The Rich Roll Podcast - Sacha Gervasi & David de Rothschild: Chasing Dreams, Seeking Adventure & The Power of Story To Change The World

Episode Date: October 3, 2016

Two British ex-pats walk into a room. One, a writer and filmmaker. The other, a global adventurer and environmentalist. Upon cursory glance, it's an odd pairing — two exceedingly talented and accomplished yet very different people with little in common beyond their homeland of origin. But peer just beneath the surface and you'll quickly discover certain common passions unite them. A zeal for chasing dreams. An appreciation for cultivating imagination. And a deep understanding that a story well told holds the potential energy to change the world. My very good friend for over 16 years, Sacha Gervasi is the hyper-charismatic screenwriter behind the Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal and the director of 2012's Academy Award nominated Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren and Scarlett Johannson. But Sacha is perhaps best known for Anvil! The Story of Anvil — his critically acclaimed rockumentary about an also-ran Canadian heavy metal band. A true-to-life Spinal Tap the London Times dubbed possibly the greatest film ever made about rock and roll, it took independent cinema by storm at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008 and would go on to win both an Emmy and Independent Spirit Award. But behind the film's can you believe this is actually real? narrative and comedically endearing head-banger protagonists is a powerful, indelible dissection of what it truly means to never give up on your dream. Equally charismatic is Sacha's brother-in-law, David de Rothschild. A world adventurer, passionate environmentalist, entrepreneur and provocative storyteller, David spearheads more conscious causes, mind-boggling expeditions and well deserving non-profits than you can possibly count. In between writing books and graphic novels, David has traipsed the Arctic from Russia to Canada, is one of only 14 people to have traversed the continent of Antarctica and was part of the team that broke the world record for the fastest-ever crossing of the Greenland ice cap. Named an Emerging Explorer by National Geographic, a Climate Hero by the United Nations and Man of the Year by GQ Magazine, David is perhaps best known for sailing from San Francisco to Sydney in a 60-foot catamaran forged from 125,000 intact, reclaimed plastic bottles. Dubbed Plastiki — an homage to Kon-Tiki, legendary explorer Thor Heyerdal's epic 4,300-mile crossing of the Pacific on a balsawood raft in 1947 — the hair-raising odyssey was a successful effort to captivate awareness around the 73.9 million pounds of plastic currently floating in our oceans. David's latest obsession? The Lost Explorer — his recently launched line of stylish, sustainably sourced and manufactured garments, grooming products and travel accessories. The three of us convened in David's spectacular, airy Venice live-work loft for a proper chat and spot of tea. Between witty barbs, this conversation pivots on a central theme: the power of storytelling to lift the human spirit, speak truth to power, incite positive change and elicit indelible, eternal verities about who we are. And how, together, we can leverage imagination to cultivate a better relationship with nature and a brighter future for ourselves, our children and the planet at large. Enjoy! Rich

You know, I've got a number of interesting projects that are kind of out there, and I realize that what you need to do is kind of, I call it kind of the equation of curiosity, where it's like dreams are the breeding grounds for adventures, adventures are the breeding grounds for stories, and stories inspire more dreams. And that entire equation is pushed through by asking questions. And so, to me, the first stage of any adventure

is dreaming about it. And then the second stage of the adventure is talking about it. And as soon as you talk about it, it materializes. People grab onto it. It becomes real. That's adventurer and environmentalist David DeRothschild, who joins filmmaker Sasha Gervasi this week on the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. How are you guys doing? What's going on? My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome or welcome back to the podcast, the show where I have the great fortune of going deep and long form with some of the most interesting, some of the most compelling, some of the most provocative, positive changemakers all across the globe. unique, more like some kind of West LA freeform Algonquin roundtable with two extremely perceptive and extraordinarily charismatic minds. Sasha Gervasi is somebody that I have been very good friends with in Los Angeles for most of my tenure here. I think we've been buddies for like 16 or

17 years. Sasha is a filmmaker. He's a writer, director, perhaps best known for a documentary called Anvil, The Story of Anvil, which is sort of a rockumentary about and also ran Canadian heavy metal band. You can kind of think of it like a real life spinal tap. But beneath that, it's really this beautiful expression, this beautiful work of art about what it means to have and hold on to a dream. It's really quite something. The movie premiered at Sundance in 2008. It was incredibly well-received and critically acclaimed. It's got like a 98% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Times UK called it possibly the greatest film yet made about rock and roll. So if you have not seen this documentary yet, I mentioned it in one of my roll calls a couple weeks ago. You definitely have to check it out. In fact, you should just hit pause on this podcast right now. Go watch it and come back and listen to this later for context. Beyond Anvil, in 2004, Sasha wrote a script called The Terminal. It caught the eye of a little-known filmmaker named Steven Spielberg, who went on to direct it, starring Tom Hanks. And then in 2012, Sasha directed a movie himself called Hitchcock, starring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, and Scarlett Johansson.

So that should give you some context of the level of talent and gravitas that is Sasha Gervasi. He's also attached to some pretty interesting projects. We get into that in the context of talent and gravitas that is Sasha Gervasi. He's also attached to some pretty interesting projects. We get into that in the context of the conversation. But who is this David de Rothschild guy? Well, in addition to being Sasha's brother-in-law and the youngest heir to quite the family banking fortune, David is a super interesting and interested. He's one of those people that is not only engaging, he's engaged, right? If you catch my drift, David is a world adventurer. He's an environmentalist. He's an ecologist. He's a storyteller. He's a provocateur. He's one of those people that's

active in more causes and expeditions and ventures and nonprofits than you can possibly count. But perhaps he's best known for his 2010 Pacific crossing in a 60-foot catamaran made entirely out of reclaimed plastic bottles, like 12,500 plastic bottles and recycled materials. And we get into this interesting project in the course of the conversation, but it was dubbed Plastiki, and it's just one of many expeditions David has created and accomplished in the interest of raising awareness around issues of global environmental concern. In 2006, he spent over 100 days crossing the Arctic from Russia to Canada. He's one of only 14 people to ever traverse the continent of Antarctica. He's part of the team that broke the world record for the

fastest ever crossing of the Greenland ice cap. He's written a few books. He's won all kinds of awards like the Emerging Explorer Award by National Geographic. He was nominated as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2007. He was named one of GQ Magazine's Men of the Year in 2009. He was named by the United Nations Environment Program as a climate hero. So look, this is just, the list goes on and on and on, right? This is just the tip of the iceberg of who this guy is and all of the things that he has his hands in. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible. All right, back to business. This is just a super fun episode.

I don't know what else to tell you. It's light. I love it. It's totally different than anything I've ever done before basically because both of these guys have just amazing personalities um and i love it uh we did it in david's pretty spectacular work live loft space in venice the conversation meanders a bit all over the place in this one but if I had to boil it down to a few themes, I would say that this conversation is about the power of story. The power of story to lift the human spirit, to speak truth to power, to incite positive change, and elicit certain truths about who we are and what we're meant to do and be. So with all that said, I barely scratched the surface with Sasha and David.

And I really hope to have them back on individually in the future so I can get a more focused idea of what makes these guys tick and all the amazing things that they're involved in. So without further ado, let's just jump into it. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Sasha Gervasi and David DeRoccio. Are you guys ready to rock? Oh, yeah, man. Dude, I don't even know where to start with this bizarre alliance that I have sitting here before me. Sasha Gervasi. Where did it even begin? I'm still on the phone.

I'm still on the phone. I know. Will you put your phone away? I'm putting it away. Oh, we're doing a fucking... This was your idea. He's sexting me. Yeah, well, here's the thing.

I just said, like, we've got to have lunch. We've got to have lunch, and so this is what happened. Right, so here we are. Here we are recording. Basically, we're recording our lunch. Banjo's here. We're having a good time.

Except it's a food-free lunch. Hopefully, yeah. Right? It's one of your fitness lunches. I know to get fit don't eat right how to get slim just don't eat anything that's right that's what we do i'm a breatharian i'm inspired by my brother-in-law i know that's the whole thing isn't it yes family i know i understand that it's funny because sasha i've known you how long have we known each other now i think probably like 15 oh it's gonna be i think it's longer than that it's like 18 years yeah it's a long time uh-huh and David I wasn't born then I know you weren't born yet but I was following you when you were in utero probably before Sasha had ever met you so I've been tracking I'd never heard of him before

he became my brother I was like who the fuck is this guy and now what is going on you guys have some kind of collaboration that you're working on right now it's all very top secret we decided like we can't even talk about it because it's too super top secret we do have an idea that we're working on and that is sort of the bonding us but it's so private it's so top secret that only certain eastern european governments are actually aware of what it really is yeah if you go on to the nsa will tell you all about it. Yeah, just talk to them. No, we do have something. It's exciting, but we can't get into it too much because really,

we don't know what the fuck we're talking about. We're still figuring it out. But it's big. It could be. What do you think, Dave? I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I mean, or it could be really small.

Or it could be tiny. It could be a midget of an idea. Yeah, I'm getting a very crystal clear picture now of what's happening. Like in the dog. There is something happening but for a later podcast right today we'll just focus on the dog eating the microphone yes what's going on right now so rich paint a picture for us where are we what are we doing we are in david's fantastic uh venice uh studio slash living space slash workspace launch pad it's like how would you just describe the aesthetic of this pad sasha yeah he can paint he can paint a nice picture in two words i feel it

it's very peter beard i would say the two words that spring to mind are just shit sandwich shit sandwich yeah which is also spinal tap's second album yeah i think so no i think it's amazing i mean i i every time it's a gluten-free shit sandwich every time i every time i come here there is something different and it's been improved and it gets bigger and it's wonderful i mean the art you have here is extraordinary incredible art it's very well appointed so it kind of cap it it captures the aesthetic of the lost explorer i think right actually dave i want to know this because we were going to have lunch i was going to ask dave this myself yeah tell us what is the lost explorer what is the whole where does it come from what are you doing

it's a it's a good question i don't i mean you know try to be right up on the mic a little bit so i'm knocking over my unicorn man who's puking a rainbow. The Lost Explorer. So I think it kind of came from really just a sort of a collection of ideas over years of working with different brands and kind of not being that inspired anymore to sort of necessarily sell something that you don't believe in. So, you know, if you get sponsored to do expeditions and after a while you're sitting there, you know, presenting something on behalf of a brand and you're really a marketing whim, you know, you're as good as that season's, you know, investment in a message. And then as soon as that ends, you end up being, you know, pushed to the wayside.

And if you're passionate and you invest in, you know, the stories that you believe in, you're passionate and you invest in you know the stories that you believe in and then all of a sudden you're told sorry we've changed direction then it's it seems inauthentic to then find another brand that you want to try and tie into right and right so i got kind of you know i thought well if i'm going to do all this why not try and just build something that i believe in that kind of epitomizes the lifestyle that i believe in and the lifestyle that I'm living. So Lost Explorer is kind of built on this kind of notion of working in partnership with nature and saying if nature is a magician we've all got to start believing in magic again. And I love magic because magic is a space in which holds a sense of wonder and curiosity that is integral to the brand. The brand is living curiously right and curiosity is an emotion

right and I think that's something that we both share i mean you share a curiosity of stories and the curiosity of of characters and how do you you know weave those together to create a sense of magic which is either through film and through for me it's through adventure it's through products it's through you know creating a new partnership with the planet i have to say i was super impressed because i just saw the the clothing line and it's you know even in it i mean obviously without sounding ridiculous but it even tells a narrative in the way the things are designed i mean it's incredible i mean the best part of just reviewing the product line is i know i'm going to get a new wardrobe i mean that was really actually no there's a 20 percenting hike for you

20 percent hike yeah yeah i'm a fucking relative yeah i know exactly that's the point okay no but seriously the clothes are extraordinary i mean they really are man i'm actually really impressed because rich and i just before this began we walked through some of the product lines and it's a vast array stuff it's sort of men's clothes it's kind of you even have a tequila you have bath products you have sort of nutritional stuff it's kind of a phenomenal thing and it's bound together with this you know by the single single idea right that you're of connection to nature and as john was showing us some of the designs that he's done i guess

your designer you know he was saying this this this is all natural dyes and i was pretty impressed that the color was that yeah yeah clothing dyed with with coffee beans yeah coffee black tea green tea hibiscus. You know, I think there's a thing, isn't there, where, you know, it's like we need another brand, like we need a hole in the head. You know, we don't need more stuff, right? And that's kind of the sort of the antagonistic relationship that I have to play with in my head the whole time, which is like we don't need more stuff. And yet we're making stuff and so you know the first thing people say is well if you're doing it really for nature short

you shouldn't make anything else and then you realize that that's you know sort of antithetical to the whole way that we're geared you know we're geared in society to consume right whether we like it or not you know everything about every single day that we are, you know, walking through these journeys in life and we're being extracted from at every different juncture. Right. And, you know, so that's not going to change. And for me, it was about saying, well, how do we how do we find something that maybe just twists on that, you know, that notion or that idea of consumption being just slightly better. Right. Not saying we're perfect right not saying we're

perfect not saying we're going to get it right from the gate you know so when we introduce natural dyes or we introduce materials that are you know more sympathetic to you know the natural cycle and nature it's exciting but it's challenging and you know you're trying to break new ground with things and and ultimately you know our jackets aren't going to save the world our pants aren't going to save the world our creams aren't going to save the world. Our pants aren't going to save the world. Our creams aren't going to save the world. They might make you smell nice. Speak for yourself, Dave.

My pants aren't going to save the world. But it represents an ideal. It's an ideal. We all have to wear clothes. Hopefully, yeah. You don't. You don't actually. I mean, Sash is in fact the only one.

You're naked right now. I'm just, you know. He's the only one that I wish would wear clothes. It's chilly in here, is all I will say in Venice. But I was most impressed. There was one single item, the bright white jacket right now i'm just you know he's the only one that i wish would work it's chilly in here is all i will say in venice but i was most impressed there's one single item the bright white jacket made of pure rock cocaine yeah that was good that was fantastic yeah yeah that was a good jacket yeah i'm gonna take that abroad you should it gets it gets it gets a lot of um it gets a lot

of interest that one so i'm really i can't understand why it makes people really chatty what do you think of all the products? The chat jacket. Which do you think, is there, is there any one that you think is going to be sort of a signature lost explorer product in terms of the thing that you think people will associate the brand with? You know, I mean,

I think at this stage you hope that there isn't, um, I mean, I say hope there isn't, I mean, I said that I hope that there is a, um, there's a,

an equal weighting to the stories as there is to the product, right? And so actually crafting stories and trying to figure that out is a challenge. And I think the first product that kind of came to mind was the mezcal. And the reason why mezcal is because mezcal is a spirit that you share around stories, right? So it's, you know, if you take tequila being the younger brother and mezcal is the older, wiser sister. And tequila is sort of synonymous with, you know, slam, you know, wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. It's kind of almost like the American culture, right? It's like, you know, people slam them back.

They take a bit of salt and a bit of lime and then pull a stupid face and get fucked up as quickly as possible. Whereas mezcal is about sipping and stories. It's about a campfire it's about consideration it's about you know having a moment with people and sharing a moment so for me the mescal is interesting because it's an ingestible and it's like you know you're giving someone something that they can you know almost they're drinking the kool-aid but they're drinking the mescal right and i think it's interesting because it's it's again it paints the kind of variety that we want in terms of the product range and how we want people to just live a more curious

lifestyle across lots of different products and i think that's the challenge with anything nowadays you know we're bombarded by so many messages we're bombarded by so many moments in our everyday lives and that's what i was saying earlier it's like how do you how do you encapsulate that and And how do you change the partnership? How do you change the relationship a little bit? And I think that's where stories come in, right? And, you know, we are over-storied, you know? So it's about making stories that stand out

and stories that really are grounded in human context, right? I mean, it's the human story that is always the most fascinating. I mean, I was watching last night, I don't know if you've seen it, but the O.J. Simpson documentary. Oh, And if you seen it, but the OJ Simpson documentary, it's one of the best things I've seen It's one of the best things I've seen and you you look at this thing and you could not make that up Yeah, you mean you could not make up that story I mean if you made that story up and wrote it as a film and presented it to people wouldn't believe it They say it's absolutely unbelievable. I thought it's best that I've seen all year OJ made in America It's a it's a five. I think it five fiveJ Made in America. It's a five, I think it's a five-part documentary.

I actually watched it in one go in seven and a half hours, and it was extraordinary. It's extraordinary. But at the very heart of it is this human struggle, right? This human story, this human element. And I think that is ultimately when you strip everything down, the most fascinating and the most connected thing that we have is that notion of belonging to a tribe that human connection right we're on a planet in the middle of nowhere right there's nothing else

out there that we know of yet that can support life as we know it your eyes pop out of your head and your head you know sets on fire in seconds if you leave this atmosphere we're on this beautiful ball of of of you know the spaceship earth and you know the the thing that we often forget about because we're taught be individual be you know be unique be something else and and and and swim upstream and for a lot of people that actually is intimidating and i think when you really get into it it's actually those moments that where you can belong to something the idea of a connected tribe an idea of a human story you know to me is is really what it all boils down to is like how do you find those relationships and those stories

i think it's interesting because i think the similarities are always greater than the differences yeah like people present as being incredibly different but actually we all have dreams hopes fears you know we all have families and i think it's you're right finding that connective tissue is what makes i think a great story that speaks to people beyond a single demographic. And, you know, I think it's interesting what you're doing because what you're doing with your brand is sort of similar to, you know, what people like, you know, as a filmmaker, you try and connect people. That's sort of the point. You know, you want people to have a group experience and feel something. And, yeah, it's an interesting point in the world i think sasha as a

you know master storyteller yourself i mean your projects how much did my mother send you that check she did yes i love your mom uh you know your stories vary in terms of genre and tone but there is that uh consistent theme of humanity that and the and the humorous side of humanity that runs through all the work that you do. And it's very, I never walk away from anything that you've done without feeling impacted emotionally, like feeling moved by it. And, you know, David, for your part, I feel like there's this ethos of inclusivity that has run through all these various projects and adventures that you've gone on. And as an environmentalist and somebody who's done, you know, traveled all these crazy parts

of the world and traversed the Arctic and the Antarctic and, you know, sailed the Plastiki across the Pacific and all these things that you've done, it would be very easy for people to sort of categorize you as somebody who is an inaccessible person, right? And I think as an environmentalist, it's easy to create those walls and separate and say, you know, these are good people, these are bad people. But your message seems to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, has always been one of inclusion, like trying to make it accessible to bring people into whatever adventure you're on, or the storytelling that is entailed with that.

into whatever adventure you're on or the storytelling that is entailed with that yeah i mean i i don't um you know it's it's nice to have a someone else's viewpoint on it but i i think the worst thing about the environmental movement ultimately has been the environmental movement i mean it perversely is made um you know um i when i when i first started getting interested in my my sort of entry point was actually more through my degree. I did a degree in natural medicine on naturopathy and you are what you eat and you are what you breathe. And, you know, my body is still definitely, you know, it swings between being a nightclub and a temple, you know, and it's that balance, right? And I think that, you know, the big problem I saw in the environmental movement was that there was an air of worthiness, exclusiveness. There was a sort of, as you said, a right and wrong.

And it's not. It's many shades, right? None of us are perfect. All of us have an impact. The planet is going to be just fine. It's whether or not we want to live on it in a certain way that can support us. way that can support us you know are we smart enough to figure out that actually without clean air without clean water and without you know food that's covered in chemicals um you know if we don't have you know sorry you know those things and we you know we can't live on this planet as

we know it and we're destroying our ability to live on this planet and it can be told with you know doom and gloom and i think I think the environmental movement has been very good at being the undertaker of the wilderness, publishing statistics on the demise of nature. And we've created this false dichotomy that there's nature in us, and we've created this external conversation that's like nature's out there, and we go home and we love nature, right?

I mean, everyone loves nature. I've never seen anyone say, I'm so happy that dolphin got it, you know what I mean? and let's go and fuck up that whale you know what i mean no one's ever like yeah man i got such a boner today i cut down five trees you know what i mean like no one's like getting off on killing nature um i bet there is we're never not in nature there's this idea that exactly so we are. We are part of the system. We are fundamentally ingrained in it. And so for me, I sat there and I said, look, I can dive into stories that are really specific or I can try and in some way elevate and celebrate nature, right? Give nature a voice.

Nature has a voice, but we just sometimes don't listen because we're so bombarded with other voices and other noises and and and the daily you know grind right i mean it's like you know there's a lot of going on in everyone's daily lives and i remember one time standing in this um this bread line in the middle of russia in a place called narilsk which if you put a pin in the middle of russia is literally right in the center and there's this queue of women all standing in these big is literally right in the center and there's this queue of women all standing in these big fur coats and it's freezing cold it's about minus 40 we're we're delayed before we head off on our on our on our trip to the north pole and i'm standing there and like my gore text freezing my balls off and um i'm looking at this woman and she's kind of laughing back at me and i'm like

poor bear you know and and she just in her very broken English said you know when you have when you think of environments you don't think of anything else you you have nothing you have no other problem right so she's like when you're when you're thinking about the environment you have no other problem to think about and I think that's a general consensus that you know it's all good and well to sit on your high horse and say drive a Prius put solar panels on your roof, change your light bulbs, and tell people what they shouldn't do or what they should do and be sort of, you know, rather dictatorial about it. But the reality is that actually it's for you, as you know, change comes from within. It comes from your own curiosity, your own desire to make differences in

your life, to live a healthier lifestyle, to live more harmonious. And I've always felt that a really good way to kind of crack that nut is through humor i mean it's something you've done sash with your films a lot you know is using you know serious stories serious human context stories but using humor using you know to disarm people to allow people not to feel intimidated because if people feel intimidated by the subject matter they're not going to go any deeper. And most of the subject matter that we portray is, you know, these boring, long reports that are intimidating intellectually. They just make you feel bad about your life. Well, yeah, they make you feel bad about your life and they really satisfy, you know, they're there as a sort of an intellectual wank fest for PhD, you know, professors to, you know, compare notes. wank fest for PhD, you know, professors to, you know, compare notes versus actually saying,

how do we just break this down and go, look, if you cut down trees, there's a finite amount of them. If you continue to do it, then the air we breathe becomes more polluted and we all get cancers and we all end up getting sick. Right. So like, it's really simple, you know, go into a classroom of five-year-olds and they'll give you all the, all the answers you need to know to every environmental problem. So maybe I resonate with five-year-old mindsets better than i do with adult i think that says a lot yeah and that's but there's been part of my job right you've been able to hold on to that conversation and so i could have written you know people said to me why didn't you just write a report about plastic in the ocean and do a recycling campaign and i was like well you know plastic in the ocean sounds really boring but if i'm going to build a boat out of plastic bottles there's potential

that i might die that creates drama drama creates good stories there's a there's a protagonist that's right you know i think and that's the thing right i totally agree when i think one of the first dates with your sister i came to san francisco to sell salita to see the launch of flosiki and i remember my wife saying you've got to meet my brother. Before he dies. Before he dies. And so I remember standing on this quayside and he's on this boat that literally looks like a sort of Evian bottle

with a few boys on it. And he's got like all these... When he means boys, he means buoys. Buoys, sorry. There were a few boys. He also had some small boys. Little boys, small boys on it. But what was that?

There were all these kind of Samoan wrestlers. Who were those guys? They were delivering us some takeaway. So imagine you meet your future brother-in-law, he's standing on a giant bottle of Evian, and there are some Samoan wrestlers being blessed by a priest with some sort of incredibly large explosive turban. And I'm like, who is this flipping nutcase?

I first heard about... It was insane, but you know what? And then he went off to sea and he didn't... I know. He disappeared. For how long did that all voyage? Four months. I want to get into that.

But I first heard about what you were doing in Plastiki when my college buddy, Nathaniel Corum, came by to visit my house and we were catching up and he was telling me about all these... He's an architect and all these amazing projects that he was working on building sustainable houses on indian reservations and traveling to all kinds of crazy parts of the world but he had just completed design on the cabin for plastiki and he was telling me all about it and that's when i started looking into what you were up to and it's just amazing amazing. So if you could indulge us, sort of take us through what that was all about.

Yeah, I mean, the cabin design was really... I mean, not the cabin per se, just the whole plus. I just want to talk about the cabin. It's where all the fun happens. Just about the cabin. But no, I mean, I think the cabin design is a good place to start

because it was actually inspired by Buckminster Fuller. And that was a design kind of nod that I wanted to include in that, mainly because of his kind of coining of the phrase Spaceship Earth in 1963. He was the one who kind of really popularized that conversation. This was a year after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962,

which was one of the seminal publications to spawn the environmental movement and um you know he said you know it's got to be everybody or nobody we cannot live on this planet for much longer unless we see it as a connected system and that connected system i think is really was kind of you know transferred into the boat adventure right because we needed to create a connected system for living. It was our spaceship on the ocean. And that was, you know, the kind of, the sort of starting point was like, how do you manage your food, your shelter, your water and your energy

on something where, you know, you have to live in a confined space? It was like, you know, the first port of call we actually did was go to NASA and speak to them up at NASA Ames up in the Bay Area and had some amazing conversations with them and got shown how to drink our own piss and all these kind of incredible things. It's like, this is awesome. Sounds like a fun weekend.

It was a great weekend. I stayed back and got some extra glasses and I remember getting peed on. It was good times, good times. But the scientist was super sweet. He was very gentle. No. We really took this approach that waste is often kind of labeled waste, but really it's about resource management.

And so the Plastique,ique started out actually very early on. Um, I came back from the North pole in 2006, trying to cross the Arctic ocean. It was, you know, 110 days living on the Arctic ocean, 16 dogs trying to traverse from Russia to Canada. And about two weeks later, I'm sitting around, um, with some friends talking about the trip and trying to kind of explain to them what it's like to live on the Arctic Ocean. And I sat there and I was like, it's amazing. You know, a couple of hot meals later and a hot shower and a warm bed and a couple of long sleeps.

You kind of detach yourself from that adventure. And so here we were trying to use these adventures as a medium to educate and inform people about fragile ecosystems. And yet i'd lived there for 110 days and felt totally detached from that story um and so i was like well if i'm going to start another adventure then i need to find a story that can be grounded in something that everybody can feel and see and be part of and so the conversation came around um waste and the idea that we have this kind of waste footprint in our everyday lives no matter how green you are no matter how you know um hard

you try every single thing we touch creates an imprint right and so i was like that's a really interesting place to start and then when i started researching, I came across this obscure line inside of a report that the UN had put out about the biodiversity and the state of our deep oceans. And in it was this line that said there's 46,000 items of plastic on or below every square mile of our oceans. And I thought that's got to be a misprint. How can there be 46,000 items of plastic? And when I started search researching that i realized actually that was a conservative estimate and in fact you know for me the best thing about going into the plastics space was that no one really knew the statistics which means i could make them

all up which is always fun they say 70 of statistics are made up on the spot and i would say that jokingly you know in talks and i still say that jokingly in talks with people because it's kind of absurd that we don't know. We don't even know how much plastic is in our ocean. We don't know the effects of it. We're only now seeing the effects of it in our food system. It's crazy that we don't know. We don't know.

We just don't know. And there's a reason we don't know, because we, one, think about, you know, as an individual, you put your rubbish, your waste into a bin. If you're a little bit more responsible, maybe you separate it and then it goes. It's just a way it goes to a place called away. So there's a detachment between my action of consumption and what happens to that end of life story. Where does it go? And so to get people to be engaged in in that end-of-life story is really really hard let alone to say well now it's going into the ocean and once it's in the ocean you

start to think about the scale of the ocean right i mean we got it wrong by calling it planet earth we probably should have called it planet ocean because you know our planet is covered by the majority of it 78 is ocean right and for those of you out there smoking weed right now your mind just got blown yeah boom totally my planet ocean just let that resonate yeah take another hit well most people have heard of the giant floating you know flotsam of plastic the size of texas somewhere you know in an obscure corner of the pacific but it's not so obscure anymore right i mean so what and that is where it became the conversation was like there's a floating planet a floating island of plastic you know and i always would laugh i'm like you know that's where kind of tupac and princess diana and elvis and all these guys are hiding out on their little island having

a right a well of a time um but it's it's basically wherever we have a convergent zone in our oceans wherever there are currents that converge so there's eight major gyres in our ocean and that effectively the best way to describe is if you're sitting in a jacuzzi and um which you often do right sasha does a lot sasha's a big jacuzzi sitter i know i'm just laughing because sasha's such a tenderfoot like sasha's the kind of guy who likes to lounge in his bathrobe and slippers. And then we have David talking about going to the North Pole. But I imagine if I was to lift up Sasha's shirt right now and I was to look inside his belly button, I'd probably find quite an accumulation of fluff from his pajamas.

Imagine away. Because there's a convergence of currents there. So when Sasha basically, yeah. Marks and Spencer's, by the way, fantastic brushed cotton pajamas. So when Sasha gets into the hot tub, he's the dude responsible for that little bit of scuzz that floats in the middle. Because it comes out of his belly button. There's some fluff in his pajamas. It's terrible.

I'm so sorry. By the way, I'd just like to use the correct English pronunciation. It's jacuzzi. Jacuzzi. Okay. So when Sasha hits in the jacuzzi he's um there's that little bit in the middle where all the bubbles are and then there's a sort of dead spot and we have that in our ocean so you have all the currents that converge in our ocean and there's an area called the doldrums

which are often very windless and flat and there is not a lot of motion and in that area is a convergence and that convergence is where a lot of our trash goes. A lot of our trash sinks in the ocean. And it does something more, you know, there's a sort of a more noxious side to the story, which is the photodegradation, right, of plastic. So as the plastics get into the ocean, the plastic is, in fact, hydrophobic. So it repels water. But it attracts the toxins that run off from industry so you think about all the pesticides all the herbicides the dioxins from paper production the fire retardants all those chemicals that get into our water system are attracted to those bits of plastic

initially so you have a big bowl of spaghetti at night from your takeaway when you finish you look around the rim you know you put it into your microwave there's a there's a rim of oil usually stuck inside so all those oils and all those those those toxins that are going into our ocean are attracted to those bits of plastic they then photodegrade which means they break down into molecular sized pieces those pieces live in the life layer of our ocean which is where light can penetrate our ocean they're then ingested by the smaller things in our ocean we call like the salps and the arthropods the things that basically filter feeders filter feeders are like vacuums so they suck everything up now we've got these molecular sized pieces you know they call them

that very they call them mermaids teardrops which i always think was kind of like an interesting uh i thought that's also coincidentally the title of a jethro tull album yeah i think it is as well um and so they basically um jethro tull lives in the life layer of our ocean that's where he's gone and he's hiding out there where there is light he is constantly hanging in that layer of the ocean um but then it gets into that food system uh into our food system and then the things that we actually revere on our table the things that you know if some people are eating fish um you know and especially the fatty tunas that you know are sold for more money they're the ones that are actually attracting more toxins right that fatty tissue stores that fatty tissue is same thing storing highly

concentrated highly concentrated chemicals and and then we're ingesting that um and i often get people say well i don't eat fish and i go go, do you eat meat? And they say, yeah. So one of the things that a lot of people don't know is that in, in, in agriculture, in, in,

in, in, in the beef industry, we're feeding cattle on fish meal. So we're grinding up fish and feeding it to cattle. And that fish is also then transferred. Those toxins are transferred into meat as well. Right.

It gets even more concentrated. It does. So, so it's, it's basically what I'm saying. It's a fucking clusterfuck of information, right, that overwhelms people. The oceans are massive.

The problem is massive. There's a detachment. How do you make it interesting? How do you make it some jeopardy? And actually, it was interesting because it was a filmmaker and a producer, a guy called Jeff Skoll, who I went to see back in 2006. He'd just finished Inconvenient Truth,

and I went to see him. And Sasha, you'd appreciate Inconvenient Truth, and I went to see him, and Sasha, you'd appreciate this. I went in, I said, look, I'm going to take a bunch of artists on a boat to this massive plastic gyre, which is twice the size of Texas, and we're going to take some trash from the ocean, and we're going to then take it back,

and we're going to build these sculptures, and it's going to be called from sea to show, and we're going to do a whole art show with all this trash. And he went, that's really great, but as a filmmaker, I need to know where the final act is where's the drama where's the reveal if it's twice the size of texas it's not like you're not going to find it and there doesn't seem to be any kind of like sense of jeopardy where where could the jeopardy come in you know and so i left that on that voyage i left that that um that meeting and I was flying back to the UK and I was looking out the window

And I remember thinking what is one of the most sort of iconic ocean adventures of all time was the Contiki right? Which won best documentary in? 1946 I think was 51 actually but it was 1946 the exhibition happened You know this great ocean voyage and it was all the drama and, right, was there because it was like these guys were going out on this crazy adventure on this raft. And so it started out with like Contiki, plastic is the problem, Plastiki. So I started with a name. And I think it's something interesting about that. That was the name had a resonance because of its history, right,

because of the Contiki. As soon as you said Plastiki, you went, oh, yeah, I remember the story. So you already had a leg up from a great story right it's evocative of you know one of the great adventures of all time and so that was where it started it became you know a story of design a story of um you know oceans and sailing and and innovation and i tried to bring together back to buckminster fuller you know he would always work across multiple disciplines and i think that's where it becomes really interesting i mean people often say to me why do you live in la and i i you know apart from being close to the ocean and and and you know falling in love with someone who lived here the other thing that fascinates me about la is it's the home of stories

right and stories is what we need and where we come from we you know we identify with stories the first thing you do as a parent to your children is read them stories. And here we are sitting in the nexus of stories. Think about all the films that we watch around the world. They come from this tiny little eight-mile radius block out of this industry, which is Hollywood. And we're at a point where I feel there are great storytellers. And because the whole industry, and you could probably talk to this in a second better than me, the industry is failing great storytellers. They're not making

films they're scared to make great films because of the marketing model in the film industry and so the byproduct is we've got all these incredible talent sitting around going what can i do where can i lend my my my writing or my storytelling skills and that's what excites me is being close to those storytellers which is why i guess sash and myself apart from him being married to my sister you know started talking about what projects we could collaborate and we have a we actually have a few seriously we have a few ideas we have some really good things but you were talking sort of very eloquently earlier about you know what we nourish ourselves with is is critical it's crucial to our state of mind our spirit i think the same is true as we

need to nourish ourselves with stories you know and for me i think that what you're talking about is a shift away from things which are actually about the human spirit or that are about experience and enriching people's lives to ultimately what corporate products you know and i think that there were complaints i remember when i first arrived in in la a few years ago there would be people doing like i'm doing a big coke commercial you know and and and the directors would be like frustrated because they weren't able to artistically express themselves and they said you know the coca-cola guys are behind my shoulder and they like i have to move the can slightly to the left and you know these large event movies have essentially become that they have become corporate events they're roller coaster rides they're a there's not they're not

they're not driven by an inherently like in the old old days, it was like, it's a great idea, go do it. You know, there were people who, you know, as tough as they might have been, they had the courage of their convictions. They were about doing big ideas. You know, now it's much more my committee. So, it's a kind of a frustrating process. I mean, I'm involved with some of those big movies, and I come in and out of them at different stages, as you know. And it's something where you just show up and you're doing, like, a commercial job, you know. But it's a sort of wonderful, though, that at the same time, incredible organizations like Pixar, you know, where people really deal with story in such an organic and methodical and deep and textured way,

where they sit around literally for years and as a group try and come up with something that's going to have a value not just beyond this the weekend it comes out but for years afterwards and i think to me that's where the inspiration lies a lot in in groups of people who are thinking in those ways which is about what is the value and point of what we're putting into the world if you're just doing it to make money and to sell popcorn tickets that's fine and there are you know that's absolutely listen i go to those movies and i love popcorn tickets, that's fine. And there are, you know, that's absolutely, listen, I go to those movies and I love them too. But at the same time, it's like,

we have a limited time on the earth. And it's like, there's only so many movies. Yeah. It's like, what do you like? I always think of this thing, which really helps me a lot.

Like I always think like when I'm going to be at some point, you know, hopefully in not too long, you know, but in some years I'll be on my deathbed. I'll be thinking about my life and I'll be thinking about what are the things that I did that I'm really proud of? You know, there'll be certain things I had to do because I needed a job or whatever it was. But what are those things?

Because I want to have at least one or two things or maybe more. Who knows? You know, things where I feel, you know, I really did something. And it was personally meaningful to me. And it connected with other people. And it's like, I think in those terms now, I'm at a certain point where I'm not 21 anymore. You know, I have a limited amount of time in which I'm going to be able to do my thing. And so I'm sort of trying to make, I think, choices that relate to that in some way, that have some value, some meaning.

Let's bring people together, you know, in the same way that you do with your adventures. You know, the intention, whether you succeed or not, but the intention is to connect people and to put something in the world that means something you know and so that's the criteria by which i think most decisions certainly i make right now and we are in a world where people are not thinking that way they aren't thinking about you know a lot of people the thing that i find is a lot of people truly are hopeless they don't believe they can change things you know they really don't because i mean that was one of the points i wanted to get into with david especially with respect to the environmental movement because people just feel disenfranchised you know what can i do aside from making sure that the glass bottle goes in the in the the recycle bin but i mean just in the case rich of you yourself right and i've known you

for you know for 18 years or whatever it is i I thought it was 15, but God, it feels like 28. No, but I remember, dude, I remember when you were a chubby lawyer. And I remember that time, you know, no, but this, I remember this is the truth. about it in your book where you you sort of walked up or down so you walked up some stairs and you just couldn't make it to the top of the stairs without being totally out of breath and somehow this little seed of kind of something crystallized in that moment you decide you know what i'm going to change my bloody life i'm actually going to do it and here we are whatever 10 years later and you've gone from like a chubby lawyer like 10 000 other guys into a guy who's like totally reinvented your life and has sustained that change and and that is massively inspirational to me so but what i'm saying is i think people don't believe they can do that and it's so important for people to get the message that actually don't kind of fall into the you know a bad habit of believing you can't

actually transcend issues that you might have because you absolutely can and the way you do that is with support in in people like for example like you know the reason david and i get on actually quite well is we you know we we screw around with each other all the time and we're making jokes but the reality is we basically support each other's sort of essential philosophy you know and and we're on the so it was fantastic you know it's very rare you know i didn't grow up with you know brothers and sisters you know and it was such a wonderful thing as the additional bonus of meeting my wife was you know meeting her two incredible brothers and having like that's that sense of you know a group of people like i'm not totally on my

own you know and that's a great and i think it's important to find community to find support to find people of your sort of like mind you know because i can't do this shit right you know i need to be inspired by and for people you know and how does that inform your storytelling i mean you know i just i just there's a like i said there's sort of a purpose to it now i hope well we're like i think we're almost exactly the same age. I think our birthdays are a couple days apart, right? Early 70s, yeah. And we're inching up on 50. Early 70s.

We're inching up on 50 pretty quickly here. I'm just thinking about Chubby Lawyer. Oh, yeah. He was a Chubby Lawyer, man. That should be your website, chubbylawyer.com. Can I just tell you that there are literally, I don't know, however many tens or hundreds of thousands of people listening to this podcast, I wish they could have known Rich Roll.

Because the guy he's become is like fucking transcendent, man. Like he literally was an unhappy, sort of really shut down. You were super shy. You didn't say how you felt. And you were like this fat, self-hating lawyer. And to see what you've done with your life and this message that you spread, man, is fucking inspiring. But I should also say that you've been there for me throughout the entire journey and you've always been you know a friend on the other end of the phone or you know

available when i needed you and you've helped me a lot over those years so you are a very integral you know person in this process for me so you know i thank you for that and that's what it is like in life like you just how many great friends do you have i mean honestly you know i thank you for that you know and that's what it is like in life like you just how many great friends do you have i mean honestly you're lucky if you have two or three or four you know it's like a small group of people that you know there's not that many people who've known me since i was like a kid to now but those people they're all in jail they're all in jail but not only they're criminal but they're super important those people you know and i and i've been you know i've seen you go through so much man i have to say it is amazing and one of the

i just have to say one slight family story one of the reasons i wanted to do this podcast today was because i got a call from my flipping cousin michelle kassoy michelle and andrew bernstein in fact but michelle kassoy she calls me up she goes do you know rich roll i'm like uh yeah i've known him like all the time i've been in la she goes i can't believe it how do you know rich roll i'm like suddenly like my buddy is like a star to my cousin i'm like i'm getting on that goddamn passport on that podcast so michelle this one's for you baby the hilarious footnote to all of that though otherwise i wouldn't be here i know but listen to this so i've been doing this podcast for like i don't know three and a half years coming up on four years and i think when i was about maybe six or seven months into it and i was still like you

know finding my way and trying to figure out how to do this i came to sasha like the paperback version of my book was coming out and i had this idea i was like i i want to have somebody interview me instead of me interviewing all these people like Like who can interview me? Who knows me well enough to ask me insightful questions and also make it entertaining and funny? I was like, Sasha, I'm going to have Sasha do this. So I call you up and I'm like, will you do this? And you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I go to your house, we set it all up and you had no idea what was going on. You didn't take any of it seriously. And it just went off the rails on like minute five and i just pulled the plug out this is this is not working i cannot use this this is like i asked you as a favor to do this you've let me down and i was like you're forever

barred from this podcast adventure so it's just hilarious to me redemption yeah it's redemption you guys should hug it out. I know. It's funny. But put your trousers on first. Yeah. I want to follow the through-line narrative of the Plastiki, but since we're talking about you right now, Sasha,

maybe you can just sort of tell us a little bit about how you have made your way into becoming. I mean, you're an a-list screenwriter filmmaker here in hollywood certainly in my own mind in your own mind and uh yeah no i've made yeah you you you exist in kind of rare air here no i mean you know this man i arrived in la i didn't i didn't really know anyone i got lucky i got accepted to ucla film school and uh you know i've been working ever since. And it's been, you know, I mean, tremendously fortunate. You started as a journalist.

Yeah, I started as a journalist writing for different sort of newspapers and magazines in England. And this wonderful guy called Sean McCauley, who's an absolutely brilliant screenwriter, he just did the movie Eddie the Eagle, which we all love. I was so happy for him with that movie. Yeah, he waited for 25 years and finally got it made. And it was great. And so Sean gave me my first job in journalism and we ended up kind of coming to la to sort of work together and we did for quite a few years actually and you know so so the journalism led into sort of the first script that i ever

wrote which you know i'm now actually going to finally make and uh you know can you say what that is because yeah i'm doing i'm doing this uh the script called my dinner with herve it's with peter dinklage and jack o'connell it's a pretty extraordinary film it's... Can you say what that is? Yeah, I'm doing this script called My Dinner with Herve. It's with Peter Dinklage and Jack O'Connell. It's a pretty extraordinary film. It's about a true life experience when I interviewed Herve Villachez, who most people won't know, but he was the French little person on a show called Fantasy Island, which was about number one TV show in the world from 78 to 82.

So I had this surreal experience where I was sent to interview this guy as a sort of joke and it ended up changing my life in fact because the guy was the most charming intelligent brilliant crazy lunatic uh that i'd ever met and he was so incredibly human and what happened was that after i interviewed him which was meant to be a sort of where are they now sort of puff piece with a few funny photos five days after i interviewed him uh i went back to london and his girlfriend called to tell me that he committed suicide and i realized that i had that i was basically his last will and testament he knew

he was going to kill himself and he just wanted to tell some random english guy his story and so but you made that you were able to make this kind of connection with him where well i mean what was kind of new as it was happening. I sort of knew something was going on. I mean, it was like this guy was three foot ten. He was drinking. You know, I had just had a big issues with drink and drugs myself and had got through it. And, you know, I'd had a moment with that.

And so I kind of it was really interesting. And he was this crazy, almost monstrous kind of figure. And, you know, I sort of felt how he looked, you know, at that moment, and I was really wrestling with everything. And it was just, I just had this sort of visceral connection with him. It's very odd as a journalist, you know, people tell their whole life story in the space of, you know, hours. And often, you know, they'll get emotional, because how often do you talk about everything from beginning to the end, which he did with me, and he got very emotional. Now, a good journalist will, you know they'll get emotional because how often do you talk about everything from beginning to the end which he did with me he got very emotional now a good journalist will will you know not abuse

that a bad journalist will then you know take advantage of someone's emotional vulnerability and then come up with a horrible story you know but you know they they wanted me to do a cynical kind of he's a joke kind of a piece isn't he funny and i was so taken with who he was as a human i just thought my god man look this guy i feel just like this guy like who am i to judge you know i remember walking back into the newspaper in england and just feeling like i've just had my mind blown because what i thought was going to be a joke has sort of transformed into this i actually made friends with him and i thought my god you know i i and my job as a journalist is to judge to be cynical

to evaluate to contrast to judge you know all that stuff all that stuff and yet with him i just felt sort of almost strangely honored that he told me this story and the newspaper just wanted to turn it into you know a trite piece of kind of sunday morning journalism you know so i wrote the real story and the editor of the magazine at the time said, you know, you know, that's very nice. But, you know, six million people are going to choke on their croissant. You know, this is too much. You know, soften it and make it into a bit more of a joke. And I just really resented the fact that within this cynical world that I was sort of found myself in of journalism, that there was really not any room for humanity.

Like I used to get sent on interviews and the editor would say, this is what we think of this person, write this, before I'd even met them. You know, so this idea of judgment and cynicism was something I think was part of my sort of evolution is I realized, you know, it's like, people can seem incredibly different on the surface. You know, it's a theme I touched on, for example, in a documentary I made called Anvil, the story of Anvil, where you look at these two kind of middle aged kind of headbangers from toronto walking down the streets you know smoking joints with their bum bags and you go my god they're just you know some people would say god what sad crazy deluded fools you know and so the whole point of the film i made about them was to show that when you strip away the layers you know that these guys are incredible human beings i mean

you may hate their music you may think they're silly but you know what they these guys are incredible human beings. I mean, you may hate their music, you may think they're silly, but you know what? They're doing what they believe in for the right reasons and they've given their lives to it. They've given their lives to their passion for pure, honest reasons. And so I guess the point of the Herve thing and the Anvil thing was really to say,

before you judge, before you all rush to judge, take a minute and just listen and and just really find out who people really are versus who they seem to be or who they appear to be and so i think that you know that that herve experience when i met him and when he killed himself i felt you know this incredible you know he said to me it was so weird i remember being in the hotel lobby where i saw him at the universal sheraton and um we came down an elevator together and i knew something was going on i had this sense in my instinct i mean he was very ill i mean he was taking medication he sort of smelled of medication and his eyes were glassy you know and i kind of knew something was happening i couldn't say what

it was and he said to me you know promise them that you'll tell my story. You know, and I remember saying I would. You know, and that was 23 years ago. You know, and I just, it was just a very weird thing to have, to be asked, you know, to tell someone's story when you didn't really ask to be asked. And to honor that. To honor that. And here we are now. To have, you know, the reservoir of empathy required to, you know, shepherd that story and fertilize it over all these years i mean you ended up writing a short script right yeah i wrote my dinner with her and

that was really kind of what grabbed the attention of hollywood and kick-started your career very i was incredibly fortunate to have met probably i'd say probably one of the greatest living screenwriters steve zalian who was generous with me, and read this short of mine and said, you know, you're a writer. And thus began a journey. And here we are sort of 23 years ago. And he was a great mentor for you, right, for many, many years. And he just did The Night Of. Yes, he just did the most incredible show on TV, hands down, called The Night Of.

I mean, I was just blown away with it. I mean, he's extraordinary. You know, as a human, as an artist as well. And it was just, you know, I mean, without him, I wouldn't be here. I have to say that without him, I wouldn't have anything. And I think he knows that. I know that. I just feel I've been incredibly fortunate at certain moments

to have been blessed with just the helping hand shows up and the kindness you know and not just steve but also his family you know when i really didn't know anyone in la and um so i i'm just sort of immensely grateful to steve and also to sean mccauley actually who has you know was for many many years you know one of my close friends and and and absolutely you know i'm so it's so amazing to see what's happening for him now. Yeah, it's great. It's long overdue for him.

Yeah, I know. There's a great story that you once told me that I'll never forget. I remember it vividly. And it was shortly after production began on The Terminal. And you got very emotional telling this story. And you kind of recounted what you just said and said, you know, I've struggled, and I've had my ups, and I've had my downs, and I've continued to persevere and show up for the page day after day through thick and thin and not knowing if anything would ever happen. not knowing if anything would ever happen. And yesterday I flew on a private jet and went to some set, like where was it, out in Palm Springs

or like out in the desert. And they had built an entire, basically airport terminal as a set based on your script to be directed by Steven Spielberg. And the arc of that journey, I remember you being very emotional because it was so,

that arc is so spectacular. I mean, it was just a very, it was a very, you know, I've been really lucky, man. I mean, look, like I said, you know, I've been very fortunate. I just, you know, had some lucky breaks

and Steve Zalian was the reason for that, really. He opened the door and introduced me to Steven Spielberg and you know that was an incredible experience yeah to sort of be sitting in a room for two years and actually to have not been able to deliver a script to have been totally blocked and to have been fired off it and then been saved basically by Steve and then ultimately for Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg to make the film you know it was just such a sort of it was really miraculous and, I mean, there are certain things in one's life, whether

it's mine or other people's, where you just sort of see the unseen hand of some force, you know, some positive force that, you know, if you, you know, if you, if you keep going, if you persevere, if you, if you do, if you're doing things for the right reasons, somehow, somewhere, something good will happen, you know, if you, like you like whatever like when with anvil you know like i made this crazy documentary that no one wanted to finance about two completely unknown heavy metal guys from toronto like no one was going to finance that movie and i decided you know what fuck it i'm just gonna like pay for it i spent two years making this loony new movie and everyone thought i was completely crazy.

And, you know, it's like if you're coming from the heart, you know, you can't fail. Doesn't matter what you do. And I'd had this opportunity after that success with Spielberg to kind of be part of the system. You know, my agents at the time were like, go and write this, you know, Adam Sandler and Jim Carrey and all these things. And I just was like, you know, actually, I didn't get into this to just kind of make money and be part of a corporate event. I did it because I want to fucking make some films that I can say, you know, watch this movie. This is what I'm proud of. You know, this means something to me.

This is what I'm about. You know, this is what I care about. You know, you may not care about it, but I do. And I hope that you get something from it. do and and and i hope that you get something from it you know so listen man i i i totally recognize that i've been you know struck with you know good fortune lightning on so many occasions but you've you've also demonstrated a tremendous amount of courage and faith because you know a lot of these gambles that you've taken you know very easily could have not panned out i mean i remember being at your house, you were having a barbecue when Lips from Anvil

like first came to your house. That's right. And I was like, who is this guy? And you're like, oh, he's in this band. I had, you know, followed them around when I was a kid and I was friends with him and I felt like reconnecting with him and I wanted to see him.

So he's visiting for the weekend. And I was like this strange dude with the fanny pack and the heavy metal shirt and long hair and shorts. Well, that was amazing. What was amazing was I had not seen him in 20 years, and I emailed him, and I flew him out to L.A. for that summer, and I had that house that you came to. And what was amazing was he walked in,

and he was wearing the same fucking Scorpions T-shirt that he'd been wearing in 1989 or whatever it was. And I was like, he hasn't changed. He looks the same. And what was amazing, he was delivering sort of kindergarten, school lunches to kindergartens at that time, right? But here he was, 50 years old, still believing that his band was going to make it. And I started the weekend by thinking, this poor, poor guy. so tragic like he's crazy but by the end of the weekend because he was so fucking positive about it and because he was so committed i was like he's gonna fucking make it like i like i was like there's a film here you know so it all came from his spirit you know

his attitude because that was all that drove me to make that film was this guy refused to fucking give up and i was like okay you're crazy but you know what there's something inspiring about that incredibly inspiring you know and that spark was lit to make the movie that weekend essentially and and you know what what kind of you know evolved from that was several years of basically following these guys around and you know i was kind of with you in lockstep you know cheering you on but thinking this is insane like is there ever going to be a movie like what is the movie you're just going to follow these dudes around toronto and like eastern europe and they play bars yeah meanwhile you're paying for the whole thing i'm like you know what's the

denouement i mean how are you so many crazy moments like i remember when we were in romania and they just done another gig where they were paid in goulash you know after being stiffed on their fee and we followed lips anvil had a camper van and we drove through this black forest in the middle of the night in somewhere in romania i think we were even in fucking transylvania and we the film crew were following anvil which is basically a very bad idea so anyway lips stops the car he comes out to our camper van he He goes, we're camping here. This is great. We're camping here.

Anyway, so we go to sleep in our vans. And I get knocked on the window by Rob Reiner at like six in the morning. Light's coming through. I've had two hours sleep. Not Rob Reiner, the actor. Not Spinal Tap director, the drummer of Anvil. The drummer of Anvil.

Rob Reiner. And I think Double B. It's amazing the damage a single misplaced consonant can wreak. And anyway, so I get banging on the window. And Rob says, look, man, look, man. We nearly, we fucking, anyway. So it turns out that Lips had stopped the convoy of camper vans, literally five feet from a 300-foot drop into a ravine

in the Romanian flipping forest. Like, we nearly died. And I'm like, I nearly died because of a handrail. Like, we could so easily have driven off the fucking... Making this stupid movie. Making this stupid fucking movie. I'm going to die for this. I mean, you must have had plenty of moments of thinking,

what am I doing? Many. Out of my mind. I could be writing some huge movie right now and getting paid tons of money. I remember the first night that we shot, I have this amazing cameraman, Chris Seuss. And I said, look, we're going to meet Anvil.

I persuaded him to do it, right? We flew to Munich, I think, where we started shooting, or Prague. And anyway, so we shoot the first night. And Chris says, look, dude, I've got to talk to you. And I'm like, OK, are you OK? I was like, I thought it was really bad news. Like, you know, he had to go home. You know, his mother had cancer.

It's like, dude, I have to talk to you. And I have to talk to you in private. I was like, OK, Chris. So we go up. He locks the room of my hotel room room and he turns to me completely seriously and he says dude. I need to know are they actors I'm not gonna tell the rest of the crew, but I need to know are they fucking actors amazing like my own crew just staged this no that it was like this meta kind of michelle gondry kind of thing where i was like playing a trick on my own crew dude i'm like they're real he says i don't believe they're real i said dude go online look up fucking anvil dude they've been

around for 30 years look up the record how many albums have they put 13 records you know forged in fire you know metal on metal hard and heavy metal on metal metal on metal i mean you couldn't make it up right i mean but dude by the way the new anvil album is called anvil is anvil and the album cover is painted by rob is an anvil staring at itself in a mirror that's the fucking album like i couldn't make that shit up. Amazing. I mean, Anvil is Anvil. Look it up if you don't believe me.

So, I mean, what I'm saying is it was like my own crew did not believe that it was real. So, I think that's when I knew, okay, I think I have something. Because if my own crew is thinking I'm staging it, then we're all right. But at the same time, how are you going to craft some kind of narrative out of this? Well, I spent two years trying to figure that out eventually we did i mean what was amazing was it was like a real you know it was a really tough time as my agent rowena will tell you you know we went to sundance everyone loved it but it was a really tough time in the market and you know we had no offers that were really any good enough and it was like take this dvd deal

get your money back and just move on and go and write big movies for bad comedians and i was like you know what i'm not gonna do i'm fucking releasing it on my own and everyone was like you're even more crazy and it turned out you know to be the greatest thing i ever did it's like when you have those moments of real doubt and you're really being tested my experience is you know go for it have even more courage like that's that's the wall you're being asked to climb you're being asked how much do you really want it? And so commit more. And that's what I did. And I took, at that time, a second mortgage out on my house. And I released it.

And it turned into the thing that totally changed my life in many ways. And changed theirs. I mean, probably one of the, we had so many amazing moments. That's the most amazing thing. What was amazing was standing on the stage at Giant Stadium with 50,000 people screaming for Anvil because ACDC had seen the movie. They wanted Anvil to open for them. And I'm standing on the stage with lips, man.

And they're going, Anvil, Anvil, Anvil. And he's in tears, man. And he goes, we did it, man. We fucking did it. We made this little movie. And now fucking Giant Stadium. Right. I mean, it was just like, it was transcendental.

So for people that are listening that have not yet seen the movie everybody's not going to after that but just create a little kind of just give like like a thumbnail context though for who these guys are you know it's like some gather like how long enough so i can take a pee and come back david go some people we're gonna get back to plastique this is bizarre like filmmaker environmentalist like how do i balance this in this conversation i don't think i can keep it going for as long as a number two i could leave and you know okay anyway so so it's basically for those who haven't seen it anvil the story of anvil you can get it on amazon or itunes or whatever it's uh it's you know it's a movie it was compared to the real spinal tap a lot of people didn't think it was real um you know the drummer is called rob reiner so to the director of spinal

tap as we mentioned so it's a very it's about two guys with the who age 14 decided that they were gonna in toronto canada decided they were gonna rock together forever and here they are in the 50s as we find in their 50s as we find them and they're still fucking doing it and it hasn't happened but many bands like metallica and anthrax who are influenced them, have obviously gone on to huge success. And here are these guys still doing it, not bitter. Just playing local bars. Just playing local bars. Birthday parties and things like that.

And working, you know, basically blue-collar jobs. Blue-collar jobs, yeah. And I think that my two favorite films when I was, you know, in England when I was growing up were Spinal Tap. I saw it when it came out in 1984 the swiss cottage odian and um and with nail and i you know which really inspired me and i think at a certain point i had those two movies in my mind when i made anvil it's really a story of you know a crazy rock band but it's also a story of a friendship you know and how we kind of need each other you know person is incomplete without the other. It's a story of perseverance, though. And it's a story about what it means to hold on to a dream so strongly that you're willing to do anything to make it happen.

And also when there's no choice. It's also when there's no choice. It's like you're in, you've made that decision, you can't give up. And so there's something, you know, deluded about keeping going, but there's also something incredibly inspirational about it, because you're staying true to what you believe in you know and for me you know i i lived that the message of the movie you know it was very hard to get it out into the world there was a lot of resistance even the band themselves when i was shooting were like what the fuck are we doing you know right and uh you know it was just a lot of things to keep together but i just i just really had this spiritual kind of

feeling like that this was going to be a good thing and that this was going to inspire and and ultimately as it turned out with all the artists i mean you know not just heavy metal but like everyone from kind of dave grohl to chris martin to jay-z to you know pretty much every musician in the world you know has has you know they've all championed they've all championed the movie championed it and then to get back to the original point uh the the beautiful kind of result of this being that you were able to you know put them in a position by virtue of the film that they then could step up and actualize this dream that they've had and they gave up their jobs and now they tour the world and do incredible well play huge shows and now we're doing as i'm sure i so yeah

can we say what we were doing before the podcast i think you should yeah so right before the podcast started sasha showed us the trailer for anvil 2 oh look at full title anvil 2 quest for world peace all right so of course of course what else would it be called yeah it's yeah i mean it's like i couldn't i never wanted to make a sequel to it and then the story as it presented itself is so incredible i couldn't not at the end of the day because as people may or may not know from the first film rob reiner the drummer his grandfather actually passed away at auschwitz and his father as a 15 year old escaped and so the second movie is about Judaism and identity and again I don't think anyone's expecting it but as you just saw from the trailer you know it's uh it's a whole new and very different story so

we're putting it together now we still have a lot of work to do but yeah people uh yeah a lot of work to do world peace a lot of dude we gotta say well yeah you have to actually achieve that right in the third act no no anvil's all about giving a role and trying yeah if you fail miserably if you've given everything you've won it's it's not about yeah so it's been super fun to be with them again and shooting and and we took you know anvil to auschwitz and filmed that and that was you, you know, it's what Anvil is. I mean, how could you top going to Stonehenge? Well, we just did.

Yeah, it's like there's no point in making a sequel to a movie like that unless you feel like you have something else to say. Right. It's a tall order to top what you've already done. I don't think we'll top it, but I think we'll be in the same general area. I mean, what did you think of that? I thought it was amazing. I mean, it's just great to see the bum bag back.

That's what it should be called. The bum bag is back. The bum bag is back. The quest for world peace. And the two quest for world peace bum bag returns. Bum bag returns. And I can personally attest to the fact that those guys are who they are, whether there's a camera on them or not.

I've been around them enough to know that they are through and through, true blue, 100% of the time, the guys that you see in the movie. That's exactly right. I remember when I first was dating my wife and I brought Anvil along to one of our first dates. And they were in the back of this car and my wife was in the front. And she was experiencing what you're describing, which is that exactly the same as in the movie. And after about 15 minutes, she leaned across to me and smiled politely and said, please make it stop. Because it was like being in an unedited version of the movie. No, but she loves them, too.

I mean, those guys, man, they played our wedding. Yeah. How good was that? And they wore the bum bag. Of course. And they put cake in the bum bag. They did. They did not.

Dude, Rob put a piece of cake for later into his little into his fanny pack it's important to keep wedding cake in that is unbelievable probably still there actually yeah he's gonna whip it out in anvil too anyway so that's it so that's the whole anvil story but yeah well i'm looking forward to it and it was and you got to and i got to see you play drums on stage with scottie in oh yeah where was that i think it was at sundance at sundance oh yeah yeah we did we did and slash and so that's right and slash from guns and roses came out and we all jam he had a show with guns with his band at the time pre pre the reformation of guns and roses and he stayed an extra day in in sundance because he wanted to jam with anvil and it was sc Ian from Anthrax yeah and we all played Ted Nugent's Cat Scratch people went crazy it was so fun but I remember meeting you when you

were launching Plastiki Dave we I remember you had just seen it right we were up in South Salita yeah exactly I just just just seen it I remember thinking my poor sister my sister is dating this lunatic I was like I, oh, shiples. But you're trying to make a boat out of plastic bottles. So who is more insane? Yeah, good question. So let's get back to that then. I think Sasha's more insane, for sure.

I think that gave me, I think that was what pushed me over the edge. You've done some insane shit, dude. Come on. How about like 110 days in Antarctica? I mean, who would do that? I think that should be the Anvil on Ice. That should be.

That's it. Anvil 3. Anvil on Ice. Anvil on Ice. Be so good. I just interviewed this guy, Colin O'Brady, who just broke the world record for the Explorers Grand Slam. He did it all in like under six months young he did he did yeah it's pretty young he's a professional triathlete yeah I met him you did you met him I

bumped into a cool joking here on Sasha's craziness it's just oozing out I met him actually in I was up in Svalbard at the beginning of the year which is up in the high arctic and he was just trying to do his north pole last degree oh wow so he was an interesting dude yeah yeah young guy um and i remember meeting him and he was kind of on the tenderhooks because of the delays right he's closing his weather window right right right to reach everest to climb everest um so he did it he got it done good He got it done. And then, and then I think after Everest, I think he still had to do, I'm trying to remember the order of it,

but I think he still had, was it Kilimanjaro after that? He had one more peak. Mountain climb. Yeah, that he had, that he had to get up. I don't remember which one,

but he also broke, like, so he did the seven summits and both polls but he also like broke the record for the fastest person to do the seven summits within that but he had to rush at the last minute like there's always crazy stories of course like how can there not be right but super cool kid yeah cool kid and i think again inspiring you know i mean it's it's definitely i i sort of take my hat off to those kind of adventurers you know i'm not um i'm kind of uh what's your day what's your next event like do you have a plan to do something because you did

tell me that you would take me on one do i need two to three years training no no just two weeks what is it do you have any plans or are you not bring your slippers yeah bring your slippers slippers are slippers they're one of the most important things you can have with you so whenever you find british soap i think whenever whenever you go on, exactly, a little bit of soap, a little bit of slipper. Quality soap. You know, body wash. Slipper soap. Slip slop.

Do you have a thought as to what you're going to do? Yeah, I mean, definitely. I mean, I spend my whole time thinking about adventures and just focusing at the moment really on The Lost explorer getting that off the ground um and trying to sort of figure out you know that adventure um and kind of using it as a platform for the will be the platform for you know pulling together more adventures um we just finished a project in times square which was kind of fun um where we recorded the sounds of nature down in the amazon and then transported them back through an interactive app into Times Square. So it was 360 degrees of visuals around Times Square. We got given 57 screens and then created a walking app that you could then walk through

and experience the Amazon spatially to the streets of New York, depending on where you were standing in Times Square. If you're on 7th Avenue, it would be dusk, and if you're on 6th Avenue, it was a mix of... Wow, I didn't even know this. When was this happening? Not long ago. This ran all of April um and then we actually got a note the other day from Times Square saying it was so successful they're going to make it a permanent exhibit inside of Times Square that's wow which is amazing so we're pretty chuffed about that it's almost like a Christo type you know site installation art project yeah I mean that that's that's the sort of um those kind of interactions i think are always

fun you know and i think that's the and it's on that theme of inclusion yeah theme of inclusion breaking it down making it interesting you know not taking the traditional path and i think that you know you know i think the sentiments that you were just talking about which talk to persistence and to you know making things accessible and not giving up on dreams and you know that project started in um i think it was 2010 i think i've done quite a lot of acid and i was sitting there i was like wouldn't it be amazing if uh if if the uh if the the we could bring nature into people's every and into everyday life everyday lives and we would kind of prank people almost you know you'd be walking along at an atm instead of going beep beep beep it might roar or you'd walk

Past a tree and it would talk at you or you would you know have these moments where you could actually kind of bring And elevate the sound of nature over the sound of humanity in in everyday life So you actually did it did you got Times Square to take some mushrooms? It's a face what happened so we based giant massive ayahuasca trip what it was it's a fake see what happens so we basically giant massive ayahuasca trip what it was all the tourists and you actually did it yeah we did but that's what dave does he actually does it right so that's actually what we did we took a we took a um a ceremony an ayahuasca ceremony and and shaman from the amazon uh from the peruvian amazon from i was just kidding but this is actually what happened and yeah and we actually then transported it we inverted the

colors on the phone so we used the primary colors of of kind of purple and black we inverted the colors um um to give this effect of what is lost and actually then you invert the colors on your phone so the issue what you were seeing was nature coming back and it blocked out all the advertising around and so it was this idea that nature is invisible around us but it's the space between that that we need to rediscover and bringing and elevating that. So in terms of adventures, you know, they're constant. They flow and they're just, you know, they're all over the place. And that took me five years to get it off the ground.

Can I say one funny story? It's always an adventure being around my brother-in-law. For example, I remember like one time last year, I said, Dave, I called him on a Friday. I said, Dave, do you want to have lunch next week? He said, yeah, how about Tuesday? I was like, cool. I'll call you in the morning. So Tuesday morning comes around i pick up my phone the ring is different like i'm like what's going on he picks up i said dude are

we having lunch in an hour he says i'm in the rainforest i'm like look if you just didn't want to cancel you don't have to go all the way to fucking brazil i mean that's like dave i'm there in west hollywood trying to work out which vegan restaurant. He's in a fucking tree in Brazil. I'm like, what the fuck? That is typical. He is like, it's typical Dave. Like, he'll be in the rainforest or the Filipino cave. Where does it come from?

Yeah, where does it come from? I mean, look, to be totally frank, like, you know. Why not be rich? Yeah, I mean, 999,000 out of, of a you know 100 000 people in your situation would just be a professional dilettante right well you could you could argue that maybe that is just being a professional dilettante a different version of it um no i mean i think i'm just far more interested in being outside and having the opportunity to travel and be curious and bring stories back and and actually be able to do that in a way that is hopefully engaging and exciting

is for an audience you know that may or may not listen is also exciting um you know and i just always been this way yeah i mean i just you know the the i think it's just been you know probably a combination of add and you know not wanting to be defined by one thing or sit just been you know probably a combination of ADD and you know not wanting to be defined by one thing or sit still or you know you know we've got plenty of time to sit still at some point in your life and I think you know to be able to have an opportunity to go and do these things and not do them would be a crime and so to be able to go out to different locations around the world or meet different people and you know find that kind of everyday adventure um i think it's been always kind of the quest you know just to to do that you know to keep on doing that and you know there's there's there's you know there's projects that

kind of bubble up and you know i've got you know a number of interesting projects that are kind of you know out there and i and i realize that what you need to do is kind of i call it kind of the equation of curiosity where it's like dreams are the breeding grounds for adventures, adventures are the breeding grounds for stories and stories inspire more dreams. And that entire equation is pushed through by asking questions. And so to me, the first stage of any adventure is dreaming about it. And then the second stage is of the adventure is talking about it. And as soon as you talk about it, it materializes. People grab onto it.

It becomes real. And that's where the adventure really begins. And so by seeding ideas and popping them into people's psyche and just saying, look, here's an idea. Could we do this? And that goes from everything from sailing an iceberg to um getting you know a seat for nature at the united nations which is what i've been working on as well um to try and get nature represented at the table rather than on the table and so having those kind of conversations and seeding them i think is really you know the sort of the first stage to any adventure because at

that point it opens up the door for people to contribute and to you know see things and you the stuff they've been talking about for five years is only now coming to fruition or there's a connection. I mean, the other day I was fortunate enough to do a live Skype with Bertrand Picard as he was flying around the world on the Solar Impulse. And he was coming into land. to land you know this is a huge project um to try and fly completely solo uh or sorry to buy completely on solar solar powered flight around the world right i mean it's never been done a huge project huge undertaking and you know here he is you know five hours before he lands in in abu dhabi or wherever it was for his final you know touchdown of this epic voyage. And it's taken him years. And, you know, just connecting on that idea of that, you know, the most satisfying things often come at the end of a very long road. And you have to kind of be willing to be wrong

and willing to, you know, have setbacks and willing to fail and willing to, you know, let go of certain notions and actually not just listen, but unlearn, right? You know, we go through life being told we need to learn, but actually it's just as important to unlearn so that we have space to relearn. And I think those kind of pathways and those, you know, those lengthy periods of time where you're going, will I ever get this project off the ground sometimes the the space in which you can kind of stop right and you you give up and i think it's actually that there's a space in which you allow good ideas to percolate so i realize that you know there will be years in which you know an idea will sit in the back of my mind and until there is a definitive reason for it to stop

which often you know can can be something but often you know you try and make those you try and rationalize why you can't do it when actually you still can if you can allow them just to sit there and percolate and they still resonate to you three five six years later then they're good ideas and they deserve to be done and and you land on them for a reason right i mean they they find you you know i think there's a sort of a an ethereal state around our planet in which you know ideas are shared and we either put our antenna up and grab them or we don't and that's why there's often shared ideas this idea of like morphic resonance right and the idea that we are you know we we can you know if we have an equation that needs to be

solved and then we solve it um the answer is somewhere in our ethereal state and it's probably been solved because in parallel someone solved at the same time the answer now exists right and yes that same weird kind of spiritual thing that happens where sort of technological breakthroughs are made at the same time totally and you'll see it with films right i mean you'll do you know i mean like let's take hitchcock you know no one's done a film on hitchcock for years and then two come out the same time no one does a film on henry you know whatever it was and two come out at the same time and No one does a film on Henry, you know, the eighth or whatever it was and two come out at the same time. And it's always a way, you know, you'll find there's these parallel paths.

And I think, you know, if you can remain receptive and open to that kind of, that idea that things can find you as much as you find things, right? That these ideas just find you and then you have a responsibility. as much as you find things, right? That these ideas just find you and then you have a responsibility, you know, whether it was Ove telling you, you know, physically telling you, tell my story or whether it's a dream you have and you wake up from it and you write it down.

You may not look at that notebook for another three years, but if in three years when you do look at it, it's still there and it still resonates, then it's your responsibility to act upon that. And I think there's a really nice thing about that. You know, there's always, you know, I'm constantly, you know, you're surprised at like, oh, I didn't know you did that. And, you know, constantly doing kind of what I call these mini little adventures.

And I think, you know, there's the same thing. It's like, I'm sure for years to come, no matter what you do, people always ask you what's next, what's next, what's next. And, you know, we're fascinated by what's next because we always want to try and see forward when sometimes actually you know there's a beauty in just you know what's now right and and living in that moment and appreciating it i think when you get involved in a big project i definitely you know you you go through these phases where you grow you know it was four years from inception to

from idea to inception it was four years of kind of processing and living it and then and then then you do it then the world wants to talk about it and by that point you're bored you want to think about what's next and you kind of let it go and then you realize actually i'm still doing talks today i'm still talking in fact right now about the plasticky right and in your mind that was so long ago yeah and in a way you've just got to you go through these cycles you go actually it's part of my identity and it will be part of what I do. And it spawns so many other little tentacles of ideas or adventures. And, and, you know, there are moments where you go, God, you know, what is next? You know, what is another plastiki? And then you realize that actually, there will never be another plastiki, but there'll be iterations, there'll be adventures that still can you know capture people's imagination and i think for me it's sometimes now less about the literal adventure saying that adventure resides in everything right it's how you view it is is what's important right and you know adventure is everyday life you know

it's how you go from you know your home to your office or your school or your place of work i mean that is an adventure right if you embark on writing a script it's an adventure if you embark on a podcast it's an adventure i mean you've been living an adventure for four years and it's how you phrase it and how you present it and how you view it and and the nourishment that you can you know sort of abstract from it and i think the the idea of um an adventure to me goes way beyond just a to b and in a traditional sense like the kid who did the seven summits and the thing it's incredible but it's very a to b orientated it's like i start here and i end here and actually i think the truest adventures are the ones that take you beyond a and b but they take you into this sort

of alphabet of of different ideas and opportunities and growth and and i think that's where you start to to really kind of find the magic of what it means to live an adventurous lifestyle and i think it's you know i always say if you can choose between fizzy or flat water then you're super blessed you know what i mean like i think if i did another book it'd be called fizzy or flat right i mean you have nothing to complain about you know there's two billion people around the world who have don't even have access to water and we can sit and go i have the fizzy no no i have flat now or no i have tap or you know like we're so blessed if you have that space you know which i feel obviously i do as we sit here with fizzy water on the table it um it's a constant reminder that we

do have to act and and live that adventurous lifestyle if we're lucky enough to have that opportunity you know we have the space to live that opportunity then then we should live it and we should be adventurous and we should you know look at those everyday moments and it doesn't always have to be going on a hike or you know which by the way is just a walk i can't figure that out in america Everyone gets in Gore-Tex and they walk and they call it a hike. We're hiking what? Where are you hiking? You're walking.

You're not pulling up your trousers. You're not hiking them up. Sasha doesn't hike, though. I do. You do? I do. I have this special thing called a hike machine. It's just sort of virtual reality.

I just sit there and experience it. Dave does it for me. I do it for him. I'm his personal hiker. That's actually my next. It's so weird. That's a really good idea. You and experience it now. I Dave does it for me. I do it for him. I'm his personal hiker That's actually my next so weird But um, you know, I think this and there's always adventures I get you know, constantly contacted by different people I've done some great trips and I'm about to do You know an actual series another TV series, which I'm not allowed to talk about at the moment.

But that's, again, you know, looking at kind of what I would call, you know, these certain doctrinal signatures of cultures around the world that allow certain cultures to flourish and be, you know, to me, that is a beautiful adventure, this idea of untapping human potential through cultural nuances and being able to look at those things and kind of express them in a way that is heavily accessible. And off the back of that, you know, it spawns all these other different, you know, spinoffs of kind of contextualizing what it means, again, to be human, living on a human planet, living in a connected system where we all really want to share and have the same value sets, right? No matter where you are, it might be interpreted different, but we all really just want food, shelter, water, love. We want curiosity. We want to be part of something. We want to feel safe. We want to feel loved and adored.

And also, I think with any creative project, you also want to feel your life in the moment that you're living it because i think like many people i sort of my my i have a predisposition to either think about the past or the future but sometimes robbing myself of the present experience sometimes with creative projects just the experience of doing them can be more valuable than the end result like you can make a movie sometimes you know who cares about the movie? But what you did when you actually did it, what I got from making Anvil, forget the film,

just the actual experience that I went through in creating that with those guys, you know, that was more valuable than the film for me. But it's not always the case, because sometimes... The film is just your way of being able to share that experience communally. But the actual three years or whatever that you spend... And like you said, it's interesting. The timeline for your projects is similar sometimes to movies.

It can be from an idea to being out there. It can be four or five years. In Hove's case, 20 years. 23, 24. But then there are other things that happen really quickly. But sometimes... It's so interesting. But then there are other things that happen really quickly. But sometimes, you know, it's so interesting. But it's so like what I'm trying to do in creativity is to try and feel who I am right now.

What's going on? Where am I? Because I often will rob myself of the moment by thinking about, you know, what does this mean? And what's going to happen here? And what's the result? You know, and it's like the result is ultimately not really down to me most of the time but the experience can be so I sort of try and focus on what I control which is to have the absolute best enriching experience as I'm doing

something so what is the daily routine that you practice to try to tap into your creative self well actually I was years ago that that uh guy i mentioned sean mccauley who did eddie the eagle um he turned me on to the artist's way like probably 20 years ago and i i would say that i've dipped in and out of that for you know for all of those years and it's such a brilliant thing and i know that some people you know like oh it's so hippie but you know i love it i do it all the time i think you might have been the person i think i probably passed it on to me and i think there was a group of us right to sort of all but i've continued to it's amazing it really is amazing it's a 12-week sort of you know spiritual recovery kind of experience program and it's it's a little bit hippie-ish if

you if you but if you're worried but you know i i just focus on you know ultimately it works it's so incredible in terms of probably some of my greatest creative things have been born out of actually taking the action of doing the artist's way. So I would say that's a great thing. And then that sort of touches many other things. So, you know, generally I wake up, I write longhand, you know, three pages. You write longhand? Yeah.

I didn't know that. Three pages. And you're kind of a night owl though, right? Yeah. Do you write, do you have set hours when you write? Yeah, I mean, usually when I'm writing, it's like, I have two speeds, which is like total laziness for months or like absolute mania 24-7. I'm like not very like measured, but at an average time, it's probably all right in the

day. But, you know, and then, you know, it just, it really depends. Sometimes I'll stay up really late and do stuff. But, yeah, I also, I'm changing my plan all the time. I don't have a set plan. Like, I'm like, how do I do this? No plan. No plan.

Zero plan. Just kind of follow my instinct. But I know that you go through these periods where you'll, like, check into a hotel, like, down the street from your house. It's good to be able to have food at 2 a.m. when you're writing. And just, like, lock yourself up for, like, a week. Exactly. And just go and finish something. Yeah, I've done that quite a lot in the past.

It can be really, really good. And unfortunately, it's incredibly expensive. Right. So I would really recommend not... Well, that like raises the stakes though, right?

Because you have to have something to show for it. This is costing $3.95 a night plus tax and food. And David, you know, adventure and imagination are closely allied, you know, bedfellows, right?

So how do you tap into your imagination for the things that you do? You know, you know, bedfellows, right? So how do you tap into your imagination for the things that you do? You know, I mean, I think that the main sort of thing that I enjoy with the life that I've managed to be fortunate enough to kind of create is just to surround myself with people, you know, like Sasha and yourself,

and people who, you know, are constantly evolving and working on themselves or thinking about new ideas or, you know, the ability to, you know, just sort of be in that mind trust or that mind circle of great people doing great work is really inspiring. And I think, you know, it's like if you go out and play a game of tennis against someone who's average, you know, your game drops. And if someone's really good, you know, your game picks up. And I think it gets better. And I think to be surrounded by and be blessed enough to be surrounded by people who are doing amazing things and seeing people do amazing things the whole time, you know, it makes you want to do more.

I think there's an insatiable appetite that comes from taking an idea all of um flow to that because you see it and you're like i love that it feels good it feels satisfying and also for me i have to clear things out of my mind like i have to do it or it just clutters my mind so a lot of the time it's about sort of focusing on those kind of you know beats and saying, what can I get done? How do I do it? How do I find my way? And trying to remain as, you know, sort of present as possible, you know. I think it's important what Dave says also about having inspiring people around you.

Yeah, you're the sum total of the, you know, basically the five people you spend the most time with. Yeah. I mean, there's this one guy I know here in LA who I find incredibly inspiring called Michael Neal. He's an unbelievable guy. He's written several books. I guess he's a life coach. He's a friend of mine. But my God, that guy is incredible.

And I would urge people to look him up and check out his work because he's extraordinary. And has certainly personally as a friend has really helped me a lot in terms of crystallizing the things that, you know, I want to do. And more importantly, you know, being able to clarify the practical steps that one needs to take in order to do that, you know, it because it's so easy. Well, I don't, you know, I think I was always that young guy growing up who was like filled with potential, you know, and my fear was I'll never actualize any of it. You know, people like Michael Neal or Dave or whatever, you know, they inspire you to like fuck that man fuck that narrative of you won't live up to your potential just make it happen like stop wasting time like worrying about it just do it you know and i think that is an absolutely key thing i i learned from you know

other people and so i always you know i always sort of aspire to have those types of people in my energy field. Because if you've got people who are sort of, you know, have given up around you, guess what? You end up giving up. You end up feeling hopeless. So you have to change. It takes a lot of strength because I think we can all get used to, you know, there's something familiar about being stuck, which is why I think a lot of people are stuck. Because at least it's safe. You know, you kind of know what you're dealing with you life stays small

it's actually quite awkward and unsafe to change that pattern but my feeling is that if you're willing to go through just a little bit of pain and uncertainty and insecurity on the other side of that is you can find people who will lift you up and and and allow you to kind of not be the victim and not be the oh you know I had so much potential and now I'm just gonna drink of not be the victim and not be the oh you know i had so much potential and now i'm just going to drink a lot of booze or or or be envious of other people who have had success you know and i think that's a good guide it's like it's showing up showing up and having the courage to try right and my experience is that when whenever i'm able to

it's not about not being afraid though yeah because everyone's afraid you can be afraid and most people are i mean listen man i'm on the set of a film and i'm directing anthony hopkins and helen mirren and i'm literally shitting a brick i mean i'm like scared i mean that's how it is because i'd never done that before so you you you have to understand that if you're not feeling terrified you're not making progress it's like or you're not pushing yourself or you're not pushing yourself and i think it's not just like showing up and and making the effort it's sustaining that effort when things don't go the way you want them to go because invariably like dave says you know part of success i think at least is being really able

to embrace failure and learn from it and go okay how do how do I, how do I not, or, you know, or recognizing the limits, you know, of control. Like actually you can't control all these things, you know? So, you know, again, Anvil, right? It doesn't matter whether you win or lose. It matters that you give everything. You really try. Because if you keep on giving everything, eventually you win, eventually.

Maybe a lot to get through, but I do think that's been my experience at least anyway i think that's a beautiful place to wrap it up but i have one actually i have a couple really quick questions first one is are there any books uh that you keep going back to that have been instructive or particularly inspirational or books that perhaps you give out to friends um probably not actually no no um i mean i i'm a i'm a i read a lot of books you have diary of a toilet trade i do that's something that you pass on i have a lot of books there's a lot of books in this in this house there are a lot of books but i i'm i'm a i i you know i um i also um i mean there's a you know i'm not a great believer in giving people

books and i and i because because i feel like you know there's only a limited amount of stories that you can read right and i think there's there's only so much time in a day to read. And I feel there's a quite big responsibility to hand a book on to someone. One, because you very rarely get it back. That's very true. The person receiving it then feels this burden, some obligation to read it. They feel slightly a burden and an obligation to read it. And then they end up really hating you because they haven't.

But if they don't read it, yeah, they run into you and it's weird. It's awkward and it's like there's a lot of politics in book sharing. I feel like it's overrated. If you want to figure out what book to read, go to a book club. You know what I mean? He agrees.

Oh, the chorus. Banjo is over on that. Banjo's freaking out. Banjo is freaking out. I know it's I know what you're going to say what am I going to say I don't know

answer the question no what am I going to say I'd like to know no tell me what am I going to say you're going to say The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

that is one that I read that I got a lot out of The War of Art by Steven Pressfield this is being a writer amazing I'm not giving it to you

because then we'll never speak again but it is actually brilliant it's brilliant that's a really great one obviously The Artist's Way Julia Cameron anything by Michael Neal Amazing. I'm not giving it to you because then we'll never speak again. But it is actually brilliant. It's brilliant. That's a really great one. Obviously, The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron.

Anything by Michael Neal is just great. Just get into that. But, you know, I read just a little bit of old literature, like Dickens is great. I'd come back to it. Of course, anything by the great English writers, most particularly reading Shakespeare's plays, which I have started to do recently,

and the Scottish play. I mean, there's so many great things. You know, it doesn't matter what point in your life you're at. You know, I used to study this stuff at school. You know, you read it five years after school, you read it ten years after school. Every time you circle back round to these incredible texts, you learn something new because you're looking at it through the prism of your experience in life at that moment. So you... You've got another angle.

Yeah. Different things come out like, Oh, I didn't know. Wow. My God, that's brilliant. You know?

So I think that's, what's really interesting is being able to revisit things that you think you've read, actually reading them at different points. You often is a very different experience. I love that. Last question is for Sasha. Oh shit.

I have to verify something. Oh, my God. Is it true? Is it true? Yes. At one point in time. Could be. As his lawyer.

I wouldn't answer this. I think we should end this now. I'm not answering. I'm taking the fifth. You were approached by Jaguar to do voiceover on a commercial, and you duly instructed them that it is not called Jaguar. It is called Jaguaruar that is absolutely true and from that point forward yeah that car company has been known as jaguar that's absolutely true yeah what happened was i was that is just in 19 in that's like a mind-bending okay so what

happened basically was i made my first... That's a mic drop moment. I know. My first film was a Scottish hairdressing comedy called The Big Tease. Top of the genre. Top of the genre. Craig Ferguson, who I love, who I worked on the script with

and starred as Crawford McKenzie, a rather camp Scottish hairdresser mistakenly invited to the World Hairdressing Championships. The casting director of that film, Chris Nicolau, called me into a casting room and said uh i'm also casting this voice commercial will you go and read this thing so i read this thing and it was like burwood mahogany interior you know some bullshit about some car anyway i get a call six months later and the call is dude you're the new voice of jaguar i'm like

what so i ended up doing the voice of jaguar and uh i could do the commercial for you if you'd like okay jaguar xjr rob report 1999 car of the year okay that was my first commercial i did two years of it i made an absolute fortune and uh it was the craziest thing ever i had three auditions and i got three jobs the weirdest one i ever had was on my i did a virgin mobile thing and then i did uh they asked me to do the history channel but like not in america so i did it in like singapore malaysia whatever so my line for was the history channel where the past comes alive right so i did that okay so then i went to shanghai in about 2002 and i was staying at this place called the jinjang tower which is like corporate hotel and i was asleep and i had terrible terrible jet lag and i got woken by myself on the television at 4 30 a.m going the history channel where the past comes alive and i had a fucking acid trip

i'm like i have woken myself up in shanghai in two so i did that but then they said to me bizarre i know it's like meta you know spike jones like they said to me... That's like some bizarre meta, you know, Spike Jonze. They said to me, look, man, you could get these jobs, but then I had to take it all full time. I've had to, like, do that. And I just said, you know what? I'm not, I can't do that. So I just, I gave up, but it was really quite fun.

At least you've got something to fall back on. I do. You do. I do have that Jaguar commercial. I'll show it to you. It was really fun. Is it online? I think I've got it. I'll show it to you. It was really fun. Is it online? I think I've got it.

I'll show it to you. I could put it online, but I don't think anyone would be interested. That's so great. Yeah, but it was really true. It was accidentally. I got the job because Gary Oldman at the time was too expensive, and I was the number two choice. But it was exactly that because I said it's Jaguar.

That should be in your CV, number two to Gary Oldman. Number two to Gary Oldman. So they were pronouncing it what? Well, the English guys who'd been doing the commercials before said uh 1-800-24 jaguar right and i said in london we say jaguar which is exactly how we say it and in america they thought all british people did not say it the real way so obviously they've been modifying it so when i said it the real way they went that's brilliant and then i became the voice of a career a star was born all right you guys thanks so much thank you man yeah i appreciate it we did it you feel all right sasha are you good i'm so happy man i'm a little bit dirty why do you feel dirty just a little

dirty let's go to a hamam yeah let's do that all right we're washing off with fine british soaps listen rich your products from the lost explorer products from The Lost Explorer. Products from The Lost Explorer. Yes. Can you also do a shout-out to my cousin, Michelle Kossoi, in Toronto? Michelle. How do you feel about it? Why are you not here enjoying the conversation in person with us? Why is Michelle not here?

Do you know that she is a one-woman evangelical group for you in Toronto? I love that. She's gone to all her friends. You inspired her to do a half marathon. Oh, that's great. And she is now, because of you, considering doing the full marathon. Rich, can she do a full marathon? that's great and she is now because of you considering doing the full marathon rich can she do a full marathon absolutely that's damn right absolutely i think she can congrats that's amazing very cool well done michelle well michelle we love you michelle we love you only one of us clapping as you walk over the finish line so there we go i

said walk i meant run she may be in, however, she'll get across the line. David, if people want to check out your Lost Explorer stuff, how do they do that? They can open up the nearest trash bin and they'll probably find some of it. They go to just the lostexplorer.com and also on Sculpt the Future, which is some of the foundation work we're doing. So you'll find some other bits on there as well. Cool. And you're DR Explorer on Twitter. DR Explorer on Twitter and The Lost Explorer on Instagram. Nice.

And Sasha is quite absent. Absent from all social media. Totally unbaptable. No, there's no pressure. You're one of the only friends of mine that has absolutely zero footprint on social media. Well, I'll tell you why, because I actually wanted to find a friend.

And a friend said, well, sign up to Facebook, right, to find up this friend of ours. So I signed up to Facebook for one hour, and I got four hits from people I had absolutely no interest in seeing ever again. And I just was like, you know what? This is not for me. That was it? That was your entire social media career? That was my answer.

It was one afternoon on Facebook, which was a living hell. And then I was like, forget it. Have people in the industry, like, sort of pressured you to try to do it? Yeah, like, lots of people have. But I mean you know it's just i'm listening i'm just old you are it's true it's ultimately i don't know i'd like kind of the fact that i don't have to deal with like people i went to school with 40 years ago who i didn't like then and i probably so if you're intrigued by sasha go to lost explorer they'll get lost and uh hopefully i can hoodwink you guys into coming back and intrigued by Sasha go to Lost Explorer he'll pass on messages to Lost Explorer yeah I'll pass them on

they'll get lost and hopefully I can hoodwink you guys into coming back and sharing a little bit more we would love that man but let's not forget this is your podcast man

and you are an amazing man thank you for all the good positive shit that you've spread around the world the positive inspiration peace

peace plants plants oh my god are you kidding me The positive inspiration. Peace. Peace. Plants. Plants. Oh my God, are you kidding me? How fun was that? Did you guys enjoy that? Those guys are just fantastic.

The only thing that's nagging at me is that I know there's so much more to each of them that we just didn't get to today. Like I said, we barely scratched the surface. So perhaps I can cajole them to come back for another episode two of the Sasha and David show or even cajole them into coming on individually so I can get down to brass tacks and track the trajectory, the arc of their respective lives and get down to the nitty gritty of what makes those guys tick. In any event, if you want to learn more about David and Sasha, the best way to do that is to check out the show notes on the episode page at richworld.com. I got tons of links

and resources to take your infotainment, your edification beyond the earbuds. And we put a lot of time into compiling those. So it's worth notice. Thank you so much for everybody sharing the show with your friends and on social media and around the water cooler. Thank you so much for everybody sharing the show with your friends and on social media and around the water cooler. Thank you for leaving a review on iTunes. If you have not subscribed on iTunes, please make a point of doing that. It really just takes a second. It really does help us out a lot. And thank you for all of you out there who have made a habit of using the Amazon banner ad for all your Amazon purchases. That's just fantastic. It's been so supportive to us. Amazon does not charge you anything extra on It's been so supportive to us. Amazon does not

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just things I've enjoyed, found helpful. You can sign up for that at richroll.com. Again, it's free. I'm not going to bug you with spam or anything like that. It's just cool things I've come across that I want to share with people. And as social media becomes so diffuse, I just find that sending an email is the best way to maintain communication with those of you out there who want to be connected with me and with the podcast.

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thanks for all the support you guys i love you let me know what you thought of today's episode by shouting uh give me a shout out on facebook or twitter or instagram any of those places and i will see you guys back here next week peace plants Thank you.