

• 47:28Rich Roll?

  That's going to create chronic inflammation, is it not? Which is going to lead to these diseases that we're talking about.

• 47:33Speaker 03

  It's certainly not going to be gentle with any inflammatory state in your body. But also to neutralize that acid, you're going to have to give up either some calcium out of your bones, or make your kidneys work extra hard in order to excrete extra electrolytes. It's a stress state for the body. But you lose weight. Yeah, well, sure you lose weight on that, but you're ill, because your appetite is, when you're sick, people lose their appetite. And when you're in ketosis, yeah, you don't feel like eating. You only feel like almost got the flu. And so, you know, you can lose weight on cancer chemotherapy, but it doesn't mean it's a healthy way to do it. And so, the issue is not weight loss, the issue is

• 48:13Speaker 03

  health. And I just cannot see that being a healthy diet. Plus, we're not carnivorous apes. And that's really what they're trying to turn us into. We are carnivorous, we eat flesh three times a day. Well, you know, not even mountain lions eat flesh three times a day, you know, official carnivores don't eat flesh three times a day. It's only because we're wealthy enough and have subverted the whole food system. So we kill a million chickens an hour and we've got all that flesh floating around us here. But there's nothing natural about eating animal flesh on a daily basis, let alone two or three times a day. I mean, it's still a natural world.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  And the biggest animals on the planet, elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, stallions, they create thousands of pounds of mammalian muscle without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas. They get the protein and the minerals that's in the plants. And that's, it's there for our taking. That's what we're supposed to be doing is foraging and getting the harvest of the earth, period. And to turn ourselves into carnivorous apes and supplement takers is a grotesque distortion of the natural reality as far as I can see.

• 49:30Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 78 with Timothy Olson.

• 49:40Speaker 04

  One of the things that really got to me is I, we kept judging myself through that. I could make these mistakes and then I just really hated myself. I hated who I become and

• 49:53Rich Roll?

  Well, then the only way to deal with that is to, you know, use more so you don't have to feel those feelings. I mean, that's the downward spiral in a nutshell.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  And I, and I got there. And which is, you know, looking, looking back now, there was trying times and, you know, doing stupid things, but also it's, you know, created the person that I am. And it's just kind of this, you know, this, you know, life is a beautiful mess and you, you know, you do all these different things that, that lead you to where you are later on.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we have such a limited perspective on our lives in a given moment and the kind of impact of the decisions that we make. And, you know, we judge, we judge these things, we judge ourselves based on almost no information about whether something is good or bad. It's just our instinct to say, oh, this was a bad choice or a good choice. And I remember when I first got sober and, you know, I'd go to these, I'd go to these AA meetings and some old guy would get up and he'd be like, I'm a grateful alcoholic. And I'd be like, what is he taught, you know, like, what does that mean? You know, I don't understand that. But, I mean, it's essentially what you're saying. It's sort of being grateful for that experience. It's like that crucible of pain forms who you are, and that sets a new trajectory. It helps you learn about who you are, what, you know, what you don't want to be, what

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  you want to be. And, and, you know, your whole crazy adventure, I'm sure you could have never predicted it, but it was really kind of formed out of that.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. And I'm, I'm really happy I went down that way. Like, I, I love that statement, grateful alcoholic, because it's just, um, yeah, I was definitely addicted to things and, and making not the best choices, but it led to something so much better and led to me really striving to be the best person I could be.

• 51:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm, I'm happy with it.

• 51:43Rich Roll?

  Right, that's good. And it was, it was, it was pretty dark, right? Like, you went to jail for a little bit?

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, just like a little thing, yeah. It was, it was a long haul, man. And I think it was just the pain of watching other people suffer, like hurting my family through that was really tough. And I think that was, like, you know, kind of after I hit some lows, it was just hating myself so much that I couldn't forgive myself. And I think when I finally, like, made that, that statement, like, I forgave myself. I think that's like when, you know, the tears really started coming and I was able to just, like, just, just really get raw to myself that, um, I forgive, I forgive you. And that's a really hard statement to do to, to a friend, to someone, an enemy, to yourself. And...

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  But that's the path to freedom.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Once you did that, like, you know, just that whole weight's off and it's, you know, you're not worried about what you did in the past. You get to live in the now and, and just be, you know, present and not worry about what you did back then or what people think of you. It's just, you know, you get to be yourself and it's a good feeling.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  It is, it is really annoying, though, that you have to go through things like that in order to have that realization. Like, why can't we just be blessed with that innately?

• 52:58Speaker 04

  Like Lake Sonoma a few years back and had a good race and was just kind of, I kind of kept that, all of my past kind of hidden and didn't know how I wanted to bring that out and I was just having all these emotions just kind of pulling on my heartstrings and just like, I just wanted to let it out. So I just kind of started writing one day of just my true feelings and why I run and what brought me to this and I was gonna just throw it up on my blog and I'm like, well, like, maybe a thousand people read this. I'm like, it's kind of a joke. So I'm like, so I sent an email to Brian at Iron Far and he was more than stoked to put it on and it was right before a race that I was doing that weekend.

• 53:40Speaker 04

  So I just kind of fell into this nice time and it was this moment in my life, that whole, it's kind of when, I guess, my career of ultra running took off, but I was just really, I was, my inspiration was just really fed off of, you know, meeting a beautiful wife and moving to a really cool place where the mountains just really spoke to me and really got into running them every day. And then as our life kind of progressed, I became a massage therapist, had a cool practice going on in Ashland and then all of a sudden we were gonna have our first son into our lives and just, you know, realizing like, okay, I've, you know, I've changed a lot of things in my life. I'm really becoming

• 54:21Speaker 04

  the person that I, you know, would like to be every day and just still wanted to put something out there of like, why I run and what's brought me here. And so that was just a really pivotal point in my running career to just kind of let people know how I came here and what pushes me to keep going.

• 54:40Rich Roll?

  Well, I would think it's even more than that. I mean, I think it's emblematic of, you know, your personal growth because you arrived at a place where you were comfortable enough in your own skin to say, I'm gonna put this out here. And that's being vulnerable. Like, that's, takes courage, it takes balls, you know, to like, to be that honest and know that people are gonna read that. It's a scary thing.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  I was so nervous when I sent it to him and we were like, we were traveling. To race and like Krista kept reading me the comments there and I kept waiting for someone just to kind of, you know, bash me because I was a douche back then. I was, you know, just, just you're living a selfish life and and then I got all these just responses. I wasn't sure how like sponsors would react and just how the community of running would react to me kind of spilling my past and I was just overwhelmed with the love that people, you know, showered and how it.

• 55:36Rich Roll?

  So when is the, when is the running become real? Like what's the moment where it clicks in? And, and, you know, things kind of change and the running becomes a serious deal for you?

• 55:47Speaker 04

  I think there was like, there's two points that I can kind of remember. One of them was I paced my friend Ian Torrance at a first 100 mile. It was my first time pacing and had no clue what I was doing, no clue what like, you know, all ultras are crazy and hard, but like the 100 mile distance is, you know, just epic. I mean, it's just, it's long. If you've never done that, you just can't even know what it feels like to run 100 miles. It's just, you know, your body should stop way before that. And it's just really cool to, you know, watch people go, you know, go through that and just, you know, you can watch through their bodies, watching them, the different emotions. And I watched Ian go through just, you know, so much suffering and stuff,

• 56:30Speaker 04

  but kept just working, was persistent through it. And I just learned a lot watching him. We didn't talk a lot through that. I was trying to help him not to like throw up and want to, you know, stop. And, and I just, you know, I grew really, we had a good friendship, I think, through that, you know, going through something like that with someone is really cool. And for me, watching this all go on, watching him kind of, you know, fumble around on the ground. And that's kind of another moment where you should be like, there's no way I would ever do that. That looks just awful. And for me, I was like, I think I can do this. And I'd love to give it a shot sometime just to, you know, kind of test what I could do. And so that was a moment where

• 57:12Speaker 04

  I'm like, I'm gonna keep working to train for 100 miles someday.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  And then when I did my first 50K SOB in Ashland, which I've actually helped race direct a couple of years ago. But that was my first 50K I ever did and did that. And I think I was like the third or fourth or something. But I had some, you know, some friends. Actually, I think Hal's, Hal's wife was like talking to my wife Krista. And they're like, you know, Tim's pretty good at this. He could maybe, you know, get a sponsor or something. And that kind of relates.

• 57:49Rich Roll?

  So third or fourth, you were, you don't, first of all, you don't remember, right? You don't remember whether you were third or fourth in your first hundred?

• 57:54Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 57:55Rich Roll?

  Most people would be bragging.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  I never, like, I've had really good races, good times, but I've never really focused too much on the time. Or, you know, I'm just going out there to work as hard as I can. I like pushing myself. But it's kind of funny, even back to like getting the Western States record. I really didn't know I was even close to the time until, you know, just like six miles before the finish that I could even come close to that. So I just, I really don't focus a lot on times. I still don't look at, like, look at a watch too much when I run. And I just go by feel and I just push it till I, you know, as, as hard as I can.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  Well, I think ultra running in particular doesn't lend itself well to being too tied to the watch. I mean, there's so many variables at play. And if you start, if you start thinking about that, like, it's too long. You know, you gotta run where you're at or, you know, you're gonna bury yourself, right?

• 58:44Speaker 04

  I think that's worked well with me because I'm just, I'm just focused on myself as I'm going. I'm like, you know, what do I need right now? Let's breathe, let's remember to enjoy this, you know, while you're, you're working hard. And, you know, you're just constantly taking care of yourself and figuring out,

• 59:00Speaker 04

  you know, what, what you need. And I think that for me, they're just, I don't need to concentrate on time. I don't need another thing bothering me what mile I'm at. I just need to keep moving forward and focusing on how I can do that as efficient as possible.

• 59:13Rich Roll?

  Right, so, so how do you, you know, what are your strategies for navigating the pain? Or sort of breaking through those limiters or barriers, you know, in the middle of the night when, you know, everything's telling you to stop?

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really like those points for some reason. I, I think I like being challenged mentally, physically, and just like emotionally.

• 59:39Speaker 04

  Maybe through the different things in my my past of like, um, I think, I mean, why I made it, because there was moments where I, you know, was close to overdosing and um, what felt like, you know, wanting, had those feelings of wanting to commit suicide and um, watching other friends um, you know, get so low. And I I think just having all those different things in my background, like, I'll get to a low point in a race and be like, you know, I'm I'm stronger than this. And I I think why I I made it, because I've watched also other people, you know, take drugs and their just brains are just fried and just really deteriorated themselves. And um, I should be right where they are. I should, you know,

• 1:00:23Speaker 04

  I I should be dead right now. And I'm, I think I just go to that, um, just that really gratefulness of, you know, how I survived through those different things. And I think about that in a race. And I think of people that love me and, you know, are are thinking of me, praying for me. And I I just really take a lot from that. And um, I I find in racist, I really get to this, this sense of when, you know, a lot of times when I'm getting low, I think of um, things that are like love. And I think of my family and and things and it just cheers me up and it gets me through those lows. And I think in in any, you know, problems and life struggles, like, you know, you can either keep going

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  down into that spiral of just darkness, or you can think of the things that, you know, you're grateful for. And um, in racist, that's what I do to kind of get through. I I just ran a race a few weeks ago and had some really low patches. Um, it was just a hard race. It's early in the season, so I wasn't completely prepared for it. But like, all I could think about towards the end, when I was really suffering and wanted to walk was um, my little boy Tristan is dancing all the time now. And he, me and his mother are not the best dancers. We shake our our arms around a little bit, and it's it's not impressive whatsoever.

• 1:01:41Rich Roll?

  You're a midwestern white boy.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. I'm very white. Um, and he he drops it like it's hot, like, you know, butt down, like, he's got these moves and we do not have moves. So we're not doing, you know, I don't know where he picked this up. He's just, you know, doing his own thing. But um, it just makes me laugh, just so much inside of just thinking the different moves that he does. So those are the things I think about that kind of, you know, motivate me as I run and. And then when I think of those, I get like so happy that that's what I think about. I don't think about like, how can I catch the next person? How am I gonna win this race? And which could come up in the mind and the ego always, you know, can play a factor on that. But I love that, you know, normally towards the end and the hard parts of racist, I, you

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  know, I think of family and friends and just things that bring out love and happiness to me. And I think that's what motivates me to push through some of those hard times.

• 1:02:42Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 79 with T. Colin Campbell.

• 1:02:53Rich Roll?

  He is quite simply put, a pioneer and a legend of the modern movement for sustainable wellness and ecological systems and disease prevention and disease reversal. For the uninitiated, T. Colin Campbell is a Cornell and MIT trained biochemist and current professor emeritus at Cornell University, who specializes in nutrition and toxicology, specifically the effects of nutrition on long-term health and in particular, the causation of cancer.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  I would like to open it up, if you could, for the listeners who might be uninitiated or unfamiliar with your work, if you could simply synopsize the idea behind the China Study and what the book is all about.

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  Well, the China Study, of course, is a book. It's 18 chapters, but there's only one chapter that's actually devoted specifically to the China Project itself. I have to point that out because the whole book is not just about the work in China.

• 1:03:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's something I want to explore with you, for sure.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  Yes, it's the rest of the book, the work that I was doing. At least, if I can, I say twenty-five, thirty years before I got involved in China Study that really played a major role in my thinking. The China Study, in a sense, was getting to a place in time that I wanted to really have an opportunity to examine a population, to see if, in fact, the information we were getting there was consistent with what I already had been doing.

• 1:04:27Rich Roll?

  Could you just describe the essence of what that was?

• 1:04:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, by the time the China Study opportunity came along, and this was in the early nineteen-eighties, I got a, an opportunity to, well, it was a letter sent to Cornell by the first senior scientist from China to come to the United States, and this particular gentleman, Dr. Zheng Shou, he had come from a famous family in China, actually. In any case, he was one of the first to come to this country. He was looking for a place, a land, spend some time. His government had given him this opportunity. And he was sent to Cornell a little bit, and some others turned it down, I don't know why, but I grabbed on to him by the way, and so he came and worked with me. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made, because it turned out, he really

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  was from a well-connected family in China, for starters, and high up in the government, in a sense, as far as science is concerned. And so, at that time, the Chinese government had done this nationwide survey of how much cancer existed across a total of something like two thousand four hundred counties. It was a massive undertaking, and what they were able to show was that cancer was very common in some counties and not in others. So we just, it was common sense just to ask, well, what about, you know, what's causing this unusual concentration of cancer in certain places, for about a dozen different cancers? So I just, we got together and I said, why don't we try to get an application to do some funding there?

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  His government was offering, offering a lot of support and kind. We needed capital, so I went back to NIH again to, to see if I could get that funding, and we did. We had the first project between the United States and China, the first research project at that time, so. We went there and surveyed a large population. That was an opportunity for me to see if in fact the kind of information we might learn from that population was consistent with these rather aberrant questions that I was getting in the laboratory.

• 1:06:31Rich Roll?

  And those questions were?

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  Those questions were basically that animal protein in particular was promoting cancer, because that's what we were learning in the laboratory.

• 1:06:43Rich Roll?

  And this is a landmark discovery, right? This had never been sort of established or presumed or even conjured by anyone prior to you.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  It's an interesting question. I'll comment on it in just a minute, but yes, when we were doing all the research in the laboratory, and because of my skepticism about a lot of things, what we ended up discovering were a lot of fundamental ideas that were against the rules, against what I was teaching and against what was in the books.

• 1:07:10Rich Roll?

  Such as?

• 1:07:11Speaker 05

  Well, for example, turning cancer on and off by nutritional means. I mean, that was a big deal. And it turned out we didn't do it just for protein and liver cancer. We also did it with dietary fat and pancreatic cancer and things like this. So that phenomenon of thinking about the causation of cancer and later other diseases as a result of simply modifying nutrient intake and the idea of actually reversing disease.

• 1:07:37Rich Roll?

  Right. It's the turning off part.

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  We were reversing disease.

• 1:07:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  And cancer, I thought, this is incredible. And so we were learning other things too, like that relationship between nutrition and genes. A lot of people think, and a lot of people still think, that somehow genes predetermined whether or not we're going to get a certain kind of disease. And what we are showing, no, it's not the case. We can have the genes to cause it, to start the initiation of events, but we can control it by nutritional means. Big thing. Another one, sort of principle, like if you will, and A, like protein, it causes cancer, let's say for starters. One of the things that I was really being pushed to do to prove my point was to find what the mechanism was,

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  which enzyme, which is that. And so we started looking for the mechanisms. And I had a series of PhD students spending four or five years, each of them looking at a mechanism. And it turned out there is no such thing. So that was another myth that I was all of a sudden running across too. And so a lot of the things that we learned really were... I think the result of my skepticism.

• 1:08:46Rich Roll?

  And it's quite astounding. I mean, I think people can inherently wrap their brain around the idea of prevention, like doing certain things, whether through diet, or, you know, exercise, or what have you, to prevent certain things from happening. But when you start talking about reversal, once onset has begun, that starts to get into radical territory.

• 1:09:09Speaker 05

  Really radical territory. Because the whole medical profession is, in a sense, is sort of supported by the idea that somehow you're going to be able to, if you have a disease, or about to start, or it's already there, you know, you're going to cure it. That's sort of the premise. And that's the, that's the territory of the practice of medicine.

• 1:09:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  What we were seeing, what I thought we were seeing, I'm very excited about this idea, that this formula, this nutritional formula for preventing the production of future disease, also works to treat existing disease.

• 1:09:43Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  That's the future of this field. Just the whole idea, you could take this with people with disease, or a very high risk of disease, and treat them.

• 1:09:53Rich Roll?

  Where was the moment where it kind of tipped the scales in terms of getting out into the public? I mean, was there one thing that occurred that kind of changed, changed things in terms of getting the book out there?

• 1:10:06Speaker 05

  There were certain individuals, Gary Player, the pro golfer, called me up right after it was, it came out, and he said, "I'm Gary Player." I couldn't believe that I was talking to Gary Player. But he said that he was going to be on the Golf Channel with a big audience, and wanted to know if he could talk about it. I said, "You know, help yourself. It's great. Fantastic." He told me what it's going to do. He said, "I'm going to get down on my knees, and just talk about this book." I mean, he was really impressed with it, I guess. So, in fact, we watched to see when this happened. I was actually, by this time, with Howie, Dr. Jacobson. And so, we watched Howie, and we watched Gary Player get down, and, you know, with a praying position, and says, "America..."

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  Everyone in this country should read this book, or something like that.

• 1:10:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:55Speaker 05

  That was a, that was a good hit.

• 1:10:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 1:10:57Speaker 05

  That was pretty good. And then, um, Bill Clinton.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  No publicist is gonna get you that.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  No, and then Bill, Bill Clinton came along too.

• 1:11:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, how does Bill, how does Bill Clinton come into the equation? Because this is fascinating.

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  Well, this is about two, let's see, three years after the book was out.

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:12Speaker 05

  And, uh, I was on the board with a close friend of Bill Clinton's, a former governor of, uh, North Carolina, uh, Jim Hunt.

• 1:11:21Rich Roll?

  The board of what?

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  Oh, of, of a company that my son and I had founded.

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:11:25Speaker 05

  And so Jim Hunt was on there, the chief, actually, we had some pretty key figures on there, but, uh, Jim Hunt, a former governor of North Carolina, was there. He in turn was a close friend of Clinton. So Jim came and asked me if I signed a couple of copies for Clinton. So I did. I got a, a handwritten note back from President Clinton, thanking me for the book and he, but he didn't, he didn't follow up for a couple of years. And it wasn't until the time of his daughter's wedding.

• 1:11:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:52Speaker 05

  That he had another problem with his heart and she in turn, the story goes, she in turn wanted him to do the book. And so he got pretty enthusiastic about it and I got a call from, um, uh, one of his, uh, close associates who was at the wedding and said that Clinton had come to the wedding and was carrying a book with him. That's what I was told. And I heard this before the CNN thing came along.

• 1:12:13Rich Roll?

  Uh-huh.

• 1:12:13Speaker 05

  But he had the book with him. He was showing it to everybody and including Barbra Streisand, who wanted to know, you know, what is that book you keep on talking about? This is, and this is second information before the CNN thing.

• 1:12:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:25Speaker 05

  And so he told her, and her husband's allegedly said, second information again, said to her, you know, you, I got that book for you two years ago and you never read it. So, these kind of stories, I was getting these stories. And finally then he's on CNN.

• 1:12:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. And this is the Wolf Blitzer interview, right?

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  Wolf Blitzer.

• 1:12:44Rich Roll?

  Prior, there was the, the last heart attack show with Sanjay Gupta, but it was, I remember that Wolf Blitzer interview where he talked about, um, wanting to be healthy for his daughter's wedding.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was. And he got big res, really good results and became a real enthusiast for this idea.

• 1:13:05Speaker 05

  First off, I should point out, those people who are writing this kind of information have no training in science, in the truth of science. Number one, they know experience to do in a kind of experimentation. They don't publish, they don't, they're not being held accountable for their words. They can say anything they want to say. In science, we developed some evidence and if it's going to be worthy of consideration, we publish it. And it's being reviewed by peers. And we don't publish it if it doesn't pass that muster. And my work was reviewed extensively. First off, in actually competing for funding. Only one of every six applications gets funding.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  And we just continued to get funding for 27 years for that one project. I had a lot of success in getting funding. And so I had a pretty good name, actually, you know, in the scientific world for doing good science. Then when you publish and have over 300 and some publications that were peer reviewed, so I'm held accountable for my words, let me tell you, even by my critics. These people writing this stuff have nothing, none of that. That's a very important point to make. Good writers, great writers, but they don't have this background, they can say anything they want to say, and they say just totally untruthful things. But let's, if we come down, there's a couple of observations that the people who have all these Atkins-like diets, if you will, and paleo diet and all, they're all those

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  books, different names, different authors, different times, they're all basically the same thing. They're all talking about a low carb diet. That's become the mantra of the day. Well, since plants are the only kind of foods essentially that have carbohydrates, really serious amounts of carbohydrates in them, this is really has been an attack on the recommendation we should be consuming vegetables, fruits, and grains as a means of health, from the very beginning. I mean, Atkins came out in 73 with their first book, that was following the McGovern thing, that, you know, said eat less animal food. So the low carb diet, the better name for that, they should be called a high protein, high fat diet.

• 1:15:16Speaker 05

  And there is no evidence, I find no evidence in scientific literature anyplace else, that you can actually take that, that kind of diet and treat and reverse disease.

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 80 with Howard Jacobson.

• 1:15:39Rich Roll?

  I don't think I could ever do one of those programs where you get a cheat day.

• 1:15:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:44Rich Roll?

  Because, once I've kind of crossed that line, it becomes so much easier to cross it again. And it's easier, it's actually, it seems harder, but it's actually easier for me to toe a more of a hardcore line.

• 1:15:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I talk about when I help people to transition is this concept of decision fatigue, which is, the more decisions you make, the less willpower you end up with. So if you're constantly, you know, there have been, done studies where they had people like picking out items for a wedding registry. And it was, it was a fake thing, that no one was getting married. You just had to pick, you know, do I want the bone china, or the other thing. And after that, they had all these decisions, they had people do the traditional test of willpower, which is stick your hand in a bucket of ice water for as long as you can. And the people who had other tasks, they didn't, they just had to look and rate the stuff, or did they like it, or did they not like it, did much better. They could keep their hands in the water much longer than people who had to

• 1:16:40Speaker 06

  choose between one or the other. So if you have a diet in which you're, you're kind of, you know, using your intuition, or your, your brain on a daily basis, and you don't have set rules, if you're approaching it in terms of should I, shouldn't I, you literally deplete your willpower. So by the, by the end of the day, you're like, that cookie is much stronger than I am.

• 1:17:03Rich Roll?

  Right. I never, I've never heard that before. That's really fascinating. So in other words, if you have this rule system set up, that's just your guiding principles, then you're not really having to make decisions. You're just following these rules. So it's not, it doesn't involve a lot of mental fatigue.

• 1:17:19Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:17:20Rich Roll?

  But if you're leaving it open-ended, then every proposition involves a decision tree.

• 1:17:26Speaker 06

  Right. So for higher brain function, I want to, I'm clear that I only have a certain amount to spend every day. And I want to spend it where it matters. So anything that doesn't really matter to me, I just don't care about. Or I'll set a rule, so I don't have to think about it anymore.

• 1:17:40Rich Roll?

  And that's the perception, is that taking care of yourself is a luxury, and it's dispensable when there are real-life pressures on you to provide and just literally, I mean, for lack of a better word, survive day to day.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:17:55Rich Roll?

  And so, all right, so, so where does the journey take you from there?

• 1:18:01Speaker 06

  So, fast forward several years, and it's 2003, and I'm at a internet marketing conference, and I meet a guy who is eating a plant-based diet, and he's a bodybuilder, and he's working out. I'll give him a little shout-out. His name is John Allen Mullenhauer. And we started talking, and he, like, was doing everything that I knew from 13 years ago that I should be doing. And I was really attracted to the results he was getting and

• 1:18:39Rich Roll?

  to the philosophy. Was that incompatible with the curriculum that you were studying during your PhD?

• 1:18:45Speaker 06

  Oh, sure. I mean, you know, yeah, it's, it's fine to be a vegetarian, but it's, you know, it's certainly not necessary, and it's kind of cute, but it's, you know, there's, there was no one saying, "This is the most important part of health, is to eat whole plant foods. This is the foundation." No one was saying that. People, you know, my, one of my main focuses of study was, like, indoor asthma. And so, I would say I spent the better part of a year thinking about hypoallergenic pillowcases. That's, that's important stuff. But it's not fundamental.

• 1:19:22Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, so Dr. Campbell calls you, out of the blue, to thank you for writing this review.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, we were going up to upstate New York, and we said, "Oh, we'd love to meet you." And we went over to their house, and my son got stung by a bee in their back garden, and they took care of us. And we just, we had a really nice time together. And it's like, one of the speakers on the cruise, Jessica Porter, was going off on this riff, like, she has this fantasy about, like, which celebrity she could be friends with. Like, you know, I could be friends with Meryl Streep. We, she'd like me, we'd have a good time. And I had had that fantasy about, like, Colin Campbell. Like, what a, what a...

• 1:20:01Rich Roll?

  And then, like, you're manifesting this in your life.

• 1:20:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'm like, "I really do like this guy. He's, you know, he's so humble." No matter what the claim anyone makes, he's just, "Oh, could you show me the research on that? I'm really curious."

• 1:20:17Speaker 06

  So we just started becoming friendly and then a year later, we moved down to Durham, where he has a home. And we just kept up a friendship. When he was in town, we'd cook them dinner. And then in like 2010, I think, he knew I was in marketing. He said, "There are some folks who may need some marketing help. They were working on a movie about him and Caldwell Esselstyn, and would I be interested in talking with them?" And I said, "Oh, tell me more." And he sent me an email from the producer, and they're calling this movie Forks Over Knives. And I said, "That's the dumbest title I've ever heard. I'm not even going to waste my

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  time. These people don't know what they're doing. This project is going nowhere."

• 1:21:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:07Rich Roll?

  Little did we know.

• 1:21:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:21:08Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, I saw an early cut of it as well, and I was unsure as to whether this was going to resonate. I just thought, "I don't know if anyone's going to take to this." So I'm as surprised as you that it has become this force of nature, this movie. And I think it's a testament to just how powerful the information is that's conveyed.

• 1:21:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was talking to Lee Folkerston, the director, and also to Brian Wendell, the producer. And I kind of admitted that I had really serious doubts based on the name. And they were like, "Yeah, we didn't think this name was going anywhere either. We didn't know what to call it." But I asked Brian, I don't know if you know.

• 1:21:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know Brian.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  You know, I said, "Well, what was your background? Was it in film, in documentaries?"

• 1:21:53Rich Roll?

  He's a real estate guy.

• 1:21:54Speaker 06

  I was a realtor.

• 1:21:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:21:55Speaker 06

  I said, "Well, how on earth, why did you even try this? How did you think this was going to ...?" He says, "Oh, I just knew it was going to work." Like, wow. I'd like some of that.

• 1:22:06Rich Roll?

  That conviction. Right.

• 1:22:11Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 81, with spoken word artists in queue.

• 1:22:24Rich Roll?

  But I was so struck by this man, and I knew that the instant that I met him, that I had to have him on the show. And it's not just his skills. I mean, he's a giant ball of talent with total command over his instrument and his art, but it was really his spirit, his energy, and this positive resonating message that he conveys through his art and his writing and his voice. To kind of paint the picture, before each dinner, they had these group dinners up at Summit. There were hundreds of people at these dinners. Inc. Q would get up and he would deliver a poem to kind of set the energy for the evening. And these poems were just extraordinary. They were really almost more like prayers

• 1:23:06Rich Roll?

  than poem, or more inspirational pangerics than prayers even. And I simply had never heard anything like it before. It was remarkable, completely unique, and I was moved, very moved by the experience of seeing this gentleman perform. And then Julie and I had a chance to spend a little time with him, and it was very clear that he's a special guy, a very special guy, and one of those people who's just touched, and you feel it, you know it the minute that you meet him. To kind of give you a little bit of a background and flesh it out a little bit, Inc. Q is a National Poetry Slam champion who's shared the stage, I should say, with artists like De La Soul and Eminem and the Red Hot Chili Peppers

• 1:23:49Rich Roll?

  and John Legend. And he's even performed onstage with Cirque du Soleil. I believe he's the first poet to ever perform on a Cirque du Soleil stage, so that's pretty cool. He's toured over 70 colleges with his one-man show, and he's also a musician. He's written hit songs for Miley Cyrus and Rock Mafia, and he co-wrote Selena Gomez's hit song, "Love You Like a Love Song." So, the guy is sort of multifaceted and multi-talented. He's been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, Verses in Flow, the Discovery Channel, Disney Channel, ABC, NBC, A&E, Nickelodeon, et cetera.

• 1:24:25Rich Roll?

  I'm not going to give away his story. You'll have to hear it through our conversation. But it is one that you're going to want to hear, that you're going to want to stay tuned for the whole thing. And one that, no doubt, is going to make a powerful impression on you. Not only will it move and inspire you, it will help you reframe your perception on life. It will help you, in the words of the man himself, reimagine your truth. So let's dig his vibe.

• 1:24:57Speaker 07

  It's hard for me to say yes.

• 1:25:03Speaker 07

  It's easier for me to say, next year.

• 1:25:08Speaker 07

  When the weather's fine. When I have the money.

• 1:25:13Speaker 07

  Or the time. Or the relationship I want. Or the career. Or the house. Or the car. Or the watch. Watch life pass me by, waiting for an invitation. When the world is greater than my nation or my occupation.

• 1:25:34Speaker 07

  The only thing I know is that we're all in this together. And the future of this earth depends on how we treat each other. But how we treat each other starts with how we treat ourselves. And how we treat ourselves starts with how we see ourselves. And how we see ourselves starts with context. Nothing can exist without its opposite. Remember this, the next time you find you're in an argument and both sides are talking shit, you forget your point, except you're angry now and want to win. So you continue yelling till they give it up by giving in, so you can stand victorious because you're right on what again?

• 1:26:12Speaker 07

  Seriously, what are we talking about?

• 1:26:16Speaker 07

  That's why we send young people to war. Young people tend to die without asking what for. But one man's ceiling is another man's floor. "Let's meet up in between," said the ocean to the shore, hopelessly inquisitive. "A mind without a master." "I watched the master on a tab of acid then performed after, and yet my set was an unparalleled disaster because all my poems came out as..."

• 1:26:48Speaker 07

  Do you laugh on impulse or do you choose to laugh? Do you ask because you care or do you merely ask? I ask you this because I care about how humans act. We're animals, aware of our future and our past. And this can be an obstacle to traveling our path. Instead of just accepting where we're at, we analyze our tracks for what we could have had, looking back, focused on the memories instead of on the facts, hence what we attract. But it's hard to factor in how fast it really flashes past. It's an exponential graph from creation into ash. I'm sentimental one minute, then I'm making plans, staking claims, shaking hands, breaking

• 1:27:31Speaker 07

  out or breaking in. I have about a billion mimes hidden underneath my skin. And they pull my face into this grin or push my wrinkled forehead and so portage in philosophize because no one has your awesome eyes. Your view is worth the lows and highs you go through on these coaster rides. Control has got you holding on when letting go could be more fun. Hands up. Put your hands up. Wherever you are. Now feel the drop. Eventually it all has to stop, level out then come back up until you reach the very

• 1:28:16Speaker 07

  top because one day all your wheels fall off. So take advantage of your shocks. Do something you've never done. Do someone you've never done. Go someplace you've never gone. Someplace that could scare you some. Be someone you've never been. You feel all that adrenaline? It's medicine to jumpstart the spark inside your skeleton. See, everywhere you are is where you're supposed to be. So hopefully you're hopelessly as lost as me. Because if you're not, you ought to be.

• 1:28:53Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. That's just magic. That's gorgeous.

• 1:28:57Speaker 07

  Thanks.

• 1:28:58Rich Roll?

  Lovely. I know, I feel like, alright, the podcast is over. What else needs to be said, right? That's right. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 85 with Julie Pia.

• 1:29:17Rich Roll?

  I went out running this morning and you know, somebody was even running and they like turned around, this woman turned around and ran after me and said, "Oh, you're, you know, Rich Roll, I gotta get a picture with you." And we're like, running and she's holding her phone, you know, and I'm like, "Wow, you know, this never happens at home. You know, this is cool. I think I need to stay in Toronto. I'm feeling the love so much." So, I think that brings us to the real kind of overarching theme and what we wanted to talk about today, which is gratitude and being in touch with gratitude.

• 1:29:47Speaker 08

  Yes, that's right. And it's, it's just, um, to experience it, it's almost like it's exponential when you touch into it and you experience it. It amplifies like many times over inside of you. And, um, you know, to meet all these people and to connect at this way, at this level, and to sit with them and listen to their story and find out who they are, the transformation they're experiencing in their lives, it just blessed us, you know, a thousand times over for every single story that we heard. And, um, you know, I've just been literally vibrating for the last week with that immense emotion of gratitude and

• 1:30:31Speaker 08

  being grateful for being able to serve in this way and able to connect in this way. And, um, and I think it just, it really is, um, an emotion or a state that also can be cultivated as a part of everyday living and living for transformation and living in the highest vision of yourself. Because this effect is not unique to us or not unique to this experience. It's with everything in your life. And, you know, they always say, if you can cultivate an attitude of gratitude, you know, there's a lot that can be experienced through that portal. And it's always a choice of perception. You can always find something

• 1:31:14Speaker 08

  to be grateful for. I mean, yeah, it's, we're, we find a lot to be grateful for in this situation. But in every situation, you can always choose to find...

• 1:31:25Speaker 08

  You know, that nugget of gratitude which will propel you into a heightened experience and a more expanded experience.

• 1:31:33Rich Roll?

  What are some of the things that people can do who struggle with this to help them connect with it a little bit better?

• 1:31:42Speaker 08

  Okay, well, I mean, specifically, so all of experiences is simply a chosen perspective. It's a perception, you know, it's like, it's like, you know, people say, well, is your glass half empty or half full, you know, how are you choosing to look at it? So I think that, you know, it's great to acknowledge that, you know, a default is not to be grateful and to be in resentment and to see the negative in everything. And then one step beyond that is to understand that you, we are all powerful creators and especially at this time in history, at this moment, in this energetic field on the planet,

• 1:32:24Speaker 08

  we are actively co-creating our reality. So what you can do is if you find yourself in a negative looping pattern, or you find yourself looping and you're looking at the lack in any event, situation, circumstance, or person, you can make the decision to stop the behavior.

• 1:32:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, see, I think that's the thing. What happens is people say, well, is your glass half empty or half full? Like, make it, you know, make it half full and develop an attitude of gratitude. But there's no, what's the roadmap?

• 1:32:57Speaker 08

  Well, the roadmap, well, the roadmap is first to understand that it is in your power to make the shift. I mean, it's, it's, so if you're doing this as a default, I would say that possibly one thing to consider is that you've gotten lazy and you're letting your mind run you. So you're not your mind, you're your heart, and you're, you're much more than just your brain. So the brain can experience looping patterns of thoughts.

• 1:33:23Rich Roll?

  Explain what a looping pattern is for somebody who's not sure.

• 1:33:25Speaker 08

  Well, like if you just, it's like an automatic, like you're on automatic. You're like, well, I always do that. You know, when I always, when I see the dog, I always kick him. No, I don't mean that literally. But, you know, yeah, it's like, well, whenever I get tired, this is what happens, right?

• 1:33:39Rich Roll?

  Well, I think a good example is, we all know those people that are, they just, you know, there's a cloud over their head all the time, or they're a professional victim, and nothing ever works out. And they're always pointing their finger like, ah, I didn't get the job, I got fired again. Or, or even like, the guy who always seems to end up in a fight, you know, at the bar, and it's always somebody else's fault. And it's like, what's the common denominator? The common denominator is yourself, and what you're bringing into the equation. And, you know, if you keep getting that same result, you have to look in the mirror and try to figure out, how are you co-creating, or how are you contributing to that? And more often than not, it's that looping, you know, behavior or attitude in your mind of, you

• 1:34:21Rich Roll?

  know, that guy is more than me, or why can't I have that? Or, you know, the world always wrongs me, or whatever it is, that story that you tell yourself that becomes reality because you're looping it so often, that you are perpetuating this attitude, that you then project out onto others and onto the world, that facilitates that negative result.

• 1:34:44Rich Roll?

  Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 96, with Julie Piatt.

• 1:34:54Rich Roll?

  There really is no stasis. That's an illusion. You're either, in every moment, with every decision that you make, every action that you take, or even every thought that you conjure, you're either growing, or you're regressing. You're either moving towards something better, or you're lapsing back towards something maybe not so good. Back into bad habits, or assumptions, or modalities, or whatever, you know, certain things that might not serve you so well. And it takes a lot of focus, and concentration, and energy to not take things for granted. And for me, it requires a daily practice, because I forget. You know, I wake up, everything's good, you know, everything's sorted, I can just... Move on throughout my day. And I have to really stop and remind myself, okay, what am I doing? Am I moving forward?

• 1:35:39Rich Roll?

  Am I moving backwards? Where are the things that I need to focus my attention and work and try to grow and be better? And creating ceremony around certain important aspects of your everyday life can be really helpful. I mean, that's kind of what the marriage vow thing was about. So whether it's relationships or whatever, it really helps me understand that there's always improvement to be had and that it takes constant work and pressure and focus and concerted consciousness.

• 1:36:13Rich Roll?

  Instead of like applying yourself in a willful way, it's a surrender. It's a letting go and it's an allowing. And that's a very, very difficult, uncomfortable thing to do.

• 1:36:24Speaker 08

  And it isn't allowing and it's a letting go, but it's not a sitting in a cave.

• 1:36:28Rich Roll?

  No, it's not a do nothing thing.

• 1:36:30Speaker 08

  It's a very subtle click. It's a subtle shift of the way that you do things. And this is what I've been talking to you and some of the athletes that I've met through you about finding that place where you're training for the love of it, simply for the love of it. Like where is that without the competition, without the numbers, without all that stuff? So, I mean, you were asking a minute ago, how do I get in the zone or how do I flow? I mean, for instance, I will have experiences of that I'm going to teach or I'm going to speak or I'm going to share something. And I don't over prepare. Like I don't necessarily know, but I have an ability to connect with myself, with my

• 1:37:15Speaker 08

  heart, with my soul. And a lot of times the fun for me is to be in the moment and listen to what is given to me and trusted at that level. And that's crazy because, and it is, it can be scary and it can be terrifying, but...

• 1:37:32Rich Roll?

  See, I can't imagine doing that.

• 1:37:34Speaker 08

  Yeah, but you know, but you could maybe at some point, you know, it's like you, you start to, you can start to, um, to enjoy the process and once you see that you're supported time and time and time again, if you will release your grasping onto your idea, it's really a mental setup that you have in your mind about, you know, this is what this takes and, you know, you have to bleed for it and this is how it is. And it's just understanding that all of the information exists at some level, some dimensional level. And if you can tap into it, you can be given any, any, any information at any moment, but you have to be willing to let it come in. So I would say,

• 1:38:19Speaker 08

  if you hold on too loosely, you'll miss the miracles. You're going to miss the gifts because you tried to grab it too hard. But if you have, how I do it is I have a vision and I make very concrete steps towards that vision, but I don't hold on so tight that I, I'm so specific that I've created my own prison cell. And so, because my little human mind can never imagine the beauty that consciousness can deliver, could never, ever imagine. And, you know, we've, look at our own lives. We didn't have, you know, a lot of the stuff, they were not on our vision list.

• 1:39:01Speaker 08

  And look at how things have unfolded through a lot of faith, a lot of extreme faith. And, you know, and you've had a lot of extreme faith as well. You know, you forget because now you're in the function of what happened. But if you didn't have that faith, we never would have experienced what we experienced together.

• 1:39:19Rich Roll?

  Right. And I couldn't have predicted what we're doing now. There's no way. And I wouldn't have imagined that we'd be sitting where we're sitting. And I also wouldn't have, you know, even before it began, I couldn't have fathomed that this is how I would be. This is the life that I would be pursuing even.

• 1:39:37Speaker 08

  No, but if you-

• 1:39:38Rich Roll?

  So it's bizarre. So what I'm saying is, you know, I'm in agreement with that idea that, that, you know, if you hold, hold on too hard to where you think things should go, then you might just miss the miracle right in front of you.

• 1:39:51Speaker 08

  No, and that-

• 1:39:52Rich Roll?

  Or letting things unfold.

• 1:39:53Speaker 08

  And that, you know, that alcoholic, extreme mind, or whatever, never imagined that you would have a life. It couldn't. It didn't have enough expansion in it. Because it would have told me and you every reason why none of this could have happened. And you would have had every reason in the book. You would have had it all figured out. There's no way. And, but the interesting thing to me is, is that if you crawled inside your heart and someone did an inventory and like took pictures of what was existing inside the heart of your dreams, you're living that life right now. And that's because we had faith and we took risks and we kept dropping the external things. And we, we risked everything. We, we risked our annihilation.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  Okay, everybody. I hope you enjoyed this look in the rear view. Once again, part two of the best of 2014 with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations. Will be up later in the week. I'm going to post that late Wednesday night, New Year's Eve, Pacific Standard Time. So keep an eye out for that if you're not doing anything else on New Year's Eve. And I will catch you in a few days. Season's greetings, happy holidays, merry, merry, peace, and plants.