The Rich Roll Podcast - Millennials & Why It’s Cool To Be Conscious and Actively Involved

Episode Date: September 29, 2014

The subject of “Millennials” generally conjures up adjectives like lazy or entitled. No work ethic. Spoiled brats, the lot of them. TIME Magazine went so far as to call millennials the “Me Me Me Generation”. This has not been my experience with the teens and twenty-somethings among us. In fact, I can honestly say that I find myself relating to many millennials better than I relate to my own generation. Maybe that just makes me juvenile. But that's a perspective lazier that the millennial stereotype itself. Admittedly, my exposure to this cross-section of our society is somewhat self-selecting. But it's worth noting that over the last several years I've had the good fortune of meeting dozens of incredibly dynamic, conscious and entrepreneurial young people. Kids highly engaged in things my generation didn’t give a crap about like permaculture, social issues, sustainability, conservation and mindfulness. Students with doctorates and business degrees who could be on Wall Street instead toiling away on organic farms, working for non-profits, or starting their own — choosing career paths based not on security and salary but on impact. People leveraging the power of social media to challenge societal norms, disrupt outdated modalities, create self-styled careers that didn't previously exist and launch their own grassroots movements. The common thread is the singular goal — to make the world a better place for all of us. Jackson Foster is one of these guys — the best kind of millennial. A guy whose life presented him with every open door possible, it would have been easy for Jackson to simply step into a safe and secure (an illusion I know, but you get my point) high paying business career. But Jackson has other plans. In high school, while most of Jackson’s teen peers were playing video games, partying and generally just acting like, well teenagers, Jackson spent a year in the Colorado wilderness. After being accepted into the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, he decided instead to defer so he could travel – a year spent bicycling across the US, hiking the John Muir Trail, mountaineering in Laos and even working at an orangutan orphanage in Borneo. These experiences left him thinking about one thing: food. Jackson noticed how food greatly affected the livelihood of different communities around the world, which motivated a desire to immerse himself in diet and lifestyle study. This exploration left him with no choice but to walk his talk; a wholesale transition from a beer drinking, weed smoking, junk food vegetarian teenager reborn as a whole food plant-based activist and educator. Jackson transferred from RISD to Colorado College as an Environmental Policy major and went to work. Outside his college coursework he found the time to: become a Certified Yoga Instructor; obtain a Certification In Plant-based Nutrition through the T. Colin Campbell Center for Nutrition Studies ; start the website Plantriotic ; found and chair a vegan student group at Colorado College; write for Vegan Health and Fitness Magazine ; spend his summers working with environmental groups like 350.org ; help with student recruitment for the recent...

Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 106 with Jackson Foster. The Rich Roll Podcast. All right, let's do this, people. Rich Roll here. This is the RRP. Welcome to my podcast, The Rich Roll Podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Welcome to my podcast, the Rich Roll podcast. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing the show with a friend. And thank you for supporting the show by clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. This really helps us out. So thank you so much to all of you out there who have been supporting us in this way. Come on, don't forget, you know, you're buying stuff on Amazon. Click through, click the banner ad, do it. All right, let's broaden our horizons.

Let's think more critically about things. Let's set aside old habits, preconceived notions, assumptions. Let's challenge the status quo, people. Let's ponder the possibility of a new and better way, not just for us, but for our kids and the planet. That's what I'm here to do. So each week, you know what I do. I sit down with people who challenge and inspire me, thought leaders, artists, entrepreneurs, world-class athletes, doctors, nutritionists, trainers, and even everyday people, people who have managed to do amazing things to transform their lives. Paradigm-busting minds and personalities here to educate, motivate, and inspire you on your own unique path to uncover,

unlock, and unleash your best, most authentic self. I want to talk about millennials. You know what I'm talking about. All these crazy kids, these young people, the lazy, the entitled, these spoiled brats, the kids who are lacking a work ethic. Time Magazine even called millennials the me, me, me generation. But I'm here to say that this has not been my experience. In fact, I relate to so many members of this generation better than I relate to people of my own generation more often than not. Maybe that just makes me juvenile. Maybe, I suppose. I don't know.

But I will say this. In the last few years, I've met tons of really inspiring young people. In fact, when we lived at Common Ground on this organic farm on the north shore of Hawaii about two years ago, I was immersed with 20-somethings, 21, 22, 23-year-olds, all these kids with master's degrees in things like permaculture and sustainability, kids who could be out making bank and instead working on a farm, interested in things my generation really didn't, you didn't give a crap about, things like permaculture and social issues, sustainability, conservation, disrupting old modalities, challenging the status quo to find ways to do things better. These kids are choosing career paths based not on security and salary, but on impact, challenging the societal norms established

by their predecessors and searching to implement a better path for all of us. And today's guest, Jackson Foster, he's one of these guys. He's a guy whose life presented him with basically every open door possible. And it would have been very easy for him to simply step into a very comfortable, cushy life in business or just having a high paying career, a nice, secure life. But Jackson has other plans. I first met him when he invited me out to speak at his school, Colorado College, where he's a student. And I was really struck by his passion and his dedication to an ideal of a better world and I really wanted to take the opportunity to share his message with all of you guys which is what we're doing here today Jackson is a dude of infinite passions

he's a yoga teacher he's a college student he's a vegan animal liberation activist he's a plant-based educator he's a bodybuilder he's an artist he's a vegan animal liberation activist. He's a plant-based educator. He's a bodybuilder. He's an artist. He's a chef. He's a journalist. He's a writer. He's a vlogger. He's an athlete.

And he's a member of a really cool family of exceptional people that I've had the honor of getting to know a little bit. He has some siblings that are doing amazing, interesting things, different, but also equally impressive to Jackson. And it was a pleasure to sit down with him. And the thing about him is that, you know, while most of Jackson's teen peers were out playing video games or partying or generally just acting like, you know, teenagers, Jackson decided that he was going to opt out of high school and he spent a year in Colorado, in the Colorado wilderness.

And then he went back to school. And after being accepted in the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, RISD, he decided to, again, defer. He took a gap year so he could travel. And he bicycled across the U.S. He hiked the John Muir Trail. He was mountaineering in Laos. And he worked on an orangutan orphanage in Borneo,

all the while like gaining life experience and developing his authentic self and searching for greater meaning and what he wanted his life to be all about. And these experiences left him thinking basically about one thing, food. He noticed how food greatly affected the livelihood of different communities around the world, which in turn led him to delve into studying diet and lifestyle. And in his mind, this left him with no choice but to transition from a beer-drinking, weed-smoking, junk food, vegetarian teenager into what he is today, which is a pretty hardcore whole food, vegetarian, and teenager into what he is today, which is a pretty hardcore whole food, plant-based activist and educator. Since then, he's gone on to become a certified yoga instructor.

He's certified in plant-based nutrition through the T. Colin Campbell Center of Nutrition Studies. He transferred as an environmental policy major from RISD to Colorado College. He started a website called plantriotic.com, which we're going to talk about. He's written for Vegan Health and Fitness magazine. He's worked with environmental groups like 350.org, which is where he was interning last summer. That's the environmental group that has taken the stage in combating the fossil fuel industry. And he was helping with student recruitment for the recent People's Climate March in New York City, which

was just this past week. And he's even working on his first book. Can you imagine writing a book when you're like 21 years old? Anyway, his story, his evolution from typical high school student to really an independent thinker and someone devoted to educating the public on how to live a more peaceful, healthy, sustainable, happy, enjoyable life is really interesting and really inspiring. What I always say here on the show is, take what resonates with you, discard the rest. Jackson is nothing if not ardent, passionate, and at sometimes a bit radical, admittedly so on his part. So even if you happen to disagree with certain aspects of his point of view, you will be hard pressed not to be impressed by this young man's conviction, his passion, his devotion to service, and the selfless choices that he's made in hopes of,

again, just making this world a little bit better. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with him. making this world a little bit better. I thoroughly enjoyed sitting down with him. I'm proud and happy to share his message with you. And it's encouraging and makes me optimistic that there are young people out there like Jackson who are fighting hard to implement change for the better for all of us. So let's check him out.

Let's see what his vibe is all about. Hope you enjoy the conversation. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and

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Bear with me. So just before we started, you said you only got an iPhone like four or five months ago. It is wild. Bear with me. So just before we started, you said you only got an iPhone like four or five months ago. It is true. I got an iPhone and a Facebook within the same week of each other for very specific reasons as well. But yeah, I went through all of high school with this waterproof flip phone. I was really into ceramics and it allowed me to get clay and water all over my phone. And I also wanted to be sort of the renegade non iPhone dude. And I rolled with that for a long time. And I got and I'm, you know, I got an iPhone when I was 21, which I am right now. So yeah, I went through all of high school without one. And did you did you previously have a Facebook page that you deactivated?

That is right. So I had a Facebook in middle school and high school, and I deactivated that right after I graduated high school and started a gap year of, you know, experimentation and adventure and spiritual development. And I just decided to detach during that time, which I do not regret whatsoever. That was a really important thing for me to do. And so what brought you back to the iPhone? Oh, my gosh. The end of your ceramics career? No, no.

I am currently the ceramics teacher at Colorado College, in fact, including as I'm a student. No, it was vegan activism and everything that I do. The person that I'm trying to become of educating my peers and the entire planet on, you know, getting on a healthier wavelength. And I realized that I needed social media, Facebook and iPhone, easy access to the public in order to really have a voice. And it was sort of a dropping my ego. I was really into being the cool kid that was so off the grid and, you know, mountain man, backpacker, vegan dude. And finally it got to the point where I had to break down my ego that I liked from that in order to give in to the mainstream in order to have a positive effect.

And it has been totally fruitful. So yeah, it's a tool. I mean, if you, it's, it's all in your relationship to it, but that's, you made a very interesting point, which is the ego attached to a certain identity. And, you know, you could say, well, you know, I've deflated my ego, you know, like I I'm not on social media and I'm not, but there's a certain kind of identity and ego that attaches to that just as well. That could be equally nefarious or unhealthy. Exactly. It's truly the same thing. It's just associating your ego with anything that you're trying deliberately to define yourself, whether it's you're obsessed with Facebook or whether you're too cool for Facebook, they're equally as demonstrative. We have this whole mentality, especially in my generation.

Like if you're checking your Facebook, which a lot of people do, your friends will be like, oh, you're on Facebook. Facebook's not cool, even though we all use Facebook and it's really cool. But at the same time, I was being that person without a Facebook and people judging me for that and myself judging myself for that. It, it just got out of hand. Or having some kind of weird pride about that. A lot of pride about it.

Right. So now it's a tool. You're using it healthy. But I think, you know, that, that also brings up this idea of, you know, being whether, you know, whatever it is, whatever team that you're on, creating an identity around that. So you're a vegan dude, right? And you have, you have a whole identity around that. So how do you keep the ego in check with respect to how you identify yourself publicly and to yourself when your head's on the pillow at night? You are asking that to me directly to my face. That's what I ask myself every moment of my life. Um, that is through the practice of yoga and meditation and constantly keeping yourself in check of the person that you're trying to become so that it doesn't become something

that's also going to destroy you. Um, I am a, I became a yoga teacher this year. I did my certification and I was vegan prior to even getting into yoga. And from balancing both of them together, they've only both heightened my interest. And I've found the inner connectiveness of both of those things, um, instead of independently practicing each. There was like a definitive moment where I was getting into yoga and I was doing my vegan education and activism stuff completely separate. And when I finally brought that together, it sort of blossomed into this whole new realm of what I knew both of them could do with each other.

And what is that realm? new realm of what I knew both of them could do with each other. And what is that realm? Oh, man. Nonviolence, pretty much. I got into the whole vegan movement purely through nutritional stuff. It happened during my gap year, which we can delve into as well. Yeah. Let's just take it back. Yeah. I, I think that's right. In order to get a nice picture. Yeah. I mean, so you grew up in Brantwood, right here. It's like a Tony neighborhood of Los Angeles. You're an LA kid, born and raised. And, uh, and, and you've had, I mean, I've, I've had the great, you know, the, the honor, nice opportunity of meeting your parents and one of your brothers.

Super nice people. Loving people on the planet. Yeah. I mean, it seems like you had pretty charmed upbringing. I did. I am the most privileged person on the planet. I know a lot of people could say that, but I truly think that I am so privileged in so many ways. privileged in so many ways. And growing up in that private school, LA, wealthy upbringing,

has its demons with it. There's no doubt. And that is, that's how I, it was being amongst that community that allows me now to read, to go back and now rethink all of the normalities that I grew up with, um, in order to define what means anything to me anymore, because I realized that I grew up with sort of this shield cloud fog of who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to like and how I was supposed to define success that really no longer pertains to how I do. So yeah, I grew up, I went to sort of all begins at Harvard Westlake high school where I went to school, which is a great place. Right. For people that are listening out there, Harvard Westlake is like the Tony is sort of private high school in, in Los Angeles, like the most prestigious high school

that you could go to. And I, I can only say a lot of great things about it because they have a lot of amazing qualities. I found an amazing creative arts community in there and I never let it sort of strangle me, but the mainstream college student, the average, or sorry, the mainstream high school average student at Harvard Westlake, people sort of say are either like super geniuses or like kind of bought into the system. It's just like how it is. Um, and so I grew up at that school, um, really defining like a cool person, a successful kid was someone that got the best grades, literally had a fancy car, like 12 year old girls walking in with like thousand dollar handbags into, into school. And I just never got it. Like I never understood why I should be coming into that mentality of how I should,

you know, promote myself to my peers on the planet. Right. And, you know, there's a classic story. My parents always say that my first like words when I was a baby, I would run around the house naked, like banging on the glass doors, just like screaming outside. Cause that's like what you want to be outside. That's where I wanted to be. And I had a best friend rabbit and we just hung outside in the dirt. And I never found that connection at Harvard Westlake.

And so that forced me, thankfully, to leave Harvard Westlake my junior year of high school. And I got into this program called the High Mountain Institute in Leadville, Colorado, which is a place where you can apply in anyone from around the country or world. We had a kid from Panama there, but mainly from the U.S. And you leave your homeschool, your junior year of high school, and spend a semester out in the Rocky Mountains at 10,000 feet in Leadville. Yeah, Leadville is super high up there. Yeah, it's like one of the highest cities in the country. How many kids were part of that program? There's 40 to like 45 kids per semester,

and you can only go there for one semester, and you have to be a junior. And so what's a day in the life like at that place? So everything is so spontaneous, there isn't really a day in the life. The way the program works is that you're on campus, which is sort of like three large cabins with electricity and internet and very livable, comfortable structures where we have a couple classrooms and a small library, you know, the size of a room. And we spend three weeks on campus getting all our regular studies in. You can take AP US History, Calculus, you know, Science, whatever. And your teachers are between the ages of like 25 and 35.

Like there's no one there over like 35 years old. And so you have, so it kind of feels like summer camp. You're with 20 guys and 20 girls your age and it it's super fun, and we all cook meals together. And you just take class for about three weeks. And then after that three-week period, your academic teachers take you in groups of like 10 on a two-week super rural backcountry backpacking trip in the middle of the Rockies. Wow. So it's three weeks of school, two weeks of expedition and then repeat. And in total, you have three expeditions and like three sections on campus. So it comes out to be about four months.

Right. I mean, looking at you, you know, headband on, long hair, you got the plugs in your ears and the whole thing. It's like, I have such a hard time seeing you at Harvard Westlake. Yeah. You know, I've changed a lot. My best friends, we need to have a meeting every year to say, here's who I am now. I'm ready to re-meet you because I'm changing a lot. I grew up the hipster, skinny jean wearing, weed smoking high school kid. That was who I am. And I'm, I'm proud of

everything that has happened because it has led me to where I am right now. And I see a really just fruitful, peaceful, nice path ahead of me. But, um, yeah, there's been lots of changes and HMI allowed me to accept that I didn't need to go back to Harvard Westlake and fit into the community that I was simply placed in. And that was the first time that I gained the confidence because I was in such a place of just like what, what they valued was don't, don't stress about us history. Don't stress about math class, work hard, go into the mountains, find your connection with nature, read some John Muir, and you'll probably be happier. Right. It's that idea of if you can connect with yourself, your higher self,

and figure out what it is that is deep within you that you want to express more fully, then that's going to set you on a path towards exploration and expressing that in your life that's ultimately going to make you a more fulfilled, happy person. And no matter how great the teachers at Harvard Westlake are or XYZ High School in America, you're not going to be told what you just said. That's not part of the Harvard Westlake curriculum or the curriculum really of any public or private school for that matter. Right. And this is why, I mean, HMI was a life-saving tool in every way. Your parents must have known like, well, this kid's a little bit different.

Like, what are we going to do with this guy? Of course. Yeah. I mean, all your siblings are all doing extraordinary things. So clearly your parents had, you know, the acumen or the foresight to be able to say, all right, how are we going to, you know, design, help, you know, sort of foster this child. Foster, no pun intended. Right. Foster this child into being, you know, the person that they're supposed to be. Yeah.

It'd be very easy. I mean, your dad's a really successful business person. You know, I know where you grew up and all of that. It'd be very easy to say, no, look, you go to Harvard-Westlake. Right. You're in the best college you get. You go become an investment banker or a doctor. And that's why I go back to I'm the most privileged person in the world because despite all those comforts that I grew up with, my parents never, ever, ever forced us to be something that we didn't want to be.

And I truly mean that from dressing up as a girl when we were little to just doing whatever we want. There was no rules that were silly rules. We had rules like don't drink, don't smoke, don't be violent. But we grew up in a safe, open atmosphere where we could be who we are and experiment. And that's what allowed me to always strive towards, okay, I can take a step back and I can figure out who I am and I'm probably going to be happier for that reason. And now I've only taken that to a further extent. Right, with what you're doing now. But was HMI, was that your idea or how did you figure out that that was something you wanted to do?

I totally just heard about it. My cousin had done a similar experience at another school called the Mountain School. There's tons of semester high school programs, and that one's in Vermont. It's sort of focused on farming. Super cool. And I found HMI. And I grew up, despite how much I love my parents so much, getting to take a bike ride to the beach was like my form of like going camping. That's how like indoors my family is. Well, that's life in LA too, you know?

Yeah. But, but I grew up with a lot of friends that, you know, their family would go to Yosemite over the summer or they'd go to a national park. Like our vacations were go to New York, go to Seattle, you know, go even around the world to cities. Cause that's what my dad does. He's in the movie business. We go to movie premieres. That's like the fun weekend thing. And both my brothers are really happy with sitting on a couch and watching a good movie and reading a book. And like, that's a great day. And I, that's just not, that's not your thing. That's not my thing. Um, so HMI was, I, I just found it and my whole family knew it was going to be a positive thing for me. And, and I, I wasn't in any trouble. Like all my,

you know, all my like mom's friends were like, Oh yeah, Jackson's like in the mountains for the semester. And they're like, Oh yeah. What, what happened? And, and there's like, no, it's like a prestigious program. It's like really great. It's like code for rehab. Yeah, exactly. Like troubled kid or something like that. And there's a lot of great programs for people that, you know, need to have that experience,

some wilderness experience for rehabilitation reasons. But so while I didn't go to HMI for any substance abuse reasons. It was rehab for people that aren't clinically addicted to something. Like I was addicted to my LA fast, non-natural lifestyle and I needed an alternative. And I went out in the mountains and met a bunch of amazing people and got the confidence to have just formal backpacking skills that I now use forever. And it literally liberated me to be an adventurer and seek higher consciousness when I never knew it was an option. It is a weird thing that, you know, if you do any, if you just take a left step or a right step, any, any way outside of the norm, especially, you know, during the high school years or the college years, that something must be wrong, right?

That it's, oh, he's doing what? Like, what happened? You know, instead of like— If you get off the path, oh, no. Right, yeah, if you get off the—or what's going to—how is this going to affect how you're getting into colleges and what are people going to think and all that kind of stuff comes into play. And it's—that's messed up, man. And it hurts a lot of people.

We don't associate a lot of the problems that our generation is going with. You know, millennials, we have all these issues. Kids, you know, getting addicted to cigarettes and drugs when they're 12 and teen pregnancy and just all these things that we deem as bad things in our world, whether that's right or wrong, there's always a reason to that. There's a root cause to a lot of things. And just as in veganism

and preventative medicine, there's preventative medicine and growing up to be a depressed or a happy person. And I think that all starts at a very young, young age and being told that you belong on a path that everyone else is following. And if you veer off in any way, you know, you're fucked over your other friends. That just promotes fear. Like just keep towing the line. And fear is suffering. Right. And fear leads to suffering. So, yeah.

So you return from this experience and then you go back to Harvard Westlake after having this mountain experience. Yeah, so I went. What was that re-entry like? work, a combination of like, I'm so grateful for what I just experienced and it's going to change my life with a combination of, you know, being a teenager and just being like, I hate my life now because I'm back in LA with all the same people who don't understand the experience I just had. I went by myself. There was no one, no other students from my school. So you don't know what it's like, man. Yeah. You don't know what living in the mountains and, and, and these profound experiences I've

had, I had, I mean, I keep in mind, I'd never like had a real backpacking camping experience. And I found myself, you know, on day 12, like usually the expeditions were like 14 days, like on day 12 in literally sub zero temperatures, summiting the highest peak in Colorado, Mount Elbert, you know, without much food, carrying everything on my back in a landscape that you literally are like on another planet. It was like, it was a trippy, spiritual, incredible experience. And I came back and my friends are doing the same thing and doing their high school thing and worrying about college. And that was the last thing on my mind. And it was

hard to immerse back into that community. And because of that, I became a bit of a loner. There's no doubt. Right. I mean, I envision high school at Harvard Westlake as being something out of like a Bret Easton Ellis book? Like, you know, like to like, what is the social strata like and what are the parties like? Yeah. So it's not like a conventional high school where there's like the jocks that like in there, you know, leather jackets that run the place. Like it is a creative artsy, um, hipster vibe that, uh, the cool kids but but it's not crossroads either no no it's way preppier and more formal and like that but you know like drugs just formed high school the high school experience like if you did not do drugs or drink no matter if you were a jock or an artsy kid,

like you probably weren't cool. And what kind of drugs are people doing in high school these days? I'm just, I'm being voyeuristic. I'm like old enough to be your dad. Like I'm just curious. It's my dad. It was my dad's 52nd birthday yesterday. And we went to Gracias Madre. Oh, cool. And it was very nice. But like just kids, kids got really into smoking weed. Um, and it's easier to get weed here in LA than it is to buy a six pack. Right. And literally by like 10th or 11th grade when people were turning 18 or their siblings were turning 18, like there was no like drug dealing. Like people literally left school, went to the marijuana club and like got their weed for the weekend.

Yeah. And, and like if one kid got their club card, you know, for complete BS reasons, they would literally go to a doctor, say, I have a, you know, ache in my back and I go to a stressful school and they give you your card. And so I began to like, I was always a little distant. I, I came a little later. It was actually coming back from HMI that I started to smoke more and I was never much of a drinker, but I, the, the, the one thing that my brothers and I, um, sort of talked to my parents about now that we don't agree with and the way they raised us was like, drugs and alcohol are going to kill you. And if you experiment with that stuff, like you're going down and I wouldn't, you know, if I had children this moment, I would now reflecting on that, give them that message. Cause it's just not true. It's just another experience, like anything to have. And I think it's valuable. And I experimented with casually smoking pot for a few years, like 11th and 12th grade. And keep in mind, oh gosh,

I was a junk food vegetarian at that time. So I became a vegetarian when I was in eighth grade, purely because- I didn't realize it went back that far. Yeah. And my mom was like pseudo vegetarian. Like she just didn't eat meat really for just like to be lean and healthy, but like she would eat fish and whatever. She wasn't a vegetarian. But yeah, so I became a vegetarian in eighth grade. What prompted that? What was the catalyst?

Since I can literally remember thinking every single moment that I ate meat, I would feel like a jerk, literally from three years old. So just in your core, in your constitution, that's just how you're hardwired. Was I don't want to be involved with killing animals. So you had that awareness, that consciousness very early. And I was in love with animals growing up. And I manifested that in keeping animals in enslaved captive environments that when I was younger. So another way of saying having pets. But I like to have no that language is a big thing for me right now, especially when you're trying to communicate to people.

I think it's it can be a really powerful tool to not use these fake words. You know, meat is flesh. You know, bacon is pig, whatever. So, but if you have a dog, you're not enslaving your dog. No. So dogs are very different. We can get into that whole concept. I don't want to get too sidetracked onto this. We shouldn't, but sort of the, the, the big differentiating figure is that the modern

dog from the golden retriever, you knowver to the pug are not wild animals. There's literally not one wild golden retriever on the planet. These are species. No, it's actually pretty crazy when you think about it. Every dog comes from the wolf, which is a wild animal. wild animal and however many years ago probably in some cold climate wolves realized that if we team up with these humans they can provide us with food and shelter and we can pull their trolleys and whatever so it's like a mutual thing and we both do work for each other and then that came into crossbreeding and whatever which makes our dogs So literally the purpose of the dog is to serve human. And I

think there's a lot of wrong things with that. Cause when you think about it, how many dogs are in America that are just soaking up resources? I mean, we love them. I love my dogs. I have dogs in my house, but they do not balance the ecosystem in any way. And here's me talking just very scientific and practical. We no longer need the canine to make our lives function. They're purely recreational for us now. Emotional. They can emotionally balance people. Right. But how much meat is being eaten by dogs being grown on factory farms in our country in order for us to have that emotional connection to our dogs. It's a lot.

Yeah, I haven't thought about it that much. Yeah. I was just talking to this about my friends and they were getting mad at me because like to be mad at. Just relax. Come on. Yeah. And, you know, that's a huge thing that I struggle with. Like I am, you know, I in a way I sometimes think I've grown up too fast because I

am the, you know, I'm 21. I should be raging in college, just not thinking about anything. And instead I haven't done any drugs or alcohol in over two years. I'm vegan. I make a hundred percent of my own food. I spend my time practicing yoga and working out and writing, writing material, writing a book. Um, yeah. Where did it all go wrong, Jackson? I know. Like I, I'm a 21 year old, 90 year old. But anyway, you, you, you, you come back to Harvard-Westlake, and you're having this surreal experience after being in the mountains. But then you're in your final year, right? Yeah.

So gearing up for the whole college experience. Yes. So as a ceramicist, I was just really into pottery in high school. So they taught you that in high school? We have an unreal ceramic studio at Harvard Westlake that literally any professional would pay to have. And it's because our teachers, this one guy named John Gilbert Lupto, he is like 80-year-old ceramic and glass artist that is the teacher. He's literally taught there for like 50 years, something crazy. And he was my escape in the Harvard Westlake day.

So I would go through my classes mindlessly. I just hated academic class because when you just say to yourself that you hate school, you're going to hate school so much. I love school now because when we'll go into it, I got the time to literally not go to school for like 20 months or something like that in between high school and college. But, you know, just going through hating your stupid math classes that you think are pointless and you're never going to use. And I was in the arts department and this man, Mr. Lupto, he has, he's really old, has a massive like walrus mustache.

And he teaches the clay class, the pottery class. He's an amazing artist. And he would talk to us like we were real human beings and we would engage in conversation during class. And he was just sort of a radical hippie dude. And, you know, he would throw F-bombs here and there. And like, he made us feel like we were with our friends instead of that formal, you know, teachers at Harvard West like are like in suits and ties

and they're not your friends. Like they're your enemies in a way they can be. And maybe they're not trying to create that, but you sort of create that mentality. So this guy's different. This guy's, you're connecting with this guy in a different way. Yeah. So ceramics became a really important thing to me. I started doing it in ninth grade and I, it was my focus all throughout high school. Like I won the arts award, best artist at Harvard Westlake my senior year. And that was my thing. And I was good at it and I was creative. And after coming back from HMI, I became that sort of off the grid, different creative guy and I liked it. And so I thought

I was really into clay and pottery. So I applied in my senior year to the Rhode Island school of design, which is another super prestigious, just like my track of my prestigious elementary school to middle school, to high school. And obviously, you know, I, I thought that was the next step to go to RISD. Yeah. That's a bad-ass place. It is. It's great. And if you want to study art, it's probably the best place for you to be. So I got into RISD early. You did? Wow. Yeah. And that was so awesome. And I accepted. And that sort of HMI looming cloud in my brain said, take a step back. You got into this awesome college. Why don't you defer for a year?

And so I called them up and say, I accept, but can I enter the following year? So just have a full year in between high school and college free to not have to worry about school. I was into school. Um, and they said, yeah, that's totally cool. So once I graduated high school, instead of all my friends packing up to suit up for college, giving them not one breath of air in between this insane high school experience that we've all had going straight to this other crazy experience. I took a step back and I started to plan a little gap year. And that is where the journey truly, truly begins. Yeah. And I think that's another example of where your parents have been amazing because most parents would have been like, are you insane? You know, no, you're not doing that.

Like get moving with your life. It's time to move on. Thank you, mom and dad. So yeah, they had the foresight to see that this was something that was in your best interest or at least, you know, where your passion lied and they supported that. They were totally confident in me that I would not spend my year sitting on the couch, you know, with a joint in my mouth. They knew that wasn't going to be the case. And I proved that. So what I decided to do, um, was I went to summer camp that summer as a, as a counselor, as I did with all my friends. Nice Jewish boy. Yep. And that is a great place that I also, very HMI like in terms of how I learned what love was. This camp is about, Camp S. Kramer, it's up in Malibu, was about how to give love and to receive love. Forget the Judaism. They don't focus on that.

You know, there's arts and hiking and the ocean and singing and hugging. That is what Hess Kramer is. Is it overnight camp or just during the day? No, it's an overnight camp. So you go for a full month. Yeah. And I went since I was eight years old and I developed my best friends there. It's like an escape from your parents when you're that young to like discover love and friends.

Like it's, it's unbelievable. It's cool. I ride my bike by that camp all the time. Yeah. It's Yerba Buena right there. I think. Right. Exactly.'s, it's unbelievable. It's cool. I ride my bike by that camp all the time. Yeah. It's Yerba Buena right there. I think. Right. Yeah. Right. Right by Neptune's Net. Yeah. And I, and I looked down in that, into the campus down there and I was like, that looks pretty cool down there. I wonder what goes on down there. Amazing things. So I spent, so I graduated high school, went and, and did my summer camp, which is always fun. And and you know all my friends were

getting ready for college they're talking about oh i got in here i got in here and i'm like yeah i'm taking this gap year and my best friend in the world who was also a ghost camp his name is jason boxer and i convinced him he he was going to nyu he had just gotten into into NYU and was about to enter in September. And literally in like July, I convinced him to defer from NYU. And, um, I had the idea of riding my bicycle across America from coast to coast. Wow. So his parents must've been stoked. And I convinced him to do that like too much, two months before starting school. Um, And he is a great mindful person and convinced his parents that it was going to be all right. And so we developed, we began developing that plan. That's cool.

So you would have to figure out like how are you going to get from point A to point B? Exactly. What is the route you're going to take? Where are you going to stay? I mean, you just get like panniers for your bike yeah so we got touring bicycles i rode a trek 520 just super super simple with a big disc so you can like go up you can climb really easily um and so yeah he got a surly long haul trucker and we had panniers two in the back and two in the front and we were iphone-less we both had flip phones and i actually we recruited one more member which is my older brother drew and he was at brown

he had just finished his sophomore year i believe at brown university and we and i got him to take a semester off um from brown to go on this bike trip. And so, you know, September 1st came and we got everything together in L.A., our bikes, our panniers, and we picked out the route. We were going to start in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and make it to our home in L.A. Oh, so you flew to the East Coast and you were working your way back the other way. We actually took a train. Oh, you did?

Just for kicks. Uh-huh. So, and keep in mind, what was really interesting is that my older brother, like I was the older brother in this sort of adventurous situation. Because you'd already, you'd already, you had more experience. A lot more experience. I was the leader. He was following me. And that became its whole dynamic, which taught us a lot was the leader. He was following me. And that became its whole dynamic,

which taught us a lot during the trip. Um, cause he was always the older brother to look up to. And then, you know, on day two, I was the one changing his tires when he got a flat and we really grew to just love each other so much more and learn from each other through that. But so yeah, we decided to do the Transamerica route, which is Adventure Cycling is this company that sells like bike maps for cross country distances. And so there's this route that goes from Astoria, Oregon to Virginia Beach, Virginia. And we decided we would follow those maps. So they're just paper maps that say like, here's a good country road to take, and then here's another good one.

So it's not like a GPS or anything. It just gives you a guided route of, like, here's how to stay off the freeway and still, like, make distance. And it also says there's a convenience store this many miles away so you know you can get food or whatever. And so we thought it'd be kind of fun and funny to take a train across the country with our bikes so we took a train from like Seattle through like Montana North Dakota down to like all the way to DC and we hung out with a friend

in DC for like two days got everything together And then they drove us to Virginia beach and say goodbye. And we got our bikes out and we dunked them in the Atlantic ocean and just started riding home. And that feeling of the first 10 minutes of your cross country bike trip, like what are we doing? Where your bike weighs like 3000 pounds. No, our bikes were like 60 pounds with gear. Right. Um, cause we had, we had everything. We had our, our spare parts, our, you know, we would keep like two days of food as a time at a time. Cause it's not like a camping trip. You're going by gas stations and restaurants and whatever all day. But it was, it was a pretty rural trip, especially in, you know, rural Virginia, Kentucky. So the whole route was Virginia,

Kentucky, Southern Illinois, Missouri, Kansas. And then once we got to Pueblo, Colorado, it was like November. So instead of going over the Rockies, yeah, we hit snow in the Grand Canyon, actually. So at Pueblo, we went down south to New Mexico, Arizona, then California. So that was the whole route. Right. And so how many miles were you covering a day? About between 70 and 90 a day. And just camping at night? Yeah. So that was the best part. We literally did not plan one night of sleeping. So like on the first day, we did not know where we were going to be sleeping that night. And we mainly stayed, we camped on the side of the road, not like the side of the road,

but we would end in like, you know, literally the populations of the towns we were going through are like, like 200. Like, and I had never seen places like this before. And this is, this is where my veganism began to engage because I was a vegetarian through the whole trip, but a vegetarian happily eating milkshakes and grilled cheese and French fries and Coca-Cola all day. That's all you're going to get. Exactly, but I didn't know that. I grew up in L.A. where I could have an organic salad any day I want. Where's the gracious madre?

Exactly. Like, truly, that's how sheltered I really was. And I found myself in the— What? Yeah. Like I would have to literally describe what a vegetarian was to waitresses, like in diners. Like I would say, Hey, can I have the black beans? But I'm a vegetarian. So I, so is that okay? And they didn't know what a vegetarian was, a lot of people. So I really was like, whoa, I am eating milkshakes and eggs and fried food all day. But I thought that this was the part of the country that the food was supposed to come from. Because we were passing by farms all day, every day, miles and miles a day. And so finally- You're like, where's the fresh produce? Yeah. I thought this is like the nature way of American living. I grew up in the concrete jungle

and it was pretty good. Like this must be better. And it was literally the opposite. The people like, so we would sleep in city parks in tiny little towns outside of courthouses. We would stay in churches. We would ride up in our little spandex and some old granny would come out and literally give us cornbread. And we would charm them and say, hey, we're, you know, we're college students biking across the country. You know, we need a place to stay. And we would get put in, put up by people all the time. So you're staying in people's houses, staying in people's houses. You know,

if they fed us, we'd stay there for a day or two, take a rest. It was just, did you ever get busted by the cops for sleeping where you shouldn't sleep or, um, not, not that I can think of. It went pretty smoothly. Um, we figured out that if you call fire stations in the morning and say, hey, we're biking across the country. We're college students. We think we're going to end up in your town. Do you have any room in your firehouse? We stayed in so many fire stations. Really?

That's interesting. I didn't know that. Really fun. So this trip was, you know, me, my best friend and my brother, you know, biking stoned all day, every day across America, drinking pints of beer, you know, coming straight from high school. It was literally glorious. It was amazing. And on the fifth day of the trip, the trip was 81 days. And on the fifth day, we were riding by, you know, massive, um, hay bales. And we found, um, this man also with a, with panniers, um, on the side of the road, taking a picture of these hay bales.

Right. And we went over and said, Hey, what's going on? You look like you're taking a long, you know, cycling trip too. Um, and he's like, yeah, I started in Pennsylvania and I'm, and I'm actually going to California. And we're like, Hey, we're going to California too. And this was in Virginia. And we said, you want to like go to lunch together? Like you look like a cool guy. He was a little older than us. Um, like 28 ish. And we went to lunch at some random diner that day, got to, he was doing it solo, got to talking with him. And we literally did the entire trip all the way to our house with this man that we met. Wow. That's cool. And he is now a brother and a best friend of mine and we see each other multiple times a year.

Yeah. I mean, you just can't, I mean, I can't imagine going through something like that with other people and not coming out the other side, just completely bonded, either totally fractured and, or forever bonded together. It's interesting. There was a bit of both of that. There was a bit of both of that. Um, but this guy, Adam Gruber, um, he was from rural Amish, Pennsylvania. Dad was a truck driver. Amish Pennsylvania. Dad was a truck driver. He worked construction, lived out in the boonies. And here were these three Jewish kids from LA, you know, who had never been in middle America. So we couldn't have been different from each other. And the whole trip was constantly teaching each other about our lifestyles. Interesting. It was you uh are you familiar with this guy jedediah

jenkins i am not the dude uh this is amazing this guy's riding his bike from oregon to patagonia and he's been instagramming his trip along the way you should check out his instagram feed yeah post these amazing pictures and he's writing a book about it you know what kind of bike he's using i don't i don't know but his instagram amazing. Yeah. Cause I want to do that trip someday too. And I was always thinking like you could ride a touring bike road bike in America, but you probably need more of a mountain style, sturdier tires when you're getting through. Yeah. Cause this guy's going on dirt roads and all kinds of stuff like that. That is awesome. So for the future, right? Bucket list item for the future. Another social media person to follow. So what's the takeaway from this experience? So the takeaway once we

got home, we got into crazy situations, just crazy things. One of the best things that happened was we stayed in a person's house in Kentucky that like turned out to be swingers. Like just crazy stuff happened every day. Like we always said. Having like a swingers party when you were there? Like wanted us to be the party. No, like it was just amazing random things happened. It was just amazing random things happened.

And, you know, lots of just fun, you know, country American alcohol and, you know, finding weed places. And it was just great and fun. You can't call the fire station for that, right? No, but we definitely broke some laws in fire stations. I'll tell you that. All right. Yeah, it was just kooky. And now reflecting on it, while I would take a very different trip if I took it now, all of those steps were puzzle pieces and what turned out to be Jackson at this very moment, which will be different from Jackson tomorrow. But what I took away from this trip was food related.

And I didn't think that I was a happy junk food vegetarian for like seven, five to seven or seven years coming to that. And I realized the people that we met on that trip were fat, sick, depressed, pill popping Americans. And a lot of people were really nice and really great. Almost everyone,

but they were trapped eating at gas stations while they were growing the genetically modified corn that they were selling to someplace where they'll never see it again, that wasn't going to feed humans. And I never knew that because I didn't have any farmer friends growing up at Harvard Westlake. And I was just so ignorant to all this stuff that really disturbed me. And so I began to marinate on that experience, reflect, and I had set up, two weeks after I got home, I actually shipped off solo to Southeast Asia and volunteered on an orangutan orphanage in Borneo, Indonesia. So boom, going straight from Confederate America to a rural jungle village. So my dad, his company shoots documentaries, nature documentaries,

and I'd seen this movie about orangutans born to be wild a couple years before, and it looked super cool. And I called up the orphanage and they're like, we love American volunteers whenever, like we won't pay you, but we'll let you stay in like one of the local people's houses and they'll feed you and you can just like work for us. That'd be great. And I said, wonderful. And so I did a little touring around Laos and Thailand and Vietnam and did my whole backpacker crazy thing where everything is so cheap and fun. And it just felt a little meaningless while I had crazy experience backpacking in the limestone mountains of Laos. But I ended up at this orangutan sanctuary orphanage and living with a family that worked there.

They had just gotten electricity about a year before I came. The electricity turned on at 6 p.m. and turned off at like 5 a.m. So the roads were being paved. It was an off the grid place that I'd never experienced before coming from just the heart of America to this place where they were making literally $70 a month. Most of the families, there were no cows on the Island to milk. I was fed rice, fruits, and vegetables for three meals a day every single day. And I was chasing orangutans up trees and picking fruit.

And what is the purpose of the sanctuary? I mean, are those animals in jeopardy there? Or what are they trying to achieve? So orangutans on the island of Borneo, it's the biggest population in the world. And they're endangered. They're being extremely threatened from palm oil plantations. And palm oil is an ingredient in a lot of processed food and soap products and shampoos. Peanut butter. And it's the greatest place to grow palm oil in Borneo. So what happened was the government about 60 years ago started to allow companies to come in, deforest

the island in order to have some source of economy because they were just literally a random jungle country. You know, they're part of Indonesia, but they're their own island. So orangutans are terrible for palm oil plantations because the orangutan doesn't know that it's not their land. Of course it is. It's all of our land. And palm oil farmers would shoot orangutans when they came and foraged on their trees. So they became endangered very quickly. And this amazing woman named Barute Galtikas in the 60s went to Borneo, bought 25 acres of wild jungle land, gathered up all the orphaned orangutans. So orangutans live with their mother for like five years of their life, like attached. So if you see an orangutan that is under the age of six or seven, its parent has been killed.

And she gathered them all up, built a little like enclosures for them to live in and essentially is preserving the species. Interesting. That's amazing. So when you were working there, what was your responsibility? So I was it was the same as every single person in the village was employed by this orangutan orphanage. And it's sad when you go there, they're in these cages. We're not trying to obviously hurt them. We need a place to enclose them so they don't go and get killed by farmers. So they're in these enclosures, and our job is to every morning take out all of the orangutans from their cages, bring them into our 25-square-acre playground of a jungle, let them forage and hang out all day.

acre playground of a jungle, let them forage and hang out all day. It's literally patrolled by people's people, you know, soldiers so that palm oil people don't come in and take the land, let them do their natural thing. So they don't become just a species in captivity and literally make sure that they all come into camp by the end of the night. How do you herd them back to return at night? This is the hardest work I've ever done in my life. Like they're literally, like each person, there's like 40 people that work. I mean, this village was tiny

and there were like 40 or 50 people that would take out the orangutans, including myself. And each one would be in charge of like three or four. And so you'd literally like, there's no leashes. Like we would put them up into a tree and five seconds later, they're 200 feet away from you, 40 feet in the air. And orangutans are incredibly smart creatures. And there is a sense that they know what's going on and you can communicate with them. And at the end of the day, we them back so sometimes if one is being stubborn and knows that

we're going to come out with their favorite treat you know to to hold up a piece of corn in a tree for them to come down they'll wait till you have three pieces of corn in your hand and when i came there it was like orangutans know the social dynamic of like the new kid so there were some people that um had worked there for like 30 years that had known some of these orangutans know the social dynamic of like the new kid. So there were some people that had worked there for like 30 years that had known some of these orangutans their whole lives that they could literally like say in Bahasa Indonesia, which is their language, like, come over here, go get me that stick. You know, don't go too far away from me. And the orangutans would listen. It was like these people could speak to and it was literally incredible. And me coming in, they knew that I had treats in my bag and I had fun things

to play with. And I was a new kid and I would find myself walking around the jungle, keeping my eye on my orangutans and three big males would start walking up to me, start slapping my face, laughing, stealing my water bottle, throwing it around to each other, like bullying me. Right. They're like, we can, we can get over on this dude. Yeah. He doesn't know what he's doing.

And eventually, you know, I, like some of the men that had been in the community for a long time would help me out and show me like, you know, you got a rough house with them. They're like indestructible. They can fall out of like a 30 foot tree on their backs and be fine. Um, so, you know, you just push them around, give them a little yell, say I'm the man. And after a couple of weeks I became like a, like a cool dude in the community and they would listen to me and I earned their respect. During the day after you let them out, do you have to follow around your four or five and keep track of them all day long? Yeah. So my day is all day.

We're just knee deep in, you know, watery, swampy, mosquito biting jungle in the heat. It would, it would rain about every day. It's about a hundred degrees every day and it would rain. It's like what you think of a rainforest is what it is. And yeah, we just walk around and, you know, just zone out, be in nature and chill and, and follow my orangutans and pick wild fruit and, you know, eat rice all day. And so this is where I, I sort of woke up and was like, I feel like a superhuman. Like what is going on? I'm working with guys that are 90 years old that can beat me in a sprint race.

And there was no heart disease in the community. These old guys are climbing trees like crazy probably and gathering food for the village. Yeah. And living off of $70 and we would laugh at night and just hang out. And things were so peaceful. And so many of the stresses that I had experienced on my cross-country bike trip just didn't exist in this community. And it really, like, it just clicked. It was like, whoa.

Well, it's a heavy juxtaposition because you go from middle America where you're eating these foods that, you know, aren't so good. And you're seeing people that aren't so happy, aren't so healthy. you know, aren't so good. And you're seeing people that aren't so happy, aren't so healthy. And then you go to this extremely exotic place that we've been programmed to believe is backwards or inferior or what have you. And you're seeing people that are happy, incredibly healthy, and they're eating fruit and rice, basically. Basically, that is the key point. So I had the opportunity for the first time in my life to actually eat, or not for the first time, I was comfortable with actually trying to eat an animal. first time I was comfortable with actually trying to eat an animal. So they would about once a week,

some of the families, they would take a chicken that roams around the community, they would kill it and they would eat it that night. And the kids, the younger kids, my generation ate a lot more meat than the older people, but it was becoming a thing in the community. So while the diet was predominantly vegan, they did eat animal products very sparingly, literally once a week, and they would eat a whole chicken and that would be their meat for the week. And keep in mind, I had not been relatively plant-based as a vegetarian for nutritional reasons. That meant nothing to me at that time. It was purely an ethical thing. And I didn't like growing up in LA, the disconnect between killing an animal. You have no idea who killed it. You have no idea what kind of torturous situation it was grown up in, what it was fed, all these illusions that we are raised with in America. You know, the concrete slaughterhouse

walls that we can never see. And we go to jail if we film something in it with ag-gag logs, things like that. And I finally had the opportunity to take an animal in my hands and feel the suffering and pain of what it's like to kill an animal and consume it. And I decided that would be best for me to do. And so for the first time in five years, I, with my house dad, after a couple of weeks of being there, we, I told him the situation that I'm, he knew I was vegetarian. Um, and we went outside at like 5 PM, um, and grabbed a chicken that just lived its life roaming around and show me what to do. I took it between my legs, kind of pinched it in my knees, grabbed the head of a chick, grabbed the head of it,

kind of stuck it out and had a huge knife and I slid its throat and I drained the blood into a big bucket that we would cook with later. And I then laid the chicken on the ground. It took about five to 10 minutes to take its last breath. So I just watched it sort of breathing and dying from blood loss. And it was about, yeah, five or 10 minutes. Then I took it once it was dead and soaked it in like a tub of hot water for like 15 minutes and then de-feathered it, which was very easy. Surprisingly, chickens have so many feathers and they just came right out.

It was very easy, surprisingly. Chickens have so many feathers and they just came right out. And then with my house mom, we then cut off the limbs. So cut off the head and cut off the feet. And we actually fed that to, we had dogs and they ate that. And then we opened up the rib cage, pried it open, took out all the guts. So I got my hands deep in intestines and hearts and lungs and all these things that I had seen growing up in anatomy class that were in my body too. And we took that all out and cleaned all the blood out and chopped it into the ideal pieces that we like to eat, the wings,

the breasts. And then I ate chicken for the first time for dinner, uh, since I was 14 years old and I was 18, uh, 19 at the time. Right. And so how was that experience? So, um, by the time it was dinner time and I had done all that process that I just very described in a detailed way, I was already messed up in the head from, cause I'd never experienced that before. Like I'd never taken a life before I'd swatted a fly, but when you swat a fly, it's, it's intestines and heart don't spill all over the place. Right. So what, I mean, what was it that made you want to have that experience just so you could say, okay, so I've had this tactile experience of, you know, what it actually entails to,

you know, kill an animal to eat it. I just want to know what that feels like so I can speak to that. Yeah, I'd become a vegetarian because of the disconnect between kill and eat. Right, so here you are connected to that. I had the first opportunity. Right, so here you are with the opportunity to actually connect to that. And I'm on my gap year and it's about experience and it's about trying new things and I experienced it.

And I'm on my gap year and it's about experience and it's about trying new things and I experienced it. And I ate it and obviously I got a massive, massive stomach ache. When you eat food like that, that you're not used to eating, your body reacts in a crazy way. So I had terrible digestive problems that night from eating chicken for the first time. And I also just felt like an, like an asshole. I just felt like a jerk that I saw life in front of my eyes, you know, an hour before eating it that was running around doing its thing, doing the things that I do, walking on its feet, breathing my air, drinking my water. Um, and then I took that life only to have a stomach ache. What was the point of that? I had lived pretty good the past five years eating mainly plant foods that don't have brains and don't have nervous systems. And I just questioned,

what was the point of that? It tasted disgusting. You know, in America, when we eat food with MSG and sodium and salt and all these spices, which come from plants, meat tastes pretty good. But if you graze a raw piece of meat over your tongue, your instant sensation is not, this is what I want. When you graze a strawberry or an orange, you practically, you know, have an orgasm in your mouth. Like it's so good. And so I got a real idea of what meat is, what meat tastes like, what it goes through in order for us to consume these foods. And from then on, I was a vegan. So that was the defining moment. I experimented it a little bit more.

I ate a fish. I had like four more weeks there. I stayed in Indonesia for like eight weeks, like two months. And I experimented a little, came back home and put down my vegan flag and began to educate myself. And meanwhile, you're seeing these older people who are so vital, you know, on this island. And the kids were getting fat. And yeah, like the kids that were going into the town over, which was like a 30 minute drive on a motorbike and like eating processed food, it didn't have the vitality of like the 80 year olds in the community,

like straight up. And that was, and so I just began to make these connections that I'd never made before. And I came home from that. My gap year was coming to an end. I had like four more months before school started. And I fully from the grace of mother earth got hooked into Colin Campbell and the whole crew of plant-based educators and scientists and nutritionists and began to educate myself on, because I like wanted to solve a puzzle. Why, why were these people in America that I experienced doing so poorly?

Why does 18% of our gross domestic product go to healthcare when like this community, it's like zero, like why? gross domestic product go to healthcare when like this community, it's like zero, like why? And so I just tried to solve the problem and happened to get tuned into the books that I now believe in, know are true. And once you educate yourself, there's no going back. Right. So the books you read were obviously the China study. I read the China study. You watch Forks Over Knives. You, you know, watch any YouTube video from Caldwell Esselstyn, read Engine 2, read Finding Ultra and hear about all these cool people doing from the science background, from the spiritual background, from the athletics, just everywhere.

This one fits all solution. We're so used to in our reductionist society of you can have one problem and there's one thing that's going to fix that problem, but you can't use any other solution. And when it comes to plant-based nutrition and eating high vibration, healthy foods, it fixes millions of things. It fixes our environmental crisis, our health crisis, millions of things. It fixes our environmental crisis, our health crisis, a lot of the depression in our country, economics. It's like a miracle. Right. It's like a turnkey solution for all of these things that ail us. And where else does that exist? So like, literally, I got into nutrition just because I realized how fucking cool it was.

And, you know, if you had asked me, like if you had said the word plant-based nutrition to me when I was 18 years old, I would have put my hand in your face. Like, don't talk to me about boring stuff. And I realized this was literally the most exciting thing in my life, the stuff that I'm reading. And if it's true, I need to, I need to scream this message to the world. And I've spent the past two years doing that research and it only gets better every day. Oh man. So. And your, uh, yeah, your megaphone is getting bigger and louder and you're, you're unequivocal and you're passionate in your messaging. Yes. I, I am doing all I can right now to be a young, confident educator in spreading this word because we need it. Obviously, we are the first, my generation is the first generation

that said to live shorter lives than their parents potentially. We are hooked into things that actually distract us from finding true success, which is happiness and satisfaction and peace. And we're seeing the problems. If you just watch the news today, like the issues in our world every week, it seems like it exponentially more intense from the environmental crisis to religious wars, politics. I mean, it's, it's insane. And like with the amount of information that I take in per day, if I did not have a spiritual releasing mechanism, which is yoga

and meditation for me, amongst other things like exercise, um, I would explode. I would be too overwhelmed, destroyed. Yeah. And like so many people, I think my, a lot of my peers who are equally as stimulated and interested in making the world a better place. I see the people that don't allow themselves that detailed path to consciousness and to calmness aren't able to do the things that I've been able to do because it's too overwhelming. And so there's no like, that's why I say veganism and yoga are not two separate entities. I couldn't have one without the other. are not two separate entities. I couldn't have one without the other. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you really look at it,

sort of adopting a plant-based diet, wherever you come into it, whether you come into it for health reasons or animal rights advocacy reasons, environmental reasons, it really, you know, behind the whole thing, it's kind of a spiritual trip, you know what I mean? And once you get invested in it and you start to realize the benefits and, you know, I say this all the time, but it's sort of like taking the red pill and the matrix and your eyes get open and you're like, wait, what's going on with deforestation? What's going on with species extinction? Where's all the water going? Like, what are we doing? Like, look at our system of industrialized livestock agriculture. This is completely insane. This is not sustainable. We can't continue to feed all the people on the planet this way. What are we doing about it? Why aren't we talking about this? Why are,

why are so many people sick? Why is it, why are we in a healthcare crisis? I mean, already like just all that information will make you an insane person. If you, if you don't allow yourself to get educated and find solutions, if instead what a lot of people do is take in that information and go party instead and say, no, I'm out. No, I'm out. I can't handle that. I my one impact is not going to change everything. If I ride my bike every day and don't drive a car, the ice caps aren't going to freeze again. And we have this idea that we are meaningless. We can have no impact. We, our voice isn't loud enough. And that's how we've been, been raised. And it's scary.

It's, it's totalitarian. It's 1984, like versus coming together, educating yourself, finding the numbness through a productive means. You know, I've known the numbness of doing drugs, of drinking. And as someone who has been sober just for choice the past two years, I'm able to get number than all my other friends from my morning meditation and getting out of a two hour yoga class. And I truly am. I'm saying that honestly. So, but that's numbing in a different kind of, there's a different connotation to that than, I mean, numbing implies like sort of a negative tuning out or removing yourself as opposed to just a better way of processing information. Well, I, I think, I actually think they're more similar than that. I think that

numbing out for a short period of time that will enhance your ability to think mindfully later is necessary. When I'm in meditation, I'm not thinking, I'm not saying to myself, I'm going to be a productive vegan activist and save the world. I'm trying to actually tune all of that out. I'm trying to accept every single meat eater, which I do. I'm trying to accept all the violent things in my life and find this level of peace and calmness where I don't really care about all of the things that go through my mind 24-7 that I'm trying to save and solve. things that go through my mind 24-7 that I'm trying to save and solve. And it allows me this recharge, you know, cycling phase to stop and in order to tap back in and I'm able to do it to a higher level than I could before. Right. But I think that involves just being more grounded and present in the moment and having greater control over, uh, you know, the ruminations

of the thinking mind, whereas, whereas numbing really implies kind of like a denial or just trying to like a conscious ignorance. Um, so those things are different, but you know, what the, you know, what's inescapable to me is, is, uh, it's just this kind of inversion of, of, uh, you know, the, the, the conventional wisdom that surrounds our millennial generation. You know, when you talk about millennials, people say, oh, entitled bratty kids, they don't want to do anything. They're not motivated. They just want the whole world handed to them. And, you know, time and time again, I'm proven wrong with this when I meet young people like yourself, who, I mean, when I was 18, 19, 20, 21, like I was a mess, you know, I didn't know what I wanted to do. All I wanted to do is party. And, you know, I didn't, I wasn't thinking beyond two days later or whatever my next class was in college, or I had

zero sort of consciousness or awareness or care for anything outside of my own selfish concern. And so when I meet someone like yourself and other people who are so aware and passionate and devoted to change and optimistic and actually doing things about it, I think that we need to redefine what we mean when we're talking about millennials. I agree. I would say that as a millennial, I would like us to redefine that definition and show that we have incredibly passionate, driven, smart, you know, young adults and kids in our planet right now that are doing amazing things that no one has ever done before at our age.

And it's like hip to do so. Like it's cool to go work for a nonprofit. It's not cool to be a schlub. It is not cool to not be active. Like the cool kids at my school now, Colorado College, where I transferred to are the mindful, environmental, you know, cool kids that plan events and plan screenings. And, you know, are the heads of different academic groups

and teams and stuff like that. It is cool to be active because we have these platforms that never in any time in history we've had in order to have a loud voice. Anyone can have it. And if you don't use that opportunity, it's like, what are you doing? But I do want to say that there are a lot of, like, at the same time, while there are a lot of kids that are being woken up, quote unquote, waking up, kind of getting in tune at a younger age, there's equally just as many that more than ever in history are being forced to tune out why being forced what do you what do you mean about the forcing part while the iphone and facebook can be an incredible tool for the motivated passionate person to educate the world on whatever they care about it can also be a tool to prevent you from learning about, you know, what it means to kill a chicken. Right.

Or what ends up on the end of their forks, actually the true effect that that has on their lives in the future. Right. We have more distractions than we have ever had. The distractions are endless. It's crazy. You can just disappear down the rabbit hole completely. And I think it's, you know, again, it goes back to how are you using these modalities of technology? And, you know, we talk about, my wife and I talk about this all the time because we have little kids and, you know, we have a couple iPads in the house and computers and things like that. And, you know, my perspective

on it is I don't say get off the iPad or get off the computer. My litmus test is, are you using it passively or are you using it actively? Like if you are watching some, a movie or a television show, then all you're doing is losing yourself in somebody else's creative unless it's forks over knives right or you're using it to educate yourself right but if you're just using it to tune out and sort of okay i'm passively absorbing yeah the result of somebody else's creative fruits of labor that's one thing but to then what if you're actually using it to make your own movie or record your own podcast or write your own blog or doing something like that. That's an active use that it has a positive impact. So it's not like how much time are you spending on the iPad?

It's like, what are you actually using it for? But that line is dangerous because it is so dangerous to give our entire generation all these products and say, you better do something good with them, because that's not the message we're getting. Because when you see a iPhone ad or a ad for KFC or just all of these products, no matter what it is, jeans, clothing, it's never, hey, you can be a really sexy environmental activist in this gene, in these genes. It's like, hey, you can be a really sexy environmental activist in these jeans. It's like, no, you're going to look good at the club in these jeans. Or here's your iPhone. You should use it to photograph mountaintop removal and tar sands mining.

No, they're saying you can listen to great music at a party or just whatever. You can listen to great music at a party or just whatever. We are not being fed through the mainstream political and sort of corporate industrial complex that is our country. We are not being given good messages. I can say that confidently because if we were, I wouldn't have had to do all of the off the grid work. Extract yourself out of your environment to have that discovery. Every kid should get out of high school ready to be an activist to make the world a better place. But no, instead, a lot of kids get Wall Street internships. Like there's a reason for that.

We're not just dumb kids. No one is a victim. We're not just dumb kids. No one garbage, literally and metaphorically in terms of the imagery that we are, you know, that we get from literally age one as, you know, my little cousin is two years old and he doesn't know my name, but he can click his favorite iPad game on the iPad and play it. Like we're, we're turning into some and I'm making general generalizations, but if you really take a step back, these funny words like addicted zombies, like if, if you, if you looked at what the world was is, is right now and take yourself out of the context of what is normal to

you, which is what I've been trying to do the past few years, like think of what was defined as normal to me growing up, take a step back, say maybe it could be another way and redefine it for myself. If you did that for every single thing from what you're eating to what you think of when you wake up to the way you view your family, to the way you view your family, um, to the way you think of class. If you take a step back and rethink all those things, your world is going, you're going to come into a different world because you don't realize how brainwashed you've been in nice or not nice ways from your family, from your school, from your teachers, from your friends. Like we are the people that other people make us. If we were raised in a black hole in space, we wouldn't be human beings. We're not human beings on our own. We're human beings by the experiences that we have of other people.

I'm speechless. I don't even know. I don't know how to respond to that. It was very well put, but I think that you have to bear in mind that, you know, we live in this world. These things are not going away, whether it's technology or whatever systems that we've kind of unconsciously subscribed to. So how do you navigate the modern world and, you know, without becoming a pariah and moving to Borneo, you know, just for somebody who's listening out there who's like, yeah, but you know, I go to my job every day and I got kids, I got to support and, you know, how can I try to divine a better, more conscious existence out of my day to day without having to, you know, radically let everything go and move to the jungle. So speaking from my experience, unfortunately,

I think the first step is to get pretty disturbed. There needs to be, just as I was disturbed through my experience of cycling across America, while it was so amazing and I had so many amazing experience, there was one thing that felt really wrong to me. This idea of people living in practically poverty, growing food, not to be fed to humans, but to be fed to animals later for these animals to be killed and abused for us to eat them. And that disturbed me and that tortured me.

And that's what allowed me to say, I'm gonna be above this and I need to educate myself in order to find a higher consciousness. And also I have to say, and I'm sure you can speak to this too, that sobriety is a pretty big part because it is really easy, even in our generation to go to class and talk about capitalism, Colorado college.

We just, we literally just talk about corporate America, capitalism, like, Oh, industrial food system, this stuff sucks. And then turn 10 o'clock, if you have a couple of drinks in you, you find yourself at KFC drinking Coca-Cola. And you wouldn't do that. Like you would not do that if you were not under the

influence of an external substance that's dictating your emotions and your behavior. So consciousness, essentially drugs and alcohol take away your consciousness. They take away your ability to make thoughtful decisions, right? Well, there's no question about it. I mean, removing drugs and alcohol is the first step towards mental clarity, of course, but really developing a higher state of consciousness. And then you become more and more aware, like the road gets narrower. And then you start to realize like, oh, television is impacting my consciousness in a way that that's kind of similar to drinking.

Like, I don't know that I can do that anymore. And then you got to like remove that. And then you're like, wow, I look at my phone a lot. You know, like that's just, that's taking me out of the moment. I eat Cheerios with milk every day. Like I'm pretty, you know, I'm ticked off in the morning if I don't get that fix. Like, is that an addiction? And it's a slow process of like, and then once you realize that you can become a more

heightened, more productive, even more successful human being by having that sort of tortured episode and then starting to simply educate yourself. So just take a step back, think mindfully, you realize that you can make your life a much brighter entity than it was before. And that's how you get started. It's terrifying though. It's terrifying for most people. You have to go through all that work. Well, pain is the ultimate motivator, right? Like you had to be tortured or so you had to have an experience that shook you up enough for you to look at that. You know, I had to like hit my bottom with drugs and alcohol before I was willing to change, even though I knew it was

destroying my life. I didn't care. Right. So, you know, you're lucky if you have those bottoms or you have those moments of clarity or those reckonings. But, you know, I think it's also important to always be aware that, you know, if that elevator is going down or something isn't serving you that, you know, you always have the choice to say no to it. It's just harder, you know, when you're not in pain, you know, when you're in pain, that choice becomes easier to make. Yes. Right. So if you're just cruising along and your life's pretty good, you know, it's harder to wake up. Yeah. Somebody is,

you know, in a job that's not great. It's not what they really want to be doing, but it pays well. And they can feed their family and they live in a nice house and there's two cars in the driveway. It's pretty hard for that person to wake up until something intervenes. Like, you know, you, it's the trite thing, like somebody gets cancer or something like that. And that is why the tools of, um, the tools of a Gary Yourofsky speech or a PETA video that shows, you know, industrial animal agriculture and the abuse that 60 billion land animals are going through per year in order for humans to eat them and thus get diseases from them. If you see those, if you get hit in the face with those things that are so hard, that's what I guess our disillusioned species, we need something that intense in order to wake up. If you ask the person that is going through

their path very happily, not thinking about the impact that their individual life is having on the rest of the world and eventually themselves, and you say them and you ask them when they're eating their salmon, like, how do you feel about the fish that you're eating? Like, I've been there. I wouldn't care. You don't care. Listen, you know, if you show the average person a Gary Yourofsky video or a PETA video or sort of cattle prod them or, you know, sort of gut check them on their food choice, they're going to tell you to fuck off. They don't want to see that. They don't want to, you know, that, that, that way of messaging doesn't work for a lot of people.

Exactly. And that is why what I'm doing right now, and we can get into this, I think is the future of animal liberation and vegan activism, which is instead of showing people, look at how terrible and disgusting the, you know the eating animals is. You should be a bad person. Why don't you look at Robert Cheek and say, hey, you can be a bodybuilder if you go vegan, or you can be an ultra runner and triathlete if you go vegan. How cool is that? You can achieve these goals in a quicker, faster, more healthy, more sustainable, goals in a quicker, faster, more healthy, more sustainable, cheaper way than you could eating your normal, sad, standard American diet. So right now, I'm going through an episode.

I've been a vegan educator to my friends and family and school community for a couple years now, and I've been into yoga and running, and I'm a super lean, healthy vegan. I'm about 6'2". I weighed 140 pounds for my first two years of going vegan. That's super skinny. Super skinny. I have pictures that I look at now. And, you know, it was a big problem in my family when I went vegan and I was eating larger quantities of food than anybody else. And I took veganism in a really, really hardcore way. I was tofu tempeh and seitan free for two full years, oil free two years, zero processed sugar, zero wheat. Still, most of those things are true. I now eat tofu and tempeh and soy foods because I've

actually educated myself on the health benefits of those, but I am completely oil-free and processed sugar-free. And because I read these books, like the Gerson Therapy and the China Study, I drafted my unique vegan diet in order of the people that were trying to help people with terminal cancer. Like I treated myself as a cancer patient, as a healthy 18 year old. And so I got like, I literally wouldn't go to Cafe Gratitude the first year and a half of being vegan if you paid me. I was like, oh no,

that's not gonna give me all my micronutrients that I need. I need to make my own food. That's what I do. Don't threaten my health. Like are your parents tripping? My parents are tripping. They're like, this is, this is so great, Jackson, but you literally look like, you know, you just came out of like a concentration camp. Like seriously, I was really thin. I thought I was great. My hands were bright orange from eating so much beta carotene. And, um i was active it's not like i was like

comatose on a couch like i was running you know 10 plus miles a week nothing crazy but i was getting like a lot of exercise in just cardio based because i was just into being the lean skinny vegan guy but a lot of people would say that being that ardent like that that controlling is is that's really a form of an eating disorder on some level. Now reflecting on it while it, while I don't want to say I have an eating disorder, cause I don't want to offend people that have different types of eating disorders. I had a version of that. There's no doubt about it. And it wasn't an eating disorder and that I was calorie restricting. I was the opposite of calorie restricting within my diet of what's okay. So

cooked lentils, cooked beans, rice, quinoa, tons of raw fruits and vegetables, nuts, seeds. I was eating massive, massive, massive amounts of food. But the control aspect of it is the same because that's really the real derivation of that disorder is this drive to control every aspect of- Literally, it was truly insane. And to an extent, like I,

I'm much better now than when I started, but because I educated myself on these, um, you know, works from Colin Campbell to Caldo Esselstyn, whatever, I, I took it in a really, really, really extreme way. I am an evangelical vegan. There's no doubt. And right. Like if you had a avocado, you were suddenly going to have a heart attack uh no i i was into avocados um or just like a dab of olive oil i was whole food plant-based right no like literally if there was olive oil on something and i was starving i wouldn't eat it so yeah it was an eating disorder there's no no doubt. And as a result, I was, you know, 6% body fat for like two full years, six to 140 pounds. And I, and, but when I looked in the mirror, I was like,

I am fricking rad. I look great. I'm awesome. I'm doing this cruelty-free lifestyle and I'm super lean and everyone wants to get lean. So this must be great. Right. And finally, as I got into college and a couple months ago, you know, as I'm educating people and going up and talking to people, I keep getting the same message like, well, dude, I don't want to look like you. Why should I listen to you? Right. If, you know. You're unbeknownst to you, you're actually perpetuating the stereotype that you're trying to. Exactly. Over overcome. Exactly. So I, you know, got into my research. All right. What do people want? People generally want to look healthy, have muscles, be strong. You know, all of our superheroes are have six packs and big arms. And my goal in anything I do from now on is to get this message out of animal liberation.

And while it turned out, while it started way more of a health related thing for me, what's the optimal human diet? While that's equally as important to me now, the ethics and environmental portion of veganism wasn't as important to me when I started. And it now takes the highest regard in terms of why I continue to do this. Right. But being conscious of like, how are you carrying this message so that you can impact the most number of people possible, understanding that you're going to have to sort of... Buy into the system. Well, not buy into the system, but maybe, you know, carry yourself or appear in a way that is.

Cater to the mainstream audience, sort of. And so I, you know, got tuned in to Robert Cheek and Derek Treesize and Giacomo Marchese and all these vegan bodybuilders. builders and said, what is the, and also living in Colorado Springs, it is a conservative military town of meat eaters and Confederate flags. And, um, being the skinny hippie, you know, ponytail tattooed vegan is not the best way that I am going. Like the vegans will love that. They'll love to hear all that. You look exactly like how everyone expects you to look yeah so i decided i'm gonna stir things up i'm gonna experiment with trying to talk to the people that need to hear this message more than anyone and i'm gonna try to build a little bit of muscle simple goal and but the reason it's profound as a vegan is the 99 of probably the world population or at least in amer, think that vegan and bodybuilder is an oxymoron.

It's not possible. You cannot build muscle on a vegan diet. And through not changing my diet very much, but changing my exercise, I have gained over 30 pounds of mainly muscle. If you look at me now, I'm very lean. Still have a six-pack. 30 pounds in the past. If you look at me now, I'm very lean, still have a six pack, 30 pounds in the past five and a half months. Right, that's not that long.

Which is a lot. Yeah, so you're starting to get buffed. So I am trying to do that in order to be the best vegan educator that I can. Did you listen to the NPR piece that was on the other day? I did, I just listened to it yeah yeah and we were just hanging out with him at the meet us right exactly so for the listener out there a couple days ago on npr they did a story on the relationship between diet and our ideas that surround masculinity and they interviewed a bunch of people uh a bunch of

vegan dudes who were at a vegan barbecue in Brooklyn. It was at our friend Joshua Catcher's. A lot of muscly dudes. Yeah, like a bodybuilder, Joshua's big CrossFit guy, and triathlete. And there was a quip by John Joseph in there. And it was cool. It was a short little piece or whatever. But, you know,

Joshua as always was very well-spoken and he said something, I'm going to botch his quote, but maybe you remember it, but the idea that, uh, that, uh, you know, sort of mainstream ideas about masculinity are an impediment to sustainability, right? It was something along those lines. And in order to kind of carry the message, you know, you have to exude health, right? And so when we were talking to Joshua at John Joseph's book party a couple of weeks ago, he was talking about how, you know,

he's super into CrossFit now and he goes to this CrossFit gym and I was saying, oh, well, you know, there's a lot of paleo people there. How do they perceive you as being a plant-based person? He's like, I'm in the top 10% of the strongest people there. So I get respect and it's a great opportunity to have productive dialogue with people. And it's been cool. And he loves CrossFit and that's kind of awesome. Right? So, you know, in a similar respect, I would imagine you being in the gym, you know, all of these places are all opportunities when you interface with people to have a different kind of conversation about this kind of lifestyle. When you really think about it, a wimp, a, you know, non-manly figure is someone that doesn't act on optimal potential for success. If you sort of just like break it down to the simplest form of like what our socially clothes, just a man, like aggressive in ways, simply in that animalistic way of you have control of a situation. Being manly is to be in control.

a large portion of the country eating animal products is, it is if you have seen Cowspiracy, which most people hopefully will try to see at this point, or if you just watch any simple YouTube video, if you read The Food Revolution, tons of books and content out there, you will realize that being addicted and consuming animal products is going to result in the destruction of all human control. And it sounds apocalyptic, but it is the most vulnerable point. Climate change is nature taking the manliness from the human race. That's interesting. Explain. the human race. That's interesting. Explain. Well, in a World Watch study, which was put out in 2009, I believe, it found that 51% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, so the driving force of global warming and climate change, over half were connected and a result of livestock animal agriculture.

That means growing animals as food. So chicken, steak, hamburgers, to milking cows for milk and cheese, to raising eggs. And that didn't even include the 90 billion marine animals that are farmed and eaten in our world every single year for human conception, which has a huge environmental impact as well. So that was a conservative estimate that was done through years of research that essentially the largest form of climate change and global warming is because we put animals onto the planet in order to murder and eat them or put them on our cars or put them on our feet in the form of leather and things like that. A lot of people say, and this is just someone who clearly hasn't done their research or thought very much,

if you stop eating animals, there's going to be wild cows roaming the streets. There's going to be cows everywhere. Chickens are going to be in your house. Well, it wouldn't happen overnight. It would be a slow deceleration of this system over time. Right, but we need to remember that almost 99 point whatever percent of the animals that human beings eat in our world today are just as much pieces of technology as our iPhones or computers. They were bred and created by human beings to be put onto our planet.

No cows breed anymore even. We artificially inseminate animals in order to produce more animals like a factory in order for us to sell and consume these products. So think about, I mean, it takes 660 gallons of water to produce one hamburger, one pound of meat. I think it's a quarter pound hamburger. Sure. A quarter pound hamburger. Sure. So, and inversely to produce the exact same amount of calories of plant foods, it takes about 50 gallons of water. So these animals that do not need to be on our planet, do not need to be fed, do not need to drink because they don't need to exist because we put them into captivity and an enslavement, they're taking a majority of the resources that could be going to human beings to feed them.

One in seven people on the planet is starving of calories, starving of food, when over 80% of the calories grown by plants in our country is fed to animals for billions of calories to be lost while they're hungry people. It's criminal. Right. But bringing it back to this conversation about masculinity and control. So the idea that you're trying to get across- I really lose track here. You got it real. You went down the statistic. The activist. Yeah. The black hole of statistics. Yes. But no, those numbers are powerful. They're very powerful. But this idea of what it means to be a man and sort of being able to exert control, the other point that was made in this NPR story was it was made by some professor, but she was saying something like it's actually masculine to be in control of your diet. Like vegans, there's more vegan men than vegan women.

Like there's more vegetarian women than men, but more men of that population are vegan. And there's something about the kind of control aspect. It's just like John Joseph said in his book opening, it's not manly to not be able to walk up a flight of stairs and shitting in a bag when you're 60 years old because you have all these health problems. What is manly about that? I mean, it is manly to be 50 years old, look like you're 35 and be able to beat anyone, you know, in a race or have

huge muscles or, you know, be able to care about the planet that That is manly. Right. I think it's about reframing this idea around compassion being, you know, a weakness as opposed to a strength. And when you look at any great leader throughout history, the greatest leaders of all time were the most compassionate. They were strong and they exerted that strength when they needed to, but they also showed extreme compassion. And now getting into political figures, that is why I have created the brand website, future book title, Plantriotic, which is something that I've created. And I trademarked the term and it is defined, as you can read on my shirt here. Right, Plantriotic, honoring the planet by practicing a healthy, ethical, and sustainable plant-based diet. So patriotic to the plant, like what is the idea here?

No, patriotic to your country, patriotic to your community, patriotic to your body, to Mother Earth, to your wallet, to your health, the greatest thing you can do for America, let's even take, you know, good old USA, the best thing you can possibly do for our country in order for us to grow. I mean, what, what, what built our country having ample food, having beautiful landscapes, having wild species, having a thriving population of human beings. Veganism is the only way we're going to be able to do that. We've already proven, we already have the information that the way we eat right now, if we continue to eat processed food and animal products from dairy, eggs, meat, fish, our country is sooner than later going to be in crumbles. We won't be able to grow food. The temperature will be too hot in a matter of 15 to 20 years if we continue to emit the greenhouse

gases that we emit right now. You can see that in 350.org's little documentary, Do the Math, by Bill McKibben. Which is where he worked this summer, and I want to hear about that in a minute. Cool. But go ahead. I mean, just as bringing it back to the beginning, the one fix all of all these problems in order for us to have a prosperous country and world, I know can only be achieved if more people adopted a healthy plant-based vegan diet. Undisputed. There's too much information. You're just talking crazy talk. there's too much information talking crazy talk i'm a i'm a radical crazy wacko because i because i think mcdonald's is gonna destroy the world i mean this shows how truly brainwashed and taking control over we are that we don't associate what ends up at the end of our fork with ultimately

the destruction of ourselves and the planet and again if, if you take a step back, if you take a day to do research, I have no doubt that any person will be put on the right path. It's that easy. But there's a gap between information and implementation. You know what I mean? Like the information is out there, you know, all, every side of the equation can look at the numbers when it comes to the environmental impact of animal agriculture. And it's, it's not in dispute. There's nobody who's saying these numbers are wrong or there, or people are lying or hiding the truth. Like that's just, that's just is what it is, regardless of your political, you know, point of view.

But it's about, it's about actually taking action on that. And when you were talking about, you know, we've never been more distracted or there's just a, you know, we're just not as, this is not the 1960s where we're going to take to the street like they did over the Vietnam war. Like what would it take now in 2014 to get people super riled up? I mean, we couldn't even get Prop 37 passed on GMO labeling. So what are you going to get people? How are you going to get people to turn Dancing with the Stars off and start to get active? So first off, as a yoga teacher, I'm first going to address the issue with a glass half full perspective rather than half empty, that revolution that you were just talking about is already in full swing. There's no doubt about

it. Compare the vegan plant-based movement 25 years ago, 50 years ago to what it is now. How about five years ago? Five years ago. I mean, like I have so many friends that are casually vegan. You, you walk around the street with a lot of vegans out there and that has never been the case in the past couple hundred years. So the movement is already there. You don't have to create a movement. If you want to get into it, all you have to do is join because the platform is already in full swing from animal liberation. I'm working with, um, NY class this summer. Um, but just, just volunteering. I'm working with NY Class this summer, just volunteering. I'm working with 350.org, and they're not directed to any animal liberation or food-related things, but rather the fossil fuel industry, which is the catalyst to allow us to grow animals as food.

But I'm volunteering with NY Class, which is trying to ban horse carriages in Central Park. So you can take that route if you care about just animal ethics. You can join PETA. PETA is its own revolution. Veggie Grill, that's its own revolution. You can get into it in whatever area you want, whether you care about the environment, whether you care about culinary arts, health, athletics, animal liberation, we already have this power team of millions of people around the world that are

screaming at the top of their lungs that this solution is veganism. We just are still getting everyone educated on it and it's going to take some time. It is truly, and I'm going to make this comparison, I think the animal liberation vegan movement is the next civil rights movement. There's a lot of people that feel that way. It is. And I think that, you know, in messaging people, like I'm always conscious of trying to meet people where they're at. And a lot of people just aren't, they don't want to hear about animal liberation. You know what I mean?

They're not, it's not their thing, whatever, you know, it doesn't matter. But people get into it for different reasons. You know, the way that PETA messages people appeals to, you know, a certain kind of person. Some people, but not others. And other people are very turned off by that. In your story. Some people just want to lose five pounds. And if they think that eating plant-based is the best way to get them there, then that's all they want to know about, whatever. And that's all good. I think your point ultimately

is that there are so many points of intersection and so many points of entry that there's something for everybody, no matter where you're coming from and that you can be welcomed in. But I think it brings up another interesting point, which is, you know, there's a lot of sort of subcultures within this movement, you know, like we just referred to, you know, you have people that are super into animal rights and then you have other people that just don't want to have a heart attack. They couldn't give a shit about the animals. And, and you have the fruitarians and you have the people that are on the sort of no oil Esselstyn diet and then you have the, you know, the sort of David Wolf, you know, the avocado.

Yeah, cacao people. Yeah, all these like very, yeah, and there seems to be, I mean. It's all okay. But on the bigger issues, they all agree. There's a lot of quibbling over the details there that I think ultimately. Why are people making such fusses about these minute.

Here's my analogy. You ready for this? Yeah. Tell me what you think of this. Oh gosh, I'm excited. So if you look at our political system, right? If you look at the Republican party, well, maybe not lately, but take the Republican party five or 10 years ago, extremely organized, extremely consistent in their messaging, very on point, and everybody's on board. They're completely all marching in the same direction. And the Democratic Party,

they're all fighting amongst each other. They can't get their shit straight. There's a lot of dissonance and people thinking this way or that way. And as a result, they have a harder time getting organized and moving their particular agenda forward. Similarly, if you look at that in the diet context,

you look at the paleo world, very organized, very vertically integrated with the CrossFit gyms. They have their shit together. Like they know how to message. They know how to connect with people. And they are very united in how they do that. And it's extremely effective. And there's a lot of good that has come of that.

People who have gotten off the standard American diet to, you know, sort of wean themselves off dairy and processed foods. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. who have gotten off the standard American diet to sort of wean themselves off dairy and processed foods. And I have no problem with that whatsoever. If you look at the plant-based world, it's like the Democratic party, like there's a lot of argument. It's true, right? It's absolutely true.

So my interest is in trying to sort of overcome that just by making it as inclusive as possible and focusing on the you know, the bigger picture as opposed to the small arguments that I think are cutting us off at the heels. I think that is an extremely astute and mindful discovery that a lot of people in the vegan world get into their dogma rather than their end result and they get lost in in something that created that they create in their own minds of what needs to be done and creating this sub sub movement when the most powerful thing is numbers is to all come together at the idea that our diet is what's

killing us it's also killing lots of animals and we need to get away from that and eat more plant foods. We've got to realize most people are going to McDonald's and Wendy's all the time, and they don't care about what this faction thinks about that faction. When I talk to a friend that's like, hey, I eat a standard diet. I eat milk and dairy and meat and eggs, and I'm thinking about going vegan or vegetarian. What should I do? What if the first thing I said was olive oil is going to kill you? Like, that's crazy. Like, it's not about that. One, it's not even true, but there's so many categories of some people in the movement that

would say that. My first step is, hey, introduce more plants into your diet. You know, maybe say one week I'm going to cut out chicken. The next week I'm going to cut out or in a month I'm going to cut out steak. And like you can't give people all of these crazy, sometimes dogmatic health and diet related, you know, I can even call them fads. Instead of just giving them the overall encompassing concept of like eat plants not animals and see how that see what that does for you yeah you have to respect people to go on their own journey with it you have to create like a soft landing pad a comfortable door to walk through and uh and allow them to make their own discoveries. Because where you're at is not where you were at,

you know, when you first landed in the jungle in Borneo. Exactly, it's constantly, constantly changing. It's always evolving. Right, so tell me about what's going on at 350.org. Yeah, so 350.org is an awesome organization that has kind of taken the stage around the world and battling the fossil fuel industry just, and that's a scary, scary job to have. And I commend everyone at 350 for, um,

taking it upon themselves to work on that. It's a really cool organization. It was started by Bill McKibben, who is a teacher at Middlebury college in Vermont. And he started a club like five or six years ago with a bunch of environmental related students, you know, kids that were 19, 20 years old, and they tried to create a little, you know, activist outreach company about that. And it has blossomed into a environmental powerhouse of, you know, from lobbying in Congress to making the largest environmental mobilizations America has ever seen. They run all of the Keystone XL pipeline protests and help organize for that. And they're such an intersectional organization. They don't only care

about the, you know, whales, bears, and seals of the world. The main focus of 350 and most of the big environmental organizations are about social justice. It's the fact that, you know, dump sites and communities like toxic waste dumps always get put in communities of color and in poverty. And that's why the privilege- Yeah, it's like a NIMBY thing, not a My Backyard thing. Exactly. And that's a really cool movement from, what is that, the 60s or the 70s of people gathering around and saying, hey, we've realized, and this is a governmental thing of deciding where

to put our trash, our consumer items that we put in our trash, they end up somewhere. Landfills are a thing. Most people know the word and have never seen one. And those things get placed in communities that they know won't have the resources to get up and shout about it and say, this is wrong. And so 350 is really all about that, that we cannot function as a peaceful functioning society if we continue to rely on digging up mother earth's fossil fuels and then and then burning that fuel putting it into the atmosphere

in order to continue civilization and that's and that's been proven this is a resource that we've already hit peak oil so we've already dug up enough oil for to to be the cheapest. It's now a precious item that we are soon going to run out of. Oil, this mythical fantasy name that gets put out of a gasoline thing at every corner street is actually the fossilized dug up bones of dinosaurs and plants. It's amazing. And this stuff belongs underneath the ground as carbon. And when we take those millions and billions of years worth of living matter, take it out of the ground and put it up and burn it into the atmosphere. it takes a long time for, cause our bones one day will become oil. And we've gotten to the point where we've actually literally think of it as a big pool and we just suck out water from the pool. And that's how we drive our cars. And that's how we grow our genetically modified food to feed to cattle, to eat meat. And this resource is actually soon to be gone. So what are we going to do if we haven't created an

infrastructure in our world and country where we can rely on actual sustainable forms of energy that we know aren't going away, aka the sun and the wind that passes by every day, and hydropower and lakes and stuff like that. And if we convert our system to functioning off of those forms of energy that we know aren't going to go away, there's another bringing in the manly aspect. It would be manly to have a sustainable energy future versus our government, which subsidizes coal and oil production, which is going to be gone probably within my lifetime even. That's why Elon Musk is the most masculine man on the planet right now we're always waiting for him to figure it out for us i i i don't know enough about elon musk um well he's just getting it like you know he's into space right but he's also he does a lot of space stuff he's getting into like sustainable energy sources too. Okay, cool. Anyway, that's cool.

So what were you doing at 350 this summer? Yeah, so I'm actually still there. This is my week. Oh, you're on back. Week trip, yeah. I am even in California right now because this Friday in two days, I am shipping off to Austin, Texas

to go to the Naturally Fit Games to watch the plant-built vegan bodybuilding team compete. And I actually just got a gig with vegan health and fitness magazine, and I'm going to be writing a piece that's going to be in that magazine. So I'll be following around the plant-built team. So, uh, Giacomo Merchese, Robert Cheek. Giacomo was part of that NPR story, wasn't he? He was. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and they have Jahina Malik who just, do you know her? No, I don't. She, so to get into professional bodybuilding, like the MLB or the NFL of bodybuilding, you need to win a certain caliber competition first place, and you get your pro card, okay, to become an IFBB bodybuilding professional. And this woman who lives in brooklyn um jahina malik just became

the first vegan since birth her parents raised her vegan i heard about she just became the first vegan since birth ifbb pro professional bodybuilder yeah and she's competing too i mean how amazing is that and so the plant-built team is like she's. She's going to be at the seed. So the team is, I don't know, how does team sports work in bodybuilding? So I'm just getting into this, so I'm no professional on the topic. But at a bodybuilding competition, it's not just, hey, best bodybuilder, go up. There's men's bodybuilding, men's swimsuit, men's physique, men's fitness, women's, you know, there's a million subcategories of different body types that people spend years crafting what the judges want to see for that specific look. And so the plant-built team has men's heavyweight, men's lightweight, men's swimsuit,

men's heavyweight, men's lightweight, men's swimsuit, men's fitness, men's powerlifting, women's bikini. They have, they have competitors that are all vegan and all the different categories. And then they come into a competition and try to take first place in every single role. And last year at the naturally fit games, they took like 40% of all the competitions, which was the best team and the whole thing. And this year it's only going to be better. So cool. Well, that'll be fun, man. Yeah, it'll be fun. I'm just going to hang out with them.

I'm sure we're going to eat a lot of good vegan food because bodybuilders going up to a competition while they look really good, they're in their weakest state because they've been like starving themselves to get super lean. That's a whole freaking weird world. It is really weird. I never want to be a professional bodybuilder i'm simply building up my body to present myself to the vegan movement so that more people will want to listen to me simply put um but it's going to be fun because they'll probably like pig out on

a bunch of vegan food right after the competition so and austin for me. Yeah, definitely. So when are you doing that? So I leave for that on Friday, and then that's Friday, Saturday, Sunday I'll be there. Then I go back to New York, and I finish up my internship with 350, and then I am ending my summer going to the Woodstock Fruit Festival. Oh, you are? Okay, cool. Which will be really great. And I am not fruitarian. I have experimented with it. I am a full believer in I have experimented with it.

I am a full believer in the potential of a fruit-based diet. I've done it and felt so wonderful by it, probably better than I ever have. But right now with some of my bodybuilding goals, I know there are fruitarian bodybuilders, but I'm having success with what I'm doing, eating legumes and rice and tofu. And I'm feeling good about that. So I'm not full blown fruitarian. Also as a college student, like I already have enough things that make my life, you know, off like off the beaten path and hard to work with within the college environment. I don't eat at the cafeteria. I bring my Tupperwares around. You make it, so you make all your own food in college.

I literally do. I'm not on the meal plan. I'm probably the only, I am the only student at the school to do it. I live in an on-campus house. I actually live in like the sober, quiet house just because I knew there's a huge kitchen that no one would be using. And so that's my little office. And I wake up every morning an hour before I need to and make my meals for the day and bring them around with me. And that's what I do here too. Wow. That's cool. So what are the other college students think of you? Okay. So last year was my first year at CC and I came in just as- We skipped over the whole thing about like how you were supposed to go to RISD and then-

Oh man. Yeah. Let's go back a little bit. We're running out of time though, dude. We got to wrap it up here, but explain that really quick. Pretty much. I went to RISD like four months before going into RISD. I knew that I'd be transferring because I wanted to study environmental and food related things. And RISD is a strict art school and that's all you can study. So as a result of your gap year, you just your your mind was blown. And then suddenly that whole idea of being an artist was not as important to you anymore. You said it beautifully.

So cool. So so I but I had put into. Well, no, there's a little little one more chapter that I can talk about very quick. So I went into RISD because I'd put down a deposit because I deferred. So I had to go there. My parents were like, just try it out. Who knows? Maybe you'll think it's really cool and you'll be able to fit in your passion there.

And so I went for first semester and it just, you know, I knew that I had a brighter future somewhere else. So I went for that semester, had a great time and took off second semester. You just can't stay in school longer than life. And worked on, well, this year at college has been the longest I've been at school in the past three years. So I, and I worked on an organic farm right outside of Yosemite for four months, second semester of, I guess, two years ago. The past couple of years, you've been out of school way more than you've been in school. And you know what? I have learned more about myself and about the world and become a smarter person than I ever have in school.

School is a great thing. But look at so many countries around the world, Israel and Europe. People take like three years in between high school and college to work, get their feet dirty, realize what they're passionate about. And then when you're paying thousands of dollars of your money, you actually know what you're doing. 90% of my friends are just having fun in college, not knowing what they want to do. And that's really fun, but you can, you can learn a lot from taking a step back, discovering something that a conventional education system simply couldn't teach you. Right.

And then you can go in it as a full-blown passion about what you care about. So now that I'm at Colorado College, I am the radical, vegan, hardcore, environmental dude. And in a way, that is. I just to make myself feel better about what I'm doing. I remind myself that all the most innovative people throughout history were extremely criticized with what they were doing at the time of when they were doing it. And then, you know, it takes time for the mainstream to get tuned in to what you're talking about. But there's a lot of people that respect what I'm doing and I hold protests. And I also obviously started plantriotic.com and

CC PlantStrong, which is the first vegan club on campus where we met each other. Last year I brought you, I brought Susan Levin from Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. I also brought in Ocean Robbins. And next year, Gene Bauer will be coming, which will be awesome amongst many others. So I'm starting this community of this, you know, vegan movement within my school. And it's a small school. There's like 2000 undergrad and no, no graduate program. So people know you around school. And, you know, I am someone that does not shut up. Yeah.

There's that guy, you know, but I have friends and like, they think it's cool. Um, but no, I mean, there's no doubt that like, and I can say this, you know, my social life because of what I care about and the, and the impact that I want to have, it is a lot easier to be on your path, go to the parties, be quiet and shy and shy and just like do your thing. But I have this urge to literally change the world. And despite the obstacles that come in my way, I need to fulfill that because I know it's what's going to be best for myself and the planet.

Well, I think you're doing it, man. And I appreciate all of your support and everyone's support that has been helping me out on Facebook, on YouTube to get this message out. Cause I mean, I've, I've had friends, you know, recently that have been like, Hey, you know, me and my mom have reconnected. Cause we make sure to watch your video like every night and it's so cool. And we're making all these recipes. And I'm sure you get that, you know, thousands of that a day. And because the reality is what we have to offer people, we're not in it for the money. We are in it for the impact and for benefiting the planet and the animals and the people. And there's no gimmicks to being a vegan. You can do vegan cheap. You can do vegan expensive and fancy. You can do vegan cheap, you can do vegan expensive and fancy, but all you need to know is that it's going to have a profound impact on your spirituality, on your health, on your physical development, on the planet. It's amazing. Right. That was awesome, man. I think that's a great place to end it.

Beautiful. Cool. How do you feel? I feel great. I want everyone to, you know, have that motivation to kind of break out of the bubble that they may be afraid to sort of wake up to a higher vibration and a consciousness that it's going to be too scary. But honor that no one goes through anything alone. We are all holding each other's hands. There's no one vegan activists or environmental speaker that, you know, is in the hierarchy in this movement. This is about numbers. This is about coming together. It is about peace. It is about being a plantriot, a plantriotic supporter. And, you know, exactly. Get your feet dirty, take a step back back know that getting off the beaten path

is ultimately going to put you on a better path in the future and take risks take failure as a success and you know go vegan all right man if you're digging the jackson vibe the best way to connect with him online now that you're you iPhone and you're actually on the Internet. That is right. The Plantriotic YouTube page, right? Facebook page. I have a Plantriotic Facebook page. My personal Facebook page is Jackson Foster.

And YouTube is Plantriotic as well. And I'll say it now, written in stone, so I can't back out. I have a book that will be out called Plantreotic, which is going to be a just overall guide, just pretty much defining the definition. So a breakdown in a very fun, easy, and digestible way to read of why adopting a healthy whole food plant-based diet is ultimately the best personal impact you can have to benefit your country, world, yourself, and beyond. All right, man. Well, I look forward to checking that out.

It's going to be rad. You're close to being done with that? You're working on it now? Writing-wise, it's almost fully written. I've been working on it for over a year. So now it's going into the editing with my beloved family, who's very nice. They're going to be my initial editors. My,

my little brother, Lucas is an amazing, um, poet and writer. So it's going to go into that. And then I'm going to start taking it to the official sort of bureaucratic steps of getting a book published. All right, man.

Well, good luck with that. It's going to happen to come back and tell us all about it. Definitely. All right. Well, thanks for talking to me. It was lovely.

Peace. Plants. All right, you guys, that's the show. I hope you dug it. I hope you dug Jackson's vibe. I really liked that kid. If you're in Los Angeles, don't forget to check out Joy Cafe, J-O-I. It's 100% awesome, 100% organic, 100% plant-based. It is our new restaurant that we've partnered in, and we're really excited about it. Also, if you want to sit down and say hi to me, I can generally be found there around lunchtime. Not every day, but quite often. So please stop in, introduce yourself, ask questions, enjoy a delicious meal, and leave healthy and happy. I want to stay current with all things plant-powered. Subscribe to my newsletter at richroll.com. It's free. I won't spam you. Just a couple emails here and

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All right. This week's assignment, here's what I want you to do. I want you to think back on what you were doing when you were a college student or a young person around the age of 21. What did that look like? And what were your hopes and your dreams at that time? Now let's compare this to who you are now, what you're doing now. I want you to do an inventory. What's missing? What did you love then that got brushed aside then i want you to identify one thing one activity one hope one aspiration and make a decision to begin to find a way to express that in your current life i'll catch