The Best of 2017- Part I

This is the time of year to pause. It's the time of year for reflection. For gratitude. And for giving back. So let's do all those things. Welcome to the fifth annual Best of the RRP Anthology — our way of taking a moment to reflect on the year, express gratitude and give 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 2017, it's amazing how many incredibly dynamic conversations and perspectives I was honored to share. Second listens brought new insights. Another reminder that this show is a gift that just keeps giving. For long-time listeners, this two-part episode is intended to inform and inspire your new year's trajectory. If you're new to the show, my hope is that this anthology will stir you to peruse the back catalog and/or check out episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology are enumerated below. RRP #266: Navy SEAL David Goggins RRP #267: Kundalini Yogi Master Guru Singh RRP #268: Superfood Hunter Darin Olien RRP #269 Rock Icon Travis Barker RRP #272: Integrative Medicine Doctor Rachel Abrams, M. D. RRP #275: Marathon Swimmer Kimberly Chambers RRP #276: Cultivating Your Inner Jedi With Julie Piatt RRP #278: ‘What The Health' With Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn Thank you. I appreciate you. I love you. Here's to an extraordinary 2018. 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?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05David Goggins?

  I have a whole bunch of calluses on my hands from doing pull-ups. I also callous my brain through my life, through suffering, through not saying no, for not listening to the negative energy, to negative people. And when you continue to move forward through hell, and move forward past your fears and your insecurities, and continue to push through this wall, your brain becomes really callous. And you're able to see things that most people can't even comprehend. Because you've always, you never ran from the fight, you ran to the fight. And that built a different kind of mindset that allowed me to deal with very, very tough things.

• 1:44Rich Roll?

  That, my friends, is the great David Goggins. And this is Part 1 of the Best of 2017 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? Happy holidays to all the good people out there. Welcome or welcome back to my podcast, the podcast where I do my best, my very best to have probing, meaningful conversations with the world's best and brightest across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for spreading the word on social media and at the dinner table with your nutty relatives. And welcome to my annual Best of Anthology series where I feature excerpts from some of my favorite conversations of 2017. And as a broad lifestyle wellness podcast, I pride

• 2:51Rich Roll?

  myself on trying to embrace and contemplate a wide range of important subject matters, varying perspectives, opinions, and attitudes. And I feel like we accomplished that in 2017. When I look back, even I'm surprised at what we've covered, what we've accomplished, the diversity of guests, how many interesting and unique people and perspectives we have entertained, the amazing lessons and tools that have been conveyed. It's really extraordinary. And these next two episodes are really just about excerpting some of those insights, basically a snapshot of the year, a refresher course, if you will, a little inspiration capsule to catapult you into January, informed and motivated and inspired to hopefully take

• 3:35Rich Roll?

  your health and your wellbeing in your life to the next level. So if you've been with me all along, then this will hopefully help bring some of these insights back into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams heading into the new year. And if you're brand new to the show, then this should provide a really excellent window into the world of my show, of my guests, and should give you a sense of what this program is all about and hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to the episodes in full or visit some of the shows you might have skipped over or missed over the course of the year. And I've provided links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes on the episode page for this episode, which you can find at richroll.com.

• 4:28Rich Roll?

  Okay, I gotta tell you guys, it's really hard to choose amongst my babies. Not every guest could get featured in this anthology, and I love all my guests. Every single one of them has been an extraordinary gift. So this is an impossible task. It's a thankless task. Who do I include? Who gets left out? So suffice it to say that we did the best that we could. And know that if I left out one of your favorite guests, I get it. It breaks my heart more than it breaks yours to leave anybody out. These are all my favorites. So with that being said, these next two shows should be considered, should be digested, should be approached as simply my love letter to all of you. It's my way of saying thank you. It's my way of saying I recognize you.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  I appreciate you. It's my way of saying I believe in positive change. I believe in you, and I believe in the power that we all have to do better, to be better, to be better servants to ourselves, to our families, to our loved ones, and to humanity, to quite literally step into our best, most authentic selves. So happy holidays, and let's just dive in. Our first excerpt, our first guest, is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met, David Goggins. This conversation with David is the most downloaded, most listened to podcast I have

• 5:55Rich Roll?

  ever created, and so it makes sense that it would go first in this pecking order. For those of you who are new, David is often referred to as the toughest athlete on the planet. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @DavidGoggins, and he is the only member of the US Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, including two hell weeks, plus the US Army Ranger School, where he graduated as enlisted honor man, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller Training. Again, one of the most extraordinary people on planet Earth. His message is very powerful, very palpable. So with that being said, I give you my conversation with David Goggins.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  If you tell me what David's morning routine is, or if you tell me exactly what his training program is, or if you tell me exactly how he eats, then I can be David Goggins. Or I can approximate some aspect of... I can bring a little bit of David Goggins into my life.

• 6:58David Goggins?

  Right.

• 6:59Rich Roll?

  And for me, it's missing the most important thing.

• 7:02David Goggins?

  It's the mindset.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Which is going back to mindset. It's like connecting with yourself.

• 7:06David Goggins?

  That's all it is.

• 7:06Rich Roll?

  What is it that gets you out of bed? Like, how can you find that... It's not about what David does in his morning routine, or what his workout is. It's about you and your relationship to yourself.

• 7:17David Goggins?

  You said it, right? Period, dot. It's not about what David's eating. It's not about what anybody's eating. Once you figure out who you are, hopefully you get one thing from me today: change the way you are thinking. Don't put your...

• 7:32Rich Roll?

  But if you're... Listen. I'm just trying to get into the head of the guy sitting at his cubicle at work.

• 7:39David Goggins?

  Right.

• 7:39Rich Roll?

  Who's hating his life, right? And David's telling me, "I gotta change the way I think." Well, like, what the fuck do I do with that? Like, I don't understand what I'm supposed to actually do.

• 7:49David Goggins?

  Well, what you do, what you're supposed to do is... Everybody has issues. You're a human being. You're fucked up somewhere. And that somewhere, or several somewheres, is keeping you in that same spot. Like, the spot is this: How do you lose 100 pounds? How do you run 100 miles? How do you...? Let me tell you how. Stop asking these fucking questions is how. Stop... You're delaying the fucking process by wasting my fucking time. How I did it? I wanted it. So, my process was, as I'm asking questions, I'm running to lose weight. I'm figuring out how to do it.

• 8:33David Goggins?

  Most of us sit back and say, "God, I wish I could do that." And we wait. And we wait and we ask more questions and ask more questions and prolong.

• 8:41Rich Roll?

  David, what kind of watch are you wearing? What kind of running shoes?

• 8:44David Goggins?

  Exactly.

• 8:44Rich Roll?

  It's like they're not going to go out and run until they got all the answers.

• 8:47David Goggins?

  I need the gear.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  I need to know all this stuff.

• 8:49David Goggins?

  Right.

• 8:49Rich Roll?

  Or who's, you know, what is your approach to this thing?

• 8:52David Goggins?

  Right.

• 8:52Rich Roll?

  Da, da, da, da. And I look at you and I'm like, this guy wanted to do bad water. You know, a week later, he's running a hundred miles on a track.

• 8:59David Goggins?

  Exactly.

• 8:59Rich Roll?

  You know, nothing about nothing.

• 9:00David Goggins?

  That's exactly.

• 9:01Rich Roll?

  But you just knew that you had, you had drive and you had a vision and you had passion and you went after it. And you had, not only did you not have the answers, you weren't even asking the questions yet.

• 9:11David Goggins?

  I don't care. Because, and this is the thing about it, like, and that's what's so funny. You, and that's why I get so turned off by people like that. I get it. You have to have knowledge to be great at something. And to lose weight, to be a smart, you gotta have knowledge. Knowledge is power. But I'm gonna tell you right now, man, how much damn knowledge do you need? You can go on the internet right now and figure out how to drop five pounds tomorrow. Everything is right there at your service. If you want it, you will achieve it. But if you want to waste time and figure out, ask all of these fucking questions, I'm gonna give you the same answer. Stop asking the question, achieve what you want.

• 9:54David Goggins?

  If I asked a bunch of questions, I would still be trying to figure out how to do, run a hundred miles. So many people tell me, I would love to run bad water one day. Why the fuck haven't you done it? You told me that five years ago. I wonder, I hadn't, I didn't run bad water. I did it in four months. I qualified in four days and ran the damn race. I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, had to lose a hundred and five pounds in 60 days to get in and do it. I lost the weight and became a damn SEAL. I wanted to be a Ranger at 41 years old. People go, what are you gonna do next? I don't know. I've already done it. Cause the second I thought about it, I researched it. I didn't ask questions. I achieved it.

• 10:33David Goggins?

  We waste tons of time not starting our journey for asking so many fucking questions on how to start the journey. Get an idea, start walking and figure the shit out as you go. Vision quest.

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  But David, you don't understand my life.

• 10:47David Goggins?

  Exactly.

• 10:48Rich Roll?

  You know, I got, I got, you know, I work, I have to get up at five and I work till nine and I got three kids and I'm barely making ends meet. Like, it's cool that you can do that, but like, that's, you know, it's just not possible.

• 10:59David Goggins?

  What I love about that is people can come at me with all that crap all day long. When I say that right there to you. I was a full-time Navy SEAL. There's 24 hours in a day. I would do an ultra races and how I did it was I had to be at work at 7 o'clock in the morning. I woke up at 3 o'clock in the morning. I ran and then I rode my bike to work and I did the same thing and I came home. If you want it, you will find time in your life to do it. If you don't want it, you will continue to do exactly what I'm now giving me excuses. You're gonna make up every excuse on why you can't do it and that's why I can't connect with you. That's why you hear the passion come out of me and you wanna say it's anger? No, cuz I know it can be done.

• 11:43David Goggins?

  And you're telling me all this shit on why it can't be done. And then what you do is he's crazy, he's in a can't, no. You don't want it bad enough. If you want it bad enough, you will figure out how to make this shit happen.

• 11:56Rich Roll?

  Are you willing to like entertain the possibility that you do have like some talent doing this? Or is it all like you're chalking it all up to preparation and mindset?

• 12:06David Goggins?

  Well, like I said, if anybody's familiar with sickle cell, um, it's a blood disease that pretty much, it's called sudden death syndrome. A lot of African-Americans who have it, they just pass out and die. So, you know, my VO2 max is horrible. My hematocrit and all this stuff is horrible. And also having a hole in your heart that the size I had, it took away a lot of my.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the thing like you have like, you have like, uh, you're operating with like only like 25% of your capability.

• 12:37David Goggins?

  And that's what I'm trying to tell people, right? And I was trying to tell people, everybody thinks that they, they wanna believe and I wish I was. After every race, I was either in a, on a, in a wheelchair or whatever, because running with sickle cell is, is just not the smartest thing to do. Those, those distances. At mile 50 of every 100 mile race, man, I was destroyed. And I just had to find, but the feeling of. The next 50 miles I had to go, I learned a lot about David Goggins and the will. It was always me against me. So, no, I don't have any ability.

• 13:13Rich Roll?

  See, this is the heart of the whole thing, though, because I think it's really important. Because if you are a genetic freak of nature, then it's very easy for somebody to shrug you off. Like, oh, yeah, well, he does it, but like, you know, he's who, he's David Goggins. You know what I mean? Like, normal people can't do that. And for you to always anchor it and bring it back to, look, man, these are the challenges that I'm facing. I'm facing, I have to overcome more of these challenges than the average guy. Like, I'm actually starting at a deficit like this.

• 13:42David Goggins?

  And I'm not gonna ever let anybody make themselves feel better by telling me that I was some genetic freak. I'm not gonna make yourself feel better about that. You, I suffered. And I always say suffer because that's what I did. It was miserable. The races, every single race in Hell Week, in Buzz, in Ranger School, I suffered tremendously. I was not, I should never have been able to do it, which is why I'm so proud of myself. I don't care what place I came in. I don't care. I walked 105 miles of bad water.

• 14:17David Goggins?

  I did it. That was the journey. That was the mission. That was about. It's not about, oh, well, this guy's just a freak. If that makes you feel bad, it's fine. No, you can do it off just a breath of air in the right mindset. That's the message. So, you watered down my message by putting me in a category of I'm crazy, I'm a freak, whatever.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  Well, all of those, all of those arguments are comfortable arguments to allow people to stay stuck in whatever situation they're in. You know what I mean?

• 14:48David Goggins?

  Right.

• 14:48Rich Roll?

  So, it's more uncomfortable if they have to actually reckon and wrestle with the fact that you are like them.

• 14:55David Goggins?

  Just like them.

• 14:56Rich Roll?

  And no one, people don't want to do that. They don't want to look in the mirror, right?

• 15:00David Goggins?

  And, right.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  So, tell me about the mirror thing is a big thing with you, right?

• 15:03David Goggins?

  It's a huge thing for me. It's called the accountability mirror. So, I talk about my childhood, and if anybody thinks I'm some great person, listen to my childhood again. I had to change my thinking process and basically the accountability mirror is what did it. I started shaving my head and my face when I was 16 years old. And I realized when I started shaving my face and my head, you have a lot of time to look at your reflection. And for some, it sparked in me, I'm like, man, I'm a piece of crap. Like, I ducked school, I ducked school, I'm barely, I'm graduating, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, I'm all these things, man. And I had to really tell myself the truth.

• 15:46David Goggins?

  And so many people, when you say you're dumb, the first thing people say, oh, no, you're not. If you're dumb, you're dumb. If you're fat, you're fat. But if you're not willing to tell yourself that, and everybody around you in your circle continues to give you this positive feedback, if you suck, you suck. If you tell yourself you suck, that is when you become great.

• 16:09Rich Roll?

  Well, then you're getting into the solution.

• 16:11David Goggins?

  That is what I'm talking about. So that accountability mirror was, I gotta become, I gotta get to the surface of who I'm not. And I held myself accountable. I lied to this person today, I'm a liar, I'm a cheater, I'm this, I'm that. And I tell myself, and I fixed these issues, and fixed these issues, and that part was hard. It was hard to not be jealous of this person who had this and this and this, had nothing. Nothing. It was hard to tell this person, yeah, I'm jealous of you. And I'm insecure. I'm a very insecure guy. And I have nothing. It was hard to look at all that. I'm not real smart. And I had, but I had to fix these issues.

• 16:53David Goggins?

  And the accountability mirror was, now I look at myself in the mirror and say, wow, you fixed these issues.

• 16:58Rich Roll?

  Right. So that's a thing that you consciously practice every day?

• 17:03David Goggins?

  Every day of my life. Every day of my life, even now. So if I were to say some little white lie, and I go to the mirror in the morning time, I shave my head, I'm like, man, why the hell did you say that to that guy? And he would get a call from me and say, look, dude, I, I, I lied.

• 17:18Rich Roll?

  That's like, that's like 12 step, man. It's like doing your daily inventory and like making amends for your bullshit.

• 17:23David Goggins?

  That's it.

• 17:23Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 17:24David Goggins?

  Cause you only lie to yourself.

• 17:26Rich Roll?

  When you see like this, you know, we're in this cultural malaise right now where like every kid gets a participation trophy. And like, we have to tell everyone that they're great, even though, you know what I mean? It's all about like feelings and everybody's a special snowflake and all of that. Like, you know, that must make you insane.

• 17:43David Goggins?

  It makes me more than insane. It, it really, um, it's the destruction of this, of, of this country. And I love this country. I've, I've fought hard for it. I will continue to fight forward and hopefully through mental toughness, it takes mental toughness to change how you look at things. And giving a person a trophy, saying you're great, when you're really not, if I had that growing up, there would be no David Goggins, zero. There'd be no tough people, none, which is why the world is where it is today. A bunch of weak, uh, some weak people.

• 18:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:21David Goggins?

  There's a lot of weak people now.

• 18:23Rich Roll?

  Right. So let's wrap it up with this. I mean, if there's one, if you can like distill, uh, you know, everything that you're about into like kind of one core message that you want people to take away. Like what is it beyond what we've already talked about? Like what is it that's holding people back? That's limiting them, that is, you know, that's keeping them stuck in, in their blind spot? And how can you kind of speak to that to perhaps, you know, shake it loose a little bit? And get people to think a little bit differently about how to proactively approach their lives?

• 18:56David Goggins?

  The truth, their truth, the real truth about who they are as a person. And, um, I think it all really starts there, the truth. And knowing that you may not be a courageous person, you may not have this and that, but are you willing to?

• 19:13David Goggins?

  Find it within yourself to go through the very hard journey. A lot of people in this world have died eighty, ninety, a hundred years old, and they lived a great life. They had a lot of things. But a lot of people who have died never really started the true journey that whatever you believe in, God, or whatever you believe in, if you believe in nothing. I believe we're all here to start a journey. And that journey is fucking hard. If you choose your real journey. Most of us, we decide to take a different journey in life. It's a journey of least resistance. And so, what I challenge people to do is to realize that in themselves, that yeah, I have taken a lot of left turns and I should have stayed straight because why?

• 19:57David Goggins?

  I wasn't good at something. And it embarrassed me to not be good at something, or I wasn't the smartest person, or this, or that, whatever all these excuses are that we build up. Find the truth of who you are. Go back to the start of your journey and go down that path. I guarantee you, if you finish that journey, and you don't fear and waver and go places that are very easy, the other end of that journey, let me tell you, is a peaceful ending.

• 20:32Rich Roll?

  Next up is master spiritual teacher and celebrated Kundalini Yogi wizard Guru Singh. This is a man who has incredible capacity, aptitude for fusing Eastern mysticism with Western pragmatism. It's very wise. It's a beautiful consciousness. One of the coolest people I've ever met. So, without further ado, please enjoy Guru Singh.

• 20:58Guru Singh?

  Ego is the glue that holds soul to body. So ego is an innocent mechanism through which you express life. The reason that ego has gotten such a bad rap is that ego has often, when life is very expressive, been also very exclusive.

• 21:27Guru Singh?

  Or very greedy. But

• 21:33Guru Singh?

  people like Jesus had a huge ego, people like the Buddha had a huge ego, people like the Dalai Lama, Mother Teresa, had a huge ego. Ego is what ego does. So, anything that has created an impact on the planet is a massive ego. But it's a massive ego used for benevolent purposes, as opposed to a massive ego used for personal reasons.

• 22:01Rich Roll?

  Trying to wrap my head around that.

• 22:02Guru Singh?

  Ego is ego.

• 22:04Rich Roll?

  I think you have to define ego.

• 22:07Guru Singh?

  Right.

• 22:07Rich Roll?

  Talking about.

• 22:08Guru Singh?

  No, no, redefine ego.

• 22:09Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 22:10Guru Singh?

  Because ego, as I said, has gotten a bad reputation because it's been defined by people that were using their power, their human power, their personal power, for personal reasons. But ego is not positive or negative. Ego is not good or bad. Ego is an innocent participant, a tool that can either be used as a tool of benevolence, or a weapon of destruction, or a weapon of absorption, of limited and only personalized and exclusive absorption.

• 22:55Rich Roll?

  But isn't it true that just by virtue of like an over, an enhanced ego is going to lead towards that inflated sense of self that will almost make, you know, those negative actions that come with an overinflated ego automatic, right?

• 23:17Guru Singh?

  Not automatic, but semi-automatic, to use a weapons mechanism, right? The only thing that keeps you going in your extreme events is ego. Now, if you were only doing it to get known.

• 23:40Guru Singh?

  There would be a problem in there. And it may even sap some of your energy so that you weren't able to perform as well. But ego is a performance mechanism that enables you. Because what if you were not known by anybody? What if you didn't do extreme things publicly? But just did them very privately? And nobody knew that you did them? You wouldn't be able to have a podcast that had, what, hundreds of thousands of people listening? Or millions of people that are listening? Whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter. But it's a big number. Which means that you wouldn't be able to get these messages out.

• 24:24Guru Singh?

  Which means that you wouldn't be able to do the work that you do. That's an ego that allows you to do that. But it's a brand of ego, not a force of ego. There's an equal force of ego that could be on another brand. The brand of "I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me." And you would also attract a big audience, as many of them do. But it wouldn't get the same effect.

• 24:51Rich Roll?

  And the seeds of destruction are baked into that.

• 24:54Guru Singh?

  So I declare, not the only one that's ever declared it, but I also declare that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. But absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And power does not necessarily have to corrupt. Just like in a wind, the way you set your sail is going to determine how you make your way through the wind. Yes, big gusts of wind will tend to knock you over. But if you set your sail at a certain way, your ego can ride those winds for very beneficial reasons.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  And the practical, real-world way to properly set that sail is what? Like, what are the practices?

• 25:44Guru Singh?

  The Hippocratic oath: "Cause no harm." Hmm? And for that, you need to have a higher awareness. So as you're, as you're learning to do this, you're going to cause a lot of harm. You're going to bump into a lot of people. You're going to mess things up. But as your awareness is raising, you become more intuitive. You become pre-scripted so that you know the consequence of your action before you take action, like in the 12-step program. You become more aware by, by making friends with the people that you've hurt, by asking

• 26:28Guru Singh?

  for forgiveness for the things that you've done.

• 26:32Rich Roll?

  We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us.

• 26:36Guru Singh?

  Perfect, perfect, exactly. And in doing so, you can use ego to become well-known for the purpose of getting people to know the information of recovery, to get people to know the information of discovery, to get people to know the information of extreme discovery, right? Endurance kinds of discovery.

• 27:02Rich Roll?

  It's about intention and the motivations that fuel it, right?

• 27:07Guru Singh?

  Yes.

• 27:08Rich Roll?

  And, and, and this journey, this practice, I kind of want to, we gotta start to like wind this down a little bit.

• 27:15Guru Singh?

  I know, we can go on and on, we're good.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  Will you come back and talk to me more?

• 27:19Guru Singh?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 27:20Rich Roll?

  Cause I could, I could like go all night.

• 27:21Guru Singh?

  We'll do another one.

• 27:23Rich Roll?

  I just, I want to leave people with, with, you know, at least a tool or two that they can take away from this and begin to incorporate into their life. So beyond find a Kundalini, you know, yoga practice in your vicinity, or, you know, go to your website and watch your videos and read your writings. And I'm going to talk about that in a second. And of course, what you referenced earlier, which is developing a habit of waking up very early in the morning and the precious kind of.

• 27:57Rich Roll?

  Beautiful like flowers that can bloom from commitment to that practice. It's something that I feel strongly about and it's difficult, yes, but once you get used to it. I mean, I know that like my most creative time, my writing, everything comes in those precious hours before everyone else is awake. So maybe speak about that a little bit.

• 28:23Guru Singh?

  Well, you asked for, in your, in your lead up to this, you asked for some practicals.

• 28:33Guru Singh?

  One thing that I want listeners to remember is Newton's third law of motion. For every action, there is a reaction that is equal and opposite. And so if you live your life in that premise, that for everything that is happening to you, there's a way out, there's a way through, there's a solution. Because if it's a problem, there's a solution. If it's a solution, watch out for the problem. So if you're living, if you're governing your life by the laws of physics,

• 29:16Guru Singh?

  which apply to our lives, because our lives are physical, in addition to mental and emotional and all, and spiritual, then you will realize that no matter what's happening, there's an alternative. And within, even if you go down into the quantum of physics, there's a way of reconstructing the moment, deconstructing and reconstructing the moment, which simply means always have hope, always have hope.

• 29:50Guru Singh?

  Always have hope. Then go on from there. What are the ways in which I can help to instill hope? Every single day, go out onto the ground

• 30:07Guru Singh?

  and get in your bare feet on unpainted pavement or on the grass or dirt. And just stand there for at least three minutes and get in touch with your earth magnetic field, gravitational field, et cetera. Just get really grounded. Very practical. Three minutes. And then do some stretching. So three practical things. One mental, one very physical, and one very exertive. The mental is know that there's an equal and opposite in every situation. A way out of every challenge, a way through every block.

• 30:51Guru Singh?

  Physical, get grounded every morning. And in exertion, stretch. Stretch into your body glove. There's not just Kundalini classes. There's exercise classes. There's your, there's your trainings. There's so many different trainings. Learn to do stretching for another 10 minutes of your morning. Because the way in which your nerves and muscles and tendons and bones and fascia interface inside of your physical body. I'm not going to try to go into the technical details, but just trust me. I'm not saying to you, because you know, but I'm saying to the listeners, just get into your body. Get fully inside your body.

• 31:35Guru Singh?

  And if you can handle it, take a cold water shower after your warm water shower to really force the blood down into the deep glands and organs to flush them out. Because you used warm water to wash the skin. Now use cold water to force, it constricts the skin, forces the blood down inside the body to flush out the inner part of your body. And just end your. Five-minute hot water shower with a three to five-minute cold water shower. It'll be cold only for the first few seconds and then your body will get used to it. So, cold water therapy as well. So, these are some practicals that-

• 32:15Rich Roll?

  Very practical and very doable.

• 32:17Guru Singh?

  Very doable.

• 32:17Rich Roll?

  Very simple, very doable.

• 32:19Guru Singh?

  Very doable.

• 32:21Rich Roll?

  One of my most popular conversations of 2017 was with my friend Darren O'Leary, who you can find on Twitter at SuperLifeLiving. Darren, return to the podcast for a second conversation so that we could delve deep into next-level nutrition insights that he's gleaned from his many unbelievably extraordinary adventures as an exotic superfoods hunter and environmental activist. Darren is a friend, he's an inspiration to me personally. This is a guy who really walks his talk. He's a thriving embodiment of what it means to truly own and take responsibility for your health and for your life and for the planet that we collectively enjoy. So, that being said, here's Darren.

• 33:06Darin Olien?

  What's the number one thing? People, you have to take responsibility for yourself and your life and your health, period, regardless of what we're even talking about. You can't, you can't just throw it to some doctor and you can't just kind of divorce yourself in listening to advice. You have to be educated. This is your body. This is it. This is your vehicle. This is your deal. If you don't think that that's an important thing to, to have something that's out here and open your mouth and let it inside your body, and if you're not looking at that as something really important-

• 33:53Darin Olien?

  Then, I don't know, but that's a, that's a big frickin' deal. And that's a big disconnect. Because that's what it's all about, man. It's out here in space and we need to bring it inside. So we open our mouth and the fact that we're just thinking these twinkies and this fast food and, and all this stuff is, is, oh, we're fine. No, it, I mean, come on, it's.

• 34:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, every action has a, has a reaction. And in the same way that every, you know, decision that you make and behavior that you engage in either moves you in a positive direction or a negative direction. It is the same with every food that you put in your mouth. It's either making you healthier or sicker. And the idea that it's static or that it doesn't matter, or, you know, whatever you put in, it's all the same because your body breaks it down in calories or calories is nonsense.

• 34:47Darin Olien?

  It's nonsense. And, and that's where I'm like, you know, even before I was full on into this stuff and, and I, I never, never made sense to me to skimp on food, right? Pay, pay the money, pay it. Because here's the thing, it's, you're gonna pay for it.

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  You're paying for it eventually, no matter what.

• 35:06Darin Olien?

  The debt collector's coming. And, you know, luckily I got into this early because of challenges in my own life and, and, and, uh, and I'm formed that have, I have a great, I've got a fantastic addictive personality that luckily I turned and went this direction and now I'm obsessed. But not obsessed in the, that's all I think about. And I'm obsessed to the point where I want my body to function so that I can live. So that if you and I want to go to the beach and pull a log or jump in the ocean or run up a mountain, I can do it.

• 35:42Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:42Darin Olien?

  Without kind of dreading the last half of my life and, and, uh, barely kind of doing the things and barely playing with my kids and like, that's, no, I'm not interested in that. And I, I'm not interested in fads. I, I just, I just don't like, I'm actually anti-fad because the reality is that. In order to make any lasting change, and just for me being here and you being where you're at, we didn't just turn on a light switch and we were eating this way. It was a slow burn. It was a slow education. And it's not sexy to market it. Because everyone wants the quick fix.

• 36:25Darin Olien?

  And I get it. I can put a concoction together that will light your ass up and make you freaking climb a mountain. But what I'm really interested in is inspiring people to go, listen, what you're doing, the choice you're making today for your breakfast, or your meal, or your... every little choice. I want to inspire millions of people to be excited that today, I'm sitting in my chair of my past choices and I'm proud of it. And I want to, I want people to be stoked that, hey, you know what? You're choosing today, and maybe tomorrow you don't have everything you want,

• 37:09Darin Olien?

  and maybe you still have aches and pains and everything. But I promise you, if you decide to do this every day, that a year is gonna blink by, and your life is gonna be sustainably different. And you're not gonna be yanked around by weird marketing and weird fads, and yo-yoed around, and be more shamed than you possibly can imagine. I hate that shit. I just, I, I, I, I just, I don't like it. It's not real. It never works. So, I know it's not sexy. I know it's hard to market, because people want. But yes, of course, you have wins along the way,

• 37:54Darin Olien?

  and you feel better and all that stuff, but...

• 37:58Rich Roll?

  I think the core of what you're saying really is that when you do decide to bear that mantle and take responsibility for your own health, that puts you in a position to no longer be necessarily reactive to these fads as they arise and just latch on to whatever the latest thing is and ping pong around, right? Because then you become your own sort of, you know, regulation device to make a conscious, non-reactive decision as to what serves you and what doesn't. And the only way that you can really make those decisions, you know, in your best interest and as consciously as possible is to do your own research and to use yourself as your own personal lab, right?

• 38:41Darin Olien?

  Exactly. Well, it reminds me of what you're saying, too, is if I'm someone that's honoring myself and following a day-to-day plan of how to, what do I really know how to take care of myself? I'm not really worried about that person when a fad comes down the road because they're kind of solid and they're gaining strength inside themselves and physically and stuff. What I'm concerned about is when people are not taking care of themselves well and they have suffered and they've put on the weight and they have chronic disease and they're in pain and all that stuff, and then this information comes out, they're desperate. So then they grab on to it and then they're yanked around and then there's a bunch of

• 39:26Darin Olien?

  other consequences to it.

• 39:30Rich Roll?

  Dubbed one of the 100 greatest drummers of all time by Rolling Stone, Travis Barker, who you can find on Twitter @TravisBarker, is a guy who rose from blue collar roots to become one of the world's most talented, most prolific, and hard-working rock stars, a multi-hyphenate, most well-known as a member of the multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated punk-rock band Blink-182. This was an absolutely riveting, incredible conversation with a remarkable human being. And you're gonna want to hear it in full if you missed it the first time around, but here's a slice.

• 40:08Rich Roll?

  Well, can we talk about the plane crash?

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course.

• 40:11Rich Roll?

  You're okay with that? I mean, you know, it's well documented and everything like that, but you know, it's quite, you know, it was quite the tragic encounter. I just, I can't imagine, you know, what that must have been like trying to, you know, overcome that, but maybe, you know, walk us through exactly what happened.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  So it was, it was one of those days where we had a show, it was for like T-Mobile, and they would pay us big money to go and play these shows, and it was in South Carolina. And whoever, before we left, I was like, I don't really need to go. It's summer. And, and my, my, my baby's mama, Shayna at the time, we weren't together, but she was like, don't go then. Like, if you don't have to go, you don't need the money. It's like, why are you doing it? And I was like, I'm doing it because I love playing with Adam. And I think Adam was going through the same thing, like, ah, we don't have to go. But it was just one of those things, it's booked, let's honor what we committed to. So we flew out to South Carolina.

• 41:11Rich Roll?

  Wasn't, uh, wasn't Shayna gonna come with you?

• 41:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, Shayna was gonna come. My kids were bawling, man. It was like, it was the weirdest thing. My kids were bawling. My little girl, Alabama, was saying, she's freaking the whole time. She's never done this. She's crying, saying the roof's gonna come off. And I'm like, what are you talking about, Bama? And, and she's a baby at the time, and she's just, the kids are crying, not normal, like weird, you know?

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  That is so trippy.

• 41:36Speaker 05

  And yeah, like, like I said, my gut, this is one of the big examples of where I was like, my gut told me not to go. So I end up going, and she was gonna go with us, but she's like, nah, I shouldn't go. Just in case, God forbid, something was to happen, we'd both be in that plane. So we go, and, uh, the flight out there is cool. I take my assistant, little Chris, and, uh, and our, uh, we just had a big homie named Che, who was like our good friend. And he was like, he was playing college football. Uh, basically, Chris and I were like, dude, instead of hiring security for now, and we should just take Che with us. Che's gonna be a security for now on, because it's, it's good having friends on tour with you too. And Che's big and, you know, intimidating. Che's never been on a private plane.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Uh, you know, we go out there on a G4, everything's cool, we play our show. And then after the show... Um, we had a flight booked for tomorrow. Everything was, everything was set up. But, uh, Am's like, yo, I want to get back tonight. Like, you know, what are we going to do in South Carolina? You know? And then Chris had just had his son Sebastian, who's my godson. He's like, yeah, man, we should just go home, Trav. Um, and I was like, well, we have a flight booked tomorrow. Don't trip. Let's just chill here, you guys. But it's like majority rules. Anywhere we go, if I get outvoted, I'm, I'm rolling with the punches, you know? And everyone was like-

• 42:57Rich Roll?

  The people skills.

• 42:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I took one for the team. I said, okay, whatever, man. You guys, let's book the flight, whatever. So booking flights like this, usually like the, the flight out there, it's like, I'd speak to a manager and I say, who's the pilot? What's the plane? What's the history? Is everything cool?

• 43:16Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. So you're getting into it.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm really, I'm terrified of flying. So, and ironically enough, the, the flight out there was cake, a piece of cake, man. We, we knew who the pilot was. He was super cool. He knew I was a little bit weird about flying, you know? Um, great flight though. On the way back, you gotta think, man, we just got off stage. It's nine 30, 10 o'clock. And we make the phone call, get us a plane. So the plane is booked in an hour's time. No, there's no one dotting the i's or crossing the t's. It's like, yo, you guys want a plane? I'm going to do everything I can do to get this plane there. So the plane gets there and-

• 43:56Rich Roll?

  So implying that like shortcuts were made on the checklist or?

• 44:01Speaker 05

  I know my checklist wasn't done, you know? Cause Gus, who was our tour manager for Blink, you know? Usually there was like a, a, you know, there's a little checklist that goes, and I know that checklist wasn't going to happen. It was an hour's time. And LV's like, dude, it's not going to be the greatest plane, but I'll get it. Once again, rolling with the punches, you know? Whatever for the team. So we get there. We pull up to the airport and it's like private airport and there's all these jets. And then there's this fucking Lear over all by itself. And I was like, oh, cold as ice. Tell me that is not our plane. And sure enough, the driver drives up to that plane and I'm just looking at it. And I was, you know, bad, bad feeling, man. Bad feeling. My guts saying no.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  It, to the point where I actually called my dad. Who at the time, now I say I love you every time I speak to him, he's like seventy-five, but growing up, he's a Vietnam vet, he's tough, man, tough, tough dad, you know? And I know he loved me, but we wouldn't say I love you or be gushy, you know? It was like more tough love.

• 45:06Rich Roll?

  Not a hugger.

• 45:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, for him and I, so I call him and I'm like, I'm bawling at this point. I say, Dad, like, I have a really bad feeling.

• 45:13Rich Roll?

  You were crying before you even got on the plane.

• 45:15Speaker 05

  I'm crying and my dad's like, what the fuck is wrong with you, Trav? Why are you crying? And I said, Dad, I don't know, I have a horrible feeling. If something happens, pal, just do whatever you can to make sure the kids are cool. Cause I have a horrible feeling. And he's like, well, you're gonna be fine, you know? And I take a picture of the plane, I send it to like, I think I sent it to my pops, I sent it to my boy Rob, that's in the transplants with me. Weird enough, Chris does the same thing. I don't know that he does this, but he sends a picture of him in front of the plane to his wife.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  We get in the flight, there's like a really young pilot and it kinda like eased off some of the pressure because she was really young. And I was like, wow, you look really young. I was like, you fly the plane? She's like, yeah, I'm like getting my hours up or whatever, you know? She's basically, you know, she's with like an OG captain that's, you know, flying with her, you know, teaching her. So we get in there and she's basically like, okay, well, there's no room for a stewardess in this plane, so I'll be up in the cockpit. If you guys need anything, you know, just come knock on the door, whatever. So we get in the flight and I'm fucking baked, man. I smoked so much weed and I've taken so many pills. It's my normal concoction to get on the flight, you know? Especially this one, I'm going heavy, you know?

• 46:40Speaker 05

  We get on, everyone's like, there's actually a video, man, I have the video of it. AM, back in the day, there was these flip cams, I don't know if you remember. They were like the coolest thing before everybody phone had one. And he's on the flight and he's like, what do you know about a drummer, a DJ and a PJ? Like, you know, like, kinda like, kinda flexing a little bit, we're on a private jet, whatever, having, trying to have fun. And Chris is like, you know, what's up, Chris, whatever? We're just goofing off, like, you know, thinking we're just living in the lap of luxury on a private flight home. Everyone else is, I'm scared to death already, you know? So. Chris falls asleep, Che falls asleep, we're still on the runway. And I'm like wide awake, man, I'm just sitting there.

• 47:24Speaker 05

  Adam's sleeping. We go up and down the runway, we're going the wrong way. And they turn around.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  Wrong way on the runway.

• 47:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:34Rich Roll?

  Like so right out of the gate.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  They're like, sorry, yeah, we're, uh, sorry, we went down the wrong runway. And then I was like, oh my gosh, man, what the hell, you know? And then, uh, and then I'm kinda like dozing off and then finally, you know, you feel like the engine start up again. And we go to take off and our, uh, our, our landing gear, like the tire, basically our tires explode.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  Sounds like gunshots, you know? Not very many people will know what it sounds like when your tires explode on your plane. So it sounded like someone shooting at the plane.

• 48:05Rich Roll?

  Multiple tires.

• 48:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  Like it'd be, like if one went out.

• 48:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. It sounded like someone was, you know, like throwing rounds, you know? So I hear like these, these loud bangs. And then the plane is like skidding on the runway. So we have no tires. So now it's landing gear against the runway. And then smoke just starts filling the cabin. And fire immediately, cause the friction from

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  the landing gear on the runway. And then we go up in the air. And then

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Ah, you have to lift off.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. And then we, we lift off, so we're

• 48:42Rich Roll?

  You hear it from the captain, from the cockpit at all?

• 48:45Speaker 05

  No, I'm just screaming, cause I, I feel like I know something's wrong. Once the bang bang happened, the plane kinda got out of control, then we, we were up in the air. So I'm screaming, man, and it's just black in the, in, in the plane and smoke everywhere. And then, uh, the plane is basically going up high and then it's dipping down and then going up. And then dipping down and, uh, and then it started, it started getting lower and hitting the, the cement. Going up and down.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  Bouncing.

• 49:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, bouncing off the cement. And I'm screaming, man, I'm screaming like, but obviously they, they have their hands full in the cockpit. Who knows what's going on? And then we go, and by this time, there's fire everywhere and I, I'm looking at fire, no longer smoke, it's fire. And, um, we swoop up, I think we swoop up and down like five or six times. And then the last time we go really high in the air, it almost felt like we were almost like going vertical and then all of a sudden the plane swoops down and we hit an embankment.

• 49:47Speaker 05

  And we stop and I'm somehow alive. You know, every time I'm just bracing myself because I'm looking out the window. I'm wide awake. I'm numb, I'm on so many painkillers and whatever else. So I'm seeing a swoop down so I can kind of like brace myself every time we hit. Finally, we hit and I'm on fire. You know, there's

• 50:07Rich Roll?

  Like literally.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  I'm on fire, yeah, like my, my hands are on fire. Um, I'm trying to move forward to see if I can get to Chris or Che.

• 50:16Rich Roll?

  There's four of you in the cabin?

• 50:17Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, and then my, my whole, everything catches fire. My, my shirt catches fire. And then I turn to my left and AM's knocked out and I grab him and I shake him. He wakes up. I can't get to Chris or Che. It's just a wall of fire. I can't see anything. So I open, I open the emergency exit, which I always, I forgot to say, but I always sit next to an emergency exit in any plane. I sit, I, I open the, kick open the emergency exit. I jump out and I land in the jet. So I land in, in the jet, which if anyone knows about like planes.

• 50:55Rich Roll?

  Like behind the, like in the jet stream behind the engine.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, which is filled with fuel.

• 51:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:01Speaker 05

  So my whole body catches fire. I jump into a, basically a pool of jet fuel. Um, my whole body catches fire. AM jumps out over the jet. He's not on fire and he's basically on the phone. I'm running and he's screaming. He's on the phone with our manager going, our plane crashed. He's like crying, screaming. He's like, Trav's on fire. So I'm just running and at this time the embankment was right next to a freeway. So I have cars that are watching me run on fire and I'm just stripping off my clothes. My gut tells me to strip off my clothes. I don't know what else to do.

• 51:38Rich Roll?

  You're in the middle of the road this, at this point and cars are coming in both directions?

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, the cars are like facing us and there's no one on our side because everyone sees the plane there and, um. And I don't realize my, my skin is soaked in jet fuel. So it doesn't matter what I take off. So I get to the point where I'm butt naked and I'm just running, but my whole body's on fire. And then I just hear one guy, man, like, I don't even, I don't even know where he was. I know he was off to the left of me that just says, like what you learn in elementary school, like, stop, drop and roll.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Drop and roll.

• 52:10Speaker 05

  And sure enough.

• 52:11Rich Roll?

  Like yelling from a car?

• 52:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, yelling from a car. And I, I just lay down and I start rolling and then Adam comes out, DJ AM, and he, he gets his shirt and he starts patting me out. And that's how he, um, got burnt a little bit. He got a little burn on his arm and on his neck. But basically, after a couple of minutes, he pats me out. And then as he pats me out, the plane explodes.

• 52:39Rich Roll?

  And you were the, you're the only two guys who made it out?

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, we're the only two guys. Um, I mean, later we found out, we found out Chris and Jay, my assistant in my security, they weren't wearing their seat belts. So they, they died immediately of head trauma. Probably the first couple of times, the plane did the, the crazy, you know, up and down. Um, found out unfortunately, the, the pilots, um, were burnt. Um, and, uh, and we were the only two survivors.

• 53:20Rich Roll?

  Okay. Next up is with Dr. Rachel Carlton Abrams, at Dr. Rachel Abrams on Instagram. She's amazing. Rachel is a board certified primary care family practice physician. She's an integrative health expert and an author with over two decades of experience in preventive and comprehensive care medicine. She's a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. She received her medical degree from UC San Francisco and her master's degree in holistic health and medical sciences from Berkeley. She's been voted the best doctor in Santa Cruz County every year from 2010 to 2016. And she's authored a whole slew of books, but the focus of this conversation was on her latest offering, Body Wise, Discovering Your Body's Intelligence

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  for Lifelong Health and Healing. I love this conversation. She's amazing. So please enjoy this little snippet with Dr. Abrams.

• 54:13Speaker 06

  You know, I would say that for me personally, in my, in making decisions in my life, and this is what I try to teach in BodyWise, how to use, how to use what your body is speaking to you, and that could be a sensation, or that could be a physical experience, it could be painful, or it could be pleasurable, but the way that that is actually trying to guide your decision-making, because in a way, it's the expression of your unconscious. It's, it's your inner wisdom speaking to you. And if you learn to interpret that language, you know, I said before that I think that if you really want to be successful in your, you could be successful in your field ignoring your body, but if you want to be a leader, if you want to be a groundbreaker, if you want to be truly inspirational, you need

• 54:56Speaker 06

  to be connected to your body. Because from there, you get leadership qualities, you get insights, you get, you know, inspiration for the people around you as a manager, as a leader, as, you know, as a business person, whatever you do in your life. And I think that the body intelligence is like the secret weapon, I really do, in the best way, right? That allows you to both live a life that gives you joy and vitality, but also allows you to do work in the world in a much bigger way. And when you meet those people who are doing that work, you know, not the people with huge egos who are maybe successful, but you meet them and go, "Lord have mercy," you know?

• 55:35Rich Roll?

  You know it when you walk into a room. You can tell when somebody's got it dialed in, like they have that, like, that self-awareness, you know, to understand who they are. And there's like a grounded power in that, that defies language. You just, you can sense it, right?

• 55:51Speaker 06

  Right.

• 55:51Rich Roll?

  And one of the things you talk about in the book is, is kind of starting, learning how to read these signals, like, understanding that words like gut instinct and what my heart is telling me actually have great meaning.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  It's real.

• 56:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that these are real things, that this isn't just woo-woo, new age, Santa Cruz speak, right? And I know that you wrote this book predominantly for women, but I feel like women already are halfway there, if not most of the way there, in terms of having that language or having that aptitude for listening to their bodies in a way that men really aren't. Like, men are much more shut down. Like, I almost feel like this is really as much a book for men, even though it's really voiced to women. It's, men are the ones who really need to hear this more.

• 56:36Speaker 06

  I agree.

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  And I think culturally, we're kind of pushed further away from that, and it's less okay, or less comfortable for a guy to talk about how he's feeling, or what his heart is telling him, than it is for a woman.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  I agree with you. And to be honest, I see men in my practice, and boys, and I see babies, and I see older people. It's a typical family practice. I see everybody. And I love my male patients. And I regret, actually, not writing this book for men and women. It was a conscious decision, because it gets complex trying to talk about the body and women's physical experience of being embodied in our culture, and around trauma, and around sexuality. It's a little easier to speak to women directly, but for sure, the concept, really important for men, absolutely basic. And I know, in the current political

• 57:28Speaker 06

  climate, and in the last year, there's been a lot of talk about men and women and patriarchal values, and, you know, what are we gonna do about this? There's been a bit more of a shakeup. And I think that it's important, in my opinion, to keep in mind that, yeah, it's true that being male gets you some privilege, but it also buys you this whole system of oppression of men, a big piece of which is shutting down your body, right? That being a machine for making money, being a machine for making a name for yourself, and all these other things, that really is about ignoring your body intelligence, and not listening to those voices within. And I think that our way out is for all of us

• 58:11Speaker 06

  to be doing that. And, you know, I talk about this explicitly in the book, but I feel like once you're really actually connected to and listening to your body, and you get a sense of... You know, being in touch with your own nature, that it is a natural extension to realize how connected you are to other people and how connected you are to the earth. Because there really is no separation. It's a crazy idea that we're separate from the earth we live on, right? Everything we are comes from the earth and everything we're exposed to from a health point of view, all the toxins and the pesticides, the things people, you know, clean their houses with and, you know, the food we eat, all deeply connect to our bodies, right? The microbiome, the bacterial population of the earth that

• 58:55Speaker 06

  our food has grown in influences our own microbiome inside of our own guts, which is such a fundamental part of health. I don't know if you've talked about this on podcasts.

• 59:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. Do you know Robin Shetcan? Yeah, so I had her on. She's wonderful.

• 59:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you can't separate them. We are intimately, and everything we do to the earth, whether it's, you know, tearing down trees and, you know, creating a loss of oxygen and global warming, or it's the toxins that we're using, it all impacts us directly, directly. And if you look at the emerging illnesses, allergy, autoimmune, learning disorders, neurologic disease, cancer, it's all related to our environment. It really is.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  Now you're just crazy talking.

• 59:39Speaker 06

  Now I'm crazy. Yeah, I'm good crazy.

• 59:45Rich Roll?

  Kim Chambers. Can we talk about Kim Chambers? Oh, my God. How inspiring. How amazing. @KimberlySwims on Twitter. Kim is one of the most accomplished, record-setting, marathon, open-water swimmers in the world. Her story is incredibly inspiring and I love everything about this conversation. So please enjoy this little tiny nugget from my conversation with Kim Chambers.

• 1:00:12Rich Roll?

  But underneath all of this for you is the current of joy. Like joy is fueling this for you. It's not like you're not coming into this with this hardened, like, I'm gonna prove that I can do this, coming from some kind of unhealthy place. Like you're just, you just love it, right? Like you're, this is what you're supposed to be doing, right? And when you're doing it, not only do you feel... Alive, you're completely in your, in your bliss.

• 1:00:38Speaker 07

  Yes, and I feel filled with purpose because all of these swims I do for charity. And another great learning that I, I got from Vito and Night Train Swimmers, because we do swims around the world all for charity. And, and that's what I've incorporated into my solo swims. And so it's, it's really making these swims bigger than about yourself.

• 1:01:01Speaker 07

  Sure, there, you're, you're the one that gets the accolades and, but I'm the first to say that, you know, I didn't do it alone and I share all of these achievements with my crew. And even the people that, you know, someone at the club or someone here in the city would just say, like, I read that you're gonna go do the swim, like, good luck, like, just the fact that people are thinking about it. And then, you know, I have a GPS tracker on the boat and people can track me in real time on a Google map. And I've had my colleagues at work on their big monitors, like, track me and, and that helps.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  You put them up on Strava?

• 1:01:37Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:01:39Rich Roll?

  You're like, I think you have the KOM for the Farrelawn swim.

• 1:01:44Rich Roll?

  Nobody's gonna challenge that anytime soon.

• 1:01:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. So it's just

• 1:01:50Speaker 07

  the fact that people are interested as well in a sport that they might not understand, that they might not connect with, like, I never used to understand why people climbed mountains, but now I understand why people climb mountains. And,

• 1:02:05Rich Roll?

  And that's because?

• 1:02:08Speaker 07

  Their journeys, they, you are pushing the limits of your physical and mental self. And I think also many of us are afraid to do that because a lot of times it's scary and a lot of times it's uncomfortable. It's gonna hurt. And human nature is to avoid things that could potentially hurt us, that could make us cold, could make, you know, make us uncomfortable. But when you, and we all have fears, but when you really push through those fears, and again, human nature is to retreat from fear, when you push through, there is the sense

• 1:02:53Speaker 07

  of self, there is a real, in my case at least, that's where the treasure lies. The treasure in life lies right on the other side of where you're most fearful.

• 1:03:04Rich Roll?

  Super powerful.

• 1:03:05Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:03:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, not only do we sort of recoil from the uncomfortable, we're sort of haplessly chasing these emotions that you're experiencing, joy, gratitude, giving back through the charity, that sense of feeling alive. We're sort of encouraged to seek those out through material possessions.

• 1:03:26Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:03:26Rich Roll?

  Or social status.

• 1:03:28Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  And that's what is encouraged in our culture and the messages that we're sort of, you know, met with on every billboard and every television commercial and every magazine, right?

• 1:03:38Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:03:39Rich Roll?

  And the truth lies in shucking that aside.

• 1:03:42Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:03:43Rich Roll?

  And doing something that scares you.

• 1:03:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Rich Roll?

  Whatever that is. And it doesn't have to be, you know, swimming the English Channel.

• 1:03:50Speaker 07

  No.

• 1:03:51Rich Roll?

  You know, and it didn't start that way for you either. It started with you dipping your toe into aquatic park that first time.

• 1:03:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. You know, and even getting in that pool, I was most afraid of people looking at my scars. I mean, so silly, but, but we all have fears and they're different for all of us. But I can guarantee that when you pick a fear, you know, we all have many fears, pick a fear and decide to challenge it face on and you get to the other side, I, I guarantee you will have a transformative experience that will serve you for the rest of your life. Because again, life is not smooth sailing. And I feel like through these experiences, I've been able to equip myself with skills and lessons and how to deal with

• 1:04:41Speaker 07

  certain things. And then also just dealing with people and, and...

• 1:04:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I walk around every day with a heart that's full. And I just want to give back and I, I want everybody to feel just a little bit of what I get to feel in a naughty day. I mean, I feel spoiled, spoiled rotten, because I am in this world that is right where I am supposed to be.

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:12Speaker 07

  And, um, and then to be able to share it with people. And I love, you know, I love talking to little girls and, you know, you just see these sparks of possibility light up in their head and, you know, just knowing that we're capable of doing far more than we think we can.

• 1:05:30Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:31Speaker 07

  And it's just about deciding that you're going to tackle something that might be uncomfortable, that might be a bit scary.

• 1:05:40Rich Roll?

  We can't have a best of episode without featuring Julie, right? AKA Shrimati, my wife. This is an amazing excerpt from Podcast 276, which was entitled, Be Devotional, Not Emotional. An extraordinary conversation all about how to best bridge the emotional landmines of our expanding cultural divide. It's basically about how to channel your inner Jedi warrior. So please enjoy Julie Piatt.

• 1:06:09Julie Piatt?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the greatest human quality is empathy. You know, it's our ability to feel empathy for another. And we all as humans, we all need, desire, want the same things. It's not different because you live in a different country, or your skin is a different color, or your hair is a different color. I mean, this is so elementary, like that you would think that, you know, someone would be more desirable than another because of the color of their skin or their sexual preference. So we're really getting caught up in things that, you know, consciousness is just celebrating everything, just because it exists at all. And, um, you know, I think that, uh, again, like, you know, this moment

• 1:06:54Julie Piatt?

  is required for us to remember our divinity, because if it wasn't this intense, we would just still be going on doing whatever it is that, you know, we do as a collective.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  So if somebody's listening to this and they're struggling with these ideas, or they're finding themselves reactive or challenged in their ability to remain composed in light of the fear mongering and everything that's going on, like what is the path to creating more mastery of self around these ideas?

• 1:07:33Julie Piatt?

  Well, I did a recent podcast on it. The title was "Transforming Frustration Into Knowing." Right? Again, you feel into the energy of frustration. If anybody's been following the political play, it can just pull you into mass frustration, right? Because you can't understand how these things are actually happening in our country, around the world. And again, it goes back to spiritual connection. It's all about spiritual connection. Because if you understand that this earth and this life is for our evolution, it's for our unfoldment, it's so we can transform many energies

• 1:08:18Julie Piatt?

  that have been very out of balance. There's many energies that are happening on this planet that are not high vibrating. Violence, murder, slavery. It's been going on all along. And the only difference is it's like someone came in and turned a huge light on and the cockroaches are scurrying left and right all over the place. This stuff has existed on the planet. I mean, make no mistake, it has been going on for thousands of years. So we kind of had it all sort of in a place where it wasn't really seen or you didn't really look at things that way. And now I think that we're really understanding that we don't really live in a world that we thought we lived in. So now, what is our choice?

• 1:09:02Julie Piatt?

  Our choice is to develop that spiritual connection, which gives you the knowing that this consciousness is playing out exactly the way that it is supposed to.

• 1:09:12Rich Roll?

  If this is a new idea to somebody, though, the idea of cultivating spiritual connection, how does one begin that?

• 1:09:18Julie Piatt?

  Well, I would say, first of all, it begins with your diet. So I would look at what you're eating. Immediately cut out processed foods. Consider adopting a plant-based diet. Get rich in my cookbook, The Plant Power Way.

• 1:09:31Julie Piatt?

  No, but it's true. I mean, you asked me why, and I'm just sharing. You know, I just spent the last two years developing a cheese book, This Cheese is Nuts, all with plant-based cheeses. The second thing is, and really super important, get yourself on the mat. Get yourself to a yoga class. And you know, I know movement is really good, but it's not the same. I'm talking about really, really finding a connection to your spiritual nature. And this is, it is beyond religions, has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the one breath that is breathing all of us. So yoga, just getting into the asana, starting to breathe, starting to practice pranayama, any type of yoga, find it in your local town, wherever you live. Follow Guru Singh on Facebook.

• 1:10:16Julie Piatt?

  He streams live his teachings and classings. They are genius. He's funny, he's uplifting. You will be, you will leave with a much more positive framework and some tools to start to loosen the frustration. Feel into your body where there's hardness, where you're holding, where you're blocking, and consciously find a way to let go of those ideas, thoughts, feelings, traumas. We have to commit to heal ourselves. We have to really look at what's happened in our life and really commit to ourselves to release the trauma. I do healing techniques, you know, on my podcast all the time. You can listen to Divine Throughline.

• 1:11:01Julie Piatt?

  It's all free. And I am sort of going, leading everybody on a process of transformation through what I offer on that show. So this is a, this is a spiritual journey, folks. This is Earth School. So we are spiritual beings having a human experience and everything that is happening is for us, for our awakening, for our remembrance into that which we are. And I am no more spiritual than any other being on this planet. And everyone is potentially divine, potentially, because you have to exercise the free will and, and make the move, you know?

• 1:11:42Julie Piatt?

  It's not just gonna happen just because you're, you exist. So.

• 1:11:48Rich Roll?

  I think that, that that's a really important point. We all, we all tend to believe that we're exercising free will every day, all day long in our lives. And I think we're not as conscious as we should be to how our behaviors, our actions, our thoughts, our words are sort of embedded and programmed based on our life history, our buttons that were installed as young people, our past traumas, and all of these things that create cycles and patterns that become deep grooves that can almost be predictors of how we're gonna behave or react

• 1:12:28Rich Roll?

  in a given situation at the, you know, at the, at the cost of free will, right? So this path towards sort of mastery and getting on the mat and getting conscious and doing that like deep interior work and the meditation and the mindfulness is a journey towards greater self-will so that you're not reactive, that you can create a new groove and change the narrative, right? Like, right now, there's a narrative going on culturally, and there's the narrative of self. There's the narrative of the story that you tell yourself about who you are. And chances are, that's a false story.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  Right? So, so it's a call to action to pick apart that story, to examine it, to get to a point where you can identify what is true and what is not true about the story of yourself and start to piece together a new story, a story of, a story that can, that can lead you towards greater agency, towards mastery, and towards that, that journey of finding a purposeful, meaningful life.

• 1:13:41Julie Piatt?

  Right. I mean, and I mean, ultimately, you know, the, those stories, any of those stories that we tell ourselves are all illusion. They're, they're all, they're all not really the truth. The truth is, is that we are all consciousness, which is pure love. You know, that is, that is the, there, and that really isn't a story. It's a state of being, you know, it's a state of awareness. But what I would say is, things are even getting weirder. Okay. So it's, it's not even, it's almost like gone to another level now. And the other thing that we have to continually ask ourselves is where are the thoughts we are thinking coming from? And

• 1:14:20Rich Roll?

  Well, that's what I was sort of getting at with free will. Right? Like, we, we think we're creating those thoughts, but, but all right, continue.

• 1:14:27Julie Piatt?

  But I'm not saying they're created from your past trauma that you had this lifetime. I'm saying that they're being impulsoed, and they're being pulsoed through our human grid, through like an energetic grid around the planet. So literally, all this obsession with the electronics, with the, with the AI, with, you know, programs, TV programs, you know, Twitter, like all the social media, everything. I mean, we just experienced, you know, we have this thing flying around, this fake news thing flying around. I mean, the, the whole paradigm is starting to crumble in many different ways. So I want to just propose that just because a thought enters your mind, that thought might not even be

• 1:15:09Julie Piatt?

  coming from you. Okay. It might be coming from some, some other force, some other vibration that is directing at you. It could be from somebody You're walking next to, it could be residual from some sort of media that you're addicted to. So again, all these are impulses. Energy is something and everything that's happening is affecting our experience. So when I say thoughts or things, like it's up to us to understand that the mind is a great tool that can be used for many things, like coming up with programs and structures and getting places on time and these type of things.

• 1:15:51Julie Piatt?

  But your real mind is in your heart. Your heart knows and your body knows. And we have to switch the place where we're originating from, okay, out of the mind and place it in the heart. Get grounded in the heart.

• 1:16:12Rich Roll?

  What the health, what the health. Oh my God, what the health. What an unbelievable impact. That extraordinary documentary, Hat on Culture in 2017. Unbelievable. Not a day goes by where I don't encounter somebody, meet somebody who said they were inspired to adopt a vegan, plant-based lifestyle as a result of watching that movie. It's just amazing. And I had the good fortune of sitting down with the filmmakers, Kip Anderson and Keegan Coon, the dynamic duo behind not only What the Health, but also Cowspiracy. I think this was our third conversation. And we conducted it right on the precipice of this unbelievable movie being released. So please enjoy this excerpt of my conversation

• 1:16:57Rich Roll?

  with Kip and Keegan, the documentary filmmakers behind What the Health.

• 1:17:03Speaker 09

  I mean, the film is based on science. And that's, I think, the foundation is that you have to look at real scientific information and what is science actually telling us about when it comes to nutrition? And then when you look at that science, you also have to look at, well, is it real science and who is it being funded by? Because you can look at a study and you can say, well, hey, red meat is directly caused to coronary heart disease. Like, it's 100%. Everybody knows that. But then you can find another study that says complete opposite. And so people will say, oh, well, you know, that's a moot point then. It's like, well, who funded that original study? And who funded the pro-meat study? And it's like, well, was it a, was it, you know, Calamity Association? Was it a meat board? So we looked at that. That was a big, that's the foundation is you have to look at real science and real research.

• 1:17:45Speaker 09

  But you can, I mean, there's, I think anybody logically can understand that if you put foods that your body wasn't designed for into your body, it's not going to function. It's optimal. And so that's part of the film that we looked at is the anatomy of human body. Are we, are we true omnivores? Are we carnivores? Are we really herbivores? And that's actually one of the things that was kind of surprising while making the film was that, you know, I'm vegan. And so like, I want, I want it all to fit into my narrative of like, we're supposed to be 100% plant eaters. But something that we found is that actually, well, human beings, we can get away with eating some animal products without detrimental effects. And it's like, that's not something you want to hear as a hardcore

• 1:18:26Speaker 09

  vegan. But the truth is, is that, yeah, maybe 5% to 10%, you can get away with it. But the impacts that that has on the environment, the impacts that it has on people, the impacts that it has clearly on the animals is huge. And is that really worth it? But then, you know, looking again, going to the anatomy and what, what are we really supposed to eat? Well, we're not really herbivores. We actually had a whole section in the film where we had this whole animation about how we're herbivores and it shows our anatomy. But then we realized that, well, actually, we're not herbivores. We're frugivores. We fit every characteristic of a frugivore, which is-

• 1:18:57Rich Roll?

  So explain what a frugivore is.

• 1:18:59Speaker 09

  So frugivore is, is an animal that gets 90% or more of its nutrition from plants, particularly high carbohydrate plants. So-

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  Is that similar to us? What's the difference between that and like a starchivore? Like what McDougal would call like a starchivore?

• 1:19:13Speaker 09

  It's, it's actually really, really close. So what, you look at the, the great apes, they're all frugivores. So, you know, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, they're, they're frugivores. And human beings being a great ape, we 100% fit into it. So it's something we go into the film, you know, more in depth. But I think it's really, that's a great place to start, but I think that we have to, and what we do in the film is we start from the standard American diet, and we just start to pick it apart and looking at all the different aspects. A big thing right now that's talked about in health and nutrition is sugar. Sugar's like the big devil. You know, a few years ago, it was wheat, and I think wheat is still kind of like the bad guy, but sugar's the big thing.

• 1:19:56Speaker 09

  And so, we look at that, and we ask the question, you know, what role does sugar play in things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes? And the responses we got were actually really pretty shocking for both Kip and I.

• 1:20:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's super interesting, and sorry, Kip, I want to hear what you have to say on this, but right now, it's all about sugar, you know, and which kind of contravenes, this is an ancillary topic, but it sort of contravenes a more holistic approach. Like, it's not any one thing, right? We have to look at these things in the context of the matrix of everything, right? But right now, you know, sugar's on everybody's minds, and you know, sugar is the culprit, sugar is the devil. Certainly, processed sugar is not a good thing. When you see the sort of explosion of processed foods with sugar in them, and you know, high fructose corn syrup, all that kind of stuff, there's no question that these things are

• 1:20:46Rich Roll?

  making us sick. So, what's interesting is this sort of contrarian perspective that you get from, say, Dr. Neil Bernard, that contravenes, you know, what you would hear from Gary Taubes, right? Gary Taubes coming from "it's all about sugar" to Neil saying, "Don't worry about sugar, it's the animal products." And as a consumer watching this, it's very easy to get confused. You know, there's doubt, like, these people are saying different things, they both seem smart, I don't know what to do, I'll just keep doing the same thing. So, how do you parse fact from fiction, and why do you come down on the side of someone like Neil Bernard as opposed to Gary Taubes?

• 1:21:28Speaker 02

  Dr. Davis, Scott Davis, did you have, you had him on?

• 1:21:31Speaker 09

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  That was really good, actually. He sums it up in this one part, right after, in the film, after Neil Barnard talks about how diabetes is actually not caused by sugar, it's caused by saturated fat. And then, King, you might remember the way he says it, he says, "Sugar doesn't cause plaque, sugar doesn't, you know, it just kind of goes down this list. It's not good for you, doesn't increase inflammation.

• 1:21:53Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  It doesn't like lock your, uh, the way he said it, I can't remember. He did this laundry list of what sugar doesn't do. It's not good, no one said it's good, but like Cowspiracy, we, we address fracking, we address other things that are happening. And as we address this, we compare it to eating animal, for, for this film, eating animal products. What's fracking in Cowspiracy? Um, the comparison of fracking to animal agriculture, there's no comparison of how much water is consumed or, uh, taken from it and polluted. The same thing happens in this film. Yes, sugar is bad, but how bad is it compared to meat and dairy? Um, so, so when you have these doctors who say that sugar is bad, yes, but there's, there's,

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  again, there's just no comparison to, to saturated fat, and especially from animal proteins and animal products.

• 1:22:41Speaker 09

  Yeah, and again, we just, we kept coming back to the science. It had to be based on hard science. Um, and so, yeah, you look at the studies and it's like, well, what are the studies actually saying? And the research is saying, and, and it's really actually pretty interesting, because even groups like the American Diabetes Association will say, if you look at their site and you look, do you dig a little bit? They'll say, oh yeah, high carbohydrate diet actually doesn't cause diabetes. They encourage all of their, you know, supporters and anyone with diabetes to be careful of your sugar intake, because clearly if you have diabetes, you should be concerned about your sugar intake. But it's not what causes diabetes. Causes diabetes is your insulin system not working because it's clogged up with fat. And so, well, what's, what's got more fat in it?

• 1:23:21Speaker 09

  You know, the sugar is what, it's like four calories per gram versus seven calories per gram for, for, uh, fat? So it's really, it's looking at the impacts of fat, but it goes again even beyond just that because it's not just these isolated things, not just saturated fat, it's not just cholesterol, it's not just carcinogens, it's all of these things put together and it's how all those things work in our bodies that is the real issue.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  And also too, as you said, where does, how can you tell fact from fiction? A good example is on the cover of Time, I think now is two years ago, it was a stick of butter and I can't remember the title, but something.

• 1:24:00Speaker 09

  Butter is back.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Butter is back and so that started a huge craze that Bullet Coffee, all this and we go, we look, go back, go back, go back, who funded this, who did the studies, go back and it was.

• 1:24:11Speaker 09

  National Dairy Council.

• 1:24:12Speaker 02

  National Dairy Council.

• 1:24:13Speaker 09

  The whole study like, I mean, that's like that whole, saturated fat isn't bad for you, it's based on basically two studies. Anybody who's listened to the Garth Davis interview will know about this.

• 1:24:23Rich Roll?

  Presume people haven't.

• 1:24:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's based on two studies and they're funded by the National Dairy Council. So it's like they have a vested interest in protecting their industry, so they're going to fund studies that are going to say that, no, no, our product isn't bad for you and the leading source of saturated fat is from dairy products, not from meat.

• 1:24:40Rich Roll?

  I think it's a combination of a couple of things. First of all, my recollection is, isn't that those studies said that saturated fat is good for you? They just cast doubt on how bad it might be for you. And then journalists looking for appetizing headlines will take that and translate it into fat is your new best friend and then there's books being written about it and the average consumer who doesn't have time to drill down to the truth of all this stuff is just going to see the headline, modify their behavior accordingly and this is not helping anybody. It's a page out of the merchants of doubt. It's directly out of the playbook from big tobacco.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  If you can make people sort of confused enough, then you have them exactly where you want them.

• 1:25:31Speaker 02

  And that's exactly where the film leads into Dr. Gregory talking about that, about the tobacco industry, doubt is our product and that was right in there, right in their their.

• 1:25:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, and their mammals. I mean, they really, it's about, yeah, confuse the public enough where they don't know what to do and they just continue as business as normal. And so what the health, the film does is it lays all this information out easily and it's all, again, you can go back, we're going to have on our site. All the original studies, you can source everything, you can see where all this information is, because we really just want, this is just a starting point. You know, you learn, you get some of, you get your appetite for understanding nutrition, and then you can go deeper.

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  All right, how you guys doing? Are you hanging in there? Come on, it's so good, right? Well, get excited, because next up, I got Leo Babauta, @zen__habits on Twitter. I love this guy. Leo is somebody who I had never met in person prior to the podcast, but somebody who has informed my path, has positively influenced my personal transformation for many years, and continues to do so to this day. He's a beautiful guy, just an authentic example of the powerful ideals that he espouses. And it was personally a thrill to be able to sit down with him and talk about mindfulness, and meditation, and yoga, and minimalism.

• 1:27:01Rich Roll?

  So without further ado, here is me and Leo Babauta. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about how you, how you convey these ideas in your own household. You got six kids, some of them are grown and out of the house, you got all ages, you're married, you're very much living in the world. You're not like a single guy living in, you know, Ted Kaczynski style in the woods, like you're, you know, you got real life obligations and pressures. So how do you instill these notions into your children? What is your, you know, I want to talk about education and parenting, and how you kind of navigate all of that, because it's super interesting.

• 1:27:45Speaker 10

  I think, I was listening to a podcast where the two of you, you and your wife, talked about veganism with your kids. And we have a similar philosophy, is that they're on their own journey. So with veganism, we went vegan, like in the middle of my kid's journey, so I'm still in the beginning, but like, they're already meat eaters, so.

• 1:28:05Rich Roll?

  And what was the impetus for you to go vegan?

• 1:28:09Speaker 10

  I wish I could say it was you, because that would be so cool.

• 1:28:11Rich Roll?

  By the way, I'm not fishing for that, but like, genuinely interested in what it was.

• 1:28:15Speaker 10

  I feel like saying that right now, but it's not true.

• 1:28:20Speaker 10

  It was just a bunch of things. I went into it as a vegetarian to become healthier. I was overweight and then I started reading about, like educating myself and of course, looking for inspiration. And then, then you learn, as everyone knows, you learn about animal welfare and horrible stuff that we do to turn them into food. And it's just like, you know, once you are awake to that, it's really hard to turn it off. So that was, it was, it was a progress. It was a progression.

• 1:28:52Rich Roll?

  But you can apply the minimalism calculus to it, right? Cause you can say, well, is this serving me?

• 1:28:57Speaker 10

  Right.

• 1:28:57Rich Roll?

  Is this not serving me?

• 1:28:59Speaker 10

  Is it necessary?

• 1:28:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What are the implications of making this choice on my life and the life of others?

• 1:29:04Speaker 10

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's just, the, one of the things was like, oh, I thought I needed this stuff. Like I needed cheese or whatever. And then that was like my 99%, I was 99% vegan. That was my 1%. I would eat cheese once in a while. And then I like, let go of it and I realized I didn't need it all along. Like I don't miss it at all. Although I'm looking forward to your wife's.

• 1:29:26Rich Roll?

  The cheese book.

• 1:29:27Speaker 10

  Cheese book, yeah. Vegan cheese. I actually, I just had some nut-based vegan cheese and it was delicious. But I haven't missed it at all. And so, yeah, it's like that letting go, like I think I need this as an attachment. I thought I needed meat and then I let go of it and it's like, oh, I don't need it anymore. And for health reasons too, like I often thought, like you need this stuff to be healthy. And it turns out like you can, I know it's a big surprise to you, but you can actually be completely healthy as a vegan. And like, if you, if you can be completely healthy as a vegan, then what's the justification for putting the animals through that kind of suffering? It's like your pleasure, basically. And so like, I just, yeah, started to turn that spotlight on that, just like I did with, with minimalism.

• 1:30:11Speaker 10

  And it was like, actually it's not necessary and I'm just gonna go with what is necessary for my health and it's plants. So that's, that's, that was my journey. And of course, it was actually supported by other influences of people on me. And then two friends who we met in London who were vegan. One of them runs a vegan site now called plantshift.com. It's a little plug there. But they came and visited us and we spent a week in San Francisco, taking them around to different vegan restaurants. And that was an influence on us, was just having this vegan experience with two people who are very strongly believing in veganism and. Yeah, when you see that influence that you have on each other, like I said, we create each other.

• 1:30:54Speaker 10

  We co-create each other and they created us who we are today because of that influence.

• 1:30:58Rich Roll?

  That's really cool.

• 1:30:59Speaker 10

  It's amazing, right?

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  It's cool.

• 1:31:00Speaker 10

  We are all influencing each other all the time, even sometimes without knowing it. And we're just creating the people that we are with this huge network, this mesh of influences.

• 1:31:10Rich Roll?

  It's all one consciousness.

• 1:31:12Speaker 10

  Exactly. No, no, don't tell them that. No, but that's my belief is that we're all constantly co-creating each other. And we wouldn't be the people we are without each other. And we're completely enmeshed in this network of human hearts.

• 1:31:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no question about it.

• 1:31:31Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  Now, more so than ever because of podcasts and blogs and everything that the internet avails us of.

• 1:31:39Speaker 10

  We're so intertwined.

• 1:31:40Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:31:41Speaker 10

  But yeah, that was my vegan journey.

• 1:31:42Rich Roll?

  Right, so you do that and then you talked a little bit about your basic philosophy with your kids is similar to ours. Like allowing them their own journey. And then where does the homeschooling and the unschooling come into that?

• 1:31:54Speaker 10

  Again, influenced by someone, it was my sister who was homeschooling her kids. And our kids were in school. One of them was being punished by his teachers because he was reading in class, like a novel. And he was supposed to be doing something that he already understood and was bored with already. And I was like, that school is not meeting our kids' needs. And of course, there are amazing teachers in the world. I'm not saying all teachers are like that, but it was just like, oh, we can actually meet his needs probably better. And my wife decided to quit her job and unschool our kids. Actually, it was homeschooling at first and then we went along the unschooling route a couple of years later.

• 1:32:38Rich Roll?

  Explain unschooling for people that might not be familiar with what that is.

• 1:32:41Speaker 10

  It's a version of homeschooling, so you do it at home. But homeschooling often is doing school in the house, just like, okay, we're doing reading, we're doing math, we're doing history. And often you're following a curriculum with textbooks and you're doing exactly the same activity, but just at home. And which is a great experience, not knocking. Talking that at all, but unschooling is like, what if we wiped this entire board clear and started from a clean slate? And like, what would it be if we didn't school our kids? And it's just like taking a new look at teaching like education philosophy and like, do our kids need to learn X by this grade and X by this grade and Y by this grade and so forth? And like, who came up with that curriculum?

• 1:33:23Speaker 10

  Some like, you know, someone with a degree, obviously, but like in the education system who doesn't know my kid at all. And they've like decided the perfect route for them to, to do what? To become ready for college, to become ready for a day job. And so it's like a factory that it puts, and again, I don't want to make people who are putting their kids through school uh feel bad about what they're doing, because everyone is being the best parent that they can. But for us, it was like, we didn't quite, we, once you start with a blank slate, you throw out those goals. Like actually what we want to do is make them become good human beings. And how do we do that? And one of the things, one of the problems with school, I was gonna sound like school bashing, is it's a um top-down approach, like the teacher has the wisdom, they teach you.

• 1:34:06Speaker 10

  And unschooling is about you becoming your own teacher and deciding what your curriculum is. What are you excited about? Like you and I are doing every single day. And it's actually preparing them to be like passionate creators and human beings and learner, lifelong learners. Because, you know, no one is telling us what to learn these days, but we keep learning. And that's exactly what kids do naturally. And if we can just get out of their way and not like force them to learn certain things in a certain ways, they'll learn naturally and they'll learn what's important to them. And they'll learn how to motivate themselves to learn if like they want to build a teepee or something like that. Like, how do you do that? Well, I gotta go figure it out. And then you learn to be motivated and you learn to find resources and support.

• 1:34:49Speaker 10

  And all of the things that we do as adults, that's what kids would naturally do if you get out of their way. So that's what unschooling is.

• 1:34:58Rich Roll?

  The executive director of the Good Food Institute and founding partner of New Crop Capital, Bruce Friedrich, at Bruce G. Friedrich, F R I E D R I C H, is a man who has devoted his entire life to reforming animal agriculture and innovating the future of food and food systems. This conversation is about that very subject, food system innovation. How technology, urgency, and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable, and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health, and environmental crises. So please enjoy this snippet of my conversation with Bruce Friedrich.

• 1:35:41Rich Roll?

  So let's talk about clean meat. At the vanguard of this super fascinating movement is your friend Uma Valetti at Memphis Meats, who's doing some truly extraordinary work in finding technological advances for this problem. I'm sure you listened to Sam Harris' conversation with Uma.

• 1:36:03Speaker 11

  I did.

• 1:36:04Rich Roll?

  Which was absolutely fascinating. So before we even get into that, maybe explain in a little bit more in-depth what you mean by clean meat. It's sort of anecdotally known as lab-ground meat. And I know language is important. You're going to avoid that term, but that's sort of colloquially like what people understand it to be. And I think there's going to be a learning curve here in getting people acclimated to understand exactly what this is.

• 1:36:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, let me start by saying, the reason that we don't call it lab meat is the same reason that we don't call Cheerios, lab Cheerios, or Budweiser, lab Budweiser. Like, every processed food starts in a food lab. So technically, every processed food is created in a lab. But at scale, this will be created in a factory, just like every other food that starts in a food lab is created in a factory. And what it will look like is it will look like a meat brewery. So you picture a beer brewery, those vats, instead of creating beer, they will be created... And that has some huge advantages over the current system.

• 1:37:12Speaker 11

  It's three times more efficient than chicken, which is the most efficient meat, causes 95% less climate change, doesn't include all of the extra stages of production, it's exponentially cleaner, doesn't require antibiotics. I mean, according to the Centers for Disease Control, there are tens of millions of cases of meat contamination, foodborne illness, there are more than 100,000 hospitalizations, there are thousands of deaths every single year. All of that goes away because the process is cleaner. It's also clean meat as sort of a nod to clean energy, the environmental benefits. So just like clean energy is more environmentally sustainable energy, clean meat is more environmentally sustainable meat.

• 1:37:51Speaker 11

  And the two sort of pioneers of this movement, one is this guy Mark Post, who is a former medical school professor at Harvard Medical School, and now he's a tissue engineer, he's a PhD in tissue engineering and an MD, and now he's teaching tissue engineering at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, which is one of the top medical schools in Europe. And previously, he was, I think, about a decade at Harvard Medical School. The other one is also a medical doctor, Dr. Valetti, who was on Sam Harris's podcast, which I highly recommend, really just a fascinating conversation. And Valetti is a cardiologist, he was trained at the Mayo Clinic, he was a professor of

• 1:38:32Speaker 11

  medicine at the University of Minnesota, he was the president of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, the Twin Cities chapter. Like, you know, these guys are brilliant. Yeah, he's legit. Yeah, they could be doing anything, and they have put their entire lives into creating a more sustainable, healthier alternative that is exactly the same thing. So if you're eating a clean meat chicken nugget, or you're eating a clean meat hamburger, or a clean meat pork chop, whatever, it is literally the exact same thing, but instead of putting feed into an animal and causing the animal's cells to grow and wasting most of the inputs, instead you're just taking similar nutrients, you're bathing the cells, you're causing them to multiply.

• 1:39:16Speaker 11

  Crow, but instead of in an animal, you're doing it in a meat fermenter. And it takes away a lot of the problems of the meat industry.

• 1:39:24Rich Roll?

  So essentially, the process is extracting cells from live animals that are sort of health, raised in a very healthy way, and then culturing them, correct? In these brewery vats, like I'm trying to understand kind of the logistical process of how this whole thing works.

• 1:39:44Speaker 11

  A sesame seed biopsy can feed the world. So you don't need like, you know, a herd of cattle for the clean meat industry. You need a sesame seed biopsy from one cow.

• 1:39:58Rich Roll?

  What does that mean, a sesame seed biopsy?

• 1:40:00Speaker 11

  So basically, you take a teeny little bit of meat.

• 1:40:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, sesame seeds sized?

• 1:40:04Speaker 11

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  I got you. Okay.

• 1:40:06Speaker 11

  Sorry, sorry. Yes. Yeah. So you need a biopsy from the animal, the size of a sesame seed. And that can create literally billions of pounds of meat. So it's not like you need a herd of donor animals. You just need a tiny little bit. And you can certainly take the biopsy from a live animal, or you can take the biopsy from not a live animal. But it's a very little bit of meat that you then use standard cell, you know, tissue engineering techniques. So it's common and all aspects of this are common in medicine. The problem is nobody's going to haggle over the price of a liver, you know, or an ear or whatever. So we need to, we need to improve the processes so that we can get the cost down. But the cost is down more than 99% over just two and a half years.

• 1:40:48Rich Roll?

  Right. It started off as like $3,000 a burger or something like that?

• 1:40:52Speaker 11

  Well, it was $300,000 for a quarter pound burger.

• 1:40:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay. So some shake in UAE could order it and that was about it?

• 1:41:02Speaker 11

  Well, yeah, I mean, it was a, so it was $1.2 million for the first pound. And it was $9,000 a pound last week. And I mean, you think about the first iPhone, the first iPhone R and D cost, I think, $2.4 billion. And iPhones are a lot less expensive than that. Sequencing the human genome, like the cost of that came down, I think, a million times over the course of a decade. So these processes are so much more efficient. It's inconceivable to me that we won't get to a place where because the processes are so much more efficient, as we get economies of scale from where they are now, which is just a couple of people, not that many labs working on this, not that many companies working on this, as it scales up, the price is going to come down. It will be cost competitive.

• 1:41:44Speaker 11

  I mean, Dr. Valetti and Dr. Post think that they will be cost competitive with expensive meat in about four years and cost competitive with cheap meat in about a decade. And that requires that the venture capital and the investments are there, but we think they will be.

• 1:42:03Rich Roll?

  Imagine yourself running an ultra marathon. Suddenly, you're surrounded by a brush fire. This brush fire closes in on you and your body is consumed in flames to the point where survival seems impossible. And yet somehow, you're able to live, but your body is burned over the vast majority of your exposed skin. And yet, rather than wilt and become a victim, you end up leveraging this experience to become a beacon of inspiration and female empowerment to millions of people across the world. This is the amazing, powerful story of Tariya Pitt. @TariyaPitt on Twitter. I love this conversation. She is one of the most impressive, unbelievable

• 1:42:47Rich Roll?

  people I have ever met. And this is a conversation all about facing life head on, about taking risks, about facing your fears and believing in yourself. So, without further ado, please enjoy this snippet with Tariya Pitt.

• 1:43:02Speaker 12

  So, in 2011, I was running an ultra marathon. So, an ultra, probably your listeners would know what an ultra is.

• 1:43:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we'll explain.

• 1:43:12Speaker 12

  It's larger than a marathon. So, a marathon is 42 kilometers. And so, I was a quarter of the way through the ultra marathon.

• 1:43:18Rich Roll?

  How old were you at the time?

• 1:43:20Speaker 12

  I was 24.

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  And was this your first ultra?

• 1:43:23Speaker 12

  That was my first ultra marathon, yeah.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  But had you run marathons?

• 1:43:26Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  And this was like in the bush, right?

• 1:43:29Speaker 12

  Well, I mean, it's been portrayed in the media as being like an outback desert ultra marathon. It was kind of like that. Like, it was a pretty remote area. So, I was a quarter of the way through the ultra marathon. There was no phone reception on a trail. And I heard what I thought were trucks coming down the highway because I knew that the next checkpoint was really close to the highway. So I actually started running a little bit faster. Cause I just wanted to get to the checkpoint, have water, some food and you know, cool down a bit. It's pretty hot in the Kimberley's that's in Western Australia. It's pretty hot at the time of year when the ultra marathon was on.

• 1:44:12Speaker 12

  And I was stuck in a, I came into a little gorge. There was six people in the gorge. And we could see a fire quickly approaching. Now that was the sound of the trucks.

• 1:44:24Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:24Speaker 12

  That was what I.

• 1:44:25Rich Roll?

  The fire trucks.

• 1:44:25Speaker 12

  That, that was, that was what I thought. I'll, I'll go back. When I say I thought I heard trucks, it was actually the rumbling of the fire.

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:44:36Speaker 12

  Now, I don't know if you know of the venturi effect.

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:39Speaker 12

  So when hot air is funneled into a smaller space like the gorge. It actually sucks the fire through. It increases the, the speed of the fire.

• 1:44:52Rich Roll?

  Hmm. So it's like sucking the air into it, right?

• 1:44:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, so we were at the start of the gorge and we saw the fire. We were like, oh shit, like, what do we do? And so we all tried to run.

• 1:45:06Rich Roll?

  So you just run back the where, where you, the way you came from?

• 1:45:09Speaker 12

  So this is the thing, so.

• 1:45:10Rich Roll?

  Cause it's weird, it's like trying to understand, like, how do you get caught up in this thing without being able to run away from it?

• 1:45:15Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so don't forget that a fire can move at around a hundred kilometers an hour.

• 1:45:19Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:20Speaker 12

  So I don't think that even you'd be able to.

• 1:45:23Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:45:23Speaker 12

  Run away from it. And it's also weird because it's, it's a day in my life, close to six years ago. So my memory is a little bit patchy, but we were running through shoulder high grass.

• 1:45:38Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:45:39Speaker 12

  Dry spin effects. So I thought that would be perfect fuel for the flames. Or the side of the gorge, it was really rocky. There was less vegetation, but I also knew that the speed of fire accelerates going up a hill.

• 1:45:53Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. So you had to make a decision like in the moment, like which way are we gonna go?

• 1:45:59Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. So I chose to run up the hill, run up the side of the gorge.

• 1:46:03Rich Roll?

  And you, there were six other people there? And so did they go with you or?

• 1:46:06Speaker 12

  Well, we, so two of them ran back the way we came from and they didn't get burnt.

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:15Speaker 12

  Uh, two guys jumped through the fire.

• 1:46:20Speaker 12

  Yeah, and uh.

• 1:46:21Rich Roll?

  And what happened to those guys?

• 1:46:23Speaker 12

  They got burnt. They weren't as badly burnt. And Kate and I, Kate was the other woman who was badly injured. We got burnt to sixty five percent of our body.

• 1:46:30Rich Roll?

  Wow. And so you're running up this gorge, right?

• 1:46:33Speaker 12

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Rich Roll?

  And what it encapsulates you, it just surrounds you all of a sudden?

• 1:46:36Speaker 12

  It surrounds me and I just remember looking down at my hands and arms, I was both ablaze.

• 1:46:43Speaker 12

  And I just thought, this is it. I'm never gonna see Michael again. Now, once the fire had passed, I was.

• 1:46:49Rich Roll?

  So how long, but for how long did that go on for?

• 1:46:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, I, I think a couple of seconds, five seconds.

• 1:46:55Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:46:55Speaker 12

  I'm not sure.

• 1:46:57Rich Roll?

  And do you pass out?

• 1:46:58Speaker 12

  No, no, no.

• 1:46:58Rich Roll?

  How do you get the, you roll on around or?

• 1:47:02Speaker 12

  How did I get the flames out?

• 1:47:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03Speaker 12

  I don't know.

• 1:47:04Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:47:05Speaker 12

  Don't know.

• 1:47:05Rich Roll?

  You go into like a fugue state, right? Like some kind of crazy.

• 1:47:08Speaker 12

  Total shock. Like, did that, is this a dream? Did that really just happen? You know, and then I actually got this sense of elation because I was like, I've survived. Like, I'm gonna be all right. I'm gonna go to hospital. They'll bandage me up. I'll be back at work on Monday. I was in that semi-delusional state of mind, which is probably just my body's reaction to try and save my life.

• 1:47:33Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, like the adrenaline rush, probably.

• 1:47:35Speaker 12

  Adrenaline and I was just off my head. I had no um grasp on time or, or space.

• 1:47:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:46Speaker 12

  So we actually were stuck on that hillside for four hours.

• 1:47:50Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:47:51Speaker 12

  Yeah, and that.

• 1:47:52Rich Roll?

  We, like, all six of you?

• 1:47:53Speaker 12

  All six of us and there was some other competitors as well.

• 1:47:57Rich Roll?

  Cause people coming up from behind are discovering you, right?

• 1:48:00Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we end up waiting for four hours. A helicopter comes. The helicopter has to balance on one skid.

• 1:48:10Speaker 12

  First I take Kate and I was like, hello.

• 1:48:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:48:13Speaker 12

  I'm here, like, why, why are you taking? Hello?

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  Four hours.

• 1:48:17Speaker 12

  That whole ego thing.

• 1:48:18Rich Roll?

  Why did it take so long? They didn't have, they didn't know what was going on or?

• 1:48:22Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think just due to the location, you know, there was no, not very good communication. Um, like I said, there was no mobile phone reception, that type of thing. So.

• 1:48:33Rich Roll?

  How many people were in this ultra?

• 1:48:35Speaker 12

  There was, I think around fifty people. Yeah. So it wasn't huge.

• 1:48:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:48:39Speaker 12

  Wasn't huge. So when I got picked up in the helicopter, I went to hospital. I said to the doctors.

• 1:48:46Rich Roll?

  For those, hold on a second though. For those four hours, do you remember, like, what were you doing? Like, were you alert? Or were you passed out? Or you remember, like, I mean, that's a long time.

• 1:48:55Speaker 12

  It is, but when you don't have a firm grasp on reality, four hours could have been four minutes. It could have been forty minutes. It could have been, well, wouldn't, it couldn't have been four days, but you know, I didn't, I had no idea.

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  I mean, the survival, you know, instinct must have kicked in pretty powerfully, but there's only so long you can keep that adrenaline coursing through your veins before you kind of.

• 1:49:18Speaker 12

  So I think towards that end of the four hours, I was like, starting to pass out. And the people who I was with was like, no, Trina, wake up. They would talk to me about work or just something really mundane and.

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  Just to keep you awake.

• 1:49:35Speaker 12

  Just to keep me lucid, yeah. And I think though, if we, if the helicopter wasn't able

• 1:49:44Speaker 12

  to extricate Kate and myself, I don't think we would be here.

• 1:49:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:49Speaker 12

  Yeah. Because we were starting to swell quite badly. We didn't have any water, no pain medication. I, I think the helicopter got there just on dark too.

• 1:49:59Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:00Speaker 12

  Hmm. And I mean, full credit to that helicopter pilot though. He wasn't a medical helicopter. He was just a normal.

• 1:50:09Rich Roll?

  Just like an average helicopter dude, right? Pilot guy?

• 1:50:12Speaker 12

  Not that helicopter pilots, you know, of average, but he was just.

• 1:50:16Rich Roll?

  He's not a paramedic though.

• 1:50:17Speaker 12

  He wasn't a paramedic because he was a regular bloke. He had a wife at home. He had a six week old baby. They're not supposed to balance on one skid.

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:50:27Speaker 12

  You know?

• 1:50:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:50:28Speaker 12

  So he. He risked his life to save me.

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Wow, so it gets you in.

• 1:50:33Speaker 12

  Again, another example of someone doing something completely selfless.

• 1:50:38Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:39Speaker 12

  And, you know, even when I was trapped by the fire, I was really scared. And I said to one of the blokes who I literally just met in that life and death situation, he had his son there. And he saw that I was upset and he took precious seconds to comfort me. You know, again, another act of total selflessness.

• 1:50:59Rich Roll?

  Right, that makes made a huge difference. I mean, I would imagine your life is very much in the balance. I mean, four hours with the extensive, you know, the extent to which you were burned.

• 1:51:08Speaker 12

  Yeah, totally. So we, the helicopter landed in the little town of Kananara. I walked from the helicopter into hospital.

• 1:51:16Rich Roll?

  You walked?

• 1:51:16Speaker 12

  I walked. Well, they were, they were kind of like stuffing around, like trying to get the ambulance around. And in the end, I just thought, stuff this.

• 1:51:25Rich Roll?

  All right, you know.

• 1:51:26Speaker 12

  I like hopped out of the helicopter and started walking into the hospital. Cause in my head, I was fine.

• 1:51:32Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:32Speaker 12

  I was gonna be back at work in a couple of days.

• 1:51:35Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's crazy. The power of denial.

• 1:51:37Speaker 12

  Bandaged me up and, you know, I wanna go, you know, I wanna go home.

• 1:51:41Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:51:41Speaker 12

  And in, in the hospital, they weren't really taking my, taking me seriously. I was like, can someone call Michael? Like, I need to get out of here. I wanna get going.

• 1:51:52Rich Roll?

  You were really not tapped into what was actually happening.

• 1:51:55Speaker 12

  That I was out of there, like.

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:51:59Speaker 12

  And then.

• 1:52:00Rich Roll?

  Did they have a burnt, like a burn unit in this hospital?

• 1:52:02Speaker 12

  So the town is really small, Kananara, there's probably about 5,000 people who live there. So they put a needle in me and I woke up a month later in a hospital in Sydney.

• 1:52:16Rich Roll?

  All right, I gotta land this plane. We got one more person who's gonna round out part one of the best of 2017. Come on, you guys, it's gonna have to be an RRP favorite, maybe the RRP favorite. John Joseph. John Joseph, at JJ Crowmegg on Twitter. Back by popular demand. Good friend, provocateur at large. This is John's, I think his fifth appearance on the show, and he returned to share a little bit more about his unbelievable story. A story that really demonstrates the indelible power of the human spirit to basically face, transcend, overcome unimaginable, seemingly insurmountable obstacles,

• 1:52:57Rich Roll?

  and ultimately transform one's life wholesale to essentially fully actualize. John's got a message for you. This whole thing is about helping people. It's about getting people to wake up. This guy is hardcore. He's a survivor. He's a spiritual warrior. He's got one of the biggest hearts of anybody I've ever met. So without further ado, please enjoy this little slice of my conversation with John Joseph.

• 1:53:25Speaker 13

  Day one has to come. And day one has to be, like even after all the crack and everything else, I was still getting high and then like, you know, started smoking weed again. And then it would turn into doing ecstasy pills in the 90 and all this shit. And then I finally said, you know what? I had to face the truth. And the hard truth was that I'm an addict. And I, you know, I have addiction issues. And I needed to have a day one where I could say, from this point on, I'm never gonna fucking touch any drugs. I'm gonna work on myself every day. You know, the bad brains in HR, they were surrounded by a lot of very positive people who were into a lot of metaphysical yoga, philosophy and all.

• 1:54:10Speaker 13

  So I had a good foundation. And I had to fall back on that. And just, and from my time living as a Hare Krishna and meditating and getting up, I just had to have that day one where you say, this is the day I'm not gonna fucking get high anymore. And then it's every day. You have, and I said that to somebody recently and I go, hey, man, I'm an addict. I'm just choosing not to fucking get high today. I'm gonna train for this Ironman. I'm gonna, I'm gonna write. I'm gonna do everything I need to do. So that today, one day at a time. I choose not to get high. I choose to do the right thing.

• 1:54:53Speaker 13

  Everything in life is, is based upon, it's the choices we make under pressure define character. That's the whole thing what McKee says in Story Two. Anybody could act like they got their whole shit together when there's no pressure. When the pressure comes, then you see true character is revealed. And, you know, what kind of story do you want to leave for the world about how, you know, like, my whole thing and, and what I've seen, and I'm writing this book on PMA now, I mean, you know, uh, is, is I hope that my story, like I said at the end of the book reading, I go, "Look, man, I didn't write this book to get pats on the back, sympathy, oh, you're so strong." None of that shit.

• 1:55:38Speaker 13

  I said, "I wrote the book and I put my whole story in," well, McKee wrote in my storybook from him, that I had him sign it after class. He goes, "Always write the truth." And that's what I did.

• 1:55:53Rich Roll?

  For people that Donald Robert McKee wrote a book called Story, he's the guy who's sort of known as the king of, you know, how to structure a screenplay, and he does these seminars.

• 1:56:02Speaker 13

  Seminars, three days. I've, I did it twice. I took his workshops.

• 1:56:06Rich Roll?

  He was depicted in the movie adaptation, quite, quite comically.

• 1:56:09Speaker 13

  But I had a defining moment with him because I've been utilizing, uh, what happened to me a, as a kid for the main character. And then I walked up to him after class, and he had his little bantering going back and forth, "Yeah, true character, you know, characterization. You see these guys with all the fucking tattoos to their eyeballs. Really, they're just marshmallows." And he was talking about me, you know, he's picking on me through the, so after like, I was like, the second day, I walked up and I was like, you know, I said, "Mr. McKee is, you know, everyone's allowed to ask questions." I go, "As far as like..." You know, a kid that was abused as a child, he stopped me right there and he goes, "Child abuse is the cliche of the fucking day."

• 1:56:54Speaker 13

  "It's like writers use it to try to gain sympathy and empathy for characters that are weak, "they're thin and we can give two shits about them." "It's not the abuse, it's what we do as a result of it." "That's the fucking story." "And I was just like, that was when I was like, I have to put everything into this story." "I can't leave out, as embarrassing as it was, "that these motherfuckers put their hands on me like that, "I had to tell that story and, um, and, and I said at the end of the meeting..."

• 1:57:28Rich Roll?

  And ultimately, that's, that's the path towards you healing it for yourself.

• 1:57:31Speaker 13

  Yeah, it was, because that's why I always had addiction issues and everything else. "It was like these old scars, every time somebody did some really grimy shit to me that would, "whether it was a relationship ending or my band members robbing me, ratting me out, "doing fucking grimy shit, these two clowns in the Chromeags, Harley and fucking Paris." "And, and I considered Harley especially my friend and he just kept stabbing me in the fucking back "and I would spiral out of control because it was just ripping those wounds open." "And it wasn't until I wrote the entire story and got it off my chest to the world "that I was really able to heal and that's why I wrote that book,

• 1:58:12Speaker 13

  "because I've gotten thousands and thousands of letters, I correspond with people, emails "and fucking all kinds of shit. I just got one today, this dude on Twitter was like, "your book helped save my life practically by your example." "And example's better than precept, we have to live." "It, it, these days, everybody talks shit, everyone talks the talk, who's walking the walk? "That's who I look to." Guys like you, guys that, you know, overcame stuff in their own lives and pushed on to, to achieve tremendous things in, in, in the world. I'm not, I don't care. Everybody talks shit out of their ass these days. You know, I'm, I'm like, I'm looking to see, you know,

• 1:58:54Speaker 13

  what actions, how are people living their lives? And that's the example. And that's, that's what I try to do too, is, is lead a positive life and show people, you know, no matter what, you can climb out of any hole, you know, no matter how far in the depths of hell you are. And I've been down there. I seen crazy shit, mad people murdering in front of me. I mean, shit, nobody should ever have to see. But I was willing to like climb out of that and, and surround myself by positive people. That's the other thing is the association we keep.

• 1:59:32Rich Roll?

  Who are you hanging out with?

• 1:59:33Speaker 13

  That's it, man. If you hang out with rogues and thieves, you're gonna be a rogue and a thief or a fucking junkie or whatever. It's people, places and things. I never went to the programs, but a lot of the stuff they say is stuff that I just know to follow. People, places and things, you know, you know, just, I'm an addict. I'm choosing not to get high today, you know, and the higher power and all that. I, I utilize all the stuff, except, you know, it's like we're training. I do, that's part of my therapy too. I'm not a great Iron Man, but I don't do it to, to, to, you know, to brag or anything else. I just do it because it's part of my discipline in my life.

• 2:00:19Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed part one of our Look in the Rearview. Part two with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations is gonna go up later in the week. On Sunday night, December 31st, New Year's Eve, to be exact, because, hey, man, I never get a day off. I'll work on New Year's Eve. I don't care. If you want to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media. If you're home with your family, sit around that dinner table, talk to them about the RRP. What else are you going to talk about? Always subscribe, hit that subscribe button, leave a review on Apple Podcasts. We have a Patreon set up for people who want to support my work financially. Thank you, everybody who has done that. We had a great AMA the other day. I'm going to set up another

• 2:01:00Rich Roll?

  one for the following month, for January, pretty soon. So stay tuned for that. Exclusive content for Patreon supporters only. Again, we're offering 20% off our Plant Power Meal Planner with the promo code POWER20. This is an insane deal. For just $80 a year, you will be supported for 365 days with thousands of plant-based, personalized recipes, expert food coaches available seven days a week, handy grocery lists, and even grocery delivery in 80 US markets. It is amazing. It is an incredible deal, and it's only available through midnight, January 6th. And again, this is something we're not likely to do

• 2:01:40Rich Roll?

  again. So you're going to have to jump on it right away. To do that, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the upper right-hand corner at richroll.com and use the promo code POWER20, POWER20, at checkout for $20 off the annual membership fee. Again, that's meals.richroll.com promo code POWER20 at checkout. I want to thank everybody who helped put on this show, not just this show, but over the course of this entire year. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, and interstitial music. Shawn Patterson for help on graphics. Theme music, as always, by Analemma. I want to thank Moby for allowing us to use some of

• 2:02:20Rich Roll?

  his gratis music for our interstitial music over the course of the year. David Zammatt, who helped out for a couple of months with photo portraits and video. Who else has worked on this show? So many people. Thanks for the love, you guys. I will see you back here in a few days. Season's greetings. Happy holidays. Merry, merry. Peace, plants. Grace, love. Namaste.