The Mindset Mentor - From Alcoholic to Ultra Marathon Athlete w/ Rich Roll | The Expert Series

Episode Date: June 8, 2021

Rich Roll discusses the struggle of sobriety, having spiritual transformations, and the overall power of the human spirit on this week's episode of The Expert Series! -- Thank you to our sponsors: Blinkist: Go to Blinkist.com/MINDSET to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership! AthleticGreens: Simply visit athleticgreens.com/DIAL and join health experts, athletes and health conscious go-getters around the world who make a daily commitment to their health every day. Huzzah: Get your cooler ready and stock up on HUZZAH Probiotic Seltzer by using code: DIAL for 20% OFF your order at DrinkHuzzah.com! LadderLife: Go to Ladder Life.com/DIAL to see if you instantly qualify! -- Rob Dial @robdialjr Rich Roll @richroll Want to learn more about Mindset Mentor+? For nearly nine years, the Mindset Mentor Podcast has guided you through life's ups and downs. Now, you can dive even deeper with Mindset Mentor Plus. Turn every podcast lesson into real-world results with detailed worksheets, journaling prompts, and a supportive community of like-minded people. Enjoy monthly live Q&A sessions with me, and all this for less than a dollar a day. If you’re committed to real, lasting change, this is for you.Join here 👉 www.mindsetmentor.com My first book that I’ve ever written is now available. It’s called LEVEL UP and It’s a step-by-step guide to go from where you are now, to where you want to be as fast as possible.📚If you want to order yours today, you can just head over to robdial.com/bookHere are some useful links for you… If you want access to a multitude of life advice, self development tips, and exclusive content daily that will help you improve your life, then you can follow me around the web at these links here:Instagram TikTokFacebookYoutube

Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I am so excited to show you this interview with Rich Roll. Rich Roll is a ultra marathon athlete. He has an incredible story from his past, his dealing with being an alcoholic. We went through the whole, we dove really deep into what being an alcoholic is like, how to overcome it, the trauma that he went through,

but also how he pulled himself out of it. Also how he decided to go from corporate lawyer to vegan ultra-athlete, and how he became a best-selling author, has one of the biggest podcasts in the entire world. I think you're going to absolutely love this podcast episode. So without further ado, this is the episode with Rich Roll. Welcome to today's episode of the Mindset Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rob Dial. If you have not yet done so, hit that subscribe button so that you never miss another episode. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Rich Roll, who is an ultra endurance athlete, bestselling author, and host of the Rich Roll Podcast. Began his athletic career in his 40s and was an alcoholic, 50 pounds overweight. And within two years, at the age of 43, if I'm not mistaken,

you won the stage one of the ultra marathon, which is a three-day, 320-mile triathlon. Is that correct? That is correct. So, and you're also one of Men's Health's top 25 fittest men in the entire world, which is impressive. But I would like to, one thing I always do with all of my audience is dive into your story and kind of how you got to where you are, because it hasn't always been rainbows and unicorns to get you to where you are. But if you would kind of start off on how you got to where you are, I would love for everyone to know who you are.

How far back do you want to go? We can go back to college time and the transition of everything that happened to you. Well, you mentioned that I started my athletic career in my 40s. It's not technically accurate because I was a swimmer growing up. Swim at a very high level competitively throughout high school and collegiately at Stanford,

which had the number one swimming program in the country at the time in the late 1980s. So I competed on two NCAA Division I championship teams, sharing lanes with Olympic gold medalists and world record holders and American record holders. So I do have a robust athletic background. But when I got to college, well, prior to college, leading up to that, I was a very studious, introverted kind of kid. I never got into trouble. I didn't party. I was on the grind all the time. I got up at 4.45 every morning, went to the pool, swam an hour and a half, went to school.

Back to the pool after school, two more hours in the pool. Homework, 9 p.m., lights out, repeat, and did that from age 14 through high school. So by the time I was a senior in high school, I was regarded as one of the top recruits in the country and started going on all these recruiting trips and had gotten my grades to the relatively close to the top of my class. So the world was very much my oyster. I thought that I was gonna go to Harvard. I told them that I got in and was intending to go there.

I told the swim coach, this is where I'm going. Visited Stanford at the last minute because I had always, like as a kid growing up in Washington, DC, who had a stack of Swimming World magazines pre-internet on my bed stand, would see these heroes of mine who were at the farm at Stanford and never thought that I was quite good enough or that I would have a shot to compete at that level

because there's a difference between being a standout high school swimmer and being an Olympic contender. That's a pretty wide gap. But I visited at the last minute, fell in love with the people and the campus and the idea of swimming outdoors every day and the combination of being able to train and compete at the highest level in my sport alongside the best people in the world while also attending arguably the best if you know one of the best you know academic institutions in the country and i just couldn't say no to that so that's how i ended up at stanford and i loved it and there was an environment there that was very conducive to um open-minded thinking in the sense that if you came with a dream, there was an institution there

to support it. And nobody said, you got to pick academics or you got to pick swimming. You're not going to be able to excel at both. Instead, it was an environment that said, why not? Like, that's what you're here to do. How can we support you? And I love that ethos about that institution that I think still is a hallmark of what makes Stanford great. But when I arrived at college, I quickly fell into the partying scene. I had gotten drunk a couple times and I could tell that whole story.

But essentially what happened was alcohol from the first time that I experienced it just gave me a sensation that I knew fundamentally, even at age 18 was different from my peers. Like it was like this warm blanket that, uh, you know, made me feel comfortable and as if all the problems in the world faded away. And I had this sense of feeling like I thought I was supposed to feel all the time. And it was a facilitator to a social life that had previously eluded me. I could suddenly look a girl in the eye

and have a conversation and go to parties and be sociable, which I had never done in my life prior to that. And I loved it. And over time, it was a very slow erosion. But over time, that became much more important to me than any of the goals that I had set for myself as this high school senior looking at conquering the world. So fast forward to a very dark place that alcohol took me at age 31 prior to getting sober.

But along the way, I had a lot of good times and it did teach me some social skills that I was lacking. So it wasn't all bad. It works until it stops working. And the extent to which it stopped working was kind of a progressive thing that occurred over many years. But it didn't take long before I was the kid

who was the last one to leave the party or was going out three or four nights a week when I was still getting up to go to swim practice. And suddenly, my times aren't so good and my grades are slipping and I didn't care. I just was focused on where's the next good time. So I maintained my drinking after college, lived in New York City, and that was really an accelerant to the whole thing because

New York City at that time, early 90s, it was like Disneyland for alcoholics. And I knew in my heart of hearts that I had an alcohol problem, but I was very far away from being in a place where I was ready to reckon with it. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll give you my background. So my father was an alcoholic. Parents got divorced when I was nine because of it. And then he passed away when I was 15 from alcoholism. Sorry to hear that. Thank you. So I've been thinking about it my entire life and just kind of what gets somebody to that point. And

what's interesting is that, you know, uh, are you familiar with Gabor Mate? Yeah. So I know, I know him fairly well. Yeah. So he talks a lot about almost all addiction in some sort of ways is trauma-based and there's, there's sometimes when it's, when it's not, it just happens to be like you said, where it's maybe for the feeling that it gave you and the fact that it was able to get you outside of your shell and give you a you know an experience that you weren't able to have do you feel like there was something that was trauma-based or do you feel like you just went hey i'm too far down the line at this point and i've it gave me something that i wanted to like social skills or getting me out of my shell and then just one day you're like i'm too far down

well i think it's a combination of a lot of things. I think there's a lot of merit in Gabor's work and what he has to say. I think it's mostly instructive in terms of a parent looking at how to guide a young person to avoid the kind of trauma that might trigger something like that. As somebody who's been in recovery for well over 20 years at this point, I can tell you that the solution lies less in looking in the rear view mirror and more about the practical tools that you can access and apply in order to rectify some of your precept behavior patterns or kind of the mental narratives that's been in your head to live a better life. In my case, I didn't have alcoholic parents. There was no alcoholism around me. I never really saw people drink excessively. And I don't think anybody gets out of childhood without some kind of trauma.

And different people index the level of impact that those kinds of traumas may have. But I didn't suffer any kind of trauma where I can point to it and say, this is why. And I think it's important to understand that, like I said earlier, you can go down that rabbit hole and spend years trying to parse how you got to this place where you became an alcoholic. But ultimately, it's not that helpful, you know, in terms of like how to live now. Right. Hey, these days it'd be hard to find time to sit down

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So make an investment in your health today and try the ultimate all-in-one wellness bundle and support your immunity, gut health, energy, and so much more by visiting athleticgreens.com slash dial. You'll receive a full year supply of liquid vitamin D for free. With your first purchase, just go to athleticgreens.com slash dial. Yeah, I always tell people it's, it's, it's, if you look back at the why too much, it's going to get in the place of the what and the how, like, what do I need to do? How do I need to get through it? And I feel like sometimes people do go too far in the past and pay too much attention to it. When in reality, you're in this present moment, and there's something that might be in front of you that you can work on. And so this was, you know,

if you talk about, you said when you were 31, so about 13 years that you were an alcoholic and performing well, and I mean, you graduated, you became a lawyer and everything. Yeah, I mean, I was fairly high functioning for a long time. I got through law school. I don't know how I did that. You know, and I I lived in New York City and then I worked in a law firm. But like I said, my life was degrading day to day. And the kind of circumstances that I would find myself in were becoming progressively more and more dire. I was able to get away with it for a long time. But as any alcoholic will tell you, they think that no one knows what they're actually doing.

But it's pretty transparent. And it was bad. I mean, at the very end, I was the guy who would pour a vodka tonic before I would get in the shower in the morning. And I'd put a tall boy between my legs to drive drunk to work. And I would sneak drinks throughout the day, just waiting until I could get home and like get my buzz on, you know, real time and then go out and inevitably blackout. There's so many, you know, I have tons of crazy stories,

but ultimately there was nothing very Bukowski or rock and roll or sexy about it. It was just sad, lonely, and pathetic. And it really came to a head not that long after I moved down to Los Angeles, where I got two DUIs in a row, like literally within a period of six weeks of each other, I was facing jail time. I had rear-ended an elderly woman. My license had been stripped. My boss knew about it. The whole house of cards was basically collapsing on top of me. And it's not that I didn't know that I was an alcoholic.

I knew I was an alcoholic for a long time, but there's a powerlessness that's baked into this disease. It's essentially this allergy of the body, but it's really a spiritual disease. And people, when you hear about that bottom that people hit, that's different for every people. And I think it's calibrated in accordance with people's pain threshold. The elevator is going down.

Sometimes it's going down slow. It went down slow for me for a long time. Then it started to accelerate. And at any moment, you have the opportunity to step off and change your life. But it had to go down pretty far for me before I was willing to really reckon with it. And, you know, it was a situation in which my life was clearly going nowhere fast. And my family didn't want anything to do with me anymore. I'd lost a bunch of friends. I was quickly on route to becoming unemployed, sleeping on a bare

mattress in a shitty apartment with no furniture and just alone, you know, and that was really the catalyst. And I ended up going to a rehab facility in Oregon where I thought in my mind, I was going to spin dry for 28 days like people do. And when I got there, I realized that my best thinking, me thinking I'm this smart guy, I got into Harvard, I went to Stanford, I went to Cornell Law School, I have all these skills and I was this swimmer. I don't belong in a place like this, but my best thinking had essentially landed me in,

to put it bluntly, a mental institution. And that landed like a pile of bricks on top of me. And I just remember thinking, I need to do this right because I never want to come back here again. And ultimately, that led me to being open and honest about how I was actually living for the very first time because alcoholics are loners. They isolate.

They don't want to tell anyone what they really feel and they feel like their problems are totally unique and nobody would understand them and when i finally you know opened up and started saying this is this is what i do this is what a day in the life looks like for me the counselors essentially said or one counselor in particular said listen you have you have a case of alcoholism that we typically only see in like 65-year-old lifelong drinkers. Like it's bad. And if you don't sort this out for yourself, like you will die. I've seen it a million times. You can leave whenever you want, but we would suggest that you stick around. And I said, whatever you need me to do, I'm here.

And I ended up living in that treatment facility for a hundred days. Was there like a one moment where it was like, you said that you knew for a while, but there's one moment where you're like, I have to make a change. And it was like, that was the moment where you decided to wake up or was it just the slow burn like you're talking about? I mean, it was a slow burn, but Rob, I think you would agree that all of us at moments in our life, it's sort of like sliding doors. There are these windows of opportunity that suddenly appear where your willingness to make that change matches up with a set of circumstances that allow you to kind of step through that door and make that change. Because like I said, I knew this was gonna end badly. I knew at some point I was either gonna kill somebody,

kill myself, end up in jail or get sober. But I just couldn't get myself to make any of those changes until one day I just was ready. And I can't explain it any more further than that. But to say that, you know, the level of pain that i was in like the the the pain that i was experiencing um exceeded the fear of the unknown because it's a very scary prospect and you probably know this from your father the idea of getting sober it's like only alcoholics if you present them with this idea, look, you can keep drinking, jails, institutions, or death.

That's the only place this is going. Or you can get sober and just your life will change and you'll be met with unlimited possibilities. You'll be happy. You'll be a responsible member of society again. And the alcoholic will say, I need to think about it. Right. Like, you know, and normal people don't understand that.

And I'm sure growing up, that caused a lot of chaos and confusion and pain, you know, and turmoil and trauma for yourself and your family. Yeah, and I get messages from people all the time, which is why I, you know, I don't want to dive too deep into it. But I think I appreciate you sharing because there's a lot of people that hear my story. And they're like, well, my father's going through this, my mother's going through this, or they're going through it as well. And it's important, I think, for people to hear this and also to realize that there's nothing wrong with those people. They think there's something wrong with them. And I'm like, they kind of just need

support sometimes. And it's also sounds like from what you said, it's just some people get to a point, they realize they need the help. It's very, very difficult when you have a loved one who's in the grips of this disease. And it's a sense of powerlessness that is unlike anything else. You cannot will that person to make a change. There's nothing about it that's rational or logical. Did you go to Al-Anon when you were a kid?

Yeah, I did. Yeah, and I went to Al-anon more than my dad went to aa yeah you know and it's uh it's there are people who have messed me they've been al-anon and it's as as a a child of an alcoholic it's super hard to understand because also you feel like and i never consciously knew this until i did a lot of work on myself of oh most of my trauma comes because I actually thought my dad loved alcohol more than he loved me. Right. But then you grow up and you're like, that's not actually the case. But now that is some of the trauma they need to work through,

you know, because you see this thing and you're like, I just want him to be around. I want him to show I want to I say I got I got lucky in the sense that my father was an alcoholic who he never hit me. He never abused me. He never emotionally, physically, sexually abused me. And if that stuff, he got drunk and he fell asleep. But in turn, there's emotional glad that comes from that, right? At times he was supposed to pick me up, didn't pick me up. Having to walk home by myself, you know,

thinking he was going to pick me up to go fishing, sitting on the steps. It's the typical story. Or just the day in, day out trauma of not having a dad present in your life and falling into that belief that he must love that more than he loves me. For sure.

Yeah. So it's been some work. It's been a lot of years. I mean, I look at it this way. It was a blessing. It was the day he died was the worst day of my life, but it was also the best day of my life because it made me realize this is gonna end.

And I don't think that I would do any of the stuff that I do now. I actually, not that I think, I would not do the things that I do now. I wouldn't have the podcast. I wouldn't, you know, try to help people with it. So in turn, I think it's turned into a beautiful thing. It's the way that it always works. Yeah. It's supposed to work this way, right? If you give them the attention and wrestle with your demons and do the inside work, those terrible moments generally are the generators of amazing lives. For sure.

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slash dial. That's L-A-D-D-E-R, life.com slash dial, ladderlife.com slash dial. So you go there for 100 days. And then it, again, wasn't all rainbows and sunshine after that, right? So after you get out of there, you were still, you went back and worked, I think, as a lawyer. And then there was a moment where you just decided that you wanted to do what you do now, it seems.

Yeah, it was, excuse me. I'm sorry your were you with your wife at this point in time no i well i met my wife so i come out of treatment and my my whole mo was to build the most solid foundation of sobriety that i possibly could i was so terrified of relapsing or being back in that place that desperate lonely place lonely place that I was in. So when I came back to Los Angeles, it was just all about meetings. Like I just went to two meetings a day. I needed to change all my friends and found some, I mean, the good thing about one of the many good things about LA is there's incredible recovery here. And there's a lot of amazing young people in recovery and the community is just unbelievably supportive. So I embrace that wholeheartedly. And that was the most important thing in my life. So yes, I went back to the law firm where I was working. But prior to leaving

the treatment center, my main counselor was like, listen, I really think that you should be celibate and avoid dating or getting involved in a relationship for at least the first year. Because so many of my issues were tied up in how I interrelated with the opposite sex, because that's how I learned to talk to girls. I couldn't do it sober. And the idea of trying to do that was terrifying to me. And I needed to really just focus

on developing life skills and getting as sober as i possibly could before i could welcome in any other human being because i'd never been in a healthy relationship before so i did that but right when i reached the one year mark i met my wife and and that was that was it like she's literally the only person that i've dated in a significant way in sobriety and we've now been together for 21 years yeah and it seems like from the stories the research i've done it seems like she's pretty amazing as well he's a badass yeah like when you talk about the stories right yeah when you talk about the stories of like you know you were you were at a point one time where you couldn't even uh pay for your garbage to be picked up so they took your trash cans right and uh but she still was supportive in in getting you and helping you to where you wanted to be it wasn't so much

helping me it was more helping us the the idea behind it so yes i went back to the law firm and there's a whole story about that but ultimately i ended up walking away from that life when I start to discover that there's so much more to explore as I wrestled with this kind of existential crisis that I was having about who I was and what I'm here to do. And that was multiple years of trying to figure things out, during which time we went through a very difficult financial time where the prospect of just putting food on the table became precarious. And part of that was, yes,

there was a time where we couldn't pay to have our garbage bins, couldn't pay to have our garbage picked up. So they took the bins away and we would have to put the garbage in the back of this beat up, our only car car which was a beat up minivan with like 250 000 miles on it find a dumpster somewhere to dump it and it was

humiliating and emasculating as a guy who you know again going back to like i'm this person with this pedigree and i should be doing this and now i have kids and i'm married married and it's a tough pill to swallow. So you're wrestling with this idea of chasing meaning, they call it following your passion. I'm not a big fan of that phraseology, but finding meaning, trying to connect with something more potent and personally fulfilling to do with my life.

And that was not a quick process. So during that period of time, yeah, there was a lot of hardships. And Julie, I would have moments where I'm like, screw this. I need to just get a paycheck. It doesn't matter what it is. And she would say, no, you're on this path. And for you to stop or backtrack now is to disrespect everything that we've gone through to date. And I have faith, like she had extreme faith that this would play out in a positive way, but that we had to just, if anything, double down on the way that we were kind of pursuing this path. So it was her strength, I think, that in so many ways allowed me to stay in it when my faith faltered. And she's a powerhouse,

like her spiritual practice is something to behold and she doesn't suffer fools lightly. And I think when you talk about spirituality, the mind wanders to a bunch of new age people doing crazy stuff, talking about a bunch of nonsense, but really what it is is is an internal fortitude and a sense of fidelity to whatever your North Star may be. That's beautiful.

And so what was the path that you found at that point? Well, what happened was I get out of treatment, I'm working on my sobriety, I meet Julie, we're together. And there was a decade in which, in addition to just being sober, my goal was to become a responsible member of society again, like to rebuild everything that I had destroyed and to regain a level of respectability,

to be a responsible member of society. And in my mind, the path towards doing that was to, double down at work at this law firm and become a partner and do all the things that society will smile upon and approve of. So that ushered in a phase of workaholism because the way alcoholism works is you could take the drugs and the alcohol away, that's not really the cure. take the drugs and the alcohol away. That's not really

the cure. The drugs and the alcohol are a symptom of an underlying disorder that just wants more, that's trying to fill this hole that you have in your soul and your spirit. And if you're not fully dialed in in your recovery program, your behavior is going to start to manifest in all manner of unhealthy ways. You're either going to get into a terrible relationship or you're going to start gambling or you're going to be shopping too much or you're going to be now scrolling on social media all day. In my case, it manifested in workaholism.

And this is important because people don't talk about workaholism enough. That was how my trauma manifested from my father was working 110 hours a week. Well, because it's something that you feel like you can control. And for you coming out of an environment in which there's a lot of chaos, it's not surprising that you would gravitate towards that. Like I'm in my domain, here's what I do.

And as long as I'm working and pushing these papers around in this particular way, I'm gonna be able to create the life that I want for myself. And what happens with that is that it's myopic to the bigger picture around purpose and meaning. And so while I was chasing all of this, I was also medicating my repressed emotional state

through unhealthy food. So I was basically a junk food junkie, eating all my food through drive-ins and late night Chinese food at the law firm or whatever the case may be. So by the time I was 39, coming up on 40, I was about 50 pounds overweight. I was never like a big morbidly obese guy

or anything like that. Just like a heavy guyid morbidly obese guy or anything like that just like a heavy guy who looks like he's working in the law firm too much and riding the elevator up and down was the extent of my physical exertion for the day um and in my mind this is fine like i'm but i'm also in the back of my you know in the in my heart of hearts in the back of my mind i'm like i'm really unhappy here i look around at these partners i don't aspire to any of their lives you make partner then you just get more responsibility and i saw a lot of relatively unhappy people who then become leveraged to the hill because they would buy the house that's a little bit out of their reach or

lease the car that's just a little bit too expensive and before you know it you got kids and you wake up and you're 45 and you're like well this is my life like i can't course correct at this point i'm too far in and i had that sense that if i didn't do something different that that was going to be me and i was terrified about that but i didn't know what else to do this was the only thing that I'd ever really considered. And it dawned upon me that I'd never, despite this high level education that I had and parents that cared about me and always met my needs and the like, I had never spent a minute thinking about what it was that I wanted to do for myself. I didn't feel entitled to that. And I think part of that comes with this other thing that people who are lucky enough to get a great education don't feel like it's okay to talk about,

which is if you get that kind of education, then you need to go be this kind of person in the world. And you can't really squander it to chase some crazy dream because then what was all that for, right? And I was dealing with a lot of that at the same time. So this existential crisis eventually crashes into a health crisis when um i come home late from work i'm on the precipice of turning 40 my family's asleep and i'm walking up the stairs to go to bed and i had to pause up a simple flight of stairs. I was winded

out of breath, sweat on my brow, heart disease runs in my family. I had tightness in my chest and I thought, am I having a heart attack? Like it was a scary moment in which everything suddenly became crystal clear. Like another sliding door situation, line in the sand moment, where I suddenly had a willingness to make some of the changes that I knew that I needed to make with respect to my lifestyle and to really tackle this existential dread that was consuming me at the time. And I think, looking back, I mean, you mentioned, you know, you have these bad moments in your life and ultimately they become good things. I knew because of what had happened to me so many years prior, eight, nine years prior,

where I made that decision to go to that rehab and how drastically my life had changed as a result of that decision. So I had the sense that a simple decision can change your life and the idea that anybody can change their life if they can summon the courage to welcome the unknown into their life because that had happened to me before. But that was a very specific moment. I'm going to go to this treatment center. Had I waited a day, I don't know if I ever would have gone. So when I'm on the staircase, I had this palpable sensation that I was being visited once again with one of those moments.

And I knew well enough that it was going to require me to act right away because if I just let it pass and say, well, that was weird, maybe I should eat a little bit better or go to the gym yeah that that wasn't going to work like i needed to do something immediate and drastic that was similar that would that would like connect me with that experience of going to that treatment center in a different way um and that's what i did so the next day i did like a seven day i started this seven day fruit and vegetable juice cleanse because that felt like a version of detoxing off drugs but with food and it wasn't that i felt like i needed to detox my body i just needed to do

something hard that would like wipe the slate clean yeah and and and provide me with a new perspective and some momentum which i think is very important in making any change in your life to begin this journey of how I was going to recreate how I was living. Yeah. So did you decide at that, after that point, did you become a vegan or did it take time until you got there? Yeah, that took time. It's funny because if you Google my name and it all looks like all this stuff happened in a very compressed period, like he was a drunk and he went vegan and then he was doing ultramarathon. It's like, this is like, we're talking about like a 15 year,. Like he was a drunk and he went vegan and then he was doing ultra marathon. It's like, this is like,

we're talking about like a 15 year, well, it was like, you know, nine years sober before the health thing. And then it took about six or eight months of playing around with diets before I entertained the possibility of trying to eat a 100% plant-based diet. Like I didn't want to, it wasn't like,

oh, I can't wait to not eat animal products. Like I wasn't an animal rights person, but I tried all these other diets. It didn't want to, it wasn't like, oh, I can't wait to not eat animal products. Like I wasn't an animal rights person, but I tried all these other diets. It didn't really seem to work. And that cleanse, that seven day cleanse that I did on the seventh day, I felt incredible. Like if you've ever done anything like that or done some fasting, there's something about that process

that really supercharges your vitality. And I just remember like a good alcoholic, I was like, I want to feel like this all the time, right? Maybe I'll never eat food again. My wife's like, yeah, you're still an alcoholic. Like you gotta eat food. I'm like, all right, well, how can I eat so that I feel like that?

And that's what kind of led me down the rabbit hole of trying a bunch of diets. The last being a plant-based diet, because it seemed the most extreme, it seemed the most difficult to master, but nothing else worked. And honestly, I was like, I'll try it because I need to check that box.

And then I'll just go back to eating cheeseburgers because I'm 40. And maybe when you're 40, you're supposed to just feel like shit all the time. So I did it. And within a week of making that switch, I did feel like I did on that seventh day. There was something about eating only plants, close to their natural state, no processed foods that really agreed with me.

And that was like a profound moment. And I've been eating that way ever since. So that was, how long ago was that? I'm 54. So 14 years. So for people listening, they're thinking how, because the way that we understand, you can, people can't see me, it's air quotes, understand nutrition, think if someone's going to be an ultra marathon runner, they got to get a lot of calories, they got to get a lot of animal products, all of that. So to be a vegan ultra marathon runner seems counterintuitive for the average person that's out there. Do you have, do you have anything to say around that? Because I think for a lot of people that switches the way they think.

Right, I mean, it's changed a lot in the 14 years since I've been doing this. Now there's tons of athletes that are killing it on a plant-based diet and movies like Game Changers have really helped change the conversation, the cultural conversation about athletic performance and a plant-based diet. But at the time, yeah,

there weren't that many people doing it. There was one guy that I knew called Rip Esselstyn. He was an all American swimmer at the University of Texas. I competed against him. We didn't really know each other. We weren't friends, but I knew who he was. I knew his name. I'd swum against him when I was a kid.

He was a couple of years older than me. And we were Facebook friends. And on his Facebook, so this is, what is this 2006 or something, so just to like root your internet, you know, vernacular around like Facebook being, you know, kind of the main thing at the time. And he was about to come out with a book called the Engine 2 Diet.

And he'd been plant-based for a long time. Then he was a professional, he was an all American swimmer. And then he was a professional triathlete. He was first out of the water at Kona one year. Like he's a very good athlete. And we started communicating. I was like, tell me about this thing that you're doing, because I just started eating plant-based.

I don't know what I'm doing. He's like, oh man, you know. So we started a friendship up, and he was kind of mentoring me. Then his book came out, and that was a big deal. It was basically, he was a fireman at the time and he took all the guys in his firehouse through like a 30 day experience of cooking for them in the firehouse plant-based only. And they would do, you know, all this stuff that firemen do, push up challenges and pull up challenges. And he was taking their

blood week by week. And there were guys, young guys in there who had crazy cholesterol and all kinds of like health problems that, you know, somebody in their 30s shouldn't have. And he was able to reverse a lot of that. And that provided the basis for this book that explored the plant-based diet. His father is also a cardiologist and a researcher who'd done a lot of work in this field and was an Olympic rower

and had been eating plant-based for like 50 years. So that was like, those guys really helped me to feel confident or assured that I wasn't being completely irresponsible or crazy. And in tandem with that, with this elevated vitality that I was experiencing, I started exercising again, which is something I hadn't done in a long time,

despite having been an athlete, but I had no designs on returning to becoming competitive in any regard. I just wanted to lose this weight that I was carrying. It was really a vanity thing. Like I just wanna lose weight. I wanna look good. I wanna be able to enjoy my kids at their energy level.

My wife bought me a bike for my birthday and I just, you know, would go out for a jog. I went back to the pool occasionally, but it was all like super casual at first. It didn't, you know, the whole like ultra endurance world didn't come until a fair bit later. Yeah. So what was that transition? Is it just, you just started getting a little bit better, a little bit better, and then something popped up and you're like, all right, I'm going to go run a marathon or a half marathon. Yeah. No, what happened was the weight came off really fast. And every week I was making crazy gains. Like I would go from being barely able to run, you know, three or four miles to then running eight miles, like, you know, two weeks later. And I just was feeling good. And I was

bouncing back day to day. Like I wasn't getting overtired by any of these workouts and that started to you know get my brain thinking like wow I feel like I can't believe you know I was never a runner yeah I can actually go out and run pretty far and pretty fast and then one day it's probably about maybe six months into this whole thing I went out for a trail run near my house and it was a weekday morning. I didn't have that much time because I had work I had to do. And my plan was just to run for 45 minutes or an hour. But I had that kind of flow state experience that you hear about. And runners talk about a lot that they're visited with occasionally where you just feel

unbelievable, like you can run forever and i was experiencing that for the first time and i just decided to keep running and keep running and keep running and ended up running like 24 miles on that run which was like so much further than i ever had before and i just couldn't believe that i was able to do that. And it didn't seem that hard. Like I wasn't that tired afterwards either. And so that got me thinking about a challenge for the first time. And part of that is also like, hey, you're 40.

That's when you start to kind of look at your life and have that midlife crisis. A lot of guys end up going to do Ironmans or buying a fancy car or something like that. So there was a little bit of that mixed in with this sense that I had that I'd never reached my potential as an athlete because alcoholism had really robbed me of that. And so that's 24 miles. That's almost an entire marathon just going for a typical run.

And then, so how did, how did it transition you going to a hundred mile race? What was the first really big, oh shit, this is a, this is a typical run. And then so how did it transition you going to 100 mile race? What was the first really big, oh shit, this is a big deal for you? Well, so I started entering some triathlons, local little triathlons around town and thought, hey, I'd love to do an Ironman because I'm having a midlife crisis. You didn't want to get the red Corvette.

I didn't know anything about that world at all. And I thought you could just sign up for these things. I didn't realize you got to sign corvette anything about that world at all and i thought you could just sign up for these things i didn't realize you got to sign up for them like a year in advance um and so that was kind of off the table because i didn't want to wait a year in order to have a date on the calendar that would kind of drive me in a certain direction i did a half iron man that i didn't finish i didn't know what I was doing. Like I just cramped up after the bike. It was a terrible experience. Like I was not off to like this great start of, you know, where everybody's like, wow,

he's a, he's an amazing endurance athlete. Like that was not what was going on. But, but then when I was trying to figure out what would be a cool challenge, I read this article about this race called Ultraman, which I'd never heard of. So for people that are listening that don't know, an Ironman, widely considered the ultimate challenge of endurance, is a one-day race in which you swim 2.4 miles, you ride your bike 112 miles, and then you run a marathon. Super hard.

The fastest guys do it in eight hours plus. Most people do it in like 12 to 14 hours or something like that. And I just thought there's nothing harder than that, like that's the ultimate challenge. And then here was this Ultraman race that I started reading about, which was twice that distance over three days. It's essentially a double Ironman distance triathlon

that circumnavigates the entire big island of Hawaii, a 320 mile race, wherein the first day you swim 6.2 miles, 10 kilometer swim, and then you ride your bike 90 miles with crazy amount of elevation up to volcano national park in Hawaii, the big island of Hawaii. The second day you race your, so then you go to bed. It's like a stage race. The second day you wake up and you race your bike 171 miles all the way around the island. And then the third day you celebrate this insanity by running 52.4 miles, like a double marathon to bring you back to where you started. And I'm reading this article and I just, it blew my mind. Like I just didn't think that was humanly possible. And the story was really about,

well, David got, part of it was about David Goggins because he had just done this race right after doing Backlogger. So David Goggins had just done it. So he came into that world before you then? So David, yeah, I mean, David's been around for a long time. I mean, David was like, the first podcast that he did was my podcast.

Like in the endurance world, like everybody knew David, but he wasn't David Goggins. You know, he's not like, it's crazy that he's this cultural phenomenon now because he was a guy who was doing lots of races in the ultra endurance world, which is a very small world and everybody kind of knew him, but he didn't have any visibility outside of that whatsoever. But he had just done the Badwater 135 ultra marathon. And then he had done this Ultraman race and he had all kinds of problems. His pedal broke and he had to tape his shoe to the, it was like his crazy story. And I'd never heard of David prior to this. And it was about him being this overweight,

powerlifting, football playing playing navy seal guy who then decided to tackle all of these difficult endurance challenges to raise funds in honor of some of his fallen brothers right at the same time the description of this race very clearly positioned it as much more of a spiritual journey than a competitive event it is a world championship event there are athletes there that want to win but it's hands they hand select just 35 people from all over the world they keep it really small and the overarching goal and there was a quote from the race director was to provide every athlete and their crews because it's a self-supported thing you got to bring people along with you,

to have a spiritually transformative experience as a result of not just this difficult endeavor, but really connecting with the island of Hawaii, which has magical powers in many ways. Like, it's a very powerful place. And I realized in reading it that that was what I was looking for. I didn't want to do an do an iron man to like check a box or say that i did this thing like i was still very much wrestling with this existential crisis and i was on some form of a spiritual journey of self-understanding and this just seemed like an unbelievable vehicle for that

exploration and something inside me clicked and i was like i am doing this thing i don't know how And this just seemed like an unbelievable vehicle for that exploration. And something inside me clicked and I was like, I am doing this thing. I don't know how or when, but this is what I've been looking for. And I just then proceeded to assume that some way I was going to find my way into this race. Because again, you can't just sign up for it. They have to like select you. You have to apply. But I just assumed I was going to work that out and just proceed it accordingly as if I'd already

been admitted. Yeah. And so do you have to do any races before then to then qualify for those? Or is it just like, cause it seems like it's 35 people quite elite where they're going to just be like, yeah, man, you haven't done enough at this point. Well, yeah, I mean, that was my dilemma. Now that race has become so popular that there are a lot of things that you have to do in order to in order to do it um what i did and this was a different time was i just called up the race director like her name was in the thing and i found her online and i just called her up and i said i read this article i i can't stop thinking about this like i literally couldn't sleep i was like i

have to figure this out and i just told her i'm like i really want to do this and she said what have you done and i basically said i haven't done anything like i was very honest with her i said please just tell me now that it's you're never going to let me in so i can at least go to sleep and like forget about this and and she said something amazing to me which was i'm not saying she didn't say yes and she didn't say no she said why don't you call me in a couple months because this was very early it was very far out from like the deadline or all of that and that was all that i needed like she just gave me that little glimmer of hope i ended up hiring a coach i told him this is what i'm doing he was like you're crazy but, I'll try to prepare you as best as I can.

And he put me on an incredibly rigorous training program that ramped up very slowly, but ultimately was extremely challenging. And I stayed in communication with that race director. I had my coach write a letter saying, I'm gonna get him as prepared as I possibly can. And she let me in. And, you know, had she not like my life would have been very different. I think. Yeah. This is the thing I was really interested about with you. Cause I've always thought

that these types of things are spiritual journeys. It's, I mean, I guess there are probably some people that go there just competitiveness, but I would think that probably a lot of them, it is a journey, like an inward journey to do something like this. So for you going and signing up and actually getting into this race, what was the spiritual journey like for you going in, we said it's 320 miles? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it was a journey that played out through the course of preparing for it, because as any ultra endurance athlete will tell you, you're spending an unbelievable amount of time with yourself in an elevated heart rate situation where you're connecting with your breath. I wouldn't characterize it as meditation, but it is a form of active mindfulness

that I think gave me the space to really go inward. Like if I was on an eight hour bike ride, like you can't listen to music. that I think gave me the space to really go inward. Like if I was on an eight hour bike ride, like you can't listen to music. It's like I was going deep inside myself and trying to understand what makes me tick, what it is that I wanna do. And all I knew was that this was making me happy and I felt directed.

And after that 24 mile trail run, I made a decision and a promise to myself that I would no longer ignore the things that brought me joy in my life. And it was this understanding that those things weren't having a certain kind of house or a certain kind of car or a job. It was the feeling of the sun on my shoulders at dawn on a trail run or what it feels like to jump into a swimming pool. Like these are things that made me so happy as a kid swimming. And I just completely put them in the rear view mirror and said, I'm an adult now. So I just said, this is, I enjoy doing this and I'm going to prioritize making time

to continue to do this, even though it doesn't make sense. There's no logical path forward for me. It's not like I'm gonna become a professional athlete or figure out a way to make money doing this, but I didn't care. It just felt, the only way I can explain it is that it just felt like the right thing to do for me. Yeah, you're familiar with Charlie Ingle, I'm like the right thing to do for me. Yeah. Um,

you're familiar with Charlie Ingle, I'm sure. Yeah. I know Charlie well. So, uh, I, I met him at an event and we speak pretty often and he is, uh, he, he told me kind of the same thing as well. I mean, he did, I think 5,000 miles across the Sahara desert and, uh, and it's, it's a complete it or journey, you know, like it's, and that's the, but what's, what's interesting about what you said is that you didn't want to not do anything that didn't make you happy anymore, which I think that a lot of people get away from, you know, there's a lot of people that email in and they're messing me on Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is. And they're like, you know, I just, I don't know what makes me happy anymore.

And like you're saying, it usually goes back to childhood. And it's like, we almost build up this, who we're supposed to be and forget about who we actually are. And it seems like this spiritual journey was kind of a journey back to who you were and who you truly are as a child. Who I was all along. Right. And then just over time, it seems like you just, you know, you figured out through society of people around you who you were supposed to be. But in reality, that wasn't the thing that actually made you happy. Yeah, because my whole life was directed towards becoming this, you know, respectable, upwardly mobile person.

Right. Right. And there wasn't room for what I wanted to do. Like that was just never, like I said earlier, never really part of the conversation. Yeah. With myself. Yeah. And so when you're doing something like this, I'm sure a lot of people are like,

there's probably a lot of pain that you're going through when you're going through this, but you have a real unique perspective on pain in your relationship with it, don't you? Yeah. I mean, pain is a phenomenal teacher. You know, pain doesn't lie. Pain is truth. You know, pain has been the thing that has taught me the most through Dark Nights of the Soul and through my successes. And it is a weird thing. Like, I remember as a kid in the swimming pool, I was not the most talented swimmer, but I also realized that I was willing to endure more suffering than the other kids. realized that I was willing to endure more suffering than the other kids. And that's how I was able to bridge a certain talent deficit gap and achieve a certain level of proficiency in that sport. And from, and that was meaningful to me back then. So I always became, so I just became

the grinder. Like I'm not the smartest, I'm not, but I will outwork you every single time. And that's good in certain doses, but that's also what led to the workaholism or that creates a situation in which you're blind to the other areas of your life that require your attention. But I think the endurance training helped me kind of calibrate what that relationship should be.

And I realized that my ability or my willingness to suffer is a strength if I could channel it in a healthy way. And ultra endurance is a pretty good template for somebody who's not afraid to suffer a little bit. For sure. I'm thinking that there's probably people listening and saying, well, you went from alcoholism to workaholism to doing this. And I'm sure there's probably people who said it to you

before. It was like, oh, you just traded to a new addiction. But for you, what's your viewpoint on that? Because I personally don't see it that way. And I'm sure you don't as well. I think there's truth in that. Yeah. I think people who dismiss that are not being honest with themselves. If you go to any ultra endurance event, there's so many people in recovery at these things. Really? Yeah, so many. Lots of tattoos, lots of former junkies,

because it is a spiritual journey. And a lot of drug addicts are people who have that hole in their soul or in their spirit and they're seekers. Like they initially seek it out through drugs and alcohol, then they get sober, but that hole is still there, yearning to be filled. So I think it's very easy to lapse into

an unhealthy relationship with these kinds of pursuits. There's a trope called the Iron Man widow, like middle-aged dudes who get into Iron Man and they just wanna train all the time, and then they're never home, and other areas of their life suddenly aren't getting proper attention, and their lives kind of fall apart.

I've seen that a lot. So I'm somebody who is prone to having, like I have buddies, what they wanna do is like go to Vegas with their friends and play golf and gamble or whatever. And when I think about think about like oh wouldn't it be great to like get a cabin in the woods by myself and i can just train you know so you know i can easily uh fall into a situation in which it is out of balance for me so i have to be very mindful about that and i've been i've you know i flirted with that in my life before. So basically what I'm saying is I'm, I'm admitting or conceding

that, that the addiction piece can, and at times does play a part in my relationship to endurance. But overall, I think it's important to also acknowledge that that's an overly binary simplistic way of looking at it. For sure. The drink was always the way out, the escape. You know, putting on the running shoes is hard. Yeah, it's not. Yeah, it's just like, it's not like,

when you're doing drugs and alcohol, like you just, you don't wanna do anything that isn't pleasure oriented. And endurance training is exactly the opposite. It's all about doing what you don't wanna do. Yeah. Do you feel like drugs and alcohol is more of like, you don't wanna feel, and when you do ultras

and do this stuff, it's more of you actually feel more? You definitely feel more. And there is this deep interconnectedness with yourself that occurs because it's just, it's between you and you. For sure. And you're alone, whether you're in a race or you're training, you know, what are you gonna do when you're at mile X and you feel like you can't go another step?

Like that's where you meet your truth and you can't lie to yourself about who you are or what you're capable of. And I think those difficult moments come early and often in the endurance world. And those are the things that reveal character. They provide you with these of those boundaries you start to develop a broader sense of possibility and potential for yourself that spills out into every area of your life yeah i've heard david goggins talk about you know the rule of 40 i've heard that you you agree with that as well where it's basically like when you feel like you can't go anymore you're only about 40 of what your actual full capacity is.

What's your relationship with that? And then also at the same time, what do you feel like you've learned about yourself going past that point that you thought was just absolute, can't go any further from that? Yeah. I mean, I've had, I've had lots of those experiences. You know, I think that, that maxim is rooted in the idea that the body is stronger than the mind. And usually it's the mind that, that, that kicks out before the body, right? Because we're not meant, we're not as meant, you can train all you want, but if you're not mentally strong, your, your Achilles heel, like the weak,

weak link in your chain is your mind, right? And your mind is going to get you to quit well before the body needs to shut down. Yeah. It's probably a safety mechanism. Probably. I'm sure there's an evolutionary advantage to all of that so that you don't overly harm yourself. For sure.

Do you talk to yourself when you're doing this? Do you have like a positive self-talk of when you're going through this? Or do you just try to clear everything? Because I'm real curious as far as what's going through your head when it is really hard or when you know you still have a hundred miles in front of you or whatever it might be. Yeah, I don't really have a specific practice in that regard. I mean, I would say that I do my best when I'm as present as possible. And there's something about like that low grade suffering where your heart rate is elevated

and you're connecting with your breath that tends to mute out whatever your brain is. If you were just sitting in a chair without a formal meditation practice, your brain's gonna start looping some stories and you'll just get lost in thought. But when you're in that active state, there isn't a lot of room for that.

Like you have to be really present with what you're doing. And when you reach those moments where you feel like you can't keep going or like you can't, I don't think about the destination. I just try to be present with how I'm feeling and what I'm doing in the moment. But of course your brain's gonna go, I can't, about the destination. I just try to be present with how I'm feeling and what I'm doing in the moment. But of course, your brain's gonna go, I can't, I'm so tired.

I can't, I'm not even halfway done with this thing. I'm never gonna make it. In those cases, I default to breaking it down into the tiniest chunks possible, which is I'm just gonna, all I need to do is like get to that lantern, you know, the next street lamp or whatever, and then I'll worry about everything else after I get there.

That's the only thing that I'm focused on is how can I cross this next 100 meters? And there's a lot of that. I'm trained in that regard because so much of 12-step recovery is similar. This precept that you don't have to worry about not doing drugs and alcohol for the rest of your life you just have to your head has to hit the pillow tonight sober that's all you got to

worry about like breaking it down into small bite-sized chunks so that the challenge becomes as digestible as possible yeah rich deviney talked about that the other day when he was in here and it's it's i think it's it's funny because there's so many life lessons that are just so simple, you know, and he talks about when he's in these crazy missions and, and it's just like, we just got to get to the next five minutes from now. We just got to get to the next tree that's over there, whatever it might be. And I think there's so many lessons in life of just the same way that you're saying it. Don't think about the whole 50 miles that you still have in front of you. It's just like, most people get paralysis by analysis thinking of, oh my gosh, I want to build this business.

I want to create something amazing. But they don't think about like what's the next 15 minutes and what I need to do to get me closer to there. And then they're paralyzed because what they actually want seems so far away from them. I mean, analysis paralysis is a huge one. I mean, I would have never done Ultraman if I was waiting to figure out the answer to all these questions. Am I going to get in? What kind of bike do I need? What kind of shoes? You just have to start.

Everything that I've ever been successful at, I just started doing it without any of the answers. And I've learned to trust that the journey unfolds in front of you and all those questions get resolved or answered in due time, but progress is made through action, not through trying to solve all of this in your mind while you sit at home and do nothing. For sure. And it's the simple, you know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Just take the first step and don't worry about mile 478.

I'm curious with you, is there anything that you haven't done at this point that you see is like the next mountaintop for you i know you're talking about being present and all that but is there something that that that kind of makes you click on the same way that the the ultraman did i don't feel that i have anything that i need to prove to myself or to anybody else physically i still love endurance training and i'm sure I'll do a race here and there and maybe I'll really gear up for a race at some point to see what I can do.

But that really isn't my primary motivator. The internal work is never done. So I've been sober a long time, but I'm still prone to all kinds of character defects and things that I would be well advised to better master than I have. And now I'm a parent. I've got four kids. I've got two teenagers.

They need my attention and my time. So my focus is how can I be the best dad? dad um and professionally my my kind of north star is trying to figure out a way to impact as many people as i possibly can in the most meaningful substantive and and um effective way possible so the podcast the books that i do the speaking all of that is oriented around around that And when you're an endurance athlete and you want to train 25, 30 hours a week, like those two things, you know, they compete. And so as much as it would be cool to set aside everything and train like a madman to see what I could do as a mid-50s year old guy, how is that really meaningful to the broader mission of trying to be a force for

positive good in the world? So my focus is really on the work that I'm doing now. Yeah. I'm curious with, you know, you going through, how long have you been sober now? Well, I got sober in 96. I had a little bit of a lapse 13 years ago, a one-day lapse, so I had to recalibrate the clock. So I gotta be careful. I mean, I went to treatment in 96. So it's only 24, no, 98, I'm sorry. So nine, so that would be coming up on 23 years,

but really, you know, coming up on like 14. Yeah. I'm curious with you with people say, even when they're in recovery, they say, you know, Robin, I'm an alcoholic. I'm curious your thoughts on that,, even when they're in recovery, they say, you know, um, Robin, I'm an alcoholic. I'm curious your thoughts on that, of saying that they're an alcoholic, even when they're in recovery, do you feel like that makes it easier for someone? Do you feel like it could make it harder because they're still identifying with a past version of themselves? Uh, you know,

I try not to, I'm not in the business of passing judgment on how other people think about their own alcoholism. I only have my own experience. That's another thing I've learned in recovery. Like I don't give advice, I share my experience. My experience is that alcoholism is something that I have that's part of who I am that requires a lot of attention in order to keep at bay.

And my relapse was a profound teacher in that regard because that was a period of time in which I never questioned whether or not I was an alcoholic, but I thought I had a handle on it. And my meeting attendance had slipped. My kind of had slipped my kind of um prioritization of my recovery routine wasn't what it had been before and i'd really made endurance training my higher power for lack of a better word like i had put i was all in on this i was going back to ultraman in 2011 and my goal was to win the race and i was like so fit and crazy ready. But I really hadn't been paying attention to my recovery. That race ended up not going well.

I ended up DNFing. I had all kinds of problems. And I was so despondent. And because I hadn't been adequately taking care of myself in that way, was primed for a relapse and i can tell you after one sip of a beer it was like game on it was like my alcoholism had been doing push-ups in the dark all along and was like ready to go really and it was scary really scary wow so that immediately disabused me of any idea that I could one day drink like a gentleman.

It was very clear that it went immediately without any thought on my part. Like it was so spontaneous and strange how it happened, but very clear that that's something I can never do again. And ultimately has been a seemingly negative experience that ended up turbocharging my recovery program because it was so clear that like, this is something that, you know,

for me, I'm always gonna live with and I'm okay with that because the process of getting sober and the principles and the tools that I've learned and the number of with that because the process of getting sober and the principles and the tools that I've learned and the number of people that I now get to help has given my life like, you know, incredible meaning. As far as being a vegan, I know you guys, you and your wife have cookbooks. My girlfriend and I purchased it like six years ago. That's how we started going vegan and everything. And I'm curious with you, with being a vegan,

what are some of the, I mean, you talked about the benefits as far as energy and it didn't seem like it was a pro animal thing for you, but over the time that you've been doing it for how many years is this that you've been vegan? Almost 14 years. 14 years. What have you noticed? And obviously you don't seem like the type of person

who wants to recommend or tell people what to do in any sort of way, but for people who are out there, they're thinking about it in some sort of way, like maybe they are on a journey where they've looked at themselves in the mirror and be like, maybe I should go vegan. What's the simplest way to do something like that? I think there's a lot of on-ramps to this lifestyle

that has been such a positive in my life. So it really depends upon what people are sensitive to or interested in. For me, like I said, it was kind of vanity and it was just wanting to feel good. It was a very selfish concern, but after doing this for so long and being very steeped in the plant-based movement,

I've become much more passionate about the environmental implications of the food-based movement, I've become much more passionate about the environmental implications of the food that we eat, the health considerations of the food that we eat, and the suffering that is incident to a system of conglomerate animal agriculture that is disgusting by any measure. Even the ardent meat eater can't, you know, get on board with the

practices of factory farming at the highest level. And I think on the, in addition to that, the United States being this unbelievably prosperous country, our health outcomes are not so good. And millions and millions of people are suffering from an accelerating rate of chronic disabilities that are entirely lifestyle related. Whether it's obesity, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, of course. All of these things are directly correlated to the foods that we eat. And Americans have a taste for highly processed food, food that's very high in saturated fat and artificial ingredients and the like, and it's making us very unwell. And so, the way that I look at the plant-based lifestyle is like this means of checking all kinds of boxes.

You're being healthier for yourself. The animals are happier. They're certainly happy that you're not consuming them. And it's better for the environment. I mean, right now we're in the midst of a mass species extinction. We are raping and pillaging the rainforest to clear them to raise crops for for animal feed and uh and the deleterious environmental impact of i

mean i just listed like one thing out of a million things that get packed into animal agriculture the extent to which it's um polluting our waterways and creating these algal blooms and it's just it's just it's not sustainable it's not sustainable so like i said it's not incumbent upon me to tell anybody how they should live but i don't miss eating the way that i did before i At 54, I still can go out and kill it. I rode 40 miles today. I feel good. And it's nice to opt out of participating in a system that's really just creating harm.

Yeah, for sure. And I don't stand on any pedestal with this either. I'm not better than anyone else because I'm eating a vegan diet. It's not a harm-free lifestyle. It's just an aspiration to live a little bit more gentle on the planet. Yeah, and going back to that book

that you were talking, Engine 2, where, so my brother-in-law is, I remember when I decided I wanted to start eating vegan, I got, everybody made fun of me, right? Because they're like, oh, okay. And it's not as bad as people act like it is. Like there's some really delicious stuff that you can have. Like, it's not like you just eat lettuce all day long. There's some really delicious stuff that you can have.

It's not like you just eat lettuce all day long. But my brother-in-law is a firefighter. So he loves- In Austin? No, he's a firefighter in Tampa. But people don't realize going back to firefighters is their bodies go through a lot. Heart attacks are very common for them at young ages. Strokes are very common at young ages for them. So my brother-in-law had a second heart attack and he's not like

severely overweight in any sort of way. He had a second heart attack and they decided to, you know, give it a shot because his cholesterol is really high. His cholesterol dropped like 20 points in two weeks. And just like crazy how fast it happens. It's amazing how, how quick the body can change. Like it's, it is made to shift the way that it needs to. And once you start feeling really good, you realize for how long you actually felt really bad and you realize you didn't have energy for a long time. And you're like, Oh my God, this is like, you're saying, you're like, Oh my God, I do have this surplus of energy in ways, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The body is unbelievably resilient. And I learned that with food, as well as with the endurance stuff. It's like, you think it's only capable of doing X until

you eclipse that boundary. And then you realize that there's so much more potential baked into all of us if we can just you know embrace the possibilities a little bit more broadly for sure well rich i appreciate it it's been great man good um where can people find you what's going on in your future find rich roll podcast wherever you listen to podcasts richroll.com is kind of where all my stuff is uh at rich roll on the socials got a bunch of books on my website that you can check out but the podcast is the main thing Rich appreciate it man thank you man

good talking to you yeah you too