The Best of 2017- Part II

Welcome to the 5th 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. It's been an honor to share my conversations with so many extraordinary people over the course of 2017. Second listens brought new insights — and more reminders that that these evergreen exchanges continue to inspire and inform. For long-time listeners, this two-part episode is intended to launch you into 2018 with renewed vigor and intention. 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 #296: Dr. Neal Barnard, M. D. RRP #298: Meditation Master Sharon Salzberg RRP #302: Addiction Recovery Expert Tommy Rosen RRP #305: charity: water's Scott Harrison RRP #311: Ultra-Athlete Samantha Gash RRP #317: Bestselling Author Gretchen Rubin RRP #319: Chinese Medicine Physician Colin Hudon RRP #320: Healing Mushroom Expert Tero Isokauppila Thank you for taking this journey with me. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  To see the truth of it, you just have to look at a country like Japan or China, where these are non-dairy-consuming countries. And they really weren't eating much meat. You know, meat was a kind of a flavoring for the rice, and noodles, and vegetables, and so forth. And back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between 1% and 5% of the adult population. McDonald's came in, fast-food chains came in, meat came in in a big way, and cheese and dairy started to follow. Some of the people in Japan initially, and then China afterward, started to say, "Okay, we need to drink milk so that we're strong like Americans are." And what they've gotten is diabetes rates went up to now 11% to 12% in Japan by 1990. Diabetes is massive now in China.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Cardiovascular disease, I'm talking heart disease, huge in China. And it's not because of rice.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  That's Dr. Neil Bernard, and this is part two of the Best of 2017 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:18Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody. How you guys doing? What is happening? Happy New Year. Happy New Year. I can't believe it. It's 2018 already. I don't know what it is, but I really believe that as you age, as you get older, time accelerates. At least that's the way it feels to me. That is my experience. That is my truth. I don't know if it's true, but I cannot believe that we've already gone all the way through 2017 and we're into 18 already. In any event, welcome to the show, to my podcast, the program where I endeavor to have long-form, in-depth conversations that matter, at least I hope they matter, with the most compelling thought leaders across all aspects of positive culture change. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing

• 3:03Rich Roll?

  on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for spreading the word to your friends and on social media. And welcome. Welcome to part two of my annual Best of Anthology series where I feature excerpts from some of my favorite conversations of 2017. And the idea behind all of this is to hopefully provide you with a little inspiration, to set the right mood, to create the right mindset to help you reflect back on 2017 and hopefully better contemplate the year ahead, to catapult you into January, a little bit more informed, a little better motivated, perhaps a little more inspired to take your health and your wellbeing and your life to the next level. This is my way of just saying Happy New Year, of saying

• 3:48Rich Roll?

  thank you. Thank you for investing in my work. Thank you for being an incredible audience for this show, for honoring all of the guests that I've shared with you and for implementing their work into your lives. I love you guys and I promise to continue raising the bar in 2018. If you've been with me all along, then This part two in a two-part series will hopefully help bring some of my guests insights back into the forefront of your mind as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams, your goals, heading into the new year. And if you're new, if you're brand new to this program, maybe you just stumbled upon it accidentally, then this window into the world of my guests should provide you with, should give you a little bit of a sense

• 4:33Rich Roll?

  of what this show is all about and hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to the episodes in full, or at least some of them, and visit some of the shows maybe you might have missed throughout the year if you have been a listener. And I'll provide links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes, which you can find on the episode page at richroll.com.

• 5:01Rich Roll?

  Okay, again, I love all my guests. My instinct is to excerpt all of the episodes, but that would just be too long. I really wanted to just give you a flavor of what this show is all about to help jog your memory of this journey that we've been on. And so of course, I just had to choose only a few of the amazing people that I've been blessed to have conversations with. So consider this some of my best content of 2017. And to launch us into all of this, let's begin with the great Dr. Neil Bernard. @DrNeilBernard

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  on Twitter, D R Neil Bernard, N E A L B A R N A R D. Neil Bernard, M.D. is a preeminent authority on diet and nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. He is the founder and president of PCRM, the Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. He also runs the Bernard Medical Center, which is a groundbreaking nonprofit primary care medical practice where board-certified physicians, nurse practitioners, and registered dietitians help patients prevent and reverse serious health problems, leveraging a holistic approach that involves tackling

• 6:23Rich Roll?

  the actual causes of illness. Imagine that, the actual... Causes of illness with extra attention, of course, on nutrition. I love Dr. Bernard. He's a good friend. He's been an amazing multiple guest on this show, and here's a little bit of my talk this past year from episode 296. Enjoy.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  The big picture that I see, it was relatively few people going to a plant-based diet, say 20 years ago. Now it's like all over the place. This movement, I think, is unstoppable, even with this war of misinformation. And for every ridiculous industry-funded study, there are plenty of good studies clearly showing the truth.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  But those, those studies aren't getting the kind of bandwidth that these other studies are getting. And is it, is it a financial thing? It's like, you know, the kale and broccoli growers can't get together and pool their money to compete with the dairy industry and the meat industry?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  You said it. I got to tell you, it's true. They, they not only pour money into doing the research, which is costly, but then they've got their communications teams set to push it. And worst of all, the studies done in the US have the backing of the US government. Because by law, the government must promote American agricultural products. And they have specifically funded studies and they fund promotional programs, not only to make dairy products look healthy, but to actually promote more consumption of them, whether they're healthy or not. So that's all the bad news. The good news is, if you look at milk consumption, it's, it's been falling. Despite all the milk mustache ads and so forth, it's been falling. Cheese is going, unfortunately, going up. Meat has fallen, meat consumption has fallen

• 8:07Speaker 01

  about 10% over the last decade. We're not where, where we need to be at all, but we are making progress.

• 8:14Rich Roll?

  So this, this idea, you kind of touched on it. It's called, what is it called? Government setbacks?

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, there is the checkoff program.

• 8:22Rich Roll?

  The checkoffs, right.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  There, there are the.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  For every unit of milk that you sell, or every cow you sell, you will donate money to a kitty that the government administers. And they pay for research, and they pay for promotion, and all this kind of stuff.

• 8:40Rich Roll?

  Right, so there's that, they kind of touch on it in the documentary, What the Health, and you spoke about it in your presentation at Moby's House the other week. When you see an ad for a Wendy's Double Cheeseburger, or the newest version of, you know, the Pizza Hut pizza with injected cheese into the crust, and all these sorts of things, that actually, there is a relationship between those marketing campaigns and those products, and the influx of government funding. So can you explain that a little bit? Because I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  By law, the US, and this has been the case for a long time. The US government, by law, must promote American agricultural products. This is something Congress, in its wisdom, passed a number of years ago. And they promote products regardless of their health value, and it's often in spite of their health value. So they take this pot of money, and they pour it into research studies. And the US government did work with Wendy's, with a contract that I can show you, to market the Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger. I'm not kidding. It sold two and a quarter million pounds of cheese. They then worked with Subway to, which Subway had two sandwiches that didn't have cheese on them. So, on contract with the US government, they stuck cheese on those sandwiches.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  They worked with Pizza Hut to put an entire pound of cheese on one serving of pizza. They worked with Taco Bell, Burger King, all the others, so that cheese was promoted, for example. You go through the drive-thru, and you can't imagine that what they say over the loudspeaker is going to be government speak. Welcome to Taco Bell. Would you like to try our quesadilla today? You know, they don't say you want a strawberry smoothie or something. You know, it's like something cheesy. And so these are all done on contract. We got them through the Freedom of Information.

• 10:29Rich Roll?

  So those talking points are like upsells that are specifically kind of inserted into the talking points that that person at the fast food restaurant is sort of told this is how you communicate with the customer.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was part of it. The government has supplied advisors to McDonald's. I'm talking about people going to McDonald's headquarters and advising them on their business practices. I mean, don't you think every computer manufacturer would like to have the government promoting their product? Well, it's wrong. It should stop. But that's where we are. We live in a country which, if this were a Latin American country, you could imagine drugs, it kind of infusing the, their influence in the government. Well, here it's agricultural products doing the same kind of thing.

• 11:14Rich Roll?

  So what would have to happen systemically in order for the government to get behind sort of using that machinery to push fruits and vegetables instead of, you know, cheese and meat?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  You know.

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  Subsidies, eradicating subsidies or changing the structure of lobbying in Washington? Or, I mean, it would have to be from the top.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  It would literally require an act of Congress. And I have to say that the fruit and vegetable people don't really want to be part of that. They want to fight their own fight, but they are not interested in subsidies for the most part.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And none of this would matter if these products didn't have a health impact, but they do.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And they have a surprising impact. And this is something else that gets swept under the rug.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Let me give you a short example, if you don't mind.

• 12:07Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  There's a woman named Catherine Lawrence, who you may know. She's a, she lives in Texas, but her story is very striking. She, she was originally from Louisiana. She was in the Air Force. She was an aerospace engineer. She was one of the first people going into Iraq in 2003 to lay down American military bases. Anyway, she's working in this war zone. She's in, she's in the military and you're not gaining weight eating military food and working hard. Her tour of duty comes to an end. She goes back home to Louisiana. All her friends say, Catherine. Let's eat. You know, you're home. And what does she love the most? Cheese, mac and cheese, um, cheetos, all this stuff. She had a friend who knew she loved mac and cheese. So they gave

• 12:49Speaker 01

  her a case of forty eight mac and cheese boxes, those things that college sophomores eat all Right. Uh, she, for forty eight days straight, Catherine ate mac and cheese out of a box. Anyway, she gained weight. But she also started to have these pains in her abdomen. And the, it, as the months went by, it got worse and worse and worse. And her doctor diagnosed endometriosis, which is a condition where cells that are supposed to be inside your uterus migrate out and they seed around your abdomen and they start swelling with your cycle. And the pain is terrible. The treatment can be his, and it also causes infertility and the treatment is a hysterectomy in a lot of cases. And, and she said to her doctor, you know, rather

• 13:32Speaker 01

  not have a hysterectomy. I'd like to have a family. And this was the treatment and she was not getting better. So they scheduled it. Anyway, a friend said to her, why don't you try a plant-based diet? Because there's a lot of evidence that that will affect your hormones, your hormone balance. And what you've got is a hormonal issue. And she was really half-hearted about it, but she thought, like, what's my choice? So she went 100% vegan, no dairy, like no cheese, but no animal products at all. And she started feeling better. She started losing weight. Week after week, she was losing weight. And as time went on, all of these abdominal symptoms started to just go away. So she went back to the doctor who did a laparoscopy. You, you look into the abdomen with a scope and he looks all around,

• 14:16Speaker 01

  looks all around, the doctor's looking all around, and then sends her into the recovery room. And the doctor went out to the waiting room to talk to her husband and he said, her endometriosis is practically gone.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  And the husband said, you know, she changed her diet. She went 100% vegan. And she's been feeling better week by week and it's, and her pain has been going away. And the doctor said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Foods do not cause endometriosis and there is no way that a diet change is going to heal it. There's only one explanation for this. This is a miracle. So the doctor said- Cause that's, cause that's more plausible. That's more plausible. This is barely written in her medical record. But anyway, she never had the operation. She had, she didn't have the hysterectomy. She, her endometriosis is gone. She's got two kids and in fact, she's, her third child is on the way. Uh, and she has now become a food for life instructor, working with PCRM to tell other women and men

• 15:14Speaker 01

  about how foods affect your body and to get, to get healthy. So anyway, my hat is off to Catherine Lawrence for sharing her story. But anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is you're going to promote, not you. People are promoting cheese. They're saying, don't worry about it. It has no effect. Cheese comes from milk. Milk comes from a cow who is pregnant. The cows, cows don't give, cows don't give milk at all, but they don't make milk until they have been impregnated. They give birth and then the milk that their calf was going to get goes to the dairy. Um, a cow pregnancy is about nine months, similar to human pregnancy and they're impregnated every year. So what that means, three quarters of their lives, they are pregnant. They are being milked during that time. The estrogen that the cow makes gets into the milk and it's just, it's not much.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  It's only a trace, but the milk is turned into cheese. The, the hormones go with the fat. And the average person eats 35 pounds of it every year. So researchers in Rochester, New York, looked, looked at men. The men who ate the most cheese had the worst sperm counts, the worst sperm morphology, the lowest sperm motility. In other words, they're- Because of the estrogen content of that? Well, that's the theory. The theory is this, you're consuming just little traces of estrogen with your breakfast. On your Egg McMuffin, the little cheese and a little bit more at lunch and quite a lot at dinner on your pizza. And could those little traces of estrogens matter? Now, we, we had all thought, couldn't be. But I gotta tell you, Rich, here's the worst. Um, here in California,

• 16:43Speaker 01

  researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. And if you've had breast cancer in the past and you were treated for it, that your concern is, is my cancer going to come back?

• 16:55Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  Well, the women who consumed the most cheese had a 49% higher breast cancer mortality compared to the women who eat the least. And the difference is small. The difference is one daily serving or more, less than a half a serving a day. So the women who eat little or no cheese and other high-fat dairy products, it's cheese, it's butter, that's where the hormones go. You compare to these low-cheese consumers, the ones who eat one or more servings a day, which is not a lot. The increased risk was 49%. I'm talking about risk of dying of your cancer. So again, the amounts of hormones are small, but it raises the question, do you want to feed any kind of dairy?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  I'm talking about cow's milk, goat milk, whatever. Do you want to feed it to your six-year-old daughter? Or your six-year-old son? Or your wife, or your husband, or yourself, or anybody? And my thought is that the dairy products are this cultural aberration that has stuck because people get hooked on it, but it has nothing to do with human biology and we should be avoiding it.

• 18:04Rich Roll?

  Up next, we have Sharon Salzberg, @sharonsalzberg on Twitter. That's Salzberg, S-A-L-Z-B-E-R-G. Sharon is a towering figure in the field of meditation. She is a world-renowned teacher, a multiple New York Times bestselling author, and somebody who's played a crucial, central role in bringing and introducing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West. She released a new book this year. It's called Real Love: The Art of Mindful Connection. And that was truly the locus of today's conversation. How to practice love, how to receive love, how to be love. So without further ado, please enjoy this little snippet from episode 298.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  What is real love? I have to figure it out. I usually talk about it as a state of really profound connection that needs to take it, take that concept away from kind of the adornments, you know, and the elaborations that the culture puts on it, that it has to be romantic. It has to have a certain flavor. Almost the whole book, actually, oddly enough, was born out of this one line in a movie, the movie Dan in Real Life. The line goes, "Love is not a feeling, it's an ability." And of course, we know it as a feeling, we yearn for it as a feeling, we think of it constantly sometimes as a feeling, but what if we reconceptualize that as an ability,

• 19:29Speaker 02

  some capacity we have within us that's not in the hands of someone else, but is really part of us and that other people may awaken it, or enliven it, or nourish it, or threaten it, but it's within us. So I realized that without that shift, I tended to think of love as a commodity, and it's almost like a package. And it's like the UPS person was standing in the doorstep with that package in his hand and changed his mind and went the other way. And it'd be like, hey, wait a minute, you know?

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  I've lost all the love in my life, but really, it's within us. And that was a huge shift for me.

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  And how did you? Well, I guess that's going to bring it back. I want to get into the whole origin story. We'll, we'll, we'll work our way towards that for, for context. But you break the book up into three sections. It's basically love for oneself, love for others, and love for all, right? And, and you kind of, it's a journey towards reclaiming this word and freeing it of all the baggage that we kind of associate with it and, and, you know, placing it in a context, really as a verb, right? And not something to be, not this sort of state, or something that we're striving for

• 20:45Rich Roll?

  or trying to get from another, but trying to really kind of germinate and cultivate within ourselves.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  That's right. And it, I think that that realization has every level to it, including the fact that maybe it's up to us then, you know, which can be a little scary. Like, whoa, wait a minute, you know?

• 21:03Rich Roll?

  We don't want to take personal responsibility, you know? That's how fun.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, you know, oh, you know, maybe the package is a better deal, but, um, yeah, it has lots of levels. But that's. When I first was thinking about this book and kind of creating it and I talked to someone in publishing about it, they said to me, "Oh, the love market's really saturated." You know, it's like so overdone. And I thought about that and I thought, "Well, maybe the how to fix your relationship market or how to find your relationship."

• 21:31Rich Roll?

  Right, the romantic love market.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  That's right. You know, but this is something, this is something very different.

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  It's not a mistake that, you know, the first section is cultivating love for oneself, right? And I think we, you know, in our current society, think of self-love as indulgent or selfish or narcissistic or an exercise of the ego. But really, you know, cultivating love for oneself is a foundational component in actually even having the capacity to love other people. So can you talk about that a little bit?

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think we tend to think of self-love as narcissism and being selfish and like you say, self-indulgent. But I think it has two really amazing components. One is a sense of inner resource, not feeling so exhausted and bereft and impoverished within, but having a sense of inner sufficiency or even inner abundance, which becomes like the source of being able to give and care and take care of others. You know, it's like if you feel like you've got nothing going on inside, nothing to contribute, it's kind of a really bleak and hollow world within, you don't look at somebody in pain and think, "How can I help you?" You know, it's like, "Go away, I'm really tired, you know, it's too much, I can't bear it." And we truly can't bear it in that moment. But we have

• 22:48Speaker 02

  the capacity to have a very different view of our inner life and our experiences that it doesn't feel so bleak and it doesn't feel so not good enough. And the other part of the love for oneself is self-compassion, which really comes into play, not in our triumphs, you know, in our great days, but when we've blown it and we've made a mistake or we've fallen off a course that we want to stay on or whatever it is, you know, to be able to pick ourselves up and start over and have a sense of resilience. Really take some examination. A lot of people think self compassion is laziness. It's like, yeah, so what? I'll forgive myself. I'll blow it again in 10 seconds.

• 23:30Rich Roll?

  Like letting yourself off the hook for everything.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. But really, I think when we look at what's most effective and most efficient in making a change or getting something done, it's not going on a harangue towards yourself for like five and a half hours after you've blown it. You know, it's like saying, okay, lessons learned or something like that. Or that doesn't feel very good, or what can I do to make amends and then start over?

• 23:54Rich Roll?

  Most of us walk around with an inordinate amount of self judgment and self criticism and doubt. And, you know, an undercurrent of worthlessness, or, you know, I'm not worthy of love. And, and we play this tape in our mind, right? And, and I think when you're in that spot, whether it's victimization or just sort of, you know, wallowing in your own fear or what have you, you tend to look outside yourself for love. Like you, you, you, you look at another person as being the missing variable in that equation that's going to solve that for yourself as opposed to that inward journey of cultivating it within.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  But the problem, of course, is that nothing, you know, will actually fill that gap.

• 24:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Nothing outside. And then I took in the book.

• 24:44Rich Roll?

  We know that intellectually.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Oh, we do.

• 24:48Rich Roll?

  Well, I, a lot of people do and we, but we still do it.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Of course we do it, you know, and it hurts so much. It's really sad. Of course we do it, but that's where there's some self compassion right there. Um, but we don't have to do it in as obsessed a way and as deluded a way perhaps as we once did. Because we can see clearly, we can see for ourselves, you know, the, I think that the world is, is built of so many myths and just untruths and we're led to believe so many things that simply aren't true. And we incorporate them, we, we run around trying to find the perfect whatever.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  And sometimes we can step back and say, wait a minute. Do I really need that? Or what's the nature of that? And even love itself comes onto that, that idea. Because so many times people think of love as being stupid, or you know, like sentimental, or

• 25:42Rich Roll?

  Or weak.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  Or weak, or saccharine. And, you know, what's really strong is like vengefulness, or whatever. But when you look at those states, just look at them. Uh, it's kind of the opposite, actually. Vengefulness is very narrow, very much tunnel vision, very much, um, not seeing any options. Uh, hateful, you know, it doesn't feel really that good. And it's kind of brittle, you know, it's not really that strong. But love or compassion are, are states of tremendous like spaciousness and, um, presence and, you know, energy and generosity. They are actually stronger than we think.

• 26:21Rich Roll?

  A prominent recurring theme of my podcast is addiction, alcoholism, sobriety, and recovery. And so to walk us through some of those issues is my good friend, Tommy Rosen, at Tommy Rosen on Twitter. Tommy is an addiction recovery expert who has spent the last two decades immersed in yoga, recovery, and wellness. He is the author of Recovery 2.0, Move Beyond Addiction and Upgrade Your Life. And he is also the founder and host of the Recovery 2.0 Beyond Addiction Online Conference, which I was privileged to be a speaker, a participant in. This is a conversation about Tommy's remarkable path to recovery. It's an intense and at times profound discourse

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  on the ravages of addiction and alcoholism. Uh, I really encourage everybody who missed this one on the first go around to go back and listen to it. It's episode 302. In the meantime, here's a taste.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  There's a level of shame that seems to go along with the dis-ease of addiction, alcoholism, what have you.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  The anonymity concept was created to protect the members. So that if you were one of these people who were in recovery, nobody in your world would know, because you didn't want anyone to know. But that covets shame, that protects the shame. Exactly. So at what point, at what point do you transcend this disease? At what point? Now, if you are going to hang on to a doctrine that says you never, you never will be beyond this, well then, you have, at least for the time being, relegated yourself to a way of

• 28:13Speaker 03

  thinking that deems you sick for the rest of your life. What if one day at a time is the way everybody is in the world? Aren't we all on a 24-hour clock? Don't we all have to sleep every day, eat every day? What if one day at a time is just part of the human condition? What if addiction is just nothing more than a particular outcropping of the human condition that actually isn't shameful at all? Now, the behaviors that come out of a person's addiction, yeah, we're all going to be ashamed of stealing, lying, cheating. Any human being will be ashamed of those things at some level of their being, because

• 28:55Speaker 03

  you understand that it's wrong, that it's against the natural flow, that it's against the things that you believe in. But there's a healing of that, once you get better. I could say to you right now, I've lied, but I'm not a liar. I've cheated, but I'm not a cheat. I've stolen, but I'm not a thief. That's not what or who I am.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  There's been a transformation in me. I recognize that I behaved poorly because I was in a very dense state of consciousness in which I would seek to feel better from my disconnection and my disease through the taking of drugs that only made things worse for me. I did that. I'm not ashamed of it, not even in the slightest bit. I don't regret it. I'm not ashamed of it. And I'm not particularly concerned if you have a judgment about me for it. I'm comfortable in my character and my personality today. I've healed to the point where it doesn't matter. So you see, I'm free.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  Now, if you portray freedom to people who say to you, "It is not possible to be free", you will be threatening. You will be disrupting their way of being, and a great outcry will take place. And the way my friend described it is, "You're in a barrel of monkeys and you're climbing out of the barrel, and the other monkeys don't like it, and they will do everything they can to pull you back down." Now, that's not to say that that's... I'm not referring to people in 12-step programs as a barrel of monkeys. There's no... There's no end to my respect and love for anybody who's working at moving along a continuum of being free.

• 30:42Speaker 03

  The only thing I'm saying is, at what point do you become a human being on a path of discovery and not just a member of a fellowship? At what point do you move beyond all that?

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I get that. I mean, that's beautifully put. I think the only caveat I would present you with is that that freedom is preconditioned or, you know, is contingent upon...

• 31:12Rich Roll?

  A continual commitment to progressively growing.

• 31:17Speaker 03

  Which is the case for every human being.

• 31:19Rich Roll?

  Right, so the sense that like, I think, I think baked into the word freedom is this idea, well, you can, now you can just relax and take your foot off the gas and cruise.

• 31:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 31:28Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  I, that's so great, and I think the idea of freedom, to most people who are either stuck in addiction or who are in recovery from addiction, the idea of freedom, or healing, or having recovered, means now I can drink with impunity. Now I can use drugs, because I'm free. Now I get it, before I was an addict, but now I'm free. You see, the way I'm looking at it is, anybody who seeks to solve their life's problems through something in the outside world that ultimately is addictive, is in a state of delusion. It's delusion. And it will be played out, you don't have to listen to me, it'll be played out in your life, just like it was played out in my life.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  When I looked to the outside world through drugs, alcohol, sex, food, gambling, cigarettes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to solve my life's riddle, I was on, I had the right destination in mind. The right destination is connection, love, healing, recovery. But I was on the wrong train. I got on the wrong train. And so all I'm saying is, we have to get on the right train, and when you've healed, and when you're free, you will know it, because you no longer have any desire, any desire, to go back to the behaviors or the, the, uh, the person that you once were. It's as if, it's like a snake that has completely shed its skin.

• 32:58Speaker 03

  It's not you anymore, because it never was you.

• 33:02Rich Roll?

  But to get to that place, there's a lot of work that has to happen. You gotta wrestle with the dark recesses of your soul, and, and really figure out who you are. It's, it's a process of birthing the authentic self within, so that you can stop jamming that square peg into a round hole, and suddenly that peg fits perfectly. And to get to that place, means, you know, making peace with your past, and mending those relationships, and resolving these, you know...

• 33:32Rich Roll?

  Emotional wounds, or overcoming these childhood traumas, to put it in Gabor's terminology, so that you can own your story, speak freely about it, without shame, without being triggered emotionally. And with that comes a sense of not just self-esteem, but self-empowerment that allows you to then be this lighthouse, who then is an attractive, you know, sort of person for somebody who is struggling, or further down, you know, a couple pegs further down on that path. But it doesn't come overnight, and it doesn't come without, you know, you can't circumvent or find some way to growth hack that process.

• 34:18Speaker 03

  And think of the alternative. So you can just, you can continue.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  No one is saying you have to do anything. You can, you can stay on your train.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  And eventually, you yourself will become sick of it.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  Not because I say so, or your parents say so, or an authority figure of some kind says so, but because inside, you're not meant to suffer in that way. And you will wake up to it. And you will realize, this is unbearable, this is untenable for me. I'm going to have to change, what do I do?

• 35:02Speaker 03

  And it begins one day at a time. It doesn't happen overnight, it is a lot of work, but what are you doing in the meantime? Being a human being, you think you came here and it's gonna be easy? Whether you're an addict, or anybody else on this planet, you think there's anybody that gets away from being human?

• 35:21Rich Roll?

  I think we need to reconceptualize, or redefine the word addiction in and of itself. You know, I think that we think of addiction in terms of severe cases, the heroin addict, or, you know, even the bulimic, or something like that, but I think that- The vast majority of people, if not everybody, fall somewhere on a spectrum of addiction. You know, how often are you checking your Twitter feed? Like, you know, why can't you stop going to the mall? How much ice cream are you eating? You know, what are you trying to resolve within yourself through the relationship that you're in? Anything outside of yourself can be used as a vehicle for treating your emotional, you know, mental and spiritual state.

• 36:05Rich Roll?

  And to the extent that you are doing that on even a very rudimentary level, there is an element, a kernel, a seed, that is inherently addictive that can be redressed. Even if it's mild, it is there.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Yes. There's no question that for me, this is a part of the human condition. And it may manifest itself in a variety of different ways and levels in different people. But at the end of the day, when you close the door and it's just you, you know. You know now. Here are the things I need to work on. Here are the things that are hard for me. Here are the pains I'm feeling. Here's the difficulty of being me, the difficulty of being human. Like, you know what it is. And you know the things you do.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  The escape hatches that you look for every day to not sit still long enough to face those realities. Heal them.

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  Well, first of all, you installed them, so you know where they are, right?

• 37:15Speaker 03

  They're in there somewhere.

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  Maybe nobody else does, but you know where they are.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the problem is, you know, the two, two of the biggest addictions right now are the addiction to having, the addiction to doing. And you have to do to have. So how can we convince people that actually the solution is to stop looking for escape hatches? And to sit still long enough to develop a true, a real and true relationship with yourself? A real and true comfort with yourself?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  You can, you can look for addiction and, and outlet, you can look for an escape hatch in anything. You know it full well with athletics and you can, you can go there. I've seen people use yoga as a, as a full-on, full-blown way of avoiding themself. So we, eventually, we will be brought to stillness. And when we get there, it's a incredible day because we're like, wow, I'm contented just to be sitting still with myself. That's enough. Now, most people never even could imagine such a place or imagine that they would want that for themselves.

• 38:40Rich Roll?

  Taro Isakapila, at 4Sigmatic on Twitter, is the co-founder, president and marketing director of 4Sigmatic Foods, the company behind a wide variety of health-promoting mushroom products. He's also the author of a new book that came out this year called Healing Mushrooms. And this is excerpted from what I think is a mind-blowing conversation about the mystical, magical wellness-promoting properties of fungi with the original fungi himself, Taro, that will forever change how you think about mushrooms. So please enjoy this excerpt from RRP 320 with my friend, Taro Isakapila.

• 39:18Rich Roll?

  So let's go through it. You know, the more popular medicinal adaptogenic mushrooms that you kind of are involved in are not just lion's mane, but we've got shaga, we've got reishi, we talked about cordyceps a little bit. I mean, those are kind of the main ones, right?

• 39:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, those are the-

• 39:37Rich Roll?

  So let's parse those and like, what do these do?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Those are the main ones-

• 39:39Rich Roll?

  And like, why should we be including these in our diet?

• 39:42Speaker 04

  Yes. So those are the most kind of researched and most differentiated. And if you're in the health circles, you might've heard of reishi. But if you're just tuning in and you-

• 39:51Rich Roll?

  Is it reishi or reishi?

• 39:52Speaker 04

  There's neither way. It's a Japanese word and you can say either way. And, but if you're tuning in and you're like, hey, what are these? Like, I've never heard of any of them. They sound so exotic. I just wanna- Before we dive into what do all of those do is just know that there are more familiar mushrooms that offer similar and equally good functional benefits, the shiitake, the maitake, the enoki, the oyster mushroom. So not all of them are exotic as cordyceps. But to just to kind of frame it, reishi or raishi is the queen of all mushrooms. So it's the most studied of them for their health

• 40:35Speaker 04

  benefits. It's really like this motherly, calming, nurturing mushroom, especially good if you're highly stressed or if you need to improve your sleep quality. But all of these top mushrooms help with your gut health, your gut biome. Reishi is great for that. They help with usually blood sugar, you know, and just managing. But yeah, gut health and immunity, they're moderating your immune system. But reishi particularly is this nurturing, motherly, calming mushroom. And then there's pretty fascinating studies on how it could improve sleep quality. So you can go into a deeper sleep. And then cordyceps is even though neither of them are like sedative or stimulant,

• 41:15Speaker 04

  it's like somewhat the opposite. It's like, it's like fire, energy, go, go, go, like get more out of your workout. Used for more of the lungs and the respiratory issues, but also a sports and performance. Actually, in my upcoming book, there's a recipe called Cordyceps on the Beach, because it was used as an aphrodisiac for a long time. So as a kind of a playful, fun way of making a mocktail and using cordyceps as the booster. But so that's like fire, energy, go, performance.

• 41:51Rich Roll?

  One question I have about that is I use it not on a daily basis, but kind of pick and choose. Like, okay, I have a really big workout on Thursday, so I'll have it that morning. But I don't do it every day. So but I don't know, like, is it okay to do it every day? Or do you develop

• 42:10Rich Roll?

  Like a not an immunity, but a tolerance to it. Like is it something that is should be for daily use? Or is it something that you should just use periodically?

• 42:18Speaker 04

  So this adaptogen, this concept of these 10 to 20 of the most studied powerful herbs and fungi in the world that balance our body. So the word adaptogen comes from it being helpful to adapt you to stress and difficult situation from exercise to just your normal daily life of being a mother to and to children or whatever.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  Right. And then it just sorry to interrupt, but like in an Ayurvedic sense, it kind of reads your body and understands what's out of balance and and sort of naturally knows how to address that.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  That's exactly the point. So in order to be an adaptogen or as Darjeeling, they often like Rosayana or an emperor herb in China, or you have to be safe and non habit forming. So if it causes you an addiction or if it's not safe daily, it cannot be an adaptogen. Second is what you just said is is it restores balance. So it's not really healing you of anything. It just restores balance, whatever the homeostasis and balance it is for your case. So the same thing for someone might be a lot of energy and for the other person, it might be a lot of calming, depending where you are on the spectrum. And then third one is that it's non-specific. So it works the body like a symphony versus an individual instrument. So so those are things.

• 43:34Speaker 04

  And so, yeah, cordyceps is safe every day to answer your question. That being said, I all of these adaptogens, I think they're better if you if you play with them seasonally and rotate them a little bit. That being said, the mushrooms have and actually oats in, but in much smaller capacity, have these one of the most studied compounds in the world called polysaccharides, these many sugars. And even if you're on a ketogenic diet, they're not going to impact your blood sugar. But especially these betocloogens are among the most studied compounds for human health.

• 44:13Speaker 04

  And those betacugans are kind of like the chlorophyll plants in a way, the same ways that you, you don't have to eat spinach every day. You don't have to eat kale every day, but it's probably in your best interest to have chlorophyll in some capacity on a daily basis, on a regular basis. The same way is probably good to have betacugans and polysaccharides every day, but one day it can come from a shiitake, one day it can come from cordyceps, and then one day it can come from goji berries or oats. But um, so it's safe every day, but you're probably doing it the right way by just kind of rotating them a little bit.

• 44:51Rich Roll?

  I think that's an important point that has a macro application to how we live our lives and, and think about, you know, what we put in our bodies because we have a tendency as human beings to, uh, you know, to wanna just zero in on one thing and think that's the, you know, that is the, that's the thing that's gonna make the difference. And those things tend to vacillate depending upon cultural trends. So for a while it's kale, you know, and then it's this, and then it's like, that's the answer, that's the thing. And it's like, it's not, you know, we, as human beings and, and part of this greater ecosystem, we are as cyclical as the plants that grow out of the, the ground. And I think we need to pay more attention to those circadian rhythms and modulate our, our behavior patterns

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  and our eating habits accordingly.

• 45:37Speaker 04

  And I think that's a really important point. So even though I'm, you know, gallivanting around the world, talking and yelling about mushrooms and, and I'm trying to be like a PR firm for this kingdom.

• 45:49Rich Roll?

  You're doing a good job, by the way.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Thank you. At, at any point, I don't want somebody to think that mushrooms are better than another kingdom, or that mushrooms are like the ultimate superfood. No, they're just overlooked.

• 46:03Rich Roll?

  That doesn't get clicks. You know what I mean? It's like, in doing my research for today, it's like, I look at the headlines of the press that you get, and it's like, you know, mushroom coffee is the new kale. It's like, that's what gets people interested.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure. And, you know, there's a value to that. If you get, it's like a conversation opener. It's the same way as like I said, like often on a daily basis, somebody comes to me and is like, ha, ha, ha, are these psychedelic or are these magic mushrooms?

• 46:27Rich Roll?

  Never heard that joke.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so, I mean, if that gets the conversation going, let's roll with it. It's not, it's not a bad thing, you know? I'm sure you also don't want to be known as just this guy who does these ultra endurance feeds, but if that's a conversation starter to join you.

• 46:47Rich Roll?

  Right, like what gets people interested and what else you have to say.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, and like the whole, the lifestyle and just who are you as a father and as a family man and holistic and just spirituality and all that other stuff that you have to offer, that that might be the conversation starter is like, how many Iron Mans or you know, it's like, it's like, so the same with that is mushrooms is a kind of conversation starter. You know, I don't mind those headlines, but as long as you kind of very quickly move the conversation to what they actually are, is that they're a kingdom that is part of the planet. The planet doesn't survive without them. We probably will benefit using them for our health and wellness. Doesn't mean that all mushrooms are good and it doesn't

• 47:33Speaker 04

  mean that mushrooms are better than good bacteria or good plants. They're just part of holistic, smart lifestyle. They're just very overlooked. And there's like these immediate benefits and immediate clear things that you can get by just incorporating a little bit of them to your diet. So that's probably going to help you live a life that you more want to live, you know, healthier life, more fulfilled life.

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  Okay. Next up, I've got the amazing, super cool, ultra athlete humanitarian Samantha Gash. She is so awesome. At Samantha Gash on Twitter. Samantha is somebody who is amazing for, I don't know, I can't count how many reasons, but something I think is really cool about her is that she was somebody who had no athletic background, who then, in a very short period of time, became one of the most accomplished and inspirational female role models and ultra runners of our time. We had an amazing talk. We talked about self-belief, purpose, perseverance, the call to service, and the close kinship, the close

• 48:48Rich Roll?

  relationship that exists between passion and suffering. Here's a slice from episode 311 with Samantha Gash.

• 48:59Rich Roll?

  What is it about, like on a broader level, like what is it about that suffering or that experience of pushing through? You know, what is the allure and like, what does it mean to you? Like, what is it? What is it that you're connecting with and why does that give your life meaning?

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Do you know, um, I talk about this a bit in my like presentations, but do you know the Latin root of passion is to suffer?

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that, but I love that.

• 49:25Speaker 05

  And so often people go, I'm so passionate, I'm so passionate. And I'm like, oh, are you willing to suffer the most in your life for that thing that you're talking, that you're passionate about? I mean, it doesn't need to be the thing that you do for your full-time job. What we're passionate about can be fulfilled the most through the thing that we do outside of work because we have the time and space and maybe financial freedom from our full-time job. But I think when you are willing to suffer for something and you connect it for something that's for me outside of myself to a bit, that suffering doesn't seem so great anymore. I really do gain great perspective of it. I also choose when to suffer. Like, I don't suffer, like, it's why I don't always race anymore because I know what it's like and how hard it is and I want to make my footsteps count.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  And on the idea that maybe we don't have that many footsteps, what is the best use of my footsteps?

• 50:15Rich Roll?

  How do you think of the balance between mental and physical in terms of, you know, the strengths and requirements to tackle these types of events?

• 50:26Speaker 05

  Uh, I definitely think mental is a lot stronger. You know, I've seen people who are physically very capable and pull out of these races the second day. And the worst thing about these races is you have to, typically you have to stay with the race because you're in the middle of the Sahara Desert. So you actually have to watch people complete the race that you dreamed about doing. And time and time again, I would see people and I just would see their, like their head in their hands thinking, why did I pull out at that point? Like, could I? The thing is, there's so many things you can do before pull out. You can slow down, you can take on more nutrition, you can wait for someone to come and like bounce off their camaraderie. Um, you can sit down for a moment, but somehow all those alternatives become, like, we don't

• 51:11Speaker 05

  think of them when we're feeling in that crux of like discomfort and we're on the edge. We think our only solution is to completely take ourselves away from it.

• 51:23Speaker 05

  I can't actually remember what your question was, but.

• 51:25Rich Roll?

  Well, it has to do with the mental game.

• 51:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I think.

• 51:27Rich Roll?

  And, and, and the barriers that, that we erect, I think that prevent us from really connecting with our capabilities. Like, you know, David Goggins says all the time, like, he's got his forty percent rule, you know, his famous forty percent rule. Like, we're Kate, you know, when we think we're done, we've only tapped into about forty percent of what we're truly capable of.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 51:45Rich Roll?

  And you meet that, like, like, how do you, is that, do you agree with that? Is that, do you think of it differently?

• 51:50Speaker 05

  I don't have a formula for it, um, but for me, I.

• 51:54Rich Roll?

  Forty one or thirty nine percent.

• 51:56Speaker 05

  I'll be like, David, mine's forty three point five percent.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  Um, I, I definitely think mental plays a massive role in the creation of self-belief that you can do something like that. And then the self-belief then requires you to have the, the commitment to do the training. So I think it starts with the mental side, but then it also empowers the physicality as well. But I think you have to really believe in yourself, you have to believe it's possible. Um, and you have to believe in your ability to do the hard work behind it.

• 52:30Rich Roll?

  Have you had any of these kind of spiritual experiences that you hear about? Like Dean talks about, you know, sort of having his visions when he becomes delirious. And, you know, what is your, what is your kind of like ethereal connection to these endeavors?

• 52:46Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know if I, in the expeditions, you have a couple of them. Um, in India, I couldn't have been running in a more spiritual place. And, you know, I, I talked about spirituality a lot with my crew whilst I was out there because some of my crew were avid yogis and felt the departure of being able to practice yoga in a, in a studio meant that they were void of their spirituality. And I said, spirituality isn't something, in my opinion, spirituality isn't something that you get in a room. It's something that's with inside you that you can bring into other parts of your life. And spirituality for me is to experience or to be part of what the majority of the population truly live their life like. And the way the majority of Indians live.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  Daily survival, moment by moment, not thinking ahead, to try and like get into that frame mind, takes me to my closest place of spirituality without a doubt. And it's something that we're not used to in like, it's very hard to get to that. But these people live it by, not because of choice.

• 53:51Rich Roll?

  And what does that spirituality look like for you? Like, how do you, how do you articulate that?

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Uh, I think it's the, it's when I actually stop fretting about what's to come and dwelling on what's past.

• 54:03Rich Roll?

  Being in the moment, being in the now, right? I think that's how you, you get through these ultras ultimately, you know? The more you can anchor yourself in the present, that like fear of the future and reflection on how hard it's been, or whatever difficulties you've had evaporates and allows you to just propel forward.

• 54:23Speaker 05

  Hmm. But I, and as I think I said earlier on, but I don't, I, I'm very careful when I choose to take myself there. You know, I don't, I'm not someone that just wants to beat myself into like discomfort all the time to constantly see what I'm capable of. Like I, I do back myself now. I know that I'm capable of going there. Um, but I don't always need to go there. And I think that's something I've learned with maturity and getting a bit older.

• 54:49Rich Roll?

  So then what is your relationship with balance?

• 54:52Speaker 05

  The balance is that I have to really believe in why I'm doing it to take myself there. And that, you know, my relationship with, um,

• 55:03Speaker 05

  myself and my family and my partner and like my health, they, and the pursuit of pushing the boundaries need to sometimes be moderately aligned. And there'll be times when I push the boundaries of, out of the comfort zone a lot. So the last three years I've been doing that a lot with India. And now I need to kind of like go back into like,

• 55:27Rich Roll?

  Pendulum has to swing.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  It has to swing. It has to swing back so I can go back there and do it in the right way for the right reasons and with the right outcomes. So now I'm kind of like going back to that.

• 55:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you couldn't just launch right into the next thing.

• 55:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, which everyone goes, what's next? And I'm like, for the first time in my life, I felt comfortable going, like I, for a moment, I tried to kind of say a few things. Cause I've got ideas. Of course I have ideas, but I'm like, no, there's no what's next. I'm just, I'm going to do little, I'm doing little micro adventures. Um, I'm finishing my book, which comes out next year. Um, we're gonna make a document. We just got the funding for the Run India documentary.

• 56:01Rich Roll?

  Well, I know that you made these amazing, there are these amazing videos on Vimeo.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 56:05Rich Roll?

  You can find on your, on your website. I, I believe those are, those were the ones produced by World Vision, right?

• 56:10Speaker 05

  Those, those ones were produced by a guy called Steve Young, um, who was hired by World Vision, um, kind of at my request as the right person to come out on this expedition.

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  But they'll be a proper documentary.

• 56:21Speaker 05

  Proper documentary made by that guy who filmed that kind of content.

• 56:25Rich Roll?

  That's very cool.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  And that was something that was hanging over me. I'm like, we have so much incredible content in the can that shows these stories of these people that we met and what we went through. Um, it almost wouldn't be doing justice to the project to not be able to showcase that stuff.

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful. So do you, is there an anticipated sort of release date for that?

• 56:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, December. It'll be out by December, yeah. So hopefully we'll, um, can take it into a couple of the film festivals, um.

• 56:53Rich Roll?

  Is Jennifer then sort of taking a look at the footage?

• 56:56Speaker 05

  She, oh, she's my, I mean, Jennifer's one of my best friends now. You know, I, I came to her wedding, um, in Berkeley last year.

• 57:04Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 57:04Speaker 05

  Um, and I, I'm gonna go and visit her in San Francisco at the end of this trip. So she's definitely my soul sister and has looked over every content that I've ever kind of put out and she's a very good guiding, um, I suppose, figure for me on that stuff.

• 57:21Rich Roll?

  Well, we gotta land this plane, but, uh, I think the final thing, and I kind of want to explore with you is how you think about your role as a, um, you know, as this sort of inspirational figure or role model for female empowerment. You know, and this is a theme that kind of comes up from time to time on the podcast and I kind of, my mantra, the thing I always say is like, there are amazing women doing amazing things all over the place. We don't do a very good job of shining a spotlight on them. And, you know, in America, the spotlight is keenly on the Kardashians and, and kind of all kinds of, you know, figures that as a father of two young daughters, I would prefer my daughters don't model themselves after.

• 58:04Rich Roll?

  And so I'm always so happy, uh, to be able to share the message of somebody who I think is a healthy role model and inspiring figure who is really empowering, you know, women and young women in particular all over the world with your strength and your grace and, and your accomplishments. So how do you like, think about how you carry that?

• 58:25Speaker 05

  I struggle with the word inspiration. Um, I struggle with the word inspiration.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  When you get an email and somebody says, you're such an inspiration, how does that make you feel? Like, what is your emotional reaction to that?

• 58:35Speaker 05

  I used to cringe because I, maybe I, I think the place is, the people I'm inspired by are the ones that just do what they really believe in for the intention of doing the thing that they really believe in, like, wholeheartedly. And then it's my choice to feel inspired by them, not because they've said that they're inspiring, but because they're doing something they really believe.

• 58:56Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 58:56Speaker 05

  And so if someone chooses to say, oh, I'm really inspired by your talk or what you did, like, that's, that's them. Like, that's how they choose to feel and that's awesome. But I'm, I guess I don't go about my business and I don't run across India with the objective of being inspiring. It's, I'm doing this thing because I really believe it can make a tangible difference through a different type of way. And it's, I think it's soft, that run across India, I think, was a really great example of soft diplomacy, which I think can be really effective. Um, and if someone chooses to feel a certain way about it, I mean, yeah, of course.

• 59:30Rich Roll?

  But you're aware that that, you know, that this is, you know, that this sort of sense about yourself is being cultivated. I mean, you go and you give talks at corporations and, you know, probably at schools and all kinds of places, right? So when you're delivering that message, like, how are you, you know, what is, what is the core idea that you're trying to communicate?

• 59:49Speaker 05

  Well, my core thing is to just show that I am really a normal person in the sense that I'm relatable, that anyone could make the choices that I've chosen to make and go down this path. It just comes from choice. And if I can open up people's minds to how they can pursue their choices, well, that excites me, particularly when it comes into the way of positively impacting the lives of other people.

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  One of the most impressive people I have ever met, Scott Harrison, @scottharrison on Twitter, is the founder and CEO of Charity Water, which is this amazing nonprofit that is not only making a huge dent in solving the global water crisis, which is this massive problem, but is also this incredibly inspirational organization that has completely upended the whole charity sector altogether by redefining how we think about giving and ultimately how we give. I have become a proud supporter of Charity Water in the wake of this conversation, and I'm super grateful for all of your contributions over the past year. Together, we raised a whole bunch of money

• 1:01:00Rich Roll?

  that ultimately is going to provide access to clean water for thousands of people for the very first time, with this amazing ripple effect on generations to come. I'm excited to share this excerpt with you. And if this is your first introduction to Scott and to Charity Water, and you want to learn more, please go back and listen to the full episode. That's episode 305. And go to charitywater.org to learn more about the nonprofit and to give. So without further ado, please enjoy this snippet with Scott Harrison.

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  So let's talk about the water problem specifically. So a billion people, when you began this journey, lacking clean water. Most of that is Sub-Saharan Africa. Is that correct, right? And now that number's down to like...

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  660.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:49Speaker 06

  Yep, 663 million. So it's Sub-Saharan Africa. It's India, it's Southeast Asia, very little bit in Central and South America. Yeah, so the state of the crisis today, it's a 10th of the world. So one out of every 10 people alive today is drinking bad water today. Because of the circumstance that they were born in. And this is kind of a profound concept that we've wrestled with over the last decade now of Charity Water. And I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia. Water for me comes out of the tap. It's in bottles that we can afford. And in the places that we're working, women are often walking five, six hours a day to get dirty water from a swamp or a river,

• 1:02:33Speaker 06

  often risking their lives to do it. You know, I'll talk about the crisis. So if you don't have clean water, it makes you sick. Fifty-two percent of the disease is because of bad water and sanitation. It's incredibly harmful to kids under five. So about a thousand kids will die today and every day just of drinking bad water. And you actually die of dehydration. So unheard of here in the West.

• 1:02:57Rich Roll?

  Disentery and diarrhea.

• 1:02:59Speaker 06

  That's right, because the way that you cure diarrhea is with clean water. We've all seen the Pedialyte, right? The kind of blue stuff at the Walgreens. Well, you don't have that. So if your child gets diarrhea, you give them the same bad water and they actually get so dehydrated that they just die.

• 1:03:15Rich Roll?

  They're worse.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  So huge health implications, worms, parasites, leeches. People hard to see a trachoma, people go blind from water. Huge education implications. So at the time when we started, and I don't know the updated stat, but when we started Charity Water, 50% of the world's schools didn't have clean water or toilets. So I'm sure there are people listening that education is their number one cause. How can you imagine going to a school where there's no clean water or toilets and you've got to bring dirty river water with you?

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  And what was interesting was learning about how that has a disproportionate impact on young girls.

• 1:03:54Speaker 06

  On girls. And the toilets even more than the water, because the girls will hit puberty and will stay home, you know, those four or five days every month, fall behind in their studies, you know, missing a week a month. And culturally, there's already resistance against them because they're the workhorse. They're the ones getting the firewood, doing the cooking, getting the water.

• 1:04:13Rich Roll?

  Doing those eight-hour walks.

• 1:04:15Speaker 06

  Doing the eight-hour walks. And it really is, for someone listening, it's just such a disconnect. It's so hard for us to fathom, you know, 663 million anything, you know, an eight-hour walk. But that's what's happening. The women are getting up at four or five in the morning, they do the eight-hour walk, and then they come back for the second day of the work, cooking, cleaning, gardening, getting firewood.

• 1:04:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's really difficult to imagine that.

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  So that's the third one, really, is just time, just the amount of time wasted. There's health, there's education. Forty billion hours are wasted in Africa every year just collecting water. So you think of the potential there to turn that wasted time into productive time, whether it's family time, whether it's small business or entrepreneurial endeavors. We hear incredible stories when people get clean water. Probably the most, I've really seen a lot now over the years. I've been to 66 countries, I've been to Ethiopia 29 times since starting Charity Water. So a lot of my job is on the road, stuck in, I don't know, seat 62H on a 14-hour flight.

• 1:05:24Speaker 06

  But it's, the story probably that's, for me, best personifies the water crisis or the emergency that is facing people is a story from Ethiopia of a woman named Leta Kiro. And I'd heard this story, let's say, on my 24th or 25th trip to Ethiopia, staying in a crappy $5 a night hotel room with some donors. And the owner of the hotel recognized me, comes in the lobby, or this little restaurant that we were sitting in, and says, "Hey, you know, I'm from a really remote village. Before I came into this town to run this hotel, there was this woman in my village and she used to walk eight hours with the other women. But one day, she gets home and she slips and falls,

• 1:06:06Speaker 06

  and she spills her water and she breaks her clay pot. So her whole eight-hour walk is now undone." He's like, "She hung herself from a tree, and we found her body swinging there." And maybe he paused and he kind of watched the shock on her face and said, "The work you guys are doing is important." He walks back into the kitchen. I remember thinking, "Definitely not true. Tell the white international donor a sad story that makes them feel really good about the work." But I just, it just nagged and gnawed at me. And, you know, is it possible that someone had committed suicide because they slipped on a rock and spilled their water?

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  And I got a pass from my wife to go and explore this for myself and live in this village completely off the grid. I had to fly to Addis, fly up to the north, drive five hours and then rent a donkey and hike nine hours, a little solar backpack and a sleeping mat. And I found out it was true. I found 2,800 people living in this man's village called Maida. And they were walking eight hours to horrible sources. And, you know, I met her mom, I met her friend, I walked in her footsteps, I saw the tree where they'd found and cut her down. I saw the little pile of rocks behind the church where

• 1:07:29Speaker 06

  her grave was. And I didn't know this at the time, but when I got to the village, I learned that she was only 13 when she died. She was a little girl. This wasn't a woman who'd walked her whole life and said enough. This was a 13-year-old girl brimming with aspirations of wanting to get out of the village and wanting to be a doctor. And what was even more shocking was when I tried to figure out what the motivation was, her best friend said, well, she would have killed herself because of shame. You know, she had screwed up. She'd spilled the water that the family needed to cook dinner. She'd broken the clay pot, which is a $3 asset. So it would have just been too much for her to

• 1:08:09Speaker 06

  face her family because her carelessness would set them back. So, you know, you have an experience like that and you're pissed off. I mean, you're fired up. And I don't think there's anyone listening that thinks 13-year-old girls should be hanging themselves from trees because they spilled their water after an eight-hour walk. And, you know, the terrible irony is that in so many of these communities, the solutions are simple. They're living on top of massive amounts of clean water. You know, we're often able to drill 200 feet deep and get 10 liters per second of spring water. What the communities don't have access to is the $10,000 required to drill the well. They don't have access

• 1:08:53Speaker 06

  to a million-dollar drilling rig and compressors and trucks and hydrologists, which is what our community is able to provide. But the community will contribute stone and gravel and sweat equity. Many of them will build roads over periods of months just to get the drilling rig into their village. They just don't have the money for the capital expense.

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, $10,000 and the transformation for the entire community is undefinable. Like, I heard you tell a story about a woman who said she feels beautiful now, you know, because she always had to make that decision, where is this clay pot of water going to go? Is it going to go to, you know, my kids? Is it going to go to my husband to wash the clothes? And never, of course, never being enough to just sort of, you know, attend to her personal hygiene.

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's incredible. And we never even thought of that, that water could restore a woman's dignity. You know, we think of it typically in practical terms, but I was just in her village a few weeks ago, Helen Appio. And the women were all saying, "We look so smart now, looking so neat," because they had the water to, as you said, wash their clothes, wash their face, feel beautiful.

• 1:10:09Rich Roll?

  Next up is the super impressive Gretchen Rubin, @GretchenRubin on Twitter. Gretchen is many things, former Supreme Court clerk turned Uber author. She is a member of Oprah's Super Soul 100. She was also named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company. She has sold over 3 million books on the subject of habits, happiness, and human nature. You might be familiar with her from her wildly popular blog, her runaway bestseller, The Happiness Project, or her new book, The Four Tendencies, which is the subject of this conversation, kind of the focus of this conversation, or of course, her podcast,

• 1:10:47Rich Roll?

  Happier, Gretchen Rubin. Here's a taste from episode 317 of the Ritual Podcast with Gretchen Rubin.

• 1:10:57Speaker 07

  So the four tendencies are whether you're an upholder, a questioner, obliger, or rebel. So you and I are both upholders. So, and this has to do with how you respond to expectations. And all of us face two kinds of expectations. So there's outer expectations, like meeting a work deadline, meeting a request from a friend. And then there's inner expectations. So your own desire to keep a New Year's resolution, your own desire to start lifting weights again.

• 1:11:23Speaker 07

  So upholders readily meet outer and inner expectations. They meet the work deadline, they keep the New Year's resolution without much fuss. They want to know what other people expect from them and meet those expectations, but their expectations for themselves are just as important. Then questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They'll do something if they think it makes sense. So they make everything an inner expectation. If it meets their inner standard, yeah, this makes sense, then they will do it, no problem. If it fails their inner standard, they will reject it. They tend to hate anything arbitrary, inefficient, unjustified. So they always want to know why they should do something. Then there are obligers. Obligers readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. And I got my insight into this when a friend of mine said, "I don't understand it.

• 1:12:07Speaker 07

  I really want to go running, and when I was in high school, I was on the track team, and I never missed track practice. So why can't I go running now?" Well, when she had a team and a coach waiting for her, she had no trouble showing up. But when she was just trying to go on her own, she struggled. And then finally rebels. Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do in their own way, in their own time. If you ask or tell them to do something, they are very likely to resist, and typically, they don't even like to tell themselves what to do. Like, they wouldn't sign up for a 10:00 AM yoga class because they're like, "I don't know what I'm going to want to do at 10:00 AM." So those are the four tendencies. Now, you and I are upholders, and that's pretty unusual because the biggest tendency for both men and women, the one the biggest number of people belong to Obligers. is obliger. Obligers, yeah.

• 1:12:52Speaker 07

  That's big. Second of them is questioner, also very big. Rebel is the smallest tendency. It's the longest chapter in the book, but it's the smallest tendency. It's the one the fewest people belong to. But our tendency, upholder tendency, is only slightly larger. Those are the two kind of extreme polar tendencies, and they're pretty small. Not that many people are rebels or upholders. Right.

• 1:13:14Rich Roll?

  So before we get into the particulars of these four different personality types and the pros and the cons and kind of what we're supposed to do with this information.

• 1:13:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  How did you arrive at this? Like, how did it dawn upon you? Is this the result of just a continuing pursuit into the depths of what make people tick? Did you have like an epiphany? Did it come to you slowly?

• 1:13:37Speaker 07

  Well, both. I started picking up these patterns. So my friend said that thing about the track team and that really got me thinking like, well, what's going on? Because it's the same person, it's the same behavior. Like, why was it at one time effortless and now she can't do it?

• 1:13:49Rich Roll?

  And let me just interrupt you to ask you this.

• 1:13:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Rich Roll?

  When you hear that, as an upholder, what is your reaction when somebody tells you that?

• 1:13:56Speaker 07

  Well, see, that's what's interesting. And that's why I think it was an advantage to me to be an upholder in figuring out this framework. Because to me, I was like, I don't understand that.

• 1:14:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Speaker 07

  That didn't make, like, I'm like, huh.

• 1:14:06Rich Roll?

  Just get on with it.

• 1:14:07Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's like, I'm like, that's interesting because I don't experience that. And also, people were saying other things that I was like, I don't experience that. So like, when I would talk to people about New Year's resolutions, because I wrote this book, Better Than Before, that's all about habit change. So I was talking to people about, I would also often ask people about New Year's resolutions as a way to get into their habits. And a certain number of people would give exactly the same answer. They would say, I would keep a resolution whenever it made sense to me, but I wouldn't do it on January 1st because January 1st is an arbitrary date. And that really struck me because I was like, well, the arbitrariness of January 1st never bothered me. Then there were people who would say, like, things like, well, why is it that busy parents like us can't take time for ourselves? And I would think, well, I'm a busy parent, but I don't have any trouble taking time for myself. And

• 1:14:51Speaker 07

  then there were some people who just, like, when I talked about habits, like, to me, the idea of habits is energizing and freeing. I love the idea of a life full of habits. But some people were repelled by the idea of habits. Like, you could tell that the whole idea of trying to form habits was repugnant to them. And I was like, it's so weird. They see the world so differently from me. So it's trying, all these things are sort of running through my head simultaneously. I had no idea how they fit together or if they were part of a pattern. And then one day, I was just glancing down at my to-do list, which was like, you know, all messy, half things crossed off. Half things that I still needed to do. And all of a sudden, this idea jumped out at me, expectations. And I realized that was at the core of all of these things.

• 1:15:32Speaker 07

  And once I saw, once I focused on expectations, and I saw that it was outer expectations and inner expectations, then everything started sliding into place. All of these patterns began to fit together and make sense. And so, it was like, I was pondering, pondering, pondering, kind of wandering around my head for months, and then suddenly, it just clicked when I thought of the word "expectation."

• 1:15:55Rich Roll?

  And there can only be four, right? Because there's only four permutations of expectations that are either motivated, stimulated internally or externally.

• 1:16:04Speaker 07

  Yes. It's sort of like, inner, inner, outer, outer, inner, outer, outer, inner. Those are the four. There can only be four, because those are the four combinations.

• 1:16:10Rich Roll?

  Did you wake up in the middle of the night and jump up and down? Or how did...

• 1:16:13Speaker 07

  Well, you know, I was sitting there, and, and I, and part of it too, was at first, I was trying to make it into a two by two. And I couldn't get it to work out two by two. Because it's like, how do they fit together that way? When I realized it was a Venn diagram of the overlapping circles, that showed me how they all fit together. Because like, they, they, they touch each other. So you and I are both upholders. Well, upholders are like questioners, in that we both resist, that we both meet inner expectations, but upholders are also like obligers, in that we also meet outer expectations. So it showed me the relationship of the four, how, how they really intersect with each other. So that was another big breakthrough, is when I realized it was a Venn diagram and a diamond shape of circles. It was like, the visual.

• 1:16:57Rich Roll?

  And then you, you constructed this test, this quiz?

• 1:17:01Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:17:01Rich Roll?

  And how many people have taken this now?

• 1:17:03Speaker 07

  I mean, I'm coming up on a million people.

• 1:17:04Rich Roll?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:17:05Speaker 07

  Soon, yeah. Happiercast.com/quiz, if you want to take the quiz.

• 1:17:10Rich Roll?

  Everybody should take it, if you're, if you're not sure where you fall on this. And so you have this massive data set.

• 1:17:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:17:15Rich Roll?

  And I'm interested in, in, you know, as you kind of dig into that... Are most people some combination of the two? Or are there people that are just purely, you know, in one camp? Like, how does that look in breakdown?

• 1:17:30Speaker 07

  Well, from my observation, people, almost everybody really is within one core tendency. But like you say, you can kind of tip because you could be, like, say, my husband's a questioner. He's a questioner. Now, some questioners kind of tip to upholders because upholders and questioners both meet inner expectations. But some questioners tip toward rebel because like rebels, they both resist outer expectations. And so it depends, so you're, the flavor of your questionerness can take, can change depending on whether you tipped one way or the other. So it's not that you're a mix, but you sort of are leaning in one direction. You're tipping towards a, an adjacent tendency. But I really do think that people fit within a core tendency.

• 1:18:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. And let's, let's talk a little bit about the pros and cons of each of these. I mean, to me, like, if I take rebel, or let's take questioner. It's kind of easy to discern the pros. I mean, to me, tell me if I'm wrong, but a questioner who's going to ask a lot of questions, that's good because they're, they want to make sure they're making the right decision. And they're going to, that's going to be based on logic and what's best for them. But questioners, I would imagine, can also end up in some form of paralysis as a result of not being able, they can just keep asking questions.

• 1:18:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, analysis paralysis.

• 1:18:49Rich Roll?

  Allow that, you know, questions can be fear, right?

• 1:18:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Rich Roll?

  They're just afraid to move forward. As long as they keep asking questions, they have an excuse to not actually do anything.

• 1:18:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, you see this in something like exercise where it's like, well, I have, like, I don't know what the most efficient, the very best thing, so I'm going to do this exercise.

• 1:19:05Rich Roll?

  What shoe should I get?

• 1:19:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, no.

• 1:19:07Rich Roll?

  I feel these questions all the time. Which watch? What's the heart? You know, and it's like, and they're, and they're going to research that forever and days are going by where they could just go outside and at least go for a walk.

• 1:19:15Speaker 07

  So if you're a questioner who's dealing with this, or you're around a questioner, one of the things you can do is you can remind them, at a certain point, it's not efficient. Because efficiency is such a deep core value for questioners, remind them, at some point, it's better to just start exercising than to find the mythical perfect form of exercise, or it's better to just get a shoe, you don't need to get the perfect shoe. You can also do things like set deadlines, like I'm going to decide by Friday, like best guess by Friday, or I'm going to go to these three stores where the people, I'm going to look at these choices, I'm not going to go every single place in the city. Or you could go to a trusted authority, you could say, okay, this person I know really

• 1:19:57Speaker 07

  thinks things through, does their research, if something is good enough for this person, it's probably going to be good enough for me. I'm not going to just slavishly do what they say, but I'm going to be very guided by their judgment. I don't have to research this from the ground up, I can take what they say and think about whether that's good enough for me. So there's ways to intervene in this analysis process, once questioners realize that they're experiencing it. Because sometimes they don't realize that they've fallen into this black hole of why, why, why, why, why.

• 1:20:25Rich Roll?

  But getting somebody like that to respond to a boundary requires them to be responsive to external motivators, right?

• 1:20:36Speaker 07

  Well, what they're really responding to is their own inner sense of efficiency. Like at a certain point, you're just like, you know, you haven't exercised in a year. You've been researching it for a long time, you know you really need to start exercising. So, why don't you say that by the end of the week, you're going to pick a shoe, you're going to pick a class, you're going to pick a mechanism. And also what you can remind, questioners tend to love to customize, and they love to experiment on themselves. So you could say, well, this is the way people typically do it, but if you want to tweak it, tweak it the way you want. Or, why don't you try it as an experiment, and then you're going to learn something about yourself. Okay, try this form of training, if it doesn't work, then you can move on to something else, but you'll have learned something about yourself. These are the kinds of things that appeal to questioners, and so they can get them

• 1:21:20Speaker 07

  moving past that starting point if they're getting stalled out.

• 1:21:23Rich Roll?

  Interesting. Did you do any... Probing into kind of the emotional underpinnings that create these archetypes, like the psychology behind it, like is it nurture, is it nature?

• 1:21:34Speaker 07

  I think it's nature.

• 1:21:35Rich Roll?

  Can these things be changed, like they're just set in stone?

• 1:21:38Speaker 07

  I think that they're genetically hardwired. I think we bring them into the world with us. I don't think they're a function of upbringing, or culture, or birth order, or anything like that. Now, the question about whether you can change, I think what you can do is with time and experience and wisdom, you can learn how to harness the strengths of your tendency, and then offset the weaknesses and limitations. Because all of these tendencies have strengths and weaknesses, and they're the same. It's like the strength is the weakness. So you can figure out ways to kind of hack yourself, so that you don't, you're not hobbled by the weaknesses of your tendency. I think it's very, is it possible to change your inner nature? I mean, people dispute that. I think if it is even possible, it's extremely difficult. But it's very easy to change your circumstances.

• 1:22:22Speaker 07

  So I'm like, don't worry about like trying to change your inner nature, and trying to change your fundamental tendency. If that's even possible, it would be extremely difficult and take a long time. Take the simple, easy way, and just figure out a way to deal with it. Like if you're a questioner and you're stalling out, don't try to turn yourself into a different tendency. Just say like, hey, man, decide by Friday. Or, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna just, you know, here, my brother-in-law is like been doing this for years, I'm just gonna do whatever my brother-in-law does, and take it from there. Like, I'll start, I'll try it that way, if it doesn't work, then I'll, then I'll, then I'll have learned something, but I just need to get myself going. You know, rather than trying to fundamentally change your, you know, relationship to the world.

• 1:23:00Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I think that's, I think that's right, and, you know, as I was, you know, kind of absorbing these ideas, it made me reflect back on my own path. Like I've undergone a tremendous amount of change professionally, emotionally, like a lot of change in my life over the last 10, 20 years. But I didn't change my core fundamental nature.

• 1:23:18Speaker 07

  Right, right.

• 1:23:19Rich Roll?

  But I think what I was doing... And I think this might be something that's common to a lot of people is I was structuring my life in accordance with a tendency that was not my core.

• 1:23:32Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:32Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:23:33Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:23:33Rich Roll?

  I put myself in a situation that didn't allow me

• 1:23:36Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:23:37Rich Roll?

  to fully embody and express the positive aspects of that core nature and that tendency.

• 1:23:43Speaker 07

  But see, this is the most important thing. Like, you put your finger right on a key thing, which is, we all have to construct the life that's right for us. There is no one best way. There's no magic one-size-fits-all solution, because like, what works for you isn't going to be what works for me, because you and I are different. And so, we always have to begin, if we want to be happier, healthier, more productive, more creative, it's like, okay, well, what kind of person are you? Where do you thrive? What works for you? And not to try to jam ourselves into somebody else's conception of what we should be able to do, or what is the best thing to do. It's like, it doesn't matter what works for somebody else, or what you should be able to do. It's like, it only matters what works for you. And sometimes it makes me sad, because people will say, "Well, I don't like being my tendency."

• 1:24:26Speaker 07

  And I'm like, "All these tendencies have huge numbers of people in them. There's nothing wrong with you. You don't lack self-control or willpower. You don't need to change who you are. You just need to set things up in a different way, and then you'll get to be able to go wherever you want to go." It's like, you don't, you don't need to change yourself. You don't have to feel bad about yourself, you just have to figure out how to work with yourself.

• 1:24:48Rich Roll?

  All right, how you guys doing? Are you settled in? Are you engaged? I think we're about halfway through at this point. Are you feeling good? Good, because the next clip is super amazing. It's with my friend Colin Hudon, @colinhudon on Instagram. Colin is this amazing healer. He is a physician of traditional Chinese medicine and Dao arts. He's also an herbalist, an acupuncturist, a tea master, and the founder of Living Tea, livingtea.net, which is this enterprise whereby he travels to all these amazing places all over Asia and imports the best, most exotic living teas to make them available to all of you.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  This clip is really powerful, and it's excerpted from Colin's presentation on "Living in Alignment with Nature" that he delivered during our Plant Power Ireland Retreat this past summer. I think you're going to want to listen to the entire presentation if you missed it the first time around, or you're new. To do that, it's episode 319, go back and listen to it. In the meantime, please enjoy this clip with Colin Hudon.

• 1:25:56Speaker 08

  The beginning of Chinese medicine came from these emperors or aristocrats or different people in China, trying to figure out how to live forever, how to have greater virility and strength, or power in the bedroom, or wisdom, or insight, or knowledge. And the basis out of which all the practices came, Tai Chi, Qigong, meditation, herbs, different foods, they were attempting to, they were attempting to find a way to optimize health. So it was really a study of health. And with Western medicine, it's really a study of both the functioning of the body,

• 1:26:41Speaker 08

  but also of disease. And so in all my Western medicine classes, it was, the emphasis was on pathology of the body and how to treat the disease. But it wasn't on how to optimize health. So we have some doctors in the room and some physicians, and that's an ongoing dialogue that'd be an interesting one to talk about. But I ultimately came across a guy named Sun Si Miao. Like, you know you're a real geek when your hero is, you know, somebody who lived in the 600 or the 800s, and was an old Chinese guy who broke the mold by living to 104 at a time when people died at like, you know, 30 years old.

• 1:27:26Speaker 08

  But he developed a philosophy that he calls Yang Sheng, which means nourishing life. And his belief and his ideas were about, how do you really nourish health? How do you optimize health? How do you find out what would be customized and optimized for an individual to be really robust and healthy, and to extend their years, extend their life? And so those ideas are kind of the basis of Chinese medicine.

• 1:27:58Speaker 08

  So I'm hesitant to go too deep into Chinese medicine right now because I think I'll start to lose people, except for those who are really excited about it. But the basic idea is that we have this concept of yin and yang, which everybody here, you know, we have the sun and the moon, and male and female, and day and night, and on and on and on. And that they're in a constantly cycling process of transformation and change. That movement is constant, and life is movement. It's constantly in a state of change. And that it works in cycles. You know, we observe what we call the five seasons in Chinese medicine.

• 1:28:36Speaker 08

  The cycles of life from early age to, you know, puberty, to early adulthood, etc. And the cycles throughout a day. And these ideas that different organs in the body are controlled by different elements. So, for example, the wood element corresponds to the liver and gallbladder, the fire element to the heart and small intestine, etc. And so Chinese medicine is based on balancing these five elements. And it's also about looking at what are called the eight principles. And I'll describe that really briefly because it's actually got a practical application that you can think about in terms of your life. So we look at, when we look at a disease in a person, we look at, is it internal, and

• 1:29:19Speaker 08

  how deep in the body, or is it external, out towards the surface? We look at cold and heat, which you could think of as like inflammation, or as a lack of circulation. Is a cold condition in the body, or is it something, it's an inflammatory, more heat condition? We look at deficiency and excess. So we look at, is there a deficiency of an organ, or an organ system? Or is there something excessive happening, you know? A simplified example would be like hypothyroidism versus hyperthyroid.

• 1:29:55Speaker 08

  And then based on those, we determine if a condition is a yin condition or a yang condition. So we look at that, and then we look at conditions like atmospheric, like wind, dryness, fire, cold, heat, dampness, which is like phlegm in the body. And we look at this relationship between nature out there, the macrocosm, and nature inside, which is the microcosm, and we look to harmonize those, so that a person's in balance. So a big part of that is living in balance with nature. It means eating foods that are truly seasonal, foods that are grown in the region where you are, taking herbs to help support and balance the body.

• 1:30:39Speaker 08

  In the summertime, we have more daylight. It's a very active, yang fiery time, so it's a time of far more activity. Whereas in the middle of the winter, it's a time for sleep, introspection, and quietude. And so it's also living in accordance with these cycles of nature. And that by doing that over time, you become harmonized between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and that constitutes real health, real true health. That also means that you're living in accordance with what I'd say are natural laws. And we, at this point in history, are so far profoundly, so far away from living in

• 1:31:21Speaker 08

  those natural laws, because we have artificial light, we're very yang in the West, so it's like more, work more, longer, all the time, non-stop. It's a very fiery, yang culture. And in a lot of ways, it's out of balance. And if you look at what's going on in the world right now, and a lot of the dysfunction of the world, I think it's because of this, these imbalances on a collective level.

• 1:31:45Speaker 08

  So where I'd like to end and then open it up to some questions is,

• 1:31:52Speaker 08

  I'm working on a book which are, it's based on what I call the 12 vitalities, or the 12 healths. And they're aspects of what I think it means to really live in health, in a healthy way. But you can strip it down to five, so I'll leave you with five for today.

• 1:32:11Speaker 08

  The first is sleep, the second diet, the third movement, the fourth meditation, and the fifth tea.

• 1:32:19Speaker 08

  So I'm just gonna say a little bit about each of those.

• 1:32:24Speaker 08

  There's actually a great book on sleep by Arianna Huffington that was just published recently, it's fantastic.

• 1:32:31Speaker 08

  My basic idea towards sleep is that different people have different needs, and that we should sleep in accordance with the season. In the summer, you can stay up later and rise earlier. In the winter, I think it's really important to actually get more sleep. If you go back and you look at a lot of the older Chinese, the writers in Chinese medicine, their ideal is to go to sleep with the sun and wake up with the sun. I think the likelihood of most of us in here going to bed at 6pm in the middle of winter is probably not very high.

• 1:33:04Speaker 08

  But I do know that there have been times in my life where I really try to live closer to that, and you feel absolutely extraordinary.

• 1:33:12Speaker 08

  Like we were saying the other night, when we were adjusting to jet lag and we got like 12, 13 hours of sleep one night, you just feel like a superhuman the next day, you know? You feel like you could probably fly if you focused on it or something. So I think sleep is so fundamental. In people who are having a lot of insomnia, it's indicative of something going on, either psycho-emotional or physiological in the body. Chinese medicine, both through needles and herbs, can be incredibly effective with insomnia. And then there are occasionally anomalies where there's something else going on, like sleep apnea or what have you.

• 1:33:48Speaker 08

  The other thing I want to say about sleep is, it's incredibly important to be in a really calm space as you fall asleep. A really calm and positive and peaceful state. Oftentimes, we're like flipping through Instagram and then we're like, "Okay, time to go to bed."

• 1:34:02Speaker 08

  And so you're bringing in like way more stimulation than anybody in human history has ever taken in, and all of those are impressions. All those impressions are going in, you know, our subconscious takes in forty million bits of information a second, whereas the conscious mind only takes in like ten or twelve or something like that. So you're taking all this information, like stuffing it into the subconscious and then going to sleep. And that's affecting your dream state, and who knows what other, in other ways, it's affecting you. So, there's also, the Tao, the Taoists have explored dreaming a lot, and lucid dreaming. I've met some people who say that there's no difference between when they go to bed at night and when they're awake in the morning.

• 1:34:45Speaker 08

  In other words, they have twenty-four hours, and they say at night, because they're not bound to the physical body, they're doing tai chi up in the clouds and who knows what other practices. And all of the people I've talked to about those kind of practices say there's something fundamental. Tibetan Buddhism, they have a practice called dogen, or jogen, which is same thing, dream, it's dream practice, they say. All of them agree on one thing, which is that you have to get yourself into an incredibly deep meditative state before you fall asleep. Consciously. So not accidentally, I'm really tired and I fall asleep, but to do some form of meditation to quiet the mind before you go to bed.

• 1:35:26Speaker 08

  And to set the intention, I want to wake up tonight, or I want to remember my dreams. One way to do that also is when you wake up, immediately write down your dreams, and over time it will start to create an effect that you remember them more easily. We're not going to go into dream psychoanalysis right now, but there's a lot to be said there too. So, that's it on sleep, there's a lot you can say about it, but I'd recommend that book by Arianna Huffington.

• 1:35:57Speaker 08

  Okay. Okay, so there you go. Just listen to Rich's podcast if you haven't already.

• 1:36:04Speaker 08

  So, the second one is diet. And, I mean, I eat a vegan, plant-based, whole foods, organic diet. I make most of my own food. So, obviously, I'm a believer that you can have a very healthy vegan diet. But I do think that people sometimes have to customize. I think sometimes they need to supplement with Chinese herbs.

• 1:36:26Speaker 08

  And/or to take sometimes some supplementation like B12 and iron and things. And getting enough fats. But what I would say is to focus on organic and to eat seasonally. The earth produces the food that we need in the region we are to keep us in balance with nature and that environment and that climate. There's a reason that root vegetables grow in the middle of the wintertime, right? That apples grow in the fall, or they're ripe. Nature is very intelligent and communicative. And, you know, just because we can't eat mangoes in the middle of winter from Brazil or wherever, doesn't mean we should live in a diet of mangoes.

• 1:37:15Rich Roll?

  A true Renaissance man, and honestly, one of my favorite people on planet Earth, Dan Buettner, @bluezones on Twitter, is a National Geographic Fellow. He's a world adventurer. He is a longevity expert. And he is the New York Times bestselling author behind a couple of books you've probably heard of. The first of which is The Blue Zones, which evaluated the hows and whys behind the world's longest living cultures. And his new book, The Blue Zones of Happiness, which applies the same or a similar scientific methodology to determining the factors that contribute to the world's happiest cultures. So, this conversation was all about the extent to which your environment and lifestyle

• 1:37:58Rich Roll?

  choices impact your happiness, what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favor of happiness, and also the impact of Dan's work on improving health and happiness in cities across the United States. Like I said, I love this man. I love this conversation. So, please enjoy this brief excerpt from RRP 323 with Dan Buettner.

• 1:38:24Speaker 09

  You know, you find these kind of silly articles about the 100-year-old who ate three eggs a day and smoked cigars and drank liquor and had a six-year-old girlfriend.

• 1:38:36Rich Roll?

  Everybody loves those stories.

• 1:38:37Speaker 09

  Yeah, but they're hugely misleading because a centenarian no more knows how he or she got to live to 100 than a tall man knows how he got to be tall. The right way to do it is you have to find a population that has achieved either highest centenarian rate, highest life expectancy, or lowest rate of middle-aged mortality. Once you identify the population, then you can find out what this whole group of people do. Because they're, you know, about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes. The other 80% is lifestyle and environment. So if you find a centenarian, it might just be because he or she won the genetic lottery

• 1:39:21Speaker 09

  and they can abuse their body for 100 years and still make it to 105, but that doesn't mean they have any useful lessons for us. If you want useful lessons, you have to find whole verified population reverse engineer. And the big aha, Rich, the big epiphany after almost a decade was places where people are making it to 100 and still water skiing or standing on their head or doing karate, it's not because they tried. It's not because at age 50, they got on a special diet or started taking a supplement or started running marathons. In all cases, longevity happened to these people.

• 1:40:04Speaker 09

  It was a residue of the right environment, an environment that nudges them into doing the right things all day long. And with that insight, we went about creating a program that would help entire American cities live longer, not by trying to convince...

• 1:40:25Speaker 09

  800,000 people to change their habits and eat their veggies and get their exercise, but rather by shaping their environment so they're mindlessly and relentlessly nudged into doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  Right, so healthy lifestyle is a byproduct of the environment, not a byproduct of conscious decision-making. It's an extrapolation of what's available to you at arm's length. It's the convenient choice as opposed to the more difficult or more expensive choice.

• 1:41:00Speaker 09

  That's right. So you have Herculean discipline. I mean, these ultra-marathons that you do that inspire so many people, they are for sure a positive force, but most people, if you look at the research, who start off and start running marathons, they're no longer running marathons in two years. People who start off on a diet, no matter how much resolve they have on day one, 90% of them are off by the seventh month.

• 1:41:30Rich Roll?

  And what do you, before we move off this point, like what do you make of that? Like what do you extract from that simple fact that people have trouble sort of staying on point?

• 1:41:39Speaker 09

  Our minds are hardwired for novelty, so we crave new things. Our attention can last only so long. Discipline is a muscle, and muscle's fatigue, and eventually you kind of revert to the mean of what you're doing, or the baseline of what you're doing. So if you want that baseline, if you want people to perform better, eat better, move better, socialize better, have more purpose, you need to raise the baseline. You need to optimize the environment, which is exactly what we set out to do.

• 1:42:11Rich Roll?

  And so when you go into these cities, or you go to Hawaii, what are the talking points? Like how do you shift that paradigm?

• 1:42:19Speaker 09

  First of all, the cities have to want us. So instead of a riot, we don't have a sales force. Cities come to us all the time and we say, if you like, if you're sick of seeing 70% of your population overweight and unhealthy, we have a solution, but you have to prove to us, A, you're ready for it, sort of politically. B, you have to show us your leadership works well together. And C, we have to collectively figure out a way to pay for it. Because the only way you make these changes is if I can get a full-time staff in there from three to five years.

• 1:42:53Rich Roll?

  I would imagine it requires the political will to invest in the long term, right? Because it's not about the next election cycle with whoever is mayor or governor or what have you. Like, they have to think, what is in the best interest of our electorate, of our population? And it's a solution that's not going to manifest itself overnight or in the next two years, perhaps even. It's going to require, you know, probably a large investment of capital and a long-term vision to, you know, raise that mean for everybody so that eventually everybody prospers. But it's not like the, it's not like a clickbaity kind of, you know, immediate solution to what ails a particular urban environment.

• 1:43:38Speaker 09

  It's focusing on permanent or semi-permanent changes to the environment. And it also requires the political will. You know, America, we have this obsession with freedom. And in order to be successful, we have to come into a city where they're prepared to limit our freedoms to do unhealthy shit. That's the kind of the bottom line. I wouldn't put it that way to them. But at the end of the day, we're trying to limit their access to junk food. We're trying to limit their access to always getting in cars. We're trying to limit the occasion where they're going to implode into their devices.

• 1:44:18Speaker 09

  So in every city, I have three teams, three squads, full-time. One squad just works with city council to adopt food policy that favor fruits and vegetables over junk food. That works with the built environment city planner to design their cities for humans, not just cars. You can raise the physical activity level of the whole city by 30% by just making.

• 1:44:48Speaker 09

  Parks accessible, providing bike lanes, providing bus, public transportation, provide means to walk places to limit sprawl. And then lastly, we have an alcohol policy bundle, which brings in the evidence-based best practices to limit access to alcohol. Not cut it off altogether. The second squad goes to every restaurant, grocery store, workplace, and school with a Blue Zone certification program, which makes those environments 20% healthier. And we recognize them and drive traffic to them. And the third squad works with individuals to help individuals optimize their home.

• 1:45:30Speaker 09

  So their kitchens aren't as accessible to junk food, to optimize their social networks. So they're making three or four new friends who are plant-based eaters and who recreate with physical activity. And then to know their sense of purpose and put it to work by volunteering. So when you, when you bring all three of those together, you create the perfect storm with enough intensity, three to five years, in every single city, we see obesity dropping down and happiness going up.

• 1:46:00Rich Roll?

  Former American College of Cardiology president, Kim Williams, M.D. @cardiotennis on Twitter, 10S, cardio10S, as in cardio tennis, get it, he's a tennis player, is one of the most inspiring, intelligent, and pioneering leaders in the growing movement to modernize how we think about, treat, avoid, and prevent our most onerous threat to human health, which is heart disease. And the impact of things like nutrition and lifestyle have on heart diseases onset, prevention, and ultimately, its reversal. This is an incredible conversation with a highly intelligent man. It's powerful, it's potent, I think it's important. So if you're new to the show, I encourage all of you to go back and listen to the full

• 1:46:44Rich Roll?

  discourse, that's episode 325. In the meantime, in the interim, please enjoy this slice with Dr. Kim Williams.

• 1:46:54Rich Roll?

  I think you said, there was, I saw a quote from you, like, "My job is to put cardiologists out of business."

• 1:46:59Speaker 10

  That's exactly right. And, you know, it would take a while. And I have to say that it's timely. It would be great if other organizations were focused on these things as much as we do because, and, you know, inside and outside of medicine, because last year was the first time in 40 years that cardiovascular disease deaths in the country went up. And that is just something that we just can't abide by. And, you know, they've, we're always bragging about this decreasing curve. It's about 50% over 40 years in cardiovascular mortality. And it's bypass surgery and statins and beta blockers and ACE inhibitors, all these medications for heart failure and decreasing sudden death, because we put in defibrillators that shock people when they, when they have a fatal arrhythmia and they come back to life.

• 1:47:44Speaker 10

  And we were so proud of all this stuff. And then the American population somehow has overcome.

• 1:47:50Rich Roll?

  You can end run around this, no matter what you do.

• 1:47:54Speaker 10

  Exactly. And when the CDC put those numbers out there, they said it was obesity and diabetes that's driving it. And that's nutrition. And so it all, the fundamental issue that we've been dealing with for the last so many years is really at the core of all we do. And it will uproot and undo any success that we can do with devices and medications.

• 1:48:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's got to be a shift in priorities and focus, because it is amazing to reduce by 50% the mortality rate of people who are suffering from heart disease as a result of all this amazing science and technology. But if that comes at the cost of really addressing the fact that the incidence of people who are, you know, becoming patients in the first place, then you're waging a losing war.

• 1:48:44Speaker 10

  Yep. Ultimately, yeah, everyone's going to get older and they're going to pass away at some point. Wouldn't it be nice if we were as healthy as possible until that happened and not have these chronic diseases that are completely avoidable by lifestyle? We would like to have more comparative data, but we have some. And it does say that, that principle that you can't Exercise your way out of a bad diet. There's some truth to that. I mean, you can mitigate a bad diet, but you can't, you're gonna have a bad outcome ultimately. It's not gonna absolve you. And so I would say that nutrition is the most important decision that we can make.

• 1:49:24Speaker 10

  If we could change one thing, it would be to have heart healthy information coming out and have that be a real definition. And so for the individual patient, finding out where they are and seeing what are the elements that are going to create more and more diseases, similar to what brought them to my office in the first place. And I understand that this is not primary care, this is not family practice, and that, you know, these are people who already have heart disease when they're seeing me. And so I have a little easier job because they're already motivated. The fact that they're in my office means that they're motivated to try to make some kind of change. They're expecting to come out of there with something different that's gonna change their outcome.

• 1:50:06Speaker 10

  Not every physician has that advantage, but it's something that we all should take advantage of because, you know, almost everyone has had a, you know, a family member who suffers from heart disease, or has had heart disease, or has sudden cardiac death. And so just trying to get them to understand that there is a relationship between your lifestyle and your outcome. Just make that connection. If we could do that, we would all be so much better off.

• 1:50:32Rich Roll?

  Right. It's a great answer. And the final one. If you were to wake up in some strange, parallel universe to find yourself the new surgeon general, what's the first thing that you put in motion?

• 1:50:48Speaker 10

  That's a good one. You know, previous surgeon general was a good friend of mine, Regina Benjamin. She was very concerned about, she's African American, as you might recall, and she was very concerned about delivery of healthcare and getting health equity. I would really wanna continue the momentum that she had started in terms of getting people to understand the whole impact of healthcare disparities. We actually, and it's interesting that, you know, that it's racial segregation and educational depression and all sorts of things that led to these healthcare disparities, not just genes, okay? All of this can actually be improved by lifestyle.

• 1:51:34Speaker 10

  And if we could get that word out there, there was a wonderful analysis of this published in circulation in 2015 called the Regards Trial. If you look on their website and try to find the paper, it's buried in like 200 publications that they did. They're so, so good at getting stuff out there. But the Regards Study was looking at racial and ethnic risk for stroke. And what they found is not just stroke, it's stroke, heart attack, and death. And it is related to diet and that southern diet that the African American, you know, southern meaning the south side of Chicago as far as I'm concerned because that's what we were eating there. That diet is so damaging that if you could

• 1:52:17Speaker 10

  just fix the nutrition, the gap in healthcare disparities would change almost on a dime.

• 1:52:27Rich Roll?

  So there's this documentary, it's called Icarus. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past year, 2017. It was just shortlisted for this year's Oscars, the Academy Awards. And I saw it on Netflix several months ago, and it blew my mind. I just, I couldn't get it out of my awareness, of my consciousness. It's this incredibly powerful, gripping expose of Russian state-sponsored doping in Olympic sport that will forever color your perception of sport, of clean sport, of competition. After watching this movie, I was determined to get the filmmaker on the podcast to tell me more. You guys should all definitely check

• 1:53:12Rich Roll?

  out this documentary. And I was able to accomplish that. So here is a slice of my conversation from episode 328 of the podcast with Icarus director, Brian Fogel.

• 1:53:28Speaker 11

  You're seeing that the actual organizations that are in charge of enforcing the rules really are going to do nothing that is actually in the best interest of the clean athletes and only protect their own business interests. And so it's been pretty... It's very disheartening. Disheartening because what it is doing is it's setting a message, it's sending a message to every athlete who grows up believing in the Olympic ideal. That, you know, as a kid, I know that I had this, or anybody who was really serious about sport, you grow up in believing in this Olympic dream, that you're going to somehow go to

• 1:54:11Speaker 11

  the Olympics and you're competing under peace and harmony. And it doesn't matter whether you're Russian, or American, or from India, or from China, the world is coming together to compete. And it's all in the spirit of sport. And then what I've come to realize, and what the film shows, is what George Orwell clearly said, is that sport is war without the weapons. And these Olympic Games, or World Cups, soccer, etc., are essentially just a place for a country to go to war with each other and assert its geopolitical and power through sport. Right.

• 1:54:54Speaker 11

  And these athletes are, in essence, gladiators for their country. And the case of Russia, and this program that went for 40 years, and the case of the Sochi Olympics, Russia has been using its sport program to assert itself geopolitically and show dominance and power. So if you can go in and win the Olympics... You're actually showing that you're strong, that you're powerful. And, and those Olympic medals are almost in place of its, of its nuclear warheads, or what it can do on a geopolitical level. And, and that is what countries are viewing the Olympic Games as.

• 1:55:35Speaker 11

  It's not about a country going in and competing peacefully and in harmony of sport. It's about hegemony. It's about, it's about going in and you look at those Beijing Olympics in China. And, and Gregory has told me repeatedly that he got the idea to swap out the urine, essentially from the Chinese at the Beijing Olympics. Now, these are allegations, I have no knowledge of this. But according to Gregory, according to what Gregory told me, is that the, in China, the way that the system was set up is that the athletes who were reporting for the drug testing, the Chinese athletes would go and report to essentially Chinese agents.

• 1:56:18Speaker 11

  And these agents would give these athletes clean urine. So when they went in to be tested and they, you know, and there's an inspector there watching them essentially pee, uh, that, that these athletes had been given clean urine. And that's why, uh, none of the Chinese athletes tested positive. And if you look at the Beijing Olympics, China swept the Beijing Olympics. They won more medals than any other country. But you, again, you look at the geopolitics of that. And what was on the line for China? It was China's coming out party to the world. It's 2008 and China is showing that not only can they pull off an Olympics, and those Olympic Games were incredible, what they did with the opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies.

• 1:57:01Speaker 11

  We've never seen anything like that in Olympics history. Not only can they pull off the Olympics, not only are they a global superpower, but they can win. And if they can win in sport and they can win in Olympics, what does this say about business? What does this say about war? What does this say about military strength, et cetera, et cetera? And you look at that and then you draw the analogy to Sochi or all the other games, you know, of course. The, you know, the, the, the 1936 games in, in Berlin was one of the, the pivotal moments in, in the rise of, of the Third Reich and, and, and of German nationalism and pride. And Hitler used those games to consolidate his power.

• 1:57:43Speaker 11

  And so we're seeing the, the, the replicating that in each one of these games where a country is using these games to basically assert itself on a geopolitical level.

• 1:57:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and there's no, there's no political will for the truth to come out because the stakes are too high and the ramifications of that would be too disruptive. But when you see a situation like you've presented in the film where the evidence is so overpowering and clear cut and you have to butt up against a lack of that will, you can't help but walk away from that feeling a little bit hopeless about what the future may hold because these organizations that we've specifically vested with the authority and the responsibility of policing this, if they're not even, if they're showing disinterest or they're not going to actually, you know, act on it in the way that, you know, seems

• 1:58:38Rich Roll?

  to be the morally appropriate response, then we're lost. And we're only talking about the Olympics. We're not even talking about tennis or the NBA or the NFL and, you know, the implications of, you know, unfair play on the professional level across the board.

• 1:58:57Speaker 11

  Well, I, well, I think that to me, the bigger takeaway is sport is sport and sport is always going to be a game in the sense that it is sport. I mean, as so long as you're paying NBA players $40 million a year to shoot a basket with the ba-, you know, and, and, and so long as you're playing, you know, NFL athletes, whatever, 25, 30 million dollars a year to play football, there is always going to be the, the pressures to win. But, but to me, the, the, the bigger issue that we have to look at and what I want people

• 1:59:41Speaker 11

  to take away from this film is looking at Are we, as a country, the United States or other countries, willing to tolerate a foreign power's meddling in our process, in our democracy, in our, in our political affairs? And what you see in Icarus, in this film, beyond a reasonable doubt, is a country meddling into the global affairs of, A, the Olympics and sport to cheat and to collude and to, and to create a fraud. And B, the analogy can clearly be drawn into our current

• 2:00:24Speaker 11

  US political climate and the, and the meddling into our election of, okay, if a country like Russia was willing to do this, to win medals, what else are they willing to do? How far are they willing to go? And what we're seeing is no matter how much evidence is put forward, which we see in the film, where not only has this evidence been put forward, it's all been proven. And yet you still have the leaders of the Olympics and Putin and Russia and Wada, literally standing in the face of this evidence, trying to deny that this actually happened. And we're seeing the same thing happen in our, in the current

• 2:01:09Speaker 11

  US political situation, where no matter how much evidence is being put forward about, about election tampering and meddling, we're still getting naysayers. We're still getting people going, this didn't happen. And I think we have to, as a country and a world, go, wait, what are we willing to tolerate? Meaning if we're willing to tolerate this in sport, well, I guess we're willing to tolerate this in terms of our own election, in terms of our own political process. We're willing to allow a foreign power to come in and meddle in our affairs and have that meddling go unpunished. And that, to me, is kind of the takeaway of Icarus

• 2:01:50Speaker 11

  that is incredibly upsetting, where all of this evidence is presented and you still have the president of Russia going... Not only did this not happen, I don't even remember the guy's name who brought all this evidence forward. And not only do we know that this is not true, we just know it's an outright lie. And these are the takeaways for me from the film that are frightening.

• 2:02:23Rich Roll?

  Doctors Aisha and Dean Scherzai, @TeamScherzai on Twitter, S-H-E-R-Z-A-I, are the husband-wife neurology team that serve as co-directors of the Brain Health and Alzheimer's Prevention Program at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Alzheimer's, huge problem, gigantic disease that affects millions and millions of people. Well, it's traditionally been defined as a life sentence, a life sentence without cure. But according to Team Scherzai, in one of the most impactful conversations I've ever had, Alzheimer's is not a genetic inevitability. A diagnosis does not have to come with a death sentence. In fact,

• 2:03:02Rich Roll?

  through simple diet and lifestyle changes alone, 90% of all Alzheimer's cases can be prevented. Think about that for a minute. So here's Doctors Dean and Aisha Scherzai on the hows and the whys from RRP 330.

• 2:03:20Speaker 12

  For many Americans, it's worse than death to know that you're having Alzheimer's. And the approach from the medical field is actually even worse. You have 20 minutes with a patient. "Hi, how are you doing? How is it going?" You do the cursory check of the heart, tapping the knee, and then at the last five minutes, "You have Alzheimer's, and this is what you have, and this is what you have to do, and here are some pills." And the pills don't change the progression of the disease, they just help you with the symptoms. This is a process that's going to increase, accelerate every family. Every family in America will be affected by it, either directly or indirectly.

• 2:04:02Speaker 12

  And we need to do something to kind of either curb it or have a new approach to it. I think one of the most important things we can do, and it started, it has started.

• 2:04:13Speaker 13

  It's already started, yes.

• 2:04:13Speaker 12

  Is to say, the way we're doing medicine right now is not healthcare. It is important. Sick care is important. When a person comes with an infection, they need a medicine. When a person comes with a blood pressure of 200, you're not going to say, "Go eat, you know, this." That's a long-term thing. You have to take your medicine. That's sick care. It's important. But there's another side, which is healthcare, which has to be incentivized. There has to be a mechanism. People can't just rely on goodwill, where I'm going to go at nights to the clinics, or this, or that, or to churches. There has to be a system created where we can prevent. But you know what? That system, when it's created, will reduce the cost of healthcare by 80 to 90% by itself.

• 2:04:55Rich Roll?

  That's a pretty staggering statistic.

• 2:04:56Speaker 12

  Yeah, so we just have to make the choice, as a society. And even the choice, you know, we get caught up in the politics of right, left. No, once there's enough information that overwhelms and everybody sees the benefit in this for their kids. I mean, we don't, this book is not about just Alzheimer's, end of life. I mean, our kids are overwhelmed by sugar. And then we tell them they have ADHD. Well, they might, but a great proportion just have a lot of sugar.

• 2:05:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's no question about that. And also, you know, I want to get back to the nutrition piece in a minute. But, you know, what I took away from it is that it's a book about how to live your life now so that you don't have to deal with this. Like, if you're, you could read this book as a 20-year-old and say, "Well, I want to take care of my brain, and this is the way to do it." Because those amyloids and all this sort of stuff that goes into creating, you know, the dementia and Alzheimer's. This is going on all the time, right? So it doesn't just suddenly strike you at age 65. Like, it's just like heart disease, like, you're working on this your whole life, and it has to do with the diet and the lifestyle.

• 2:06:06Speaker 13

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:08Rich Roll?

  So on the nutrition piece, so as, just so we're totally clear, as scientists who have, you know, studied this disease for a long time and treated a lot of people, you're sold on the whole food plant-based diet. This is the, this is the way to go.

• 2:06:24Speaker 13

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:25Speaker 12

  As a scientist, we say, to the best of our knowledge today, that to me is the most powerful, the most humble statement in English language. I think forced certainty is the cause of a lot of our conflicts. Science is open to change. I mean, tomorrow if they say, if you eat steak, I'm not going to because of other reasons, but I would say, okay, it's true. I doubt that it's going to come, come, but to that, right now, the data is just overwhelming. And a lot of times in discussions, or any discussion, they fail you by, by falsely holding you to absolutes, saying, but there's not cause and effect.

• 2:07:10Speaker 12

  Science cannot create cause and effect. It can create strong correlations, very strong. Even now, we can't create cause and effect with cigarettes, because you can always talk your way out of it, you know, even if you give people, even if it was ethical. But there's a tremendous amount of data that a whole food plant-based diet is overwhelmingly protective.

• 2:07:30Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:07:31Rich Roll?

  Is there any positive benefit with respect to brain health? For, is there any argument that there's something healthy about eating meat? When it comes to cognitive health?

• 2:07:44Speaker 13

  Well, yeah.

• 2:07:45Rich Roll?

  Go ahead, sorry.

• 2:07:47Speaker 13

  Nutrition sciences, you know, has its flaws. The way we're recording diet right now is through food frequency questionnaires, or diet, food diaries, and things of that nature. And, you know, it has its strengths when you look at the different components of meat, the saturated fats and the animal proteins, you know, whether it's animal studies or human studies. They're not good. I mean, the data over and over comes back and shows us that saturated fat actually causes those plaques in the arteries in the brain that supply oxygen and nutrition to the different areas of the brain and they get clogged when saturated fat is very high in your diet.

• 2:08:24Speaker 12

  Plus inflammation and everything else.

• 2:08:25Speaker 13

  Plus inflammation, plus affecting glucose metabolism as well. And on the contrary, so in comparison to, you know, other types of fats, such as polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated, they're actually beneficial. The most important element of the Mediterranean diet that everybody's been talking about for heart health and for brain health are those, you know, poly and monounsaturated fats, and they come from plants. So, you know, when you look at different, um, different comparisons of whether they're the types of fats that you eat or the antioxidants that you get from plants, it's, it's quite clear. And, you know, when you look at meat, I mean, other than fat and protein, it doesn't have anything else. It doesn't have any fiber. And some of the minerals that are there, they're

• 2:09:06Speaker 13

  just minimal. So you get more benefit from eating a whole food, plant-based diet.

• 2:09:11Speaker 12

  Uh huh. Um, and, and many studies, we did four reviews, which is these collecting all the papers and then coming out with what those said. So it's just the most painful kind of research. And, and on nutrition and Parkinson's, nutrition and stroke, and nutrition and dementia. And the thing that stood out the most was synergy.

• 2:09:29Speaker 13

  Absolutely. So these micronutrients, whether they're vitamins or minerals, they don't work, um, alone. Um, you know, it's, it's actually the combination and the levels of the different kinds of micronutrients that matter and they synergize each other's availability. So, and that makes sense. And that's why, you know, hundreds of studies on, say, for example, vitamin E and brain health, or vitamin C and Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease have come back with no results, with no particular correlation and effect, but, and, and.

• 2:10:01Speaker 13

  When you eat it in a whole form, when you eat it in a, you know, plant form, all of these micronutrients are well balanced and they're bound to other macronutrients. They're bound to the fiber as well, which increases their bioavailability. Decades of data that show that a whole food, which is unprocessed, plant-based diet, low in sugar, seems to be the best dietary pattern for, for the brain. And it affects all those processes that we just talked about, lowering inflammation, managing glucose metabolism, managing lipid metabolism, providing the best source of macro and micronutrients for the brain to thrive, to grow, to heal itself.

• 2:10:42Speaker 13

  And, you know, study after study shows the same thing over and over again. And by just looking at populations, you know, the seven-day admittance population, you rarely see dementia and the ones that do have dementia either have it very late in life, or they have had other uncontrolled risk factors in their life.

• 2:11:04Rich Roll?

  Last, but certainly not least, is Tim Ferriss, because this episode is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular and downloaded episodes that I've ever done. Tim is a relentless experimenter. He is a virtuoso of deconstruction. He's a guy who has spent the better part of his entire adult life studying mastery and sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog, his string of four consecutive number one New York Times and number one Wall Street Journal bestselling books, including his brand new offering Tribe of Mentors, as well as his podcast, which is one of the top shows in the world with over 200 million downloads. But who is the real Tim Ferriss?

• 2:11:46Rich Roll?

  Despite the fact that I have been enjoying this guy's content for many years, I never really felt like I knew the answer to that question and I wanted to know more. So this conversation gave me the opportunity to find out.

• 2:12:05Speaker 14

  I think we're all on different journeys. There are shared traits, perhaps for many of us. And we hit different legs in different portions of our lives. So for some people, they start off, say, in the heart or in the gut, and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be.

• 2:12:27Rich Roll?

  That's me.

• 2:12:27Speaker 14

  Right?

• 2:12:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:28Speaker 14

  And then you have other people. Certainly, I would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason, or a combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on. As I did in childhood, I had some reasonably bad things happen to me as a kid that I don't really want to get into specifics over, but that encapsulates a lot for a lot of people. And put on this incredible armor to protect myself, and only realized in the last few years that, and when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things out, but you also keep a lot in.

• 2:13:12Speaker 14

  And there were

• 2:13:17Speaker 14

  certain ways that I'd handicapped myself very deliberately, viewing emotion as a weakness, viewing attachment, emotional attachment in particular, as a weakness.

• 2:13:32Speaker 14

  My priority for a very long time was to simply hone myself as an instrument of competition, basically, and to use that to validate myself, to prove my worth. And anything that detracted from that or remotely made me vulnerable, I viewed as something that should be disposed of. So that led me to the pro and con list, to the hyperanalytical, to the, as close as I could manage, Spock-like approach with a high pain tolerance, to tackling different things in life. And

• 2:14:08Speaker 14

  That is just another way of accepting partial completeness, which ironically I wrote about in The Four Hour Body, which is arguably the most, I'm not gonna say clinical, that makes it sound really dry. I think it's a fun book, but it's very analytical.

• 2:14:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:14:24Speaker 14

  And very quantified. And I talk about how people should question certain assumptions they've made about what they can or cannot do, such as, "Well, my parents are fat, I'm fat, that's just the way it is." And they accept that as a partial completeness, and they never challenge that. But I myself never even thought of my longstanding lack of interest in emotion as a gap. Does that make sense?

• 2:14:55Rich Roll?

  Probably as a strength. Like, you know, from what I've heard in how you talk about your childhood, there's a lot of similarities with my childhood. I was somebody who was a very awkward kid, very much a loner, you know, not by any stretch of the imagination, anybody who looked like they were gonna be an athlete, you know, eye patch, headgear, last kid picked for kickball, and really had a lot of difficulty connecting with friends and classmates. And as a result, spent a lot of time alone. Then I discovered swimming. And I feel like, I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this. I feel like the relationship that I developed with that sport

• 2:15:39Rich Roll?

  is similar to the relationship that you developed with wrestling at that time. Because I approached it as, it was the first thing that I was actually good at, you know, and it was kind of this safe place away from school. And I realized very early and often that the more I put into it, the better I got. So that equation of...

• 2:15:59Rich Roll?

  Being diligent and being devoted and working hard had very practical, real-world results that were advancing my life in a very good way. But it was also a place where I could go and not have to deal. It was like a, not only a safe place, but a place, a way where I could just escape. So in some respects, I think I had a compulsive, obsessive, addictive relationship with it. And it was a means of not having to deal with some emotional stuff that I was going through. But when you become successful, when it's moving you forward, it's much more of a reason to continue to not look at that other aspect of your life because it's serving you.

• 2:16:37Speaker 14

  Yeah, there's a huge amount of overlap. So wrestling for me, as someone born premature, I was very, very small until sixth grade. I mean, just gotten constantly on a daily basis kicked around. I was so small, I was such a small kid, I would generally not even opt to go out to recess because that was just like going out into the

• 2:17:07Rich Roll?

  Terrible.

• 2:17:08Speaker 14

  The open sky pen at like a federal prison. I mean, that was a dangerous place for me to be. I would just get dragged around and punched and so on. So I'd read books and that was the cover that I used to sit on the step right outside of the door that went out to recess. And wrestling, which came to me really by luck because I was hyperactive and my mom was told by other moms that kid wrestling would be a good way to drain my batteries. So I was put into wrestling and then I think both of us realized that it was the one sport, since it was weight class-based, that I had access to where

• 2:17:50Speaker 14

  I could end up being matched against another equally puny nerdy kid and at least one of us got to win.

• 2:17:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:17:59Speaker 14

  But to underscore something you said, which I think is very true for me as well is that particularly at that age, but for a long time in school at least, you have fairly siloed areas of life. I mean, you have academics and it's easy to measure, you do well or you do poorly. And then you have certain sports, particularly if it's an individual sport where you feel like you have some, this is another reason I gravitated towards wrestling, a semblance of control. There's so many things you can't control, but part of the reason I always ended up leaning towards individual sports, even though I did play soccer for a short period of time.

• 2:18:43Speaker 14

  I played football for one season, which I did not like for a host of reasons. And wrestling, on the other hand, the, all the credit or all the blame was on you.

• 2:18:54Rich Roll?

  Lies on you. Yeah. I mean, swimming even more so.

• 2:18:57Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:18:57Rich Roll?

  It's the ultimate in self-determinism.

• 2:18:59Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:19:00Rich Roll?

  Determinism, right? It's just you against the clock. I mean, you're racing against somebody else. I mean, in wrestling, you have your opponent, you have to anticipate what he's gonna do. And so that's a variable that you don't have in a sport like track and field or swimming.

• 2:19:13Speaker 14

  Right.

• 2:19:14Rich Roll?

  But it's very much that idea of like you get out what you put into it and there's that equation, right? And you can like immerse yourself in that and that becomes an identity.

• 2:19:24Speaker 14

  No, and I liked the controlling of variables to the extent possible. And as you get older, at least just projecting forward, if we fast forward the film and get into twenties, thirties, certainly forties now, where more and more of my friends have passed away, right? And the decisions you make in your personal life absolutely bleed over and affect other parts of your life. And the decisions you make in one area that used to be at least conceptually as a kid, really walled off and siloed, bleed over into every other. And

• 2:20:06Speaker 14

  I think that many of our strengths in excess become or create glaring weaknesses.

• 2:20:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:20:17Speaker 14

  So for me, it was this realization, and we could really dig into some of the tools that led to this realization, including supervised use of psychedelics, that led me to the conclusion that my current state of being was not only unsustainable in a lot of ways, but really not serving me. And that if I wanted to not just tolerate myself, which I think at best is what I did for most of my life, then I had to rewire quite a bit. And it involved going back and contending with some really old things.

• 2:21:02Speaker 14

  And that many of the seemingly disparate behavioral challenges, or short-temperedness, or impatience with myself, or berating myself in my own head, or fill in the blank, it could be 20 or 30 things that I tended to view as inexplicable, separate behaviors, were in fact, all easily traced back to a handful of things that I protect, I think by necessity, protected myself against, or felt the need to protect myself against early on by walling off myself emotionally.

• 2:21:37Rich Roll?

  All right, we did it. That's it for 2017. It's officially in the rearview. It's all about 18 from now on out, you guys. Hope you enjoyed that. If you would like to support this show and my work, just share it with your friends and on social media, simple. Leave a review on iTunes, and of course, hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, super important and very, very helpful. We also have a Patreon setup. If you would like to support us financially, I will be scheduling an Ask Me Anything session, a video AMA, very soon. And that is exclusive content for contributors on Patreon only. To find out more, just click on the Patreon banner ad on any episode page at richroll.com.

• 2:22:19Rich Roll?

  Final reminder that our meal planner is on sale through midnight, January 6, $20 off the annual fee when you use the promo code POWER20 at checkout. It's an insane deal for just 80 bucks for an entire year. You will be supported with thousands of plant-based recipes, personalized grocery lists, expert food coaches, available seven days a week, even grocery delivery in over 80 US markets. Really proud of this product, very helpful tool in your toolkit to make 2018 your healthiest year ever. To learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or just click on Meal Planner at the top there on any page on my website.

• 2:23:03Rich Roll?

  I want to thank everybody who has helped put on this show and actually all shows throughout 2017. Jason Camiolo, my right-hand man throughout this whole process, for all his great work on audio engineering, production, interstitial music, the show notes, the WordPress page. He's really my dude. Sean Patterson, who has worked tremendously hard on all of the graphics for the show, giving it the look, the feel, the aesthetic, and the music, as always, by my boys from Analemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. 2017 was the best year ever for me, and I'm excited about 2018. I think it's going to be extraordinary, and my hope, my aspiration for you,

• 2:23:47Rich Roll?

  is that it will be everything you aspire it to be. And I'm here as a resource to help you achieve that. See you guys back here soon. Until then, be well, peace, plants, namaste.