Van Neistat Is The Spirited Man

A mysterious artist on the cusp of breakthrough success walks away from it all. Beyond the public’s gaze, he spends the next decade pursuing purity, beauty and truths both personal and universal. Then, like a Jedi returning from parts unknown, the artist resurfaces as ‘The Spirited Man’. And this ‘Spirited Man’ goes by the name Van. Van Neistat to be precise. The elder half of The Neistat Brothers, it’s a name that will ring familiar to many, a name typically associated with a superstar YouTuber, OG vlogger, and friend of the pod, Casey Neistat. In the Neistat Venn Diagram, Van and Casey overlap on many traits. Both are artists with an utterly distinct aesthetic. Both are exceptional filmmakers who honed their skills in the days before YouTube even existed. Both have a preternatural aptitude for storytelling, perfectionist dispositions, an appreciation for the analog, and extreme respect for detail. The list goes on. And yet, Van and Casey are also very different artists with disparate sensibilities. Back in 2010 after the Neistat Brothers HBO show wasn’t picked up for a second season, Casey went on to become, well Casey Neistat. Van on the other hand, embarked on a very different journey. An artistic journey of self-discovery—outside the public sphere—until recently. Now re-emerged by dint of his recently launched YouTube Channel, ‘The Spirited Man’, Van muses philosophical and explores questions large and small with a curious, introspective flare that is totally unique, utterly compelling, and just-so-perfectly Van. I was (and continue to be) thoroughly entranced by this series—and so curious about Van—that I reached out to Casey to connect us. Today Van shares his story, and it is wild. My plan was to unfurl ‘The Story of Van Neistat’ in a relatively linear fashion. That’s not at all what happened. And this exchange is better for it. Fluid and conversational, this is an excavation of the artist life. It’s as much about hardship and survival as it is about creativity and productivity. We discuss curiosity, sobriety, discipline, the value of being meticulous, and his commitment to preserving an analog life. We talk about why he didn’t continue making films with Casey and Van’s many collaborations with artist Tom Sachs. Finally, Van spins a few epic yarns featuring Werner Herzog, the Safdie Brothers, and the lore of 368 Broadway—a building in lower Manhattan that birthed many an amazing creative career in the early 2000s. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll609 YouTube: bit.ly/vanneistat609 Van is super awesome. I love this one. Hope you do too. 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

  There's a problem with art, and with filmmaking, and with acting, and the problem with it is that it's cool, and it's perceived as cool. And that's a problem, because sometimes it's cool, sure, but that's not what it is. It's a job. You don't go into it because it's cool. Artists are not people smoking pot and staying up all night, watching movies, and being pretentious in cafes in Paris. Artists are up at the crack of dawn. They work harder than everyone. They're all broke, but some of them are rich. And it's extreme discipline. To me, the worst advice I've ever gotten, I think, is do what you love, and the money

• 1:50Speaker 01

  will come automatically. That is fucking preposterous. I wasted 15 years doing that, and it's not the fuck true. Everyone needs money. Everyone needs to have money. Unless you're born with it, and you still need it, you really have to prioritize and understand that making money is a skill and is a craft. That's not automatic. It's very intentional, and you have to go after and do it. It is incredible blessing to be able to make a living out of the things that you make with your hands. I'm Van Neistat. I am a spirited man, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:35Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Greetings, people. It is I, Rich Roll, an aspiring spirited man who today convenes with a true spirited man, a spirited man generous in spirit, sharing thoughts and ideas, spirited in nature. This spirited man goes by the name Van, Van Neistat, to be precise. The elder half of the Neistat Brothers, an HBO show of some years back, it's a name that will ring familiar to many, a name typically associated with one superstar YouTuber, the big dog OG in the vlog game, personal friend and friend of the pod, Casey Neistat.

• 3:15Rich Roll?

  But Van is the older brother. And in the Neistat-Van diagram, Van and Casey overlap on many traits. Both are artists with unique and distinctive aesthetics. Both are exceptional filmmakers who honed their skills in the days before YouTube even existed. Both have an extraordinary aptitude for storytelling, perfectionist dispositions, an appreciation for the analog, what else? Respect for detail. The list goes on and on and on. And yet, they are also very different, different people and different artists with different sensibilities. Back in 2010, after the Neistat Brothers HBO show was not picked up for a second season,

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  Casey went on to become, well, Casey. Van, on the other hand, embarked on a very different journey. An artistic journey, a journey of self-discovery, a journey, for the most part, outside the public sphere, until recently, that is, when Van suddenly reappeared by dint of his recently-launched YouTube channel, The Spirited Man, which is a very cool and curious unlimited series that explores all kinds of questions, questions large, questions small, things like home repair, all the way to critical thinking, within introspective and philosophical flair that I think is utterly unique. I'm totally compelled

• 4:42Rich Roll?

  by this series, and I was so curious about Van and his particular sensibility that I reached out to Casey to connect us, and here we are. This one is really fun, it's really different, and it's coming right up. But first...

• 5:06Rich Roll?

  Okay, Van, Van Neistat, the story of Van Neistat. So, I plan to kind of go through his life in a relatively linear fashion over the course of this conversation, but I gotta tell you, that's not at all what happened. But honestly, although we're kind of all over the place over the course of a couple hours, I think this one is all the better for it. It's a very fluid, conversational exploration of so many things, what it means to pursue the artist's life, it's about creativity, curiosity, sobriety, discipline, the value of being meticulous, appreciation and respect for preserving the analog

• 5:50Rich Roll?

  things in our life, and so many other topics, including some pretty great stories about Werner Herzog, his brother Casey, the Safdie Brothers, and also 368 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, which is a building that throughout the early 2000s birthed many an amazing career. Van is awesome, I love this one, so let's do it. This is me and Van Neistat.

• 6:19Rich Roll?

  Such a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for doing this. I'm so excited to talk to you.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Likewise, thank you for having me.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  You're like this mythic, mysterious figure. I've known your brother for eight or so years. He was an early guest on the podcast. I think he's been on three or four times, although not all of those episodes were before he started vlogging. They're way back. So I've been familiar with you and your work for quite some time. But you are this kind of question mark in the sense that in the wake of

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  the Ni-Stap Brothers, you kind of went your own way and left all of us to make up stories about what exactly happened. You know, like project some notion of what you were doing. And in my mind, you were like this, this out of the public eye, off the grid dude who kind of walked off the mortal coil like Kung-Fu to pursue like purity and art and truth and answers to questions of the universe.

• 7:22Rich Roll?

  And now you've resurfaced with this beautiful channel, which made me think like I really wanted to finally meet you. So, thank you.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Well, I'm so psyched to be here and I'm really glad that that myth is what it is. Because that's the best case scenario. But I think in reality is I just find it really difficult to earn a living.

• 7:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  And I think that the 10 years between the 11 years between the Ni-Stap Brothers and then this channel,

• 7:53Speaker 01

  I've just spent exploring all the different options of making a living and with my craft and then

• 8:02Speaker 01

  working at all the different sort of aspects of being a writer-director. Because there's, you know, there's so much to the, it's such a complicated art form. You have to be a writer, you have to be a director, you have to be a cameraman. And then in our case, like with Casey or with me, you know, you're also the personality on the screen.

• 8:23Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  But mainly I was trying to learn how to Like tell stories from, you know, technically what is going on with storytelling. And, you know, I work with this artist named Tom Sachs and he was, he was like almost a patron. Because he would hire me to do these projects, but he gave me an extreme level of authorship. With, um, with these projects and it really helped me to develop and it was 10 years of almost exclusively working with him and he would go out and get money. He would get sponsorship from Nike. He would get sponsorship from Hurley and, um, we travel all over the world. And then at the same time, I would write my own projects, but really trying to learn like

• 9:08Speaker 01

  the technical, um, storytelling process.

• 9:12Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm. Tom Sachs is a very interesting, curious, uh, unique artist. I've been a fan of his for a long time. He inspired these glasses. He wears, I don't know if he still does, but he used to wear these exact frames and I went on a search for like a year to figure out where he got them from and I finally figured it out and these are the glasses that I wear and I just get new ones from the same place.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:38Rich Roll?

  So I've been following his career for a long time and it's interesting, uh, to see the genesis of this DIY aesthetic that shows up in your work and of course in Casey's work and how it all traces back to, to Tom. Like when you look at Tom, like a lot of, a lot of the kind of details that show up in, in both you and your brother's videos, really there's plenty of evidence in the Tom Sachs catalog from where that came from. So I'm interested in the influence that that guy had on, on both of you.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  You know, I, I really, I distinctly remember going into his studio the first time ever and he, his reputation had preceded him and a friend of mine had told me about this guy, Tom Sachs, and he was like an artist and he was like a famous artist and his work was in museums and galleries and, uh, collectors paid thousands of dollars for his art. And in my mind, that had all, people who reached that level of success in the art, uh, paradigm.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  It was always a very thick degree of inaccessibility. Like, I took art history classes in college. But there was always this really, there was this thick, thick mystery as to why. Okay, okay, I get you what you're telling me about Mark Rothko and these big blurry red splotches. I get that. But why, why, why, why? I don't feel it. I don't feel like why that is art. And I don't feel why that is going in a museum. And when I went into Sachs's studio, it was this unbelievably familiar feeling. When I was looking at some of the pieces on his wall and I, and I thought, oh, I get it. I get it. I get, I get why this is art and in a museum.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  And I also get where it comes from. And what he had, what the piece that I'm, that is in my mind, that is etched. He had a, one of those handheld, like from the eighties Defender video, video games, I guess is what you'd technically call them, but really they were just LED dots that you could move around and they like figured out how to make it into.

• 11:59Rich Roll?

  Right. Like the little football, remember the NFL football game?

• 12:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like one step above that. Those are like the digital watch kind of displays. But this was like the light displays. And it had, let's say it had eight buttons on it. He had made linkage with armature and little hinges and pennies for thumb buttons to control those buttons on the thing mounted to like a frame made out of police barricades that he had stolen. Like, that was one of the pieces that was in there. And then I got to like look through the catalogs and they're beautiful. Everything in the art industry is the highest. The art handlers are the best movers, the most expensive and most careful movers you can hire.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  The, the people who clean art are the, are the highest custodian, level custodians that exist. And so the, the books are like, there's this company called Steidl. Have you heard of them? I think they're in Austria and they're like very limited edition catalogs. And looking through his, and he had like this Chanel guillotine that he made that was in the permanent collection at the Pompidou Center. And it's like, wow, I've been to Paris. I've seen that building. He's in there. And then to learn from him, it was like almost the complete opposite. It was like the whole thing was flipped in like, no, artists are not people smoking pot

• 13:28Speaker 01

  and staying up all night, watching movies and being pretentious in cafes in in Paris. Artists are up at the crack of dawn. They work harder than everyone. They're all broke, but some of them are rich. And it's extreme discipline and extreme and like, the thing I learned from Tom was all this like meticulousness. Like, it's an incredible illusion that his work looks like it was made by a 14 year old kid that's in prison. And he just has his own, his own resources and that's what it looks like. But it's all very carefully refined over, he's been doing it for 50 years, 40 years or something, 50 years.

• 14:10Rich Roll?

  There is a, there is a feeling of chaos, but when you drill down into the most micro aspects of of his work, the attention to detail is unbelievable, unbelievable. And, you know, I mean, I don't even know how to describe his genre or what it is that he does specifically. I mean, he takes artifacts from pop culture and reformulates them to make a statement about whatever it is that he's interested in pursuing.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  He made a Sub-Zero freezer, refrigerator from scratch. You know, he like got the copper tubing and like sweated the the joints and it's all beautiful and it's made out of plywood. And I think the name of the piece is Darth Vader. But, oh, okay, the, okay, the, the sort of hidden soul of his work that to me is is everything, the hidden soul of the work is that all of those little artifacts that you see, everything, they work. And they look the way they do because they work. They function. That refrigerator, his standard was, this thing is not done unless it can freeze ice cubes.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  And we made a McDonald's from scratch, like a street cart McDonald's from scratch. And it looks like a work of art, but when it was in the Guggenheim in Berlin, every Thursday night, we opened that McDonald's and we served hamburgers and we served.

• 15:32Rich Roll?

  Right, it was a functioning McDonald's, right? And that was a two-year process of putting that show together, wasn't it?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Let me see, I started in 2000, yeah, I started in 2001 in April. And then it was in, at the Bowen Foundation in Manhattan. I think in February 2003. Yeah, and then in summer 2003, it went to Berlin.

• 15:55Rich Roll?

  What is the obsession with NASA all about that he has?

• 15:59Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 15:59Rich Roll?

  It's like unreal.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  I hate space. I hate the space program.

• 16:03Rich Roll?

  Well, you made the whole documentary though.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I know. Mark Parker is to blame for that. Mark Parker went to the show, he's like, you guys gotta make a fee share about this. We're like, okay, we did it.

• 16:13Rich Roll?

  Well, the, there's an interesting story in how you met him and started working with him. Can you tell, can you tell that story?

• 16:19Speaker 01

  So I worked at Scholastic, the publisher that publishes Harry Potter. They also make the little classroom magazines that you would get when you were a kid. And I worked on a magazine called Super Science, which was for fourth to sixth graders. And one of my jobs was I had to do a science experiment every month that the kids could do with just supplies they'd find in their classroom or in their house. So my desk would have all of these like little, you know, solar ovens on them and little, the little coffee can with the rubber band and the weight inside that rolls and then rolls back to you. And a friend of ours, a friend of mine, Joe Torxen, he worked in marketing and I had lunch with him every day. And one day he brought in Tom Sachs and that's how I found out who he was. And I just kinda met him, oh, nice to meet you, blah, blah, blah.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  And then when my job was, I had stretched my internship into a five-day-a-week, like basically full-time job. And my editor was like, look, for legal purposes, you either have to become, like dedicate yourself and become an associate editor here for a salary and all that stuff, or I have to fire you just for legal reasons. And I was, I was like, ah, I was like, I don't really wanna do this. And Joe said, go work for Sacks. He's doing, he's doing a job. He's doing a big project. And so I, it was around that time, I came down and on my bicycle, I had mounted this, for an old DV video camera, I mounted this bike mount to record myself riding through

• 17:47Speaker 01

  the Holland Tunnel on a bicycle. And he was, Sax was examining it on the street, like in the wild. And I was just like, wow, that's my, that's my.

• 17:57Rich Roll?

  He's like, I found my kind.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  And so when I went to apply, I'm the guy who did that thing. So it's sort of like, maybe this guy has the rudimentary ability. And I think what he liked about me was that I didn't go to art school, I was unrefined. And I'm kind of like, I can get the thing done, but in the like, really in a, just a terrible way that he loved.

• 18:19Rich Roll?

  Right. Uncorrupted by the fineries.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Uncorrupted by education and technique.

• 18:24Rich Roll?

  Right. So you start out as like a formulator, cutting like foam board and stuff like that, and spend two years putting together this, this gallery piece that then ends, ends up in, in Berlin at the Guggenheim, right?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And then in the meantime.

• 18:40Rich Roll?

  But you're making films.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, I brought my video camera to, to work and I made an unauthorized movie. And I was on the clock and there was, I was, I was measuring foam core and there was a tape measure. And I finished my measurement and I put the tape measure down and on the tape measure, it was a Stanley Powerlock tape measure. And where it normally says Powerlock, it said Kubrick is dead. So it was a Stanley Kubrick is dead tape measure. And so I made a movie about that and then about how weird the, the space that we were working in was. And then for the soundtrack, I just lifted the Burleos music from The Shining and then the, the, the monologue of the head of the hotel saying, man, he killed a family and

• 19:25Speaker 01

  stacked them, stacked them in the north hallway or whatever.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  But this isn't part of why Tom hired you. That was like a little moonlighting thing, right? That he ends up seeing.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  And then he saw it and he was like, okay, keep making these. You still gotta do the fabrication, you still gotta make all this stuff, but keep making, keep making these videos. And then he helped refine my process because he would give me.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Viewing assignments. And he would say things like, okay, this is, this work is about the sculptures. So get really, really close, as close as you can. Show the hot glue, show the screws, show the, you know, the, the burrs. And um, he showed us the Eames short films that they.

• 20:09Rich Roll?

  Powers of Ten?

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Ray and Charles Eames made in Venice. Powers of Ten is one of them. There's one called um, Introduction to Feedback. And then they made, in my opinion, what is the greatest industrial film of all time. And it's called the SX70. And it's about the Polaroid SX70. And it was just made for the employees of Polaroid, which I don't really understand why. Maybe they would show it at a party or something. But it's this miraculous movie about exactly how the Polaroid SX70 works. But there's also a humanity in it because the things that they're photographing for the movie

• 20:50Speaker 01

  are children like pushing over a whole stack of, of, of um, cardboard boxes or, you know, flipping over rocks at the beach. And then the Polaroid is taking pictures of those. And then they show you like the three layers of Polaroid film and how the light meter closes the iris and it was, and it's unbelievable. And it was just unbelievable, the humanity and the technical virtuosity of the film combining. And that is sort of, I think in essence, that's the thing I'm, I'm subconsciously making all the time, that with a combination of like Mr. Rogers for adults. Like that's my ambition.

• 21:29Rich Roll?

  Well, that was the original uh, idea behind, well, maybe not The Spirited Man, but you had a pilot, right? That you were pitching that was basically that idea. The idea of like Fix It Man for adults kind of show.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I made this pilot called We Can Fix It. And it wasn't good enough because I was smoking way too much pot at the time. So it had that, it just wasn't good enough. But I've been able to, you know, I, I steal from it and put little bits of it in uh, in The Spirited Man. Like there's this episode called Sobriety.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Where you see me chopping down a door and then it cuts to these little dolls in the same hallway and it's stop motion. And when I posted that video, Isabel, my wife, said, "Did you just make all that?" And I was like, "No, no, no, no, that's from 2011."

• 22:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The archive is unbelievable. I mean, that's one of the things I've noticed with Casey, like in making the videos. Like you guys created this incredible library that then informs all the videos that you make, that you're able to tap into all of these memories and access all of these events throughout the course of your life.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Do you mean like the library of movies that other people made?

• 22:45Rich Roll?

  No, no, no, the library of home movies of you guys growing up. And then just the way that you've maintained like a catalog of all the work up to date so that you can access it and weave it into the new projects that you're making.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  It's crazy you mention that because this week I was confronted with some of the limitations of that. And things fall away. Like no matter how careful, unless you stay in one spot, I think. Like Kubrick had that big mansion in England and he just stayed there and he didn't leave. So I'm sure he had everything.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  But I'm a Gen X or nomad generation and I'm moving all the time. And so I've been moving hard drives around with all my footage on them. And then I had this studio in the South Bronx. And the hard drives went from the size of like an Encyclopedia Britannica to the size of a pack of cigarettes. So I could take six 500 gig Encyclopedia Britannica hard drives and put them on one pack of cigarettes

• 23:52Speaker 01

  hard drive.

• 23:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And I did that and then something happened that they like got corrupted.

• 23:59Rich Roll?

  Oh, no.

• 23:59Speaker 01

  And I was just, and now we're in the process of trying to rescue a lot of footage. Like it's like from 2007 to 2013 or something.

• 24:11Rich Roll?

  That's like your worst nightmare.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Raw footage. It's horrible, but I have a lot of movies. I have a movie archive that I can pull. I can like completely edited videos that I can pull footage from that way. And then I have the tapes that go to 2000. Seven, I think, and then 2007, I think, we switched over to card-based.

• 24:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  Video. So I've been going and taking tapes down to like this company that can like turn them into, because I don't have any of the gear to play the tapes anymore.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  Right, but with your appreciation for being meticulous in every regard, it's amazing that this has been a blind spot. You gotta get on top of this.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  What's horrible about it is that I've been like, I've been crazy about it. I've been like focused and yelling at people and making sure things happen and don't forget this and I put tremendous amount of effort in and then despite that, like certain things just kind of you just, you just, you just lose them, but I'm confident we'll get, I'll get, I'll get that one hard drive. It's just one hard drive, but it's three terabytes of like really small video.

• 25:24Rich Roll?

  Somebody ought to be able to figure that out.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 25:27Rich Roll?

  Well, let's take it back. I want to go back to the origin story a little bit. You growing up in Connecticut and, and we're, you know, in looking at your work and reflecting on your brother's career path, the overlaps, the differences, like there's a shared appreciation for not just detail and precision in the work that you do, but also this unbelievable capacity and understanding of storytelling and the importance of telling stories that are meaningful. Like where do you, where does that come from?

• 26:01Speaker 01

  I think, well, I think my mom and my dad, who are no longer together, like they're two hemispheres of the brain. And my mom is like the right hemisphere of the brain, which is like very creative and artistic and she is an unbelievably gifted natural storyteller with no technique. Like she, I'm sorry, with no discipline. Like she doesn't write, I mean, she writes, but not, not as she should write. She doesn't do, she takes pictures, but not as she should. She, you know, she doesn't make films. She doesn't blah, blah, blah, blah. But her natural gift, like to just sit and tell you a story, unbelievable, unbelievably good how she can weave and she'll put a little,

• 26:47Speaker 01

  she'll put like a little seed over here that just seems like an interesting little detail and then it comes back at the end of the thing and it's unbelievably great. So that's mom.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  And then my dad is like the left hemisphere of that. He, if you ask him like was his favorite movie in the last five years, he'd be like Caddyshack. You know, he's seen like eight movies in his life, read like 10 books. But he's extremely orderly and he's very responsible and he works really hard. So I, you know, I think-

• 27:21Rich Roll?

  The meeting of the mystical with the rigor.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think those, those probably mom and dad are responsible for why. But, and my mother's entire side of the family is, they're, they're, you know, Irish, Portuguese. And they have that, they just have that storytelling gift. But my dad is also extremely funny and extremely charming. Everyone loves him, so.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  So by osmosis.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:49Rich Roll?

  Filters down, right?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:50Rich Roll?

  But the original plan was to do what, like, writing?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, there wasn't. Filmmaking was this thing that you need in order to have access to, it seemed.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  You know, you had to go to film school. And there were like really two film schools. There was USC, which was like the west coast guys, like Spielberg and Coppola and those guys. I don't even know if they went there. But, and then there was, the east coast was NYU. And they were just both prohibitively expensive. It was just, it was not, it was not an option. I didn't know about Werner Herzog. I didn't know you could just get a camera and do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So when I was in high school.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  I, you know, a friend of mine who read a lot, he's told me to read Hunter Thompson. And I read Hunter Thompson and I was just like, okay, well, this is something I would love to do. I would love to do this. And then I said, okay, so I'm going to go to school and I'm just going to learn all the liberal arts stuff.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  And try to go out and be a writer. I'll move to New York.

• 29:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  And like, you know, back then, writers made a lot of money.

• 29:06Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Writers did well. You could write for magazines and have a nice, awesome house.

• 29:09Rich Roll?

  It's so crazy, right?

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:12Rich Roll?

  That's no longer.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And I just didn't, I don't like writing. I mean, I, I mean, I do now. I write every day now, but back then, like, sitting down and I did it professionally and just the revisions and the revisions and working with the computer. Just doing it all on the computer. Just.

• 29:29Rich Roll?

  Offends your.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Oh, I hate it. I hate it.

• 29:31Rich Roll?

  Offends your analog sensibility.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Well, you know, it's not, it's not pretension. It's like, I developed from zero to like 20. I sent my first email when I was 23 years old. So I developed without any of that computer stuff and computers to this day, like, people talk about how when they hear the ding on their phone, it gives them a small, um, like endorphins rush. For me, it is the opposite. When I hear a ding on my phone, it is dread.

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  It is like, oh, this is another damn thing I gotta deal with.

• 30:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  And I gotta go through this device that's probably gonna break or malfunction or not work somewhere along the way. And the typewriter, like, I love the typewriter because the typewriter is just, once you get your fingers, knowing where the keys are, it's just direct thought.

• 30:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  And you can type the way that you think and talk because you can't just go back. You can't just like, if you start down a path, you'd just be like, and Tim and I went down to the, no, no. It wasn't Tim. It was Billy. You have to write that. Whereas if you were with the computer, you'd be like, oh, no, it wasn't Tim. It was Billy. And you go back and it's so, and, and then when you're done with the typewriter, let's say you get a, dinner's ready, you just stand up and, you just stand up and go. And there it is.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  You don't have to remember to save it either.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  You just shut it down or any of that stuff.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, I'm, I'm a little older than you, but I'm also Gen X and, you know, there is something profound about being the last generation of people who were reared in an analog world, you know? I, my first exposure to a computer was in college and I typed papers on the first uh, Apple Macintosh and it was many years later before I sent my first email. Like, there was no internet throughout most, you know, all of my formative years. And, you know, we're gonna, in the same way that we would talk about our grandparents, like, oh, they didn't, there was no tele, the television didn't exist, like, There's something really profound about that. And I think there's some wisdom in that as we age in terms of like how we communicate with the younger generation.

• 31:37Rich Roll?

  And your work is infused with this idea, like there's a nostalgia to it, but also a reverence for the practical and what it means to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty and, you know, connect with your environment and your natural world.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, one of the things that like creative people who have an audience, one of the things that they do is they preserve the things that they found valuable. They say to their audience, who's invariably going to be younger than their influences, they say, oh, this is important. Remember this. Here's something. Look at this. And I don't know, to me, it's natural. It's part of being very, very stubborn, being like, there are certain lines that I've drawn. Like, I remember when, you know, in high school, they went from Mac to DOS-based machines. And I just, it had been Macintosh and I could get my head around that.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And you click the thing around and you double-click. And then DOS was typing in these codes and I just said, no.

• 32:44Rich Roll?

  I never did that either.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I said, if this is going to be the thing, I'm not doing it. And you can fail me in whatever, but I will not do this.

• 32:51Rich Roll?

  With the floppy disk that you had to put in and the whole thing?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  I mean, that was fine because Apple had those floppy disks and so forth. But the code, typing in C colon slash, and everything had to be exactly right and do all this work just so it would like, a zero would come up on the screen, like, no, no.

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  But I think, yeah, I don't, I'm afraid of that word nostalgia because it does sound like, I mean, it is nostalgia, but it's also like, this is just kind of how I live. I have an old truck and I put so much energy and love into it, but like... I love driving it.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  I love it. I do.

• 33:32Rich Roll?

  Well, it comes across in the videos.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 33:34Rich Roll?

  The reverence for this truck is unparalleled. But I think on top of that also, and I heard you talking about this in another interview, another relic of our era being Gen X is that we grew up in a time in which we just weren't exposed to the truth of possibilities. Like, I remember going to, I went to a really nice college and I was unclear on what I wanted to do. And I went to the campus, you know, career counseling center. And it was just brochures on consulting companies and applications for investment banks. And I was like, is this it? Like, is this all that is available to me? There was no, as you had mentioned in this other interview, there was no YouTube.

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  You couldn't pull up videos of the people that you revered and respected and have them tell you exactly how they did it. So there was this sense of, these people are inaccessible. What they're doing is not possible for the average human being. They were baked as geniuses from the get-go. And I'm just gonna have to go, you know, pursue this sort of mundanity.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, they left, they leave out the story of the geniuses, right? And so, wait, you went to Stanford?

• 34:46Rich Roll?

  I did, yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. But now, don't you think Stanford is kind of the opposite, right? Like...

• 34:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, I was there at a transition period. You know, it was this great institution, but it was right on the precipice of it becoming like the tech place to be. You know, Palo Alto at the time was still a pretty bucolic little college town. And of course, there was Intel and IBM and things like that. And a lot of my, you know, friends were studying computer science and the like. But there wasn't that sense of like Silicon Valley, and this is where it's all happening. That came later. And I have lots of friends that went off to make billions of dollars and do that. And, you know, I just wanted to read books and do other things. Like, you know, I sort of wasn't plugging into that. Sensibility at the time.

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 35:37Rich Roll?

  But yeah, I'm sure it's different now. I mean, now it's like a giant metropolis. It's completely different.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Did you know how much work you were going to have to do? That was that? I guess to get into Stanford, you have to do. To do anything.

• 35:52Rich Roll?

  To do.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Like I was, that was a thing that came as, and to this day comes as a surprise to me, is the amount of, I don't care how smart you are, the amount of, just the crazy amount of work. Like, um, you know, I don't know. I just, that came as a surprise to me. I didn't know it was going to be to do something of consequence or to do like, oh, follow your path or whatever was going to be. I can't believe how much work it is.

• 36:21Rich Roll?

  And how long it takes, right?

• 36:24Speaker 01

  It takes so long, even though you're doing all this work, like every waking hour.

• 36:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I look at it like, I mean, I was never super talented in anything that I've, that I was doing or that I continue to do. I'm a grinder, so I'm never afraid of the hard work. Like I relish that and I see that as my advantage long-term, like as I'll outwork anybody and bridge that talent deficit gap to the best of my abilities. And that's the way I looked at, you know, that's how I got into Stanford and that's how I tried to keep pace with these students that were much smarter than me and, you know, talented in ways that I couldn't possibly imagine. But yet, you know, I think, I think on top of that is, is this patience and appreciation for the length of time that it takes to do anything well, right?

• 37:12Rich Roll?

  And I look at your path, you know, I want to talk about the sobriety aspect of it, but it's, you know, it's been a 10-year period of you kind of figuring out who you are and what you want to be. Until you get to this point where you can synthesize all of these experiences that you've had and deliver them in a way that, you know, I think you're hitting a certain stride right now in terms of what you're doing and how you're communicating with the world. That's a reflection of that 10-year period of work that you've put in. And, you know, the things that I, I'm 54. Like, I didn't start figuring out who I was or what I wanted to do until I was like 41, 42 years old. And I've spent the last

• 37:53Rich Roll?

  nine years doing this thing. And I only feel now like I'm starting to understand what it is exactly. It takes time. And I think everybody, particularly now, in the way that the culture is with this, you know, kind of hack your way to success and, you know, this priority on trying to find the shortcut, we're missing the bigger picture. It's in that struggle, it's in that journey that you develop the resonance that will make you great in whatever field it is that you're trying to pursue.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  So you went, and you did, you went to law school, right?

• 38:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that was a giant mishap all to get, yeah. So I went, I grew up in Washington DC. I was a swimmer, went to Stanford, swam there, graduated, lived in New York City for a couple of years, went upstate to law school for a couple of years, but spent most of my time in Manhattan, getting into trouble and screwing up my life. Moved to San Francisco, was a lawyer there for a couple of years, moved here in 96, was a lawyer for a couple of years, bottomed out on drugs and alcohol, went to treatment, got sober. Sobriety was my job. I still worked as a lawyer for many years after that, but sobriety was the thing, you know? And that was my introduction to tools

• 39:15Rich Roll?

  and new principles for how to organize my life and live. And, and that's still the lens through which I, you know, process everything that I do. But that was, I mean, I got sober in 98. And I feel like only now I'm starting to really feel like I'm expressing the authentic version of who I am.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  Whoa. Yeah, I mean,

• 39:41Speaker 01

  The brutality of sobriety. It is

• 39:45Rich Roll?

  Slow bribe.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  It is unbelievable.

• 39:47Rich Roll?

  Are you comfortable talking about that?

• 39:49Speaker 01

  I am, you know, I called a friend before I did my sobriety movie because you know, there's the traditions and one of the things is, there's this quotation about in something, something, something in television and radio. And it's like in one of the traditions.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're anonymous at the level of press, radio and film.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:07Rich Roll?

  So it's always a tricky thing. And as a sort of public facing person myself, I struggle with the tension between wanting to speak about these issues. Cause again, it's sort of like that, that campus, you know, you know, job center, like there wasn't a lot of information.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:25Rich Roll?

  And I think the downside of that tradition is that there's a lot of people who don't really understand what's available to them when they're in pain and struggling. So I try to walk that tight rope and share my, it's always experience based. I just share my experience. I try to steer clear of being specific about, you know, the, the 12 step program itself. But you know, it's, it's, everybody has different opinions about where that line lives.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, lucky for me, like, if you like stories, man, that is your place.

• 41:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Speaker 01

  That you go and you will hear the most incredible things, the most incredible stories. And then when you hear someone tell your story, that's like, that's the biggie. That's the one where you're like, okay. Because I think people don't feel like, you know, they call it qualifying when you go to, when you sit at the desk and tell your story, right? And I think a lot of people just are like, no, no, I don't, I don't, you know, I don't drink like that guy in the gutter or whatever. I don't, and like, and that's how I felt. I was like, no, because I'm not like so and so, I'm like blah, blah, blah. But like, really? When I sat in there, I was like, okay, I gotta restructure the whole,

• 41:41Speaker 01

  the whole way, the whole way of thinking, my whole way of, of thinking. And that's, and then you don't have, you don't have the thing anymore.

• 41:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  You don't have the valve. The valve's gone. And the valve is the meetings. And like, when you start to go, you just, okay, drop everything and go to a meeting and it'll be okay. And that works.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  I had a lot of trouble living in New York. I lived in New York for like, I moved in 98 and I'm still keeping an apartment there. And in my 40s, just, I was never, I never lived, I never had enough money to like, live like a New Yorker. Like, I never made enough money, never, made enough money to like, go to a Broadway show, or take taxis. If I wanted to go somewhere, I had to do the subway, which is almost non-functional. It's the worst subway system I've ever been anywhere, including like Lisbon, Portugal, or Mexico City. It's the worst subway system I've ever been on.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  Highly, highly offensive to the spirited man.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  It doesn't work, it doesn't work at all. And so I rode a bicycle, or walked. So navigating around that city is very, very important. And there's just, this is another reason why I attention to detail, because there's no margin for error. There's no margin. You can't leave your bike unlocked, ever, never, not once. Or else, it's gonna be, it's gonna be, it will be stolen. And that wore on me. That really wore on me, because I don't have that, I'm not naturally inclined to be that kind of left-brained person, who's like, careful with keys and wallets and stuff.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Thankfully, New York City beat that into me, because I think you need that degree of functionality to do things. But that stress like, really, really wore on me. I had to go, to get from my apartment to outside, I had to go through five doorways. Five doorways.

• 43:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  To go from my room in my apartment to outside. And, you know, one of those doorways was an elevator. Two of those doorways were elevators. And...

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Just and and being stoned, I didn't mind any of it.

• 44:11Rich Roll?

  Right. So that's to bring it back. It's a this is this is the this is the introduction to drugs and alcohol as a coping mechanism for dealing with being flat broke in New York City and trying to just fucking make your way.

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And you know, the thing is like, I I tried to get it across in the video very subtly. When I was like, you know, there's this amazing shot of me like riding in the sunset in Maine. And it just says, sometimes it was like this, you know, before I was sober, sometimes it was like this, riding my motorcycle in Maine.

• 44:41Rich Roll?

  That's what we hang on to.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And but I well, the point I'm making is that like, it wasn't all bad. It wasn't 100% bad. This thing was used. These tools were useful at the time. They got us through. Like, you got through law school, you know, that ain't no.

• 44:57Rich Roll?

  No, they they work until they stop working. There's a reason why we do it because it's actually serving a purpose for us. And there is a functionality to it.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  It is hell when it stops working. It's horrible.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  It was pot for you mostly, though?

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what took me out in the end. It was I couldn't function without it. I was just full of rage. I was horrible without it. And yeah, and God, I quit.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  Was the reckoning out here? Or what was the what was the moment?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  It was in Yosemite. I've had nothing but bad experiences in Yosemite. Something about that place in me don't mix. And I was in the last beer I ever drank was in Yosemite. And yeah, it was I didn't bring any weed on me. I'd been looking forward to this trip for so long. I'd been working really hard. And I went up there and I just cracked. I just lost all control of all my emotions. And it was and I just called a friend of mine. And he was like, you know what? Try going to a meeting, man. He was like, so he'd been sober for a few years. And I was like, it was like a total. I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like, that was the last my last suspect. I thought I was had mental illness and all this stuff. And it was like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, really?

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  It can't be the pot.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I was like, okay. And then I just went and it was just like, the first one was in Atwater.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  And it was like, I was like, yeah, I've never done this before.

• 46:26Rich Roll?

  The one where you sit outside?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  No, no, it's like in a little just nondescript room. And man, I went back there. I went back there for like, I was out here for a movie premiere thing for a space program. And I went to that meeting and then like, I saw this gal that I like, like kind of went out on a date with in New York that who's like kind of a, she's a famous person. I'm not gonna, obviously I'm not gonna say her name. And it was just like, how, this is so random, but this is what this thing is. It's just tons of these running, the people you run into. Another thing about it is if, I don't know, I could just go on and on about, in my mind, it's a magical thing. It's something, I don't believe in magic, but like magic is a, is sort of an adjective

• 47:09Speaker 01

  we use to describe things that we can't explain. And so any kind of like people that I run into, that's important. Like if I run into someone from the past that one of those, that means something. There's something to that. That's not just some random thing. Do you know what I mean?

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I, I believe in the, the, you know, the magic of, of AA like no other. I mean, my life, it, it just, it bears zero resemblance to what it was like before. Now, and it's purely a result of, of doing the thing, the way that they tell you to do it.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:44Rich Roll?

  But the people, and I think there's something really special about the recovery community in Los Angeles. The people are unbelievable. I've met so many incredible human beings that are so important to me now, that are the most meaningful people in my life.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:01Rich Roll?

  And just where else, I mean, on that subject of magic, like just generally, what other institution exists where you could walk into a room utterly broken, alone, lost, desperate, broke?

• 48:20Rich Roll?

  And be embraced by a group of people who truly want nothing from you other than to just help you and support you. And the only requirement is that you have a desire. You can go in drunk and high, you just have to have a desire to stop.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Rich Roll?

  And when you start to get it, the only obligation is you start paying it forward to other people.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you have to bring a dollar, bring a dollar, bring a $1 bill to the meeting.

• 48:46Rich Roll?

  But if you don't have a dollar, ain't nothing but a thing. You don't have to have a dollar.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  But you might feel weird if you're like, man, no one told you to bring a lot of money.

• 48:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I just, I think it's, it's one of the most miraculous things of, of modern times that it hasn't imploded either.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievably miraculous. And I also love the like, I love the like secret handshake thing about it too. Like that you meet people out in the wild.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  Wherever you go.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  And it like, it'll help you, like it'll help you. And if you're in a new town, you can just pop in and then you're instantly dialed into some, to some, you're instantly dialed into a community.

• 49:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  I've, I'm in this, I'm, so I, I ran into an old friend in New York and at, at a meeting and he had been sober for a while. And we started going to this one meeting on Sundays in the East Village. I can't remember the name of it now. It was one of those big like, not stadium, but like the size of a big venue meeting. Like it was in a playhouse or something. And so they would do, cause it was once a week, they would do like anniversary, like anyone with five years, and then there'd be a big line of people that would come up. And this friend of mine pointed out, he said, now watch between five years and 10 years,

• 50:14Speaker 01

  watch how few people go up. So there's, you know, the person at the front, the meeting chair would be like, okay, anybody with six years of sobriety and then like 11 people would come up. Anyone with, you know, eight years of sobriety and like three people would come up. Anybody with one year of sobriety, line, 40 people. And he said, there's a, he's like, I went through it too. There's a trough between five and 10 years where you stop engaging. And I'm, I'm at the very, I'm doing that. I'm like, cause COVID is year eight for me. 2020 would be year eight for me. So I'll be nine in September, God willing.

• 50:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And I didn't do any of those Zoom meetings. My last meeting was in a church in Topanga. And I'm really, I'm paying a price. I mean, I'm really crazy.

• 51:03Rich Roll?

  It's been hard. The Zoom thing's been rough.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Has it?

• 51:06Rich Roll?

  There's some great Zoom meetings, but my, my meeting attendance precipitously dropped off. Like, I really struggle with trying to stay connected in that way.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  And how did it manifest?

• 51:16Rich Roll?

  Just all my character defects coming out and me just being generally not happy.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Fuck, that's on the same boat.

• 51:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I, and I'll tell you this, and then we can kind of move off of this a little bit. At 13 years, I, I went out for like, a day and a half.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 51:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I came right back.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:36Rich Roll?

  But I had to reset the whole deal. It was the most humiliating, embarrassing, and kind of pathetic. It was a super lame relapse, but the good news is I came right back. And that was, that was a reflection of what you just spoke about, that like, lackadaisical attitude towards sobriety that, you know, for a lot of people, just becomes a thing after you've accumulated a number of years. And I just found that, I never questioned whether I was an alcoholic. And I, and I, and I didn't stop going to meet. I still went to meetings. I went to meetings, I mean, when I was newly sober, I was going to two a day for a long time. I went less. And, and I got really interested in these other things that I was doing. And what I didn't realize is how much I'd made them my higher

• 52:21Rich Roll?

  power. And how I started to think, I didn't need, like, I've been doing this for a while. Like, I get it. It's cool. I'll check in. And when I did check in and show up at the meetings, there was an ego to it. Cause it's like, I've been around here. I know what's up. You come to me for the answer. I got, you know, I can give the share that people want to hear. And that's just, you know, you're toast.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:45Rich Roll?

  So it was a reckoning and a reset that really helped me appreciate just how fundamentally important it is to make it the first thing, even though I've still been struggling with the Zoom thing and all of that.

• 53:00Rich Roll?

  And really helped me understand like that this is, you know, that this is just, this is just something that I have to do.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 53:06Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 53:07Speaker 01

  It's so much, it's the, it's the foreground, it's sort of like the first, it's like the top priority.

• 53:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:14Speaker 01

  It's like the number one thing.

• 53:15Rich Roll?

  But we forget, we wake up every day and we forget.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  I forgot until you said, until you just said, I was making other things my higher power. That hit me like, I was like, oh my God, I've been doing that.

• 53:26Rich Roll?

  So this is an interesting moment for you because the spirited man is blowing up. You're getting all this attention, all these subscribers, a lot of people are interested in what you're doing and they want to talk to you. And as somebody who's been pursuing this art form relatively anonymously, ever since the Nystath brothers, I would say that there's, you know, you gotta make sure that you keep your ego in check and remember what your priorities are.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  So that you don't get derailed by it.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:54Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 53:55Speaker 01

  I mean, on my way over here, I was just like, I was like, okay, this, you are not going to therapy right now. Do not go in there and unload your shit on this guy. That's not what.

• 54:06Rich Roll?

  No, this is what I, this is the stuff, man. We can go through the chronology of all of that.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  My last therapist was over here in Agoura Hills. I was just like, wait a minute, where am I going?

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, but none of that stuff is as good as the meetings, though.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  And I, I haven't found any that have been as good as, as the meetings, but, but yeah, the, the ego thing, I mean, it's so, it's so, I'm, I, I just feel so overwhelmed with work and I cannot, I, I can barely, barely keep up with it because I didn't realize the vitality of doing two videos a week.

• 54:48Rich Roll?

  I can't, I can't do, I can't do two podcasts a week.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  One a week is what I thought I might be able to do because the first six that I launched my, you, I launched my Kickstarter campaign, I made six.

• 55:01Rich Roll?

  But you spent a year making those.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:04Speaker 01

  I spent a year, but I didn't have, it wasn't my full-time job because I had to have a full-time job to support making them. And then I had a kid, a little kid. That I had to watch and I thought my, my bet was that, okay, if I am doing this full time and I says, and I'm not having to do all these other jobs for money, then I can do one a week. And it was just a hunch that I could do it. And then I called my brother like a day before I was gonna launch the Kickstarter. And he was like, can you, can you postpone it? Cause you gotta launch the Kickstarter the same time you launch the channel. And then he said, and you gotta do two a week.

• 55:35Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  And in my head, I was just like, okay, well, I've got six. It's three weeks. It took me a year to make them.

• 55:43Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. You gotta do a hundred and four this year.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  And then.

• 55:48Rich Roll?

  That was one of the first, cause the, the quality is so high. I watched, you know, when you first launched, I watched a couple of them. And I was like, how is this guy gonna maintain this pace, even at one a week?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  But there's some that I throw in that I'm like, I can do this in one day, but it's a hard day. I don't know. When I, there's only one person on this planet who could do what my brother did. That eight hundred and eight hundred days straight. That's it. I know that kid. No one else could do it. No one else could do that.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  I don't think people appreciate what an unbelievable feat that was.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  It was so, he's an Iron Man. He's done the Iron Man. He's climbed, he's summited Aconcagua. He's summited with a, like a steel femur. He summited Kilimanjaro. This kid has, and he's smarter than everybody. So he's got the two things you need. He's got conscientiousness and intelligence and him a hundred percent can do it.

• 56:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Nobody else.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  And he's been making films since, you know, he was 17 years old.

• 56:47Rich Roll?

  And it almost broke him.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he could barely do it. But you look at some, like, I haven't watched them all, of course, cause there's so many. I've only seen a very few, cause he is so influential. Like, I'll subconsciously just steal. I'll just, I'll take one of his ideas. I'll think it's one of mine and then I'll go and do it.

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  Well, part of your magic sauce is that you are, you're, you're uncorrupted by being a consumer of this type of content. You've been doing your own thing. You've, you're, you're not on social media and you're just, you're living your life and you're pursuing your art in your own way. And that freshness that you've brought to, to the work that you're doing, I think is a big reason why it's connecting with people because it is so, I mean, you could see details and elements that trace back to the Nice Step Brothers and, and a little bit of, you know, overlap stylistically with your brother, but. Overall, like, this is completely unique and different. And I think that's why people are embracing it and really appreciating it. So yeah, you should stay away from watching other stuff.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  Well, I hope that's true, but in my mind, I'm just like, I'm just ripping off this person and this person. But like, these are the people that nobody, or very few people know about.

• 58:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're ripping off rendezvous from 1962 or whatever.

• 58:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. That's true. Yes, that's right.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  But, so it's just coming from a different source. And what was nerve wracking about, there's another thing about YouTube is

• 58:21Speaker 01

  there's like guts involved in it because you're not getting paid. You're only getting paid based on your appeal. And your appeal is measured in numbers. It's not like eight people got tattoos of your thing because they love it so much. Doesn't matter. You're not gonna, you're not gonna make a living off of that.

• 58:45Speaker 01

  And so, you know, these things cost money and they cost time. And if you're gonna just put them up there, you're putting, you're taking this risk of like, it's not gonna, it's not gonna, there're not gonna be enough people for me to make a living. And then I've shown my hand so that I can't go out to Fox or

• 59:06Speaker 01

  Netflix or Hulu or whatever and get the deal because they're gonna say, look at this thing. And then there's but, but, but. Two things. YouTube right now, I think, is approaching this incredible golden age. And so that's the first thing. And the second thing is people are coming from the mainstream stuff are coming into this.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Are coming into this YouTube thing. And so there's this, do you know this comedian named Andrew Schultz? Oh, he's so great. And he was talking about in, during COVID, how he had this podcast set up and he had, and it was like a living room and all this stuff. And then he said during COVID, Jimmy Kimmel and the other Jimmy guy that does the the late night thing, they had Jimmy Fallon, that's right, they had to do like, like what he was doing. He's like, oh, it's a home game now.

• 1:00:00Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, that's exactly, I went through that same thing. I'm like, also, when everybody started doing Zoom.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Rich Roll?

  You know, I was like, oh, we're just all making videos of Zoom calls now? That's what we're doing? Like, I don't want, that's not the game that I signed up for. Like, I don't want to play that game. I'm happy to go toe to toe in the one on one conversation thing. But if we're all just doing Zoom calls and putting them up on YouTube and podcasts, like, it's phone calls.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Rich Roll?

  You know, I'm like that, I need, I need to sit across from the person.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:31Rich Roll?

  I'd rather not do it at all. And I've done, I did a bunch of Zooms, but you know, that not, it's just not the thing. But I think what you're saying is, is, is correct. I think YouTube is, is at this, you know, point of maturation, this inflection point where mainstream culture has intersected with this, like, you know, I hate that word, like influencer culture or whatever, where the powers that be have to reckon with it in a way that they kind of dismissed it previously. And I think that's different. And maybe that's only happening now, like in the past year. But I don't think, but it is true, like, the stakes are high for you if you do it and, and the numbers are

• 1:01:15Rich Roll?

  low, then how does that impact your long term career prospects for other project? Like, oh, people didn't like the thing that he did and they can see the numbers every, it's completely transparent.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:01:27Rich Roll?

  But luckily, it's working.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  And, oh, thank God, it's working. Thank God, it's working. Do you, do you ever listen to Jordan Peterson or any of his things?

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  I've listened to some of his stuff.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love, he has really great, like, like, simple insights that have.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Kind of like profound implications. And one of those insights is he talks about the sensationalism of the of the news media now. And part of it is because of it's so much cheaper and more profitable to have just someone spouting opinions than it is to have a team out in, I don't know, Bosnia, you know, reporting in satellite trucks and so forth. And that YouTube and the Internet is totally destroying that system because that system

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  is so incredibly expensive to maintain that they have to, in order to compete on the profit side of things with all of their overhead, they have to just go for what sells the most. And what sells the most is anger and disgust. And so that's what they're trying, that's what these, you know, opinion based news shows that get the ratings, that's what they're doing. And so it's a symptom of their death now. And whereas people are going to YouTube, the talent is going, is going to YouTube and people who are maturing and people who are new and like, I'm astonished that I'm able to have this popularity with this.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  I mean, basically, I'm just stealing Eastern European filmmaking techniques, you know, very quiet, lots of Foley sound, very slow, it's not hypercut. I was really nervous. I was like, are people just gonna like click the channel and be like, I'm not, this is too boring. You know, I need, you know, my stuff is not driven with music. It's more driven by sound and sometimes music will kind of help you along a little bit. But I'm, it was really astonishing because there were some comments that, I don't read the comments, I take Joe Rogan's advice, I don't read the comments, but I have Isabel read me comments that she thinks I might find encouraging.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  And it was amazing to read that people were like expressly being grateful for these things I was a little bit insecure about. They're like, oh, I like that it's quiet. I like that it's slow cut, you know?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  And I think that, you know, there've been some like copycats, like people who've made their own like spirited man things, which is unbelievably, that's the whole point.

• 1:04:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  The whole point. And I think the thing all came, I think Isabel just asked me one day, I was like super stressed out, this was a couple of years ago, and she said, well, if you could do anything and money was no object, what would you do? And I was like, I would just walk around the house tinkering and fixing stuff and putting up coat hooks and, and making these, and then I just points to stuff around the room, I'd be making this, I'd be making that because I, my house is just full of little, little things. But what you, and I did a movie called, I did a, a episode called Details that was about that tendency. And I get to do that now without having to worry about like, dude, you gotta pay that mortgage, you gotta pay that mortgage, as long as I'm shooting it, as long as I'm

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  shooting it, and as long as.

• 1:04:58Rich Roll?

  Which is the other thing that you love doing anyway.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Not really. I hate that part. I hate the cameras. I hate them. I hate the computers. Ah.

• 1:05:08Rich Roll?

  Do you like the editing?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  I like the editing. I do like the editing. That, yeah, I do like it. And, and my favorite part of the process is grading, color grading. Like, I think people call it color correction, but I think that's a different thing. But, um, my brother, bless him, gave me like, my brother's like hand-me-down equipment, it's like professional grade, like, wow. He gave me this camera, it's a Canon 1DX.

• 1:05:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  Unbelievably cool thing. But he's like, these Sony Alphas are like state-of-the-art, cutting-edge, the most, the best ones. And that's what he shoots on. But he gave me this big Sony, and I, you know, I did, yesterday I started, I had like, I started to kind of start to love them again, started to, I've been using the same camera that Canon T2I I've been using for 11 years. And the one I got Casey gave me as a present for my, like, birthday. But now I'm graduated, and I didn't make any big deal, I didn't even announce it, but, uh, for, for one of these most recent videos, I don't even remember which one it was, I just switched over to 4K. So now everything's in 4K.

• 1:06:18Rich Roll?

  Well, the shooting, the editing, the making of the videos is the price that you have to pay to do the tinkering that you love, right? Like, that's the rent.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:06:28Rich Roll?

  You know, and it's, that's not so bad.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  I like the writing, but if that was all it was, I would hate it.

• 1:06:35Rich Roll?

  The writing is amazing. You know, you're, you're, um, that's, that's where your true voice comes out. Like, the intentionality that you put into the monologues is exceptional. And I think that's a huge differentiator in what you're doing.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:06:53Rich Roll?

  Because it demonstrates the level of thought that you put into this. Like, there's a reason why I'm telling you this story. And you see the arc over the period of time on the details. That's the one that ends with Isabel saying, "That's what I love about you," right? It's like, it's a very emotionally resonant moment.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because, okay, so for Christmas, and I think it was 2019, so I had it for a year, Isabel got me the masterclass suite, so I could watch all of them. And what I would do is I'd just put the headphones in, because I'm always tinkering. And the headphones, the, the, I, the headphones and listening to smart people talking, for me is riddling. Like, that is how, that stops my mind from racing. I can really dial in, it's like what Pot used to do for me. I can really dial into what I think, it relaxes me, I really help. Like, I listened to your podcast the other day while I was doing my most recent movie. I listened to your podcast with, um, Brogan.

• 1:07:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, Brogan Graham.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  Yep. And then there was another one about periodicalizing your life, period.

• 1:07:58Rich Roll?

  Periodizing your life.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  Periodizing your life. Okay, so I, so I listened to the David Mamet masterclass, and he said...

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  All the writers, I've listened to all the writers' master classes. And they all kind of say the same thing. And it's, you've got to sit in that chair and it's, you've got no idea. And then when you do have the idea, you have no idea where it came from. Didn't come from you. It's something that came to you because you put the three hours in or however many hours in, it came to you. And the language that Mamet put it in was he said that if the writer didn't go through what the character went through, it won't resonate. It won't be good. And so when you have these surprise, it's irony, it's where like inevitability meets surprise.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  It's because the author, the person writing that thing. I just made a movie. Today, I finished a film that's called Breakthrough. And it's about that. It's about that, that point that you get to. Where you, you need the breakthrough. And that's the point every time, and I've done over a thousand of these short films. Every time you're just like, I quit. This is it for me. This is it. I'm just, I could be a diesel mechanic. This doesn't happen when you're working on a diesel engine, but it does happen when you're working on a diesel. And so if you've been doing it for years and years and years, and you've been making

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  these things, and you're starting to get conscious of these things. One, you can do them, you can get more of them more quickly. You can get, you can get these breakthroughs more quickly, but you have to sit in the chair. And also you recognize them and you feel them coming. It's very hard to articulate. I do an okay job of it in the video.

• 1:09:55Rich Roll?

  You develop a trust and a confidence that you will have that breakthrough because it's happened so many times prior.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:10:00Rich Roll?

  Even when you're experiencing it, you're like, I know. Yeah, I'm feeling it again, but I just have to keep going. And then once again, just when you thought it was never going to work out, you figure it out.

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  That's right. And the video that I finished today, when do you think this will come out?

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Not for a little bit.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Okay, good. So then it won't, because this video I did will probably be out by the time this is out. So I do this thing where I say,

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  You know, like you hit the wall. You hit the wall with your project. And I say this, I say thousands, thousands of walls. Every project has this wall since day one. And then it cuts abruptly, the music cuts out, everything. Hammer cuts to mini DV footage, New York City shaky camera. And it says, day one, May 1st, 2000. And then that wall, that's May 1st. That wall, the breakthrough is November 17th. Okay. Now, the breakthrough that I needed to make this movie that you're watching, I had two days to get that breakthrough and I did it.

• 1:11:11Speaker 01

  And what, to your point is that you, they do, they come faster and you, you get accustomed and you get, you understand that.

• 1:11:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  But I think David Mamet articulating that for me and listening to it and all of the writers saying that, they all, Judy Blume says the same thing. And there's this, this, and that's what you're seeing when you see a good piece of writing is you're seeing the struggle that this guy learned that. This guy didn't know that going in, or this gal didn't know that going into writing this thing. And that's what you're seeing. It's, I don't know.

• 1:11:43Rich Roll?

  It's such a relief to hear that coming from David Mamet because you just think this guy, you know, is, is gifted in a way that I can't connect with. But if he's talking about this struggle, there's a, there's a sense of, of comfort that can come over you when it's visited upon you and just to hear him say it. Right?

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Isn't it incredible how many people are doing this stuff? And how, by the stuff, I mean podcasts and making things and putting them out for everybody. And how good it all is? Not all of it, but how much of it is good? It's, do you ever listen to Sean Avery's podcast?

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  No, who's that?

• 1:12:24Speaker 01

  I was on that. He was, um.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  He was an instigator on the New York Rangers. So he was a hockey player, but he was like, I asked him if he was an enforcer and he said, "No, no, no, I was a," I think he was, I think he said an instigator, I can't remember, but he was like a tough guy. And I've known him for a dozen years or something. And he does this podcast called No Gruffs Given, and he's an NHL hockey player. And he's just got it. It's like really interesting. I think this is like the first podcast I did.

• 1:12:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  And he's just got it. Super cool, but there you go.

• 1:12:58Rich Roll?

  So many podcasts, I know. As somebody who's been doing this for a long time, I'm like, oh.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  When did you start?

• 1:13:04Rich Roll?

  Like 2012, end of 2012.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:13:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  How many have you done?

• 1:13:09Rich Roll?

  605 or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, when I started, you know, no, it wasn't cool. It was, it was a, you know, it was for Radio Shack tinkerers. You know, it wasn't a career path. It certainly wasn't cool or the thing that people were clamoring to do.

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  So what, why'd you do it?

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  Because I love the medium myself. Like I was listening to Marin and Rogan and, you know, Corolla. And at the time, it was mostly comedians. They were the ones who were doing it and they would have their friends on. So although I was an early adopter, very much so, I wasn't the first. Kevin Smith was an early pioneer. And I just loved the medium, but you had to work for it. Like you had to go on your desktop computer, figure out what you wanted to listen to, download the MP3, bounce it to an iPod. You know, you had to, you had to be very intentional and committed in order to be a listener. But I was just curating my whole listening experience way back in 2010, 2009,

• 1:14:14Rich Roll?

  and was flabbergasted that nobody else I knew was doing this. And I just thought, this is unbelievable, the amount of information that's available. I can like listen to these incredible conversations with, you know, the same thing that you're talking about. Like people would come in and share their journey. Here's what I, here's how I did the thing that I did. And I just, this is, and it's free?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Rich Roll?

  You know? And nobody I know is doing it.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  And it's like hours long?

• 1:14:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  Like an hour with Robin Williams?

• 1:14:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, exactly, right?

• 1:14:44Speaker 01

  Mark Marin was the one who did it for me. I started listening in 2012, 2011. And I was just like. This is un- before that, you did not, unless it was a documentary film.

• 1:14:56Rich Roll?

  You were never, ever gonna hear anybody talk for more than five minutes about anything.

• 1:15:00Speaker 01

  Uncut.

• 1:15:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Never. I mean, sometimes that may be on Howard Stern.

• 1:15:05Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  But even then, those were segments. Those guys couldn't, they only had 20 minutes. Yeah, okay.

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:15:11Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  30 minutes.

• 1:15:13Rich Roll?

  At the same time, it was when I was getting into like all this ultra endurance stuff that I was doing. So I was spending an unbelievable amount of time by myself on a bike or running on a trail. And, you know, I would bring podcasts with me to a company.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:27Rich Roll?

  So I would listen to hours and hours. So my 10,000 hours was first as a listener. And then I had a book that came out in 2012 and then I started thinking about what I wanted to do next. And it was just a whimsical like, hey, let's take a, why don't we, you know, we have some mics, like let's, just my wife and I had a conversation. There was no plan, like I'm launching a show. It was just, that was fun. Like, let's do it tomorrow. It started like that and it's just built from there. But it was very uncrowded at that time. So, you know, you could go right to the top of the iTunes charts because nobody was starting podcasts.

• 1:16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was like digital video in the 2001.

• 1:16:06Rich Roll?

  And there was no, like in the topics that I was interested in exploring, there wasn't anybody doing anything all that compelling. There was tons of comedians and there was news and stuff like that, but talking about kind of self-improvement or entrepreneurship or health and wellness, you know, fitness, stuff like that. Like, nobody was really doing anything all that interesting. And I just thought, I know some cool people, like I've learned a few things, like let's just do this. And it's just grown organically from that.

• 1:16:36Speaker 01

  Don't you, aren't you so appreciative of that, like 10,000 hours discovery? That like someone, I know Malcolm Gladwell gets the credit. It wasn't him.

• 1:16:45Rich Roll?

  No, it wasn't him. It wasn't him.

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  Whatever. Okay.

• 1:16:47Rich Roll?

  It was that shrink. I forget his name, but yeah.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  Was that, was it outliers?

• 1:16:52Rich Roll?

  It was in outliers. The, the theory comes from this research psychologist who I think just passed away. His name escapes me right now. And that theory has been put to the test. There's a book called Range by a guy called David Epstein.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  I read it.

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. He, uh, he's been on the podcast too. So him and Malcolm have these like little tete-a-tets over that stuff.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. I watched, I watched also, uh, like a symposium of those two guys on stage talk.

• 1:17:18Rich Roll?

  Right. They're funny together.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, but, well, since you brought up the 10,000 hours thing, it's like, I got the 10,000 hours editing pretty, you know, seven years probably. And then just recent, so I'm 20 years in now doing this, making every day.

• 1:17:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Making these things, some form of it, either shooting, writing, or editing. 20 years of it. And then there's the, the craft stuff of me, like kind of the subject matter.

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Or if I need anything, I have to make it myself for the thing. Um, and recently I tried to like, I'm working with this guy who's new and I'm trying to like, can, I'm just like, okay, just shoot this. And then I have to like really explain da, da, da, da. And then it's occurred to me, and I said, you've got 10,000 hours of camera now. Cause it's been 20 years. You've got 10,000 hours of camera. There's camera stuff that you don't know, you know. There's, you know, and, um, that's, that's, that's, that comes as a surprise when you realize, oh, no, no, no, no. It's not just one thing. You might have.

• 1:18:32Rich Roll?

  You don't know how much you know. You've forgotten more than most people have learned. But you have people helping you, right? Like when you're making, there's, there's somebody else holding the camera on a bunch of this stuff.

• 1:18:41Speaker 01

  Yep. There's BC Sface, who's, uh, it's just him and me really. And then Isabel.

• 1:18:47Rich Roll?

  He's the guy from the catch video?

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Then there's Isabel, um, who I just make do stuff, like if the kid is asleep or something.

• 1:18:55Rich Roll?

  Who'd you get to get up at five o'clock in the morning and go running with you?

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  BC. Yeah. He was on a bicycle. He was on an electric bicycle. Because a bicycle, the pumping, you would see the pumping. The camera wouldn't be a smooth shot, but the electric bicycle, you can just

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Real perfectly. And then those GoPros are really incredible. We mounted it to the thing. The, I almost, I like listening to you guys about the, the endurance stuff. I'm like, yes, I am impressed, but it's, I, how can you do it? How do you do it? How do you like the, the, the amount of time, the number of hours a day? How many hours a day do you put into it?

• 1:19:43Rich Roll?

  I mean, now, you know, it's at a super low boil. I mean, I haven't raced in, in many years and my life was a lot simpler when I was really doing it hardcore. Like, and that was a, that was a, that was a spiritual journey that I was on, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And the training was really a template for exploring myself, I think.

• 1:20:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:05Rich Roll?

  But I was in a lot of pain and had a lot of confusion and I have a capacity for that kind of thing and I enjoy doing it. So I don't, I don't dread it. I actually look forward to it. It's like the highlight of my day. But it's just like anything else, you, you like, when I watch one of your movies, I'm like, how the hell does that guy do that?

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Thank God.

• 1:20:25Rich Roll?

  That just looks like, I would never be able to, yeah, I don't understand. Like, how is he putting the camera there? Like, that just seems like it would, that would take me months to figure. So the endurance stuff, you just, you, you, you know, you're, you're, you out and you run four miles every day. So, you know, next week, you're running four and a half miles. A week after that, you're running five and a half miles and time becomes malleable. Like you're, you know, what's hard and what's easy changes and what you get used to.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  But the drive, I know all that, but like the motivate to keep it, it just, it takes so long. It's not like running.

• 1:21:00Rich Roll?

  Look at what you do. Just, just replace endurance for filmmaking. Look at, look at, look at how hard you've worked for how long. And a lot of people would look at your path and say like, why are you still doing this?

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  Cause it's there though, but the thing I'm doing is there. It's like still there. You can go watch the Holland Tunnel right now.

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  Right, but, but does that make it-

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  It's gone.

• 1:21:20Rich Roll?

  But does that make it, does that, does that make it any less real or meaningful? Because it's ephemeral-

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Also, I have to do it because I need to pay, I need, there's no other way for me to make money. I'm totally, I'm, I'm not going to Stanford. I'm like-

• 1:21:33Rich Roll?

  Well, forget about all of that. Like the endurance stuff, there was no way I was getting paid for that. Who would have known that it would have ever led to anything beyond the simple doing of it?

• 1:21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, you're not getting paid for that. That's what I mean.

• 1:21:46Rich Roll?

  When you're compelled-

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  There's even less motivation.

• 1:21:48Rich Roll?

  It's, it is, you know, in some ways, it is, it was, it was my version of, of, of being the spirited man in my own-

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:21:58Rich Roll?

  In my own way, right?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. I'm, I'm understanding something new here.

• 1:22:13Rich Roll?

  Walk me back to, I'm really interested and curious about the decisions that you made after the Nine Step Brothers was canceled. So walking up to that moment, you and your brother get together. I grew up with Tom Scott. I don't know if you knew that.

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 1:22:29Rich Roll?

  I've known Tom since we were fourteen, we were in school together.

• 1:22:32Speaker 01

  Unbelievable. That guy-

• 1:22:33Rich Roll?

  So I first knew who you guys were because Tom was like, you should check these guys out.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:39Rich Roll?

  Um, so I was on that, oh, and I brought these too. I actually have, I've got DVDs-

• 1:22:44Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:45Rich Roll?

  That Casey gave me these, oh yeah, 2000, he dated it of course, 2012 gave me that. And then gave me another one in 2013.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:22:55Rich Roll?

  I've got the pen from his studio.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  Uh, so yeah, I've been like hip to, you know, your guys' vibe for a long time.

• 1:23:06Rich Roll?

  The Nice Step Brothers thing happens, you guys are on HBO. It kinda was a thing where like, nobody really watched it though.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was on at midnight on Fridays.

• 1:23:15Rich Roll?

  It didn't get picked up. Casey decides to go and do what we all kind of know he did. And you make this decision to go in a different direction. I think there were a lot of people out there who were like, did they have a fight? Like, what happened? Like, why is he going over here? Why didn't he continue to make movies with Casey? Like, what was that about? And what was your mindset at the time?

• 1:23:37Speaker 01

  So, I, I thought, I had, okay, first of all, I was on drugs and drunk all the time. So, I was a completely unhinged, egomaniacal nightmare. Because I, from scratch, from a video camera that was the first thing I ever bought on eBay, I got an HBO show with my brother, who it turns out is like a fucking genius.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  And so, I started not, I just wanna blame it on drugs and alcohol. But, you know, that's not fair. It's just-

• 1:24:17Rich Roll?

  But if you were-

• 1:24:18Speaker 01

  I hadn't been through what I've been through.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  You were asked at the time, I'm sure, people were like, why aren't you still doing this? Or what would you have said in that moment?

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  You know, Casey sat me down and he said, "Look." You know, and at the time, you gotta remember, okay, what is this? He's got like a 12-year-old kid.

• 1:24:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Okay? And he said, "I have to prioritize money in my life. I have to make a lot of money. I got a kid, he's gonna be in college soon." You know, um, I'm, whatever. And we all have to do that. And my, I thought we were on this path that would continue. And we would just keep doing the thing that we were doing, which was not really understanding what we were doing, but following these little impulses and turning it into this really successful thing. And what I didn't realize at the time was how much work Casey was doing on the business side of things. How many meetings he was taking? How many things he was writing up? All the numbers and things and all this stuff.

• 1:25:20Speaker 01

  I just thought that we were these two super talented bohemian dudes and everything was just working out for us. Cause I wasn't doing any of that stuff. And so, um, he's, you know, he put together some work for us to do, like some jobs. That he and Tom went out and got, and I was just like, no, I'm not doing that. Let's fucking keep doing what we did with the thing. And it was just like, you know, we gotta keep, you know, this studio costs a lot of money to support and blah, blah, blah. And so I was just like, well, okay, fine, then I won't be a part of the studio anymore. I'll just pack up and I'll move out to Los Angeles. Because that was what I wanted to do. New York was, like I said before, it's just like really grinding on me. And, um, and that's what I did.

• 1:26:04Speaker 01

  And I was like, and then when we didn't get a second season of the TV show, it was just like, okay, keep going. And I had that arrogance to just keep going and keep going and keep going. And I've heard this story so many times. There's this guy, I can't remember his name, it's like, I think Wayne White, the guy who, he does the paintings.

• 1:26:24Rich Roll?

  The cartoonist guy? Who's a musician?

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Pee Wee's Playhouse?

• 1:26:29Rich Roll?

  Yes, that guy. They made that documentary about him.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Called, um, Beauty is Embarrassing. And his story is very similar to mine. And it's just like grinding yourself to the bone until it's just like, no, this isn't right. So I came out to LA and I, you know, I thought the whole thing was like, make feature films. Learn that, learn this whole thing of making these. I didn't realize we were pioneering anything. I thought we were just in the minor leagues, trying to get the bigs to guide, to, what's the guy from the Brooklyn Dodgers who signed? It's the greatest name, the guy who signed Jackie Robinson. Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey's gonna come down and, and sign us and we're gonna get, you know, the thing.

• 1:27:14Rich Roll?

  But you can't be blamed for having that idea. I mean, that was the idea of the time. I mean, Casey went through that as well with, you know, producing this, that Safdie Brothers movie and had that experience. And I know those guys are part of your like sort of creative collective. That was the path. There was no, people forget, when the Neistat Brothers came out, there was no YouTube. There was no, and you were making viral videos before there was even a means for something to go viral. The pipes, there was no distribution channel at the time. So how would one know that this was this impending future that would create a career path?

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  You'd have to ask Casey Neistat.

• 1:27:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, only somebody like Casey. And so the way I think about this, and tell me if this is fair or way off base, like, certainly both of you guys are artists. I think the differentiator is. There's a little bit more of purity in terms of how you think about art and creativity. Whereas Casey is this entrepreneur, business person, who's figured out this perfect combination of art and commerce at just the exact, correct cultural moment for him to ignite a wildfire. When I, you know, over many years of knowing Casey, what gets overlooked in terms of how

• 1:28:34Rich Roll?

  people think about him is the fact that he's a fucking genius when it comes to marketing and business. Like, he understands that side of things in a way that very few people do. And he's able to cast that sensibility with great foresight. Like, he knows what's coming. He understands what's important and what's not. And he melds that with, you know, an expertise in storytelling. Like, his vlogs, you know, it's not just that he made 800 movies in a row. Like, they're all really good, and they all have three-act structure, and they're extraordinarily well-edited and conceptually coherent in their own regard. Like, that's a feat that I don't know that anybody else on earth could have accomplished.

• 1:29:18Rich Roll?

  And so I don't think that, yes, you know, people love his videos, but I don't think they understand why they love them and why they're so good and what makes them work. And it's that, it's that engine behind the scenes that fuels that whole thing, from that very specific sensibility that he has. But when I look at you, I see somebody who, who thought, you know, "I'm an artist. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna continue to be this bohemian, you know, guy, and I'll figure it out as I go."

• 1:29:48Speaker 01

  I think, um, I think in the end, it's, we just, we do different emotions. Like, Casey does exuberance and comedy. He's hilarious. And I do, I don't know, introspection and, I don't know, insight or something. I don't know.

• 1:30:11Rich Roll?

  I think that's, I think that's correct. Yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  And comedy and fun is way more fun than...

• 1:30:20Rich Roll?

  Well, that's gonna travel, yeah, on the internet.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, and that's, but as far as, like... I mean, what he's done in doing, trying to do this thing, like, what he's done is a really significant artistic feat. And I know that, you know, I, we have friends that say that stuff to, you know, our close friends, you know, we have allies, you know, old, old friends, like, from the neighborhood and stuff, that, like, this was my old friend, and he says what you just said to me, he says that to me, and then Casey has his old friends, and they say whatever they say to him, and Casey has the success and the thing, and the... But, the way I look at it, it doesn't feel like I'm an artist and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  It feels like I can't do it any other way. It's not that. It's like, okay, fine, put Michael Jordan behind the wheel of, of Louis Hamilton's Mercedes. He's not gonna do it. I don't care how good Michael Jordan is. He's not gonna get it around the track as fast as Lewis Hamilton. And that's really what it feels like. And it's like, maybe because I worked with Sacks and his instruction, he was, he is, he is an incredibly good teacher. And one of the things he taught you, he taught people who listened, was this... Okay, we're writing a studio manual, Sacks and I, for his studio, and one of the chapters is called

• 1:31:50Speaker 01

  "Protection: How to Avoid It and How to Exploit It."

• 1:31:54Rich Roll?

  So, like, the human resources manual?

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  Part that, there's a lot of that. But, um, there's this thing where, oh... There's a problem with art, and with filmmaking, and with acting, and with, and the problem with it, with it, is that it's cool. And it's perceived as cool. And that's a problem. Because...

• 1:32:19Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's cool, sure, but that's not what it is. You know what I mean? Like, it's a job. You don't go into it because it's cool, you know? And a lot of people do go into it because it's cool. And when you say, "Oh, I do it because I'm an artist and I want to do it this way," like, that sounds cool, but that's not really, that's not what it feels like. I just feel like I didn't prioritize. I was like, I'm always hoping people will say, will ask me, "What's the worst advice you've ever gotten?" Right? And to me, the worst advice I've ever gotten, I think, is, "Do what you love and the money will come automatically." That is fucking preposterous.

• 1:33:04Speaker 01

  I wasted 15 years doing that. And it's not the fuck true. Like, you really have to put, if you, you, everyone needs money. That's, everyone needs to have money. Unless you're born with it and you still need it, you really have to prioritize and understand that making money is a, is a skill and is a craft. That's not automatic. It's very intentional and you have to go after and do it. Casey learned that at 16 when he got his girlfriend pregnant. I was there, man. I was there with him.

• 1:33:34Rich Roll?

  Well, he left home and moved in with you, right?

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Yes, I remember that whole thing coming.

• 1:33:38Rich Roll?

  That had to be insane. What was going on with you when he was?

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  I was just like, I mean, yeah, I mean, it was like.

• 1:33:46Rich Roll?

  And then did he follow you to William and Mary?

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  At ease, yeah.

• 1:33:49Rich Roll?

  And lived with you when you were in college, right?

• 1:33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Rich, he was so at ease with it.

• 1:33:54Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  He was just like, "Yeah." He was like, "Yeah, so, yeah, we're gonna, I'm gonna have a baby." I'm like, "You're 16 years old right now."

• 1:34:05Speaker 01

  Like, "Are you kidding me?" And then, like...

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  I can't, I mean, I can't believe, okay, so on top of all that, he's a dad. On top of all that stuff he did, he's also a dad. And he's like a high school dropout. And, um, so I just think that, I mean, I don't know, it's not intentional. I wish I had made more money. I wish I had, I would have been, I, you know, I think what he did is more pure than what I did because he just unconsciously did it and look at how much work, how much work he has, you know?

• 1:34:41Rich Roll?

  Sure, but then he had to take an entire year and a half off.

• 1:34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  You know, to chill out.

• 1:34:47Speaker 01

  I'd never make another video.

• 1:34:50Rich Roll?

  Well, that's interesting that you say that because we just got off this jag of you talking about the, you know, the disconnect between the romantic ideal of the artist, the person who thinks it's cool to be an artist. You look at Tom Sachs and you're like, wow, like huge, you know, cool lofts and like lots of cool stuff. It's like, it's sexy. But the artist is the person who, who, who creates because there is no other choice. There is something inside that person that is yearning to be expressed. It's a specific lens on an experience or an event that in the expression

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  says something more broadly about humanity or the world that we live in. And that person cannot rest until that exists in the world. And so I, when I talk about purity, like that's, I sense that in yourself. So it's interesting that you'd say you would never make another video again. Like, I don't believe you. I don't think that's true.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  That's what it feels like. It feels like it. Ever heard, I heard David Spade once say, if I had my brother's money, his brother's Andy Spade, who's also a friend, he's a friend of mine. He said, if I had my brother's money, I'd throw mine away.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  But.

• 1:36:08Rich Roll?

  That's funny.

• 1:36:08Speaker 01

  I don't know, I just, oh wow, the work is really, it's very hard. And I, you know, I made that, I made a video or an episode called gratitude. Because it is so rare and so, it is incredible blessing to be able to make a living doing out of the things that you make with your hands. That is another, you know, another thing that came to me as a great relief is I heard Jordan Peterson talking, you know, he's advising kids in college and he was talking about how impossible it is to be a professional artist. And he just goes one after another, after another, after another.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  And these are rational, rational, correct reasons. And hearing him say that and then knowing, you know, I, you know, I can't, I've never really been able to pay all my bills, but I'm still doing it.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:04Speaker 01

  For 20 years, I've been doing this, this thing. And I do have a tremendous amount of gratitude for it. And at the same time, I'm wrestling with the resentment of the reality of how hard it is.

• 1:37:14Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  And I just wish I, I wish I was more, I wish I would just lie and just say, oh no, it's unbelievable. I wake up, I pop out of bed, it's unbelievable. But really, and I hope that this is just a phase and maybe when I get older, it'll ease, it'll ease back.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  But it's, it's as if I'm in a house that's on fire and I have to just grab all the passports and the thing and the kid and the stuff and try to put some of it out. And it just feels like a terror and a panic all the time.

• 1:37:45Rich Roll?

  Oh man. Yeah, there are sustainability concerns with what you're doing.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:37:50Rich Roll?

  You know, in terms of your overall wellbeing.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying to develop these families of videos that I can make in one day. And I've had some success. It's a hard day, but I've had some success of doing these videos that take one day, like the one about the lock in the Tacoma.

• 1:38:05Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  That, that would, that would unlock. And then the one about the bike rack in the Tacoma, um, those took one day.

• 1:38:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to develop a family and I came up with another one that's a one day thing yesterday that I'm going to try to make tomorrow. And those saved me because they give me more time to work on the longer ones. And then I also, see, I also don't know how much of business you're supposed to talk about, but maybe this isn't business. But I also want to be able to dedicate more time to brand sponsored things. So like if a brand is paying me a bunch of money to do an episode, right? I want to be able to do, you know, six of the days of that week, or five of the days of that week on that video, which is what I just completed today with this breakthrough movie.

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  And that today was satisfying, finishing that movie. Can I just tell one technical thing? I just want to say, I just want to tell. So I had. What? I had to make a wall that broke, that snapped and broke away.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, you can't make it out of cardboard because cardboard doesn't snap. It bends. Can't make it out of paper. Paper bends. It tears a little bit. It doesn't bang snap. So I, this is like, this is the best thing that happened on this movie is I figured out, oh, and the thing that needed to break this wall were little puzzle pieces. They needed to shatter the wall. And so I figured out how to make a wall by taking an angle grinder and putting a sanding pad on it and then sanding the paper off of sheet rock, off of both sides.

• 1:39:57Speaker 01

  And then carving the little bricks with a Dremel with the rotor, with the bit. And you can draw with it. And I drew this perfect wall and it was so amazing. I had one take, it took, it took an hour to make this thing. And like, and I had to pull a puzzle piece through a string with a string, through this, through a hole in the wall. And it's super, super close up, super close up. And that like a puzzle piece is almost full screen. And it, and it just snapped the wall and I shot it in slow motion. The sound was.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  Was perfect and those that's that's satisfying.

• 1:40:37Rich Roll?

  Right. So this is this is why.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Those little things.

• 1:40:40Rich Roll?

  This is why you're never gonna.

• 1:40:41Speaker 01

  One of the hundred thousand things.

• 1:40:42Rich Roll?

  You're never gonna stop making videos though, right? Like the exuberance and the enthusiasm with which you just shared that story. Like you're you're toast dude, cuz you're all in.

• 1:40:51Speaker 01

  But it's the pace, Rich. How do I get around the pace?

• 1:40:54Rich Roll?

  I don't know, man. Talk to your brother about that.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  I don't know what to do about it. My brother said you suck it up.

• 1:40:58Rich Roll?

  Do you really have to do two a week? He said that's what you gotta do, right?

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  He just said he he's just so good at like, he's also like such a great salesman. He's so convincing cuz he has all the tactics down. Cuz he's just like, yeah, right. He's like, you know, I know. He's like, it nearly destroyed my family. He's like, you know.

• 1:41:18Rich Roll?

  But here's what you gotta do.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  And he's just like, and he's like, yeah, and then he's just like, look, you know, if it's just a if it's just like a fun hobby thing for you, that's fine. You know, but like if you wanna support your family and like get a new engine for your truck and stuff. Yeah, you gotta just you gotta just suck it up. And then he's funny about it.

• 1:41:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

  And he's like, yeah, he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, but yeah, the pace, the pace is very.

• 1:41:43Rich Roll?

  It brutal, right?

• 1:41:44Speaker 01

  It's brutal. It's brutal. But I'm gonna get faster. I'm getting faster.

• 1:41:48Rich Roll?

  Doing it all yourself. Well, you're in the in the doing of it. It's informing how you iterate on it to make it sustainable for you, right? But, you know, you don't wanna destroy your life in the meantime.

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  I bet meetings will make me faster. Going to meetings again and like that that reset. I think and then I got some equipment that makes me faster. I got a big like iMac with the big screen and like the 10 core. You know, they don't get faster. They don't get faster. Just the software gets bigger. Yeah, cuz I'm shooting 4K now. It's just as slow as the other thing.

• 1:42:21Rich Roll?

  Right, cuz the resolution increases in lockstep with the limitations of the the actual computing power.

• 1:42:28Speaker 01

  Lightning speed. How come I'm waiting 40 minutes to to render this move this two minute.

• 1:42:34Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, that's another video idea right there.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:42:38Rich Roll?

  You know.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  Oh, another thing about being in my like late 40s now. Like ideas used to be so important to me, like I had to be in a I take them all.

• 1:42:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  I say, people are like, movie business. I was like, sobriety? That wasn't my idea. That was in the comments. So I was like, make a movie about it. I was like, okay.

• 1:42:55Rich Roll?

  But you say like you're, you know, Casey does action and drama and comedy in your introspection. But there is a droll, kind of self referential comedy, like low key in your videos. Like when you're like, it only took me seven days, you know, or something like that, you know?

• 1:43:16Speaker 01

  I also put little Easter eggs.

• 1:43:17Rich Roll?

  There's a self-awareness around that.

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  There's a bunch of little Easter egg jokes too, that you have to really... And when people get them, I'm like, oh my God, thank God.

• 1:43:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Speaker 01

  Like in the, um, like in the, uh, did you see the one I did for UNICEF?

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  About the flag?

• 1:43:32Rich Roll?

  You just put that up today, right? Or yesterday?

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  Yesterday, yeah. I was like, it took two days to make this 15 second video, but that's okay, because it was for the kids, you know?

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  It might've taken you two days. I, I would have never been able to accomplish that in a million... I'm more likely to get an invitation to come to the White House and like create what you created in that 15 second video.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  But the only dialogue I, where I said, I, you know, it took, it took two days and I was like, I said something like, uh... But that didn't matter, because it was all about the kids, you know? Which was, I stole a line from Casino and the first comment on that video is like, is this from, is this line from Casino? But then Joe Pesci's talking about his kid in the Little League team? And I was like, oh my, I wrote right back, oh my God, this is the first comment, unbelievable that you got. That's really satisfying. I also put in, no one's gotten it. I don't know that anyone's got, there was this thing where, um, I'm doing the running thing and I'm talking about the dad and the kid and the son that I run into on my run.

• 1:44:38Speaker 01

  And I said, I hope they're training, you know, or maybe they're training for something. And I go, some kind of racism, like that, which is this very subtle reference to, um, Linda Mance, I think is her name? Who does the narration for Days of Heaven? Did you ever see that movie?

• 1:44:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, forever ago.

• 1:44:57Speaker 01

  And she's talking about how the farmer was getting better. He was supposed to die, but he was getting better and he was like, maybe the doctor gave him something, some kind of medicine or some.

• 1:45:07Rich Roll?

  No one's gonna get that.

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  I put that in there so Josh Safdie would get it. So for one person, I put that line and I'm like, Josh will get this. But I don't know if he's got it yet.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  Quite a career those guys are having right now.

• 1:45:19Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Have you met these guys?

• 1:45:21Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:45:21Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. These, I love them so much.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  Well deserved. I mean, talk about an original voice.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  Oh. Oh, my God. It's unbelievable that they're brothers, too. Like Ben doesn't, like Josh gets, I feel like Josh gets more like, he gets lauded more, maybe not, maybe I'm wrong, because I don't, I don't know. But Ben is unbelievable because he has the performance side. He's like an unbelievable performer. Did you see Good Time?

• 1:45:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  When he's like.

• 1:45:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that movie is crazy.

• 1:45:56Speaker 01

  Don't count your chickens before they hatch. What does that mean to you? Don't count chickens. That's like the first line of the movie. And they wrote it. They came up with that. Yeah, those guys.

• 1:46:10Rich Roll?

  Don't they also, did they found or do they own that little tiny museum where you did a thing?

• 1:46:17Speaker 01

  Okay, Josh and this guy named Alex Kalman, who's another one. I mean, do you, has Casey talked to you about the Diane Fink School in New York?

• 1:46:26Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  Okay. Someday, we will, you will, we will know about this. Someday, this, maybe this is something for me to make. Maybe this is something for me to make. Maybe I should do this. Maybe I should take a year and make this in little YouTube videos. So there was, after September 11th, 2001, there were all these subsidies for buildings south of Canal Street because the air was poisoned with mercury. So nobody wanted to.

• 1:46:53Rich Roll?

  How do we get people to go back down there?

• 1:46:54Speaker 01

  Yes, like, how do we get? Make the rents cheap. So we got this amazing deal on this building and 368 Broadway.

• 1:47:03Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's how that happened?

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Yes. And the, because I think we got that building in 2004. I think, or 2003, I think we started renting that little space. And.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  And so our buddies started renting spaces in that same building. And then across the street, like directly, we can look into their window. Yaniv Shulman and his brother Ariel Shulman and Henry Juiced. Henry Juiced and Ariel Shulman are directors. They just directed The Power Project with Jamie Foxx. They're like big Hollywood directors.

• 1:47:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, now they are. People, people listening who, who those names don't sound familiar, they're the guys behind Catfish.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:47:44Rich Roll?

  That was really well established then.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:47Rich Roll?

  But Lena Dunham was in the building too, right? Like there was all kinds of people in that building.

• 1:47:50Speaker 01

  Yes, we all had the same landlord. Her name was Diane Fink. And Henry Juice said, yeah, that's the Diane Fink School. That's not all. Greta Gerwig.

• 1:48:01Speaker 01

  Sam Lysenko, who's a, he's a, he's like a production designer, art director. Josh and Ben Safdie. Alex Cowman, who did the little museum, who's had shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Yeah, Lena Dunham rented a space. Carlton DeWitty.

• 1:48:19Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  So many, so, and we were all there.

• 1:48:21Rich Roll?

  That's, that's like the quintessential New York, like factory, you know?

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Rich Roll?

  Like cauldron of creativity.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  If you've ever seen that movie, um, oh, what's the movie with? It's black and white. It's Noah Bernbaum and Greta, Greta Gerwig is the star.

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  Baumback.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  Baumback?

• 1:48:41Rich Roll?

  Noah Baumback.

• 1:48:42Speaker 01

  Noah Baumback.

• 1:48:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  He wrote it and directed it. Greta Gerwig is the star. It's black and white.

• 1:48:51Speaker 01

  I can't remember the name of it. Do you remember the name of it?

• 1:48:54Rich Roll?

  No, let me, I can look it up.

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I'll just tell you what I'm getting at. That movie is that scene is, I can tell the guy.

• 1:49:03Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:49:04Speaker 01

  What's it called?

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Oh, did you find it?

• 1:49:07Rich Roll?

  No, hold on, I'm looking it up, keep talking.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

  So that movie is, okay, so the guy who's, the guy who's from Star, I can't, I'm so bad with names. Adam.

• 1:49:15Rich Roll?

  Adam Driver.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  Adam Driver, that's a combination of Yaniv Schulman and Ariel Schulman.

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  No way.

• 1:49:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so the guy who's writing Gremlins, Gremlins 3, the guy who's writing the script for Gremlins 3, that's Sam Lysenko.

• 1:49:29Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  And all those people are people from that, from that little world, from this Diane Fink school.

• 1:49:36Rich Roll?

  Right. Francis Ha, how long ago?

• 1:49:39Speaker 01

  Francis Ha, that's right, Francis Ha. I remember watching it, and then Mickey Sumner, she's one of us, she's also in the movie. And I just remember watching this and being like, oh my god. We're like, this community, this like little gang of people? This is like, they're gonna talk about this.

• 1:49:55Rich Roll?

  Somebody should write a book about that, or make a documentary.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:57Rich Roll?

  Just like, call 368, I mean, that's, that's an amazing thing.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  It's super cool, it's super, super cool.

• 1:50:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I didn't know that, I mean, I knew there were some cool people in the building, but I didn't realize the full extent of it.

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm leaving people out, there's Brett Juckowitz, who's a, who's a cinematographer, there's a, I'm leaving people out, there's, I mean, if, if there was one other person from there, if Casey was here, they'd be, he'd be able to name.

• 1:50:21Rich Roll?

  I'm sure, right.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  But it was astonishing, and it was all.

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  And everybody's hanging out and going into, like, is that what led to the, the wall of Polaroids with all the people in the studio?

• 1:50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, I don't know, I don't know, I don't remember where that came from. I think that came from when you would go to, like, our friend, we have a friend named, we have a friend named Cynthia Rowley, and she has, she's like a big fashion designer. And you know, when you go to designers, when they're doing their looks, they do the Polaroids, and they put them on the walls of all the different, like, outfits. I think that comes from that, maybe, I don't really remember, but that was a cool idea.

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  But explain that museum, like, it's M Museum or something, it's like this, it's literally just a closet, like, that goes out, that opens to an alley.

• 1:51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, um, I think it's 80 square feet, it's like 10 by 8. And it's filled with all these.

• 1:51:15Rich Roll?

  It's still there.

• 1:51:16Speaker 01

  Incredible, it's still there, it's filled with all these incredible artifacts. Like, the shows have, now they have, like, really kind of tight themes. It's M Museum M dot com, it's really unbelievable, buy the book, the book is unbelievably great. And Alex Kalman. His mother is Myra Kalman, who's an artist who's incredible. And she did like New Yorker covers and writes books. And then his father was, um, uh, uh, oh gosh. His father was something Kalman and, oh, I can't believe I can't remember his name. I'm so embarrassed. And he is a very pioneering, innovative designer and advertising guy.

• 1:51:58Speaker 01

  And you know who he is because he did, I think he did 100% of the Talking Heads album covers, among other things. And he also is responsible. His company was called M and Co. And they made these umbrellas that had blue skies and on the inside.

• 1:52:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  And, um, so that's his project. And it was started with Josh Safdie and Alex Kalman. And then Alex took it over. And, uh, yeah, it's unbelievable. They did a show where it was all artifacts smuggled in from Syria, like from Syrian refugees. It's, it's, it's incredible, but.

• 1:52:42Rich Roll?

  You did a thing there, didn't you? Where, where you would sit down and talk to people for like a half an hour and then like carve a word into a Swiss army knife?

• 1:52:49Speaker 01

  Okay, look, so I, um, so here, this, I took, I, this, I did this for, um, so I take a Swiss army knife and a wood burner and I engrave with the wood burner, I melt the plastic. And so I have one in my hand here and it's like, I wrote V. Nice Dad on one side and then on the other side, I wrote a date, 10 03 12. And that was the date that that show ended. And, um, I did this for a picture because one of my rewards on, for my Kickstarter campaign was that one of these knives.

• 1:53:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:26Speaker 01

  So I have to make like a hundred of them. Or something.

• 1:53:30Rich Roll?

  The burdens of being a YouTuber.

• 1:53:32Speaker 01

  So you, um, and then it was real gold leaf paint that is in, in the,

• 1:53:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:53:38Speaker 01

  That it's in Boston. And so I did, I set up this little desk, which I made that was all compartmentalized and it held all of the equipment inside of it and it had a handle. And I set it up in that little museum and I wore a suit. And then people would come in and I, you know, for a while I was giving these out as presents, these, the Swiss Champ, which is like the Mac Daddy Swiss Army knife with the pliers in it and the magnifying glass and everything.

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  Right. For people that are listening, that's the super thick one.

• 1:54:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I would do the first initial and then the last name on one side of the knife. And then what I called the golden word on the other knife. And it was just some word that would resonate with the person I was giving it to. So, um, I should give an example, but I can't think. I have a whole list of hundreds of them, but I can't. So I just did this show and I donated a bunch of the proceeds to the museum so that they could pay their rent for like the year. Cause the rent is like a hundred bucks a month or something. Cause it's just a closet. And like, I had all these people come and they would just, they were buying it as a gift for someone. And then they would talk about this person and I would just throw out words.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  I would say, how about, like one of them, I came up with a person was like, that's perfect, was breadcrumbs. And so, um, yeah, that went on for months. And so it's 10/03/12. My sober date is September 8th, 2012. So I was less than one month sober. My hands. Cause I, I developed this stoned and I would be steady as a rock. I could do eyeball surgery. My hands were so steady, so dialed in when I was stoned. One of the reasons why I loved getting stoned is I was so good at making things. The whole world would disappear and I would just be that, I would just be so present.

• 1:55:20Rich Roll?

  So a lot of it was about productivity and, and being able to like do the thing.

• 1:55:25Speaker 01

  It was all in, in service to doing the work.

• 1:55:28Rich Roll?

  So did you have that crisis when you were newly sober of like, I'm never going to be able to do anything creative again? That big fear that-

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  No, because it's just I didn't, I was in the storm. I didn't have a choice.

• 1:55:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  There was, there was like no other way for me to make a living. So it wasn't, it's like, there's this scene in Hearts of Darkness, have you seen this?

• 1:55:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  There's this scene where France, it's about the making of Apocalypse Now and Francis Ford Coppola, who's like 35 years old and he's like mortgaged his house and everything to pay for this production. And the monsoon has wiped out the set and the studio stopped giving him money and like Marlon Brando's not cooperating. Everything's going wrong and he's in the Philippines and there's a civil war going on. And his wife secretly recorded with an audio recorder his like evening conversations. And you hear one of them and like La Traviata is playing in the background. He's making spaghetti. And you hear Coppola and he, she, he's saying, he's like, yeah, so and so said, you know, am I gonna quit? He's like, how can I quit? I can't quit. He's like, I can't quit. There's, there's no way.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  He's like, I could put a bullet in my head and, and, and it, and I mean, that's what it comes down to. There is no, there is no-

• 1:56:39Rich Roll?

  There's no other choice for you.

• 1:56:40Speaker 01

  There's nothing else. It's worse.

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  I mean, of course it's better.

• 1:56:45Rich Roll?

  It's a good news, bad news thing.

• 1:56:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course it's better. And this is what, you know, they all tell you this, like Sax told me this. Sax is like, you know, when you're starting out, he's like, the first thing you do when you make a little money is spend every penny so that you have to keep going. You have to make the, another thing.

• 1:57:02Speaker 01

  And, um, yeah, I don't know. So I was, my hands shook really badly when I was making the knives.

• 1:57:08Rich Roll?

  Wow. That's a story though, that makes me feel nostalgic for New York though. Like it's that, it's a romantic New York story.

• 1:57:18Speaker 01

  The thing about New York is most people's opinion of New York, most people who've been to New York, their opinion of New York is based on visiting New York. Living on that, how long did you live there?

• 1:57:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, it was two years right out of college. So yeah, it was like four guys crashed out in a room and a half.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  That's the golden age.

• 1:57:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, where you can get away with it and it's just a good time. And your apartment is just basically a locker.

• 1:57:43Speaker 01

  Sure. Seventeen to thirty-five, it's, there's no other place like it. It's fantastic. Also, if you have a thing, I don't know if it's still like this because the internet is New York now. But if you have a thing, a mission, and you're like, I'm gonna do, even if it's vague, I want to make a lot of money. I want to become an artist. I want to, even if it's vague, go there and don't stop and you will do it because it is so hard to live there.

• 1:58:05Rich Roll?

  Matters anyway, if you're on that, if you're driven in that way.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:09Rich Roll?

  Doesn't matter what your apartment looks like, or if you're only eating, you know, dollar slices of pizza.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  But to live there, and I've never lived there rich, and I'll bet living there rich is amazing. Like, I think Casey might move back.

• 1:58:23Rich Roll?

  I'm sure he's gonna move back.

• 1:58:24Speaker 01

  His life there, like, I mean, it's no secret that that kid has like a lot of money. And his life there is like luxury apartment, Battery Park City, which is isolated from the rest of Manhattan by the West Side Highway, but it's also its own little village with a movie theater and a mall that has all of the greatest stores and restaurants in existence in it. It has views of the Statue of Liberty. It's clean. They keep all the homeless people out with private security. It's got a park. It's got the West Side bike path that runs through it. It's perfect. You can keep your car, your like Land Rover in the basement in a heated thing. You don't need to take your slippers off. You don't need to leave. Like, yeah, that is cool.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  And you can get on the private plane. You can charter a private plane and fly to your house in Nantucket. Yeah, that's cool. But if you're a regular guy, if you're a regular like middle-class person, and you're living in New York and you're doing the grind and you're dependent on the subway and you

• 1:59:24Rich Roll?

  It's hard.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  And you have a family, it's, it's too, it's not worth it. I'm sorry, it's not.

• 1:59:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:32Speaker 01

  And I think past like, and in my forties, it very nearly killed me. Very difficult place, very difficult place.

• 1:59:39Rich Roll?

  So here to stay in LA.

• 1:59:42Speaker 01

  And LA is the greatest city in the world. And Werner Herzog, in person, said to me, "Los Angeles is the most vital city in the world."

• 1:59:50Rich Roll?

  When did he say that to you?

• 1:59:51Speaker 01

  This was in 2018 or 19.

• 1:59:55Rich Roll?

  You gotta walk me through how you ended up in a conversation with Werner Herzog.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so...

• 2:00:01Rich Roll?

  And, like, maybe a little background on, like, you know, the fanboy fascination with this remarkable human.

• 2:00:09Speaker 01

  With Herzog?

• 2:00:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's the best.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is what it is. This, how did we find out? I think Tom Sachs told me about Herzog, I think. And we were making this piece for Sachs called Toyens, and it was the largest boombox in the world. And I think it had 100,000 watts of amplifiers. And it was 220. It wasn't 110. It was like, there was so much amperage that they had to use a different, they had to use like the kind of voltage that you use in a washing machine. Or maybe it was 110? And then somebody connected it to 220 and the whole thing? Anyway, the thing was huge. It probably weighed over a ton.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  And we had to move it from Tom's studio to this amazing warehouse on Hester Street that's now luxury apartments. And it was like two or three blocks. But you have to, you know, negotiate traffic and... This is the legend in my mind. It's probably not true. This isn't probably what happened. But I think Tom put on his required viewing list to watch this movie called Burden of Dreams. And it is a Wes blank film about Werner Herzog making Fitzcarraldo. And in the making of Fitzcarraldo,

• 2:01:39Speaker 01

  I believe Werner Herzog was 35 years old. And he was making it the way that we make films. Like, just a few people, camera guy, blah, blah, blah. Not all the trailers and stuff. And he was in Peru. And sort of the central theme of the movie was this man with this dream of bringing opera to the Amazon rainforest.

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  And in order to do it, he needed to bring this gigantic ship over a mountain to a different river so that he could get rubber and bring it down to, it was like during the rubber boom and that's how he was gonna afford to buy the opera house. I believe that's the premise of the movie and it was based on a guy who actually did bring a movie, a boat over a mountain. But he took the boat apart, the guy who did it in real life. And the mountain wasn't as steep as the one that Herzog did. So Herzog, it took him 10 years to make this movie. And with just rudimentary

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  levers and so forth and rope and native people, they brought this like, I don't know how many, 100 ton ship over a pretty steep, mucky mountain. They really did it for this film. And I think Sacks had us watch it because it's like, okay, look, guys, if you're gonna get into this business, this is this business. This is what this business is. And this guy, this guy is doing something that is impossible. It's not impossible. You can't do this. And I made a movie called Toyin's Burden and it's about, and it takes audio from that, from Burden of Dreams and it's about us moving this

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  boombox down into the thing. And in that movie, he's, you know, Herzog talks about the jungle, working in the jungle and he's like, people talk about, you know, the harmony of the jungle and he's like, there is no harmony, but if there is a harmony, it's the harmony of collective murder.

• 2:03:45Rich Roll?

  That's such a classic, you know, in his Droll Deadpan, you know.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  And so my whole, my whole like, um, voiceover, cause I write all those Sacks movies. I wrote all those voiceovers and I, you know, I delivered them, but I'm just channeling him, his style, his, he's just such a master at turning the, making little ironic things and, and putting in these little incredible jokes, but with such reverence that it could, you could miss it. And so we made this movie, Tom Sachs and I, we had been writing, we made a movie called Ten Bullets, which is basically about how to behave in a job, on a job. When you have a job, these are the 10 things that you should do. Be on time, keep a list. There's 10,

• 2:04:32Speaker 01

  there's 10 of them, 10 bullets. It's incredible. And we made a sequel to it that was written by Alex Cholas Woods, and it was called The Fear Bullets. And it was for managers. And it was about, like, one of those bullets was like, never yell under any circumstances. And so Tom and I, it took us years to write the sequel. And we wrote part of it, and we went to Japan. We went to this place called Onomichi in Japan, and had like, a very peaceful time. We took the bullet train there from Tokyo. And we very slowly teased out this movie. And one of us had this idea, it's like, it's not the fear bullets. The bullets, what these, what we're getting at in all these bullets, is that when you get to a certain

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  level with, with your work, or when you get, there's a certain level that you get to in your endeavors, where your skill is so good, that you reach these paradoxes, where you are entrapped in a paradox. And you have to pick the left versus the right. And they're both right, and they're both wrong. And so we made this, we wrote this script for a movie called Paradox Bullets. And I can't remember how many there are. I don't think there were 10. I think there were six. And like, one of them was like, never give up, know when to quit. That was one of the bullets. Do the hard thing first, do the easy thing

• 2:05:51Speaker 01

  first. And so, I did the first voiceover. And Mario Sorrenti, who's a, he's a photographer. He discovered Kate Moss. But he's a photographer, and he's a friend of Tom's studios. And I consider him a friend of mine. And his common law wife is Mary Frye. And she's also a friend of the studio. Anyway, Mario Sorrenti said, you should get Herzog. You should get Herzog to do this. And we're like, how are we gonna get Herzog? And he's, they're just, and Mario's like, just, just figure out how to pay him. Just figure out. And so Tom got Nike to pay for the movie. And so, I don't know what the deal transpired, but we got Herzog to do it. And

• 2:06:36Speaker 01

  At the end of the movie, he added a line. And it was to the bullet that was, um, oh, God, if I was my mom, I would know this detail. I could remember this detail.

• 2:06:50Rich Roll?

  Is it online? Can you find it online?

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's online. It was something about how we work in the, how we work in, oh, it was something like, follow irrational ideas with as, as rationally and logically as possible, right? And so we get to the end of that bullet and then Herzog in the studio, in the booth, doing the voiceover says something like, "Otherwise, we are no better than the cow in the field." And that day was unbelievable because I had, you know, when I do my voiceovers, I am channeling him. I am channeling, I'm like, okay, that is the pen, that's as high as you can get with

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  voiceover narration.

• 2:07:38Rich Roll?

  The spirited man.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  Yes. And so to hear him, he's reading my words and it sounds exactly like a Herzog film. And I don't know, it was, I don't know what that is.

• 2:07:50Rich Roll?

  It can't be anything else if he's reading it.

• 2:07:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know, it's just, I don't know, but I wrote the words, you know what I mean?

• 2:07:59Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  It was really, it was like a, I don't know, I felt like a little kid or something. I don't know, it was really, really, really cool.

• 2:08:06Rich Roll?

  For people that are less familiar with, with his work, I love the stuff about the Werner Herzog Film School, which is basically like, you know, with no money, find your way across Europe and, you know, get a, get a job, like all this crazy stuff, like this is your film school, basically like go live a life of adventure and hardship.

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, he said, "The application process is you have to walk a tremendous amount of, a tremendous number of miles to me. Keep a journal every day and by reading it, I'll know if you were lying."

• 2:08:45Speaker 01

  Because there's a famous story of this, um, he was in,

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  I can't remember, he was in like Munich or something. And this is a very close friend of his, who was a film critic, I think her name was Lottie something, was dying and she said, I have two months to live, Werner, I have cancer. And he said, do not die before I get to you, I'm coming to you, do not die. And he walked. So it took him months and months and months, so she kept living. And then she went on to live years and years after that. And he wrote, and it's called like, I think it's called Walking Through Fire and Ice. Is the name of the book. It was like.

• 2:09:23Rich Roll?

  That's crazy.

• 2:09:25Speaker 01

  I don't know, he's just, he's unbelievable. He bought us fish and chips.

• 2:09:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:29Speaker 01

  We, he scheduled four hour, he scheduled four hours for the, for the voiceover. But his game is so tight and our game is so tight, it took us 30 minutes.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  And so after he showed us a cut of his film,

• 2:09:46Speaker 01

  without music, and then he talked to his editor, he was like, I want you to look up. And then he was like Georgian wedding hymns. And the kid's just like, and he looks it up and he plays it and he's like, okay, plug that in. And we're watching this movie and I'm watching it, I'm like, you know, without the music, it's like, I'm like looking at sax, I'm like, what, this is her sax? And he puts the music in and you're like, holy shit. And it was just amazing, I mean, I got to see the guy, you got to see him doing the thing. But.

• 2:10:20Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 2:10:21Speaker 01

  You know, he's still doing it, he's still doing it like the YouTube way.

• 2:10:24Rich Roll?

  I know, right?

• 2:10:26Speaker 01

  Suitcase with cameras and just he shoots and no permits. He said, you know, one of the film, an essential filmmaking school is the ability to forge documents, to make counterfeit documents.

• 2:10:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's his whole thing.

• 2:10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Speaker 01

  And he had one, he was shooting in Peru, he had it signed by like the president of Peru. He just like forges his signature and he hands it to the Colonel or whatever and they're just like.

• 2:10:50Rich Roll?

  I know. What a gift that guy is.

• 2:10:52Speaker 01

  Oh my God, he's so good. I just watched some, oh, I watched My Best Fiend, I had never seen it.

• 2:10:59Rich Roll?

  I haven't seen that.

• 2:11:00Speaker 01

  That's about his relationship with Klaus Kinski, who was the star of, um, of Fitzcarraldo. He played Fitzcarraldo and he was an absolute maniac.

• 2:11:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:12Rich Roll?

  I'll check that out. Well, let's round this out, but I can't, I can't, I can't end it with, without a few thoughts on just this idea of the spirited man. Like, where does it come from? And what does it mean to you personally?

• 2:11:33Speaker 01

  Okay, so where it comes from is this book by Matthew B. Crawford, and it's called Shop Class as Soulcraft. And Matthew B. Crawford is a writer, and he started out, he had a PhD from, I can't remember, I think maybe University of Chicago, in philosophy. And he worked at think tanks, made a lot of money consulting, like, I think, big corporations and executives. But his real love was working on vintage motorcycles. And he was like, he raced his Volkswagen Beetle when he was a kid. And he wrote this book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. And it's about the kind of like, intellectual significance of working with one's hands,

• 2:12:17Speaker 01

  of making things with one's hands. And I read it, I think I read it in two, I think it came out in 2009, I might have read it in 2011 or something like that. And it was an incredible relief to know that there were people out there that were like, bookworms, and they were tinkerer people like me, who like to mess around with machines and stuff. And this was it. And this is like, the book about it. And in it, he has a chapter where he's talking about how the new cars, you just, you need millions of dollars worth of diagnostic equipment to figure out what's wrong with them. And you plug in a USB into your 7-series BMW, and all this stuff comes out.

• 2:12:57Speaker 01

  And he said something like, "The spirited man needs to know exactly what's wrong with his car," or something like that. Or like, you know, and then he went on to talk about, basically, that the spirited man is a man who can take care of his own stuff. And so, that's, to me, what it is, is a, you know, the spirited man is a man who, I said it in the, in one of the episodes, is a man who takes care of his own business.

• 2:13:26Speaker 01

  So that's what it is.

• 2:13:28Rich Roll?

  It's also, it's this discomfort or intolerance for asymmetry in the universe, right? When there's something off, like you walked into our studio and immediately gravitated towards this corner where we have a bunch of stuff stacked and you're like, that is unacceptable, right? It's not, it's not so much-

• 2:13:45Speaker 01

  It's very expensive stuff.

• 2:13:47Rich Roll?

  It's not, it's not like, uh, I'm sure a lot of people would call it like an OCD. It's more like a hyper vigilance and a sensitivity to this idea that, that there's a right way of doing things.

• 2:13:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean?

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:01Rich Roll?

  And it's not okay to be, to slack off on that.

• 2:14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:05Rich Roll?

  Like, there is, there is valor in doing things properly.

• 2:14:10Speaker 01

  You know, we live in this very, in this era, this, this era, have you read The Fourth Turning? Do you know that book?

• 2:14:16Rich Roll?

  No, but I saw your book report.

• 2:14:18Speaker 01

  It's so good. It's so good. Cause these guys are financial guys and you can trust these guys? You can, I know it sounds weird. These financial guys, they make these predictions. They say, okay, these trends exist and then they make money off of it, which is the hardest thing to do. So in my mind, you can listen to these guys. These guys, these, these words have weight, like Ray Dalio, yeah, he can predict the future. He's good at it. He's been doing it for 50 years. So one of the things that this guy says is people in our generation, Gen X, and we also line up with the lost generation. That's the same generation in that history slot. Hemingway and all those guys, they were Xers of their time. We grew up in a time, a post-war, very rich, unraveling time where kinda anything went, right?

• 2:15:02Speaker 01

  And one of the conclusions that I drew with anything goes is no, that's not true. Anything goes provided certain things are perfect. And I don't know this, I-

• 2:15:16Speaker 01

  To me, my whole being able to wrestle my craziness into something productive was all because of me learning disciplines, you know, learning techniques and learning things that aren't negotiable. You know, sometimes as a creative person, you think, "Oh, I can read blah, blah, blah. I don't need the three act structure. I don't need plot. I don't know. No, no, no, no, no." What, thousands of years of innovation and you're not, and you're an exception to thousands of years of Plato and Socrates and all these people being, you know, having to follow these rules, but you don't know, no, no, no, no, no. And I think, I don't know, maybe this is, these are sort of the little,

• 2:16:01Speaker 01

  these are the little things that are just the residue of me learning that stuff the absolute hard way.

• 2:16:10Rich Roll?

  But how does that, how does that square with the fourth turning in the sense that, you know, you're perceiving yourself as, as a cog in, in a machine that's kind of, you know, progressing towards this, you know, this dismantling as we, as we progress towards 2028, right? Like, we're in this age of basically, you know, an unraveling of sorts, right? A destruction, a reckoning.

• 2:16:34Speaker 01

  Crisis. We're in the crisis. Unraveling is what we grew up in. We grew up in, the unraveling was 1984, maybe 1988, end of Reagan, to 2008. That was the unraveling. Now we're in the crisis. But before the unraveling is the awakening, and that's the, starts in 63 with the assassination of, but are, one of the characteristics of our generation throughout history, you can go back to Civil War, all that, is that we are a repair generation. And we are the ones that say, "No, no, no, no, no. You have to save this. You have to save these institutions. This is of value." And that, you know, and, and reading, reading

• 2:17:18Speaker 01

  that book, and reading the other one, the spirited man, the, you know, Matthew B. Crawford book, Shop Class is Soulcraft, and frankly, listening to certain Jordan Peterson lectures, it made me very comfortable with the fact of like,

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  It would be artistically rewarding and valuable to isolate, to like really narrowly focus on your propensity to like repair in a very literal sense. And if you are literal and precise enough about it, it'll have a universal resonance with people. And so I try not to be self-conscious or perceptive. Like, that's all subconscious stuff that I learn after I've made the thing. I try to just really dial in, like, you know, these little details. I just try to really dial into them and then just trust that in writing the, you know, the words that I'm gonna narrate,

• 2:18:19Speaker 01

  that it will have some kind of universe. There'll be some universal power in it. But the thing I'm trying to, I think the thing that I'm consciously trying to, to talk about is that there, there are things that we have to preserve and there are very valuable things. And many great people gave lives and stuff to bring us this thing, this civilization that we live in, and it's unbelievably great. It's unbelievably good. And look, I hate it just as much as everybody else. And I bitch about it. And I hate that my fucking AirPod Pros do not sync up every time. It's like, you are a trillion dollar company. Solve that problem, please.

• 2:19:02Rich Roll?

  How about when you publish a podcast and it doesn't show up in the fucking app for like 40 hours?

• 2:19:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's hospitalization for me.

• 2:19:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it speaks to you, you know, reading that and seeing that must have been like, I've never felt so heard in my life. Like, now I can fulfill my destiny as a repairman and preach and speak to this idea of preservation and appreciation for the tactile and the analog, because these things do have meaning, especially as we hurdle towards this disposable culture where everything gets thrown away. I mean, and it's, it's almost not... Like responsibility doesn't always fall on the individual's shoulders. Like, my daughter has a record player. And she said to me the other day, like, can we go get this fixed? It's broken.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  How old is she?

• 2:19:57Rich Roll?

  13.

• 2:19:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:19:59Rich Roll?

  And, and I said, yeah, of course. I said, why don't you, I want you to go online. I want you to find a place that will repair it and then call me.

• 2:20:06Speaker 01

  Good luck.

• 2:20:07Rich Roll?

  Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so the reply is Guitar Center. I know Guitar Center is not going to repair a record player. And I said, I want you to call Guitar Center and ask them that question. Figure out, like, we did find a place in Woodland Hills that does audio repair.

• 2:20:23Speaker 01

  Wonderful.

• 2:20:23Rich Roll?

  So, we're going to go have this experience, right? So, we take this record player. That's probably worth $65. It's not a high-end thing, you know? It's intended to be disposable, right? But we're going to try to repair it. The repair shop requires $50 just to look at it before the, and then 10 days before they actually give you a diagnosis and tell you whether they can even fix it and what that, what's that, what that is going to look like. So, we're in the waiting phase now. But my prognosis is that they're either not going to be able to fix it or the cost of fixing it is going to so exceed the value of the thing itself that it doesn't make economic sense to do it.

• 2:21:06Speaker 01

  So you think.

• 2:21:07Rich Roll?

  What?

• 2:21:08Speaker 01

  The cost of fixing it will exceed the value of the thing itself.

• 2:21:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so I think.

• 2:21:13Speaker 01

  That's where, I mean, that I wrestle with. That is, that's basically like my life is wrestling with that. And the truck, my truck is the embodiment of that.

• 2:21:24Rich Roll?

  Right, but your truck is...

• 2:21:27Speaker 01

  If you want to be rational about it, you're right. And if you want to be rational about it, throw that thing in the garbage can and go get an iPhone. But this is an irrational thing that you're doing. It's irrational to do that record player. That's not rational.

• 2:21:38Rich Roll?

  That's what I'm, that's what, that, that makes my point that it isn't the individual's fault for not adopting a sensibility like yours, right? Because you have to, you have to be irrational to do it.

• 2:21:51Speaker 01

  Not at all, not at all. No, this is, it's a gift. It's a gift. I have a gift. I've been like this always. Since I was a little baby, I've been like this. It's a gift. And I'm grateful for it. And I don't know, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say beyond that, but I've exploited it. And it's, yeah, it's.

• 2:22:10Rich Roll?

  I don't think you're exploiting it, you're expressing it.

• 2:22:12Speaker 01

  Okay, sure.

• 2:22:13Rich Roll?

  And you're doing it beautifully. And I think that's probably a good place to, to end it. Anything else you want to say? Any final?

• 2:22:22Speaker 01

  Well, no, but, nothing but thank you for having me and thanks for the coffee. It was very good.

• 2:22:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Super fun talking to you. Everybody, definitely go check out The Spirited Man on YouTube. Subscribe immediately and enjoy. Two videos a week. How many do you have now? Like 16 or 17 or something like that?

• 2:22:41Speaker 01

  I think I'm in the twenties. Maybe 24.

• 2:22:44Rich Roll?

  You're on your way.

• 2:22:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:22:46Rich Roll?

  You're on your way. Let's go to a meeting in the meantime.

• 2:22:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:22:51Rich Roll?

  All right. Cool. Thanks, man.

• 2:22:54Speaker 01

  All right, thank you.

• 2:22:55Rich Roll?

  Appreciate it. Peace.

• 2:23:06Rich Roll?

  Thanks for listening, everybody. For links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page on richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis.

• 2:23:49Rich Roll?

  Portraits by Ally Rogers and Davy Greenberg. Graphic elements courtesy of Jessica Miranda. Copyrighting by Georgia Whaley. And our theme music was created by Tyler Piotte, Trapper Piotte, and Harry Mathis. You can find me at richroll.com or on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. I appreciate the love. I love the support. I don't take your attention for granted. Thank you for listening. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Amasté.