The Rich Roll Podcast - Louis Cole Is Living The Life of Adventure

Episode Date: April 24, 2017

Ever wonder what it would be like to get paid to travel the world, jetting from one exotic port of call to the next in search of adventure? Now imagine sharing these experiences with millions of people all over the world on the daily. Few could pull this off. But if you feel the allure, then you're in for a treat with this week's guest — because Louis Cole is the master. With almost 2 million subscribers on his Fun For Louis YouTube channel (plus 1.5 million on Instagram), this British-born dreadlocked globetrotter was one of the first (if not the very first) daily travel vloggers to break out — an internet personality so sensational, YouTube crown prince Casey Neistat (RRP 73, 144 & 174) dubbed Louis the godfather of daily vlogging. Louis has crossed India on a rickshaw and skydived high above Dubai. He has skateboarded along Sydney Harbor and sailed a hot air balloon in Kenya. From kayaking in New Zealand to salsa dancing in Cuba, it's just another day of fun for Louis — a guy committed to sucking the marrow out of life. But the true allure of Louis isn't travel. And it isn't vlogging. No, Louis' greatest talent is his ability to inspire wonder. Imbued with a rare enthusiasm for embracing all that life delivers, he has an infectious touch when it comes to encouraging his followers to pursue big dreams while he enjoys his own. After a brief training progress report with my coach Chris Hauth, this week I sit down with Louis to find out exactly how he created such an extraordinary life. This is a conversation about cultivating imagination, then translating that imagination into reality. It's about the mindset, tools and practices required to craft the trajectory of your wildest dreams. And to embrace the life you deserve. An old soul with a big heart, Louis is a truly beautiful guy. I sincerely hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it. Peace + Plants, Rich

If you're not doing what you want, then you're doing what you don't want to be doing, which doesn't bring life and it brings resentment and it brings, you know, you're trapped, right? But if you're truly pursuing your heart of what you really want to be doing, then I think that's what people feed off. Like that's being the best version of yourself is pursuing your heart, right? And then that gives life to other people. You can overflow with that kind of energy, right? That's Louis Cole.

This week on The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. You ever wonder what it would be like to get paid to just constantly travel the world seeking out adventure in one exotic port of call after another? Well, imagine not only that, but then sharing that experience with millions of people all over the world on a daily basis. That sounds pretty cool to me. sounds cool to you, then I think you're in for a treat this week because that is exactly the life that British born and bred Louis Cole has created for himself. With almost 2 million subscribers on his wildly popular Fun for Louis YouTube channel, Louis is one of the first, if not the very first, legit travel and adventure vloggers, a guy who has become so influential in this emerging creative space that even Casey

Neistat has called him the godfather of daily vlogging. Louis is a guy who has influenced many of the people in this space, including Casey himself, guys like Ben Brown, Jack and Finn Harrys of Jack's Gap, and on and on and on. So this is a guy who does not shy away from a good time, from a good adventure. He's a guy who's seemingly been everywhere and done everything, everything from crossing India on rickshaws to skydiving in Dubai, hot air ballooning in Kenya, kayaking in New Zealand, salsa dancing in Cuba, on and on. You get the picture. But the real draw isn't the adventure.

It's Louis himself. He's just one of those people you immediately like. His smile, his enthusiasm is infectious. And in his mission to discover the world, he has done a really amazing job of using his influence to inspire wonder and enthusiasm as he encourages the pursuit of big dreams while living his own. My name is Rich Roll. Welcome to my podcast. And this week, I sit down with Louis to find out exactly how he went about creating the life of his wildest imagination and what can be gleaned from his experience, the mindset, the tools, the practices to help you craft the life of your dreams.

As usual, I have a couple more things I want to say about Louis in this conversation. But first, I thought I would take a quick moment to bring you guys, at least those of you that care, up to speed on my training. As some of you guys know, back in November, I resumed intentional training and preparation for this race in September called Otillo. It is the World Championships of Swim Run. It's an ultra race that over the course of one day, you end up running about 40 miles, swimming about six. But I believe there's like 52 transitions. So you're constantly changing it up between swimming across these cold water inlets south of Stockholm and climbing up on these rocks and running across these little islands. You do the whole thing in a wetsuit with your running shoes on.

It's going to be really crazy, super intense. And if that's not enough, you're tethered to a teammate. You do it in duos, pairs of teams of two. I'm doing it with my coach, Chris Houth. I'm being coached by him as well as competing alongside of him. He's the guy who has coached me through all of my Ultraman competitions as well as Epic Five. He's a two-time guest on the podcast. If you're a longtime listener, you probably listen to those. It's going to be nuts. And I just want to say for me, I hadn't been training with

that kind of intention for a couple of years. I haven't raced in about five years. So I had to kind of begin the process of climbing back up this mountain to get into race fitness. And I began that in November. It's taken a long time for me to start feeling myself again in my body again, until everything sort of clicked in, clicked in a couple of weeks ago. And I really started to feel great again, like really connected to my body. And then last Monday I got sick. Basically the whole last week was a wash right when I felt like I was getting some really good momentum.

So I'm managing a little disappointment over that and just trying to get well and back to form. September seems like a long time off for this race, but it really isn't. Um, it's really time to get super focused on my training. So I'm feeling a little bit of pressure around that. Uh, in any event, I thought I would dial up Chris, uh, and check in with him on my training. He just had a 50 miler race this past weekend. So I want to find out how that went for him, uh, and to ask him how he thinks I'm doing and the work that lies ahead for us to be at our peak at our best come September for Otillo. How's it going?

Pretty good. That sounds good. Before we get into, you know, all of my stuff. Yeah. How was your how was the race? Not good. What happened? I, uh, I've had, I've been having a nagging little left hip injury, the last, um, right

hip injury and tight hip flexors. And it's been carrying down into my knee and tight, um, it band and into my kneecap. So I thought with a little bit of rest the last week and, you know, some R and R and taking care of it, that I would be fine for most of it. I knew I'd be going through some tough times, but you do that on any 50 or a hundred mile event. So, but at 25, I just could feel I was running wrong, crooked. And so I said, you know what? I probably could slog through this for another seven hours, but I'd be injured and I'd be probably flat for a good six to eight weeks because I could just feel the pain in the kneecap

and the problems in the other hip coming up because you're compensating. Right. Oh man man i'm sorry to hear that that's a bummer yeah so i'm i was fine for the first 10 12 miles and then it came on real quickly and i was like all right well give it time it might just pass but it didn't and i didn't want to just load up on the advil and so on that's just not yeah the right strategy if it's not the a event where you've been you know if this is in lake sonoma is my backyard i've slept in my own bed it's not that big of a deal so it's more about being smart and it's part of part of the whole process too as you know right yeah you have to

look out for yourself your body and keep the big picture in mind and that is what we're doing in september and to to mess with that, then that for six, eight weeks, you're gingerly trying to figure it out. And then you're the next six weeks of training, you're always observing. If it's coming back, if it's creeping back, oh, no, what is that? What do I feel there? And you have these doubts in your head that then turn into just bad training yeah you definitely don't want that especially at the very beginning of the the summer and the main part of the season with all these you know more important events coming up that's that's the last thing you

need so that's a different kind of discipline to be able to pull the plug you know early on before you have to it's hard and i also put out there you know my race on before you have to. It's hard. And I also put out there, you know, my race plan and stuff like that. I talked about it on my podcast last week and how to do a good race plan and why racing is important and how you want to respect the training you've done and the course and the sacrifices you've made. So it's the flip side of it, right? You also have to be smart and listen to your body. so it was uh it was a hard decision but i know even the next day walking up and down the steps and having only done 25 of the 50 miles i was like this was the right decision i can barely take it had i done the next 25 where the bigger damage comes it was like this was smart yeah no way well i'm glad you made that

decision for my own personal self-interest yeah because i want you fresh and on that note it probably uh makes sense to take a little state of the union uh on where things are at with me it's been a little bit rocky over the last seven days i was was so excited to like, I think I, uh, like last Monday was the first kind of like, not monster workout, but like, okay, it's real. And, and, uh, and I got through that and I felt pretty good. And I think I texted you and said, you know, that felt like the first real training session of the season. I feel like everything leading up to that was training to get ready to train, like preparing my body and getting it healthy and fit enough to then test it. And now we're entering like a new phase, like where, okay, it's time to really focus and get

specific about what we're doing. And I put in that workout. And then that night I felt terrible and got a little bit sick and was essentially benched for the whole week. And now I'm sort of, you know, licking my chops and just frustrated because I feel like I lost all this ground right at the point where it was starting to get good. well-timed with regards to closing out that first phase of training, what we're trying to do. And that is, you know, you noticed it. It's more about routine. It's about getting back that fitness of feeling connected, being able to recognize the niggles and things that are up with your body, feeling good in the pool again, which is important. And just neuromuscularly firing consistently over many days, over many weeks, and just getting you back to the platform of fitness so that you now can handle a bigger load. And then on the side note for that is, do you know how many workouts I've done over the years

where I'm having a great endurance workout and And the next day I get sick. There's something, and I haven't ever researched this, but it's phenomenally fascinating to me how it squeezes that last piece of fitness energy out of you. And you feel really good and really fit and really connected. And you have all these positive vibes. And then, boom, it quickly catches you and you're sick. Yeah. And it's happened so many times. It's something I'm always fascinated by. That's so interesting. Yeah. That's exactly the experience that I had. And I so rarely get sick, like it blindsided me. And, you know, I did the appropriate thing of, you know, I'm not going to

try to push through it and train, but it lingered a little bit longer than i would like and you know i went back to the pool this morning uh and put in like 2500 and and felt kind of lousy and just sort of feeling like i just lost everything that i spent you know since yeah so it's no we're trying to build you know your body's fighting something else right now and so it's not trying to build, you know, your body's fighting something else right now. And so it's not going to go away. And part of that too, is like when you texted me and you said, I'm ready, I think to, to test the waters again. And I said a 45 minute easy jog, that's more about just activating, but we don't want to take any energy away from the body still trying to heal itself. Right. and that's what i always say

to so many athletes and you know this from the past like when you think when you think you're healthy give it a whole nother day because that way you don't go right to the edge of right when your body was recuperating and rebuilding itself again going to the well and draining all that energy and health it needs to continue to get back to normal. And so you're right on that edge, but that's good. Only 2,500, only 45 minutes. That's exactly what you want to do. Just sort of to feel the motions, but not tax the system at all. It's busy rebuilding and re healing itself. Yeah, it's great advice. And it's hard, you know, it's really hard because every instinct in your body wants to get after it, you know, and you got to really hold back. So, all right, well,

assuming I can get over this hurdle and get well in the next couple of days, you know, what's, what's lying ahead here? Like how crazy is it going to get? Well, that's the thing is now we're going to jump into the endurance phase of training and that's, um, you and I are getting ready basically for an eight ish, eight ish, nine ish hour, seven and a half ish hour event. I mean, if we're seven and a half, we're right on the front end of the race. Um, but let's say eight hour event. And so we're going to work our way up to having the fitness to get through an eight hour event. It doesn't mean that you're fast at eight hours or you're killing yourself during those eight hours, but that we feel and observe what happens mind and physically

for eight hours. And so we're going to build up some running. We're going to build up some swimming and do it so that you're out there every few weeks on a given day for six-ish up to even seven-ish hours. We don't have to necessarily go to eight hours, but that we do a long swim in the morning and then do something else, maybe even a bike ride. It's about keeping the body activated and working out for eight hours, for six to seven to eight hours. And so that's what we're going to build to next, build up the endurance, not about speed, not about power, not about threshold, but just long swims. I've been doing some seven to eight to 9,000 yard swims. And so I want you to slowly get up to that too, so that soon, once we have the fitness, we can start squeezing in some effort level. Because the other aspect that I think we really

want to be ready for for Otillo is threshold work. Because when we're getting out of the water and have to run again right away, that transition, our heart rate is sky high, and we're not gonna wanna walk a little bit in order to sort of calm things and find ourselves. We wanna use active recovery, active motion to sort of bring the heart rate down while we're still running pretty fast. And so there's a lot of changes in what we're doing,

and it's gonna be hard. It's gonna be lung busting And it's going to be hard. It's going to be lung busting. It's going to be cold temperatures. It's going to be arms using all the blood to then the legs, then back to arms. So therefore, down the road, we're going to insert a bunch of threshold work, higher intensity, harder workouts once we have the fitness of a dish hours yeah i'm looking forward to that i've already noticed in the phase that we just completed that there was a lot more you know tempo work and kind of changing gears and getting used to ramping it up and dialing it back and

ramping it up again because everything that i've done prior uh been about getting into, you know, sort of the most efficient aerobic state possible and holding it for as long as possible. So I got very good at being like a diesel locomotive. Like it takes me a long time to warm up, but once I'm warmed up and I'm in that lane, I can just stay in that lane at that speed for an incredibly long period of time. But what I'm not good at and what I don't have a lot of experience with is going fast and slowing down and going fast again and slowing down and changing it up and your heart rates through the roof. And then you got to bring it down again and settle into a pace like this is brand new

terrain. And it requires a completely, although, you know, it's a very long race. It's certainly an ultra. It's a completely different approach in terms of preparation and strategy. And it's exciting. It sounds like a lot of fun. And it's terrifying. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's the thing, too. As you know, from the past, like our ratios will change, you know, in the beginning here with the endurance phase, we're going to do a lot of zone to work, you know, probably 80%, 70% of the time, but still maintaining 10 to 15, 25% of the time, we still need to do some threshold temper, tempo, higher intensity work to stay connected with our ability to do that work. And then once we have that endurance, we're going to gradually dial back that zone to aerobic

work and increase the amount of time of VO2 max and threshold work where we're going to be 40% of the time, even 50% of the time, some weeks with some high quality, high intensity weeks and wrap some endurance and aerobic training around those weeks in order to recover actively for a week from a high intensity week. Awesome, man. Well, uh, I'm looking forward to it and, uh, maybe you can pop back in, in another, you know, five or six weeks or so we can take another, uh, state of the union here. Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. And I'm glad you're getting healthy again. And, you know, I think the next time we check in, what will be important is you and I are going to have to start getting on the same swim pace. Yeah, that's for sure.

And we have to start, like, getting together because we're going to be tethered to each other. So we got to find each other's rhythms. other's rhythms you know once i see your run paces and your your training peaks file showing me the proper run paces i'll know that we'll be we'll be pretty closely tethered if it's that if if we're too far off i think we're wasting our time well i could tell you right now i'm motivated uh motivated by fear of of disappointing you and i you know i don't want to be like obviously you're only as strong as your weakest link and right now i'm definitely the weak link and I got a lot of work to do. So, and it's fun. It's so much fun. We're going to, it's, it's fun writing your plan, knowing that it's something new for me too, right? Writing a plan, knowing that that plan

affects me. Yeah. That's a different thing, right? I've never been through that. So that'll be exciting too. So we'll, we'll definitely talk about that next time. All thing, right? Exactly. I've never been through that. So that'll be exciting too. So we'll definitely talk about that next time. All right, cool, man. So what am I doing tomorrow? All right, now that I know that you're healthy and feeling a little bit better, we'll gradually ramp up the yardage again in the pool.

The pool is the hardest thing from being sick because you emerge yourself into that colder temperature. So if you're still fighting something, it's harder to do if you had a fever and so on. So I'll probably have you run easy tomorrow. Just pick it up a few times, open up the legs and get that heart rate bouncing a little bit short enough

so that it doesn't tax you, but good enough to feel the right sensations. Sounds good, man. Alrighty. All right, man. Thanks. All right. I'll talk to you soon.

Cool. Bye. All right. You guys like to you soon. Cool. Bye. All right. You guys like that? Was that cool? Should I do more of that? Should I check in with Chris every couple months? Give me a shout on Twitter at Rich Roll.

Let me know what you thought of these little coaches corner things. I can do more of these just little 10 minute segments. Whatever. Let me know what you thought. All right. I'm just really happy that I got a chance to connect with Louie. He came up to the house with his girlfriend, Raya. We hung out a whole afternoon.

We ate great food. We got to know each other. And I wasn't even sure we were going to do the podcast because we spent so much time together. And I was like, do you still want to do it? And he was up for it. And we did it. And it was great. All the way into the evening, he was a trooper. And the whole thing came out stupendously fantastic. So Louis is a beautiful guy. He's an old soul. He's got a huge heart. And I really think it comes across in this conversation as it does in his videos and I'm just really happy to be able to share this experience with all of you guys so with that said let's have some fun let's do it we've been talking for two hours straight what are we gonna talk

about now oh there's plenty to talk about don't worry about that thanks for coming up to the house man it's been. It's been good getting to know you a little bit the last couple hours. And I've been following your journey for quite some time. So, it's cool to finally meet you. Yeah. Nice to meet you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So, what brings you to Los Angeles? I think mainly friends. The weather. I would say the it hasn't not today not not quite the weather we highly unusual yeah but to be honest because i know that the drought the last few years i don't mind too much that it's raining because you know that it's good for the plants and nature and the

environment and stuff but i am more into sunshine than rain yeah i know well you're you're kind of endless summer is your thing right yeah this was the first winter in five years that i've had uh-huh i've managed to um migrate every winter to warmer climates right so i've been kind of yeah chasing summer uh-huh and this has been going on for like four years now at this point the my so my current youtube channel that i do these kind of daily travel videos on that's been going for four years but i've got a pre i don't know if you know about my youtube channel it had something to do with food yeah yeah food for louis food for louis that actually started almost six years ago oh wow so all right so you've been on you were on youtube for quite some time yeah i

gotcha so so how did you let's take it back um you know where you grew up in england yeah just south of london kind of in the suburbs pretty average upbringing i would just say there wasn't anything you know my parents are awesome but they've got pretty normal lives like my dad's been in the same job for 35 years um yeah i just grew up in the same house i've never moved brothers and sisters yeah two sisters and yeah just you know we did a bit of traveling every kind of kind of the same as anyone else though there wasn't a lot and probably when i was 14 we did a big kind of quite a more of an exotic holiday where we ended up going to Sumatra and Malaysia and that was kind of a big eye-opener for me that felt like lit the spark yeah because I've been

a lot I've been to Europe France Greece a few places like that but suddenly going being dropped into this completely different culture um that was a real eye-opener and we didn't do it like a package holiday either we did did like, you know. Bushwhacking. Yeah, it was like really, you know, staying in random little houses of people we'd met. And it was kind of crazy, but very, I'd say it was a turning point in my life where I realized this whole world out there. Did you have that awareness though? Like, this is what I want my life to be about? Or was it just you filed that away in the back of your head?

Like, I want more of i want my life to be about or was it just you filed that away in the back of your head like that was i want more of that in my life well i think from when i was young and i don't know what triggered this but i've always had this desire to be different i've always had this desire to do something different just almost sometimes just for the sake of wanting to do it differently i want to wanted to experiment would you get in trouble as a kid i mean what kind of kid were you uh i think i was a bit of a weird kid to be honest like a lot of my friends didn't quite get me and did you have the dreadlocks in high school no but i had long hair i had long ponytail tied back right so you were like a grateful dead kind of guy or no it wasn't it was weird i was kind of just a bit thing is i wasn't like a bully like i was a complete weirdo like no one talked to me but i just kind of floated between the different groups of people there was never i didn't like to be

pigeonholed uh-huh um so you weren't it wasn't like you're not hanging like you could kind of vacillate between the jocks and the druggies and the goth people and all the little subgroups yeah and i think what it was that people just didn't know quite what to make of me they were like oh this kid because you know when i was a bit younger in high school i'd like just play crazy games and just be like i know i'd never really be in the sports teams but i just you know i don't i don't know i just feel like i i had a really big imagination and i'd always but you're you but you're an extrovert right like i would imagine you were still you were popular with everybody like nobody had a problem with you no no yeah i'd say it was relatively popular um so what was the plan though like what were you what was the idea what was the big idea what did you think you were going to be doing with your life well i

if i'm looking back one big thing that happened in my childhood that was quite unusual was i decorated my bedroom as a rainforest to the extent where i had like we literally moved trees into my bedroom and i had like a big pet lizard that used to walk around like free roaming around my room really and i had a water feature like a waterfall that was in my bedroom like a real one or yeah it's like running water a running waterfall and i lived i lived in a cave that i'd built in my bedroom so it was kind of like from then and also i got you know that's the first time i'd gone in the public eye where you know news reporters were coming to my house because from the street you could see this kind of crazy tropical it was it's more than a bedroom it was so the neighborhood's like what's going on

yeah so i got you know there's a few news then things and i won this kind of like competition on a tv show where you know it was a decorating like interior design thing um and then from there i thought oh this could be my future i could be an interior designer but decorating people's bedrooms as these like fantasy worlds and right um and that was my plan when i when i finished high school and in in the uk we do like high school up to the age of 16 and then we do an additional two years which we call college and then we do university so when i went to college i was convinced i was going to do design like interior design so um but by the end of those two years I'd kind of lost the passion for that and I guess were you in London for that or yeah

just outside of London um and then I was really into computer stuff like designing on computers web design ended up getting some work experience so never ended up going to university to do a degree or anything so I ended up doing a couple of years doing like 3d animation and visual effects stuff and along this along that kind of time I started doing a lot of voluntary work with a church and doing more kind of working with young people and often young people that are getting into a lot of trouble so I had this desire to help more from on a kind of there's something more than just wanting to do practical like build things and design stuff but i wanted to connect more with people and help people which i think something as that's been an ongoing theme in my life yeah

it seems like a theme that runs through that runs through the work that you do but you didn't like you weren't like an av nerd like you weren't a camera geek kid right like you didn't like when it wasn't like you were tinkering around with cameras all the time no my dad's kind of liked cameras and i know i i filmed this i've got like camcorders from being a kid where i used to go and film fun things and i'd always film trips we went on but I wouldn't be like talking to camera like in as a selfie like nobody did that no I know I have got a video which I put on my channel back from when I was 17 so this was in like this must have been in like 2001 and I was doing talking to camera as if it was like and I was thinking who was I talking to back then like YouTube wasn't a thing yeah YouTube wasn't a thing i don't know who i was talking to but i knew i was like doing a video diary to the camera you were channeling your destiny yeah maybe yeah that's a trip well i mean

when i think about your bedroom i mean your bedroom that has that's crazy right like there it is there's the template all packed into that design that you created in your room yeah who would have thought right and then i mean were your parents like go for it or they're like we have some crazy kid like they were more than go for it they they were they were so um supportive to the point where they let me practice painting in the living room downstairs so i ended up you know painting half of my parents house with like you, you know, underwater scenes of like turtles swimming around and stuff. They were like really, really supportive. They kind of love that creativity. That's super cool. Right. That's amazing. And that's rare. You know, most people don't have that. Yeah. Most, most kids are told not to, you know, stop drawing on the

walls and stuff. But I was like the opposite. They were like, yeah, come draw downstairs as well. This will be fun. That's man yeah so all right so you're figuring out not maybe not going to be a 3d animator or a visual effects guy so at this point i think this was one of the biggest kind of changes in my life where i'd found myself in this very comfortable job whereas earning at the time it was good money for me enough to kind of rent a house with some friends and do what I wanted but I felt challenged particularly by this one guy who came to visit who's like a friend of a friend and he had had this real dramatic kind of spiritual life experience where he'd stepped away from massive wealth financially and kind of pursued this life where it wasn't about material gain.

And he he'd almost had this kind of like real eye opening experience with God and decided to sell everything he had and travel the world with just like a Bible and a toothbrush. And I found this fascinating. I was like, whoa. world with just like a bible and a toothbrush and i found this fascinating i was like whoa and he came and shared with this group of guys uh that i was hanging out with about his experience and what he'd been doing and he just basically sparked in motion this whole set of questions i was questioning everything i've grown up knowing like you know what what's important in life what do we need what's essential you know what's what is success you know what do I believe spiritually because I've grown up you know in church with my family all of these things like everything got thrown up in the air as questions and I started like testing everything so my first test was why do i need a house so i bought a small like minivan

and saved and basically this is when i quit my job so i saved up some some of my paycheck quit my job and just thought if i can live like if i can just buy the minimal food i need like every week i think i learned to live on eating like 10 10 pounds like 15 or whatever of food a week and then i actually to be fair at the point i was i was still living with some friends in a house but it was like a communal house and we were i was paying very little rent and then i moved on to living in the minivan and decided i don't need to be earning that much money to sustain this lifestyle and at the time having time free time was way more valuable than me to me than earning money yeah that's the ultimate wealth right having control

and domain over your time i mean that's that's super interesting i mean i've had you know i've had my version of it's sort of like you you figured this out really young it took me until i was 40 before i started wrestling with these issues. But it's almost like, you know, these are the existential questions of our time. Like, what is important truly, right? What do you want to express in your short time here on earth? What is most important to you? How can you, you know, live and be contented and contribute and all of that, right? To be able to ask yourself those questions at a young age and to discover, hey, I don't need that much. And actually how much I have isn't necessarily related to how happy I am is amazing, right? And now we're seeing this explosion of the popularity

of minimalism and tiny houses and all of this. And I feel like, you know, your generation specifically and the generation even that's younger than you is coming up with a different set of values around these things because of you know kind of the exploration that people like you are doing where you're showing people like hey listen there's a different way than just going in that traditional path and i think maybe the same approach i'd had as a kid in the same way i was like why can't i decorate my bedroom as a rainforest was the same thing that question was like well i kind of want to be different so none of the traditional ways of living appealed to me i was like i want to try

something different and i was more than willing to fail as well i think that's the thing that most people have a fear of failure and i'm like it doesn't matter in a way it's it's like I just thought it's trial and error I'm gonna try something if it fails then I just you know I've learned something right and I think a lot of people are so scared a lot of people said like why did you leave that job it was it had everything it had like great future potential it had the security had flexible hours all of these things and I was like i don't know i just didn't i wasn't passionate about it i didn't see a future that i was excited about and i'd rather go into the unknown than to stick with something i can predict you know also at your age like you don't it's not like you're married or have anybody depending on you like there's no

failure is the wrong word i feel like we need a new vocabulary around how you make those choices because at your age you should be encouraged to try new things and to kind of divorce yourself from you know the results of whatever this choice is because you've got to try on a bunch of hats and the idea that at 21 20 24 whatever you're supposed to know who you are and what you want to do in the world i think is unrealistic for almost everybody yeah and the scary thing as well is society pushes you into university straight out of high school or college or whatever, and then instantly you're in debt. So you have to instantly then get a job. So in the UK, I don't know how it works in America. I've heard it's even worse in America,

but my friend came out of university with 30,000 pounds of debt. And I was like, whoa, like you're going to have to spend years paying that back. So instantly, like there's no option to go off and explore the world and kind of have that free kind of, you know, justitude and people that are so young is, is, is ultimately a short sighted thing in terms of like a prosperous country, right? Because you're, you're, you're truncating people's sort of, uh, you know, the maximization of people's potential by limiting their, their bandwidth to try different things, know so you're you're you're you're getting people that are less well-rounded and their sort of life satisfaction quotient is going to be lower because they feel like they're pressured into jobs that they have to take in order to repay this debt the whole system is it needs to be rebooted i think and for me even

if you know the path you want like you want to be doctor, you want to be a lawyer and you know you need to do further education for that. I would still say take a year out before you go and do that and travel the world. Like it's not bad. You're not going to be able to do it after. And it's so important. It was so important for my path. I think everyone benefits from that. Like having this global view of people, meeting people so different from themselves, like being put in situations where you're challenged

and all of those kind of things, you don't get from staying in a comfortable bubble back in your kind of home. Well, within the bubble, you're told what to do and you're rewarded for doing it. And it's not necessarily an environment in which you learn to be self-reliant and learn the value of sort of creative problem solving

outside the box and all of that right and unfortunately rather than being encouraged to explore that side of yourself i'm sure you met a lot of resistance like people are like why are you doing that you're crazy you're walking away from this why would you do that yeah and i think even my close friends they there was this hesitance it was like like, they kind of got it. They're like, okay, like, yeah, this is cool. But you could see there was that also concern. Right.

Like, is he losing his mind? Yeah. Or is this just like, my parents maybe, they've always been super supportive, but I could feel like there was a bit of confusion. It wasn't like they didn't support my decision. It was more just like, they didn't really get it they were like okay what was the decision so all right so you're kind of sort of living in this communal household but you're kind of living in your van too and then what's the next move yeah so then well the main thing is i actually originally asked my

boss if i could go part-time because i was like I'm so passionate about the youth work I was doing you know I was meeting with kids that were kind of getting in trouble getting kicked out of their homes and get running with with the police and stuff and I felt this really strong connection to try and kind of take some of these kids under my wing like help them out and I'd go and like hang out in these rough neighborhoods and and um just wanted to kind of I don't know just be an older brother in a way to a lot of these kids that didn't have strong families didn't have good people around them but I found that this would like sometimes be like I'd be like three in the morning out sitting under a bridge somewhere with a kid who's like suicidal and then have to go into work the next day and i was like oh i'd much rather just stay on out all night chatting to this kid so for me that's the change

where i was like oh maybe i can just work two or three days a week rather than five days a week i can have more time to do that but when i suggested to my boss i wanted to go part-time he was just like that's not an option so then and there i just said you know i'm gonna have to quit then but the you stuff that they weren't paying you no no it was it was all voluntary yeah so then how are you gonna make it work well i just felt like almost had trust that i could make something work but if i could just live off universe would uh kind of yeah provide the solution yeah exactly i thought well i'll find something and even at the time i still had some skills where i could design i just thought i'll just go freelance design a few websites here and there and i can do those in my own time whenever when your overhead's that low it's not that big of a crisis right you've

got some skills you can whatever and i've got a bunch of friends they'll let me crash on the couch wherever here and there and because i even had a thing where because i was driving this minivan around with we were going to do different activities and there was a bunch of like younger teenagers that were like coming out like i was kind of like their older brother um they would always chip in for fuel so we'd pull up the gas station and i'd be like i just need like one pound each and then we can go to the place because i couldn't even afford fuel so it worked out really well at the time um and that lasted for a few years i think and i managed to do a ton of traveling in that time as well because the same theory applies right i'd pull up we'd plan a trip we ended up doing these annual

trips like road trips around europe and i would have no money but i'd say to everyone look we all need to pay a hundred pounds and then we can, and I'll drive and it's my bus. So I kind of like, you know, I might not be able to pay £100, but everyone was more than happy. We'll all throw in some money and we'll just drive into Europe and kind of sleep in the van. And, you know, we had hammocks strung up and it was like on a budget. We just buy a bunch of cans of beans and, you know, jump on the road. Right. That's beautiful because I'm sure you get asked or people come up to you all the time

and say, well, you know, it must be nice to do all this travel, but, you know, I could never afford that. Or, you know, there's always a reason why I can't. I was doing it way before I had any money. Like to be able to figure out how to do it on like no money and have a blast. Yeah. And that's why I think from that point where I had zero money, it never scared me to try anything because I was like,

worst case scenario, I'll have no money again. And I'll have to live in my van or whatever. I honestly think that one of the most important skills or experiences that you can instill in a young person is to help them learn self-sufficiency and to be able to like kind of navigate the world without any money like to go backpacking in Europe with like the tiniest of all budgets because you learn like it's going to be okay you know, maybe I have to sleep like under an awning or something like that. But like I'm still alive. And actually that was kind of cool.

And I had an adventure. And then it makes you less afraid of the world. And it makes you more kind of you embrace adventure and challenge with a different perspective as opposed to being afraid of something not working out or what's going to happen. Yeah, absolutely. as opposed to being afraid of something not working out or what's going to happen yeah absolutely yeah i'd say my it's weird saying this now because my whole kind of brand is like living the adventure but i would say my biggest adventures were when i had no money they were more adventurous because there wasn't any safety net there was no plan it was overcoming problems knowing that i can't just like you know just pay pay for a hotel if i

stuck somewhere you know right right right uh yeah so yeah some of my biggest adventures were back then cool so so how long do you when does youtube come into the thing so when you start like one of the major phases and stuff one other major phase of my life that happened before youtube was i so i was hanging out with these kids trying to do positive you know community work then had this dream to buy a double-decker bus like a London double-decker bus and I talked about this for years but just didn't know how to do it didn't have any money and then this this guy just one day said I've heard about your dream we want to fund it we want to fund this essentially it was

going to be like this mobile youth club so um yeah so this this this group came and like gave me like i think it was like 12 000 pounds which was like more money than i'd ever seen in my life uh and then i bought a bus and started converting it and it'd already been partially converted it'd been built for like a emergency living so it had like a sink and a toilet in it but I ended up um stripping a lot of the upstairs and I got some graffiti artists to paint the side of it and ended up using it just as this mobile kind of youth club going into and at the time I'd started doing some work in really bad neighborhoods in London so this was like quite different from where I grew up these were kind of really high crime neighborhoods with gang gang

violence and stuff and I started taking the bus in there and we set up a little music studio on the bus and kids came flooding in it was like amazing like absolutely amazing engaging with young people that would never go near a youth club and then i managed to partner with um like community groups youth clubs churches even the police started paying me for my services to connect with young people that's cool really cool and it also worked really well because although i wasn't there permanently i just like cruise in once a week it was the people that were voluntary volunteering on the bus which would then maintain longer longer term friendships with these kids right so it'd

be like a local church group or the police from that area would be the ones you know hanging out on the bus and chatting to the kids and building these friendships so i'd ended up doing that for five years and during that time accidentally started living on the bus yeah yeah I was and then you just drive it to wherever and they're yeah just drive it to wherever that's where the party is and accidentally well accidentally I started a party business with it as well because these kids would say oh it's my birthday party on the weekend can I hire the bus and like invite some friends and we'll just cruise around listening to music and i was like that's a great idea so then i started on the weekends hiring it out for like friday and saturday nights and making good money as a and i'd be like i'd just turn up with the

music pumping and i'd be like cruising around london and it was it was great it's honestly really really great but you can't where do you park this thing if you're living in it like you gotta where do you just park wherever i could and i often would get woken up in the middle of the night with police being like what are you doing and i'd be like sorry you know um but yeah the stories from that time in my life were just crazy like some of these kids were really rough like they would only have to like you know take knives off kids because they were going to stab someone do you know me it's like quite and at that point I really felt respected by a lot of the kids because I was they could see I was genuine I wasn't being paid often to do some of the work I was doing so it was like they could see I just loved doing this and wanted to help

them so they kind of got it and so that was a really rewarding time in my life where there was this like you know and really tough as well because you see kids going through hard times and um and this is where youtube comes in and it was completely accidental that i fell into this but at the time i was starting to film kind of things i had this i just bought this nice camera and i was starting to film like music things that the kids were doing on the bus and different, you know, different things. And then one weekend I had a friend of mine

who we were just bored sitting in his bedroom and he said, oh, let's film, let's start a YouTube channel and we'll just dare you to eat really crazy things. Because at points i'd like eaten weird things just for a joke and they found it really hilarious so they're like let's see how far you'll go with this kind of thing and the first thing we did is that i just drank a bottle of wasabi sauce and they filmed it they you know they were crying with laughter they thought it's

hilarious she's just going for clicks right out of the bit right out of the this is actually it we talked we talked previous to this and said let's see who can get a million views on youtube we'd already thought that would be a fun challenge as a group of friends like let's see who can get a million views on youtube what year was this then this must have been 2010 uh-huh that wasn't that long ago wasn't too long ago no so we were already talking like this and it was like just a complete messing around joke like i had never really watched much youtube i'd only watched this channel epic meal time have you seen epic meal time they just eat and see how many calories they can eat and it's all like meat it's all like

bacon and everything so i felt saw the format i thought that's funny like these guys messing around doing a crazy stunt and kind of making a channel from it so some of my friends suggested let's call it food for louis and i was like cool like it was just like a silly hobby um and the first couple of videos and at the time so this is this leads into my whole journey of going vegan right but at the time i was like an avid meat eater i'd eat meat every meal if a meal didn't have meat in i was like this isn't a real meal um so anyway i'd ate i started eating crazy things like i think the second thing i did was bought a box of locusts that they um they sell it at like pet shops to feed your pet lizard or whatever and ate and then pour this entire box of live locusts into my mouth and i was just a factor

there's a show and i think part of the theory was that i in my head it was like black and white eating meat is normal and okay and it's just a fact like it's one of those things i never questioned right so i followed that theory to its conclusion was that, well, if eating meat's okay, then, you know, as long as I'm not torturing animals and in my eyes, I'm killing them quickly and eating them. Like there's no difference between me eating packeted meat, which often is kind of tortured going through the whole commercial kind of animal industry and me just getting little animals and killing them and eating them. In my head, it was like the same and i've like you know in my time visited farms and killed chickens and even in africa i was in kenya and killed a goat and like i in my head i'm like if i'm okay to eat meat then this would isn't a question for me like i have to be able to kill animals that i am willing to eat it just came hand in hand whereas a lot of people were saying if i had to kill my own animals i'd never eat animals but it should be the other way around actually like in order to eat animals you have

to you should have to have that tactile experience of having to take a life of an animal right yeah and i thought it's so anyway i started eating these like mainly insects. I think the most, the biggest stunts I did was I ate a live scorpion, like a big scorpion, a tarantula. A live tarantula? A live tarantula. And you just, oh my God. And some cockroaches. So hold on a second.

Like, so how long did it take? I mean, right out of the gate, zero subscribers. Yeah, straight out of the gate, like probably third or fourth video we i jumped to like overnight like something went viral and i got like 20 000 subscribers i remember going on youtube and hitting refresh and it was just like ding ding ding ding subscribers running up i think it must have got featured on like one of the big prep maybe like um i can't remember now what it was one of the big websites that featured it and that day i got a phone call i don't know how they got my number saying we want to do a tv show it'll be like fear factor kind of thing i was like whoa this is that's when it triggered i was like oh maybe

maybe this is a direction like to do some kind of not career but yeah maybe this could be like a something that i could get into is like being this online kind of personality doing something you know i hadn't given much thought before then right um so anyway then i just every week was like right we need i need to do something even crazier and people would be suggesting the volume's getting turned up pretty quick yeah exactly like within a month i'm like i i can't beat it. Yeah. And did you get, did anything bad happen? You getting sick or? So the only, the only time I got ill, well, there's two times I got ill. I mean, this is pretty graphic stuff, right? So one of them was I bought a sheep's head, a raw sheep's head, sawed his skull open and scooped out the brain, like ate the brain raw. And I felt a bit bad after that i'm so glad that you're vegan now because if you if you weren't like we might have to like take that edit that out of the interview

because the vegan audience is gonna go insane it's quite a powerful story actually because i basically confronted the reality of eating animals and people but people really didn't like it like it wasn't just for me being a meat eater at the time like vegetarians and vegans would really get angry in the comments but i always understood that i was like yeah we've got different views i get it but then when meat eaters got angry with me i was like none of this is valid because you eat they're like one person was like can't you just eat something normal like a hamburger from mcdonald's and i'm like are you crazy do you know what goes into the hamburger do you that's more of a horror show because i've been to slaughterhouses like none of the none no slaughterhouse footage really shocks me to be honest because i've seen that

like my dad grew up in a farm area and i'd been to visit his friends as a kid and seeing how it works and yeah it was upsetting but it never like stopped me eating meat personally but for some people to seeing animals dying like it's a flawed logic right you're you're you're basically pulling covers like pulling the veil off what it really is and doing it in an extreme way but like qualitatively it's it's basically it's still a dead animal that you're eating yeah and my theory was if i and yeah it was gruesome and part of the shock factor was that's what drew people to watch it but for me i was like look as long as i'm killing these animals quickly in my eyes that was the same ethical standard i was holding to eating something that i didn't know how it had

died or anything i was like you know i hope that all the animals I'd eaten up till then had died quickly and weren't tortured but the reality is a lot of them probably were in torturous situations so anyway I would like kill it quickly whether it's biting his head off or um whatever like you know my aim wasn't to like pluck each leg off and cause it pain but people just had such an issue with the whole thing. They said I was like killing for entertainment. And I was like, no, it isn't the killing that's the entertainment. It's the reaction that I was having to eating something raw. And I actually, and one of the other things was eating roadkill that had just been freshly, or what I hoped to be freshly killed.

And I'd be eating it from the road, like uncooked. And I saw an interesting video on YouTube. You didn't get sick? No. The only one I was really sick from was my friend. He goes to this Chinese food market and he'd bought this jar of cow's bile from a cow's, I don't know why, who cooks with cow's bile, but it was like this Chinese thing.

And I drunk this raw uncooked cow's bile but it was like this chinese thing and i drunk this raw uncooked cow's bile and it was like had horrific high levels of harmful bacteria in it and it immediately made me vomit within minutes it was like pretty pretty stupid of me really but um that's intense man i thought you were just eating some cockroaches or something like that i had no idea it was getting it was this crazy so are you you're all right you were about to tell a story about eating roadkill. So anyway, recently I found this video online making the argument that we're not meant to eat meat and we're not even omnivores because of the way our teeth are designed. And they used a video I'd made as an example because I pick up this rabbit

and they cut to me trying to up this rabbit and they cut to me trying to eat this rabbit and I can't rip the fur I can't rip the skin off the rabbit to get to the meat and I'm like trying my hardest with my teeth to rip through this fur and it takes me like a couple of minutes of trying so hard to rip through and then I'm trying to eat this raw meat off the body of the rabbit and it's like really really tough it's like really really hard to do um anyway i just thought it was a kind of very interesting and they made a real point i was like yeah this totally makes sense but you're conducting some totally bizarre social experiment yeah and at this point most even some of my closest friends thinks i've lost the plot yeah it's getting crazy well i mean you're certainly i'm sure the argument is made like you're you've lost the plot just to for the

purpose of trying to be as famous on youtube exactly yeah right yeah and that showmanship can kind of take hold like i've had friends with steve-o he's got on the podcast so it's similar to that right like how crazy can you get and how much of your sense of self is invested in exactly so my theory was i'm not harming myself or i didn't think so really because none of it was like it wasn't masochistic like i wasn't injuring myself for entertainment in my head i was like this is still protein this is the same as eating a steak um and then i guess now we can argue whether eating steaks harming yourself right but that's speciesism argument yeah so it was it was interesting to me that it sparked such

controversy and like i've found forums since you can still find an internet hundreds of pages of forums people back and forth arguing arguing whether it's any worse than eating ethically yeah anyway so this all came to a head um in 2012 when i got taken to court by the rspca which is the same as peta based peter it's like the royal society for prevention of cruelty to animals and the animal i ate which triggered that was a goldfish so i had a i had a goldfish that we'd bought from a pet store same as like the tarantula and scorpion and i and i picked it out of glass and within a second killed it bit the head off and swallowed it and my my argument was fishing's legal we can we can hook a fish through you can put hook a fish take it out, slam it on the boat, stick a knife through its head, cook it and eat it.

I was like, there's no difference. But somehow this fell into a category that was illegal to do in the UK. So I actually went to court, had to pay legal fees and ended up getting kind of like a slap on the wrist. I didn't get anything major, but it was all over the news. So all these animal rights groups uh found out about me went to my channel um they flagged like seven of my videos they all got taken off youtube there was this whole thing started spinning out of control

and at that point i was like this only really started as a bit of fun i didn't want to become this guy that's like trying to make a point like i don't have a point to make and although that isn't that isn't a very interesting ethical conundrum yeah you know what i mean that you know i don't know what the laws say in terms of what the laws are in the uk but the idea that that that eating a goldfish would be illegal but fishing isn't is from an ethical perspective you know raises something worth having a discussion about um but yeah you find yourself in the middle of this hurricane yeah and then people and then i'm like right either i'm like strong defend myself i'm trying to make a point and essentially saying oh eating goldfish are fine you know and all of this was like do i really want to encourage this kind of behavior was this something that i was my life goal and at that point i think i had this big

realization that i don't want this for my life i don't want this to be my legacy and some people are like it's too late you'll always be this guy from now to the end of his end of time you'll be that weird guy who you know ate crazy things and people still do recognize me as that guy like occasionally so you were getting millions of views on these yeah most videos had over a million views but i had this i had this kind of strong feeling at this point i was like i want to i want to reinvent myself i want to show the true me i want people to realize this this was never a big part of my life i never this is always just a stupid fun thing i did like once a week at my friend's house it was never like my core identity

and i think a lot of people met me and they were like wow you're actually relatively normal like you're not this weird psychopath i thought you were um i got i got accused on live radio of being a psychopath and i was like i'm really not like i just don't see the difference between this and eating meat right but on some level you have to take responsibility for this character that you cultivated and presented to the world right you know i mean you entered that bargain you know with eyes wide open yeah so i realized okay this is what i'm portraying do i want to portray this any longer i was like no i don't so i stopped making videos and that's and then started my channel which i currently do fun for louis because i was like

you know it's just a brand thing food for louis fun for louis and yeah just started doing these daily videos completely unrelated to eating weird things but it's just sharing my life and was it was it daily right out of the gate it It was, no, I think I did. I did a month of daily just to experiment. I was like, let's try a month for daily. Then I did a couple of months where I was doing like every other day. And then I went back to daily again. I was like, yeah, I can, I can do the daily and it's yeah. And I think someone challenged me to do it. And originally I was like, I don't think my life's interesting enough, but then I was like, maybe it is is maybe people would find the traveling I'm doing and the friends I've got and the things I get up to quite interesting and I also saw at that point that it could be a career like it could be I could

earn from it because I'd started earning some money from the the food for living right so so you were able to build a subscriber base pretty quickly because of the notoriety that you had yeah and also I'd made friends in the youtube community who made very different videos they made more like sit down videos like vlogging in their bedroom but they found my videos hilarious and interesting the food for louis videos so i made friends like that and then i said to them look i don't want to do that anymore can you help me build my channel the food the fun for louis channel so yeah right off the mark i was getting like probably like 15 20 000 views a video on my daily vlogs which is a great start to like a lot of people start from zero right so i had all this you know five friends in the uk youtube

community that were really supportive and was the intention behind that from the get-go like i'm gonna treat this like a profession well just enough to sustain an income just to like so you can live in the van just so i can live yeah it wasn't ever like are we living in the bus still or i was living yeah i was living in the bus still yeah and then at that point and that transitional point i ended up coming and staying in la with a friend who let me crash on his couch for a few months and yeah it was it was cool making that transition and I think a lot of people didn't think I could do it but I remember the day where I surpassed my subscriber count I'd got like half a million subscribers on my Food for Louis channel and I passed that with my Fun for Louis channel and it was like a real moment of like wow I've succeeded in becoming bigger as Fun for Louis than I was Food for Louis.

Was there one particular video that you made with the new channel that locked it in for you and gave you a sense of like sort of like anchored you in kind of a a connection with purpose that fuels what you do now um no it was just it was just a gradual like you know i wasn't getting a million views of video like my last channel but i was getting you know i was putting a lot more content and people getting to know me on a much deeper personal level and found out what was really important to me and realized like oh him eating weird things was never important to him um i don't know if i'd say it was a mistake i'd say it was a really peculiar part of my journey and i think it's something i've yeah that's kind of helped me in my journey to where i am now like that realizing testing something to the extreme well i think you were you were you put on you, you put on a costume,

you tried on a skin and ultimately it wasn't the right one for you. You just did it publicly. Right. And I think it's, you know, look, that's how we grow and evolve. Right. You have to be willing to try things and then say, that's not for me, you know, and, and the idea that you would stay that person, you know, that's not the way human beings operate.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. I mean, when did, so when did, when did like, you know, this whole like permanent gap year thing lock in? Because it didn't start off necessarily as super travel focused. Is that, that's what I'm getting from it. But is that correct?

Yeah, well, I think I was doing a few trips a year, maybe like three or four trips a year. I think I've always done that. I've always found time to go with friends. I've never liked the idea of just going away once a year. Like I'd liked, you know, as soon as I left school, I was like, yeah, I'm going to, I don't know if I thought of them as holidays but i'm gonna do numerous trips away as soon as i had the freedom with my with them fun for louis channel to travel essentially didn't matter where i was i could still make videos right because like adsense kicked in and you were able to support yourself just on on youtube revenue and even early on i got i remember getting a sponsored video and it was kind of funny because it was with an alcohol brand and i've never

drunk alcohol really like never like maybe i kind of quit when I was 16 it was never a thing for me but it was with a beer company and I ended up getting paid to go to this festival in Austria and this was like within a few months of starting my vlogging channel and they were paying me like I think at the time it was like 5 000 pounds or something I was like whoa look this is like enough this is like good month this is good couple of months wages like this is and it's exciting to me that from the from the start i was like oh i could do not only adsense but work with brands it wasn't a great match to be honest because i don't drink beer right and i'm still doing this but it gave you a taste of perhaps what you could cultivate if you continue to kind of invest in

and in the channel so they flew me out from back from la and to europe and we did this trip and i was like wow i could you know maybe this is the direction where i could do a lot more traveling now that i have freedom to go wherever and that yeah that kicked it all off and i think the day i got back from that trip i booked to go to uganda to visit a friend out there and it kind of all rolled on from there and i just immediately just thought wow this this could be my new brand in a way is just traveling the world having adventures showing the positive side of things and yeah it was it was really exciting did you when and so when did you actually like get like let go of the bus and just decide I'm on the road now?

Yeah, that was, that was, that was at the same time I started a month into daily vlogging. I went, that's when I came to LA. So I had the bus. Right. Put in storage. And then I was like, I'm going to, I'm going to quit doing the bus parties and give some more time into this. Because the bus parties meant I would have had to stay in London. And I just wanted to travel a bit.

So I just, it wasn't like I was ending it. I just thought, I'm going to put that away for now. Right. And then there you are. You're like, endless summer, permanent gap year. It's all happening. Right. And you're living, I i mean you're literally living like

you know so many people's fantasy or dream the idea that you could just perpetually travel wake up not really even be sure what you're going to be doing next like how do you um you know how do you articulate the value of that experience like what has it in like a meta sense like what has it meant to you value it's interesting i think as a lifestyle it's very addictive and the more i've done it the more i love it i think i'm still constantly learning i think we all are as people that maybe i think maybe the the pace at which i travel sometimes is unsustainable i get quite exhausted especially with like the choice to do these videos every day but i i think it the amount of people i'm meeting in the different cultures i'm experiencing it's ingrained in me this absolute belief that i'm much more than just like a british citizen

that i have this responsibility as is what i see as a global citizen i think it's just reinforced this idea that we we are humanity together we're not i hate the idea that we're like especially the current political climate which we don't need to go into but it's it's way more like division let's build walls let's you know let's not embrace other cultures let's not celebrate diversity and that's like the opposite of what i've experienced is getting out there and seeing different parts of the world and meeting different people from different backgrounds is that diversity is one of the biggest things we need to celebrate it's so exciting and we can learn so much from

other people and I in a weird way 10 years ago felt like I knew a lot more I felt like so much more opinionated and had a black and white philosophy on the world and spirituality and now i feel like in a healthy way i just question everything and i'm so much more understanding of other people's opinions in a way i feel like i've formed the ability to be more empathetic to how other people well you're a true global citizen you're a citizen of the world right i mean how many countries have you been to in the last four or five years i don't even know i think i've got a total count of like 70 something 72 74 or something i've kind of lost you keep do you but do you keep track like are there are you like i have to go to all of them or i've never felt that i it'd be fun but i've i saw someone recently this girl did it it's the first girl that's done it

and she did it like two and a half years she went to every country and i was like well maybe less maybe she didn't less time but anyway i've never been that guy but it would be cool like it'd be cool to visit every country but it's not my life that's not the driver right yeah i had that um this friend of mine chris guillebeau was an author and he traveled to all one at the time it was 193 countries yeah i think it was before he turned 30 or 31 or something like that okay um but a lot of them i think are bump and run you know like you're you're going and staying for a while like you're like going and then immersing yourself in these cultures i mean to some extent

i think not as much as i could be often i'm going for a week so i'm not going for a day but i'm often only going for a week or two weeks real like hardcore travelers might go somewhere for a month or two or three months and that's a bit more immersive because you're not just visiting you're like living there and i rarely get to live places just because of the pace that i travel but i try to experience i mean it's tough i'd say i do a range of travel ranging from like staying with friends and experiencing like real culture and then sometimes i do feel like more of a tourist where i'm just coming in staying in a hotel so it's a range of it and i you know i definitely say the more rewarding traveling times are when

we've got a bit longer and you can start really building friendships with people and beyond the the diversity aspect that which you just spoke to i mean what do you you know what is it because most people don't have the opportunity to travel to the extent that you have so you know what is it that you think most people um can't see or don't understand or, or, or, or can't quite embrace, um, about sort of the, the, the various cultures of the world that you've been able to experience and see firsthand. Like if you could express that to people, because we are, you know, like, I don't want to get into politics either, but you know, we're in a very divided time and sort of, you know, these, these lines are being drawn and there's a lot of very divided time and sort of you know these these lines are being drawn

and there's a lot of discussion about walls and sort of you know where we're gonna where we're gonna sit in terms of you know where where we sit in terms of of you know the global conversation community and citizenship um i think we are taught in the western world from a young age going back to what i was saying before there's that there's just facts there's things that are true and false and those uh centered around success and what society should look like and how we should live and how we should go to school and you know i don't know how we should shop and how we should what we what our dreams should look like everything when you go to some poorer countries and i think for me it's the the poorer countries that are the most impacting because they're the ones that don't have anything they're in survival mode right they can barely have enough to eat and they're living in shacks but for me it's blown me away how happy a lot of these people are and like they might be

struggling but like these kids that have been you know from whatever african countries i've visited some of the poorer areas um i don't know it just really strikes me like how are they so happy where whereas kids i know in the western western cultures and even myself just you know you just get so miserable and fussy about little things i Oh, I don't want to eat that. Or, you know, I don't want to go to school today. All these things. I'm like, we're kind of trained to, we just take a lot for, for,

um, for granted. I think, and I've done the same constantly challenging myself. Wow. I take a lot for granted. And then to see that some of these kids are like deeply happy, just running around naked with like hitting a can as a toy.

They don't need the latest computer games and stuff. So that's one thing. Last year, I got the opportunity to go to the Calais Jungle, which was basically a refugee camp that was set up in France. Since then, it's been demolished by the French government. But it was all the people from all over the world trying to get into the UK. And there was thousands of people from all over, mainly kind of the Middle East, North Africa, living in this refugee camp. And we went to visit with somebody just to see what was going on.

And we walked into this tent with the Syrians because of all the Syrian refugee crisis. walked into this tent with these syrians because of all the syrian refugee crisis that's like one of the biggest kind of you know crisis is happening right now that everyone's talking about but this these syrian guys that felt completely lost they felt like they had nowhere to go they felt like they weren't being looked after by the uk government the french wanted to kick them out it was you know there's no one being nice to them and back home they were getting bombed and by the syrian government it was just like horrific and these guys i walked into this tent obviously we we weren't even really we didn't know them but we kind of peeked our head in and they got up out of their seats insisted we sat down around this fire and made us tea

and were like the most warming amazing people and i was like this is it was kind of almost brought me to tears because i was like they're like the forgotten kind of dirty people that people are like oh we don't want to keep we don't want you in our country and i'm like and they're just so genuinely loving and like so nice and i was like we are missing something here because there's not many people that i would peek my head in their door that i didn't know that would invite me in right not knowing me and especially it wouldn't happen here no you'd get like the someone would call the police if you open someone's front door and said hey like and they wouldn't still like sit you down make you a cup of tea no no no no yeah it's amazing i mean that's that's that's beautiful

and i think i mean do you feel do you feel, I mean, how many, what do you have? Like how many millions of people watch your YouTube? You have 1.8 million subscribers. So with that, I would imagine comes a sense of not just purpose, but responsibility. And when you experience things like that, do you feel a sense of urgency about you know telling that story or using the platform that you've built for expressing that point of view or for the greater good i mean absolutely i think the challenge is for me that people it's a lot to digest people don't want to get to the end of the day they've had a hard day at school or work and tune into youtube and watch like a refugee crisis every day

so for me it's it's about getting a balance like there's so many important messages and things i want to share with people there's so many things i've learned there's there's so many kind of issues going on that i'd love to highlight and i try to highlight but amongst that i also want to kind of dilute it a bit with some of the fun travels i'm doing some of the adventure side of stuff but i don't want to shy away from the issues i want people to know what i believe what i believe we should be doing as humanity to say you know or also just opening the discussion like i don't know all the answers and one of the things we did last year which was one of the most exciting times

with the platform and one of the most exciting projects i've been a part of is me and my friend dave erasmus he he'd done a lot of a lot of his kind of business life has been centered around looking at how to encourage people to give more so um he'd started this kind of giving platform online and stuff but anyway we cooked up this plan to travel around the world and basically look for people with what Dave coined this phrase, compassionate problem solvers. So we started this project we called Solvee. And we went to, I mean, this, China, Japan, South Korea, North America, Brazil and Iceland.

And in each country we held, some countries, in Brazil, we flew in and out of in the same day. But we held discussion groups with my audience and we invited them to a location and we sat down. In Ethiopia, there was only four people, but in India, we had like 50 or something. And we asked them the questions, what problems do you see in your society, in your where you live? What solutions do you currently see happening to combat those? And then what ideas do you have that you haven't seen yet, but that ideas you have to solve things? And it was amazing, absolutely amazing. ideas you have to solve things and it was amazing absolutely amazing and then we at the end of that we ended up um supporting 10 people that we we identified as having these really good ideas

and got a tiny bit of finances like micro lending or yeah we got a tiny bit of finances but also gave them uh someone to mentor them with their idea and help it happen yeah it's beautiful um and it was really cool because it was a it was taking my audience along for one month and the whole goal was uh highlighting social issues and looking and but not ending there but then looking at how we could find solutions including people from every walk of life i mean the only limitation was that they were all english speaking because the way they found out about it was from my vlogs. But it was still really amazing, the range of problems and the range of people we spoke to. But it was something.

I mean, it was, you know, and then maybe the next month, I don't know what I did. We did something a bit more fun. Maybe we went away where it was just a bit more like fun sports and an adventure. But that's what I've always felt on my channel. I don't want to feel guilty for not talking about the issues every day but i also don't want to forget that this is actually the real crux of like where my heart is i don't get deep fulfillment from going to on hotel holidays right i mean it's a balance right so you get to do backflips off of you know cliff diving and all that kind of stuff right but you have to infuse, I mean, at this point, especially if you want to continue to grow and mature and really leverage this unbelievable

platform that you have. I mean, you have so much, you seem, you strike me, I mean, we just met, but you strike me as somebody who really does have this, you know, beautiful core of, of this willingness, this desire to be helpful and be of service. And that was expressed as a young person helping these, you know, these gang kids, these, you know, kids that need, you were like drawn to that, right? So to infuse your work with that same spirit is where I would think that you would evolve, you know, more and more into. And it's, that's beautiful to hear that story about you and your friend to have that kind of through line of purpose you know uh infusing infusing the work that you do and all these

fantastic places that you get to travel to yeah and i think moving on to like where i'm heading i think looking back to my upbringing i had this solid group of friends that i spent a lot of time with which i think kind of really helped shape me one of which was this dave guy who went traveling with last year um also i like i said i was mentoring these younger guys so i had this kind of more like tangible community around me and these more tangible connections with young people now i have this much broad much bigger influence but it's gone from this micro relationships where I'm like spending all day with a kid like helping them to this slightly more detached audience situation where I'm hopefully inspiring and encouraging people with things but there is this detachment where I don't know who they are and and often when i've over the last few years met people they've said to me your videos have

really changed my life and they feel like i'm genuinely their friend and i'm like i kind of get that because i share a lot on my videos and you know i wake up in the morning and i i don't go into all the details of my issues in my life but i share a fair amount and um i think people actually do get to know who i am through my videos so that doesn't seem strange to me but it does leave me feeling like oh it'd be cool to figure out a way to connect more to some of my some people i miss that being able to be a real mentor to people yeah i think you'll figure it out it is it's it's intimate you know i think that that you you do you know you're very demonstrative of with who you are in your videos and and you know you get like the person that i'm

experiencing today doesn't seem different to me from the person that you know is in it's not like you're affecting some character you know what i mean like you're affecting some character. You know what I mean? Like you're being you. So how do you make that decision about what you're going, you know, what is going to make it into the video and what isn't? Like how much of your life is going to be that transparent? I think for me, I've wanted to deliberately, I mean, any daily vlogger, anyone sharing anything of themselves online always curates what they release like they're always amending changing or like creating this particular image of course um i don't know whether like i've i am genuinely a positive person i'd say i'm like often like overly optimistic which gets me in trouble sometimes but I think I do want to focus on positive things therefore when I'm like editing a video or even before that even picking up the

camera I won't pick up the camera to have a whine or a whinge about like something or I'm feeling like annoyed because in my head I try and shut down those thoughts anyway if I'm feeling like in my head i try and shut down those thoughts anyway if i'm feeling like frustrated i'd rather not talk too much occasionally i might even with friends talk about something i'm annoyed about but it i don't know how helpful it is to share that on camera and put that out maybe it gives someone a slightly more balanced view of who i am but i don't know i feel like i'd rather put out positive stuff um right well you got into a little bit of deep water over the north korea thing right yeah yeah i mean that was like a little bit so sure yeah well i can give you some i can give you some other interesting information actually which i found out yesterday um so you're this is exclusive so yeah for those who don't know last year i in august got invited

to north korea with us they're actually just like a international kind of surfing group that go and do projects and they're linked up with a local guy who runs projects out there he actually does like builds wells and works with the government to help the government so you just get an email from this uh it was actually through a mutual friend he he had said does anyone want to come to north korea with me and i was like yes i do tell me about it and then i had a skype call with a guy who organized the trip i was like oh this sounds amazing so i arrived as i do with any country immediately looking through my eyes just what i saw and with a positive attitude i'd done a fair bit of research in north korea i'd watched all the vice documentaries

about kind of what it was and in a way that's what i'd found a bit fascinating the way that it was so closed from the rest right they bring they bring people like yourself over and they sort of candy coat this experience to make it look all fantastic and great yeah so you're being watched and you know monitored the entire time yeah so there was there's a bit of the tough thing is there's definitely this exaggerated version of north korea that we see as Western world. I honestly think that a lot of the, I'm not saying there were, there's not atrocities.

I'm not saying there's not massive, massive issues that need to be figured out. But I also feel like, you know, the press have demonized North Korea on every element. Like we, you know, I even read all these articles about people,

you know, South Korea was saying they should just blanket bomb pyongyang and all this like it just didn't seem in any way like there was any truck anyone was trying to understand their perspective right so i went it is bananas though didn't didn't didn't one guy just get killed the brother of yeah yeah well i i yeah there's a lot of crazy stuff going on but for me let's leave the leadership and the government out of the picture for the moment um i i really felt like the people of north korea i met who honestly weren't all actors people are like oh it's all actors right i'm like no what the reality is you are watched.

You're kept very closely to your tour group. All of the tour guides have been very carefully trained in how to deal with you. But the people you see down the street over there, they are normal people. And to be fair, it might be a wealthy area. They're not taking us to like poor areas in North Korea. I've seen way more poverty and even in some of

the towns we drove through and they said you can't film any of this they told me put your camera away and then you see and there's like slightly poorer accommodation and people with you know wearing ripped clothes or whatever i've seen 10 times worse in india do you know i mean it was still like i was like okay but talking to the talking to the people i did meet um i just feel like they just were very very very sheltered they weren't going through massive atrocities as a nation right now i know like 20 years ago there was a big famine lots of people were dying there was horrific stuff that came out you know um right now there's still massive control there's still massive limitations but i i was just filming what i experienced right i wasn't meeting people that were getting

tortured and i wasn't meeting the government i was just in my tour group in the same as any country i go to right i think the controversy arose out of the fact that that you're going there as a vlogger to have an adventure. You're not going there. You're not being dispatched by Vice to investigate. And so you did what you do, right? Yeah. But on some level, the criticism was more about the fact that you didn't take the opportunity to at least express like a sort of objective opinion about

what is perhaps actually going on there right to the extent that you you just kind of tried to make it like a fun adventure and didn't speak to those other issues yeah and i think fair well i think the the difficulty is is that for me to speak outwardly, probably even now about ongoing issues in North Korea, like we see in the news and everything. It's, it can be damaging to the people that I went out there with. The North Korean tour guys, the company that got me out there, all of it can cause a lot of issues because suddenly there's this question to like oh why why was i out there was i like a journalist creating this expose you know and i don't know i never wanted to do that i felt like there's a there's but you weren't being there was this idea that you were you were paid by the government no no that's crazy create this tourist i definitely watched what i said on my

videos and in hindsight and i actually a few days into my videos i was releasing when the criticism came i started putting a disclosure at the beginning saying go and do your own research there's tons of material out there and stuff facts you can find out and then weigh that up with what i'm experiencing so it's like but were you surprised with the controversy or did you sort of know that that was i was a bit surprised mainly because like i've been to countries which have and are currently having a lot of you know there's still atrocities happening there now and no one cares at all but because north korea is such a big hot topic in the media the media were jumping all over it but i've been to like egypt there's horrific stuff happening in egypt being you know even parts of

the middle east like dubai like everywhere has like criticisms and things that are happening and injustices i just think you know i just feel like i was bullied a bit um but i'm also like i mean would you do it if you if you were to go there again would you do it differently yeah but i don't know how i still don't know how i do it like so this is the this is the exclusive right yesterday i was phoned by the guy who organized the trip saying that he's just come back from a snowboarding trip there which i was invited on but i declined because i was just like i don't want to i don't want to handle do that again but he said there were hundreds of people snowboarding skiing with families in north korea locals and he said fair play they're they're the middle class locals

they might not represent the most of the country but they weren't actors like there's hundreds of people you could see them from his room do you know i mean like they're not so he was just making the point the media never never talk about this stuff that north korea are progressing as a nation they are they are there is more wealth happening there and my big question is and this is something i want to look into what would happen if we did flood north korea with tourism the government would make more money but also that would ripple out we're hoping to the country as a whole it would infrastructures would improve and i don't like the idea that we we're declaring war on them and bullying them to become capitalist because a lot of the things i saw about this in the same way as when i went to cuba about this kind of more communist approach to

thing which i guess has its criticisms of you know communist government but i saw a lot of things i really loved about i was like wow like i get it i get why they want to protect a lot of this so i don't know it just made me think like if we flooded them with but they're not i mean there's no there's no freedoms there's no freedom of speech there's no free press no you know they're they're living under an autocrat that is prone to some pretty nasty things so but a lot would have to change i wonder yeah yeah and i wonder whether i'm not saying they have this perfect society at all but i'm saying if we flooded with people from all around the world

that locals would inevitably get to connect with the more thousands of people that flood in they'd have to increase tourism start building it out to different places you know and then you've got you know this interaction and one of the tour guys was saying like he would love for for more people to visit and for us to find a way to get past this this kind of um conflict of like them versus us like this north korean guy was like i would love to be friends with you know and I was talking to I was talking to a um another North Korean diplomat who was saying like they and they seemed very clued up about the rest of the world like they and the media there is very limited but they they knew a lot they knew about Brexit in the UK happening and the government

situations and I don't know I just thought oh I'd love to build more of a connection then going back to me feeling this globalization this global community I naturally want to connect to people in North Korea I do I want to I want to learn about them I want to learn about you know one of the big comparisons I had from South Korea to North Korea is yes the North Koreans are in you know controlled you know no freedom of speech but they also had no media telling them what they needed to look like and the girls that had zero self-esteem problems like they didn't put makeup on they were so happy and bubbly but isn't the state telling them what they should be doing and thinking and

dressing and not really not in the way no nowhere near what our our media tell us we are more bright that we are as brainwashed with certain stuff as they are this is what i'm trying to say like the brainwashing happens here as well and people don't see it honestly like look at all the media things like who i don't know what to believe in the media now, but even down to like growing up with like the belief that this is what beautiful looks like. And this is what a diet should be. I hear what you're saying. And I said to them, oh, I'd read that in North Korea,

you can only choose 10 different hairstyles. And they laughed at me. They were like, no, like he told you that. That's hilarious. And I just thought, oh, that's what I was told. Like, so all I'm saying, I'm thought, oh, that's what I was told. So all I'm saying, I'm not singing their praises. I'm just saying there's another side of the story that we don't see.

And I had a glimpse into it. But when I showed the positive stuff without the negative stuff, people flipped out. I understand that. I get it. But I also, I don't know what the answer was, basically. I don't know what the answer is. Maybe one guy said you shouldn't have made any videos out there i'm like i don't know like i liked making them i like meeting them and the the this is this is the exclusive thing is the the the main girl miss kim who was our guide and she was in the music video music video right

she has had this is crazy right she's had lots of tourists come and take photos with her so now she's famous she's famous but and and she she didn't know how big the video is going to be i didn't know how how many views is the video i don't know like half a million or something but she she's seen the video right they have no internet there but tourists had come in with a video on their phone which you're not actually supposed to do but they showed her the video and she was amazed and like they i don't know what the government feel about it but the tour is the tourism there like i've had a lot of my viewers say they've visited north korea since watching those videos i didn't realize that that it was that porous like how how does that work like i didn't know that you could just go yeah that's what people don't know anyone can go you can anybody can go we're not south koreans but you can go americans can go

most europeans can go the biggest they have so many chinese people go there every year thousands like 20 000 or something which isn't that big compared to other tourism tourism wow but it's a whole we could do a whole podcast on North Korea. Yeah. Well, I mean, you definitely like took a lot of grief for that. I did. I did. And it was tough. It was because also the toughest thing was like hearing that people that had escaped North Korea had issue with me. And I was like, oh, that's tough because, you know, they'd'd been there lived there and started a new life

outside of that that government and they know a lot more than i do from seeing that week of well you should be able to sympathize or empathize with that perspective if they if they were living horrible lives there and they found a way to get out and then they see a video that makes it look like you're having this awesome time in north korea you know you can't expect them to be stoked about that no right yeah i get it i get it um yeah who knows and i would love to go back but again i'd need to really plan out what do i want to what's the message i want to give what do i believe what do i you know all of that stuff i need to give some proper thought to it so i won't just jump in so naively next time yeah well i mean youtube is is not is nothing if not uh you know hotbed for you know debate and controversy right like how do you deal with the haters and all the

sort of negativity that exists in that in the petri dish of youtube um i mean it's there's a lot going on right now right with the whole pewdiepie thing and all of that yeah yeah i feel bad for him i feel like he's he's taking it he's taking a beating by the press um i don't know it's tough isn't it especially when the media get involved because like i said i i think they're just as guilty as brainwashing people and and not fully representing situations and it's all you know from being the other side where i'm creating content that i have to try and get people's attention with like you know every day i'm thinking of a fun you know an interesting title or thumbnail to attract people to watch my video it's the same in the press every day you've got journalists they're saying right we need to grab someone's attention here so let's just kind of

throw out this really insane title that's going to draw them in and then let's write like let's exaggerate this whole situation so it seems more compelling or let's not throw show the whole spectrum of what's going on we just want to pick pick out like three points of this like massive situation and and just share the well that's what i mean with the pewdiepie thing i for me took a load of it out of context and and it angers me because it's like look this is not fair like it's not fair at all but as someone that flicks through other articles and reads the headline and then i'll go and talk to my friend about it. Oh, did you hear this happened?

Without really looking into it. Happens all the time, I think. Yeah, the economy behind publishing, online publishing is messed up, you know, because when profitability is related to clicks, it's going to, when you're're a journalist that's innately problematic yeah you know i don't know what the solution is to that but it ain't good but back to the question like how do you like what is your how do you deal with the haters um i don't struggle too much i think if i see a couple of bad comments on the video i might remove them i might ban that person but then i just might like think i'm not gonna read the comments in this video like i did a video when donald trump got elected that i was in the states when it happened and at the last five minutes of the video i'd kind of ranted a little bit just saying yeah a bunch of stuff and i got a ton of hate like thousands of dislikes loads of kind

of republican you know trump supporters in the comments i just didn't read them i just like i just you know it's weird in a way because i'm like putting my opinion across i've i have spent time kind of trying to figure out the different sides of the argument and people's opinions. But I don't want to engage people in my YouTube comments about it personally. But I could have. And I also don't have to. Like, it's not like you don't have to engage with people. Right. But I also want to stay open minded and try and have empathy for other people's views.

But I just don't always feel like a comment section. other people's views but i just don't always feel like a comment section because with commenting online is your you've got this anonymity anonymity anonymity well it seems like youtube should could do a much better job of trying to sort of clean that up a little bit yeah i'd much rather do a face-to-face discussion or videos kind of call with someone that i had a very differing opinion to and there'd be this like nice discussion about it because a lot often in the comments is like name calling and people just being abusive it's nasty i don't want to engage with that i'm like i don't immediately doesn't make me want to engage whether whether you've got a valid point or not i don't want to talk to you because you're being nasty from the start so so let's talk about the vegan

stuff yeah so how does that all come into play for you so i think it fits very naturally and with the course of my life going back to like this whole questioning everything start with to start with it was questioning a job questioning uh living where i lived questioning you know all of it most spiritual beliefs and then i think there'd been a few moments with having this online kind of persona having sharing my life with people i'd often been challenged on the whole diet thing but also because i love animals and i outwardly just adore animals whenever i see a dog or cat i'm going over them cuddling it and you know despite whatever atrocities transpired on food for louis yeah and people were like and people like this is so weird people like how can you love animals but

you would happily murder them and eat them like and i remember this one one of the pivoting there's probably four or five things that led up to watching cowspiracy which was the big one but i went i start i think one of them was i was in italy and i saw these donkeys tied to this fence and they were really skinny and they looked really unhappy and i went over and i was like really upset it. And I was like, oh, this is just so sad. Like, why can people treat animals like this? And I was filming it and stroking the donkeys. Cut to lunch. The next scene in my video was me eating a plate of meat.

And someone in the comments said something like, with no abusive language, just saying, huh, it's really strange how you have such compassion towards animals yet you were eating a plate of meat in the next scene and that really hit me and i was like and i replied to that comment i don't reply to a lot of comments but i replied i was like no you you're right like this is a challenge this has really challenged me like this has really made me think so that was one of the moments i look back on i think yeah and then i think a mixture of stuff of just feeling you know even health-wise like feeling very lethargic whenever i was eating i became like my body started reacting

to my diet like where i'd eaten lavishly for like years now i was like having a good income and traveling a lot i'd always be eating restaurants now of like having a good income and traveling a lot. I'd always be eating at restaurants and ordering like steaks and burgers and everything I could. So, you know, I just felt like almost every meal was getting like this food coma where my body was struggling to digest. I was just like, oh, I just feel horrible. I was like, anyway, so that was playing with the back of my mind thinking, hmm, I don't know how healthy this is. And then there was a couple of other things, just little challenges. I think a few of my friends were saying that I'd gone vegan and saying like, you should, you know, just kind of poking at me a little bit.

And then... Did you know Tim Sheaf at this point? Yeah, I met Tim. How do you know Tim? I met Tim through Jamie Oliver. So I did a live stream with jamie uh maybe almost two years ago and tim was there and we chatted a little bit and he'd also chatted to my other friend jack harry's yeah i know he's done some stuff with the with

with those brothers yeah so they and then jack through tim has kind of changed to a vegan diet and then jack had talked to me a lot about it and he was the one that was like you've got to watch cowspiracy and then i was um i was meaning to watch it the back of my mind i was like yeah yeah and i was thinking as well like oh i bet this is just another movie about slaughterhouse abuse and like these animals are like you know those kind of graphic the title makes you think that that's what it's gonna be yeah makes you think like it's like oh this is gonna be one of those things that just wants to make you feel guilty because these animals are getting slaughtered but in my head

i'd kind of kind of already wrestled through and kind of convinced myself that was somehow okay like um but when i watched it and and i think my friend ben brown had watched it the same night because he tweeted this is what it was he tweeted i'm finally going to watch cowspiracy and i was like that's a great idea so we weren't even together but i watched it the same time as him and that night i think there's still a video of my kind of reaction to it online um i didn't announce i was going to be like this is the day i'm going to turn vegan forever but i was like it starts with one day i'm just i know tomorrow i'm going to do it like i'm going to try tomorrow and see what happens and i was with my another youtuber friend

alfie who i think for the day maybe he'd went vegan as well just for that day but it was just real challenge to me i was like there's so many things that are out of my control in the world. There's so many things I don't have the answer to. World problems, famine, you know, global warming. But I was like, this is one big decision that I can make, that I wanted to make. And it was just this real, like, mental decision. And I thought, this is an exciting challenge because I've always eaten meat every meal. This is something that I've been convinced of now that is a positive thing for me and for the world. And I just, I'd eaten so, I don't know, I just felt like a bit gluttonous like for so many years and my entire life.

I was like, if eating meat is this bad for the planet, it was mainly environmental thing to be honest to start with. if me eating meat's this bad for the planet it was mainly environmental thing to be honest to start with then i want to start reversing some of the damage i've done because i've just i've been eating so much meat super cool uh so that was about i think it was about two years ago it was it's less it was probably a year and a half so it's october 2015 right so so i remember i watched your video where you write like you you shared your thoughts right after you finished watching it um and i don't remember exactly when you first came across my radar um you know at some point i kind of stumbled around the same time. I stumbled upon you. I stumbled upon Ben Brown and Jack Scapp.

And I had already kind of known Casey. And then I realized, oh, these guys are all kind of in the same ecosystem. And they all know each other. And then I started. I didn't watch every one of your vlogs or Ben's. But every once in a while, I'd, oh, I wonder what Louie's doing. And I'll watch one. And I'm like, oh, where is he now? And just check in and just always enjoyed your perspective um but i think i saw ben's because i started following you guys on twitter also and i saw ben's tweet

and he made a video and i watched that and i was like holy cow i i uh so i i email uh kip and keegan i was like you guys know like ben brown who's got this Keegan. I was like, you guys know, like Ben Brown, who's got this huge following, just watch Cowspiracy. You guys are going to watch this video. And then right, I think it was like, it was like the same day or that. Yeah. I was like, holy smokes.

He called his video something like I'm going vegan. And I was like, oh, I can't copy his title. So I actually called it something completely unrelated. It was like, I'd gone on a rope swing that day or something totally unrelated, but I just kind of added it in the end of the video. So, right.

So I think it took me another day before I found yours because of that. Yeah. But, uh, but then I emailed Kip and Keegan about that as well. And I was like, this is big. Cause these guys are big YouTubers.

And then I connected with Ben. Um, we had some emails and some tweets and so I'm sort of connected with him yeah uh talked to him once in a while he'll make it back someday but it stuck with you so you've been doing it ever since yeah and i just remembered the one of the other pivotal things that pushed me towards thinking about a meat or animal free diet was it was ages ago back in 2013 me ben jack and finn and a bunch of other guys we went on this trip to india where we drove these little oh i saw some of those videos yeah it was like you guys were like racing across india exactly yeah and something i'd been told

before going by a number of people that had been to india said don't eat meat in India you'll get sick this was a few people said to me just go vegetarian for the for the trip and you won't get sick so I was like okay so I was like and I said to everyone I was like guys we should go vegetarian this trip so everyone pretty much decided right we're gonna go veggie I think we were still having I think there was still cream in some of the curries and stuff but like that was like a two over a two-week trip and I felt great and I really enjoyed like and not one point did I miss me and I think maybe halfway through this was the really interesting thing Jack had chicken at this five-star hotel the only time he ate meat got eight chicken for one meal got really ill wiped out for the whole entire next day and i was like that's weird like why can't i was thinking in my head i was like it

must be like just the bacteria and germs out there that get in the meat it's just different to out you know in the in europe but no one else really got sick and i really loved just pulling over on the side of the road going to these little shacks and getting this like dal like this lentil stuff cooked up with this paratha bread and it's just like super simple homemade but like the most tasty like i'm a big fan of curry like indian food but at no point did i miss meat so after that month or three weeks of not eating meat it really made me think huh i could i could do this right like planted that seed that seed. Yeah. The hilarious thing though, is that you're this really tall, skinny guy with dreadlocks.

Like you look like a guy who's been vegetarian your whole life. I know. I'm like, you're like hanging out at like, uh, grateful dead concerts. All the hippie stereotypes I'm becoming. Yeah.

Um, that's cool. So, so you're still feeling good and all of that. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I i one of my problems is i have this extremely high metabolism so um and i don't really do a lot of exercise which is

one of the other bad things about traveling so consistently is like finding routine you got to eat a lot maybe you can help me with yeah you gotta you said you gotta eat more yeah so i i try and eat as much as i can but i don't think i'm eating enough calories so i have lost a bit of weight which most people that's like their dream right i want to lose weight but i really would like to kind of get my weight back up to what it was putting a bit more but i feel like that's cut down to a little me just exercising more as well because the more i burn the more i'm going to want to eat and it's that whole cycle so i think that's the next big challenge for me is stopping being feeling so lethargic and lazy and actually pushing myself more physically and doing more exercise well now you're going to be

hanging out in california yeah just to get with the program i know and as soon as the weather gets a bit better i want to go be down on muscle beach i'm really interested in like calisthenics and stuff not so much kind of aerobic and a job and like exercise i feel i mean i could maybe look into like more stamina building stuff like you're doing but i feel like my my immediate interest is more like uh body weight stuff like i got the guy for you yeah yeah travis brewer okay yeah he's friends with tim too and he's like a he's a ninja you know he does like american ninja stuff and he hangs out there's that that park in that's kind of like on the south end of santa monica before venice where all the all the bars are and everybody hangs out there yeah like he's that's his place i'd love to yeah

maybe you can hook me up with him yeah he'll sort you out that'd be good you have the physique for it yeah no i do and i feel like i i've in in the past had times where i've really been more excited about fun things like doing backflips off stuff and and i've kind of haven't for a while and i feel like i need them it's weird in a way i don't know how to describe it i don't know if you felt like this but when i made the transition i felt immediately more energy but not as much raw strength so like i had like way more energy like kind of clarity and like kind of bubbliness but less like i felt like i was weaker and i don't know what that is whether that's just because i wasn't eating and i wasn't replacing my it might

be a calorie thing it might be you know the you know how you're i would have to know exactly what you were eating to like yeah understand that i also think your body after having that lifestyle for so long it takes a while to rebalance you know it takes a while to kind of figure out if you've been eating a certain way your entire life you can't expect in three days you know it's not going to tell you the whole story i always feel like yeah your body kind of has to reprogram how it reacts because i think your bodies are very tolerant for poison basically whatever it is well you should know that from your food channel yeah it's surprising what you can survive eating and what you your body can tolerate i think the body can eat a lot of different things not necessarily that it

should but it can yeah i think we're very adaptable as people and i just think my body's re-adapting to like a healthier diet basically and just um yeah no i'm still with it there's nothing the weirdest thing i say this is the strangest thing about making the choice to go vegan is I've never looked back. I've never once felt like an urge. And now I look at meat and I'm like, what? It's so weird. I really like found that appealing. You don't have the craving.

No. That's interesting. Maybe some people do, but I just really didn't. And maybe it's because I had such a strong mental decision. It wasn't a test for me. It wasn't like, oh, I'm going like oh i'm gonna i'm just gonna maybe do this you know i just felt for immediately like i really want to do this um and i think different people do you know some people might want to ease into it but i just wanted to make that it has to be tricky in some of the countries you go to though

right yeah yeah china was really tough they put pork in the vegetable soup and they put pork in the tofu. I was just like, this is so weird. Yeah. The hardest place that I've had was Mexico City, ironically. You think it'd be so easy there? Yeah. Like everything. Yeah.

They just infuse everything with some kind of meat broth or, you know, carnitas and everything and all that kind of stuff. So you think like, oh, just rice and beans should, you know, some some avocados yeah no no wow but that's great you've been able to keep doing it man yeah awesome so so where's all this heading like what are you doing like what do you where do you see yourself in five years ten years like what's the what's where are you moving what direction are you moving so i think the YouTube thing has been amazing and I'm still loving creating videos, but for me, it needs to be more than that.

I don't just see myself doing the same kind of thing. And also I feel like there is a lifespan for anyone on YouTube. Like people will, you know, there's tons more creators on the platform now. There's loads of people making the platform now there's loads of people making daily content there's loads of people making really good daily content so whereas a few years ago i would have thought i'm just going to keep building my channel

it's going to keep growing now it's kind of kind of plateaued a bit like and i just feel like okay um okay so this isn't necessarily going to keep growing i could just and i know a lot of youtubers that will just for years and years and years just keep on doing their thing and that's it but i've always wanted to experiment and try other things and think beyond what i'm doing so there's no nothing soon is gonna what am i trying to say i'm not gonna end making videos anytime soon but i want to do a lot more than that and i have wanted to for a while so i've set up live the adventure which is like my slogan that i say at the end of my videos as a company to as an umbrella to do a lot of cool things one of which um to bring in a bit of kind of income is we're doing an agency with other kind of travel influencers that want

to work with brands so we've set up an office in cape town which i haven't really talked to my audience about yet i was going to wait till i would go down to cape town to see them but um uh and who my audience know she's like been my manager and assistant and stuff so she's heading all that up and now there's a team of people which is really exciting and then also going back to wanting to connect more with my audience on a face-to-face level I want to start doing events so we did like an event in the UK where we held a little travel summit we called it a travel summit but it was so good like just the there's something for me about not just inspiring people but trying to connect people and trying to like um empower and enable people and give them the

resources to do cool stuff like a lot of the people that came also wanted to travel a lot maybe a lot of them were taking that jump to leave their job to go traveling some of the people there were wanting to create videos as well and like do the social media thing all of that it was just nice to feel like oh this is real this is a bit more tangible than just an audience and people chatting in my comments it just reminded me like oh there's some you know this is great and like and it's cool helped me feel more connected um to to real people so i'd love to do more events i think i don't necessarily think that's like a business move like but if we could do like a cool

festival at some point or some other big events that would be really exciting for me and then also just doing more trips as as a group of creators I've got a lot of friends that love traveling that make YouTube videos that have you know post Instagrams and we want to do a load of really exciting trips this year and also tie in social causes so we're we're planning a trip to borneo where we're going to be uh shining a light on a lot of the deforestation problems and and um going to like an orangutan rescue center where we're going to be just seeing you know just i guess talking about real issues and causes and trying to not not just for me to put my platform but bring other people that have platforms to talk about these issues right so it can scale beyond your personality yeah yeah

and i think there's just so many there's so many potential things you can do once you've got another brand that you can you know whatever that is that's because my brand's so personal it's fun for louis you know it's me and it's totally reliant on me putting out these daily videos if i can build something that also it can start providing opportunities for me to do other things so i'm not because at the time right the analogy i've used i don't know if i've shared this online actually but when i've talked to other people is i sometimes have felt like my entire kind of progress and achievement, it's felt like I'm in the steam train shoveling coal in the engine as fast as I can. And as soon as I stop, the train's going to stop.

Yeah. So it's like these daily vlogs are churning out stuff. It's been a challenge. And it's not like I've grown to resent them. Like I know daily vloggers that have quit that resent daily vlogging now. But for me, it's not like I've grown to resent them. Like I know daily vloggers that have quit that resent daily vlogging now. But for me, it's not that I resent it. It's just that I'm like, this means I can't do anything else with my time. Like I don't have the headspace to even think about other projects or other things I'm passionate about.

Because all I think every day is I'm making a video. I'm editing a video. I'm making a video. It's got to just monopolize your consciousness every single day. What's today's video going to be? What's it gonna be am i gonna create something interesting what am i doing today like so now having the freedom to take even a day or two off here and there i mean the healthy thing anyone does when they're working

full-time is they take a couple of days off a week at least so even stuff like that like i'd love to have some time off here and there without feeling like that's a damage to my business you know i mean which is the weird thing and also as a platform by diversifying by this creating this agency and these other events and a lot of youtubers are doing it they're releasing books they're releasing like merchandise that you know a lot of girl makeup beauty gurus are doing whole like makeup kind of um they're releasing whole ranges of makeup all of those kind of things like it's not that i want to like um exploit my audience it's more just i want to diversify yeah like in in what i'm creating and how i can yeah how i can sustain my life that because otherwise if i just thought right this is the only thing i'm just going to daily vlog i'm going to burn out really bad well the yeah the videos aren't going to be any good yeah i'll get more

and more tired and then eventually i'll lose the passion for it and i don't want to lose the passion for it i still i'm still love it at the moment but i can see how people lose the love for it i would think it would be inevitable yeah because you're just you're in a rut right you're not you got to continue to push yourself and grow in different ways and if you're so immersed in one thing there's no room to even contemplate doing anything else. Like that, that's going to play itself out. And getting more headspace and giving more thought into what I'm doing and what I can create is only going to benefit the audience anyway. For instance, like I've never thought beyond daily vlogs, but what if I was to create a cool series or a feature length movie about something like those things excite me. series or a feature length movie about something like those things excite me and i can never do that if i'm just if i don't have a team helping me do stuff and it makes sense if i've got a team

to look at them investing into building like that the jack's gap guys have kind of done that a little bit right yeah i mean they i mean the frequency of their videos seems to have become well they're kind of they're going through an interesting phase at the moment maybe you'll be able to maybe you'll be able to get a chat to jack at some point about it but i mean they they started a lot younger than me so i feel like they hadn't found themselves in the same way i'd kind of found myself so being young and i think this happens to a lot of younger teenage youtubers that suddenly blow up and super famous, you know, is suddenly there's, that's a lot of their identity and they didn't necessarily know what they were letting themselves in for.

And they haven't had the life experience. And, you know, I didn't get into YouTube till I was in my late twenties. So imagine getting into the YouTube in your late teens and suddenly you're a superstar and you haven't really learned about life yet you know so i don't know i i think i think they've been on a different journey to me um but i've always loved their content i can't wait until they're making videos again at some point but i don't

think jack's released a video for like a year now right right right well they're in ones in london and ones in new york yeah so finn's studying architecture in new york and and jack's doing some other stuff in london what else do people not realize about what it's like to be a daily vlog i mean you watch your videos live the adventure it all looks like it's so fun it's just awesome all the time 24 7 but what is the reality of what your day is like i think you you got to feel that pressure yeah i think honestly i think it's all a mindset but it's very easy to fall into a negative mindset of so at the worst i felt about it um and i don't like whinging about this on my to my audience and they don't like it either they actually i actually get i don't get any

support if i feel bad about daily complaining yeah because people are like wait your life's pretty much ideal like you you choose what you do you have this endless holiday and you're getting paid great money for it so and when i when i step back it's this whole thing of like you become normalized to your situation so you forget how great things are and you you can easily take things for granted right so i'm constantly this is about i'm constantly reminding myself this is a dream situation i'm in but on the negative side of always to really like think when i've been at my lowest i think it's it's you know being discouraged by like you know if i'm finding my identity of in success as progress but then like um you know i have a month where my views have dropped and i'm not gaining as much subscribers then i'm thinking oh like i'm failing you know and i don't know how to fix it

and then you think oh it's not about competing with other people and other channels but it's like even even looking at my own growth seeing that i've it's dropping every month rather than gaining you know and i'm like oh like my views are half what they used to be and people don't like me anymore all of these things you can easily get into that rut of thinking oh what have i done like what am i not interesting anymore am i just you know maybe i've lost something you know maybe people don't like me anymore. All of these things play in your mind. And then you find like you're a bit unhappy, like, oh, like I don't, you know, you upload a video, it doesn't get the views you wanted it to get.

And you're finding your identity in how many views you get or how popular you are. Meanwhile, you're, you know, scuba diving in Fiji. Exactly. And then more of my headspace is taken up rather than being in the moment and enjoying what we're doing by like, oh, man, why is my channel failing? And then you see the odd comment, which really pushes your button. Like, oh, Louis used to be big, but he's kind of like, you know, his channel's dying. I see those comments. I'm like, oh, that like you know and it's true my channel has has kind of declined and i put that down to a few things and i've stopped beating myself up about it but um it's one of the things which can

can definitely kind of eat away at you and i think it's just constantly pulling yourself away from that mindset um of feeling like upset by it and i know so many youtubers in the same place to the point where people are being brought to tears about it they're so upset you know that their views are dropped in there um especially when you've built a business off something and i was saying i was chatting to youtube on the phone about this and i said if you were any other business and your revenue dropped to 50% in one month of what it was that's like there's no stability there you'd feel this complete uncertainty of like well how are you supposed to build anything how are you supposed to budget for your year or you know you

I know a lot of youtubers I know have like managed to save up money to buy a house or get a mortgage on a house or whatever you know what if the next month you like you predicted to earn this and then suddenly it's half of what you earned just because your views have dropped because youtube changed the way they share videos with their algorithms whatever there's all these theories of like why views drop in times and i don't know i just so that's a constant uncertainty is like you just don't know like but the lesson in that is that you have to cultivate a sense of self a strong healthy sense of self that is independent of your relationship to your audience and how the view counter and the subscriber counter and all of that that's going to make

you insane yeah and and it's and it but it trains you if your mind's in this space and most of like my generation and the younger generation coming up it's all about even people without a platform without a social following as such they still like i was chatting to people teenagers that the most popular kids are still the ones are the ones with the biggest instagram followings at school like they've got a couple of thousand instagram followers and it goes back to when i was a kid on facebook or teenager i was like yeah thinking back like the more friends you had on facebook the more popular you appeared so that it makes sense to me the more likes you get on instagram that you know it's this training of kids is that the more social interaction they get online the

more value they have as a person and then it goes all the way up to people i know with 10 million subscribers on youtube they feel the same and it's like what are we there's always somebody else who's got more subscribers what are we what are we training ourself to believe subconsciously if it's so yeah it's a it's a it's a dangerous it can be quite a toxic kind of world the online social media world. Definitely. But you seem like you're all right. Yeah, I think I've recognized it.

I still fall into those thought patterns and I might feel a bit sad one day of like, even in the last few weeks, my views dropped again or this year, and I'm like, what? I don't get it. And I'm like, I want to figure this out, but also I don't want this to consume me. So you have to make this conscious choice of like, I want to figure this out, but also I don't want this to consume me.

So you have to make this conscious choice of like, I'm just going to carry on. I'm just going to do the things I'm passionate about. For me, I truly believe if you follow your, I know this sounds so cheesy, but if you follow your heart, if you follow the things you're passionate about, if you do things that give you life,

that's what impacts everything else. Because, and it comes down to this thing i had a long time ago it's a pivotal kind of question someone asked me is like what do you want and and essentially do what you want and i know that sounds super selfish but if you're if you're not doing what you want then you're doing what you don't want to be doing which which doesn't bring life and it brings resentment and it brings you know you're not you're trapped right but if you're truly pursuing your heart of what you really want to be doing then i think that's what people feed off like that's being the best version of yourself is pursuing your heart right and then and then that gives life to other people you can overflow with that kind of energy right yeah it's what

gives you the life force and allows you to then give back right like we're we're we're sort of trained to think if we take care of ourselves that that's selfish right but the truth is is that you have to you know till your own soil so that you can you know create something fertile enough so that you have something to give yeah you know i just know it was funny i was at the pool this morning working out, and there's an older guy. He's there every day, swimming every day, you know, working out hard. And he said, hey, like I think his wife was giving him a hard time

because he always wants to go to the pool. And he's like, what's most important to you, like your kids, your wife, your career, or like fitness? You know, he he's like be honest with me no judgment i said well you're you're boxing me into a corner right there i mean the answer is obvious to me but but i will say this that if you don't take care of yourself you can't be a good servant to others yeah and so i have to take care of myself so i can be the husband and the father and the professional that I want to be. Right. And so by you pursuing, you know, what makes your heartbeat hardest, that gives you that prana that you can then sort of give back to the world. And I think your YouTube channel and

what you do online is a reflection of that. People respond to it positively because you are truly you know in pursuit of your bliss yeah and and most people don't aren't you know that's the tragic unfortunate thing right so we got to wrap this up here but you know maybe it's a good kind of like you know way to bring it home is you know what do you say to that person who does feel stuck in their life who's you know in a in a job that is not fulfilling to them and watches your videos and maybe your videos even make them angry because they see somebody enjoying their life and it feels so inaccessible to them and they they just can't see their way out of it i would i don't know how to summarize this in a sentence but i would say it doesn't have to be a sentence i would say look at what's holding you back then look at worst case scenario if you

were to quit your job or whatever and then if it comes down to like i can't pay my rent can't whatever i mean it gets a little bit more difficult if you're supporting like a family but then i'd say okay well can't you change that situation could you live in a cheaper way and and i honestly think a big strength i think you touched on this is like being adaptable and something that maybe for people listening maybe you never learned that yet when you were younger is how to adapt to different life situations so it it instills this like fear of not having enough money or not having a secure job or not having the house you want. And I'd say to know that you can survive and adapt and actually in a lot of ways be freed by letting go of certain things then then you can step out and and i guess go and go and live your own adventure without without feeling trapped i'm not necessarily

saying that you you don't have any money and you have to like be homeless to do it but to be willing to be homeless with no money gives you all to like be homeless to do it but to be willing to be homeless with no money gives you all the scope and freedom in the world because you're like well if you think well at the bottom of this worst case scenario if i don't have any money and i'm homeless what does that look like and that's what i had to like actually experience to know that that isn't actually that bad like you don't need to be living on the street doing drugs like being homeless and no money doesn't look necessarily like that but what just changes your relationship to risk yeah it goes everything's everything's like that's the worst

possible scenario right so everything's better than that and and the likelihood is that people have the initiative to do something whether it's and I say in this world, if it's travel related, right? People feel trapped and they want to go out and travel. There's so many jobs you can do online now. There's so many ways to earn money on the go, like more than ever. And I remember doing it 10 years ago, designing little websites on my laptop whilst living homeless in Australia with no money. And I was like finding Wi-Fi and finding cafes to plug in my laptop. And I was like finding wifi and finding cafes to plug in my laptop.

And I was like, if people really want to, you can do it. Like it's only them. It's only you stopping yourself doing it. But I think it's taking that jump of, and this, this niggly voice in your head saying you can't do it,

but just don't listen to that. Just. Yeah. There's a leap of faith. There's a, there's a reconfiguration of your relationship to that voice in your head and then there's tangible action steps that you can take that you know aren't going to be immediately it's not about like up and quitting your job overnight but there's

things that you can reconfigure about how you're living your life that are going to move you in that direction yeah good talking to you man cool yeah we did it it's been good how do you feel yeah great i actually do enjoy chatting good man that was awesome i was worried because i was like man we hung out and we talked about so much stuff and i was like are you sure you want to do the podcast are we going to be able to keep this how long were we talking i don't even know it's been almost two hours wow yeah it's awesome it's cool so fantastic um if you're digging on louis he's pretty easy to find subscribe to his youtube channel he needs the love he's got no one watching his videos over there fun for louis fun for louis on instagram fun for louis on twitter pretty much everywhere

right yeah um awesome dude where's the next uh adventure gonna take you um heading over to utah next week for a few days and then down to Mexico to pick up a school bus that I've bought online, which is going to be quite a big adventure. I heard a rumor about this. Cool, man. Well, this was great.

Maybe I'll convince you to come back here and we'll talk a little bit more. Yeah. But I appreciate it, man. You're an inspiration. I love what you're doing and nothing but good vibes and godspeed so why don't you take us out with your trademark tag peace out enjoy life and live the adventure so good all right peace plants

like i said that louis cole he's a beautiful man. He's an old soul. Not so sure about some of the things he had to say about North Korea. Do your own research on that one. A little controversial, but you know what? Louis has a good heart. He's got a big heart and I'm a better person for having him in my life. Something that just went down with Louis that I thought I would mention, he just wrapped a Kickstarter where he raised the funds to create this really cool documentary tentatively entitled Beyond Borders. And it's a film that follows basically a global circumnavigation by Louis and his buddy JP. In August, essentially, these two guys are going to spend 90 days

traveling the world in a tiny twin engine prop plane. They're going to fly 40,000 miles, 22 countries, six continents, all in an effort to find and document a perspective on a wide variety of different cultures and showcase the beauty of what they experience. I'm really looking forward to that. I'll put a link up to the Kickstarter in the show notes, although the Kickstarter is already closed. I don't know if they're still taking donations, but there's a little video there that kind of describes what these guys are intending to do. And it's pretty inspiring.

So you guys should check that out. Speaking of show notes, don't forget to check out the show notes on the episode page for this episode. Lots of links to find out the show notes on the episode page for this episode. Lots of links to find out more about Louis and his work. Take your edification beyond the earbuds, so do that. Plant Power Ireland is coming up July 24 through 31. We are descending upon this extraordinary villa called Ballyvalane in the heart of Ireland. It's going to be an incredible seven-day

experience of transforming your life. We're roping in the happy pair guys into this experience. We're going to cook amazing food. There's going to be nutrition tutorials. We're going to go running. We're going to do tea ceremony. We're going to have intensive but fun workshops on creativity and relationships. The whole idea is to help every single person who attends unlock and unleash your best, most authentic self and to really have a substantial, profound impact on your life going forward. So if this sounds like something that you would be interested in, that you're into, check out OurPlantPowerWorld.com, OurPlantPowerWorld.com. If you would like to support this show and my work, there's a couple of ways to do that.

Share it with your friends and on social media, leave a review on iTunes, subscribe on iTunes. When you're gonna buy something on Amazon, click through the Amazon banner ad on my website or type in richroll.com forward slash Amazon or bookmark that to your browser. Amazon kicks us some commission change and that supports us

tremendously. You can also support my work on Patreon. And I want to thank everybody who has taken that extra step to do that. Warms my heart. It means a lot to me. If you would like to receive a free short weekly email from me, I send one out every Thursday. It's called Roll Call. Five or six simple tools, tips, resources that I've come across over the course of the week. Usually a couple articles I've read, a podcast I've listened to, a documentary I've watched, a book I'm reading, a product that I'm enjoying. No spam, no affiliate links. I'm not trying to make any money off this. Just sharing helpful information with you guys. Totally free. You can subscribe to it, sign up for it on my website, any of those places where you can kind of enter

your email address. And while you're on my site, any of those places where you can kind of enter your email address. And while you're on my site, you can check out the store. We've got signed copies of Finding Ultra on the Plant Power Way. We've got cool t-shirts, sticker packs, tech tees, some, you know, cool merch and swag. I want to thank today's sponsors, Zeal, zeal.com. Choose one of their 8,000 licensed massage therapists for an on-demand massage in your own home to help get you started. Listeners of this podcast can get $25 off their first massage

by visiting zeal.com and adding promo code ROLL at checkout. And MeUndies, the world's most comfortable underwear. Visit meundies.com forward slash ROLL today to get free shipping in the US and Canada and 20% off your first pair. I want to thank everybody who helped put on the show today. Jason cameo low for audio engineering, for production,

for help on the show notes, Sean Patterson, for all his help on the graphics, all the kind of imagery and the motion graphics that you're seeing on Instagram. If you're not following me on Instagram, you gotta, you gotta go there.

I'm sharing lots of cool stuff there at ritual. Sean is responsible for all that work. Theme music by Anna Lemma. Thanks for the love, you guys. As Louie says, live the adventure. Try to find the adventure in your life today. It doesn't mean you're going to go ballooning in Kenya, but I think that there is simple,

facile ways for all of us to find free and easy ways to be more adventuresome in the construct of our daily lives. So I'm certainly thinking about this week, that about that. I'm certainly thinking about that this week, and I hope you guys are too. So I'll see you guys soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you.