The Rich Roll Podcast - Introducing The Rich Roll Podcast

Episode Date: November 27, 2012

In the debut episode of the Rich Roll Podcast, Rich converses with his wife Julie Piatt about life in Kauai, sustainable lifestyle, enhancing your personal creativity and homeschooling. Finally! I've been talking about doing a podcast for what seems like eons. For whatever reason, I just couldn't seem to get around to actually figuring out how to do it, let alone get it done. But I finally found the time to sort through at least the initial barrier configuration issues and am happy to announce my virgin episode, which features my wife and (much) better half Julie Piatt. We are still sorting through some tech issues so it's far from studio polished, aside from the killer intro / outro music courtesy of my very talented son Tyler and nephew Harrison! The sound from this episode is admittedly a bit echo-y due to the warehouse recording environment– and I have yet to configure it for video and livestream broadcasting, which I am currently working on. But rather than wait until I had everything perfect, I wanted to just begin. Start slow and organically and let it grow as I find my voice and legs so to speak. I'm far from a professional broadcaster, but I hope that through this effort I can bring some insights and interesting people to your ears that will both enlighten, provoke and entertain. First off – this is NOT a “triathlon training / coaching” styled podcast. There are plenty of those out there already that are very well done ( Zen Triathlon and IMTalk are my faves for this), so if you are looking for a podcast that is very narrowly tailored to this specific subject and this subject only, then I fear my program may not be exactly what you are looking for. And yet, I implore to nonetheless give it a trial run with an open mind (and ears). Instead, my plan is to provide a long-form discussion platform to raise and converse about a wide variety of subjects that interest me. Certainly, triathlon, running, cycling, swimming, training, fitness in general and everything that goes into that is of course a subject that interests me dearly, so of course I will be programming helpful information in this regard. But my focus will broaden from there into plant-based nutrition for the athlete and everyman (and woman); wellness in general; spirituality; yoga & meditation; and sustainable lifestyle. Most importantly, my desire is to create a platform to help lead the way to unlocking the best version of yourself. How to live more authentically. And thrive from the heart. I hope you enjoy this first episode. Many more in the works and I hope to record at least 2 to 3 of these per week. I am very interested in your thoughts on the episode, comments in general and ideas for future episodes. In the comments section below, PLEASE let me know what YOU think, would be interested in hearing me talk about in future episodes, people you would like me to interview, and anything else on your mind. I'm wide open. Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. I've been talking about doing a podcast for a long time. It's something I've always wanted to do. I'm a huge podcast fan. I listen to tons of podcasts. I listen to them when I'm in the car. I listen to them when I'm training. And really, you know, they've brought a lot of value to my life as well as entertainment. And I think it's a fantastic medium for connecting with people and providing a long-form opportunity to get to know interesting people and learn something. And it's, you know, it's a medium that is sort of old as time and, you know, as new as it gets as well. You know, you watch TV and the interviews

that you hear are five-second clips of somebody promoting a movie or whatnot, and you never really get to know the person. You never get to get behind what it is they, you know, the initial message that they're trying to deliver. So I thought it would be interesting to check it out myself and start my own podcast and kind of take a tip from others that I've listened to and have enjoyed and see what I can bring to the table. And my hope is that over time, I'll be able to bring, you know, some interesting insights to you, not just things that I've learned personally and experiences that I've had, but also to introduce you to people in my world, you know, interesting guests, people with different, differing points of views on a whole variety of matters.

people with differing points of views on a whole variety of matters. Not necessarily all that I agree with, but to kind of create a safe and broad platform for lots of different ideas to converge, I guess, is what I'm thinking. And if you listen to the Joe Rogan podcast, I think he does a great job of that. He'll have all sorts of dynamic guests on, and his only real criteria is, you know, is this a subject matter or a person that interests me? And it doesn't mean that he agrees with them

or whatever, but he gives the person a safe space to, you know, breathe and convey their point of view. And the conversations I've found at least are generally quite remarkable. And so I would like to try to take a stab out at myself. And this is our first attempt. So it's going to be rough. It's not going to be polished. It's very amateur. We're here at Common Ground in Kauai, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a minute. And we're set up in a warehouse. So we've kind of jerry-rigged up my son's and nephew's musical recording instruments into a mixing board to try to see if we can make this work. So if we run into some tech problems, I won't be surprised. And the idea is to kind of start this organically and grow it slowly over time. I would love to be able

to videotape them also and throw the videos of the interviews up on YouTube and Vimeo. videotape them also and throw the videos of the interviews up on YouTube and Vimeo. So that's the next step. And then beyond that, I think it would be cool to do live streaming also, which we have the capability of doing here, but we're just lacking a few pieces of equipment that we need. And I just wanted to get going, get an initial episode up, try to gauge people's interests and what they want to hear about and kind of go from there slowly. So that's the deal. I hope you come along for the ride and I hope that I can, you know, provide enough interesting information to capture your attention and your interest so that you'll follow along. 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, support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. Thank you. 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. First of all, my name is Rich Roll.

You probably already know a little bit about me if you're listening to this, because you probably didn't happen upon this podcast randomly. But if for some reason you don't, I am an ultra-distance triathlete. I'm a vegan, plant-based athlete. I've been vegan for about six years. And my story is one of sort of stumbling into middle age, out of shape, of sort of stumbling into middle age, out of shape, overweight, dissatisfied with my life and its trajectory and kind of feeling lost and awash in society.

And the last six years have been a journey in trying to find my way and course correct my life's direction. And it's been an amazing journey and I chronicle it in my book, Finding Ultra. If you haven't already checked it out, you can find it on Amazon, which tells my story of kind of how I got from there to where I am now as a wellness advocate, a plant-based nutrition advocate, an ultra-distance triathlete, among other things, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. Not to mention the fact that I'm happily married and father of four children.

My wife, Julie Pyatt, is here. You want to say hi? Hi. My better half by a long shot, for sure. So I wanted to talk about what's going on right now. If you are a fan or read my blog, which is at richroll.com, and you read my most recent post, you know that we have relocated our family from our home in Malibu Canyon, California, out to Kauai. And right now, there are seven of us, my wife and I and our kids, as well as our nephew Harrison. And we are living at a place called Common Ground, which is

an organic, sustainable farm on the North Shore of Kauai. It's a 50-acre sustainable community on this incredibly pristine piece of property that's owned and founded and run by a gentleman named Chris J, who's a really fascinating, interesting guy who I'm definitely going to have as a guest on the podcast, who Julie and I have been talking to over the last couple weeks. He's sort of a new friend, and he's doing some interesting things here, and there were some opportunities here to explore

in terms of some new business ventures that he's working on that seem to be very in alignment with our mission and what we're doing. And it just made sense for us to come out here and explore that with Chris. So here we are, we're in Kauai, we're living on this farm and we're living in a yurt village that we share with four 20-something kids

who work the land and work in the restaurant here. There's a phenomenal restaurant on the property here. So if you happen to be in Kauai, you should definitely come by and check out Common Ground. So we've been here about three weeks now. We're going to be here through January 10th before we go back to Los Angeles and kind of reassess our situation. So it's been an interesting adventure so far. And if you read my blog post, you know this already. I don't mean to repeat myself, but part of the idea of coming out here was to simplify our lives, to experiment with a more minimal, sustainable way of living,

a more sustainable lifestyle of getting sort of closer to the earth and where our food comes from. And, you know, I've been traveling around, my book came out in May. And since then I've been kind of on the road quite a bit, traveling around and doing book signings and speaking at certain events and conferences like, you know, VegFest and the like, meeting tons of people. And it's been an incredible experience. And part of, you know, VegFest and the like, meeting tons of people. It's been an incredible experience. And part of, you know, my gig when I speak is I talk about, I talk a lot about repairing our health through plant-based nutrition

and sort of developing a more intimate relationship with the foods that we eat and where they come from and getting closer to nature in that regard. And the truth of the matter is, is that, you know, after I do my speaking gig and sign a bunch of books, I get on an airplane and I fly home and then I get in my car and I drive to the Ralph supermarket or the Trader Joe's or the Whole Foods and buy my groceries at the, you know, at the grocery store, just like everybody else. And I try to be conscious in those choices. And I try to purchase foods that are locally grown and that are organic, provided it doesn't break the budget. But I could certainly do better. I don't always look, when I buy a

packaged food, I don't always look, well, where was this made? And how far did it have to be shipped? And what exactly is in it? And I'm probably more conscious of that stuff than most people, but still, I don't necessarily always give it the attention that it deserves. And so coming out here to Common Ground and kind of living on this farm is really an effort to greater align my actions with my words. We can do a better job of getting close to where our foods come from. The kids are working in the fields, and we're eating produce that's pulled right out of the ground that day,

and sort of helping with the restaurant in terms of planning more vegan meals, and working with Chris on improving some healthy food options for his kids and the like. And it's been great. It's been really grounding and it's definitely been an adjustment to kind of get out of Los Angeles and traffic and the distractions and the commute

and all the sort of things that come with living a busy urban life and to just be out here and settle. You know, it's had its high highs and it's had its sort of bumps and adjustments, but I think overall we're doing pretty good. And so I wanted to bring Julie in and talk a little bit about, you know, why she wanted to come here and how she feels like it's been going and what she thinks is important about this experience that we're having, not just for ourselves personally, but for our kids. Hi, Rich. I'm really honored to be on your first podcast. Thanks for inviting me to come on your

show today. I hope it's recording. Is it recording? It's recording. So I'm sitting here, just so you know, I'm sitting here with my eldest, Tyler, who's 17, and Harrison, who's 21, and they're manning the laptop and checking the levels, so it's all good. And also, I want to make sure that I point out the awesome intro music,

and you're also hearing the outro here, was produced and created by Harrison and Tyler. So thanks a lot for that. It's pretty rocking. I think it's pretty cool. So hi. So yeah, so getting to the food and getting to the core of the source

of where it comes from. You know, Kauai, as you know, has been a dear love of mine for over 10 years. And the really sort of profound thing is that I've always seen our home connected to this exact point on Kauai. And I've always known that there was something that was connecting the two places. connecting the two places. So when Chris contacted us a few weeks ago, it was sort of like a beautiful message from above. I know, it's pretty cool. So just a little background. My book tour was wrapping up and things were kind of slowing down in terms of my travel. And Julie and I were kind of sitting down thinking, well, what are we

going to do next? Or what's our next step? Or where do we go from here? And these issues of sort of sustainability and living more minimally and kind of reducing our overhead and all of that have been paramount topics of conversation at the dinner table and beyond, you know, we've been sort of living more extravagantly than we should be for too long. And it's high time that we kind of reduce that and really kind of, you know, dial things in a little bit. And we were looking at actually leaving Los Angeles, like moving out of LA and looking at different places where we might live. We looked at Austin, we were looking at Asheville, North Carolina, like cool out of LA and looking at different places where we might live. We looked at Austin, we were looking at Asheville, North Carolina, like cool communities of sort of like-minded individuals, supportive communities where we could live more affordably. And, you know,

Julie had been out to the North Shore of Kauai several times and definitely has always had a deep kind of spiritual connection to this to this you know geographical location and and i remember 10 years ago she was talking about how she wanted to open up a healing center here and she had big plans and she wanted to do this and that here and and when we were having these conversations about possibly moving or where would we go kawaii didn't even come up i mean it was because you know we were looking at moving someplace that was, you know, it's not exactly cheap here and there, it didn't seem to, you know, there didn't seem to be opportunities here. And like, you know, we've worked so hard to kind of get to a place where we have a certain audience and a mouthpiece to kind of continue to do the work that we do. Why would

we exempt ourselves and go, you know, hibernate on an island. So it wasn't really part of the equation at all until Chris called. And Chris was a guy who I had known of over the years, but had only actually met like nine months earlier. I first heard about him through a college friend of mine, Nathaniel Corum. He's an architect. He's actually a really cool guy. I'll put a link in the show notes to some of the interesting stuff that he did. He works with architecture for humanity and builds sustainable housing in indigenous communities like Indian reservations. He's always traveling. He lives a very kind of nomadic lifestyle, but always finds himself working on incredibly cool projects with incredibly cool people. Yeah, and he had actually come to visit us. He had been out to our house when we were living in the teepees in the Airstream

when we were building Jai, and so we'd met him there. Right, and at the time, he had just completed working on, he designed the cabin on David de Rothschild's Plastiki boat. And if you don't know, David de Rothschild is a sort of modern day explorer who's done some incredible things, including sailing a boat made entirely out of plastic bottles across the Pacific to raise awareness about the health of our oceans, et cetera. And he had come out to Common Ground to help Chris design the restaurant space and how he was going to sort of lay out and build the community that we have today. And he,

so long story short, he had come out, he had told us about Chris and said, yeah, you should check this guy out. He's doing some really cool stuff. At which point, this was years ago, we hadn't even finished building our house. We were living in an Airstream and a teepee at the time. Julie, you emailed Chris, did you not? Right. But Right, but I actually emailed him a couple years ago. Nathaniel actually contacted me on Facebook and let me know about Chris. And of course, it didn't go unnoticed that Chris was exactly at this point on the island that I had seen in my meditations connected to Jai. So I just took a moment and sent him a quick email and said, you know, I'd like you to know about my husband and me and what we're doing

and that I shared a similar vision for a community at this specific point on the island. So I just wanted to, you know, kind of say, hey, and he sent back an email and just said, let's keep in touch. And then we never met him over all those years. Yeah. Until I was at the Natural Food Products Expo in Anaheim this past year. And that must have been like, I don't know, nine months ago or something like that. It was before my book came out. I know that.

Six months or so. Yeah, I gave him an advanced copy and kind of walked the floor with him and Compton Rom, our nutrition buddy. Our guru. Our nutrition guru. Yeah, he'll definitely be a guest on the podcast. That guy will blow your mind. Fair warning in advance. But I had a chance to kind of connect with Chris a little bit, but that was that. I mean, he, you know, he came back to Hawaii. I think he was in, he went off and went to some TED conference and then went back to Hawaii. I didn't hear from him. And then, you know, I really didn't talk to him at all until he emailed, he emailed us, like literally it was like a month ago. Yeah. Well, when we, when we were really considering, you know, making the shift and we started to get real about it, you know, I think we looked at

Hawaii, we looked at the big island and, you know, glanced at Kauai for like five seconds and then we just, we didn't even consider it because, you know, we just didn't feel like we could really build a business here or really get momentum here and keep spreading the message with what we've been doing with all the plant awareness

and everything that Rich has been doing with his book and also the music with me and the boys and you know our records and albums that we're recording and releasing so um but I did say to you I said all of this research we're doing we spent many hours on Trulia yeah Trulia Trulia became our new yeah exactly like oh look at this house in Austin we were all emailing each other potential dwelling spaces and places we could live. And I said to you, I was on my way up to Chef for Sol Ray up in Ojai, and I said to you,

all of these actions that we're doing, they're just for our ego. They're to calm ourselves down because there's no way that we're coming it. They're just for our ego. They're to calm ourselves down because there's no way that we're coming to this point and that we may be being moved from Jai, that there won't be another opportunity presented. And I told you it was coming. That's right. I mean, basically she's like, we got to do all this legwork and, you know, you can spend all day on Trulio looking for rental houses or whatever, but the solution isn't, you know, you kind of have

to do that legwork. You got to do the lifting, but I mean, we do have children, but also with the awareness that knowing like, we're probably not going to find our next place to live through Trulia, even though we kind of have to do it. And, and that the solution will be presented to us somehow. And it really, it harkens back to the line in the book that gets the most sort of repeated back to me or tweeted to me as kind of the quote of the book, which was that the universe, you know, will provide when your actions are in alignment and you're living in faith that, you know, the universe will provide the solution that you're looking for. It was the word that you said to me during times of self-doubt and, you know, really wondering what I was doing when I was preparing for Ultraman and the like that really kept me going and proved to be true and have proved to be true time and time again in my life. Like every time I'm in some kind of weird crisis or whatever, and I can't see my way out of it,

or I don't know how we're going to solve this problem or whatever, it's just sort of to, you know, tap into what it is that you love doing, pursue that and have faith that, you know, you will be cared for, that you will be provided for, that the universe is, you know, without getting too new agey about it, is infinitely abundant, and that, you know, you will be cared for in due time. And having that faith, it's like, it's easy to have faith when everything's going your way, you know, when all the breaks are cutting in your favor, but when you're pounding your head against the wall and things don't seem to be working out and your faith is really tested, that's when, you know, you really meet, you know, what you're made of in terms of do you really have faith or you just say

you do. Well, and it always comes down to that one question, really, when you really push to the limits. And it's still, it's always the same question for me, and that's how strong is your faith? Like, that's it. That's everything right there. You know? Like, that's it. That's everything right there. And even for me, for this blessing and this sort of answer to, I mean, I've traveled to Kauai at very, very, very profound times of my life,

births, deaths, spiritual pilgrimage. And I've done ceremony. I've meditated. I've offered my heart. And, you know, it's really just sort of a love affair that I've had with this island and also a remembrance of something very ancient here and very, very deep. And, you know, in the world, as you're going through the world and all these physical things are happening and people have, you know,

credit scores and bank accounts and job descriptions and stuff like that, it's easy to lose. It's easy to even doubt yourself. And also we become impatient. So 10 years is a long time in one sense. And then it's just like a blink of an eye in another sense and then it's just a it's just a like a a blink of an eye and in another sense but anyway it's been a really beautiful um just sort of love that i feel from the universe

that chris appeared and that we're getting this opportunity to have this exchange and even though we all don't really know what that's going to be yet at this point. Right. I mean, it's, but just to bring it back, I mean, it is kind of amazing that, you know, here we were at this apparent crossroads and not sure what we were going to be doing and sort of looking at apartments and towns and never would have predicted in a million years that Chris J. would call up and say, hey, I'm working on some interesting things. I'd love to get your input. Why don't you come and check it out?

That was not part of the anticipated equation by any stretch of the imagination. So it goes back to, you can't... I think as human beings, it's in our dna it's in our nature to to judge you know we judge ourselves we judge other people we judge scenarios we judge situations every as much work as we try to do to not judge things we just do so we look we perceive a situation and inherently and intuitively we make a judgment in our mind we may not articulate that judgment when we say that's good that's bad oh that judgment when we say, that's good, that's bad.

Oh, I see that over there. That's not good. That's not bad. And if you take a step back and look at it, go, well, what is that based on? That's based on an incredibly limited amount of information and total lack of foresight. Right. Right. So, you know, it's that old, what is it that old fable of the you always hear

that story the guy who the kid who's going to go off to war and then he breaks his leg and he can't go and whatever i'm going to repeat it most people have already heard that but you can't you can't know where things are leading exactly your view is very limited and i think most people make premature yes judgments on scenario situations, people, and the like. That's right. So you don't know. So an event happens, and it's like, you know, you go, oh, I call it the big teeter-totter of insanity. So, you know, something happens, and you go, oh, that's great. That's so great. And then another event happens, oh, that's not so great.

And it just goes back and forth between the two extremes. It's really ridiculous, actually. It's insanity. It's complete insanity. Like if aliens came down and looked at how humans behaved in that regard, they would just say, you people are crazy. You don't know what you're doing at all. It is. It's crazy making. And if you review those times when we act that way and when we are not in control of our emotions and we go to those highs and lows. 99.9% of the time, if you look in the rearview mirror at what occurred, it was nowhere near what any of your perception was. Yeah, I mean, it never plays out like you think it's going to ever, right?

So no matter how good a predictor you are. You can't be. Right. So my favorite is the universe knows your heart's deepest desires better than you know. And that's the thing that really just touches me so deeply when I love something so dearly and then life just presents it to me even better than I asked for it or even better than I imagined it. Like, it's just like,

oh, I love that. Right. Wait, what were we talking about before though? What got me into the whole judgment thing? We were talking about thinking that you know the outcome to something or that you know what a good choice is or what a bad choice is. Right. But what was I talking about before that? Before that? I don't know. I can't go back that far. What made was i talking about before that before that i don't know i can't go back what made me start talking about that i don't remember anyway um the kawaii vortex i can't think back that yeah exactly so uh so yeah so so chris you know kind of popped up on the radar and and it was it was just a situation where it just seemed so in alignment and the timing was so good that we would have been foolish to not explore it.

No, there was no way. And the thing that was beautiful was that he felt the same way. And it was one of these things, one of the things we're exploring with Chris, which is really exciting, is we're exploring a new paradigm of, if you can call it business, I don't even like to use that word anymore,

it's a new paradigm of co-creating together. So that's a word that we use a lot together and sort of more than any single individual that Rich and I have ever met, our alignment was literally stacked on top of each other so that in effect, if we were doing one expression or one activity or one uh one act you know for chris or for common ground that just stacked right on top of you know rich in my you know life expression or anything that we're doing for jai lifestyle so it makes it such a rich um such a rich sort of pool to swim in because we're able to sort of serve ourselves serve this community and serve the greater whole by being authentic to ourselves and authentic to our heart and that's I think the core thing that's super exciting and why we dropped everything and

came here and really wanted to pursue this. Yeah. I mean, it is kind of crazy. I mean, by the, from our first sort of phone call or meeting, it was like, we were suddenly around a plane and we were, we were already here and we're like, what are we doing here? It was actually sooner than we thought. I know. That's our drummer. Yeah, our audio expert. Just hit the hi-hat. That's all right. But, you know, that's what's amazing. And what's so cool is that we were able to kind of, you know, take this adventure on without knowing where it's going.

And really, you know, I mean, Chris wants us here to help him co-create broader community with what he's trying to do at Common Ground. That extends through multiple avenues from the food that they're growing and preparing to the outreach that they're doing with the local community to the internet portal that Chris is trying to develop, which is really kind of the primary thing that he's focused on right now. Chris, Chris J, his background is in internet broadcasting. He was a co-founder of broadcast.com with Mark Cuban back in the 90s. It was a, it was a company

that, that went public and was ultimately sold to Yahoo. And, you know, Chris did very well in that transaction and he was presented with choices. You know, I mean, he's a guy who very well could have gone the Mark Cuban route and tried to empire build and buy and sell businesses or, you know, continue to, you know, stick his head in business and get all mired in that. And he decided that he didn't want that. He wanted to have a simpler life. And he explored different places to live, et cetera, and finally found the North Shore of Kauai and brought his family out here and has been living a pretty simple existence for a guy like that. And he bought this parcel of land, this 50 acres,

which is a former guava plantation, and has slowly been turning it into what it is today, but he has plans for what he wants it to become. And along with that, he wants to leverage his experience in internet broadcasting and bring that into the world of wellness. on developing a web portal uh to facilitate that that would aggregate wellness content um for live broadcast and and video distribution for products and services for for people that are active experts in this field and you know we're in the very very early stages of it i don't want to get too into it because there's a long long road road to travel um. But, you know, that's something that I'm obviously very interested in and seems to, you know, make great sense for me to align myself with a guy like Chris, who seems so like-minded and his heart is in the right place and is really committed to trying to help people and improve lives. So, you know, there was no way we weren't going to come

out here and check it out and explore it. So that's what we're doing. That's the Common Ground mission. Meanwhile, we're living in, you know, we've left our nice house and that coincidentally on Thanksgiving day, I don't know how many of you caught it, but, uh, well, you're probably watching football, but on HGTV, they have a TV show called, uh, extreme homes and they featured our house. They actually filmed that like in June, a long time ago. We weren't even sure that was even going to air. And I think it got cut down. We didn't even see it cause we don't have a TV here, but it got cut down and probably you know like a one minute or a 30 second clip or whatever but we heard that we had no idea we

heard that it aired so it's just funny that our house was being shown on tv with julie and i sort of walking around our house talking about our home while we're out living in a yurt out here and like in a on a farm yeah but it's beautiful and i mean you know i mean i loved living in the teepees when we living in the teepees when we lived in the teepees and we were building the house and, you know, I have a background in design and interior design and art. And that teepee was one of my favorite spaces. And, you know, Chris has done an amazing job and made our yurts really, really comfortable. We actually have a 30 foot yurt, which Rich and I are living in with the two little girls, and then the boys have

their own 30-foot yurt. And then we share a communal kitchen, and we have community showers and toilets. So it's really sweet, and we're really blessed and really grateful to be here. It's definitely not a hard life. It's a very blessed life. You know, I think a lot of people out there are, they're like, well, what's it like to live in a yurt? It's actually amazing. And isn't it amazing when the rain pelts? I was, I was waiting for one water leak. There are, there's no leaking. I mean, the rain is just dumping and they're completely, you know, watertight. I know. They're a pretty incredible design. What is it?

Are they like, is it Turkish? Like who are the people that came up with your design? I don't want to say Mongolian, but I might be wrong. Mongolian, I think. I think that might be right. Yeah. It's really, really cool. And of course, you know, we like everything open with us.

You know, we have our bathtub in our bedroom and we would prefer no walls inside of a building. There's a Quonset hut on the grounds that I would love to have. Just keep it empty and build a couple loft levels on the side. It's pretty cool. If you follow my Instagram feed, I Instagrammed a picture of the Quonset hut a while back. I was all over that the first day.

You could totally build a house within that structure. That would be pretty incredible. So anyway, so they were really sweet, and they gave us walls like normal people which is really nice but if you know we stay in the future we'll probably break them all down and yeah i mean everyone in i'm completely comfortable in them are you what's your what's your biggest sacrifice of being in the air like like well i mean we didn't have you know kind of getting back to the discussion of living minimally or, you know, sort of, you know, dialing things back. I mean, we had gotten rid of television a while ago, right?

Oh, yeah. I won that battle finally. I know. Believe me, I went kicking and screaming on that one. For years. I still do. But at our house, ironically, our house in California, we live in kind of a remote sort of secluded area,

and they don't have DSL. Like the broadband offerings where we live are really poor. The only option available to us is a really slow internet connection. I mean, it's better than dial-up, but it's kind of like satellite. Like it's not good. So you can't really stream stuff that well, or, you know, especially with all the people in our house. It's very, yeah, exactly.

It's pretty spotty. So, so ironically we're here in the yurts and we've got like lightning fast wifi. And so it's actually a step up technologically from where we were living because chris you know i mean he's he's the internet broadcast guy there's no way they're not going to be fast he's got good stuff here he's got it wired so actually the little girls i think are happy because they can stream the stuff that they want but so i'd already made peace with the no tv thing which ordinarily

that probably would have been the hardest thing, but the beds are totally comfortable. I love hearing the rain at night and there's wifi and you know, it's, you know, you don't, you don't have to get in your car to drive somewhere to do something. It's pretty insane. I get up, I get up and walk across the lawn to go teach my yoga class. Right. Julie's been teaching yoga in the mornings to the kids and to me and to the people that work here, Chris and his wife. And that's been really cool. Yeah. Just walk across the lawn to this beautiful little yoga room that Chris erected on the property. It's gorgeous. It's pretty nice, right? Yeah, it's beautiful. So what do you think? Like, could you, do you think? Yeah, I could totally hang. I mean, you know, there'd be some design stuff that I'd like to do just for my own, you know, for my own vibe.

But what do you think about, like, living on an island all the time? Well, a lot of me really, really, really loves it a lot. And I think that if I can convince some of my friends to come here, then I'll be... it would be even better. But now I'm meeting friends here and I am connecting with people from the mainland that I know that are here. You know, I think that there is a need

to just connect in on the mainland. I'm already calling it the mainland. I'm some kind of islander on the mainland. Now, just to be back in L.A. I do have a poll to Austin. I think there are some islander on the mainland. Now, just to be back in LA, and I mean, I still have, I do have a pull to Austin. I think there's some relevant things for us there, and I think it's a cool community.

I never meet anybody that doesn't say amazing things about Austin. Yeah, I've been hearing good things about Asheville too. Have you really? That might not be out of the running. Well, the good news is, I mean, listen, there's really not that much to not love here.

I mean, I think our biggest challenges are that the movie theater, the movie going situation news is is i mean you know listen it there's really not that much to not love here i mean i think our biggest biggest challenges are that the movie theater the movie going situation is not good at all yeah we're big movie people and and uh the movie theater needs a little work the only epic thing is that they were playing santana like black sabbath woman like the whole right the whole record from start to finish instead of, what do they call that? First look, that really cheesy, horrible thing that they play before movies in LA. I think, you know, for me, like that's one thing I struggle with.

You know, the idea of like there's, I can't, I have trouble getting my mind around this idea that we're exempting ourselves out of like the flow of what's happening and culture and society. And I've always been one that thrives on kind of an urban beat. Not that Los Angeles has the biggest heartbeat of any city, but it's a huge city and it's a center of a lot of things that are going on and I like being part of that.

And I love New York City. Like, you know, I spent some time living in San Francisco and, you know, I was like, I need to be back in New York or back in, like I wanna be where it's happening. So it's for me, but what I'm saying is that's an interesting opportunity for me to look at myself and go, why do I feel that way?

Or what is it about me that feels like I need that? Like, is that like a fear? Like I wanna be part of what's going on or the world is passing me by, or I'm not relevant if I'm not living there or, you know, my ego wants to attach itself to people that are doing interesting things so that I'm like interesting by proxy or something. You know, I don't know what that's about, but I definitely feel that. And so when, like when we first got here, I was like, oh, my God, we're on an island. I know you had a couple of freakouts.

I had a couple of freakouts. What cracks me up is when you get like that. Because Rich is a huge Lost fan, like, I mean, beyond. Like, he just watched it and studied it and went into it. And it was like he was all about it. Like, he was all about Lost. So sometimes when I'm driving around, I'm like, Rich thinks he's on Lost. He's Lost on that one. It is a little bit like Lost here. It has a little bit. Well, I mean,

you know, Lost is essentially a spiritual adventure, you know, like there's crazy things happening. And there's something about this island, there's a supercharged energy, and that energy can be light or it can be dark and there's a there's a there's a definite heaviness that i think you have to like be aware of and be careful of respect yeah you have to you have to respect this land you have to respect the people and you know it's a it's a tricky interesting social dynamic with the people that live here too you know whether you're relocated from the mainland or you're you know you're a native to kawaii or hawaii it's not um it's not always simple you know knowing how to socially interact appropriately well we experienced that when we first first arrived like we were like the hillbillies from L.A., just completely open.

And we got a little bit of Kauai vibe. We ended up calling it Kauai vibe. Yeah, I mean, you know. But I think that comes from our, not really ignorance, but just maybe lack of awareness of how things work here. Right, exactly.

We just didn't even know. Yeah, there's a cultural, even though we're in the United States and you know you're in the United States, we're a long way away. And there's some cultural mores and sort of unwritten rules that you gotta kind of learn as you go.

Sure, I think we've got it down now. So how do you think, I think other people are wanting to know, like, well, you have all your kids there and like, why aren't they in school? Yeah, well, we homeschool. That's scary. We unschool homeschool. That's even scarier. That's another kind of, what I want to say, battle that I'm winning, that I've been winning. No, we just, you know, we live a really creative life

and we live a creative life at our house in, you know, at Jai House in Malibu Canyon. And, you know, we're always creating and we're sort of all spontaneous in the way that we move. And I think our two younger girls, the arrival of the two little girls sort of dictated that we needed to come up with something else because the regular school structure that exists today was not supporting them. And we have

two little girls that are very sensitive. They're extremely strong. They are not easily convinced to do other than what they have their mindset on. But they're also just very energetically sensitive and they're affected by their environment. They're affected by lots of things in the environment and other people, places, energetics. And so I think it just came out of a need that I started trying to start the homeschool at our house. Yeah, I mean, I think particularly with Mathis, our eight-year-old, she is a handful, man. started trying to start the homeschool at our house and uh yeah i mean i think you know particularly

with math is our eight-year-old like she is a handful man like she requires a work of like four kids like she's not an easy child and she's got it yeah she's a stallion she's like a horse that you would want to break in but you don't want you don't want to break her in like she's got a fire and spirit and that's a beautiful thing like that's something don't want to break her in like she's got a fire and a spirit and that's a beautiful thing like that's something that you want to as a parent you want to foster and you want to develop and exactly um and we had experimented with having her in you know a bunch of different schools and she was in like three or four schools over the last couple years and it just was it was never a fit but the sort of common theme was that she after a few

weeks she'd start to come home like deflated with her head hanging low and you know sort of she'd go to school with like you know two odd shoes or especially when she was even now she's almost she's like a mini starting to get more normal betsy johnson like she comes up with these crazy outfits and you know is like stitching her own clothes together with yarn. But then dirt on her face or avocado smear on her forehead or something like that. Right, and there's something really cool about that too, right? Oh, we think, yeah. But then you could see her getting beaten down.

Well, no, actually in first grade, there were already girl cliques developing in the classroom. So there was already a culture that had developed in first grade on what was acceptable to wear or how you had to be. And Mathis is an artist and while she's a wild stallion

she's actually selling original art now. She made like 900 bucks before we left. She had one commission piece and one piece that she sold to grown-ups couples that we know that are in our community and she actually went on ebay and got herself a macbook air she's very entrepreneurial she's amazing and the thing is is and i let her go crazy and i she had and she has an amazing space at at our house it used to be my yoga room, and then we kept procreating,

and that had to go away. But anyway, so the girls have been in there, and they have their art studio. And I really let, I mean, I let the kids draw on the walls when they were little, and I really let them go. And it was a lot of mess and a lot of debris for many years. And especially Mathis would bring in, like, sticks and dirt. And, you know, I just turned my head for one second and some mess would be sitting in the house. And then, you know, I saw

her Kindle art, the stuff that she's done, you know, on her computer. And it's just extraordinary. The composition is amazing. And I just said to myself, thank God I was right. And I just let her go. So what do you think, but getting back to like homeschooling versus traditional schooling. And I think, you know, there's a lot of parents out there that struggle with this and, you know, their experience, obviously every parent wants to do the best for their children, of course, right? And I think there's a lot of parents that are interested in homeschooling, but it's scary. It scares me. It still scares me. I come from a very traditional academic background. And maybe just too scary to really explore it. And so they either, you know, spend all their money to put them in a private school that's unbelievably expensive or

try to do the best parenting they can with the, you know, with the schools that are available. with the schools that are available. And what do you think it is about the system that is not working? Well, I think that, first of all, I think every child is different. And I think, and I just want to, before I say anything, I just want to give complete respect and honoring to the mother's intuition

or the father, whoever is involved with the children. But I will say that there are an increasing number of children that are coming into bodies that are being born, I guess I could say in a more layman term, that are being born, that they have a different energetics, okay? So I think as parents, we often try to say, well, when I was a kid, you know, you always hear that statement, well, when I was a kid, it was like this. And when you were a kid and an old person

said that to you, you were just like, you know, you're old. And yet we say it to our own kids, you know? So I just think that the planet is shifting at such a rapid rate that there is no way that these kids that are coming in are so much more evolved than we are. And they're evolved in ways we don't even understand. So they have abilities or awarenesses or ways of operating that are beyond the structure that exists here. So that poses a very difficult challenge for us as parents. And it takes a very courageous parent to allow themselves to step out of the box and to break the rules in service to their child. A lot of these children that are coming in, like we were talking about, you know, our girl Mathis, she's very strong and she has a lot of energy. And if it's misdirected or it's damaged or hurt,

it can be expressed in a dark way. These energies that are coming in are very, very powerful. They may remember their past lives. They know they're not just a three-year-old little baby. They know that. So I think that the challenge for all of us, really in a lot of different structures that are on the planet now, not only education, we're starting to say, hey, wait a second, like that doesn't really make sense. Like, just because my son can't sit in a desk in a classroom, you know, with minimal art and, you know, toxic food served, you know, for lunch, and then the energies of all these other kids around me all the time, just because my son can't do that doesn't make him sick, doesn't make him in need for medication.

Or bad or wrong or required to be disciplined. No, and the thing is, once you start to see, I come back to the point that if everyone understood and remembered that we are all divine emanations from one source, right? So we are created by this like amazing force that is the conductor or the creator of all of life. So if we just remembered, and I say remembered because we know it at our soul level, but if we just remembered that each being is divine, each being is perfect, then how about if we switched our awareness to,

instead of saying, oh, Johnny doesn't fit in the box, something's wrong with him, to let me try to serve this individual in my highest way that I know how, keeping them safe. You know, yeah, you got to keep the knives away from them, the car, you know, the fire, like anything, you know, yeah, you have to parent. But what if you just did that with the intention of, I want to know who you are. I want to know who you are. And I want to support you. And I'm for you. So please, tell me more of who you are

instead of, you know what, like Osho has a beautiful story that he tells and the summary of it is Osho is an Indian master who is semi-controversial. I won't get into it. Anyway, you can Google him if you want. It's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant consciousness. But he talks about how that education was created

this way. They got like a bird, a fish, a snake, and a squirrel together. And they decided to make a standardized education. So therefore, you know, the squirrel would have to fly and swim. The fish would have to, you know, tree jump and the bird would have to dig into the dirt, right? So the whole story goes on. And at the end, they were all wounded. You know, the fish crashed tree jumping and fell to its death. And then the bird broke his beak trying to dig. The point is that people... And they all felt like shit

because they couldn't... Well, no. They all had poor self-esteem at the end of the day. They all had very poor self-esteem, which is really like the big thing in these schools. And I think in his story he says, you know, well, the brain dead eel or the very, you know, sort of simple eel is the one that excelled the most because he was medium. He was like less than medium at all. He could kind of do all of them a little bit. Exactly. So. Well, it's a, it's, it's an

interesting thing because getting back to, you know, uh mathis in our own experience um and her being sort of strong-willed and having a very you know strong personality and as a parent wanting to foster that and and you know and allow that to develop and not get crushed i think is you know really important to both of us and probably to most parents who you know they want to see their kid flourish and their personality come alive and not get kind of crushed and beaten down by a system and then at the same time we're dealing with a system that you know sort of gives participation medals to everybody you know like whether you suck or you're good right like like it's not okay anymore to tell a kid hey you know what like you're not any good at Like, it's not okay anymore to tell a kid,

hey, you know what? Like, you're not any good at that. Or like, you know, you need some work. Like, let's work on it. Like, you know, you play a sport and everybody gets to play no matter what. And, you know, if the team goes 0 for 10, they still get a trophy at the end of the year. You know, like, I kind of have a problem with that too.

Like, it's sort of what happened to honest dialogue? You know, like, what happened to just saying, like, I kind of have a problem with that, too. Like, it's sort of, what happened to honest dialogue? You know, like, what happened to just saying, hey, it's okay if you lose, but, like, let's learn from that, but let's not pretend that you're good at something that you're not. Like, I think that that's a problem at the same time. I think that's a correction in the opposite direction to not a good balance. Yeah, it's like this weird politically correct, like, response

where you can't like even have like an open conversation or dialogue about like what's really happening yeah it's not a balance and so i don't think that's good either no it's not and then oh sorry but but uh and i also think that we're in an incredible time like for you and i you know the internet's really only been part of our lives for not even half of our life, right? And I don't think that we can overstate or over-dramatize how impactful it is to the way that we live. It's huge. It's changed our lives completely.

I mean, we wouldn't be doing what we're doing at all without it, and in a million other ways, of course. But I look at our youngest, who's five years old, and she plays Minecraft on the iPad, and she's creating cityscapes that look like they're out of Inception. I mean, it's insane, right? She's actually kind of good at it. And she just intuitively knows how to do it,

and she teaches herself. And when you see that, and it gets back to what you were saying, like the kids that are coming in are different now. Well, they're coming in different, but they're also exposed to things that we can't even fathom the impact of that and how that's going to play out

over the course of their lives. So, you know, when they're learning how to intuitively interact with technology at such an incredibly young age, you know, where does that lead? And I think it leads to a future that we can't predict that's going to be completely different than anything we can imagine. It is. And I think it leads to a future that we can't predict that's going to be completely different than anything we can imagine.

It is. And I think that that calls into question and requires a dialogue about the nature, the very nature of education. Yes. Because, you know, we're really teaching curriculum, curriculums, curriculae, that have been established, you know,

were established a long time ago and have really not changed much at all like you go to you know you study english and you study history and you read these history textbooks without any real perspective about whether that's really the way anything went down um it's in in certain respects yes it's required to have a kind of a functional knowledge and understanding of our world. And at the same time, there is an argument to be made that it's incredibly antiquated and that even the collegiate system, like what is the point of that now?

Like if you want to be an English professor or you want to be a mechanical engineer or you want to be a doctor or something like that, of course, like if you want to be a doctor, you got to, of course, like, you know, you, if you want to be a doctor, you got to go to medical school. There's certain things that you need to learn to practice that. Depends on what kind of doctor. Well, to practice that trait. Oh, don't even get me into like that. Well, that's the, I can go for hours on that. And by the way, we talked

about going for, talking for an hour, but I think we should just keep going until we get bored. But my point is this. With technology advancing as quickly as it is exponentially with every year, it's so dramatic, it's just mind-blowing, that I think that a lot of these rules of education don't really apply anymore and that the future of employment is really going to be skill driven in a way that we can't really anticipate and so you know i think that that i mean is it what's more valuable like graduating from a good college with a degree in history or really knowing how to use final Cut Pro really well. Right. Or if you can HTML code or you understand WordPress or you understand how to produce a podcast.

I mean, those are real life valuable skills that have immediate applicability and value in the marketplace. And those are things you're not learning, you're not gonna learn in college. And they're not that difficult, but they're skills that require some training're they're skills that you know require some training so i think it you know i think it's it's worth discussing like a more skill specific

education-based system that prepares people for i mean i think there's a difference between education and preparation for the workforce for life how about How about life? Well, I mean, yeah, that's the broader issue, of course, that whole. But in terms of like looking at, you know, our children and considering, you know, the pros and cons of homeschooling and what we want that homeschooling experience to be and look like, and what are the priorities, you know, it's really interesting. And I think that, you know, when you look at at least the public school system where we're coming from,

and it's easy to see all the things that are broken about it and criticize it or whatever. And then are we discounting the positive aspects of that? Are our kids being properly socialized? Are they gonna be ready for the world? Should they go to college?

If so, what should they study? What do they want to study? And Tyler, who's sitting here to my left, he wants to be a musician. He picked up a guitar when he could barely speak and has never put it down. And it's pretty convinced that he wants to develop that as much as possible and that he wants his life to be about that. So as a parent, what is the responsible or appropriate response to that to help prepare him for the world? Well, I mean, yeah, I know. I mean, all of that is all really relevant. And

well, I wanted to talk a little bit about the boys because they had a different experience. You know, they went to private school as young children through middle school, and then they moved to public school for financial reasons. But, you know, they're very academically smart, and they can kind of maneuver in that world. Both of the boys, Trapper and Tyler, who are 16 and 17, are both homeschooled. It's Trapper's first year of being homeschooled. Tyler's been homeschooled two years in a row. And in their

case, they're just doing the curriculum, but doing it at home, you know, because they're almost done. So rather than, you know, try to find some alternative thing for them, we were just like, you know, just finish it and get the high school done. But you and I asked them about their college desires and if they went to college, where would that be? And the thing that surprised us is we were thinking, well, maybe they want to travel overseas or they want to go to Europe or they want to do something like that.

And both of their answers were that they wanted to stay close to us. We have a very close, creative, interactive family. something like that. And both of their answers were that they wanted to stay close to us. They, that, you know, we have a very close, creative, interactive family. And, you know, last year, I mean, I think the, the class, the colleges that they looked at were in Pomona in California, some liberal arts colleges or something like that. But, you know, the year, first year Tyler was homeschooled, he produced my record. So it's like, here he is. He's playing eight instruments in the studio with me producing.

He produced the whole thing. I mean, as a 17-year-old, he produced a record under his belt and quite amazingly. So as a mother, it's a complete triumph for me, I mean, for him. And, you know, if our children didn't have direction or didn't know what they wanted to do, then I think we would be asking a different set of questions. But they're not, you know, they're not lazy. They're not hanging around. You know, they're actually doing stuff. And now, you know, they have between them probably 80 songs between the three of you know, they're actually doing stuff. And now, you know, they have between

them probably 80 songs between the three of them, and they're going to be recording their own record, you know, for their band Anilemma. And, you know, they're actively engaged in something that fulfills them at a soul level. And, you know, you can't buy that. You can't create that. I mean, I feel so blessed that they know who they are. And the one thing that I want to just mention too for, you know, parents with kids that are in high school, you know, the thing that breaks my heart the most about the current system is that there is no,

there's no room for spontaneous creativity in that culture because both of my kids are amazing musicians and none of their friends almost none of their friends even knew that they were musicians because they would never even say out of fear that it would be the wrong kind of music and someone might not like it and they would then be pigeonholed or sort of labeled for the rest of their high school career so what that does is it makes kids walk a very narrow line. They never want to do anything or say anything spontaneous or just be free because there's this culture that judges them. And to me, that's a very sad environment

to be in and not one that I would ever want anybody to spend any time in. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, reflecting back on my experience in school, and, you know, I was very awkward throughout elementary school and junior high and high school. And, you know, I sort of fell into swimming was my solace, you know, it was my escape. Like it was, I could go to the pool and I could be away from school because I just couldn't relate know, it was my escape. Like it was, I could go to the pool and I could be away from school because I just couldn't relate to the kids in my classroom. I just, I couldn't connect. I was an outsider. I wasn't part of like, you know, the scene or whatever. And I found my way out of that through water really, which saved me in many ways. But at the same time, I was in a very, you know, very kind of hardcore academic environment, very kind of focused on academic excellence. And it was,

it's a game, you know what I mean? Like, it's a game, it's like, get into this, get into this junior high, and then get into this high school. And then if you do these things, then, you know, when you put this on your college application, then you'll be in a good position to get into this school. And, you know, I just took that lockstep

like all the way to the end. You know, I just, I was so focused on like moving the pieces around the chessboard or whatever as well as i could that i never stopped to think like well what do we you know like what do i want like what is what's beating my heart like what is it that that i'm interested in or i'm passionate about or what would i like to devote my life to that that's that that's not part of the inquiry. The system is not set up, ironically, for you to ask those questions or to kind of probe internally into, you know, what it is that you want to get

out of this short life that we're living. It's sort of, well, you know, just, you know, the better school you get into and the more jobs you can get and the more opportunities you'll have and, you know, then you can make those decisions then or whatever. And like, I went through the whole thing, never once saying, you know, what is it that I want? It was just like, well, if I do this, then I can get a good job and that will have a high paying salary and blah, blah, blah. And so, you know, shocking, you know, big shock when I like, you know, have this incredible spiritual crisis after, you know, I'm running into all these addiction problems and having all these issues, you know, because I wasn't living a life that was authentic to me

or in alignment with who I was. And I didn't even know who I was. I was so disconnected from myself. I didn't even know what questions to ask myself to even get to that place. And so, you know, the last eight, 10, 12 years have been about doing that. But I look at Tyler, I look at Trapper, I look at the girls, and I think, God, you know, what if I had had that opportunity at that age and was able to know myself and what I

wanted out of life at a young age, how different would my life have been? Well, that was always the point. And I mean, when you and I discussed it at length, and you know, you would talk about all your education and, you know, because it's an amazing thing. I mean, your education and the world of education is an amazing thing. You know, having gone to Stanford and then Cornell and, you know, you were accepted into every single Ivy League school. You could have gone anywhere. I mean, that's incredible. And yet you had this challenge with alcoholism. And, you know, we always talked about, well, what was the thing that was missing for you?

And it was spiritual connection. So, you know, it's like we have it backwards. It's the spiritual connection first that plugs you in and connects you to your heart and then everything else emanates out of that. And the same reason we saw, we were at a PTA meeting at this really great school and saw this film called Race to Nowhere. And it's a tragic story about a middle school girl who actually takes her life because she's not making grades and not you know she's stressed out from being on this hamster wheel of test taking and you know achieving certain results and you know it was the film was basically backing up everything I had been sort of fighting for

or arguing for with you and with the community and other parents and everybody that I've been talking to. And you thought I was going to stand up and really say something at the meeting. I was scared. No, but the thing is that I just sat there in silence because the parents stood up and said, oh, well, it's the children's fault. My child isn't like there in silence because the parents stood up and said, oh, well, it's the children's fault. My child isn't like that. And then another parent stood up and said, oh, it's the parents' fault because those parents are weird. And then another parent

stood up and said, oh, it's the teacher's fault. And the point is, is that nobody is connecting to this divine consciousness that is all of us. And that is the beginning, middle, and end of the problem right there. And I'm not beginning, middle, and end of the problem right there. And I'm not talking about religion. I'm not religious. I'm talking about the force that is all of us with no separation, no boundaries. So if that's intact, and in our homeschool, we started every day with a humming meditation that is an ancient Tibetan technique and it's a Maha mantra, which is like a great,

a very powerful mantra. And it's meant to open the heart and it's one that we offer on our website. And it's one that led me to becoming a songwriter and actually letting that out of my life at, you know, late in my life after I had my children

and was married for a long time. But it's this connection to the heart that will allow everybody to remember who they are. And if all of us can remember who we are, then there will be a lot of beauty. Because I really believe that at the Divine Plan, we were created in perfect harmony to interact with each other. And not everybody has the same path at all. We all come from the same, same source, but we're all very individualized and, you know, we need everybody to be more of who they are so that we can have fun, so that we can be blessed and enjoy and create

and dance with other individuals. But what do you say to, and I want to get into that, I want to talk about creativity too, but what do you say to somebody who might be listening to this and says, well, that's great, but, you know, I've got to be at work at 5.30, and I've got to get up at 4, and I've got to pick up the kids, I got to take the kid and I pick up the kids

about, but I do all this stuff. Like I'm, I'm stuck, you know, like that's great. You know, be your authentic self or, or whatever, but like, I don't really have that luxury. Like I'm, I'm, I'm stretched is to the max right now and I can barely pay my bills and I don't, you know, I can't, you know, I think there's a, there's sort of a, you know. Helplessness. Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, we're in, look, it's tough times, man. You know, it's a lot of people that are really hurting. And, you know, for the record, like, we've gone through it.

Like, we, it's been, you know, yeah. We've been through a financial cutback. We've done some really cool things like the past couple of years has been amazing, but financially very, very difficult time and we've weathered some very difficult times. So, you know, I am, I have a lot of empathy and compassion for people that feel stuck or feel helpless or whatever, but you know, is there something that you can offer? Well, I would say, yeah. I mean, I would say, first of all, that, you know, we feel, we feel your pain, and we, and we have been through it. We, I call it burning in the fire, the dismantling of burning, burning in the fire, which

removes all of your seeming security, you know, away from, you know, all of the illusion of security, so, you know, things like the structure, like bank accounts and savings accounts and insurances and 401ks and, you know, and those kind of things. And I just think one of the greatest tragedies of the current system is that we judge beings based on their bank account. I mean, you know, what is that? Like, you know, it's just, it's an incredible, incredibly violent, you know, as we just, it's incredibly violent. You know, as we have seen over the past years, the veil is starting to come down on the real, just what's really going on,

what's really going on with the banks, what's really going on. And we were all sold this kind of fantasy that we too could live the American dream and have this little sliver if we were good enough or creative enough or smart enough or clever enough. And it's been really, really violent. So I feel like the shift of all of these structures is now going to reveal a lot of really amazing artists

and amazing beings who are trapped in other walks of life, like you were. you were a lawyer. So, you know, how much more of service have you been now that we had the courage, we took the risk, and we said that we would make the, you know, leap? And so how much more of service have we been able to be since we, you know, took the risk, I guess. Yeah, well, a lot, but it's also about being in the mindset of being of service, as opposed to,

like, what am I going to get out of this? You know, like, what, you know, what's in it for me, and approaching scenarios from, like, how can I be of service? But I think, I think, actually, I don't really think you can be in service until you know who you are. So the authentic service, because service just for charity, you know, like I'm going to be involved with a charity. The ego that's collecting money for the charity can be the same ego as that of an actress, okay?

So we're talking about really being of world service, which in order to do that, you have to be dismantled. You cannot read about it in a book or decide it's a nice idea until you have lived it in your souls. So for anybody that's having a difficult moment and who has deep inside them some spiritual awareness that they are, you know, that there is something greater, I would say congratulations and amazing for you and amazing for all of us. And I so understand how difficult it is. And we, you know, we weathered things. I mean, we'll speak about it more and we'll write about it more, you know, as we start to come into this next year. But just trust me,

it is not for the weary. It has not been easy in any way, shape, or form. And Rich and I have been, often he has said, you know, I've never been more on the edge of complete annihilation or complete expression before in my life. Like, it was literally like a razor's edge. Yeah, it was like living this dichotomy of like, either everything is going to completely fall apart or it's going to blossom into the most beautiful flower. Like I can't tell which one. And it's 50, 50. It could be either way, like no idea. Right. And just, you know, getting back to dismantling, I mean, you know, really like when, when systems are falling apart or things aren't working out in your life or you're having a crisis over this

or you suffer this loss or something bad, perceivably bad, I suppose, happens. These are opportunities. I mean, everything is an opportunity for growth and it's annoying and it sounds trite and flip to say that. And the unfortunate fact is that it's true. You know, like if something happens, it's an opportunity. It's an opportunity for growth. Okay. Well, what, you know, here's what happened. What am I going to do with this information? How am I going

to collate it? What am I, how am I going to organize it? And what am I going to, what are the actions that I'm going to take in response to it? Right. Well, it's not what happens to you. It's who are you in that process? Who are you in that process? And what are you able to hold? And I think that holding neutral, compassionate awareness for the whole unfoldment is really the tool, really the technique that can get you through all of it. The other thing is, as I was saying a little bit earlier, the service has to come after you find out who you are. So you were asking me,

what would I say to the person that said that they're stuck? So getting back to that point, I just want to make sure that I address that. And I would say, it's really, really important that you find out who you are and that you connect to your heart. And the way that you might do that is by engaging in a humming meditation or engaging in any meditation. But the humming meditation is just the one that helped me the most. I think we have a forklift coming in. I know, we're in a warehouse right now.

It's a place of work, so sorry for the background noise. So sorry about that. But no, I mean, you have to know who you are. And the way you know who you are is you start to listen to yourself. And we have so much external stimulus coming at us from every which way. We have kids. We have jobs. We have technology.

We have TVs. We have kids, we have jobs, we have technology, we have TVs, we have everything else. So find a way to start to access your heart, whether it's through training, whether it's through meditation, whether it's through singing, whatever it is, try to start to listen to your soul and really take a review of your life and find out what parts of your life are designed by you and what parts of your life were designed by society or parents or some idea of who you thought you needed to be in order to be loved. And the one core message that can hold you through this whole process is that the divine, and I wrote about this in an article that I wrote about Rich and my relationship and some deep awareness that came to me through my journey with him through man and wife and, man and wife. Man and wife. Man and

woman. Antiquated language that you're speaking over there. Whoa. Anyway, through our relationship is, you know, the divine loves you just exactly how you are right now. It loved you the minute you came into birth, the minute you arrived. So we can all kind of relax and stop beating ourselves up that we haven't done something amazing or we haven't achieved some, you know, great feat or, you know, or done some amazing, I don't know, activity or whatever. The divine loves you simply because you are, you exist, right? So it's like the sun. The sun doesn't choose who to shine on. It doesn't say, oh, well, I like Rich better than Julie, so I'm going to shine more on him today than I am on her. It's equal. It's through all of creation. But you can hide in the basement. Well, that's true. So I would say come out in the sunshine. No. You really just need,

you need to find out who you are. I mean, that is kind of your biggest task. Because if you can access that and you can find out what your thing is, and it's going to be something that gives you extreme joy and something that when you're doing it and when you're engaged in it, you actually lose time. And when you start to drop out of the mind and drop into the heart and start to feel your body and feel how things feel to you,

then you can start to make a shift from living someone else's life. Or, you know, I mean, listen, those corporations aren't going to care. They don't care if at the end of your life you're sick and on the floor and you missed your bliss. You know, no one cares. And the life is so short. It's so, so short. It goes by in a blink. So I always say, I mean, I've studied with many different spiritual teachers for 30 years, and I've read nothing but spiritual texts for 25 years. I think I read my first book. Believe me, it's true. It's true.

I read my first book, book, maybe, since I was a kid like last year but anyway um I uh the one thing that I got from all of my travels and the only thing that I can count on you know because some people say oh it's this is what's going to happen or you know it's the end of the world the Mayan calendar it's not the end of the world but you know everybody has a different perspective of how things are gonna are gonna be and at the end of the world. But, you know, everybody has a different perspective of how things are going to be. And at the end of the day, the only thing you can do is serve your own heart. Because at the end of your life, it's your life. It was your choice. It was for you to discover, for you to learn, for you to live. So if you, every day when we lay our head down on the pillow in our family,

we try to say that we lived our hearts as fully as we could. And that takes a lot of hard work. It takes a lot of courage. It has a lot of joy and a lot of bliss and a lot of fun in it as well. Not a lot of certainty in it at all. No. It's hard as shit, actually. It's harder for Rich.

Yeah, it sounds all good, but it's actually quite difficult. But I think, you know, just you got to cut the chatter out, man. You know, like our minds are going a million miles an hour, and we're so overstimulated. And it's like, you know, you are not your mind. There is your mind and what it does, and then there is your higher consciousness. And these two things are not only are they not the same they're not always friends you know and i think it's important to

realize that that you know if you're not careful your mind will run the show but your mind necessarily doesn't always have your best interest at heart the interest of your higher self and you have to you have to learn how to divorce your consciousness from your mind at times and develop tools and strategies for controlling your thought patterns. Because otherwise those thought patterns just run on a loop and they control you. They control your behavior, your decision-making, all these sorts of things. It's like this cycle that takes over your life. And it's very easy to just not be aware of that and just go about your day. And so, you know, things like meditation or, you know, like even extreme

measures like the, you know, those isolation tanks or, you know, for me, yeah, flotation tanks, or, you know, for me, it's like going out on a trail run or whatever to try to quiet that mind. And it's only when you can get into that quiet space and really, you know, for me, it's like going out on a trail run or whatever to try to quiet that mind. And it's only when you can get into that quiet space and really, you know, cut through that chatter and find a way to, like, connect, you know, be completely present and connect with your higher self and your environment that you allow that opening, that space for the good stuff to happen. And, you know, that comes back to talking about creativity. I mean, you talk to great writers, great musicians, you know, stand-up comedians, all of these people will tell you emphatically, without fail, that their best work happens when they're not trying.

Like, they're just tapped, they're connected, because they are still, their mind is still, they are present, they're tapped into their higher self and it just comes. It's like, oh, the song wrote itself. How did you write that song? That song that is everybody knows. Well, it just occurred to me. It just happened. And my hand just wrote it out. It's like something's working through you, you know, and you're just the vessel for expressing that, you know, you're an antenna and you have to tune your antenna into the frequency, you know. So the work is in tuning the antenna so that you can receive the message and express it. That's true. It's very true. And just being open and, you know, I mean, I consider myself just a channel. I have expressed myself in many many different forms of art and I'm I'm not technically trained in any of them but yeah it's an ability to

just tap into your heart and open up and really have the courage to and I think another element is is to be in non-judgment. And the acceptance and non-judgment has to be of yourself first, you know, so that you can then, you know, express that out. But if you're non-judgmental of yourself, and so you're not caught up in the technique or any idea of your head, well, this has to be good,

or I don't know what I'm doing, or I'm not trained, and you just throw it out the window and then just let it come through. Let it come through. You have to allow it rather than force it or using your self-will to make it happen. And that process of surrender is a very tricky thing. Like that was the thing I struggled with the most, trying to get sober, you know, and it's sort of a critical aspect of learning how to let go of things and embrace and lean into a new way of doing things that is more on the allowing side as opposed to

the, you know, make it happen, push it, make it happen through your will. Right. Well, and even one step like beyond that, the humming meditation, you know, I started the humming meditation when I was going through a very difficult break with a spiritual teacher of mine that had happened in a very violent way. And I was in a lot of pain and I couldn't talk to anybody about it because nobody understood what it was that I was going through. And I started to just get up at 4.30 in the morning and hum really just released my heart because I had so much hardness in my heart. I didn't understand all these events that had happened

and it didn't make sense to me. And I was really, really, really struggling and I wasn't even trying to write a song and all of a sudden the music started coming. And that was the most pure expression for me because as a designer a fashion designer or an interior designer or a painter or a sculptor I would create things but it was always in the sort of waking state and with some idea in mind of what I might want to you know achieve like I think I you know I want it to be like this I want to be like that and here the music just came in my lap and I think the first time you know I think. Like, oh, I think I, you know, I want it to be like this, I want it to be like that. And here the music just came in my lap. And I think the first time, you know, I think I wrote

this song called The New Earth. And I was like, oh my God, you know, Rich, I think I'm a folk singer. Like, that's tragic because I'm not a huge folk fan. But, and it's different than that. But it's the, it's essentially what you're saying is it's getting out of the way. Totally getting out of the way. Totally getting out of the way. It's getting out of the way. And like in my own experience, I know, like, listen, you know, I would not have predicted that this is what I would be doing with my life. It was not my plan.

It's fantastic. And I wouldn't trade what I'm doing and what I've done and kind of, you know, what I've decided to devote my life to. I wouldn't change that for anything. But, you know But six years ago, I would never have predicted this to be my trajectory in a million years. No, absolutely not.

And the only reason it's, and I didn't make it happen. I didn't like wake up and come up with a plan for how I was gonna get from where I was to what I'm doing now. What I did was I did some work to get out of the way and allow things to happen and allow myself to be guided with that doesn't mean I that and and I think people make the mistake of thinking well

you're just it's like I think people think that means you don't do work or you don't you're not like actively engaged in your process you know sort of like people who watch that movie The Secret and they're like oh yeah you just lay in bed all day and you make millions of dollars or whatever. That's not what it's about. There's a lot of work that goes into it, but it's a different kind of work, I think. Yeah, it's not really work, it's letting go.

It's really letting go. And we call it detached action, right? So you're participating in action, but you're not, it's like AA, you're not attached to the outcome. So you have no expectation of the outcome. You may have an amazing vision. And so you're going to play all out, like play to the best of your ability, and then you wait and see.

You're completely released. You offer the activity and service. You control the things you wait and see. You know, you're completely released. You offer that activity and service. You control the things you have control over. You work on the things you have control over. And with respect to things you don't have control over, you divorce yourself from the outcomes, essentially. That's right, let go. I know.

Yeah, that's really hard. It's very, very hard to do. It's hard to do, but it's actually easy. It's really easy to do. It's a lot easier to do that than it is to try to hang on tight. If you just feel like yourself clench up and trying to stop something, to be a non-resistance is actually very easy. You just let go. But yes, I understand what you're saying. So we're going to have to wrap it up. I could talk like for three hours, no problem.

Did you learn anything about me that you didn't know before we started? We'll talk about that later. Can I just ask you one thing? I just want you to say one thing about our relationship. Yeah. About that fight we had yesterday. That's the one thing about being in the Yurt Village is that we can't fight freely

without the possibility of fallout. Repercussions. Somebody's like, oh God, they're not really happily married because they fought or whatever. So I was like, oh man, that's not so good. No, but I just wanted to say that it is a pleasure to be your first guest on your podcast.

I hope this is recorded. I think it did. I can see something on the... It's a pleasure. Ladies and gentlemen, my beautiful wife, Julie Pyatt. You can find her on Twitter, at J-I-C-J-A-I-S-E-E-D. But on Instagram, you're Srimati, right?

She has lots of names. It's very confusing. But then say my music, please. I will. Okay. Relax. I love you. Julia is a healer, an artist, a sculptor, a painter, a mother.

She's many things. She defies definition. But most dear to her is that she is a musician so check out her music her music is at srimatimusic.com that's s-r-i-m-a-t-i music.com so check it out it's pretty cool so we have to wrap it up because we got other things we got to do yeah i know relax i'll make all the plugs okay okay um otherwise i could talk for hours and i think in the future i do want to do like i want to just go where the conversation leads and go as long as it goes if goes for three

hours and then that's awesome but we just had a we had a hard out today i hope you'll that's a radio term right hard out what i'll have you back definitely we'll have you back. Definitely we'll have you back. And again, this is our first episode. So this thing will slowly congeal over time and we'll kind of get our voice and, and, you know, get, find our legs and, and hopefully, you know, get some nice equipment and a real studio and get it as professional as possible. I would like to be able to broadcast it live on, on live stream and, and, you stream and have YouTube videos of the whole thing and all that kind of stuff. So we'll be getting all of that underway and taken care of hopefully in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, this podcast was brought to you by Jai Lifestyle.

What is Jai Lifestyle? What does Jai mean? Jai means victory or praise or hail in Sanskrit. Yes, the ancient language Sanskrit. It's our wellness company with products and services. So check it out, Jai Lifestyle, J-A-I Lifestyle.com. We have a plant-based athletic recovery supplement product called Jai Repair. It's my formulation. It's pretty cool. It's a tri-blend of three different types of plant-based protein. It's hemp protein, sprouted brown rice protein, and pea protein. It also has all these awesome antioxidants like resveratrol, really pure

resveratrol, and grape skin extracts. It has your daily RDA of vitamin B12. But the kicker, the special secret ingredient, is the cordyceps mushrooms extract, which have been proven to boost endurance. They're great with enhancing your body's ability to utilize and uptake oxygen, increases lung capacity and the like. I've been using them for years. It's fantastic. So it's not a cheap product. It's expensive.

Sorry about that. Yeah, I know. We're working on coming out with some more affordable products. But really, my marching orders from the beginning were to just offer the best products possible. And at the time, I was like, I remember when I was coming up with Jai Repair, I was like, I don't care what it costs. I just want to make the best products possible. And at the time I was like, I remember when I was coming up with Jai Repair, I was like, I don't care what it costs. I just want to make the best thing. It'll cost what it costs and people who want it will buy it. And if they can't or they don't want it, then that's fine. So it is what it is. But we're working on some new stuff that's going to

be more commercially available. Right now, this stuff's all only available at JaiLifestyle.com. available right now this stuff's all only available at jayalifestyle.com we also have our cookbook jayaseeds 999 it's a downloadable pdf 77 pages of plant-based recipes beautiful layout it's like a coffee table book for for the ipad and we're actually in the middle of working on our second edition of that which is going to be pretty cool it's going to it's going to blow you guys away i think it's going to be like double the size. And we're going to dial in some cool interactive stuff with videos and all kinds of stuff. So that's still a ways away, but we're working on it.

The meditation program that Julie was talking about, the humming meditation, that's also available on Jai Lifestyle. And do we have anything else? We're coming out with a vitamin B12 supplement, and that should be ready in the next couple of weeks, I think. We've got it all dialed in. Yeah, it's great. It's basically just a little spray that you can spray in your mouth, just one spray every other day or something like that. Take care of all your vitamin B12 needs. If you're a vegan, you're on a plant-based diet, you know that the one nutrient that you can't of all your vitamin B12 needs. If you're a vegan, you're on a plant-based diet,

you know that the one nutrient that you can't source from your diet is vitamin B12. So it is important to supplement with that. So why not check out ours? This one's going to be affordable too. I'm not sure exactly what the price is yet, but it's going to be cheap. So that's it for Jai Lifestyle. Also, you know what? We talk a lot about the Vitamix. We use the Vitamix blender in all of our recipe videos and in our cookbook and stuff like that. It's an incredible machine. It'll literally make juice out of anything. It'll change your life if you don't have it.

But if you are in the market for one, you can get free shipping if you click on the banner ad on richworld.com or jialifestyle.com. So it's still expensive. If you can find it cheaper elsewhere, like Costco, sometimes they carry them, then you should do that. But if you can't, then buy it from us and kick us like five cents and help keep this podcast alive for the bandwidth. Hopefully we'll be getting a lot of bandwidth. We don know yet right now there's zero people listening so that could be all very presumptuous um going to try to do this a couple times a week i've got a couple guests lined up for um later this week so stay tuned i've got to figure out how to get all this up on itunes

which i'm going to take care of in the next couple of days. I'll have show notes on my blog where I'm going to host this. So just go to richroll.com and I'll try to put up all the links of stuff that we mentioned in the shows. And also I would love your feedback and comments. So please leave a comment on my website, richroll.com. Tell us what you'd like to hear, issues you want to hear about. Tell us what you thought about today's episode. Did you like it? Did you not like it? Should Julie come back? I don't know. Please invite me back. So we'll know when you let us know, okay? Can I just say one thing? Yeah. Are you done? No. I'm not

done, but you can talk. No, I just wanted to say that please, are you done talking? No, please, please do let us know your comments and keep in touch with us. And please know that any of you who have ever sent an email or left a comment or contacted us, that it means a lot to us. And so many times when we are at a very, very low point, we will get some epic, amazing email or letter or note from somebody just saying how something that we did affected your life in a positive way. And we thank you for that from our hearts.

So please keep connected and keep in contact with us because we need the exchange and we love it. So thanks. Speak for yourself. No, it's awesome. I appreciate all the support. It's been an incredible year traveling around with the book. I get lots of emails from people from all over the place.

It's amazing. It means more to me than you know. It's really been incredible. And so now it's just about how can we continue to put a positive message out there? There's people that want to improve their lives. And if we could play a small, tiny part in that, that's a presumptuous statement too, isn't it? But anyway, we'll do our best. If we can be of service by living authentically ourselves, then that would be very lovely for us. All right, let's wrap it up.

So let us know, richroll.com. Follow me on Twitter at Rich Roll. Jylifestyle.com, srimatimusic.com. What else do we have? Any other links? Anything else you want to share? Jylifestyle.com, did you sayMusic.com. What else do we have? Any other links? Anything else you want to share? JaiLifestyle.com, did you say that? Yeah, I said that a few times.

You said it. With SrimatiMusic.com, did you say that? Yeah, I did. That's it. Are there any other websites we want to talk about? Ritual at Jai Seed. Just Common Ground. Now it's getting confusing, of course.

Yeah, please. So please, Common Ground. If you want to learn more about what's going on at Common Ground, which I urge you to do, you can find them online at cgkauai.net, c-g-k-a-u-a-i.net. I think they're going to be redoing their website pretty soon. There isn't that much information up there, but amazing things are happening here. Support local agriculture, support your local communities, buy local when you can, eat clean, eat healthy. We're out, right? We're done. We're done. All right. All right, everybody. Peace, plants, until next time. Thank you.