The Rich Roll Podcast - Best Of 2020: Part Three: The Rich Roll Podcast

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

We look skyward for answers. But prophets walk among us. Allow me to indulge this truth with yet more timeless and timely wisdom courtesy of the amazing individuals that grace this third and final installment of my annual yearbook. Once again, it’s been an honor to share my conversations with so many extraordinary people over the course of 2020. Second listens brought new insights—and more reminders that these exchanges continue to both inspire and inform. For long-time listeners, approach this episode as a refresher to launch you into 2021 with renewed vigor. For those new to the podcast, my hope is this anthology will stir you to peruse the back catalog and explore episodes you may have missed. Guests featured in this episode (all hyperlinked to their respective episodes) include: Erin Brockovich Matthew McConaughey Shane Parrish Chris Mosier Hakim Tafari Chris Hauth Doug Evans Kamal Ravikant Mirna Valerio Kevin Smith & Harley Quinn Smith Compiling this auditory yearbook is both a joy and a challenge. I have great fondness for all my guests. I take no comfort in leaving anyone out. Should you find one of your personal favorites missing, I get it—please don’t @ me! The visually inclined can watch it unfold on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you for taking this journey of growth alongside me. Here’s to an extraordinary 2021. Join me, and, as my friend Doug Evans would say, let’s make it the best year ever. Peace + Plants, Rich

Each one of us need to look in the mirror and go, how can I be a little bit better? What can I do a little bit better? I'd be great. I'd be perfect. There is no best. I can be a little bit better. I can be a little more fair. How can I understand that my brother and sister are also hurting, maybe in more different ways than I am?

How can I have a conversation without a condemnation? how can I have a conversation without a condemnation? How can I have more patience to take a breath and listen and let someone who hasn't been heard speak more loudly than maybe they need to, but hear them? How do we make this time not just a flash in the pan? How do we be honest for the choices we make for ourselves selfishly are also the best choices for the most amount of people. And then there's not any specific recipe for that.

But take that into consideration when we make our choices for ourselves. I'd say this, man. Start off with trying to create more green lights for yourself and others and see where those two meet. And see that actually being selfless is actually a very selfish act. Creating more for others is actually very selfish for yourself as well. And try to make sure your selfish choices for yourself also light the way for more people as well. That's Matthew McConaughey, and this is part three of our very special Best of 2020 edition of the Rich Roll podcast. Happy New Year's Eve, everybody, or New Year's Day, whenever you find yourself tuning into this. Hope you're not too hung over, that you didn't hit it too hard. That is one of the amazing

things about sobriety, waking up fresh and clear on New Year's Day. Look, I've got plenty of dark January 1st under the belt, but now I count 23, yeah, 23 consecutive New Year's days without a hangover, which I gotta say feels pretty awesome. But if you did push the envelope a little bit, maybe you hit it a little bit too hard, maybe you indulged in a little pandemic insanity and now you're rethinking your relationship to alcohol or drugs. Well,

I feel you. I've been there. It's a longer conversation that we can have. But right now, I guess I'll say this. You don't have to use or drink again if you don't want to ever. If I could do it, I know for a fact that you can too. So all I can say in this format is raise your hand, reach out for help, find somebody that you can talk to. on Twitter and on Instagram are always open. And I really do do my best to get back to anyone and everyone who reaches out to me, who contacts me concerning a struggle with the booze and the substances. I really do want to help. So feel free to contact me. But again, the main thing is raising your hand, not being afraid to reach out for help and ultimately to accept help. Okay, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because, unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful. And recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey.

When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. A problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs.

They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you.

really do, and they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, welcome. Welcome to the third and final installation of my annual podcast yearbook, which is kind of what this thing is. So let's get back into it with a personal hero of mine,

the singular, the eminent, Aaron Brockovich, who joined me for a deep dive on the pollution and politicization of our most needed resource, water. The universe conspired to produce episode 547. I will thus oblige said universe with this deep cut, a powerful reminder of the indelible influence of the individual to create positive change and awaken a movement. So when you're first working with Masry and you're carrying around this doggedness, this stick-to-itiveness, but your life up to that point had been a lot of, you lot of banging your head against the wall and not really making your way in the manner in which maybe you envisioned for yourself. When you get that file and you see that paperwork about medical records stuck in

this essentially a real estate deal, do you have a conscious sense of like, there's an opportunity here for me? Like, what was your awareness level? Like that stuck out, but you were a file clerk. It wasn't your job to go investigate at that point, but there was something that clicked in you that said, I need to know more. Like here, I'm gonna go on a journey with this.

Curiosity. I was smart enough to read the medical reports because they were done in a bar graft. So it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what the hell. T cells. What are those? I looked it up. So white counts.

What does that mean? Looked it up. All of this stuff was off the chart. And mom kicked in and curiosity kicked in. And I'm like, what if that was my child? I'd be worried. And that's what kicked me off was just my own, oh my gosh, this is weird. I'm curious.

Why would this be happening? What's wrong with the children? What would I do if I saw blood work like this on my kid? That's where I went. Yeah. In the movie, that woman is played by Mark Helgenberger, right? Yeah. But is she a stand-in for a variety of people

or based on a real person? Because in the book- Roberta. In the book, she was more up to speed and more suspicious and knew more. Like it plays in the movie like she's less suspecting of what's happening. Well, if you remember in the movie

when Julia first meets her, it's Roberta Walker. And she knew enough because she was already asking questions. That's why I was there. And you see her connect the dots in the conversation. And she goes, my God, the water, the kids, the pool. Roberta was already there. When she looks out and her kids are swimming in the pool at the time. And that's how I got involved, beginning with Roberta's persistence. And like I told you in every community, there's a Roberta Walker. Yeah. There's an Erin Brockovich. Oh, they're there. Yeah. And then when they joined forces, we started really getting some stuff done. I still talk to Roberta all the time. I was just on text with her the other day. She's amazing. And

she's one of those moms and she was done with the bullshit and she'd been pushed through enough. And, you know, we talk about in the book, when people come to me, like even Roberta, when she first came to the law firm, in a way they're looking for permission, if you will, to act and what they really need is support. And when I showed up and I'm like, oh, hell yeah, no, I wouldn't deal with this. If this was my kids, I mean, it starts there. The support starts there. And this is something that was really well thought out to keep covered up. And so the community, they didn't know who to listen to. And then once we got together, it's amazing what happens because nobody ever wants to be the first to say it.

And we don't wake up every day and ask our neighbor, did little Johnny get diagnosed with colitis? And have you been having chronic nosebleeds and weight loss? We don't do that. getting Roberta come to the firm. I go out there, Roberta and I together, and then calling another mom and another mom. Very quickly, we became a bigger group. And I talk about that in the book. Logic, common sense, leverage.

People think leverage is a bad thing. No, it's not. That's getting to know your neighbor. The minute we started leveraging ourselves with the community, PG&E ignored us with one and five and 10. When we came 50, 200, 500, 600, they're like going, what's going on right here?

And that creates an environment where a whistleblower might feel more inclined to disclose what he or she knows. I mean, in the movie, the Fisher Stevens character, like short of getting his documents, it would have been a different story, right? So you need the groundswell, but you also need those people on the inside who might be willing to share with you something that you're not going to be able to find otherwise. Well, you do. And you're absolutely right. And

Roberta Walker had already been to the waterboard and she had made a note on one of her notes. And I'm like, what's this CR6? And she said, oh, that was chromium six. So she was already on it. So when I went into the water board, that's when I started seeing the documents like the one I just shared with you. So oftentimes documents are there on the intake. Somebody may or may not know what they are and files them and they're never discovered again

or somebody clearly will make a reference, put this over here, don't bring it out again. So there's a whole lot of factors that happen and there is a whistleblower. They will make a reference, put this over here, don't bring it out again. So there's a whole lot of factors that happen and there is a whistleblower. They will make a phone call. You've got to go find a document. And in a lot of these communities now they'll come to me and we'll go in with some documents. I can see when the light bulb comes on and I'm like, yes, okay, this community is ready to roll. Now we're going to go over here because they will catch on. And they're usually pissed. And I actually hope if people read the book when they close it, you get mad, too, and realize that you, too, can do exactly.

The women of Tonganoxie, Kansas, they ran Tyson out on a rail. The women of Hannibal, Missouri, they ran for office of one. My gosh, in Flint, Michigan, right now, we have the youngest gentleman on city council, 19 years old. Do not think for one minute just because you don't have a PhD or you're a stay-at-home mom or you're a cocktail waitress somewhere or you're working as a law clerk that everyone thinks because you have stilettos on and blonde hair and big boobs, you're stupid. We shouldn't be underestimating people. You can do this. Find your cause, whatever it may be, and it may not be water. You need the tips, the strategy, and the tools to fight. Learn them and game on.

And you can do it. And I'm telling you, the first step you take and you get just a little bit of that win or you're like, oh my gosh, I understand this. Or my gosh, I got such and such a neighbor to talk to me. And you see it, it's contagious. And the momentum builds. It's very empowering that you can fix or change a law or get involved or get noticed or get on a Superfund site or get information to a doctor and see what's happening. Change in your own backyard. I love it. We do that. So exciting. We the people. I think we the people have forgotten to believe in we the people. And I know we get like overwhelmed, freaking fatigue. I'm with you, but I can pass on a lot of fights. We are water. We are sustained by water. Do not think that we might not have water, especially if we keep going at this rate. And let's get serious about climate change. And we talk about climate change in the book, and we talk about Johannesburg, South Africa, where they literally were going to have day zero. But here's what they did, what we're not doing and where we can learn from. The people responded, the people were involved, the people rationed, they did what they had to do, the agencies responded, they became prepared and they diverted. Day zero.

We've got to get and stop the argument. I don't care what side of the aisle you're on. This is all of our issues. We need to work together. We need to be informed. We need to be prepared. And we can divert. And there are solutions to these issues. The problem is we won't get busy doing them.

And that's where we have to go. We as a consumer cannot take anything for granted anymore. And I do believe that we, the people have an absolute obligation to ourselves and to our family and to our communities to make it our job to find out and be informed. There's no reason why you shouldn't be. And to act and to find your own courage and not be afraid to step up and get involved. Because Superman is not coming. No, but Tag, you're here.

We're it. Powerful, Erin Brockovich, in the house. Thank you so much. I do wanna share with you, it's great to have this conversation because you know, when I go to parties and people ask me about water and it turns into this conversation,

I'm telling you, I know what they say when I leave. They're like, oh my God, don't invite her again. Are you kidding? People are gonna freak out. They're gonna love this. I know it's overwhelming. I feel it too. But we talk about it in the book.

We can come back and we can talk for two hours just about PFAS. Absolutely. People love it. But you know what? I will share with this. On my program ramp, realize, assess, and motivate. It's all about oneself. Realize who you are.

Assess who you are. And, you know, look, oftentimes motivate. It's all about oneself. Realize who you are. Assess who you are. And, you know, look, oftentimes we look for a hero. And the only person standing in your own way of being that hero is, frankly, you. And we all get that little negative voice in our head that tells us, do this, don't do that. You know, realize that you can have that strength and courage. You can find it. Assess. Don't assess your bank account.

Just assess who you are. What's your character? What's your loyalty? What's your respect? What's your cause? What's your passion? And what I wanted to say here is we do live in a crazy world. I'm thinking my head's going to spin off.

I really do. And it's just going faster and faster and faster and faster. And what's happening for us as people, we're losing our mojo and we've lost our motivation and we are frankly exhausted. And what you need to do when you hit that wall, and you will as you move into whatever your causes are, and it may not be water, you got to know how to fight and you got to have the tools. not be water. You got to know how to fight and you got to have the tools. One of the tools that you have to do is self-renewal. We're all on our computers, right? And when a bunch of data comes in or an overload, what do you get? The blue dot just spins and spins. That thing really irritates me. That happens to us. That's when you need to disconnect. You must do it.

And get back to a walk on the beach. Get back to a hike. Get outside and plant begonias. Go play a round of golf. Disconnect and reconnect to yourself. It's amazing when you do that you can hear yourself think. You can feel yourself feel, you can take a moment to breathe and get clarity. And when you do that self-renewal, you'll find yourself waking up the next day with some motivation and energy to go at it again. Go at it again.

Master of make-believe and musings metaphysical, Mr. Matthew McConaughey graced the show back on episode 555 in a conversation that traverses creativity and explores why the choices we make today are the compound assets for our future. Here's a little slice of that heaven. How do you feel about this, you know, later chapter in the reconnaissance of you becoming like this guru, you know, this person of wisdom that, I don't know when it began, maybe it began when you gave that commencement speech, but at some point,

don't know when it began. Maybe it began when you gave that commencement speech, but at some point you kind of went from Matthew, the actor into somebody who, you know, was, was basically imparting life lessons to the world. Like, how do you think about that? Or how do you feel about that? Was that intentional or is it just a by-product of, of who you are? I think it started off more of a byproduct and then has gained some intention along the way. You know, to go back to that, it's live. We're all in the show. The recording, the camera's always recording, you know, and ask myself, are you making legacy choices for yourself right now, McConaughey? Are you living in a way live that is useful for yourself and others? Look, I'll say this. I go back to University of Texas and I had an idea for this script to screen class as a professor, but in my mind, I'm still like, I'm talking to students. I feel like I was there the other day. But then I start sharing things with them and they're going like, whoa, that's

awesome. Thank you for telling me that. I'm like, oh, that wasn't obvious. And I'm like, no, we didn't know that. And so I started to go, wait a minute. You got 28 years of experience of acting and being on sets, Matthew. Oh, geez, that's right. Add that up. You do have some experience that may be innate to you now that is novel to a student. So you do have something to share, some experience to share that maybe someone else didn't have. I, you know, sharing this book has got quite a few tools in it for how to find our frequency individually and hopefully as a collective. We're going through a time right now of great distrust. We don't know what to believe in. You don't trust others.

You all of a sudden look up, you don't trust yourself. And that little revolution can go back and forth. Well, now I don't trust myself. Now I really don't trust you. Now I don't believe in myself. Now I don't believe in anything. And those are dead end streets ultimately. So how do we rebuild some trust?

I think it's through values. I think values are bipartisan, non-denominational. I think those are the solid stepping stones that we need to each look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we can be better out on a daily basis. And that'll be incremental steps out of this time into hopefully a more evolved state that we can get out of. And help us look back at 2020 as an actual red banner year of recreation and recreation and a new beginning. The other idea is this. We've got to remember we're never going to arrive. There's not a destination. I don't, you know, it's like our lives and say America, the Langston Hughes poem, America, yet. That's what we should be chasing.

Yet. We never get there. With the social, cultural revolution, we're going, we're not going to get to perfect justice. But if we can make an incremental ascension forward, that's it. Could stay in the race, commit to the chase. And with ourselves, can we just keep chasing our better selves? A little bit, and then we're going to screw up a long way. Can America just keep, we're an aspiration. Our lives are an aspiration. America is an aspiration. It's a chasing of yet. And I think that's what we ultimately are as individuals. We all should

be chasing ourselves. What more fun, wild, adventurous thing to chase in your life than yourself? Well, there's an unbridled optimism to that that's infectious and that I love. And I don't want to take up too much of your time. We can end it on this. I can't let you go without digging a little bit more deeply into kind of where we're at in this American experiment right now. We're headed into an election. We are extremely divided. Communities, families, individuals are having difficulty finding common ground, being able to even effectively communicate. And there is this layer of whether it's fake news or misinformation that's confusing people and driving us apart. And I have this sense of us fracturing and

I'm trying to figure out how to get my hands around it, how I can communicate with my brothers and my sisters, how I can be more empathetic. Like, how can we look to what unites us to our commonalities, which are so much more robust than the details that might divide us on paper or on social media. But I find myself concerned about what I'm seeing and where we're heading. So how do we, how do we right the ship, Matthew? Great question. where we're heading. So how do we, how do we right the ship, Matthew? Great question. Solve this problem for me. And here we go. For us. Oh, wow. Yeah. Right. You know, I was talking about earlier. Yeah. It is times of great distrust in others, in ourselves, our social contracts are broken. Our personal contracts are broken. We don't have expectations

of ourselves or others right now, the private sector down to the individual has more power than ever. We can't trust our leadership. Politics is a broken business. What do we want? People want security. Well, we're all individuals. Wait a minute. Where's the collective?

All this is being politicized along the way. The body counts are being added up for which side of the which side of the aisle wants to win. And that's the only numbers each side that's counting. We got an election year. Are we going to have a civil war? Man, can we just get to January 2021, which is a symbolic day, but nothing more than a symbolic day. Do we have a 10 year restoration? Do we have a 20 year restoration? Do we have a 10-year restoration? Do we have a 20-year restoration? I don't know how long it'll go. What can we rely on? Empathy, one thing. A little amnesty right now. It's a tough time for everybody. I don't know how to make a collective change. I don't know how to make an overall systemic change or a law. I don't think people want to be legislated like that. I think it, again, comes down to each one of us need to look in the mirror and go, how can I be a little bit better? What can I do a little bit better? I'd be great. I'd be perfect. There is no best. I can be a little bit better. I can be a little more fair. How can I understand that my brother and sister

are also hurting, maybe in more different ways than I am. How can I have a conversation without a condemnation? How can I have more patience to take a breath and listen and let someone who hasn't been heard speak more loudly than maybe they need to, but hear them? How do we make this time not just a flash in the pan? How do we be honest where the choices we make for ourselves selfishly are also the best choices for the most amount of people? And then there's not any specific recipe for that. But take that into consideration when we make our choices for ourselves. Again, responsibility and freedom.

We're going to have to build our way out of this time. We're going to have to break a damn sweat for a while. And I think we have to have that long view, that feeling like this is going to go on for a while. Now, how can we make that a part of our daily instincts of how we go about our lives? How do we treat ourselves? How do we treat our loved ones? How do we treat our employees? How do we treat people we work with? How do we treat what we're building? And what are we, are we just for profit or are we for purpose as well? What's our purpose? I'm not interested in politics. I'm interested in some purpose though. Politics is a broken business. We don't know who to trust. So that's what I mean by the private sector down to the individual. You have more power right now to define your future than ever. Cause you actually don't have anywhere

anyone else up there, no institution to rely on for that guidance. So, I understand it, man. Some of us are going, well, what the hell, man? Give me a map. I don't know what to trust in. I don't know what's a consensus here. Some of us are going to do well right now because we can just keep our head above the water. Just try and make it through this time. It's going to pass. We're going to be moving forward. We are not turning the page yet, though. When the time comes to turn the page on COVID, when the time comes to turn the page on the cultural revolution, the only way it's going to work is that the collective, all of us, every color, if you've got COVID, if you don't, every color of skin, do it together to some form or fashion. I think, you know, as much as we are a nation of individuals and love our individualism,

we are failing at any sort of collective responsibility. We have failed with the mask of seeing that as a civic duty instead of a damn, don't you tell me what to do bullshit. It's the wrong kind of selfish. It's actually not a selfish move to fight those fights. There is a responsibility that we can choose to take for and with each other and ourselves. And those two are not exclusive. My hunch is it lies in values. My hunch is it lies in responsibility, accountability, risk-taking, sense of humor. The list goes on and on and on. We can just be a little kinder, a little more fair, a little more empathetic, a little more understanding, a little more forgiving. Also holding on accountability. This isn't going to

be a free ride. I'm not in for a world kumbaya. No, it's going to take work. And the greatest thing about America is, when America's working right, is if you're willing to work at something and educate yourself and go after something, you, more so than anywhere else, should have the opportunity to achieve that. But not without the work and the education and the hustle to go do it. to achieve that, but not without the work and the education and the hustle to go do it. So, you know, I'd say this, man, start off with trying to create more green lights for yourself and others and see where those two meet and see that actually being selfless is actually a very selfish act. Creating more for others is actually very selfish for yourself as well. And make sure you're trying to make sure your selfish choices for yourself also light the way for more people

as well. Boom. Beautifully put. Think about this. Every single day, you make about 35,000 decisions. You decide to get up or hit snooze. You decide to challenge yourself or take a back seat. You decided to listen to your favorite podcast today. Well, the man behind the wildly popular Farnham Street blog, books, and podcast, Shane Parrish, is here today, a former computer scientist and spy who is obsessed with this process of optimizing decision-making. Here's an excerpt from episode 513, where he shares keys to this process. How do you think about the difference between failure and success?

Often luck. I don't know. I mean, I've had a lot of failure. I'll let you know when I get some success. But I think from a decision-making point of view, the decisions where you know the outcome or you can't fail are not really worth thinking about. And you have to determine if failure is something you can handle or not. And often we are going to fail and how do we recover from that is super important to achieving success because the odds that you succeed the first time you try something are pretty slim. If you look at like, we're all walking today

and we fell down walking hundreds, if not thousands of times but we got up and we did it again. And so often life is just getting up one more time than you fall down, but going back to decision-making again, reversible, irreversible, like where can you fail? Where can't you fail? Where can you fail? And how we think about what failure means. I think we attach so much meaning to it.

And there's so much ego that is infused into that. We're afraid to look bad. and things like that that prevent us from perhaps being more open about taking certain risks that could, you know, in the long term create, you know, a better and bigger growth curve. Well, that goes back to sort of like how we're living our life. Like whose scorecard are we using? Are we using an internal scorecard or are we using an external scorecard? Am I failing to meet up to somebody's expectations of me? Is that something I want to do? Or do I want freedom? And the freedom in this case would be freedom from living up to other people's expectations, freedom from sort of feeling the need to fulfill society's obligations to me.

And I'm not saying like break the law or anything like that, but we're so often driven by like, you're subliminally and otherwise told that the people who attain power, money, and fame are sort of the people to emulate. Like my kids come home from school and they start talking about all these celebrities. I'm like, man, I want you home talking about like Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein. And like these are the heroes, right? Like Elon, not these political sort of people or not these Hollywood movie stars. And that's, I don't want them in that life

where like they see that as success because that leads to how do I get that success? Which leads to, I can step on other people. I can do these things that are mutually exclusive from living a life of meaning in order to try to attain these things. And I think that we know, I mean, that that's not the path that we want our kids on. And like who we have as our heroes is super important.

Right. Heroes walk amongst us. We just don't do a great job of shining a light on the best ones. And in order to do that, you have to do a little counter-programming against what mainstream society is feeding all of us, not just young people. But I think some of that comes from just, we were talking about this earlier, reflection, right?

Like where do I wanna go in life? And that comes from being alone with your thoughts and working through your thoughts and having many your thoughts and having many false steps and sort of being conscious about, am I working towards those goals or am I not working towards them? Is this where I actually want to end up? Because so many of us reach our destination and we're like, oh, this isn't what I thought it was. This isn't where I wanted to go. And part of the problem is we didn't check in on the way. And maybe that's a weekly check-in. Maybe it's, I mean, I do it sort of like twice a year at this point, but maybe it's

monthly. Maybe it's sort of like something you book a holiday with yourself for a day every year. And you sort of like go to this isolated area where you're not around people. And maybe you walk in nature or maybe you sit in a hot tub or you do whatever you need to do and you think about, am I living the life that I wanna be living? What are the things that I'm doing that are leading me to where I wanna go? What are the things that are getting in the way of where I wanna go?

And what would I regret if I died today? Is there a relationship that I wanna repair? Is there somebody that's not serving me that I need to get rid of because I don't like their anger? Those are the questions that we can sort of walk through mentally. And then we start, you know, once you realize it, then you put it into action. And as you said at the start, action is really hard, right?

You might have a really close friend who's always angry and it's affecting you and it's affecting your health. But at the end of the day, you know you need to let them go because they're not going to get you where you want to go and you can't help them. What does that daily practice look like for you? I think a lot like that. I mean, I don't do daily. I sort of do it on a, I have regular like scheduled appointments with myself to make sure that I do it. But I'm always thinking about like, what is it that, how can I help this person? And at some point you can't help them. And you need to sort of like, your environment will dictate a large part of

where you go in life. So who you hang around, how much you care about other people dictates, I mean, to a large extent, how fulfilled and, you know, meaningful your life is. So yeah, it's just, I mean, everybody has their own routine. There's no one prescription for it and there's no wrong answer to it. It's just, I think that if there was a wrong answer, it would be like, I'm just not thinking about it because it's hard, right? It's hard to be like, I don't want to be where I'm at. It's hard to absolve or hard to take responsibility for being in that spot, right? And we're all born into a set of circumstances that we don't control. We don't control sort of our parents' socioeconomic status.

We don't control our zip code. We don't control how much they care. We don't control the trajectory we're put on. But at some point in life, you take control of that trajectory. And maybe it's 18 for some people. Maybe it's 25 for other people. But at that point you're in control. So you don't control what point you're at, but you control where you go from there. And you do that through your habits. You do that through your thinking. You do that through your decision-making. And the question that I want everybody to ask is like, where am I going? Am I going to there? Is what I'm doing today gonna get me where I wanna go?

And if not, what do I need to do in order to get where I wanna go? I'm here listening to you and I'm like, this is amazing. And I'm also like, I'm noticing my resistance also because I'm like, this guy's trying to write a computer program for, you know. An operating system for life. You know what I mean?

And I'm like, I'm a very emotional, sensitive person. And I'm, I'm like, where does, where does intuition, you know, where does that, that, that like, I'm a huge believer where you don't know where it came from. And you're like, I'm channeling something where I don't even know the, you know, from whence it arrives. Like, is there a place for that kind of spirituality to live in the work that you do? Totally. I believe that that's a huge component to our lives, right? So I'm not, I don't believe in just pure rationality. I don't think that's the way we should live lives. And I think that emotion and sort of spirituality and community and all of those things are also part of it, right? We're part of an ecosystem, but individually we have emotions.

We need to sort of not deny them, not suppress them, right? I think so many problems in society today from my vantage point is people over analyzing their feelings, trying to suppress them and not actually feeling them and delaying the feeling instead of just being present with the emotions. I think there's a lot of studies that say if you actually feel the feelings when you first feel them, they sort of last 90 seconds to sort of like three minutes. Like if you're angry and you don't suppress it and you don't sort of like analyze it and you just feel that anger,

it'll go away pretty quickly. But it's when you suppress it, that it starts to crop up again and again, you become passive aggressive and you become aggressive aggressive. And I think that we need to feel this feeling. And there's decisions that you're going to make in life that are not rational and that's okay, right? They don't have to be rational. I think what you want to do is just be aware that you're conscious of the fact that you're not making a rational decision or you're okay sort of like throwing the rational side of your brain out.

Like quitting a great high profile job to start a blog is not necessarily the most rational decision you can make. Who you marry, who you're in a relationship with, what that connection is like, those are not purely rational decisions. Those are very emotionally driven chemistry, physiological response-based decisions. And I think that those are equally powerful,

if not in some cases more powerful than rational decision-making. Yeah, I think they can be channeled to great effect as long as you have a healthy understanding of that emotional landscape. Like when am I feeling a spark of inspiration or when am I experiencing some kind of overwhelming emotion that I know is driving me towards making

a certain type of decision versus, oh, I'm just repeating a pattern as a result of my childhood trauma. And, you know, I've got to, this is going to take me down the wrong path. Even though I feel strongly about doing this, I know well enough to know that that's not the right thing to do. But so often that becomes an excuse today too, right? Like we sort of like, oh, I was brought up that way. And, but going back to what I said, this is what I do, right? So we, we tell ourselves that narrative and that narrative becomes reality when another narrative you can replace that with. And often we have to replace narratives to get sort of better narratives is that I'm in control

of my life. And no matter what's happened to me, it's, it might not be my fault that I'm in this situation, but it's my responsibility, how I handle this situation going forward. It's my responsibility to respond to the situation in the best way that I can. And I own that and nobody else owns that for me. And I can't blame my past, but everything in my past has got me here and that's okay. That past has put you on this trajectory. It's put you at this moment in time where you go from here is completely up to you and you control that and Nobody else controls that. Okay. In 2015, Chris Mosier became the first known transgender man to represent the United States in international competition.

Aside from being a Hall of Fame triathlete, an All-American do athlete, a two-time national champion, and a six-time member of Team USA, Chris is a beautiful guy. He's one of the most prominent and accomplished transgender athletes working out there right now to progress cultural perceptions and activate legislative change. Here are his words from episode 518. Transgender women and girls have been competing with women and girls for years without problem with their peers. And they've been participating on sports teams at the high school level, at the elite level, and there has been no problems, right? And I think that what the discrimination against transgender women and girls actually does is takes away from the real issue about the disparity in sport and the gender inequity that exists in sport. What we really should be focusing on is women's sports and how we uplift women's sports. And I think that

targeting transgender women does not do that. It doesn't help. The real problem is the lack of access, the lack of resources, the pay inequity that exists within women's sports because of systemic discrimination. Yeah, well, certainly that's for real. You know, I've just put up a couple of podcasts that kind of go pretty deep into that. I mean, that's a huge problem.

But in the track and field context, are there transgendered women who are, you know, killing it, competing against? There aren't? Tell me what killing it means. I don't know. killing it, competing against, there aren't. Tell me, tell me what killing it means. I don't know. I mean, I didn't do any research on this, so I actually don't know. Track and field is the one area that, you know, when people are talking about this across the country, they're looking at two transgender girls in Connecticut who are high school student athletes who last year went one, two at state. When we're talking about dominating, when they went to nationals, one didn't even compete and the other placed 30th and 31st

in her two races. And so, you know, yes, they have won races, but dominating is inaccurate. Right. And I think that, you know, people really pick up on those stories. And these are two young black women. And, you know, I bring up race again because race is absolutely a part of this. You know, being a transgender woman is absolutely a part of this. Women in sports, both cisgender and trans,

have had their bodies policed for years, for decades. And it's by targeting transgender women and focusing on people's bodies, I think that we really perpetuate that issue within women's sports. Well, what happens in track and field, I mean, the case study that gets brought up conflates intersex because it's all about

Castro Semenya, right? And whether or not she should be allowed to compete. And that brings up a different kind of ripple in the fairness versus inclusion conversation, because this is a human being who was just born a certain way. And so should she be unable to compete and penalized because this is how the universe or God

or whatever you wanna call it made her in a certain way. I can't, you know, proclaim to have the answer to that, but it's an interesting, you know, conversation that needs to be had. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's really important that we, that we remember that there's not just, there's not one way to be a man. There's not just one way to be a woman. And there are certainly categories that they have for hormones at the elite level of testing, right? But there's not just one way to be a trans person either. And there's not just one way to have a body that excels in sport. So the body that a swimmer would have is going to be different than what would be helpful for an elite sprinter. Or a rower, you know, so when we make these generalizations about trans women dominating in sport

or someone like Castor Semenya, you know, having her makeup being able to dominate in sport, I think that we reach real dangerous territory. And what's the vision that you hold? Like four years, 10 years from now, like where would you like to see the state of culture and sport?

You know, if it was up to you. I think that sport is one of the most magical places for people to exist. I think that sport is a vehicle for social change and the change that happens within sports in terms of policies and acceptance and inclusion can really be a guide for the rest of the world. And we've seen it in the past. And I think that we are, we're at a crossroads right now where

how we treat inclusion in sport is going to reflect in the rest of society. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think I read somewhere that, that, you know, you were inspired by some of the great, you know great activist athletes out there. I don't know who in particular, but there's these iconic images that come to mind from Muhammad Ali to the closed gloved fist on the podium at the Olympics. And the ability of the athlete to, you know, move culture forward and advance conversation around ideas that people are resistant to is a thing, you know.

And I think that you're somebody who is on, you know, the sort of, you know, razor's edge of this in a new and broader, you know, conversation around civil rights and what that means. And what kind of culture and society do we wanna be in and live in? And I think your advocacy is admirable. And I'm in awe of your athletic talent and also your strength and your courage to put yourself out there in harm's way, I think, in a very real way.

Like you're putting yourself at peril to get this message across. And, you know, that may get lost in the conversation, but I would imagine that that's a very real consideration for you as well, your safety. So it's important work that you're doing and I wish you all the best and thank you for what you do. Thank you.

You know, athletes have a platform and I think that athletes have social capital, not just in the United States, but in the world. And we look at Olympians differently. We look at professional athletes differently. We even look at high school and collegiate athletes differently. And so I think it's an incredible position for me to be in, to have this platform, you know, to have a Nike sponsorship and things like the New York Times article, and to be able to express to people the concerns about the realities facing transgender people, not just in sport, but in our community as a whole. You know, I want people to know that they can be their authentic self and continue to play the sports that they love and continue to do their passions and not have to compromise any part of their identity, to hide any part of their

identity. Because when we are authentic about who we are and when we are able to, and it's not safe for everyone to come out, but if we are able to do that, you know, your entire world opens up and it not just impacts you, but it impacts the people around you. And I think that's really how social change is created, you know, is that ripple effect. And so, you know, my hope is that me waking up every single day and living an awesome life can be my advocacy. And, you know, all the other parts I have to talk about are, you know, part of that, but I really just want people to see that, um, that I am possible, that they are possible because I am possible. And, you know, nothing is, um, nothing is off limits. Like people can have a future.

Um, but the future that I didn't see for myself when I was younger, it exists. And for the person who's listening, who's living a secret double life or just is afraid to come out, what is the kind of message that you would like to impart to that person? Yeah, there are so many factors that go into one's ability to come out. And it's now with laws and

policies like this about access to care and safety, there are financial concerns and family support concerns for young people. There are, you know, very real possibilities that people will lose their house or their, you know, apartment and their housing, their employment and things like that. And so there are so many factors that go into it that I would never tell somebody that they have to come out. You know, and I think this is one of the problems that we have in professional sports is like, we're looking for that out gay male athlete in the big four sports. Like when are they going to come out? There are so many factors in any LGBTQ plus person's existence of whether or not to come out. You know, my message

to that person would just be that they are valid and their identity is valid and real, and that they are worthy of love and respect and dignity. You know, I've had the great pleasure of conversing with a vast diversity of extraordinary humans. But every once in a while, every blue moon, I luck into a mind meld that elevates an exchange into a higher gear. This was such for my conversation with Hakam Tafari on episode 557. So here's a little taste of that experience. episode 557. So here's a little taste of that experience. There's so much beauty in suffering.

There's so much beauty in suffering. And I know it sounds so, it's not cliche, but it's people are like scratching their head. How can you suffer? How can there be beauty in suffering? When you go through the suffering that a lot of us have that have been on the show that have become successful is because when you go through that suffering, you go through such a bottom feeder kind of exposure that you learn to have gratitude for the smallest thing. The smallest thing. when I think about the times when I didn't think that I was going to really make it out of that space, there were times, Rich, when I would be in the car park of Whole Foods, like crying, crying my heart out, screaming at the top of my lungs,

looking around like, how the fuck did I end up in this situation? One of the stories that I always tell people, and it's a story, but it's a story that I often tell people because mental health and suicide is so big. And can look back at these times in that darkness and be like, man, if I didn't know the depths and the levels of darkness, I wouldn't be able to enjoy this moment right now. So there was a time when I used to pack a gun with me everywhere. Orlando was an, Orlando used to pack a gun with me everywhere.

Orlando used to be, and Orlando still kind of has a very, you've got the Disney side and you've got the super rough, like home invasions, like they'll come and run in your house. They'll shoot you in the middle of Walmart. That's like Florida, right? Right. Sometimes I pray for my kids still out there, but still. You know, Florida is a state where you have your stand, your ground law. So you can come into somebody's residence

and they can shoot you on self-defense. And that's it, it's called stand your ground or the castle law. Which is interesting in light of what's going on with Breonna Taylor right now. Yeah, right. And then also you mentioned to me that the cop who put his knee on George Floyd's neck

now is living down the street from your daughters. Was living down the street, yeah, from my kids. Yeah, in Florida. That's insane. Yeah, which is, that's a whole another story in itself. But just to bring it back to this, that was such a dark, dark time. And as I said, you know, for me,

I used to pack because where my parents live, it's not a rough neighborhood, but there was a lot of home invasions. There was a lot of breakings. It was, my parents are old. And again, remember I told you I had to move back in with my parents? Well, after couch surfing and yada, yada, And again, remember I told you I had to move back in with my parents?

Well, after this couch surfing and yada yada. Back again. My parents had to- After the divorce back in. 37, 38. So this is the umpteenth time of moving back with my parents. But if I didn't have, you know, my relationship with my parents now, I used to be scared of them.

I used to fear them. I used to, now they're like my brother and sister. The relationship is amazing. And this was partly the reason, I'm not going to say, this last thing with my parents parents and for them to see how broken I was, was really, really deep. And to cry with your parents is even deeper. And I don't know if you've ever had that, but when you're in the presence of your mother

or your father and you are legit all crying in despair, it's a hard, hard pill to swallow, man. And it was. And it was hard to come home knowing that I lost everything. And it was hard knowing to come home that I had three kids that I'm still paying for, that I'm still paying for their school. I'm still paying for everything. And I can't talk to them because she won't let me talk to them.

So all this stuff is going down. Meanwhile, I'm still paying for the house. I'm still paying for the minivan. I'm still paying for all their extracurricular activities. And I'm at home at my parents' house with a shotgun underneath the bed. Crying in the parking lot of Whole Foods. I mean, did you have a sense, you know, this idea that you can't be a Phoenix without the ashes, right? Like this idea that you're being burned for a reason,

that there's a purpose or that there's something to be mined and learned from this experience so that you can emerge more fully integrated. I mean, with all of this spiritual education behind you, you must have been able to hold on to some aspect of that or to believe or to choose to believe that there is some kind of purpose or lesson to be learned here.

I did, but it was very little in the grand scheme of things. It was very little because although I had the running that kind of took me out of that space, right? Cause I would run and run with- Running was then that becomes your new healing. That becomes my new healing mechanism, right? So I had the running that became my new healing mechanism and I could grab onto that.

And I still had my spiritual faculties, but I wasn't leaning onto them as much as I could. So in that inner room, I had my friends, I had a really good, I have a really good girlfriend of mine. Her name is Christina. My ex-wife's name, Christina, my best friend was Christina at the time.

Christina was the first person that I went to when I got essentially out the house and I was couch surfing. She looked after me basically for two summers along with my parents and really kind of helped me get back on track. And then, as I said, you know, because in that time, I had probably contemplated suicide four or five times. And, you know, the one story that I was trying to bring up, and I really bring this story, was the story was me in the parking lot of Orlando Zen Center. A friend of mine, Sandra Bianco, love Sandra. Sandra was the one who said, you need something. Come to the temple. At the time, I didn't know what the temple was. She said, come to the temple at the time at the time i didn't know what the temple was

she said come to the temple i was like okay so i drive up there and i've got this big springfield 45 next to me and at the time i just got off the phone with my ex. We had just gone into a major argument. She's asking for more money for the house. I'm literally just like shaking and I'm just shaking uncontrollably. And I'm like, do I just do it right now? I'm looking at the gun. I'm in front of the temple. I'm looking at the gun.

And then I'm like, all right, fuck it. I'm going to go do whatever this fucking thing is. I don't know what I'm going to get into, but I'm going to do it. And that ended up becoming my, that could have been my last day on the earth. And instead, I chose to sit in front of a wall in silence for an hour and a half. That's heavy, man. Next up is stellar athlete, human,

longtime friend, coach and star of Coach's Corner, none other than Chris Houth. Coming in hot with some sagacious advice from episode 514 about how to maintain enthusiasm and engagement with your fitness during this stage of quarantine. An important thing for all of us is that we want to just stay healthy and get through this with the energy and the strength that we currently have and hopefully can build upon that versus deteriorate in any way. And not even from a virus standpoint and the concerns with that, but also just because this time requires so much extra energy and everything we're doing from homeschooling to everybody being in the house and patients and so forth. I mean, me with four kids here at home,

and all of them teenagers, you can just imagine how they're all staring at me going, you gotta be kidding me. We're so sick and tired of you. But, you know, and so they're being healthy, getting enough sleep, eating well, and having some sort of physical outlet every day makes a huge difference on having the patience and perspective for them because it's difficult for them currently too. And also it's going to be of memory for all

of us, regardless how it hit us, whether in a positive way, in a negative way. That's the unique thing about this. It hit the brakes on the entire world. And we're all going to all remember this forever. Our teenagers, our younger children, us as adults, 20 somethings, 30 somethings, everybody has been impacted by this. Everybody's going to remember this time, right? And people have been saying it's our 9's going to remember this time, right? And people have been saying it's our 9-11 moment or this and that, but it has hit so many more spectrums of society.

And there's a lot of ways we don't control, we don't know how it hits everybody. So all we know is how it hits us. Doesn't mean we don't have empathy and care and respect for those who are working through this and healthcare workers and those who've been hit by tragedy or those who are losing their jobs and so forth, but it hits every one of us individually. And so what are we going to do with it? And that's what we said earlier is how do we want to kick out of this,

but also how do we make it memorable? And it's going to be memorable either way. So if that is going to be memorable either way, how do we want it to be memorable? In a positive, meaningful, caring, thoughtful, family-sharing, joyous way? For others, it's not. It's not going to be that. way. For others, it's not. It's not going to be that. But we don't control that. And it's like, you know, I was reminded of that Viktor Frankl quote, right? If you can't change or control the external circumstances, change yourself or, you know, your own internal circumstances. And that's one of those, this is one of those times that we are, we only control us and how we present ourselves to the world. And part of that is this, whether it's family, whether that's work, whether that's our loved ones, whether that's our body and how we go about our day and carry ourselves as that beacon of strength and support and outward love to others. of strength and support and outward love to others. Yeah, I can think of only a handful of other moments in my life

where the world sort of stopped. There's 9-11, there's when Princess Diana died, there's the OJ, there's certain things like that, but this is uniquely different from all of those in that it is global and is impacting all of us. And there's never been an instance in which we had to stay home and couldn't go about our day. Yeah. And I think with that, it gives this experience a certain quality that I think has the power to unite us. There's a commonality of experience that we're all sharing right now. But I fear the divisiveness that I see.

And I think there's a certain kind of toxic environment out there that if we're not really paying attention to ourselves and focusing on our priorities and really striving to be that beacon that one could succumb to. And so there's these opposing forces of the kind of unifying aspect of this that can be uplifting versus this destructive force of negativity that I see out there versus this destructive, you know, force of negativity

that I see out there as well. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we watched as a joke, not as a joke, but with intention, but it was funny. We watched Groundhog Day the other day, the Bill Murray movie. And it was weird because I've watched that a few times, but I never really took the message as clearly as it was as a, when I watched it this time with regards to how he was just being indifferent about everything. Right. And just like smoking and doing all kinds of getting drunk and being a jerk. But

then once he started paying attention to the lives around him and caring and giving, he found fulfillment in that repetition, right? He found love that finally broke the loop, but fulfillment, despite the day continuing, he was fine with it because he was giving and he was focused on externally helping others versus just focusing on what he could get out a daily day repeating itself over and over again but anyway i mean it's bill murray i mean you can only get so much message but i thought it was interesting because here we are we're living a very similar groundhog day like i i don't know how many times over the last few weeks i've said like what day is it i'm not even they all feel the same right right with the kids, there's no sort of weekend versus day.

But as soon as the process takes over, like we were saying earlier, and knowing what we need to execute on every day, whether work, whether family, whether training, whatever it is, there's sort of a fulfillment in that repetition that I've, I've come to enjoy actually these last 10 to 14 days of, all right, accepting this is the process currently, and I'm going to make the best in the present moment of this process. It's really the only way, acceptance. Railing against what is will only lead to resentment and frustration. So to embrace what's happening and shift your perspective and look at it as, I think it helps to understand

that everybody's going through it. You haven't been singled out for this experience is helpful, but the only way to find peace is through acceptance. For sure, for sure. And it is also with regards to, like you were talking about being sort of stuck with this lack of compass and direction currently as we pull back to the training aspect and the athlete aspect.

But the athlete's mindset is exactly that. Like you said, the awareness to stay in the moment and do the best you can do at the task at hand, whatever that task is, right? If it's currently with my family or currently at work or currently in this process of training or currently, you know, going on a hike and noticing nature around us like that, That's all we can focus on. And that's the best place to focus on in the current moment, in the present moment.

Yeah. Have you had any athletes that are just completely unraveling? Yes. Yes, absolutely. I mean, don't get me wrong. I'm probably busier than ever currently just because so many are at home

and A, have more time to train or B, a lot more ideas. A lot more emails, a lot more phone calls. I'm also taking this time, like I was talking earlier, about going over everybody's running form and cycling form and stretch cord form or those that can open water swim.

And they're all sending me videos. So I'm going through that, but there are definitely those who are completely off the rails, you know, and, and there's those just as on the other end of the spectrum that are completely unmotivated. It's, and they just, it's like, all right, well, I know I can get to a certain level of fitness again. And I can, it's hard to argue against that. The only part that I say there is that when we come out of this in that future version of ourselves,

how long will it come to get back to par and get to where you wanna get to versus staying somewhat close to par and then just increasing the effort, the training, the fitness, that piece that you wanna get to your event. Doubling up on that is a lot. I mean, that's gonna take a serious long amount of time

if you take the next four months completely off and do nothing. So that's another thing to keep in mind. There's a basic maintenance level that our body can be just a few weeks removed from getting back to basically par fitness, being pretty fit, but not, you know, perfectly primed for an event. And that's sort of where we want to bubble right now, just below the surface of, okay, I'm maintaining a healthy body that it is strong enough and healthy enough in order to then up the training

when that urgency, when that time comes again. The other thing that other athletes have noticed, Rich, is that those that are completely over-trained and keep adding stuff, they're realizing by doing less, how much better they're sleeping, how much better they're feeling. They're coming out of that fog. That's interesting. They're coming out of that fog. That's interesting. They're coming out of that fog of fatigue for the first time going, wow, I didn't even really realize how tired I actually was. I'm like, there you go. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. So little did I know that after hosting serial health food entrepreneur and Silicon Valley juice slinging mogul, Doug Evans,

way back on episode 221, that I would eventually be involved in inciting a sprouting revolution amongst the RRP community. Here's an excerpt from Doug's second appearance on the show, episode 524, our primer on the power of sprouts as an ultra food for health, weight loss, and optimum nutrition. It's been cool to like kind of watch all these people take what they're learning from your book and then sharing it and seeing some of this stuff like go viral. Well, the thing is that at one point,

if you had vegetables in your life and maybe it's too, I'm not a historian and I cheated my way through high school so I really don't know when, but there was a point in time that if you had vegetables, you either grew them yourself or you knew who grew them. And fast forward today, most people have no idea where their vegetables are coming from. They're getting them in the supermarket

and most of America is in food deserts. So they don't even have the quality of vegetables and produce in their supermarket. So now we live in a convenience culture. So when I was living in New York, San Francisco, LA, there was always access to fresh produce, either in a farmer's market or a health food store or supermarket.

I could always get fresh produce. But when I went back to nature and in my community, there's 600 people in a hundred square miles and there is no health food store where we live. This power of empowerment and sovereignty around sprouting was something that I couldn't believe it. Like when I came up with this like idea, I thought that it was flawed.

Like I must be missing something. And that kind of led to me, you know, calling up Michael, Dr. Michael Greger and calling up Dr. Oz and calling up Mark Hyman and Dean Ornish and Joel Fuhrman and Joel Kahn, calling these people and saying, hey, talk to me about sprouts. And, you know, I even talked to Dr. Josh Axe, you know, who wrote the keto book. So some of these people were keto, some were paleo, some were functional medicine, some

were plant-based. And the thing that they all had in common, they all love sprouts and they all had good things to say about sprouts. And that was after those, that part of my research was done. I even spoke to Andy Weil, right? Who was hard to get ahold of and he loves broccoli sprouts. And it was just like, wow. Nobody's shit talking the sprouts.

And there was nothing. And I couldn't believe, and Juji Mufu like adds sprouts to every meal. Like he's growing more sprouts than he can eat, which is a big feat because he eats 4,000 calories a day, but he adds sprouts every meal. And like I envisioned, you talk about manifestation, like I manifested, like in my mind,

like there would be a guy who you'd never in a million years would eat sprouts. Like this was a guy who you'd expect to eat a cow alive. And like now the guy is like eating sprouts. Super sprout guy. Super sprout guy. Yeah, well, you look great. I said that the minute that you walked in the door

and I probably saw you like, I don't know, six weeks ago or something like that. Like, and I know that you've been running a lot and you've been wearing the Vibram five fingers running out in the desert and you have a nice color to yourself and there's a brightness in your eye. Like you are, you know, certainly if nothing else,

like a living embodiment of, you know, healthy lifestyle. Like your energy is infectious. You have so much enthusiasm for this lifestyle and the things that you talk about and you talk about it so eloquently and beautifully. And you are the ambassador that we need. Like, how are we gonna clone Doug Evans so he can go into all of these communities

and espouse the revolutionary benefits of eating this way? I mean, you have to plant a lot of seeds, Rich. The seed metaphor just keeps circling down here. And look, I think it makes sense. And if you see, like, I've been on Instagram for a while and I didn't engage, I didn't do things, but now like people ask questions,

I'm responding to the questions. The most amazing thing is like I'm learning by having to think through these corner case examples and expanding like my sphere from the community of the collective intelligence. And the fact that now all these diverse range of people are now like sprouting and it resonates with them, that's it. So I think, how do we do it? It's like one person at a time. Like I'll engage in a conversation with one person online

or physically or at the farmer's market. In the Joshua Tree farmer's market, there's a little couple that sells microgreens and they're now selling microgreens and they're selling my book. And I'm giving them every week, I'm giving them ideas of what to do to make it easier for them to share the

consciousness. And people are like buying the book that I never, like, it's so strange because it was hard for me to write a sentence, like having barely gotten through high school, writing a book, like I, you know, for virtually no money, like writing the book and having that part was something that was missionary. And it's gotta be incredibly gratifying when you see people that you wouldn't suspect would be interested in what you have to say, like cottoning onto it and sharing it online. It's very cool. it online. It's very cool. I mean, the idea, and I had spoken to you that I met Marianne Williamson. Right. And I'd listened to Return to Love. I had read A Course in Miracles and her ideals, and she had talked about reparations as part of policy. Like in one part, I didn't feel like,

like the Sprout conversation would pique her interest. But the other part said, I think this is so important that, you know, can I infect her consciousness, you know, with lighting this up for sprouts? Like, is this important enough for her to take seriously? And now I'm seeing like this, and I'm saying this knowing where we are today in the world and what's going on. This is one of the most important conversations that people can have is about

diet and lifestyle and nutrition. And I don't know how many of the people on your guests on your podcast have talked about that decision of what you put in your mouth and how it affects your life. And if this could be something for literally pennies a serving, dollars a day to be able to up the nutrition and level the game. And if people can have better memory, better energy, better fit, because there's all this unconscious bias. There's all of this kind of prejudice and limitations.

And, you know, I have a- And tribalism. Tribalism. And this is unifying. limitations and I have a- And tribalism. Tribalism. And this is unifying like people around food and collectivity, but what is the level of unconscious bias around people that are overweight and obese? And it's just another form of discrimination.

So this is, I think plants bring people. I could tell you the woman who I started iVillage, I forgot her name, and she had been a long-term vegetarian. And then when she took the company public, she started to eat meat. And she said, I need to eat meat in order to fend off the toxicity of the public environment and all of these other people. Then she resigned. And then she went back to being a vegetarian. Like the idea of the toxicity, you know, of the aggression

that I find I'm a much nicer person. So I was trying to understand what you were saying. Basically you're saying like an order, she felt like an order for her to kind of compete in this clawing world of masculine, corporate executives that she had to eat meat to be at that level of consciousness. Yeah.

Like, you know, she, she went like, she reverted back to more primal, you know, survival. And do it.

I, I didn't fully get that, but it was something that, you know, I just became aware of. And then afterwards she went back to eating plants. So I think that to answer, go back to the bigger question that you asked,

how does this happen? It's one person at a time. It's literally having conversations and building a collective consciousness. Like at some point there's, you know, Cal came to the scene, right? And kale is no more healthy than collard greens or chard. Right?

It does have- Yeah, but it became the thing. It's so interesting that that was the one that got selected. Yeah, and Brussels sprouts became a thing, right? Did you see the Brussels sprouts? Not like kale though. Yeah, I Brussels sprouts became a thing, right? Did you see the Brussels sprouts? Not like kale though. Yeah, I don't know. Who are these publicists pulling the levers behind?

What's gonna be the thing? There was an artificial organization that I talk about in the book. What? A woman kind of created the National Kale Growers Association and launched PR and did all this stuff around kale as a passion project. But it wasn't, it was like her project and it ignited.

And I think that, you know, sprouts have been around for a really long time. My pitch, I pitched one publisher in New York and I made the recipes and I brought her some seeds and there'd never been a book on sprouting from a major publisher. I mean, this is like, so all these things were, and now I think this is the time for sprouting has come. Okay, up next is a true renaissance man. His name is Kamal Ravikant. He's a beautiful, earning his U.S. Army infantry patch, and even meditating in the Dalai Lama's monastery.

And what Kamal lifted from all of these experiences is this belief that life's greatest passage isn't physical and has nothing to do with financial accomplishment. In fact, our most challenging voyage is learning how to love ourselves. Here are his thoughts from episode 515. To be a phoenix, you gotta burn. Yeah. It's like the whole process of rebirth. It's not easy.

It's not painless. So the precipitating event for what led to Love Yourself. The inciting incident. The inciting incident. So what does it be called in chemistry? Yeah. You know, when the reaction happens. I had built a company.

I had self-funded it. This was going to be my FU money company, right? And I was doing very well. I was actually taking away real business from Google, Yahoo, and a vertical no one had ever done before. I was pulling it off, built a great team, got the deals that no one could get. It was like I was obsessed. And I was built three and a half years, and then I ran out of money. Building a tech company for three and a half years, you'd run out of money.

Self-funded. Self-funded, right? Pretty much everyone's going to run out of money, except for a couple people. Yeah. And I took investment, and it was doing doing well and the whole thing blew up and I lost everything. You know, I lost my company, but along with it, I lost my sense of self-worth, to put it mildly, because my company was my complete identity. You know, what I was doing was my identity. I was depressed beyond belief. I had no money. I was doing was my identity. I was depressed beyond belief.

I had no money. I was living off credit cards. I remember having to make some payroll on the side to some of my employees of credit cards of like, look, man, you bought him a crazy dream. I can't have your wife and kids because, you know? Wow. And it was rough to be an understatement.

There were times where I was like, look, I remember looking at the Bay Bridge from my window and really like I was so exhausted. I was burnt out. I was like really sick, burnt out, whatever they call it, adrenal fatigue, all the works. Like I went to some doctor who worked with me later on it and I didn't have the strength to walk over the Bay Bridge

and throw myself off. Otherwise I would have. I was literally like that. And I think it was the next night or the night after that, I remember getting up and I was like, I was miserable. I was like, I can't do this. I gotta get out of this. I mean, again, I get out of this or die trying.

That's it, I can't be in this space. And I walked over to my desk and I have a journal that I write in. And in there, and I still don't know where it came from. I sat down, I wrote a vow to myself. Now I do believe in the power of personal commitment. Like if I make a commitment to myself, I'm gonna keep it. That's something I've had for a while.

Something I've trained myself for a while, but a vow. I've never written a vow to myself. I don't even know where that word came from. And then it was a vow to love myself. It came in the moment. I am not a guy who was thinking about, hey, you know what I need? You know what I really need?

I think I need to love myself. That never occurred to me once. But yet in that moment, that's what came out. Where did it come from? Where's that, what's that deep stillness that runs the whole show? Well, I think what is profound about it is that it's like what you said, like, you know, if you want to be a Phoenix, you got to burn, like opportunity finds its moment in destruction,

right? And it's, it's this grand opportunity to deepen your surrender to something more powerful than yourself, right? It's a, it's a, it's, you're being asked to,rate yourself a little bit lower to really give over your ego even more, to humble yourself and to let go, like you're being confronted with your character defects in a really profound way, right? So then you have to forgive yourself again and you have to do it even more profoundly than you had to prior.

Yeah, it's actually, you know, I'm learning like life, you know, it's like building a startup, excuse the analogy, but no company just rocket ships straight up to the right. It's like, it's loops, you know? But there is something to be said about consistency and what you would really matters, like fitness, right? If you're not consistent in your practice,

it'll show, your body will show. Same with the mind. And the mind is actually more plastic, more malleable than anything else, yet it's the one that we work on the least. We really do, right? Right. We really overlook it.

That's starting to change. It's starting to change, but there's a lot of stuff out there that's, I don't know if it's effective or not. There's a lot of stuff out there. In the end, it's got to be something. What is the best workout? What is the best nutrition plan? It's the one you can do consistently.

That's what you got to go for. It's consistently that gives you results. Let's go back to forgiveness for a minute i think that's an important piece in all of this so how do you think about and practice that well forgiveness there's two forms right forgiving others or forgiving yourself the novel i wrote rebirth that's about forgiveness but that's about forgiving my father after he died, the whole journey while I walked a pilgrimage in Spain. And the result of that pilgrimage was I learned how to forgive him. Right, like 550 miles. Yeah, Camino de Santiago. And you know what it was? In the end, it was just realizing his humanity. He was a human being, man. You can't hold humans to the criteria of gods,

you know, but we seem to do that with the, you know, and just really his humanity. That's when you realize someone's humanity is very easy to forgive. But in order to do that, you have to, you have to transcend your child, your childhood lens on your parents, right? And, and? And shift that perspective to see it through the eyes of the parents. Or to see the eyes of a human being looking at another human being. You can never completely remove that, right?

The parent, but if you can just do human being to another human being, that right away shifts it. And you see their struggles, you know, their even faulty decision-making, whatever, but their struggles. And that, their even faulty decision-making, whatever, but their struggles. And that's when you understand that forgiveness actually comes naturally because you can't help it. You kind of understand, you know, you don't, you don't have to accept it. You don't have to say, yes, I agree. I'm glad you were that way. You know, I'm glad you did X, Y, Z, but you can,

because forgiveness ultimately is freeing yourself. Yeah. You know. Yeah, I think we look at it as a two-way street. Like I'll forgive you when you ask me for forgiveness or you admit what you did and how you wronged me. But ultimately the person who's carrying the resentment or the anger or that pain is the one who is suffering. The one who is the object of being not forgiven is often even unaware of that. That's our great irony, right?

So it's a self-inflicted harm. I was at an event, a thing last night. It's another like little group thing that I do that was created by this organization called the Nantucket Project. And they've created these neighborhood, they're called neighborhood projects where little, you know,

small groups of people get together and they watch a short film that the Nantucket project produces and then there's a discussion ensues. Kind of like to create, greater community in our neighborhoods. And the movie that we watched last night in this group setting was a short documentary about the genocide in Rwanda and how the president of Rwanda was faced with this prospect of how to repair his country in the aftermath of this horrible tragedy.

horrible tragedy. And the story is told from his perspective and also through the perspective of a perpetrator of the genocide, somebody who killed a lot of people and a woman whose family had been killed. And ultimately it's a story about how these two people forgive each other. Wow. And it's incredibly inspiring. And it left me thinking about the incredible exponential power of forgiveness. I think there's something beautifully transcendent and unique about forgiveness in that it holds this potential energy capacity to be so incredibly transformative. Maybe it's because it's rare. I don't know what it is about it uniquely. But to see that,

it's impossible not to be moved. And it leaves you thinking about the people in our own lives that we refuse to forgive or the resentments that we hold on to about how we've been wronged and the pain that that creates and the impediments to moving forward that that constructs in our lives. And also about the people that we've harmed and thinking more deeply about people who might be out in the world carrying that kind of pain

over things that we might've done. Yeah. And then forgiving ourselves, right? To repeat and loop the mantra, I love myself. I think self-forgiveness is a subset of that. Yeah, that's actually the other part of forgiveness, right? Self-forgiveness. What I found, you know, for me,

it's what I've learned is start with the self first. You work on the self, the rest actually gets easier. That's just naturally starts to work. And same thing with here was like in this book, I have a practice that I do on forgiving myself and it actually works easier. That just naturally starts to work. And same thing with here was like in this book, you know, I have a practice that I do on forgiving myself and it actually works beautifully. And it's a very practical practice, you know, like everything, it's practical, you can do it

and you will notice the shift. And what I learned was, I didn't have that in the original version. What I've learned is, if you're gonna make a commitment to love yourself, you can do this practice, you can't leave the past behind, but leave the shackles of the past behind.

And what you do is you forgive yourself and then you start to love yourself. That's almost like the step-by-step. Right. And it makes a huge difference. 2020 granted the return of the total badass and ultra marathon queen, Myrna Valerio. In episode 536, she smashed stereotypes left and right,

specifically the idea that you have to be a skinny white dude to be an accomplished endurance athlete. Here are some truth bombs from our exchange on all things body inclusion, identity, and diversity in the outdoors. It's wild, you know, you mentioned that there's a lot of history behind why outdoor spaces have been considered off limits to people of color. It's sickening and disheartening to hear that. I believe it to be true, but I can tell you that I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about why

that might be. Well, if you think about how the national parks were formulated and how that land was stolen from native populations without regard to any of their history or their domiciles. I mean, that's just one part of that. And I also think of how just land in the US, ownership of land is very, very white. Ownership of any sort of real estate or land is very white. And so when someone like me appears, I look like I don't belong because the ownership of land has been traditionally white. And so, I mean, there's the government. There are private entities that are also responsible for this sort of whitewashing of land in the U.S. And then there's, you know, white supremacy, white supremacist White supremacist ideology that black people don't belong. And we are seen as nuisances in many different types of spaces.

And there's research on that too. Like blacks as nuisance in public spaces. It's so heavy. It's really heavy. You see I'm smiling because it's so heavy. It's really heavy. You see, I'm smiling because it's so heavy. And to have to think about that constantly, and I do think about it constantly. Every second that I'm on a trail, I mean, I may be smiling and I may be gracious and affable, but I am always, always thinking about whether or not people think I belong. And,

you know, is somebody going to ask me a dumb ass question? Are they going to say something stupid? Or are they going to make me feel as though I'm not welcome? I'm always thinking of that. And which is why I'm like so effusive with my cheer because I have to be. Do you feel, yeah, you feel like part of that is a defense mechanism to put other people at ease, which makes you feel more safe. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's the story of every black runner. Yeah. Every single person who goes out and runs, who is black, we have to signal. There's a term for it. It's called signaling. To signal to other people that we are safe to be around and's a term for it. It's called signaling. To signal to other people that we are safe to be around and we are not a threat. Yeah, you hear stories of black runners who will wear a sweatshirt or a t-shirt that has a fancy college name on it or something like that to make white people feel like this person is not a threat.

It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you put on. Again, I'm always decked out in the latest gear, right? I wear bright colors. I, you know, I've got my running cap on, my trucker cap on, a race shirt or something that signals to people that I'm a runner. I was, when I still lived in Georgia, I was running down my own street. And I was two miles, but I had done 14 miles. And so I was finishing up the last two miles to do a 16 miler. On my way back home, a woman in a white SUV was coming in the opposite direction and stops about a quarter of a mile away from me.

I'm slow, so it takes me a long time to do a quarter of a mile. So I was still pretty far away from her. So she stops. She takes out her phone. She's looking at me. She's talking on her phone, looking at me, talking on her phone. Again, I am like really decked out. I mean, sweaty, but really decked out in all my

running gear and uh and then she gets off the phone and slowly rolls by me and looks at me and i wave i'm smiling hey um wondering and you do that on purpose because you know. Yeah. Okay. And then not even five minutes later, cop car rolls by from that same direction that she had been going. And he slowed down, rolled down the window, look at me. I wave in my head. I'm like, what the fuck? Right. And that cop rolls away. And then another one comes from the opposite direction.

Slows down. Roll rolls her window down um and then i wave again hey have a good day and uh in your neighborhood this is two miles away from my house and you know and in my head, I'm like, I'm just running. I am running. I did have a walking stick that I carried because there were lots of dogs. There were like no leash laws where I used to live. And so there were dogs everywhere. And so I would have to bang the stick on the ground to get the dogs away from me. And so, but it was a very fancy carved walking stick. So, and, you know, and so when I got back home, I, I, of course I posted this on Facebook

because, you know, that's what I do. And, um, and, you know, we had some laughs about it. And, uh, a friend, one friend called me a suspicious black lady running SBLR. I'm just going to get t-shirts made. lady running, SBLR. I'm just going to get t-shirts made. But some other people sort of question whether or not, you know, I looked dangerous because I had a walking stick with me. White people, of course. You know, maybe, you know, she was worried, maybe she was scared by the stick you were carrying. I was like, in my pink shirt that I was wearing and my Nathan hydration pack and my dirty running shoes. I mean, that's the sort of thing that I think gives people pause.

Yeah. Who has done a study of why black people don't exercise in certain types of neighborhoods because of perceived danger for their person. And that's exactly it. That's what it is. We signal, we wave, we smile. We are extra friendly and bubbly, but it doesn't seem to matter. I mean, look at Ahmaud Arbery, just running in a neighborhood.

Yeah, I mean, as you're telling this story, I can't stop thinking about him and how your story isn't that dissimilar from his. It has a different outcome, obviously, but the circumstances are related. And you can't listen to the story you just told without conjuring up what might have gone terribly wrong because somebody is confused about who you are and what you're doing. And why I'm there, Even though it's very clear. Yeah, your signaling couldn't be more clear.

And I'm just picturing you running, like what is threatening about that? And what's going on with that person in the SUV that they're feeling so threatened by you? Where is that confusion emanating from? And what's going on in their life that they would, what is embedded in their programming that perceives that as a threat

or something to be scared of? White supremacy is embedded in their programming. That's exactly what that is. So if someone's listening to this and this is like their initiation into thinking about this a little bit more deeply than they have, where does that person begin if they can't, you know, be privy to your training?

To my very expensive course. Yeah, or like, where do you direct those people? I think you should be reading. I think reading is really good. I think you should be reading. I think reading is really good. You know, doing all of the, you know, looking through all the checklists. 25 resources for anti-racism.

Yeah, there's a lot of those getting circulated around. I think that's important. I think it's a very, very important starting point. But I also think that you should, and it's difficult now, but you need to broaden your circle. You need to have, you need to be proximate to different kinds of people and start embracing their various identities. You know, examine your own, examine examine the way in which you were socialized and then see other people, see others' identities, embrace them, welcome them into your life. I think that's the way to go. Next up is entertainment's ultimate plant-based father-daughter duo kevin smith and his daughter

harley quinn smith who joined me on episode 530 for a rundown on kevin's recovery from a heart attack life in hollywood their new podcast vegan abattoir and many other subjects. Have a taste. Thanks for having, man. When the kid showed interest in doing a podcast, which like naturally, you know, made my podcaster soul leap. Because she'd been on a few episodes of Smodcast in the past and stuff. But when she was like,

I'm thinking about doing a podcast. I was like, what? What? Like, oh my God, I know a thing or two about that. I was so excited. So when she narrowed it down and created what we're calling vegan abattoir, one of the first things I said is like, oh, you have to have Rich roll on. Yeah, cool. And she was like, why? And I was like, because like in the space, he's the guy. I'd said, I did this podcast, It's like a year ago and not a week of my life goes by where I don't run into somebody who's like, Oh, I heard you're on rich rolls podcast. And it's always somebody I would never expect. Like, it's not like, Oh,

there's my vegan friend who said that it's somebody who's like, says this. I'm like, what you as well. There was a lot of reach in that part. You got a big audience. Yeah. I appreciate that. I mean, that means a lot coming from you. I mean, Harley, do you understand what your dad created? I mean, he is like the original when it comes to, there's like three generations of podcasting here because your dad, Kevin, was one of the very first, like way, way before anybody was doing it

to jump in and own the space. And he really pioneered it and created like everything that's happened. A huge debt is owed to you, Kevin. And personally, like I was, I wasn't super early into becoming a podcaster, but I was very early in terms of being a fan. And your show was one of the very first that I cottoned onto. And it's been super inspirational to me. And so it's cool to be here with, you know, somebody who goes all the way back to the beginning. Like I inherited that legacy

and it's made me better at what I do. And now to see you stepping into it, super cool. Thank you. I mean, he definitely explained how important he was to the podcasting community many times to me. And I actually was going to try to attempt to do a podcast alone. And then one day he came up to the kitchen while I was making breakfast and he was like, so I have to be a part of it. And I wasn't quite like, no, it was.

He was like, I'm'm gonna be really insulted i think no you you actually said you're going to make a mistake if you don't include me and so i was that was close to it i was like all right here we go but i'm i mean i'm honored and i'm now very excited that we have this together um but he did make sure to explain his importance to the podcasting community to me and give his own feel. What? Look, you know how we were talking about like, oh, your father created something. I created something at this table, Rich,

that I'm kind of wishing right now I'd created a little differently wouldn't call me out in public and tell my secrets. I did. I was just like, look, kiddo, I was thinking about it. Like, you could totally do a podcast by yourself, and I applaud that. But, like, it would be such a mistake for us not to do it together. I was like, because, like, I'm a vegan, too, and you flipped me to veganism. Like, your vegan story, like, changed my life.

And so I know the podcasting space, and I was, and people would love to hear like a dad and daughter talking together and stuff like that. I was like, I'm not telling you what to do, but like there's, there's a marketing hook here. That's so right. You were threatening me a little bit. I wasn't like, if you don't do a podcast with me, you're out of this house. That doesn't mean he's not right though.

No, he was right. And I think at the time I was like, this is rude. But, you know, I then realized how awesome it would be to have it together. But also how cool it is to have the perspective of somebody who's vegan for their health and somebody who's vegan for a completely different reason for animal rights. So it has like also just proved to be a really good combination for different backstories of why we're vegan. So that's also really cool. But I was hesitant. Why? Why were you hesitant? Well, I want to hear more about that, but my sense is as somebody who's on the outside looking in,

and I'm just meeting you now, is one of the incredible kind of beautiful benefits of everything that has happened to you with the heart attack and going vegan and all of that is what's occurred with your relationship. Like this is really like brought you guys close. Like it's very sweet. Thank you. That you got involved with in this movement

because of your daughter and her insistence. And now you're gonna do this podcast. Like there's just such a like like a bond there, you know, that you guys can do this stuff together. It's really cool. And I say that somewhat out of like, I have a 16 year old daughter and I'm in that phase right now. She's like, nothing to do with me, you know?

I was like, what would it take for my 16 year old daughter to want to do a podcast with me? I was like, you would have to move heaven and earth. I'm nearly 21. So just give it like a couple more years. But it has been really cool. It's been really special to be able to do it together. And I didn't really give my dad a choice at all to be vegan.

I just, I was insisting upon it. So, but it was green rolled. It's like, you're going to go vegan. I was like, all right.

Yeah. No, but you gave it, but initially, right. Yeah, no, he didn't have a choice. But initially, right, you said two months or something like that? Yeah. Well, that's how I posed it. But I was never really going to let that happen. But I wasn't going to be like, please right now commit to a lifetime of veganism because I thought I would scare him.

Right. But I did just kind of pose it as a few months, but I mean, it's been like two years. Yeah. I mean, even you couldn't have imagined that he would have, he would become like this, you know, basically you're now, you're now like the new face of veganism, like it or not, Kevin. No, but she knew in flipping me that she would like, he'd be a good get for us. I was, I was like, this is important. He's got a big mouth and he's always talking about his interests and veganism was one of his interests.

That's good for me and my community. So she kind of saw like the benefit of that. But I, I would like to believe at the heart of it. She was just like, you know, oh my God, I know a way to keep you alive. Like I had almost died clearly because I was ingesting like not just animal food products, but far too many animal food products over the course of a lifetime. So even the nutritionist in the room at the, at that point was like, you know, they, a plant-based diet will bring your cholesterol down. And that's where she

saw the opening and was like, yes, one of us, one of us. So, you know, I said, look, I ate the way that I ate for 47 years. I'll give this six months. Like, you know, I can, the least I could do is try your way for six months. Why not? And that was two years ago. Let me see, February, March, April, May, June, July. So almost two and a half years ago, two years and five months ago. And I haven't missed anything. That's the question I get the most from people about veganism. It's just like, what do you miss, bro? What do you miss? Like, no, your daughter's not here.

What do you really miss? That's so shady. Well, because they know that you're the commissar of all this. They're like, you know, as you said, like he was going vegan for life. So they know like, now I have two bosses in life, not just your mother, but also you. So when you're not around, they're like, come on, dude, what do you really think? And I honestly don't miss anything. There's nothing that I'm like, oh man. That's the thing that people are surprised about. Cause they, they suspect

that you're just walking around craving in and out. Yeah. Like your whole life. You're like, I'm living a half or a quarter life where I can't enjoy food anymore. Like we live in California. And so they've got this veganism stuff down to a science. It's dialed in. Really tasty. But even without that, like, even if you're just like, look, I can't go to some high-end restaurant where they take a kumquat and turn it into a meatball. So what do I do?

Beans and rice, man. Like tastier than most stuff that I ate on the non-vegan side. And like, that's seriously my go-to, like for the last month, that's all I've been kind of- The last time I saw you was at the Mercy for Animals gala thing. And you got up to the podium to give away like the hero award or something. I can't remember what exactly the award was that you gave away, but you said something along the lines of, if somebody had told me if I went vegan,

I'd be sitting next to the Joker. I would have done this a long time ago. A long time ago, yeah. I don't know if he liked it. Joaquin kind of was like, oh, don't tell them I'm the Joker, as if they didn't know. Right.

As if everyone in the room wasn't like, the Joker's here. But yeah, the benefits that come with it, of course the health benefits are, number one for me, have been obvious. Like I dropped a bunch of weight. Like in my behind-the-scenes life, what's not so obvious is like my body chemistry. And I find that out when I go to the doctor all the time.

And Dr. Ladenheim is the guy that saved my life, my cardiologist. Every time I've gone for the last, you know, you do six month interval checkups, he's always like, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. And the first time it registered was like when I went vegan for two, I was vegan for two months and I went in for like a blood test and he was just like, oh my God, everything is great except for your cholesterol. And I was like, well, we knew that. That's why I had a heart attack. He goes, no, your cholesterol is in the toilet. Like what happened? He's like, it dropped out. And I was like, I went vegan. He's going, well, I got to cut your, the meds in half because whatever you're doing is really doing the job.

And so I've gone back, you know, every six months for another checkup. And the last one I had was right when I got back from the tour. So it was like at the beginning of March, right before everything went into lockdown. And he was just like, your blood work is phenomenal like you know he's like and he even said because Harley always picks at him because early on I was like I'm gonna go vegan and Dr. Ladenheim was like you don't have to go vegan it's nothing wrong with me which is astounding to me he goes just keep it in moderation you know he's like there's nothing wrong with me so he later you know was like look fuck me like's nothing wrong with me. So he later, you know, was like, look, fuck me.

Like going vegan was the right move for you. Like I can clearly tell. So he has since like, tell your daughter she was right. Hope you guys enjoyed that. Thanks for the ride, folks. It was a good one. Cheers to what's ahead. Let's make it the best year ever together, right?

Links to all the full episodes and the social media accounts for all the guests excerpted today can of course be found in the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter at Rich Roll. And if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to simply subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube. Sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and always appreciated. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects,

subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis. Portraits by Allie Rogers and Davy Greenberg. Graphic elements, courtesy of Jessica Miranda. Copywriting by Georgia Whaley. And of course, our theme music was, as always, created many, many years ago by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Until then, peace, plants, namaste. stage. Thank you.