Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #93 Rich Roll on Conversation, Connection and How To Cope In a Toxic World

Episode Date: January 15, 2020

My guest on this week’s podcast is plant-powered wellness advocate, best-selling author and podcast host, Rich Roll. You may remember Rich from episode 28, when he talked about his transformation from overweight alcoholic to vegan ultra-endurance athlete, and the importance of finding purpose in life. Rich is the first of my guests to feature on Feel Better Live More for a second time and that’s because, when I met him back in autumn 2018, I felt a deep connection and I knew our conversation wasn’t finished. We cover so much ground in this chat, from learning how to say no, to avoiding the toxic nutrition wars on Twitter and why it’s OK not to watch the News. Rich recounts his journey of sobriety and reveals why ‘alcoholic’ is one label he’ll never give up. We talk about addiction as a broad spectrum of disease that even includes our dependence on technology. Finally, we discuss how best to cope with the divided state of the world, how vital it is to open up to new perspectives, and why long-form conversations – like this very podcast – might just be the antidote we need in our distracted, modern world.   I think you can hear how much I enjoyed catching up with Rich again and I know there will be many topics that resonate with you. I hope you find it as inspiring as I did.  Show notes available at drchatterjee.com/93 Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee/ Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee/ Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I really believe that addiction is a spectrum disease that essentially affects every single human being. And what I mean by that is, on the one hand, you have the alcoholic who's in the gutter or the heroin addict that just can't pull, you know, who's got abscesses and can't keep the needle out of his or her arm. But on the other hand, at the very other end of the spectrum, you have the person who mindlessly scrolls through Instagram while they're standing in line at Starbucks, or the person who repeatedly dates the wrong person that's bad for them,

or the individual who keeps looping a self-defeating narrative about who they are. Those are all different forms of addiction or compulsive behavior patterns that separate us from our innate divinity and prevent us from being the self-actualized human beings that we're capable of being. far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier, because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 93 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Rangan Chatterjee and I am your host.

Now my guest on this week's podcast is wellness advocate, best-selling author, and one of my favorite podcast hosts, the amazing Rich Roll. Now, you may remember Rich from episode 28 when he talked about his amazing transformation from overweight alcoholic to healthy eating ultra endurance athlete. If you have not yet heard that conversation, I would highly recommend you go back and listen. Rich's personal story is incredible and very inspirational. And as well as his journey, we really delve deep into the importance of finding purpose in your life. Now, Rich is actually the first person to feature as a guest on Feel Better

Live More for a second time. And that's because when I met him back in autumn 2018, I felt a really deep connection and I knew our conversation wasn't finished. Back in early October 2019, I was in LA promoting my second book, The Stress Solution. And I went out to Rich's house to feature on his wonderful podcast. But that episode came out in mid-December and many of you I know have already heard it and enjoyed hearing me being on the other side of the mic. We actually recorded this conversation for my own podcast straight afterwards so it was a bit of a marathon session. We cover so much ground in this chat from learning how to say no to avoiding the toxic nutrition wars on Twitter and why it's okay to not watch the news.

toxic nutrition wars on Twitter and why it's okay to not watch the news. Rich recounts his journey of sobriety and reveals why alcoholic is one label he will never give up. We talk about addiction as a broad spectrum of disease that even includes our dependence on technology and even social media. Finally, we discuss how best to cope with the divided states of the world, how vital it is to open up to new perspectives, and why long-form conversations like this very podcast might just be the antidote we need in our distracted modern world. I think you could hear how much I enjoyed catching up with Rich again, and we cover so many different topics that I am sure will deeply resonate with you. I hope you find this conversation as inspiring as I did. Now before we get started as always I need to do a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. I'm a huge fan of Viva

Barefoot Shoes and I'm delighted that this minimalist footwear company continue to support my podcast. I have been wearing their shoes exclusively for many years, long before they started supporting my podcast, and I've experienced lots of benefits both for myself and for many of my patients. Basically, I wear Viva Barefoot Shoes anytime that I'm not actually barefoot. So for work, for walking and for exercising. They make shoes for kids and adults and for every occasion, both work and play. And walking in their shoes is one of the best ways

to start transitioning to minimalist shoes. It can help you to start connecting with your feet and the ground. Now, Vivo recently made a short documentary shedding light on why modern day shoes and particularly trainers are, as they say, a shoe-shaped public health scandal. You can take a look at www.shoespiracy.tv. I think you will really get a deep understanding

after watching this, why modern shoes can be so problematic for many of us. For listeners of my show they continue to offer a fantastic discount. If you go to vivobarethought.com forward slash live more they are giving 20% off as a one-time code for all of my podcast listeners in the UK, USA and Australia. Importantly they offer a 30-day free trial for new customers. So if you're not happy, you can simply send them back for a full refund. You can get your 20% off by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. Rich, first of all, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast.

Thank you for having me not at all um thank you i've just been on your show and we are now we're doing a marathon today we're doing a marathon we've done we're in two and a half hours on yours let's see how far we go with this you are officially the first ever returning guest on my show oh wow so thank you thank you for coming on there is so much i want to talk to you about if we just continue what we were just sort of stumbling across at the start of this conversation you mentioned it's important to try new things so i think there's something about that that really appeals to me it makes me think so if we start off with the podcast but then sort of move on to

why trying new things might be so important for people who are trying to make change and improvements in their life so with it you know you're someone who's put out a lot of podcasts certainly compared to me i think i'm currently as we speak on episode 76 i think goes out tomorrow it's pretty good though it's not bad a lot of people abandon it after about seven or 10. Yeah, well, I'm- When they realize how much work it is. It is so much work. And you've been incredibly successful.

So hats off. Yeah, look, it's probably the funnest thing in everything that I do. I love it. I love the opportunities you get as the podcast gets bigger. You get to talk to more and more amazing people who you otherwise would never have the opportunity to sit across the table and chat to.

So that's incredible for me. But one thing I've always wanted to do with it, and I have always done, is take risks on it. Talk to people with content that maybe, you know, some of my listeners may not initially want to hear or maybe a bit too close to the bone. But I've always enjoyed that because I kind of feel my premise when I book a guest, and I used to be really bad at saying no, I am getting better at saying no. And I kind of get the impression you have some of these similar traits I have. It's really for me, it's one thing is, am I deeply, deeply interested in talking to that person? Do I really want to spend an hour, two hours with them and learn from them and find things out about them? How do you decide who you have on your show? Yeah, it's been an evolution.

I mean, I would agree with that completely in that if I can't find, if my instinct or my intuition isn't on fire for that person, then I've learned that that's a no. I have to have some kind of natural curiosity and interest in exploring who that person is. And if I don't have that, then it's going to be a flat conversation. And I've learned that through making mistakes. Like I've been in plenty of situations where a lot of people are like, oh, you got to, this person's amazing. You're going to love it. You guys are going to get along great. It's going to be incredible. And I'm like, yeah, I don't, I guess, but like, but so many people would say it and be like, okay, okay, okay. And I do it. And then sure enough, it's flat and it's no slight against the guest. It's just,

I'm not the right host for that person because for whatever reason, like we're not vibrating on the same level. Um, so my number one rule has become, um, following my own curiosity and trusting that voice. Uh, and that means sometimes I pass on people and it puts me in a position where I have to actually, I have to say no a lot. Like now the podcast has grown to such an extent that I get email solicitations all day long, every single day. I get all the books and you were just in my container. You saw all the books stacked up because the publishing houses, I'm on their list. They send me the books. So So and I get, you know, solicits people and people pitch themselves like, so navigating all of that as a people pleaser causes me like I need the stress solution for that, because I want to say

yes to everybody. And I think everybody has a cool story. And and the public could probably benefit from me helping get that out there. But the reminder that I have to keep returning to for myself is that my obligation is to the audience. What is in the best interest of the audience and how can I best serve that audience? And I've learned from experience that the best way for me to do that is to find the people that I'm on fire for, seek them out and share their message. And because I do this all in person and in the studio, that means sometimes I'll be like at any given moment, I have missives out, you know, maybe 20 different people that I'm trying to schedule. And sometimes it takes a year or maybe two years before schedules align and that

person finds himself sitting in the chair that you're sitting in right now. Yeah. It's, it's interesting to hear your journey. Um, in my limited time of doing this, I also have this sort of constant state of overwhelm with the podcast and that it's just real clash to me. I love it. I really enjoy talking to the people I get to talk to, but actually the process of making it happen, all the back and forth emails, juggling schedules, figuring out where this is going to be. I mean, you live in LA, right? You live, well, not quite. Well, I think this is technically in LA. Yeah. But it's still outside of LA. I mean, it's, it's actually a lot to ask guests to come all the way out here because it's, it's, it's, it's at least an hour drive from where most people are hanging out in LA.

Hey, well, so my house, right, where I'm now recording a lot more podcasts is one hour and 40 minutes on a fast train out of London. Right. Right. So I used to do all my initial ones in London. I did a few on Skype. And for me, it's just not what I want to do. You know, we've just been unpacking my book on your show

and I talk about these relationships and connection. And there's something about being, you know, we are what one meter, one and a half meters away from each other. I love that. I'm super fortunate because as the podcast has grown, now guests are traveling from London to come on the show, um, which is great for me because now it has that value for people. Hey, actually it's gonna, it's gonna be worth me getting on the show. It's gonna be worth me spending six hours, you know, two hours traveling out, two hours on the show, two hours back. That has value for me and getting my message out. And I am so grateful for that because frankly, I don't want to travel all the time to do this. And you can use technology if

you want to make that easier, but it's not really what I want to do. I think the way you do it is fantastic, but it's tricky. And I don't know what it's like for you, man. If I come back into the house one more time and there are books in my porch and it's like, babe, what are you going to do with all these books? It's like, where do you put this stuff? And you feel really bad because these are people's works that you've you're an author i'm an author it takes a long time to write a book to sort of go deep and you would love to talk to everybody but you can't right no you can't i mean you you know i think it's like for me because i am a people pleaser and because saying no is so difficult it's almost like the

universe has conspired to create this situation to uh compel me to work on this character defect and learn how to erect healthy boundaries you know it's not personal it's like i'm sure everybody you know everybody's like i said everyone's got something to say and all these books have value um i think the way to to help me feel better about it is to look at it like you do seasons with your show. But I'll say, I have this many slots for the rest of the year. Like, I have 12 spots left. Like, who are those 12 spots going to go to? And then when you think of it from that perspective, you're like, well, I want to find the right people.

You know, the right people for my show and the people that i think i can have the best conversations with yeah no for sure an ability to say no we've just explored that with you regarding the podcast but whether someone hosts a podcast or not that is a universal theme these days that people are struggling with in this era of overload in this era of opportunity where we're always seeing somebody else who might be doing such a wonderful thing and then someone else you know like me i'm in california this week so somebody might look at one of my instagram posts and go hey you know what a great life this guy's leading you know he gets to go out and work in california and hey i i am living a great life and i's leading, you know, he gets to go out and work in California. And hey, I am

living a great life and I'm very fortunate. I feel very, very lucky about that. But I've been working my butt off out here. I've been working really, really hard, but that is actually potentially not what is coming out on the post. And so circling back to just saying no, or how do you say no? One of the things I get from listening to your podcast is inspiration, storytelling in a way that makes me want to become a better person, makes me want to actually listen to that and go, hey, you know what? I want to sort of use that inspiration to change something in my life. But not being able to say no in this current culture means that we feel overwhelmed, means that we're often not able to prioritize and do the things that we really want to do. We fill it with kind of low value activities.

So I wonder if you have anything to share with people on, you know, how do you say no? How have you got better at saying no? And how are you planning to get even better again yourself? I have navigated this very inelegantly and through making lots of mistakes my default uh character defect because i'm also very conflict averse is that when i get an email that comes in asking me to do something and i realize like I could say yes but I don't really want to say yes and if I just immediately responded to it and said hey I'm really sorry uh it can't happen I'll have this like tickle that says well tell them to check

in with you in six months you know it's like yeah you leave the the the door cracked open a little bit. Not a good idea, right? Like it's okay to just say, hey man, I'm going to pass, it's cool. Best of luck to you. But I'll be like, yeah, I'll either do that or the worst case scenario is I shove it aside and I say, I'll respond to that later. And quite often I never respond to it,

which always inevitably creates a bigger conflict than the one you're trying to avoid in the moment, right? So what I was taught early in recovery was, if you're going to eat crow, eat it hot. In other words, just deal with this stuff as it arises. And the process of erecting healthy boundaries is very related to self-esteem right like when you feel like you're lucky to be getting that opportunity and it might not happen again, you're coming from a place of lack, then you're more likely to transgress that boundary. But if you're coming from a place of self-assuredness and a sense that the universe is infinitely abundant and that because you're

passing on this opportunity, that is not a reflection on whether you'll get another opportunity, then I think it's easier to just dispassionately say, or compassionately say, no thanks, I'm too busy. And I think the other pitfall that I find myself falling into, and I think it's very common, is this sense of guilt. Like, well, I actually do have time. Like, I could make the time. So if I say I don't have time, that's not really honest. But what's helped me reframe that is understanding that when you say you don't have enough time, it's not saying like, oh, I couldn't carve out that hour or whatever it would be.

It's that my time is precious. I value it and I'm already over allocated. And the free time that I do have needs to be spent, um, with my friends, with my family, taking care of myself or with respect to my profession. And it's okay to do that. And I think if people really embrace that, it would alleviate a lot of, that's another stress solution, right? Because I think this causes a lot of stress for a lot of people. You know, when you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else, right? is if somebody asked me to do something and it's far enough in the future like i'll agree to anything you know what i mean like hey can you come and talk at this event in nine months from now on this date and i'll look at my calendar and it's wide open because it's so far in the future what happens two weeks before that and then yeah and then oh yeah like literally like a week you're like i can't believe i agreed oh man this is speaking my language and then i'm constantly

and i'm like never again and i'm constantly living in that state of like, I just have to get through this thing that I agreed to do so long ago, and then I'll be free. And I think that's another trap. Richard, you said something there that has really got me thinking, when you're coming from a position of a lack of something, that can lead to a lot of downstream issues, right? And I guess, you know, I think one of the reasons I feel quite deeply connected to you, even though this is the second time we've actually met face to face, yes, I listen to you a lot, a huge fan of your show. But I see very similar character traits over a number of things that I guess draws me to the things that you're talking about, you know, an inability or a trying to work on how to say no better rather than an inability, I should say.

Being a perfectionist and something you said recently on a podcast, or maybe it was a social media post that really went straight to my heart, which is this idea that, you know, when you disagree with a podcast guest, which is, you know, which happens, I always really, I have struggled. I'm getting better at what to do in that situation. But, you know, I've very much come from a place that this is a guest in my home or this is a guest on my show. I want to treat them respectfully. Being respectful means not challenging, means listening, being attentive. And I've really gone, I've made huge strides in my own life personally, which I hope has been reflected in the podcast where I now feel, hey, disagreeing with someone, respectfully trying to clarify something, respectfully trying

to just tease something out and say, hey, well, look, you know, I have a different perspective on that. That's okay. That doesn't mean you're disrespecting someone. So I know this is a trait you've spoken about before. Have you got better got better would you say at challenging your guests when you disagree with them yeah i mean i'm not an investigative journalist and i'm not having guests on so that i can put them in gotcha situations uh and i do have people on the show that i disagree with on certain things but i also don't go out of my way to find like the controversial guests that we're going to have some kind of my way to find like the controversial guests that we're going to have some kind of huge, you know, thing like that, that doesn't feel comfortable to me either. But I think, you know, healthy disagreement is healthy, right? Like, if you're

going to talk to somebody for two hours, if you're just saying, that's awesome, and I agree, and amazing to everything they say, that's going to be a pretty stagnant conversation, right? And you're not being disrespectful to say, you can do it in a compassionate way. You don't have to be combative about it. But if you're like, if you lead with curiosity and say tell me more about that or like did you think of it from this angle or i've always thought it was like this explain to me like why i might not be seeing it your way like there are ways in to explore those differences and do it in a deferential way and i think right, it's critical that we find ways to do that because we're in a situation in which dialogue and discourse has been fractured and people have decamped to their

respective fiefdoms and surrounded themselves with news feeds that just reinforce their point of view. And the idea that you would cross that aisle and entertain a perspective from somebody who's not part of your tribe is anathema. And I think when you're operating under that perspective, you're participating in what I think is ultimately the denigration and destruction of democratic society. You know, free speech is important. Respect is important. And being able to communicate with people that you don't see eye to eye to is absolutely vital for a healthy society.

I got an Instagram direct message just a few hours ago. I think I read it in the Uber on the way here, actually, from someone who listens to this show and said, Dr. Chastity, I wonder if you could do a podcast on how to handle the political discourse that is going on in the world at the moment, how to handle this toxicity. This stresses me out every day. I feel really pessimistic about the state of the world. I don't know what to do about it. It's having a negative impact on my health. And I thought about it. I thought that's a really great idea. Let me think about how I could have that conversation. Let me think about a guest who I might be able to talk to about that. But I actually, I suspect you may have a lot to

offer there. You know, what advice would you give to that lady who is struggling to navigate this toxic political discourse that if you consume the media, if you consume the mainstream media, which generally speaking, I do not anymore. If you choose to do that, what can somebody do? Well, I think a couple things. First of all, to reiterate what you just said,

you don't need to be consuming that. And if you feel compelled to consume it because to do otherwise would mean that you're not participating in society, I think is an illusion. We have this idea that we need to be watching the nightly news every night or we need to be watching the nightly news every night, or we need to be consuming the 24-hour news cycle. And I would submit to that

person that they should really question the value of that, right? Like how much is being completely up to speed on everything in the news cycle contributing to your life or how much is it contributing to a lack of health in your life. So that's one thing. The second thing is you don't have to have an opinion on everything. You don't have to be chiming in on Twitter with your perspective on every single issue or getting involved in spats and making sure that everybody understands where you stand. I think a lot of that comes from not a true desire to have an even-handed good faith discussion with somebody else, nor is it truly about trying to get that other person to change their mind. And I think often it's about signaling to get that other person to change their mind.

And I think often it's about signaling to your tribe that you're a member in good standing and that you adhere to that doctrine or that perspective. The next thing I would say is that to the extent that you want to engage with somebody who shares a different point of view and you want to do that in good faith and with arms wide open, the best thing to do is to set aside your judgment, try to put yourself in their shoes, see the world through their perspective, and lead with vulnerability and curiosity. If you allow yourself to be vulnerable, if you admit you don't know everything and you say, tell me about your life, tell me why you feel this way, and you genuinely try to compassionately understand that point of view, I think it's a good starting point. Yeah, for sure. I mean, when I tell people I don't watch the news anymore and I don't consume news, the common

people I don't watch the news anymore and I don't consume news. The common question is, and I grew up this way, you know, my dad had a newspaper delivered to the house every morning and would sit there and read it. And I grew up with that habit. And I thought I was a news guy, you know, I'm an intelligent, productive member of society. I read the news, you know, I know what's going on in the world. There is this idea that to be an engaged, productive member of society, you have to consume the news because that's how you find out what's going on. And I think it takes a lot to detach from that and go, well, wait a minute, who says I need to do that? I feel I'm a productive member of society and I do not consume the news. I kind of feel that because I am on social media i feel if

something big enough happens it will come into my my world and i will see it yeah um so i think that's important i mean i would say sorry to interrupt but i'll let me just interject here like at the uh at the uh risk of one-upping you i grew grew up in Washington, D.C. My dad was an inside the beltway attorney. I grew up with the children of politicians. I was immersed in politics, steeped in it. And I knew much more about how government in the United States worked when I was 18 years old than I do now.

And the idea, like when you grew up in Washington, that's all you talk about. You, in Washington, that's all you talk about. You, I mean, that's how you fit in. That's how you fit. Yeah. Like you have to be up to speed on everything, have an opinion on everything. You know who all the players are, you know, exactly what's going on all the time. And then I moved to California. Now I live in Southern California and like a good hippie Californian, we got rid of our television like a decade ago. And I haven't watched the news in forever. I mean, I'm on Twitter, I'm on social media. And like yourself, if something happens,

I'm aware of it. Like I'm up to speed on stuff, but it kind of seeps into my awareness passively as opposed to me consciously making sure that I'm sitting down to like tune CNN in or whatever. CNN or whatever. And I think the question is to that person who feels the obligation to be up to speed, again, like, is it helpful to society for you to be up to speed? And, or is it helpful to you? Like, what are you holding onto here? How is this improving your life? How is this making you healthier, more productive? Or is it just, you feel like you're doing it because when you're at the pub or whatever, you want to be able to engage in that conversation and you're afraid that you'll be judged if they're talking about something and you didn't hear about it that day. Yeah, no, for sure. I think, I think when I, when I think about this topic, I think about, you know, we are both on social media, right? Um, I try my best as much as possible

to engage with people who disagree with me in a very respectful and productive manner. I don't mind people disagreeing with me, but if you disagree with me respectfully, I will engage and I will respect your point of view and I will share with you my points of view. And people who follow me will have seen that over and over again. I will do that. But if you are rude to me and you say it with angst and there's some charge in what you're saying, often I will now choose not to respond. Do block people uh i do actually yeah yeah what's interesting about you and this was something that i had like written down to discuss with you during our podcast but it didn't come up is that you have made what i can only presume is a very conscious decision to not participate in the toxic nutrition wars that are taking place on Twitter,

which I observe from a distance and never participate in. And sometimes I'll get tagged in some debate that's going on that just inevitably almost always ends up in the gutter somewhere. But I would imagine that you've had to think about what your role is. And you've interviewed a bunch of doctors that do participate

in this kind of stuff as have i um as a medical practitioner and somebody who's written books on these subjects do you feel like you need to chime in when the latest you know that when person x who's kind of the leader of diet tribe x is is having a debate with the leader of diet tribe Y, and they're going at each other. You know, this is a great point, actually. This is a great point. And I think it's worth exploring because I have thought long and hard about this. I have had varying opinions at various stages in my career. And I don't want to identify myself. I don't want to create an identity around myself, around a particular dietary tribe for multiple reasons. One reason is, is because as a doctor, I feel, and I have friends who do not feel this way, so there's not a slight on

anyone else, but I feel that I should be diet agnostic in the sense that when someone comes in to see me, I want to be able to help them within their ethical and within their cultural views, how they choose to eat, let's say. I want to be able to help them around that. I don't want to, you know, I've seen so many people do so well on a variety of different diets. You know, I'm coming from a place of nearly 20 years of clinical experience, right? So I see people, they open up to me, they share things with me. I try various things. Nutrition is a big part of what I talk to my patients about. And I've seen different things work for different people. I've got to be honest. I think in a lot of these dietary wars, I've got to be honest, I think in a lot of these dietary wars, one of the problems is we've created an identity. Our identity, who we are, is this particular diet. And that can work for some

people. As you said, you know, you do what was right for you on the podcast. You have figured out, look, maybe you're not the right fit for my show. I will interview you. I'm not going to interview you. It's not a slight on them. The reason I don't get involved, A, I think I've made my position relatively clear in my first book on what I think the overarching theme is of a good diet, which is a minimally processed diet. Whether you want to be vegan or whether you choose to eat meats and animal products. Of course, there is an ethical argument, which I'm keeping separate from this, from a purely health perspective. I just, A, it's confusing, I think, right? But B, I want to help every single person, right? I don't

want someone to be, this is not about, I've had an issue with wanting to be liked, right? My whole life, I think. And I think that's caused a few of my behavioral tendencies. I think it possibly started that way, that actually I don't want to offend, right? But I think I moved on. I really thought long and hard. I do sometimes chime in on Twitter occasionally for various things, but very rarely. A, because I don't see, I never see it being a particularly productive. No, it never, it doesn't, it's not like it ends well ever.

Yeah, ever. It just drains emotional energy from you, which ultimately when you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. When I say yes to that, I'm often expelling emotional energy from myself, which I no longer have to give to my wife or my children. I have done that so much in the past. So I choose not to, but I do have my views on diets. And when I was with Tom Billy yesterday,

you came up in conversation actually, and Tom, you know, Tom's view, I don't want to put words into his mouth, but very clearly he thinks that keto is a great way to lose weight and have mental clarity. And he made the supposition that he thinks for 85% of people, that is the great way to lose weight and have mental clarity. And he made the supposition that he thinks for 85% of people, that is the best way to do it. I don't agree with that, right? And I did challenge Tom in a very respectful way, which we had a great chat about this. And I say, look, so, okay, Tom, I get that. That has been your experience. I totally get that. And you've got friends who've had that experience as well. We have a mutual friend in Rich, right? So Rich Roll has made various changes in his life. He is clearly a vegan athlete who has transformed his life in a number

of ways. But one of those ways was by changing his diet. So what would you say to someone like Rich and a lot of people who follow him who have also transformed their diets by adopting a plant-based diet and so we really try to unpack that a little bit because we were talking about identities so what did he say what did he say we said look you know we've all got an equal you know he basically i could you know it was such a long conversation i can't remember the conclusion of it she said it never ends well right but it was a beautifully respectful dialogue that actually he accepted that everyone has different experiences and so i said so tom therefore we've just been talking about these identities we create about us we create around ourselves and these belief systems

we have and we spoke about absolute truths so i said so Tom, is your belief that 85% of people will do best on a keto diet, is that an absolute truth or is it a belief system? And, you know, I think he accepted it at that point that, hey, you know what? And he said, look, hey, look, I'm just saying this based on what I've seen. You clearly are a doctor who've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I totally get that we may have a different view on this and I sort of totally respect what I've seen. You clearly are a doctor who've seen tens of thousands of patients. So I totally get that we may have a different view on this. And I sort of totally respect what you've seen. But this is why, you know, I have, I will interview, I purposely want to interview people who have different perspectives, not only to each other, but also to me. I like talking to people who may challenge my worldview. And I can't remember who it was, but I had someone

on my podcast and then I got a ton of abuse. I wouldn't say a ton of abuse, but I got some negativity that, oh, this means this is your favorite diet. Now I'm like, hold on a minute. Since when does the podcast guest I choose to interview mean that that is my viewpoint? And I think the whole dietary world has become toxic. I think we're confusing a lot of the public who actually want to make helpful change, but they see a lot of doctors and other public figures who they respect. They see them fighting quite viciously. And also, I just, I don't buy into that. I don't believe that you change the world by being vicious, by being confrontational. Be respectful, right? So that's my view. It's tough.

It's tough because the nutritional science and the research out there is difficult to really understand unless you steep yourself in it completely, like reading the abstracts isn't enough. A lot of that science is compromised by partisan interests and whoever is funding it. And then there's the media cycle that picks up on these studies and then mischaracterizes them for clicks. And all of that creates this witch's brew that just foments a ton of confusion and I think exacerbates the divide between these

camps and makes it more and more difficult for people to communicate. But I do agree also that there's a lot of people who've crafted identities around their nutritional preferences. I think that's super unhealthy. And that's something that I've had to look at myself because I'm known as the vegan athlete. And I wore that moniker proudly for a long time. And I've kind of, I'm still plant-based and I still feel great and I'm still an athlete and I'm all of those things, but I've kind of moved away from describing myself in that way because I don't want to be dogmatic and I don't want to be labeled. That's a dietary protocol that I adhere to and I believe in and I've seen it be transformative for a lot of people. But I

don't participate in any of those debates either. And I've kind of worked hard with my platform in the podcast to expand the aperture beyond just, hey, I'm a vegan athlete and that's what I'm gonna talk about. Like I'm interested in personal growth across the board, emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, in all facets. I think diet, as we talked about during my podcast that you were just on, and as you discuss in this book, is super important,

but it's one element in what it means to be healthy. And I changed my relationship with food, not so that I could get stuck in that place and talk about it for the rest of my life, but so that I could be energized to go out into the world and continue to grow and progress.

And the problem when you do make it your identity, and again, until yesterday, I hadn't really unpacked this in my head, but it's something that I ended up discussing with Tom, was I actually think it's problematic. I think it can be super problematic in a way that we don't think it's problematic. And in this era of social media, where we have these cool little handles where we can actually make our preference, you know, our identity can actually be part of our handle. Then what happens if you change your view in two years and suddenly your handle and what you put out to the world is, you know so attached to that identity that you become recalcitrant and calcified against anything that would challenge that. For sure.

And it closes you off. Like, that is the very nature of, you know, hardened bias. Like, when you're so invested in this point of view and that's your identity, then even if the countervailing point of view is put in front of you and it's bulletproof, you're not going to be able to see that. And so we're seeing this play out. I mean, we're talking about it in the context of the diet wars, but this is what's playing out politically.

You're seeing it in Great Britain with Brexit. We're seeing it right now in the United States with Trump and everything that's going on. right now in the United States with Trump and everything that's going on. And it's left me thinking, like, what is happening right now across the planet that's leading to this kind of acrimony and inability to communicate this divide that I think is threatening, you know, the well-being of our species, quite frankly. Rich, you mentioned that about change, that when people have, or people want to change, and it makes, when they have these belief systems, it makes it very hard for them to actually then go

and take those constructive steps to change. And one thing we've not touched on is your story. And I know we unpacked that the very first time you came on the podcast, but I have a lot of new listeners since then, for sure. And I wonder, I think have a lot of new listeners since then, for sure. And I wonder, I think that the issue of change, many people listen to this podcast for inspiration, for ideas on how they can create positive change in their own life. So I wonder if you'd mind sort of briefly summarizing your story of change. I know you've done this many times in the past. Yeah, no, it's okay um yeah absolutely i mean i would

i would preface my answer to that by saying that the biggest changes that i've made in my life have been um have been forged through pain you know i've been in so much pain that uh the idea of continuing to behave in the way that i was behaving was more painful than the fear I harbored about doing something differently. And I think that's something that people who have changed their lives in fundamental ways can relate to. For some reason, pain is a great lever for implementing profound change in one's life. The good news is you don't have to be in tremendous pain to make those changes. Those changes that you seek are always available to you. It's just something about pain that makes it a little bit easier. But to go into my story, I mean, I grew up in Washington, D.C., two parents

who love each other. All my needs were met. We grew up initially middle class, and then my dad got a fancy job, and he did well when I was in high school. I went to a prep school. I got into all the fancy colleges. When I was 18 years old, the world was my oyster. I got into Stanford. I got into Harvard. I was one of the best swimmers in the Eastern Seaboard. I got recruited to swim at colleges. I ended up going to Stanford, swimming on a team that won two NCAA championships, training with world record holders. Basically, I was in a very, very privileged rare position to essentially create the life of my dreams. That capsized when I was introduced to drugs and alcohol. And I kind of proceeded over the next 10 years

to drain the ambition out of my life and have it kind of all go down a bottle. And it wasn't an overnight thing, but ultimately, you know, alcohol destroyed my ambitions. It destroyed my ambitions. It destroyed my relationships. It prevented me from achieving my potential as an athlete. It derailed my career.

There wasn't any aspect of my life that wasn't damaged by my relationship to alcohol. And it took me to some very dark places such that at the very end, I was alienated from my family. I was teetering on getting fired. I was looking at jail time from two consecutive DUIs. My life was a wreck. And ultimately, it's a long story, but I ended up in a treatment center in Oregon when I was 31. And I made that place my home for 100 days, which is a pretty long time to be in rehab. And that experience saved my life and was the first, it was my introduction to understanding that perhaps there was a different way to live. relentless, consumerist, materialist, capitalistic-fueled pursuit of the American dream that had kind of underscored every decision that I'd made as a young person. It was explained to me

that I was a spiritual being having a human experience, which was something that took me a long time to grok. And I started to learn new tools for how to live my life, tools that I still rely on to this day. And in the wake of that treatment center experience, I went back into the world and set about repairing all my relationships and trying to be a productive member of society again. But my evolution was still very much in its nascent stages because the kind of overarching goal that I was seeking was to kind of get back on top, right? Like be that guy that I was when I was 18. And what that looked like for me was becoming a partner in a prestigious law firm and having the nice fancy car and getting all this stuff and being the person that people would point to and say he's

got the cool job or he's doing you know like like all the things that society programs and tells you are what's required to you know kind of um be successful uh And not once during that period of time did I ever stop and rely on some of these spiritual tools that I thought that I understood but didn't quite understand and ask myself, who are you? Like, what do you think you're here to do on planet Earth? How can you contribute? What gets you excited in the morning? Like, what do you think your passion or your ikigai could be? Like, those questions never even occurred to me. I was just on

this habit trail, on this upward track, like climbing this ladder. And I think I was repressing a lot of those thoughts or instincts that were trying to gain purchase in my mind because I really didn't like what I was doing for a living. It never really resonated with me. I was just doing it because I thought that's what people like me are supposed to do. And I couldn't understand why I dreaded going to work in the morning and why I would get so frustrated and why I had this compulsion prior to getting sober that I had to get super drunk every night after leaving the law firm. And how that manifested ultimately was in this collision of this existential crisis

that I was harboring that kind of collided with a health scare because I wasn't taking during that decade-long period after from 31 to 39 I was just doing the law firm work you know workaholic thing not taking care of myself not sleeping well fast food addict you know the whole nine yards the whole package of like not being healthy such that I had this moment where I was walking up a flight of stairs to go to sleep after a long day at work, and I had to pause. Like, I had tightness in my chest and really thought I was on the precipice of having something terribly wrong with my heart. Was that here?

It was here, yeah, on the staircase right out there where you just, we were there a couple minutes ago. And it was a scary moment. Heart disease runs in my family. My grandfather, who I'm named after, who was also a champion swimmer at the University of Michigan in the late 1920s, died of a heart attack when he was 54. I'm now 53. And I realized that I could no longer continue to live the way that I was living. And it was very reminiscent of the day that I could no longer continue to live the way that I was living. And it was very reminiscent of the day that I woke up and decided today's the day I'm going to rehab. It was one of those moments where the need to change met the desire to change. And I think we're all visited with moments like this in our life that generally pass us by

because we're not mindful or aware or present enough to recognize them. And I was lucky enough to capture lightning in a bottle that day I decided to get sober. And I'd often reflected on that and thought, what if that day I made a different decision? Would I ever have made it to treatment? Maybe, but maybe not. Maybe my life would have gone in a totally different direction. And because I had reflected on that when I was on that staircase, I had a very palpable sense that this, again,

I was being blessed with another such opportunity that if I could grab onto it, perhaps I could make another hard left in my life that could have that level know, that level of profundity in terms of change. Or I could let it pass me by and just write it off and like, I'll be fine. You know, maybe I should go to the gym a little bit. But I did have the presence of mind and the wherewithal to like, hold on to that and grab on to that. And that's what prompted me to then make changes in my relationship

to food and then later with respect to fitness. And it's a long story, but ultimately that led me into this world of ultra endurance where I had unfinished business as an athlete to kind of prove some things to myself. But also it was very much a spiritual journey of trying to reconnect with my being to try to better understand what my ikigai could possibly be. And there's something about training for these super long races where you're spending an incredible amount of time in solitude. It's almost like going on a Vipassana retreat. And then the sort of low-grade pain that you're in that strips away everything extraneous and forces you to confront yourself in a really profound way that became the crucible or the engine for me

to help answer these questions about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be. I mean, I've heard this story before, but it's still powerful every time you hear it. And I certainly hope that people listening to that might feel, maybe some people might feel a connection to that and some inspiration from that. What strikes me here in that this time, Rich, is that you have these two key moments, right? So it wasn't if you had that one moment where suddenly you turned your life around.

Certainly to me from the outside, it sounds as though there was a problem with alcohol, to say the least. It got to the point where things got so bad that you felt you had to make a change there. You checked into rehab and you dealt with the alcoholic part of your life. But there wasn't, and if I had to say there wasn't enough pain or wasn't the right kind of pain for you to transform everything, you've done it in stages, haven't you? You've done alcohol first.

But if I understand your story correctly, when you became sober, you still were engaging in junk food. You were still overeating and- Yeah, all that stuff. I mean, one thing at a time, they call it slow variety, you know? And it's a spiritual journey of a lifetime.

And I think it's important for people to understand who maybe aren't directly familiar with alcoholism and drug addiction. Drugs and alcohol aren't the problem. Drugs and alcohol are the solution to the problem. It's just that that solution stops working. When you take away the drugs and alcohol, you're depriving that individual of their best friend.

You're depriving them of their coping mechanism. This is what they rely on to get through the day because the underlying emotional and spiritual pain is so severe that they resort to those behaviors, even knowing that they're causing damage and wreckage in their lives. So you take the substance away, that's only the very, very first step of what's required to redress the underlying condition of alcoholism, which is a spiritual malaise. The journey of becoming spiritually whole and emotionally whole and repaired is a very long one. It's one in which you really have to grapple with your inner demons and you undergo these 12 steps of transformation, which are essentially this

hero's journey to becoming a spiritually whole human being. Yeah. I mean, incredible story. I was reading a book last week. I can't remember which one it was. And there was a quote that I've written down by Viktor Frankl. When a person can't find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure. And I think the story you've just shared, I imagine that quote speaks to you. I think it speaks, that speaks to so many of us on so many levels. We can go back to the lady asking about how do you break out the toxic news cycle? And you said, well, why do you feel compelled to listen to this? Why do you feel compelled to engage in that? And I think it all comes down to that, you know, when we don't have that true sense of meaning and purpose in our lives, we do distract ourselves, whether it's alcohol, booze,

shopping, sugar. I'm not at all trying to trivialize those things in the same way as alcohol, just to be super clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, what I would say is this. I mean, I love that Frankl quote, and I think it's very true. If your life lacks meaning, that's a very scary place to live. And I think there's a certain cross-section of the population that's born and wired more sensitive than other human beings. And so, the acuteness of that pain of not having meaning in their life is gonna manifest itself in a more malevolent way, I think. And that would be the addict and the alcoholic, the person who's gonna seek that escape in a more self-destructive way

because that pain is so severe for them. At the same time, I really believe that addiction, I mean, alcoholism is a subset of addiction. I think addiction is a spectrum disease that essentially affects every single human being. And what I mean by that is, on the one hand, you have the alcoholic who's in the gutter or the heroin addict that just can't pull, you know, who's got abscesses and can't keep the needle out of his or her arm. But on the other hand, at the very other end of the spectrum, you have the person who mindlessly scrolls, you know, through Instagram while they're standing in line at Starbucks, or the person who repeatedly

dates the wrong person that's bad for them, or the individual who keeps looping a self-defeating narrative about who they are. Those are all different forms of addiction or compulsive behavior patterns that separate us from our innate divinity and prevent us from being the self-actualized human beings that we're that we're capable of being yeah i mean i hope people sit and reflect on what you just said there because i think it's i think it's right on and it's it's something with my own certain personality traits, my own addictive behaviors, I've also been wrestling with. In a very different way, I might add.

Of course, we're all different, right? All of our experiences are different. But when I think about life, when I think about health, when I think about what people are struggling with these days, if someone was to ask me what I think about life, when I think about health, when I think about what people are struggling with these days, and if someone was to ask me what I think the number one problem in society is, and again, I'm not very good at choosing just one thing when I'm asked that question, but I think it's solitude. I think it's the fact that we have no downtime, we have no space. I think one of the negatives that technology has done,

for all that's positive, one of the negatives is, I don't think the negative that's been spoken about enough, which is the fact that any bit of downtime we previously had has been stolen from us. It's been eroded out of modern society because we have something that is going to distract us and it is going to get our attention. These things are wired. Our own feeds with the algorithms, your own Netflix accounts, these things are programmed to feed you what is going to give you that dopamine hit, right?

You can't compete with that. So if you are chronically looking at this stuff, I think for many of us, it is a distraction. For many of us, it means that we don't have to sit there in stillness and think about our lives i want you to think about this for a moment i'm i'm older than you but i think one thing that we we share in our general age bracket is that to the extent that we are the same general generation, we are the last crop of people who know what it's like to live in a pre-internet world and now live in a fully connected world.

Our childhood was marked by periods of boredom where we had to go out of our way to figure out creative ways to entertain ourselves. Like the amount of energy that you would have to exude with your imagination to figure out how to spend time was, you know, extraordinary. Fast forward to, you know, the 12-year-old now or the 10-year-old or the 8-year-old, they have to exert even more energy to not be distracted, to find boredom, to find stillness. And I think it cannot be overstated how profound a change that is. And I'm not sure that we really appreciate the extent to which that's going to change the course of humanity, because what is that person going to look like in 20 or 30 years when they're presence in that we never have to be by ourselves ever again, ever, ever. You have to go out of your way to find a moment of stillness.

And who was it who said, you know, all of man's suffering can be boiled down to his inability to spend, you know, time alone with himself. I mean, we don't ever have to be alone with ourselves. And I know that I've found myself struggling with this because of how different my life is now from when I wrote my first book. Now there's so many more things vying for my attention. And a lot of those are driven by technology that you have to move heaven and earth to create boundaries around that to carve out a few moments of quiet

because you're expected to be accountable and in communication at every given moment of your waking day. and in communication at every given moment of your waking day. I agree that I don't think we recognize the gravity of this. I think when we, you know, we're missing a lot of the big picture when we talk about even things like food and sugar, for example, as important as they are, when you understand where a lot of our behaviours come from, you know, we unpacked a bit of this when I came on your show, but this whole idea of these underlying stressors in our life and how we then use our certain behaviours to compensate for them, I think a lack of downtime is one of the biggest stressors.

Because if you can't sit alone with your thoughts and you always need distraction, well, you're going to use distraction, whether it's social media, whether it's Netflix, whether it's food, right? So how much of unhealthy food intake is driven by an inability to sit and be alone? I think a lot. Yeah. I mean, I think emotional eating is a condition that's underappreciated. It's easy to dismiss that, like, oh, I'm addicted to whatever kind of food. But, you know, I think most people's compulsive eating behaviors and patterns are a function of this unconscious drive to change their emotional state, like this reflexive need to not feel whatever they're feeling, you know? And I think if you, if somebody was to do

a food journal or to posit the question, like, how come I always like, you know, end up, you know, face planning in the Haagen-Dazs three times a week at midnight or whatever. If you were to journal what happened to you emotionally that day, there's triggers for these things. Something emotional, you're experiencing some kind of emotion that maybe you're not even consciously aware of or completely in touch with that is compelling you in an unconscious way to behave in a certain way to change that emotional state so that you can feel different. So whether it's drugs and alcohol or food or the phone or whatever

it else, whatever else is, it's all the same thing. It's all the same thing. It is a, you know, addictive predisposition to alter your emotional state and avoid having to confront a feeling or an emotion and an inability because of the way we're hardwired to understand that feelings are just that, they're feelings. When we have an uncomfortable feeling or a fear impulse or something like that, we're hardwired through our amygdala, which we talked about earlier,

to think that we're in peril, we're going to die, right? And we're going to act accordingly to redress that. But the truth is, it's just an emotion. You're not going to die. And if you can develop the wherewithal to sit with it, to be in that discomfort, you will come to understand one fundamental aspect of emotions, which is that they are constantly in flux and they are not static and it will change and it will pass. But it is only through the willingness to weather through that discomfort that you can become connected to that. And I think we're in a culture right now where nobody wants to be uncomfortable for a minute. And everything about society is oriented around luxury and comfort and convenience.

And the idea of having to tolerate even a moment of discomfort is considered, you is considered something that we're trying to transcend. And yet, deep within us, we have a deep need to be in discomfort in order to grow. And I think that's why you're seeing Spartan races and ultra-endurance. If it's all about luxury and comfort and a padded bank account, then why are all these people showing up to climb in the mud on a cold Sunday morning?

It's because as human beings, we're disconnected from that natural state. And I think the more that we're willing to be in discomfort, the more resilient we become, the more that we're willing to be in discomfort the more resilient we become the more alive we feel and the more connected to the planet to ourselves and to each other we learn to be just taking a quick break in today's conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show athletic greens continue their support of my podcast. To be really clear, I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from foods,

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So what's the take home for someone who's listening to this and who says, okay, I get it, Rich, I get what you're saying. I recognize your journey. I understand it. I don't think I'm in quite as much pain as you were. So maybe I don't have that motivator to go and make this, make the changes that you have made and make the transformations. What would you say to that person who maybe doesn't see themselves as far gone

as let's say you were, but still wants to make an improvement? How can they use what you've just said about discomfort, being alone with your thoughts is there a practical take home you would give to them yeah i mean the first thing i would say is i'm sympathetic to to that situation in some ways i think being like a super hardcore drug addict or alcoholic is like a blessing because the problem is so uh obvious it's like oh oh, what's wrong with me? Well, it couldn't be like Russell Brand always has this joke. He's like, it couldn't be the crack, could it? It's like, no, it's not the crack. It's this other thing. It's so glaring that that's

your issue. And once you address that, you can course correct. But if uh you know if what ails you isn't uh isn't as acute as that then it becomes more difficult to diagnose and you can develop a tolerance to just live with it you know what i mean and i think that's the saddest place to be because you know the alcoholic or the addict is going to flame out and they're going to have to grapple with their problem and hopefully get beyond it. But you can go all the way to your grave if you have a much lower grade malaise and never really be compelled to confront it. So that's why I say I'm sympathetic to that person because that becomes harder. The pain isn't great enough for them to really do anything about it, and they just persist. So my takeaway or suggestion to those people, and look, first of all, I want to say,

I'm not here to give advice to anybody. I really go out of my way to try to avoid giving anybody advice. It is not for me to judge anybody's path or the choices they make about their life. All I can do is share my experience, and if that connects with people, that's great. So please take this with a grain of salt. But I just know from my own experience that the way that I can get myself to feel more alive is to carve out time and protect time to do things that I enjoy, first of all. In my case, it happened to be fitness-oriented

and that turned into ultra-endurance. In the listener's case, it could be anything. It could be painting. It could be stand-up comedy. It could be model trains. It could be anything. But I think it's really important, no matter how busy your life is, be painting it could be stand-up comedy it could be model trains it could be anything but i think it's really important no matter how busy your life is to exercise self-care by making sure that you

that you uh that you do something that you that you love and if you don't know what you love try to remember the things that you enjoyed doing as a kid. What were you naturally drawn to? I mean, that's what brought me back into swimming and running. I think that's really important. And I think it's really important to step outside your comfort zone and challenge yourself to do something that scares you. And it doesn't have to be some big deal. It can be like you told the story earlier about putting on a wetsuit for the first time and getting in the water. Like that's a scary thing if you've never done that. To me, it's nothing because I've been doing that my whole life. But the point being like just even if you're

extending yourself outside your comfort zone a little bit, I think it's important and I think you'll find it to be incredibly gratifying. And think it it also fuels um resilience and an openness to more change and if you're if you can kind of walk that path a little bit i think the universe expands it opens up for you in terms of other opportunities for yourself yeah for sure i mean i think that's some great i don't know that vague, but... Yeah. I mean, I think it's helpful. I think it's super helpful. I think, of course, like all messages, it'll connect with some people, won't connect with others, but that's okay. That's the nature of change, right? Change happens when you're ready for that change. We can't make someone around us change. I don't know, since your journey,

have you tried to, in inverted commas, make or help people around you change i don't know since your journey have you tried to in inverted commas make or help people around you change and have you found that to be futile yeah it's it's completely codependent you can't you can't compel another human being to change you have responsibility for yourself focus that energy inward and try to be the best version of who you can be and stay out of the crosshairs of somebody else's trauma or problem. You can make yourself available in a loving way. But I think, and I know this as somebody who's been in the recovery community for a long time.

I've gone to a lot of funerals. I've seen people die. I've seen people get sober. I've seen lives transformed, and I've seen other people really struggle. And I've been in that position of wanting to help them or extending myself to help somebody. And I can tell you for a fact that if somebody doesn't want to change, they're not going to change. They have to want it for themselves. Willingness is like the entire ballgame when it comes to change. Yeah, for sure. I think many of us know when we've found something, we found some insight in our life, we want to share it with those people around us. We want them to get on board with it. But

I just stick to my own business these days i i try my best just to work on myself be the example for those people around you hopefully you can maybe provide yeah but of inspiration for them there's there's an arrogance to that though as well right like oh i've discovered this truth and now i want to help you discover it as well um and the way i look at it the analogy that i use is i mean you, you can run around chasing people, trying to get them to change or see your truth. I think it's much more impactful and powerful to be the lighthouse, to stand in your strength and emit a certain frequency that is your truth. And the people that need to hear that, they will see that beam of light coming for your lighthouse and they will come to you yeah and i think that's what you do with your podcast i think that's genuinely what comes through the airwaves is you are to me living an authentic life you have figured out you have been through your trials and tribulations and now you have every number of years you're

now starting to live a life a life that is aligned what you you know really want out of life what your heart wants out of life everything seems to me at least seems to be a lot more aligned than it probably was maybe they're still going to go maybe there's still more alignment yeah the key the key word is more you know like i put you know like i have plenty of you know work to do on myself and that will that will continue for the rest of my life it's not like but that's that's the key right you certainly haven't i don't have everything you know i don't want to hold myself out as having like answers or as if i've you know figured everything out you know my my path is to try to narrow the dissonance between my behavior and my value system, right? So that I can walk the talk in as close to an aligned state as possible.

Like, that's the aspiration, right? an aligned state as possible like that's the aspiration right um how can the aspirational self merge with the actual self that's the biggest game of all right right yeah that's that's what we're here to do i believe we're all here to grow and to evolve and you know we work out our shit and our trauma with each other and we do the best that we can and we do it, you know, mistakenly and, and imperfectly. Um, and I just try to be gentle on myself and gentle with others and a support system to as many people as I can. Rich mentioned that all of us to some degree have addiction. And I find that incredibly fascinating. I think long and hard about what Gabor Maté talks about. I think I very much agree with the majority of his viewpoint, if not all of it actually.

This idea that all addiction at its core is the same and comes from, I'm very careful not to sort of misquote him out of context, but my perception of what he is saying is that all addiction comes from some form of childhood trauma. And he defines trauma as, sure, bad things that happen to you, but also when not enough good things happen to you as well. I think that's a very important distinction that he makes. So with your own experience of addiction, do you subscribe to Gamal Mate's view? Do you think that's accurate? Do you think that holds true? I guess, as you reflect on your own life, do you subscribe to gabriel mate's view do you think that's accurate do you think that holds true i guess as you reflect on your own life do you think there's a modicum of truth within that yeah absolutely i think there's a lot of truth to that um i had gabber on my podcast as well

and he did what he's fond of doing i haven't listened to your conversation with him but i imagine he might have done the same thing to you which is turn the table and then he interviews you right i had a sense that he was going to do that and i wanted him to do that like i don't feel like i've seen before that as well what please yeah like i'm going to take advantage of this incredible opportunity i have for him to give me therapy yeah and and uh and I went into that resistant to that thesis because, as I described earlier, I reflect back on my childhood as relatively charmed. Now, I was, you know, look, I was bullied and I had, you know, like I was a loner and like I have these other indicia that contribute to, you know, the alcoholic state, but my parents are happily married. My needs were met. You know,

we always had a roof over our head and all of that kind of stuff. So when I hear childhood trauma, I don't identify with that. And what I needed to learn was the broad definition that he, you know, that he has when he says trauma and that important caveat that you pointed out, which is that trauma isn't necessarily something that happened to you. It's something that was withheld from you or something that you did not get. And through the process of that conversation, he helped me understand that certain emotional needs that I had weren't sufficiently met. met. And that doesn't mean that my parents, who I love very much, did a bad job. Because what I cannot accept is this idea of vilification of my parents, who are very good people and did the very best that they could. What I can accept is this idea that perhaps within the context of them doing their very, very best, there was some emotional need that was not fulfilled, that contributed to this later state, this later condition that I had called alcoholism. I would, however, also add that I'm not convinced that that's the entire picture. I do think that there is a genetic

component to alcoholism, that certain people have a disposition. And Gabor might say, well, that's a function of epigenetics that goes back, that relates to childhood trauma, that you could trace back generations and generations and generations. And I think that's a very appealing concept and perhaps it's true. Maybe we need to, you know, understand epigenetics a little bit better to really get behind that. And like I said earlier, I think there's certain people that are more sensitive than others, you know, and as somebody who's been in the recovery community for a long time, like I've learned to identify a certain strain of human. I can spot somebody a mile away walking down the street and I go, oh, that person's in recovery. Or that person is an alcoholic. I can

see it. And maybe that's a function of their childhood trauma as Gabor Mate sees it. But I think maybe the full picture is a little bit more complicated but i think that model is really important that he's pointed out and i find a lot of truth in that and i think he is incredible and his book uh in the realm of the hundred ghosts is just an extraordinary book that everybody should read did you challenge him at all um or did you i've actually not heard your conversation with him um which is rare for me. Yeah, it was a long time ago. It was early on in the show. It was many years ago.

Were you able to challenge him on that in the sense that this genetic component, or were you too much in it? I was super in it and I was emotional. I'm pretty sure I cried. Like it was heavy, you know what I mean? It was I was super in it and I was emotional I'm pretty sure I cried like it was it was heavy you know what I mean it was meaningful for me um so no I mean look I can't even remember but I I seriously doubt that I challenged him on that uh he did say one thing to me afterwards when we were done and he's like I think you could benefit from ayahuasca and if you're interested in

that I would really like to help you and I can you. And you can come with me on one of these things. And that's something that I found coming up with increasing regularity. I mean, maybe it's particular to Los Angeles, and I'd be interested in your experience with the quote unquote plant medicine. I've had lots of friends who have done this, and I can't dismiss that I think it's had beneficial impacts on people. But I don't think that's anything that I'll ever pursue for myself for a couple reasons. I mean, first of all, I think it's dangerous to tell an alcoholic or an addict in recovery that the answers they seek can be found

in a mind-altering substance. That really frightens me, to be honest with you. And if I was to go into it frightened, then maybe that wouldn't be such a good trip. And I think, secondly, that that experience can provide you with a glimpse of what it's like to have a broader spiritual perspective. But I think it's just a glimpse and it's not earned, you know, and I think there are ways to earn that through meditation and mindfulness and these other practices related to spiritual growth that I think would have a more permanent and profound impact in the long term. about his latest book and you know about you know the science about what psychedelics can do for our mental health and from altering our perspective and his own experience through it coming from

the standpoint of someone highly highly skeptical and towards the end i asked him um you know are there other ways to access that state he He was like, absolutely. There are other ways to get there. Deep breathing, meditation, all kinds of things when practiced regularly, consistently can also get you to that point. I guess we've all got these emotional layers, right? And trying to figure out who we are. Now you had that incident where those two incidents which forced you, well, which motivated you perhaps to change. And I guess one thing I heard you say, Rich, which pinged in my ear, because I don't think I've heard you say it before. you said, I can't remember verbatim, but I think you said something like, alcohol was something I used to suffer from.

Or you said something in the past tense. And why that struck me is that, and certainly until recently, I guess I've not heard you talk about this for a while, but would you still say, would you identify now as an alcoholic? Yes. Yeah.

That's why it struck me. Yeah. Because you said was, I think. It's interesting. Like, I'd be, I can't remember what I said, but it would be strange if I used alcoholism in the past tense because I don't think of it in that term, in those terms. Like, I am an alcoholic in recovery. I'm still, you know, sobriety is my number one priority. My relationship with my recovery and my recovery community is, you know, super, is the most important thing in my life. It has to come

before everything else because if I'm not sober and can't maintain my sobriety, everything else, because if I'm not sober and can't maintain my sobriety, everything else in my life goes away. And I don't think that, at least in my own, again, it goes back to, I'm not speaking for anybody but myself, but I have not and don't believe that I ever will graduate from alcoholism. I am an alcoholic in recovery, and that recovery process is a daily reprieve. That being said, I don't walk around craving alcohol. It's not like, oh man, I think I might drink tonight. It's not like that. That could happen. I do have a daily reprieve from drinking but it's really about uh treating how my alcoholism shows up um in my life on a daily basis through my behavior and um inventorying that behavior and constantly trying to, you know, better myself and overcome my character defects that emanate from and are a result of this, you know, alcoholic disposition that I have. Do you think it's possible to leave something like alcoholism behind?

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think this is, it goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning about identity and the stories we tell about who we are. And we think of ourselves in a certain way, in a strict way, like I am an alcoholic. This is my identity. I'm an alcoholic in recovery. Can you transcend that? I mean, I think I'm a spiritual being having a human experience. I mean, I think I'm a spiritual being having a human experience. Alcoholism is something that I suffer from. For me, I think it's dangerous to step into a place of thinking that I've transcended this thing. And I say that as somebody who, you know, I went to rehab in 1998.

So it's 21 years. Since you last had a drink but at 13 years of sobriety i had a like a four-hour relapse and had to reset the clock i've spoken about this publicly on the podcast before and at that moment after having been sober for 13 years to pick up a drink was an extremely disorienting and baffling thing that I thought would never, ever happen in my life. And now I can do a forensic analysis on everything that occurred that led me to making that choice. And it involves decisions that I made many, many, many months in advance of that actually happening. And it all has to do with my relationship to my alcoholism. And I never questioned whether I was an alcoholic, but I think I had taken my foot off the gas in terms of the actual

work required in recovery to maintain sobriety that I became vulnerable. And I will tell you this, I took that drink. I couldn't tell you why I did it. And it happened so quick. And before you know it, I had like five or six drinks in me. It was like not a day had gone by since I had stopped drinking. And my alcoholism had been doing pushups in the dark, just waiting for that moment, that vulnerable moment, to pounce on me. And it was a very powerful reminder that I very much had not transcended this disease, and perhaps may never transcend it. And it gave me, ultimately it was a gift, because it reminded me of just how powerful this thing is. was a gift because it reminded me of just how powerful this thing is. And the minute I start to think that I've overcome it, I once again become vulnerable. And I think what happens when you have a number of years of sobriety is that you start to relax a little bit and you start to think

you have it all figured out. And you kind of saunter in and out of the rooms like the guy who's got all the answers and the person who gets the phone calls when somebody relapsed and you kind of saunter in and out of the rooms like the guy who's got all the answers and the person who gets the phone calls when somebody relapsed and you're gonna drop the pearls of wisdom on them. And what was so great, what was so awesome about this relapse as demoralizing and humiliating as it was,

was that it reframed the whole thing for me and made me realize that how important humility is and how important it is that I make sobriety my number one priority and and that I don't have it all figured out and that I'm constantly learning and I really only have like one day at a time yeah I mean that is super powerful you're right you know after 13 years I guess many people around you would have thought hey he's he's cracked this thing he's done he. He's out now. So I guess I would imagine there's a certain fear associated with that when you've seen what can happen. It's like, I don't know, I'm sort of, I guess, you know, we talk about the stories that we tell ourselves. And I guess that is not a criticism of anyone because I tell myself stories as well.

I think we have to tell ourselves a story. Coming back to plant medicine, I've spoken to a lot of people who've done it. And one of the things they will tell you consistently is that you see the world in a different way. You realize that everything we do is just a story. We've just created a narrative and we can just as easily, maybe not just as easy, but if we want to, we can create a different narrative. So I guess if the story you tell yourself about this

is that you are a recovering alcoholic and you're not going to transcend this, I guess in many ways it doesn't really matter, does it? Or does it matter? Because you're not going to transcend this i guess many ways it doesn't really matter does it because what doesn't matter because you're telling yourself a story that allows you right it's not engaging your life yeah productive and do the things you want to do right i get totally where you're going with this um but i think you also nailed my response which is that's it doesn't matter because it's not going to change my behavior yeah you know what i Like, I'm still going to do the things that I need to do to stay sober and that have allowed me to continue to grow. I think what you're getting at is, like, to label yourself as this,

aren't you restricting, you know, ultimately the growth that you could, you know, avail yourself of if you kind of let go of that label? And I'm not trying to put pressure on you. I'm trying to explore this. I find it fascinating. I do not know what it feels like to be on the journey you have been on. I don't know that feeling. This area fascinates me.

Your story fascinates me. And I'm not trying to probe something where you don't want to go. I'll go anywhere. Like, I think what you're dancing around the edges of is a really profound question, which is, you know, is it possible to transcend these things? And I think as, you know, infinite light beings, yes, I think it is possible. things. And I think as, you know, infinite light beings, yes, I think it is possible, you know, you can become enlightened and no longer be shackled by this, you know, this thing we call addiction or alcoholism. I would say that I'm not there yet and most likely will never be there. And I'm just trying to get better every single day. But I think, you know, I have to be, I have to be respectful and

mindful of, you know, the power, you know, the beastliness of this, of this demon that, you know, if, if, if not kept in check, you know, could, could take me down, you know, so, and in order to keep it at bay, there's certain things that I have to do every single day. And they're not that hard, and they're not that complicated, but they're super important. Well, thank you for sharing that. Thanks for going there. I think there's a lot we can all learn from that. No matter what challenges we've got in our life, they may seem very distant. They may feel not even on the same page, not even the same book as what you've gone through. But I think, you know, even this idea that a daily practice of something towards something, whatever that focus is, I think that's an inspiring story that whatever that goal is in our life. And

again, I'm not trying to demean addiction. I'm not trying to say a goal of losing weight is the same as trying to not be an alcoholic. I am not trying to to say that i'm just trying to pull out from that what is the what can someone hearing that and especially hearing the relapse right because i think that's incredibly powerful what can someone what can somebody else learn from that story is what i'm wondering uh yeah it's a good question i mean i think that well there's a couple things i mean i think the story of my relapse is instructive and helping people to really understand how powerful addiction and alcoholism really is because i think it's hard for people to understand that that don't have direct experience with it like you went to you know i went to thousands and thousands of a meetings i went to rehab like my whole life was

destroyed like how could you possibly pick up a drink after 13 years that but that in and of itself that is the insanity of alcoholism that is alcoholism people People say, how could you take a drink? The miracle of the recovering alcoholic is that a day goes by where they don't take a drink. That's the magic. And I think having like a healthy amount of respect for that is helpful to certain people. I think there's probably a lot of people listening who, if they don't have direct experience with this disease, they certainly know somebody

who's struggling or have a family member. And it's very painful and baffling. And we were talking about codependent behaviors and trying to help somebody who's not willing to change. It's infinitely more complicated when a loved one is going down the tubes in that way and you feel powerless to help and everything you do doesn't seem to have any impact on that person. That is the cunning and baffling nature of this disease. And so to the point of like, how can this be helpful for somebody? So if you are in that situation and you're trying to help somebody and you're experiencing that level of powerlessness it's important to give yourself a break a lot of people blame themselves like they should have done

more they could do more why isn't what they're they're trying to do work working um and the only thing you can do is exercise self-care make sure that person knows that you love them and that you're available for them when they're ready to hear the solution. But up until that point, there, you know, it's very tricky. There's very little that you can do. Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that, Rich. One thing as I was driving up here today, well, in an Uber, on the way here, I was thinking about about and as someone who very much admires and respects your work i i was thinking wow rich has done a lot of podcasts now how many have you done now do you

know almost 500 right 500 so i mean i don't know if it's fair to say there's an average of two hours going on there as an average i mean you may well have spoken a thousand plus hours yeah to some of the most influential um and you know amazing thought leader type people on the planet i think that's fair to say some of the people you've spoken to um i actually had another question popping so let me ask this in two phases. And I think they're linked actually. Phase one of this question is, we spoke about the toxic news environment before. We spoke before about how I was on KTLA yesterday morning, getting five minutes max to talk about what I consider quite a deep book. Um, is long form conversation the antidote or one of the antidotes to the problems that we're seeing in the modern world, particularly with media? And then the follow-on question, which I think

is related is from all these conversations, these 500 plus conversations, are there common themes that, you know, you speak to such a wide range of people, artists, scientists, authors, you know, sports stars, endurance athletes, you know, such a wide range of different people who are all doing phenomenal things in their own life. Is there a common theme that you have seen time and time again repeat itself? most powerful antidote that we have to the clickbait soundbite culture that I think is tearing at the heartstrings, you know, of the world and dividing us. The only way to repair that communication divide is through conversation and connection. And, you know, I started this podcast in 2012 and this space was very different back then than it is now. Like it was not cool to have a podcast, I assure you. It was like the purview of hobbyists. And there were some people doing cool stuff. I mean, I think,

yeah, Rogan was doing his thing, and a lot of comedians. Not a lot going on in the health space or the self-improvement space. And if there was one or two good shows, it then dropped off a cliff. Now, it's incredible to see the explosion of what's happening in the podcast space, and in particular, the form conversation and i think it's very hard to um you know when somebody tweets something you can like dismiss it or you can like you know shoot back a missive at that person and you think you know who they are and what they stand for but if you were to listen to that person that you disagree with for two and a half hours on a podcast, you may still disagree with that person, but I'd be willing to bet that in most cases, unless the person is a complete psychopath or whatever, that you're going to be able to

see the humanity in that person and understand that not everything is black or white and that the world is more complex than your binary view of what is right and wrong and so i truly believe that these kinds of conversations are what's needed most you know and i also think it's why they've become so popular, because people are starved for this. What we're missing is that experience of sitting around the campfire. We have lost that. And increasingly, families are not having dinner together, and you're not seeing your friends because you feel like you already visited with them because you checked their Instagram story. And so this experience that is so vital to the human condition is suddenly so lacking. And I believe that the long form podcast space really provides sustenance. It's not a replacement for the actual campfire or the actual time spent

with friends, but it's a far cry from you being on a television news program where you have 30 seconds to spit out the meaning of your book and then you get a pat on the back. And I think the media landscape is changing dramatically. And we were talking about this before the podcast. Television is quickly going the way of the dodo. And it's being replaced by social media and new media. And it's interesting to see the inability of certain sectors of culture able to really fully grasp that. Like right now, take Joe Rogan, for example.

I would submit that Joe Rogan is the most influential figure in media for males between the ages of 16 to, I don't know, 35, 34, something like that. His reach is insane. It is absolutely insane. And yet you nary hear a peep from the mainstream media that this guy even exists, which is bananas because his audience dwarfs the metrics of most network primetime television shows. That is a complete seismic shift in the media landscape and how the general public consumes media. And it really tips the fulcrum in a brand new direction that I think is really exciting.

tips the fulcrum in a brand new direction that I think is really exciting. And I think, you know, let's take an election cycle, for example. You see these debates. They're ridiculous. Everybody's shouting at each other. They get 30 seconds. It's just, it is a terrible dynamic to try to determine who is the best person to, you know, sit in the Oval Office. But you have, you know, Rogan's had a couple of the candidates on there. They go on a show like Rogan or a similar show, and they talk with a host for two or three hours, and they can get into the nuance of policies. I mean, you can't, if you're on mic with somebody for a couple hours, they're going to kind of figure out who you are. Like, you know, you're not going to be able to shroud yourself behind some veneer for very long before, you know, the edges of who

you truly are going to kind of eke out. And I find that to be hopeful and exciting. Yeah. I mean, on that, I just, in my limited experience compared to yours, I'm, I guess, 18 months in and, you know, I started off with a few episodes where, you know, I was told like, these have got to be between 30 and 40 minutes. That's the length of the commute. So I did that and they were okay. And I sort of, I think they were decent enough, but I don't think I loved it. I don't think I could see myself continuing that long term. And the funny thing is, as you've alluded to, as my episodes have got longer, they've got more popular, right? And I agree with you. I think we are starved of meaningful, authentic content. Everything in the media pretty much is soundbitey. Even on social media, you know, it's these click-baity,

short, snappy, you know, under a minute, under 30 seconds things that are getting the traction right. And I think there's a problem with that. I think there is so many people, as you say, like Jordan Peterson, for example, one of the most biggest blow-ups on YouTube over the last few years, very influential. If you watch a three minute segment on the mainstream news, you may have one view of him. If you properly listen to him for two, three hours, you may have a different one. Like I'm not sort of coming down one way or the other. I'm just saying it's very different. It's easy to characterize him and make him into something that potentially he is not if you don't let him speak and don't let him properly explore his views. So I mean, this is why I asked the question. I find on a

personal level, long form podcasting, I think is the favorite thing, my favorite professional thing that I do. I love it. I love the fact that you can get into the weeds with someone. I love the fact that if we were having a half an hour conversation, would we have got to that story of your relapse? Would we have got to learn things? I don't think so. I don't think that we would have warmed up enough. We would have felt comfortable enough.

I mean, I'm interested in your view on this. I find that it's the second half of the conversations where the gold occurs normally it takes a little while to you know to warm up to allow people to say what they want to say and then you can start to explore something different right especially when you're speaking to somebody who's very media savvy yeah um and i found that when i do interviews with um celebrities because they're so you it's not it's not a slight on on them they're just doing so many interviews all the time and if they're making themselves available for a podcast it's probably because

they're there's something they need to promote which is also totally fine um but they've been asked these questions so many times that it's impossible for it not to sound rehearsed, even when they're trying to be as authentic and real as possible. And the only way for me, like, I have to find a way to connect with the person emotionally. That's the number one fundamental thing when I do an interview. If I can't do that, like for me, you know, it's a wash. And I trust that if I can do that, then the information that needs to be imparted will be imparted. And sometimes it can be difficult to find that way to connect with somebody emotionally

who's so media savvy. But sometimes the strategy is you just got to exhaust them through the talking points until they've said everything that they've they've come to say and then and then it finally yeah it's in that latter half where it's like okay now it's real because they actually haven't been asked that question before they haven't thought about it do you do you find it a form of, again, therapy is the wrong word. I find doing my podcast therapeutic, right? Yeah, of course. What it's taught me, I think more than anything, especially because I feel so busy half the time

that I can't probably prepare in the way that I ideally in my head would like to have prepared. I do preparation. I do preparation. I do read. I do as much as time will permit me to do. But what I've had to do is learn to trust myself, learn to trust myself that wrong and look, you know how to have a conversation. You've been a doctor for nearly 20 years. You are having conversations with people all the freaking time, right? What I want to do as you do is emotionally connect. That is the key. I, you know, this is why I'm speaking to such a wide variety of different people now, because I

think storytelling is the key to impact people. I think storytelling is the key to changing the world. I think it's got to be done with the conversation. It's got to be done with stories. And that comes from emotional connection. on a personal level i don't know what i would do without a podcast because i it's taught me to be present like it's taught me stay focused like you know just before we went today i thought man i've been on the road i've been a bit jettaline let me just write a few talking points out in case i get stuck i haven't got stuck yet right because it's what I said on your show before about the number one skill for, I think, a healthcare professional is can you connect and listen

without judgment of the person in front of you? That is fundamentally what I do with my podcast guests. Can you do the same thing? Or something that I try to do and I'm still finding my voice. I'm still figuring out what I want to do with this. You know, you're 500 episodes in, I'm 75 episodes in, right? So, you know, but I don't know. I mean, do you find it therapeutic? And I guess we still haven't got to that other question, but I guess I'm interested to know as someone who I very much look up to in the space, um, have you got any advice for me definitely therapeutic um i've forgotten more than i've learned from all the people that i've

had on the show and i think just the practice of being present for another human being is an incredible thing to do. I think I've said this recently, the most valuable thing you can do for another human being is give them your undivided attention. And this discipline of podcasting requires that of you, right? When was the last time you sat across from another human being and stared into their eyes for three hours straight and just paid attention to everything that they were saying? Like, that's an incredible thing. Yeah.

That's a gift. And that's probably something we did much more as humans in a bygone era that has been lost. And so I think just, I'm sure you've had this experience, like once somebody's been on the podcast, like we're bonded for life. I may not see that person for years, but if I do once again,

it's like almost an emotional moment, because there's something that's transpiring that we're sharing here that I think is really special and divine. I mean, we feel like friends, right? And this is the second time I've seen you. But I've called on you for help and advice at various times. And you're right.

I guess I haven't really viewed it in that way. But yeah, you do. You know, when was the last time people have done that where there were other halves? Yeah. I have an ongoing. I mean, you've listened to my conversations with julie like we have an ongoing joke like you know the only time we have you know we ate we go we go super deep with each other when we're doing a podcast it was like how are you how are you doing i don't know i haven't

talked to you in like a week it's funny because i actually said hey babe to my wife look see what rich does with julie why do you come on the mic i mean part of that's a joke of course you know that but uh but but there is and i had this experience with my dad and i talked about this with ryan holiday on the episode that just went up uh that you know my dad is still alive and i'm blessed for that to be the case and i i had thought over the years like i want to sit down and ask him about his life. Like, what was it like when he was a kid? And like, what was important to him? And, you know, what's his perspective on X, Y, and Z? You know, a conversation, like a life conversation that you always imagine you're going to have with your parent. And yet, unless you take action towards

making that happen, that day is never going to come because you just think like well one day we're going to sit you know like we're going to have a scotch and a cigar and it's going to be like that you know what i mean yeah and and having a podcast i thought i'm going to get them on the podcast and we're going to have there's something about the structure and the formality of having microphones in front of you that makes you ground yourself and think about your response that you know you can't just get up and walk away in the middle of it if you get bored right you can't look at instagram in the middle right you can't it would be rude you can has that happened once in a while somebody does that you're kidding me are you serious and it's

been a while but anyway let me stay on point here. That is super interesting. I thought, like, I'm going to ask my dad to do the podcast, not because I thought I would ever share that. Like, I wasn't going to share it publicly, but I just wanted to have it, you know, for posterity. Like, this recording of my dad and I having this conversation. But then he wrote this book, and he actually wanted to be on the podcast. So I was able to give him this opportunity to come and share about his book, but also have this conversation and share it with the world, which was a really cool thing. My point being that if done right, like these conversations can be really profound and meaningful. And I consider it a gift and a privilege to be able to do this. And in terms of advice for you, follow your heart, follow your muse, and talk to the people that you're genuinely interested in. And don't listen to what anybody else says you should or shouldn't do.

You know what to do, right? Only you know. And it doesn't have to be anything other than what you want it to be. And I think you're right to say the key is the emotional connection. And I think that's a leap for somebody like yourself who is a man of science, right? Like you could do this podcast and just be like, keep it super, you know, about like the data. You could do that podcast. There are other medical practitioners who are doing similar

podcasts like that. But I think what makes you unique is that you do have the science of medical background, but you are interested in making that emotional connection. I think that's powerful. I'm not sure there's anyone else of your pedigree and background who's doing that. And perhaps that's the place where you can find your, your place and your unique voice. Um, because another thing I've learned is I'm doing this thing. And often I'm talking to people who are, you know, on other shows that are similar to mine, right? Like a book comes out and then suddenly like the same guys on the same five shows that are kind of in my, like the same guys on the same five shows that are kind of in my you know little orbit and i thought why would anyone listen to mine like that show or this show or whatever and what you realize is even

though you feel like you're probably asking that that person the same questions there's something about your unique personality that your audience is connected to and so for me it's been a journey of owning that as opposed to like dismissing that like that's not it's about the guests but there is an aspect of you that they're tuning in for yeah i appreciate that advice um i like to think i'm doing a lot of that already and uh hearing that from you will make me continue doing that i don't think it's as hard for me as you might imagine in the sense that yes i'm a man of science me as you might imagine in the sense that, yes, I'm a man of science. You would say that from the fact that I've got a medical degree,

but this is something we touched on on my very first podcast with you, I seem to recall. I think this is a meme you pulled out to promote it from recollection. And science has always interested me, but it's not interested me as much as results, right? And what I mean by that is I've been the doctor in the room following the protocols, seeing people coming back and not getting better and just seeing, well, this is the protocol. This is what they should be doing. And I've always been more interested in what actually works in real life. And I've realized that what works in real life that the scientific research papers don't always tell you is how do you connect? How do you communicate? Can you emotionally develop a relationship with a patient so that they feel inspired to start making the changes that you're

asking them to make? I reflect on this and I passionately do believe this is why, generally speaking, touch wood, I get pretty good compliance from my patients because i do take the time and i take it very seriously to emotionally connect first make them feel as though you have been heard you have been understood i am not judging you and then everything whether you're talking about patient change whether you're talking about a deep conversation on the podcast i think it's the same thing. I don't see any difference there. So although I'm now doing long form podcasting on a mic, I guess you can make the case that in many ways I've been podcasting my whole professional life. Metaphorically, you know,

and it's the same thing right it's the art of conversation it's how do you tell a story how do you connect how do you communicate sure this is long form i have 10 minute appointments when i'm working in the nhs so do you see what i mean it's like a spectrum right it's not different it's what fundamentally makes us human yeah it's super interesting yeah last question um last penultimate question themes that you've learned from your guests yeah it's so hard it's so hard people have asked me this before um and like i said earlier i've forgotten more than i've learned you know it's it's like what's the takeaway from having these 500 people, you know, spending time with all these 500 people?

Just themes, common themes. I know, what's weird is that, like, it all just kind of goes into my collective unconscious and that gets synthesized somehow. And, you know, what ends up becoming implementable action versus just, you know, background noise is hard to say. I think in terms of themes, God, how to even begin with that?

It's so broad, but I think- Or is it one theme that stands out? Yeah, I mean, I talked about this at the live event the other night. So maybe I can answer it with this and it's not a fully comprehensive answer, Or is there one theme that stands out? collection of people, but a paramount one is connectivity, community, and connection. That we cannot be fulfilled, happy, purposeful, self-actualized if we isolate ourselves from our community, from ourselves, and from the planet. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. That experience is part and parcel of this greater ecosystem in which we live. And to the extent that we think that is other or outside of ourselves, the extent that we think that is other or outside of ourselves, that is to buy into an illusion.

We are nature. Nature is us. I am you. You are me. You are my brother. We are the same. What unites us is so much more powerful than what divides us. And to the extent that we can embrace our brothers and understand that we are all caretakers of this planet and caretakers of ourselves in a manner that transcends like, should I have sugar or eat meat or not eat meat? And what's my morning routine? Like there is a much grander stage on which we're playing right now. stage on which we're playing right now. And so the call to action is to expand your line of sight, to telescope your vision and look down on what's happening from 10,000 feet and allow yourselves to have greater compassion for yourselves and for those people in your life that you're at odds with and realize that our time is short here. We're here to grow and we're here to serve and we're here to contribute and protect and preserve the limited resources that we have available so that future generations can

enjoy what we've enjoyed. And I think the more you can embrace that, the easier it is to see through or transcend the barriers that divide us and develop a greater capacity for empathy with those with whom we disagree so that we can come together as this unified population for the greater good of everybody. So that's my big unified theory. What a beautiful way to end. And I think, and I'll leave it with one final thought, and this is also what I shared at the live event, which is that as powerful

as these long form conversations can be, and I think the strength they have to move culture forward, they remain an abstraction. People are gonna be listening to this on the train, in their earbuds. You're gonna go publish it from your home in the UK and you'll see a little number

that will indicate how many people are listening to it. It's just as much an abstraction for you after this experience transpires as it is for the person listening on the other end. And to the extent that you can leverage that audience to come together outside of that abstraction, I think that would be a powerful thing for you to do. Like, how can we take these respective audiences that we have and bring them into a tactile analog experience where the people that care about the things that you're talking about can actually communicate with each other directly in real life. analog experience where the people that care about the things that you're talking about can

actually communicate with each other directly in real life and i think that is the thing that i'm looking at with my own audience and the evolution of my show as a way to move the needle forward on all the ideas that i've shared with you today so why you do these retreats and live events yeah i mean the live event was a was a big first step in that direction. And it was incredibly gratifying for that very reason. That these are real people. Yeah. You know?

This isn't just like a view count or like analytics. Yeah, man. I met someone in a cafe in Venice a few days ago. He listens to my show randomly. He has flown out for four days from the UK to come to your live event. He's literally come out just for that. And that is the power of what you're doing.

That's the reach. It is crazy. It's phenomenal. I think that's a really great way to end this. Thank you for having me. I'm in your studio. Thank you for, you know. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for hosting me here. I don't know why I've been interviewing you. Well, you did a bit of interviewing me as well. I'm on your show right now, right? You're like, whose podcast are we doing?

I'm slightly confused actually because we're in the same chairs. We probably should have. We're on like, we're on like hour five today. There you go. Rich, if people want to stay in touch with you,

where can they find you? Just, just Google Rich Roll, R-o-l-l at rich roll on twitter and instagram richroll.com is my website and the rich roll podcast yeah well guys so thank you you're gonna love this podcast if you enjoy mine uh rich hopefully i'll have you back on again at some point in the future thank you for having me much love wrong good that concludes today's episode of the feel better live more podcast so what did you think that was a pretty deep and wide-ranging conversation what aspects of it resonated with you the most did you agree with everything we discussed or do you hold a different

viewpoint please do let rich and i know your thoughts on social media. Rich is most active on Instagram and Twitter. His handle is at Rich Roll. And you can reach me on Facebook and Instagram at DrChastity, Twitter at DrChastityUK and on LinkedIn. Please do use the hashtag FBLM if you can so that I can easily find your comments. As always, please do try and think about one thing you heard in today's conversation that you can start applying into

your own life immediately to improve the way that you feel. And if you want to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over, please do visit the show notes page for this episode, drchastity.com forward slash 93, where you will see articles about Rich, some brilliant videos he's made, links to his fabulous book, and so much more. That page is drchastity.com forward slash 93. Now, if you're feeling inspired to take action in your life, please do consider picking up a copy of my new book, Feel Better in 5. This book is all about action. It is a simple but highly effective daily plan to help you take control of your health and well-being. Everything in my new book takes a

maximum of five minutes to do and I cover physical, mental and emotional health. There are around 50 or so five-minute health snacks in the new book. All you have to do is choose three of them, the three that fit your lifestyle, your desires, your personality and your goals. It really is that simple but I can tell you that it is one of the best ways to make short-term and long-term changes to your lifestyle. You can pick up the book in all the usual places as a paperback, ebook or as an audiobook which I am narrating and as well as the UK it is also available now in Australia, New Zealand and India. Some of my followers have told me that Book Depository is a great company to get the book from

if it is not available yet in your country. Now, Rich very kindly allowed me to use his beautiful podcast studio to record this conversation. If you've never seen it, please do go to my YouTube page where you can watch a full video of this conversation. It really is taking a look at his studio. In fact, all of my conversations are now videos. It really is taking a look at his studio. In fact, all of my conversations are now videoed. So if you have got friends and family who you feel would benefit from this conversation,

but don't like listening to audio podcasts, please do let them know about my YouTube channel. The best way to find it is to go to drchastity.com forward slash YouTube. If you enjoy my weekly shows, please do consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. It really helps to raise the visibility of the podcast and it means I can get this information out to more people. You can also help me spread the word

by taking a screenshot right now, sharing with your friends on social media, or simply do it the good old-fashioned way and tell your friends and family about the show. I really do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chastity for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure that you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back in one week's time with my latest conversation. Remember, you are the architects of your own hell. Making lifestyle changes always worth it. Because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time. Thank you.