The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best of 2014 (Part 1)

Episode Date: December 29, 2014

This is the time of year for celebration. This is the time of year for giving back. This is the time of year for gratitude. This is the time of year for reflection. So let's do all those things. Welcome to the second annual Best of the RRP Anthology. This is our way of reflecting back. Our way of expressing gratitude. Our way of giving thanks for taking this journey with us. I pride myself on bringing a wide variety of personalities, opinions and attitudes to the show. When I look back over 2014, even I am surprised by how many incredibly interesting and unique people and perspectives I was honored to entertain and share with you. Second listens brought new insights. Another reminder of what a gift this show has been to me. A gift that gives and keeps on giving. A compendium of some of my favorite conversations of 2014, the next two episodes of the podcast are certain to catapult you into the new year inspired. If you’ve been with me all along, these offerings will bring certain insights back into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your trajectory heading into the new year. If you're new to the show, then these episodes will definitely inspire you to peruse the catalog and listen in full to some of the guests and or episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology are enumerated below. It has been an incredible year. My blessings are many. My gratitude is overflowing. This is my way way of saying thank you. I appreciate you. Here's to an extraordinary 2015 — the year we manifest our greatest dreams into reality. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich

Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 121, The Best of 2014, Part 1. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to my podcast, The Rich Roll Podcast, the RRP. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for spreading the word. Thank you for subscribing to my newsletter. And thank you for clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases,

especially all you guys that use the banner ad for your holiday purchases. That helped us out big time. So I so appreciate all of you guys. Happy holidays. Happy new year. It's that time of year. What do we do at this time of year? What is it about? Well, it's about gratitude. It's about giving back. It's about family. It's a time for celebration and it's a time for reflection. And this week on the show, we do all these things. We're here to give thanks to you guys to express our gratitude for you taking this leap with me, for embarking on this journey with me. And this is an effort. It's a two-part effort to reflect back on this journey that we've taken together.

It's been an amazing year. I've had so many amazing guests. And you guys, the audience, have been with me throughout. And the audience continues to grow exponentially. I'm so grateful for that and for your support and for everything that I've had the good fortune of experiencing as a result of going on this podcast journey. And I really hope that you guys are too. Over 2014, we conversed on a wide variety of topics and subject matters. And as a lifestyle wellness podcast, I really pride myself on trying

to embrace and contemplate a wide range of perspectives and opinions and attitudes. And as you listen to this episode and to part two later in the week, I think you'll see that we really accomplished that. When I look back, even I'm surprised at what we were able to do and how many interesting and unique people and perspectives we have entertained over the course of the year. And it's something that I'm really looking forward to continuing and expanding on into 2015 and beyond. And so these next two episodes are really about excerpting some of these insights. It's really a snapshot of the year, if you will, a little inspiration capsule. And if you've been with me all along, then this will hopefully help bring

some of these insights back into the forefront of your mind as you contemplate your trajectory. You start to think about what your hopes and your dreams and your goals are heading into the new year. And hopefully it will help crystallize what that journey is going to look like for you. And if you're new to the show, then these clips should really inspire you, hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to some of the guests that you might have missed throughout the year. And I'll put show notes up to the specific episodes up on the blog so it makes it easy for you to find it. Anyway, this is a long way of me saying thank you. I appreciate you. Happy holidays.

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

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I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Welcome to episode 67 of the Rich Roll podcast with Charlie Engel. What is really kind of distinctive and amazing about Charlie are these incredible high highs and low lows of his personal life. Everything from, you know, suffering from crack addiction

and, you know, essentially living in his truck and getting shot at to the high highs of crossing the Sahara or, you know, winning some crazy ultra marathon, to then being incarcerated, being convicted of mortgage fraud and going to prison for 16 months, federal prison. It's fascinating to hear him talk about what it was like to be incarcerated and how he navigated that experience while keeping his head high and retaining a positive attitude, not just retaining a positive attitude, but exuding it to the extent that he was able to inspire his fellow inmates. He continued his running. He even did his own self-styled bad water race,

running around the prison yard until he had completed 135 miles. And in so doing, getting some of his fellow inmates out and running themselves and some of the personal sort of stories of some of his friends in prison is quite touching and interesting in its own right. So a remarkable, epic life story, a very dynamic personality, someone who definitely knows how to spin a yarn. As talented as he is running, his greater talent may be his compelling and dynamic personality. But anyway, he is a great guy. Again, I am grateful that he took the time to sit down with me to share with you guys his story. And I find it to be very inspiring and a great way to kick off 2014.

So I hope you enjoy it. Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, introducing Charlie Engel. You know, yeah, this crazy thing happened a couple of years ago and I end up in prison. And initially there was a part of me that thought, you know, wow, this is, you know, yeah, I think everybody, certainly anyone who knew me or knew of me at that point seemed to know that this thing had happened to me, but then very quickly there was like giant articles in the New York times about it. So yeah. Yeah. And in a way that was cool. I didn't have to be the one to step up and say, this was yeah. Wrong or right. I let other people do it. And I'm happy

to say that, you know, they did it. They did it well. You know, there's always going to be, it's really funny that, you know, cause running the sahara is such an interesting movie and it's 500 hours of film boiled down to 90 minutes of documentary so people who see that film have a tendency to think that that they know me like that is me like every if i yelled at someone or if I definitely edited so that you come off on the dickish, no doubt. And I don't deny that I am sometimes, you know what I mean? The thing is that I think it's fair to say that I have my, you know, I have my moments. I'll be the first one to say, I am, I am not an easy person to, you know, to be around sometimes. I'm not fair. I'm, I'm driven, uh, in ways that are occasionally embarrassing to me, but certainly as a, you know, as a human being that I, you know,

I say things I wish I hadn't said and, uh, you know, and all that. But I, I think that through recovery and through a lot of things, I'm, I'm pretty quick also to apologize for my shortcomings, but not for being who I am. You know, this is this is the this is the package that there is. And it makes me really good at a few things. And I suck at some other things. And, you know, it was very refreshing, though, as a strange way to put it, to be in prison and knowing, seeing so many things being written and printed and talked about out there about how, you know, how unfair it was and how wrong it was. And, you know, I didn't need to say a thing. Right. And I want to get into, into that, into that part of the story a little bit. Um, but to kind of backtrack, I mean, I first, the first time I heard an interview with you, it must've been like 2007, maybe. Um, it was before

I'd ever done any of this stuff, any of the Ultraman kind of things. And I think it was, it was either Bob Babbitt or it was, you know, that guy, Kevin at Endurance Planet, maybe, I'm not sure. And, and, uh, the question was something like, you must get this all the time that, you know, all this, the, the ultra running and all of that is just, you've just transferred your addiction onto your running. And, you know, what do you say to somebody who, who, uh, who accuses you of that? And you had a really, I don't know if you remember, but you had a really fascinating answer to that question that really stuck with me because it's something that I struggle with. And I feel that same question all the time. Do you remember what you said? I know what I would say now, so no, I don't remember what I would say then. I'd be interested to hear what you said.

What I would say now is that drugs and alcohol absolutely masked everything that I ever was, no matter what that was. It was a mask. hiding from anything and running and adventure actually shines this huge bright light on exactly who I am. You know, there's no, there's no, uh, there's no way to mask that when you're running a hundred miles, eventually during a hundred miles, you will become exactly who you are, you know, for better or for worse. You touched on why like do these things. And one of the other reasons why is simply because my, my hope is that I do in fact become, that I become better that without making myself better, I certainly don't have the capability of ever truly helping someone else. And that's in running and recovery and any other part of my life. If I'm

not, if I'm focused on other people all the time, how does that make, you know, that can't necessarily make me better. I can do both things in conjunction, but I use the example of like most of my big runs, I've had some cause attached water for Africa. You know, I played a part in raising $6 million to build wells and I'm, I'm eminently proud of that. You know, what I helped to build there grew into water.org, which is Matt Damon and my friend, Gary White. And I introduced the two of them. I fought to bring them together. In fact, when, when they actually, you know, sort of refused to work together for a while. And I worked and I'm, I'm proud of that, you know, with running America, the first time in 2008, it was, you know, the United way and some other nonprofits. And I,

and I love attaching something because if I'm going to do something, why not try to also do some good, but I'm also honest enough to say that I'm selfish. I'm really doing this as much as anything because I, as a human being, want to see if I can do it. And what happens, I see very often, is that people run for charity all the time or for nonprofits and such. And I totally, you know, I'm supportive of that. I admire it and all of that. But here's the conversation I hear in offices. Like the runner is in the office where they work,

and the runner is telling other people, you know, yeah, I'm going to run this marathon. And people are looking at him who are non-runners and saying, why would you, I don't even drive my car that far. That old say, why would you do something like that? And that person is then pinned into a corner and they say well i'm doing it for cancer or diabetes or it's a disingenuous response because it's not really true i mean it's great that they're raising money for that and they're trying

to make it some somewhat about something other than themselves but yeah it's not there there is a level of you know not being not being completely frank about the motivations. It's okay to do something just because you want to see if you can do it. Right. And I would hope that anybody who ever toes the line of a marathon or an ultra or any race for that matter is at least partially driven by this desire to see how good they can be and what they can accomplish. And at the same time, if they can, absolutely,

if they can honor something that's important to them or raise money for it or whatever it is they might do, I, I, I completely support that. But I, I, I'm always telling people to try to acknowledge the fact that you're accomplishing something big and you should be proud of that just for you. You know, I've been following you on Twitter for a long time and I remember, that just for you. You know, I've been following you on Twitter for a long time and I remember, um, you know, you would send out these tweets and I'm thinking, is he allowed to tweet from jail or is his son doing it for him? Like, how is this even, I'm like fascinated by the, like the, just the pure logistics of how that happened, but persistently putting out, uh, you know, this positive message, this refusal to allow this experience to control you or to lapse into some

kind of victimhood. And then to read subsequently or during the latter stages of your tenure there, the impact that you're having on your fellow inmates and these guys that are starting to run and are losing tremendous amounts of weight and are kind of rediscovering their lives in a new way. and are losing tremendous amounts of weight and are kind of rediscovering their lives in a new way. Yeah, it was that part of the experience was fascinating. And it is one of the basic tenets of addiction recovery, which is attraction rather than promotion. I certainly didn't go into prison and say, hey, all you fat guys over there, you guys should come run with me. It would have been a great way to get my ass kicked. Get shanked.

Right. And so instead, I simply just did what I do. I just went, and I ran, and I worked out, and I actually found people. There was no AA in prison, if you can believe it. That's shocking. In federal prison. I can't believe that. I mean, I've done tons of panels and

in jails and stuff in state and in jails and those places. Absolutely. They, they have pretty active programs, but federal, no, no formal AA. Is there a reason for that? Or I ended up teaching, which is funny addiction recovery, uh, classes and they were well attended, but guys got certificates. You know, you were sort of required to do a certain amount of, of that kind of work, uh, while you're there, which is good and it's good and healthy. But most of the guys sitting in there were there to get the certificate. And like any AA meeting though, I would absolutely, you know, I just did what I would do and hope that somebody maybe got something out of it. But it's a it's a it's an interesting thing.

So I was in Beckley federal prison and there is it is actually ironically a drug education prison, meaning that they have a program where guys who I mean, 90 percent of the people there are there for drugs anyway, most for, for selling, not for using, but, uh, you know, they were required if they wanted, they had a chance to get time off of their sentence if they completed this very long nine month, uh, you know, drug education program. Right. But basically the, and I'm sure the, I'm sure the, the prison and the program would argue with this viewpoint. My viewpoint was that the program basically said, you're bad. You have destroyed your family.

You've destroyed your lives. Don't do drugs. Like that was, that was the extent of the education, you know? So it wasn't really recovery oriented. It was more of a sort of a nine month shaming process. No, it's your piece of shit, don't do drugs, you know? And so stop doing that. And while a lot of people would probably think that's a good approach somehow.

It's the Nancy Reagan, just say no approach. The fact is that can be, that's all well and good. People can be, you know, feel strongly about how they view people who do drugs or have gotten in trouble with the law for doing drugs but the reality is if the goal is to actually turn out people when they come out of prison who are better than when they went in and more likely to make a contribution to society then shaming them is certainly not the way to do it. Welcome to episode 73 of the Rich Roll podcast with Casey Neistat. There's an undeniable authenticity and level of honesty in your work.

Like you're just sort of, I mean, on a surface level, you're just this guy. You're going to go out and you're going to tell this story, whether it's this sort of sweeping narrative with Nike traveling the world or, you know, your issue with the microphone on your favorite camera. It doesn't matter how pedestrian it is or how large it is. camera it doesn't matter how pedestrian it is or how large it is there's this emotional vein because you're just you're being honest and authentic to who you are and i think people recognize that and that is like that's what that's what resonates at least for me i mean what i mean is that yeah you know i i talk about this idea um of the bullshit. And it's something I talk about a lot. What I think the bullshit detector is, and your son probably understands this,

or maybe you don't understand it, but I think you're more conscious of the bullshit detector than we are. My 15-year-old son has a much more in-tune, sort of acute bullshit detector than I do. And what the bullshit detector is, is that when you know, when you and I grew up, Rich, like we watch TV after school or whatever it might be. And we were forced to watch these 30 second commercials and then get back to like, you can't do that on television or

Saved by the Bell or whatever you watch. We're forced to watch those 30 second spots and just dealt with it. But now you look at my 15 year old or you look at, you know, me to a lesser extent, and it's like everywhere we are just inundated with media. It's not these 30 second clips that are in between, you know, five minutes of Saved by the Bell. It's, it's a constant, constant, overwhelming inundation. It's Facebook. It's on our phones.

Everywhere we go on the internet, it's relentless. And what that sort of relentless media marketing nonstop in your face has done is it's made your ability to figure out what's truthful and honest and what's bullshit much more quickly and much more effectively. So you dismiss 99% of what you see. You just see it, you dismiss it. You were on Facebook this morning. Tell me one banner ad you saw running across the side of your Facebook profile. Yeah, I can't remember a single one. Yeah, you know, name one commercial that played in front of your last YouTube video. Like, you can't.

It's invisible. And that's because your bullshit detector just dismisses it. So how do you penetrate that? How do you get through that sort of level of bullshit? And that's by being authentic. And I think for me, authenticity is just inherent to what I do. I think that if Nike had come to me and they said, hey, we need to sell this exact product and we want you to discuss the attributes of it and we want you to sell it and explain

how it works and all that, I wouldn't know what to do with that. I'd have no idea. But I can definitely represent the big idea behind that because that big idea is truthful to me. It's this idea of making it count, getting out there and mixing it up. Like, yeah, I can talk to that ad nauseum. I was watching your newest little opus this morning about the Jeep getting stuck in the pond. Yeah. And it's funny because on some level, it's a silly little movie.

You're like, hey, I wanted to drive my Jeep across the pond. This is what happened. It's like stuck in the ice and all that kind of stuff. And you're trying to back out of it. But you have this cool little kind of graphic, you know, voiceover that goes across it. And you say, you know, when I was a kid, I made a lot of really bad decisions. I guess I just forgot. I just, I guess I just thought I would grow out of that. And then you say, uh, not considering the consequences of your actions

is something kids do. And I'm okay with that. And I think that that's kind of a profound statement that really kind of encapsulates a big part of your ethos as a filmmaker, like sort of retaining that childlike, you know, kid mentality, you know, whether it's the aesthetic of your studio here or even the small little movies that you make that are very personal. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of become a mantra of mine, but if I had like a mission statement in life, it would be to realize all the promises I made to myself as a kid.

Because when you're a kid, or at least when I was a kid, I was really frustrated all the promises I made to myself as a kid. Because when you're a kid, or at least when I was a kid, I was really frustrated all the time, sort of always getting held back by adults and not being allowed to do this, not being allowed to do that, and just always being in trouble. And it was like, well, when I grow up, that inner dialogue was always, when I grow up, when I grow up. I remember in fifth grade, I was either suspended,

might have been thrown out of school for skateboarding in the hallways. And the vice principal, as he's screaming at me, was like, you think when you grow up, you're going to have an office that you can build a skateboard in? And I had a half pipe in my office here for two and a half years. Did you ever take a picture and send it to him or communicate with him? I mean, I'm not one for vendettas. But in a fun kind of way, in a mean way i mean i will tell you that the high school that i dropped out of or was kicked out of sophomore year um has invited me to come speak to the entire you know body so all the administrators the teachers and students in in april so um it's a little bit of validation it's uh it's important to understand i want to talk about this like you look around the studio and it's so little bit of validation. It's important to understand.

I want to talk about this. You look around the studio, and you probably have people that want to come in here and do tours all the time. I see the sign, please no solicitors or no drop-ins or whatever. But you are not to the manner born. This is a hard-fought, long road

that got you to this place and a lot of work and not knowing where it was going to head. I mean, when you were 15, you dropped out of high school at 17, you had a kid, you were living in a trailer, washing dishes and, you know, trying to raise a child and on welfare, right? I mean, yeah, no, that's totally right. And to get from that place to, you know, dinner with the president and making commercials for Nike and, you know, being in demand to the extent that you are is quite an extraordinary journey. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's, in retrospect, I don't know that it makes any sense. And it's like one thing you realize when you get older is that it's like, it's a whole bunch of tiny

decisions that, you know, that lead you to where you are. And two things that I always say is whenever anybody asks me advice via email, which is great because I can always dismiss it with four words, which I always do, but I mean these four words. It's like work hard and be brave. And I literally think if you sort of distill life or any career path down to that, you'll find success. It's going to be scary and who knows what the outcome might be.

But working hard is something that most people are scared to do. They think it's their right or they're entitled to have a job that gives them free time and things like that. And, yeah, you're probably right. But, you know, don't complain and don't make an issue of it when you haven't achieved all of your dreams or accomplished everything you set out to do if you want to be home at 6 o'clock every night. And then being brave is just about taking chances, like taking huge chances. There's only two decisions in my entire life that I look back on and just have no idea what I was thinking when I made those decisions. And one was moving to New York City.

My only experience in life was working in a restaurant in a kitchen. No education, no resume, no career experience, no work experience, no friends. I knew one person in the city, my older brother. And I had no money. I had 800 bucks and a three-month sublet and a two-year-old. Terrifying.

What I was thinking that I can't figure it out. I remember so vividly on a cigarette break with one of the cooks at the restaurant that I was working at, standing out back, and he's like, well, you know, the good thing about this place is that you always have a job here when you come back. And I was just so insulted.

When did you come back? Yeah, I was like 18 years old. I turned to him and I was like, I'm never coming back. And I think it was that kind of conviction that made me stick it out. And the second decision was like quitting my – three years after moving to New York, I had like a really great job. I was managing an artist studio. And I don know what how much money I was making but it was like 60 grand a year it was like a good job um I had a lot of responsibilities as a boss had a lot

of like people working under me and it was exciting um and I got the opportunity to like direct some really shitty tv commercial um with a tiny budget of like 10 grand. But in order to do it, I would have had to quit my job. And without any hesitation or batting an eye, I immediately quit my job. That's the second decision. I have no idea what I was thinking. Yeah, I mean, I remember when I first moved to New York City and I met for the first time in my life rich kids, kids with like trust funds, like the Hilton sisters when they were 20, like meeting these guys and

just like, it was sort of unfathomable to me, this idea of, you know, them having everything in the world, monetarily anyways. And I remember sort of like, you know, there was a level of jealousy about that. I always wished that I was able to live a life like they did when I was in my early 20s. And, you know, now I definitely like am so happy and so lucky to have been on welfare. I'm so fortunate to have lived in a trailer park. I feel so bad for these rich kids that they'll never get to experience that. Because the truth is, like, why would I quit my job? Why would I move to New York? I mean, I still make sweeping, terrible decisions that just have no foresight whatsoever. But the

truth is, like, when it comes to your career, if I were to lose everything, I mean everything, if everything were to fail, if it were to go as tits up as it could possibly go, like what's the worst that could possibly happen? Like I'd probably be back in that trailer park, maybe even on welfare. But like I had TV then. I had PlayStation 1. Like it wasn't that bad. It wasn't like, you know, I was in Uganda earlier this year delivering morphine to late term AIDS patients. That's bad. I was in Uganda earlier this year delivering morphine to late-term AIDS patients.

That's bad. I was in Afghanistan and saw some gnarly shit. That's bad. In Taklaban, those people, they literally lost everything, and they're sleeping in the dirt. That's bad. This really polished American version of what the, you know, what the sort of end of the line is or what rock bottom is,

is, you know, luxurious compared to 99% of the population of this planet. I pretend to know a lot about parenting because I've got, like, this great kid who gets, like, who's on the honor roll and, like, no trouble and runs track and cross country and indoor. I mean, the kid's my hero. But I can't really take credit for him turning out so good. I think it was just dumb luck.

But my feelings on parenting have always sort of been, they all fall back to one very basic principle, which is like as a, it is not your job to raise a well-behaved kid. It's your job to raise a human being that will contribute to society in a positive way. And I think that's something that most parents lose sight of. I think that's why now more than ever, we're raising an entire generation of pussies, wimpy men raised by sort of their helicopter parents. Is that the right term, helicopter parents?

Hovering. Hovering parents, yeah. You know, Purell. It's like the downfall of manhood. I just think that, like, there's real risk in that. There's risk in, you know, not to pick on anybody but you know i like no friends that whose kids want to go to college that are 15 minutes away from their parents house they can come home for a meal anytime they want like that's you know that's i don't think that's okay i think you need to like

push your children out there teach them to take chances like how can you raise them to contribute to society in a meaningful way? Teaching your kids to always be obedient and always to say yes and never to question authority. So what? So they can get fired from their job at age 44 after 12 years at the company and get six months pension or six months severance package, rather? I mean, that doesn't even exist as a reality anymore. So yeah, I mean, how do you, I mean, so you have this great kid and he's, he's thriving within this system that in some ways you kind of were reared on the outside of, and you have all this sort of counterculture question authority, you know, DIY aesthetic

that is very different from, you know, sort of being the good boy. Like how does that reconcile? Well, I think that, you know, very quickly, very, very young in his upbringing, he realized that it's like, it's up to him to sort of define boundaries. And I remember his mother and I, like, we'd never let him get hurt. We'd never let him put himself in harm's way. But short of that, we'd let him do whatever he wanted to do. He wasn't allowed to be rude, wasn't allowed to be mean. but again, like whatever you want to do. You're a runner. I'm a runner. You're a much better runner than me. Not much.

But I always say like, I celebrate when people show up at the starting line, not what happens at the finish line. Because to show up at the starting line of a race means you did it. It means you're there. And that's the hard part. And that's how I feel about ideas, whether it's movies or art or spaceships or anything. I think it's really easy to talk about and they're really easy to share. But to show up, to actually do it is what separates them. I'll always watch somebody's video when they email it to me. If it's garbage, I'll watch the first five seconds, but I'll always watch it. They follow through. Right. But when somebody sends me their idea's garbage, I'll watch the first five seconds, but I'll always watch it. They follow through. Right. But when somebody sends me their idea for the movie,

I just sort of delete the email because I don't care. Right. Because one person put the effort in, whether it's good or not, they did the work. Whether it takes them seven hours across the marathon finish line or two and a half, they did the work versus just talking about it, which is, you know, it's basic. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 77, with Dr. Michael Clapper.

For the listener out there, we're sitting on a cruise ship, locked in a cabin when we could be outside enjoying the sunshine, the ocean breeze, but we're going to bring a podcast to you today. The thing that's funny, there seems to be this epidemic of plant-based focused doctors who are raised on dairy farms, and you're not exception to that rule you grew up in wisconsin yeah i didn't i spent my first 16 summers on my uncle's dairy farm in northern wisconsin and uh i went i went to school in chicago during the uh during the winter time during the summers back in the 50s and 60s 50s actually, the polio epidemics would come through the big cities, through Chicago, Detroit, etc. And as I said, my uncle had a dairy farm up in northern Wisconsin, so my parents would, and the first day of school was out. The next day we were up on the farm and spent my first 16 summers driving tractors and milking cows and slinging hay bales and living on a farm and getting exposed to the natural world. and milking cows and slinging hay bales and living on a farm and getting exposed to the natural world.

How did that experience inform your perspective on nutrition and health today? Oh, you know, again, from my young years to mid-teens, what it really did was expose me and imbue me with the realities of the natural world. My summers were filled with nature, with early dawn working with the morning dew on your boots, thunderstorms, rolling clouds coming in, full of animals, hawks and frogs and deer, and, of course, all the animals on the farm. And the life force was so vital and full, I got to see it in all its complexity, everything from the animal birds eating the snakes to the birth of the various animals on the farm.

And the rhythm became so natural. Plus the solace, the healing when I was upset or needed to think, boy, I knew just where the path through the forest was. And I spent hours walking through our lovely beach and maple forest up in northern Wisconsin. And I became very at home in the forest. And it was a place I would go for comfort. And so everything made just inherent sense to me, the way the waters ran, the way the winds blew.

And it might be in my genes a little bit. My father was a dentist. My brother's a biology teacher. We had an affinity for the natural world. But it was there that I tried to say I became a natural man, but I guess in a way that happened, as opposed to spending my time under stainless steel rooms and fluorescent lights. So nutrition came way down the road there, the awareness of that.

But the biological forces have been in my awareness since I can remember. I had a very wise professor in medical school at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I said, you know, if you just shut up and listen to the patient, 90% of the time they're telling you the diagnosis. And if you keep listening, they'll tell you what treatment they need very often as well. But doctors don't listen. What is it now? The average 18 seconds into a visit, the doctor's already pulling out his prescription pen.

If you just be quiet, just listening to the patient is healing in itself. I mean, it's one of the major affronts to the human spirit these days is nobody listens to me. I ain't got no respect. The very fact that the physician put the book down, leaned across the table and say, tell me, what do you feel? What is this? What's happening? What can I want to help with? When did this start? Tell me what you're feeling about this. That alone, the patient walks out of the room, the doctor listened to me, he heard what I was saying. That alone is a gift to the patient, and it starts the healing. I did much of my surgical training

over at Big Badwell-Cook County Hospital in Chicago, up in the trauma unit. And it was almost world famous, or at least nationwide famous, for being one of the roughest, toughest, bloodiest emergency rooms going into the Cook County trauma unit on a Saturday night. It was just a scene of carnage, just constant gunshot wounds and shotgun blasts and knife wounds. And I saw the violence. I saw the family fabric rendered apart. I saw the personal suffering, the huge expense.

That's a disconnection from humanity. And I knew I wanted to get that out of my life. And I was reading Gandhi and Satchinanda and people saying violence is not necessary. Talk and love and talk and love and work it out. And so I took that to heart, and I'm the kind of guy that if there's a spider in the room, I'll put a little cup over the spider and slide a little paper under it and take him outside and let him go in the grass there. I'm that kind of guy. And so one evening in Vancouver, where I'd gone into practice, I was pontificating to a friend over a steak dinner

about my desire to eliminate the violence of my life. While you were eating your sirloin. While I'm eating my sirloin. And he said, well, that's all very nice, Michael, but if you really want to get the violence out of your life, you might want to start with that piece of dead flesh on your own plate because the truth is your desire for that piece of meat in your mouth, you are paying for the death of that animal.

You are paying the butcher, yes, kill another one. You are doing that. And as much as I wanted to object and negate that, I couldn't. And I heard a little voice on my shoulder saying, you know, he's right. The truth is you're paying for the death of that animal. You're paying to keep that scene of violence and carnage going. And at that point, I could not do that any longer. The act of taking my wallet out of my pocket and taking dollar bills out and paying for that became a soiled act.

It became an act of complicity and violence. And I just couldn't. So I became a de facto vegan for ethical reasons. It wasn't long after I stopped eating meat that I looked at my leather shoes, my leather wallet, and I don't want to wear them. It's interesting being a doctor that you didn't come into it initially for health reasons. That was almost a byproduct of spiritual exploration, I suppose. Absolutely.

It was. A spiritual exploration, I suppose. Absolutely. But what that did was then open the door to, it reframed what I was seeing. Because at the same time, I had gone back to finish my residency in anesthesiology in Vancouver General. And day after day, I'm in the operating room, especially on the cardiovascular anesthesia service. And day after day, I'm putting patients to sleep, opening up and watching the surgeons open their chest. And from their arteries, they're pulling out this yellow, greasy guck called atherosclerosis.

And I'm looking down in there. This is what's causing their heart attacks and their strokes and their blue feet and renal failure and lack of blood flow. And it's a stunning thing to see. It's so clear. You seldom see the cause of a disease so evident as when it's pulled out of an artery. And one day I was looking and this particular fellow, his fatty deposits had a bit of a yellow cast to it. And I remember my mother making chicken soup.

And I said, you know, that stuff looks like chicken fat. And the little voice again said, there's good reason why, doctor. It's essentially the same thing. It looks like chicken fat. It is chicken fat. And cow fat and pig fat and all the fat of any of the slow animals. He was walking past his table when he had a fork in his hand. And I realize it's from what these people are eating.

And they're paying for the death of those animals. And they are eating the flesh of those animals. And without being outrageously symbolic here, we kill the animals. But in a way, they get revenge. They kill us from the inside. I never thought of it that way. No, it goes around and around. And I just had to disconnect from that in all forms.

When I adopted a vegan diet, a totally plant-based diet, within six weeks, a 20-pound spare tire of fat around my waist melted away. My borderline high blood pressure slipped down to 110-70. That was like 250 or something like that. It was officially high. And I felt great waking up in a nice, light, lean body, and I found myself a healthy man. So then the wheel goes full circle. I find myself in my general practice office.

I'd moved to Florida by that time. And who walks in my office but those middle-aged, overweight, high blood pressure, diabetic guys that I had dreaded coming in to see me before. Now I knew what to tell them. I knew why. I knew what they were doing to their bloodstream after every bacon and egg breakfast, every cheeseburger lunch, every fried chicken dinner. They send wave after wave of fat and sugar and animal protein through their bloodstream,

and it hurts their arteries, and they clog up. And so I said, you know, I had a professor in med school said, you know, medicine is 10% science and 90% common sense, you know, and if you're doing something, if I have a patient complaining of headaches, I say, when did you get headaches? Oh, every time I hit myself in the head with a hammer. I said, well, maybe you don't want to do that. Well, same thing.

A doctor, I keep running all this fat and then further my bloodstream. I keep putting on this weight. My diabetes is getting worse. What do you think I should do? I guess after 40 plus years in medicine, you get a little philosophical, I suppose. But it's a real head scratcher for me to work in a profession whose technology is so powerful and so precise that the smart guys and girls in the white coats in the laboratory can identify the most subtle genetic malfunctions on gene number A21 on chromosome 13 that puts an enzyme defect on this amino, this they can identify. But the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of type 2 diabetes, the cause of clogged arteries, let's spend another hundred billion and I find the cause of childhood obesity, the cause of clogged arteries.

It makes me want to get the biggest soapbox I can find, go down to Washington, D.C., stand on it and yell as loudly as I can, you want the cause of childhood obesity? It's the food they're eating. It's the food. Well, the cause of high blood pressure and the clogged arteries. It's the food they're eating. It's the food. Well, the cause of high blood pressure and the clogged arteries. It's the food. It's the burgers and the fries and the fried chicken and the pizza and the olive oil and the chicken and the cheese. Oh, this tsunami of fat and animal proteins that are sent through their bloodstream from vegetable oils day after day, hour after hour.

That's what's going on. How can you not see that? And yet my colleagues, oh, they want to look at that. Oh, I don't know anything about nutrition. Oh, people have never changed their diet. Oh, it's none of my business to talk to them about that.

And they don't. But statins will pound down their cholesterol so it's easier to give them a pill. And that's what's happening. And they'll take it, but they may not take my dietary advice. Oh won't take my dietary advice so why bother exactly and the reason that they don't and human nature is human nature and and i'm not clucking my tongue or wagging my finger because i when i was eating animal flesh i didn't see it either if you don't

want to until you see it you don't see it. But there's a lot of resistance. One, you know, we weren't trained in it as physicians, but also, I hope it's not casting any aspersions, but the truth is most doctors, they don't want to tell their patient to adopt a plant-based diet because that means they've got to stop eating their filet mignon and their lobster thermidor and their brie cheeses. And they don't want to do that themselves, so they'd rather just not open that door. It's easier to give them a prescription for statins. The state of ketosis is not a natural state of being for your physiology. That is, you're driving your car and the red light comes on the dashboard.

You know, there's distress happening in that engine well the same thing in ketosis you have run out of glucose of muscle fuel and you are now dipping into emergency fat stores as emergency fuel you know the red lights come on and and as burning that emergency fuel you're in a state of ket. And the body can handle that for a day or two or three or five, I suppose. But in no way is this the natural state of human beings. We've always been grazing on carbohydrate-containing foods. That's why we have taste buds for sweet on our tongue, because we like to go for those fruits and high-calorie plant foods.

To say that we've got a natural taste for animal flesh and that we want to stay in the state of ketosis, it's stunning to me that medical physicians can say this is a good and natural state to keep the body in. It's a crisis state for the body, right? Absolutely. It's a crisis state for the body, right? Absolutely. It's like being at the stoplight in your car at a red light, and you put the car in neutral,

and you hold the accelerator down onto the engine and down to the floor, and you run it on a high-octane fuel. You're going to overheat the engine. I mean, it's not gentle with the metabolic so yeah so what would happen if somebody is in a persistent state of ketosis or in this key you know sort of on this ketogenic diet i mean what are the long-term ramifications of that or have you seen any result have you dealt with patients that are experimenting with this yeah oh i'm sure there are many and they uh they don't come to though, because they know what they're going to hear. But the beautiful thing about running on plant foods, from the biochemical point of view, is that when you metabolize sugars, it breaks down basically to carbon dioxide and water, and you breathe off the carbon dioxide, and you eliminate the water through your kidneys. And that's a clean burning fuel, doesn't follow the metabolic spark plug, so to speak.

kidneys. And that's a clean burning fuel, doesn't follow the metabolic spark plug, so to speak. But when you run on animal flesh as your primary fuel, these are dirty fuels. And they're metabolically dirty in that they leave residue. While you burn fats, you're going to generate ketones. And ketones by their nature are acidic. We're talking about acetone, beta-hydroxybutyric acid. These are acidic molecules. And to keep yourself in a state of low-grade metabolic acidosis day after day, week after week, this is not a healthy state to be in. That's going to create chronic inflammation, is it not? Which is going to lead to these diseases that we're talking about.

It's certainly not going to be gentle with any inflammatory state in your body. But also to neutralize that acid, you're going to have to give up either some calcium out of your bones or make your kidneys work extra hard in order to excrete extra electrolytes. It's a stress state for the body. But you lose weight. Yeah, I'm sure you lose weight on that, but you're ill because your appetite is, when you're sick, people lose their appetite. When you're in ketosis, yeah, you don't feel like eating. You feel like you almost got the flu.

And so you can lose weight on cancer chemotherapy, but it doesn't mean it's a healthy way to do it. And so the issue is not weight loss. The issue is health. And I just cannot see that being a healthy way to do it. And so the issue is not weight loss. The issue is health. And I just cannot see that being a healthy diet. Plus, we're not carnivorous apes. And that's really what they're trying to turn us into. We are carnivorous. We eat flesh three times a day. Well, not even mountain lions eat flesh three times a day. Official carnivores don't eat flesh three times a day. You know, official carnivores don't eat flesh three times a day. It's only because we're wealthy enough and have subverted the whole food system,

so we kill a million chickens an hour and we've got all that flesh floating around us here. But there's nothing natural about eating animal flesh on a daily basis, let alone two or three times a day. I mean, it's still a natural world. And the biggest animals on the planet, elephants, buffaloes, giraffes, stallions, they create thousands of pounds of mammalian muscle without ever eating cheeseburgers and pepperoni pizzas. They get the protein and the minerals that's in the plants. And it's there for our taking. That's what we're supposed to be doing is foraging and getting the harvest of the earth, period. And to turn ourselves into carnivorous apes and supplement takers is a grotesque distortion of the natural reality as far as

I can see. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 78, with Timothy Olson. One of the things that really got to me is I kept judging myself through that. I made these mistakes, and then I just really hated myself. I hated who I had become. Well, then the only way to deal with that is to, you know, use more so you don't have to feel those feelings. I mean, that's the downward spiral in a nutshell. And I, and I got there and, uh, which is, you know, looking, looking back now that was

trying times and, you know, doing stupid things, but also it's, you know, I created the person that I am. And it's just kind of this, you know, this, you know, life is a beautiful mess and you, you know, you, you do all these different things that, that, uh, lead you to where you are, um, later on. And I'm, yeah, we have such a limited perspective on, on our lives in a given moment and, and the kind of impact of the decisions that we make. And, you know, we judge, we judge these things. We judge ourselves based on almost no information about whether something is good or bad. It's just our instinct to say, Oh, this was a bad choice or a good choice. And I remember when I first got sober and, you know, I'd go to these, I'd go to these AA meetings and some old guy would get up and he'd be like, I'm a grateful alcoholic. And I'd be like, what is he taught? You know, like, what does that mean? You know,

I don't understand that, but I mean, it's essentially what you're saying. It's sort of being grateful for that experience. It's like that crucible of pain forms who you are. And that sets a new trajectory. It helps you learn about who you are, what, you know, what you don't want to be, what you want to be. And, and, you know, your whole crazy adventure, I'm sure you could have never predicted it, but it was really kind of formed out of that. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. And, um, I'm, I'm really happy I went down that way. Like I, I love that statement, grateful alcoholic, because it's just, um, yeah, I was definitely addicted to things and, and making not the best choices,

but it led to something so much better and led to me really striving to be the best person I could be. Yeah, I'm happy with it. Right, that's good. And it was pretty dark, right? Like you went to jail for a little bit, probation. Yeah, it was a long haul, man. And I think it was just the pain of watching other people suffer, like hurting my family through that was really tough. And I think that was like, you know, kind of after I hit some lows, it was just hating myself so much that I couldn't forgive myself.

And I think when I finally like made that statement, like I forgave myself. I think that's like when, you know, the tears really started coming and I was able to just like, just really get raw to myself that I forgive you. And that's a really hard statement to do to a friend, to someone, an enemy, to yourself. But that's the path to freedom. Yeah. Yeah. Once you did that, like, you know, just that whole weight's off and it's, you know, you're not worried about what you did in the past. You get to live in the now and just be, you know, present and not worry about what you did back then or what people think of you. It's just, you know, you get to be yourself and it's a good feeling. It is really annoying, though, that you have to go through things like that in order to have that realization.

Yeah. Like, why can't we just be blessed with that innately um i was at like lake sonoma a few years back and had a good race and was just kind of i kind of kept that all the my past kind of hidden and didn't know how i wanted to bring that out and i was just having all emotions, just kind of pulling on my heartstrings and just like, I just wanted to let it out. So I just kind of started writing one day of just my true feelings and why I run and what brought me to this. And I was going to just throw it up on my blog. And I'm like, well, like maybe a thousand people read this. I'm like, it's kind of a joke. So I'm like, uh, so I, uh, sent an email to Brian at Iron Far, and he was more than stoked to put it on. And it was right before a race that I was doing that weekend.

So I just kind of fell into this nice time. And it was this moment in my life, that whole, it's kind of when, I guess, my career of ultra running took off, but I was just really, I was, my inspiration was just really fed off of, um, you know, meeting a beautiful wife and moving to a really cool place where the mountains just really spoke to me and, and really got into running them every day. And, and then as our life kind of progressed, I became a massage therapist, had a cool practice going on in Ashland. And then all of a sudden we were going to have, um, our first son into our lives and, uh, just, you know, realizing like, okay, I've, you know, I've changed a lot of things in my life. I'm really becoming the person that I, you know, would like to be every day and just still wanted to put something out there of like,

why I run and what's brought me here. And so that was just a really, um, pivotal point in my running career to just kind of let people know, um, how I came here and what, um, pushes me to keep going. Well, I would think it's, it's, it's even more than that. I mean, I think it's emblematic of, of, you know, your personal growth because you, you arrived at a place where you were comfortable enough in your own skin to say, I'm going to put this out here. And that's being vulnerable. Like that's takes courage. It takes balls, you know, to like, to be that honest and know that people are going to read that. It's a scary thing. I was so nervous when I sent it to him and we were like, we were traveling to race and like, Krista kept reading me the comments there. And I kept waiting for someone just to kind of,

you know, bash me because I was a douche back then. I was, you know, just, um, just living a selfish life. And, um, and then I got all these just responses. I wasn't sure how like sponsors would react and just how the community of running would react to me kind of spilling my past. And, um, I was just overwhelmed with the love that people you know showered and how it um so when does the when does the running become real like what's the moment where it clicks in and and you know it things kind of change and and the running becomes a serious deal for you i think there was like there's two points that i can kind of remember one of them was i paced my friend ian torrence at a first

100 mile he was doing some of his first time pacing and had no clue what I was doing no clue what like you know all ultras are crazy and hard but like the 100 mile distance is you know just epic I mean it's just it's long if you've never done that you just can't even know what it feels like to run 100 miles it's just you know your body should stop way before that and um it's just really cool to you know watch people go you know go through that and just you know you can watch through their bodies watching them the different emotions and i watched ian go through just you know so much suffering and stuff but um he kept just working was persistent through it and i just learned a lot watching him we didn't talk a lot through that um it was trying to help him not to

like throw up and want to you know stop and um and i just you know i grew really we had a good friendship i think through that you know going through something like that with someone is really cool and for me watching this all go on, watching him kind of, you know, fumble around on the ground. And, um, that's kind of another moment where you should be like, ah, there's no way I would ever do that. That looks just awful. And for me, I was like, I think I can do this. And I'd love to give it a shot sometime just to, you know, kind of test what I could do. And so that was a moment where I'm like I'm gonna keep working to train for 100 miles someday um and then when I did my first 50k um SOB in in Ashland um which I've actually helped uh race direct a couple years ago but um that was my

first 50k I ever did and did that and i i think i was like the third or fourth or something but i had some you know some um friends actually i think uh hal's hal's wife was like talking to um uh my wife krista and they're like you know tim's pretty good this he could maybe you know get a sponsor or something and that kind of relates you were you don't first of all you don't remember right you don't remember whether you were third or fourth in your first 100? No, no. Most people would be bragging, you know. I never, like I've had really good races, good times, but I've never really focused too much on the time or, you know, I'm just going out there to work as hard as I can.

I like pushing myself, but it's kind of funny even back to like getting the Western States record. like getting the Western States record. I really didn't know I was even close to the time until just six miles before the finish that I could even come close to that. So I really don't focus a lot on times. I still don't look at a watch too much when I run, and I just go by feel, and I just push it as hard as I can.

Well, I think ultra running in particular doesn't lend itself well to being too tied to the watch. I mean, there's as I can. Well, I think ultra running in particular doesn't lend itself well to being too tied to the watch. I mean, there's so many variables at play. And if you start, if you start thinking about that, like it's too long, you know, you got to run where you're at, or, you know, you're going to bury yourself. Right. I think that's worked well with me, which is I'm just, I'm just focused on myself as I'm going. I'm like, you know, what do I need right now? Let's breathe. Let's remember to enjoy this, you know, while you're, you're working hard and, um, you know, you're just constantly taking care of yourself and figuring out, um, you know, what, what you need. And I think that for me, they're

just, um, I don't need to concentrate on time. I don't need another thing bothering me what mile I'm at. I just need to keep moving forward and focusing on how I can do that as efficient as possible. Right. So, so how do you, you know, what are your strategies for navigating the pain or sort of breaking through those limiters or barriers, you know, in the middle of the night when, you know, everything's telling you to stop? Yeah. I really liked those points for some reason. Um, I think I like being challenged, uh physically, and just, like, emotionally. Maybe through the different things in my past of, like, I mean, why I made it, because there was moments where I was close to overdosing and felt like wanting, have those feelings of wanting to

commit suicide and, um, watching other friends, um, you know, get so low. And I think just having all those different things in my background, like I'll get to a low point in a race and be like, you know, I'm, I'm stronger than this. And I think why I made it, cause I've watched also other people, you know, take drugs and they're just, brains are just fried and just really deteriorated themselves. And, um, I should be right where they are. I should, you know, I should be dead right now. And I, I think I just go to that, um, just that really gratefulness of, you know, how I survived through those different things. And I think about that in a race, and I think of people that love me and, you know, are thinking of me, praying for me, and I just really take a lot from that. And I find in races, I really get to this sense of when, you know, a lot of times when

I'm getting low, I think of things that are like love, and I think of my family and things, and it just cheers me up, and it gets me through those lows. And I think in any, you know, problems in life, struggles, like, you know, you can either keep going down into that spiral of just darkness, or you can think of the things that, you know, you're grateful for. And races, that's what I do to kind of get through i i just ran a race a few weeks ago and had some really low patches um it was just a hard race it's early in the season so i wasn't completely prepared for it but like all i could think about towards the end when i was really suffering and

wanted to walk was um my little boy tristan is dancing all the time now. Me and his mother are not the best dancers. We shake our arms around a little bit, and it's not impressive whatsoever. You're a Midwestern white boy. Yeah, for sure. I'm very white. And he drops it like it's hot, like, you know, butt down. Like, he's got these moves, and we do not have moves.

So we're not doing, you know, I don't like he's got these moves and we do not have moves. So we're not doing, you know, I don't know where he picked this up. He's just, you know, doing his own thing, but it just makes me laugh just so much inside of just thinking the different moves that he does. So those are the things I think about that kind of, you know, motivate me as I run. And, and then when I think of those, I get like so happy that that's what I think about. I don't think about like, how can I catch the next person? How am I going to win this race? Which could come up in the mind, and the ego always can play a factor in that.

But I love that normally towards the end and the hard parts of races, I think of family and friends and just things that bring out love and happiness to me. And I think that's what motivates me to push through some of those hard times. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 79, with T. Colin Campbell. He is quite simply put a pioneer and a legend of the modern Cornell University who specializes in nutrition and toxicology, specifically the effects of nutrition on long-ated or unfamiliar with your work, if you could simply synopsize the idea behind the China study and what the book is all about. Well, the China study, of course, is a book. It's 18 chapters, but there's only one chapter that's actually devoted specifically to the China project itself. I have to point that out because the whole book is not just about the work in China.

Right, and that's something I want to explore with you, for sure. It's the rest of the book. The work that I was doing at least 25, 30 years before I got involved in China study that really played a major role in my thinking. 30 years before I got involved in China study that really played a major role in my thinking. The China study, in a sense, was getting to a place in time that I wanted to really have an opportunity to examine a population to see if, in fact, the information we were getting there was consistent with what I already had been doing. Could you just describe the essence of what that was?

Yeah. By the time the China study opportunity came along, and this was in the early 1980s, I got an opportunity to, well, it was a letter sent to Cornell by the first senior scientist from China to come to the United States, and this particular gentleman, Dr. Zheng Xueshe, he had come from a famous family in China, actually. In any case, he was one of the first to come to this country. He was looking for a place to land, spend some time. His government had given him this opportunity.

And he was sent to Cornell a little bit. And some others turned it down. I don't know why, but I grabbed onto him right away. And so he came and worked with me. but I grabbed onto him right away, and so he came and worked with me. And it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made because it turned out he really was from a well-connected family in China, for starters, and high up in the government as far as science is concerned. And so at that time, the Chinese government had done this nationwide survey

of how much cancer existed across a total of something like 2,400 counties. It was a massive undertaking. And what they were able to show was that cancer was very common in some counties and not in others. So it was common sense just to ask, well, what's causing this unusual concentration of cancer in certain places for about a dozen different cancers? So we got together, and I said, why don't we try to get an application to do some funding there?

His government was offering a lot of support in kind. We needed capital, so I went back to NIH again to see if I could get that funding, and we did. We had the first project between the United States and China, the first research project at that time. So we went there and surveyed a large population. That was an opportunity for me to see if, in fact, the kind of information we might learn from that population was consistent with these rather aberrant questions that I was getting in the laboratory.

And that had to do with it. And those questions were? Those questions were basically that animal protein, in particular, was promoting cancer. Because that's what we were learning in the laboratory. And this is a landmark discovery, right? This had never been sort of established or presumed or even conjured by anyone prior to you. It's an interesting question, and I'll comment on it in just a minute. But yes, when we were doing all the research in the laboratory,

and because of my skepticism about a lot of things, what we ended up discovering were a lot of fundamental ideas that were against the rules, against what I was teaching and against what was in the books. Such as? Well, for example, turning cancer on and off by nutritional means. I mean, that was a big deal. And it turned out we didn't do it just for protein and liver cancer. We also did it with dietary fat and pancreatic cancer and things like this.

So that phenomenon of thinking about the causation of cancer and later other diseases as a result of simply modifying nutrient intake and the idea of actually reversing disease. Right. It's the turning off part. We were reversing disease. Yeah. And cancer, I thought, this is incredible.

And so we are learning other things, too, like the relationship between nutrition and genes. A lot of people think and a lot of people still think, that somehow genes predetermine whether or not we're going to get a certain kind of disease. And what we are showing, no, it's not the case. We can have the genes to cause it, to start the initiation of events, but we can control it by nutritional means. Big thing. Another one, a sort of principle like if you will an a like protein it causes cancer let's say for starters one of the things that i was really being pushed to do to prove my point was to find what the mechanism was and which enzyme which is which is that and so we started

looking for the mechanisms and i had a series of phd students spending four or five years like each of them looking at a mechanism. And it turned out there is no such thing. So that was another myth that I was all of a sudden running across, too. And so a lot of the things that we learned really were, I think, the result of my skepticism. And it's quite astounding. I mean, I think people can inherently wrap their brain around the idea of prevention, like doing certain things, whether through diet or exercise or what have you, to prevent certain things from happening. But when you start talking about reversal once onset has begun, that starts to get into radical territory.

Really radical territory. Territory. Really radical territory. Because the whole medical profession, in a sense, is sort of supported by the idea that somehow you're going to be able to, if you have a disease or about to start, if it's already there, you're going to cure it. That's sort of the premise. And that's the territory of the practice of medicine. What we were seeing, what I thought we were seeing, I'm very excited about this idea that this formula, this nutritional formula for preventing the production of future disease also works to treat existing disease. That's the future of this field.

Just the whole idea you could take this with people with disease or a very high risk of disease and treat them. Where was the moment where it kind of tipped the scales in terms of getting out into the public? I mean, was there one thing that occurred that kind of changed things in terms of getting the book out there? There are certain individuals. Gary Player, the pro golfer, called me up right after it came out,

and he said, I'm Gary Player. I couldn't believe that I was talking to Gary Player. But he said that he was going to be on the Golf Channel with a big audience and wanted to know if he could talk about it. I said, you know, help yourself. It's great. It's fantastic. He told me what he was going to do.

He said, I'm going to get down on my knees and just talk about this book. I mean, he was really impressed with it, I guess. So, in fact, we watched to see when this happened. I was actually, by this time, with Howie, Dr. Jacobson. And so we watched Howie. And we watched Gary Player get down with the praying position. And he says, America, everyone in this country should read this book or something like that.

That was a good hit. Yeah, that's pretty good. That was pretty good. And then Bill Clinton. No publicist is going to get you that. No. And then Bill Clinton came along too. Yeah, how does Bill Clinton come into the equation?

Because this is fascinating. Well, this is about two, I see three years after the book was out. This was about two, I see three years after the book was out. And I was on the board with a close friend of Bill Clinton's, a former governor of North Carolina, Jim Hunt. The board of what? Of a company that my son and I had founded. Okay. And so Jim Hunt was on there. Actually, we had some pretty key figures on there.

But Jim Hunt, the former governor of North Carolina, was there. He, in turn, was a close friend of Clinton. So Jim came and asked me if I signed a couple copies for Clinton. So I did. I got a handwritten note back from President Clinton thanking me for the book. But he

didn't follow up for a couple years, and it wasn't until the time of his daughter's wedding that he had another problem with his heart. And she in turn, the story goes that she in turn wanted him to do the book. And so he got pretty enthused about it. And I got a call from one of his close associates who was at the wedding and said that Clinton had come to the wedding and was carrying a book with him. That's what I was told.

And I heard this before the CNN thing came along. But he had the book with him. He was showing it to everybody, including Barbara Streisand, who wanted to know, you know, what is that book you keep on talking about? And this is second information before the CNN thing. And so he told her, and her husband allegedly said, second information again, said to her, you know, I got that book for you two years ago and you never read it.

So these kind of stories, I always get into these stories. And finally then he's on CNN. And this is the Wolf Blitzer interview, right? Prior, there was the last heart attack show with Sanjay Gupta. But I remember that Wolf Blitzer interview where he talked about wanting to be healthy for his daughter's wedding. Yeah, it was. And he got really good results and became a real enthusiast for this idea. First off, I should point out those people who are writing this kind of information have no training in science, in the Church of Science.

Number one, they have no experience to do any kind of information have no training in science, in the Church of Science. Number one, they have no experience to do any kind of experimentation. They don't publish. They're not being held accountable for their words. They can say anything they want to say. In science, we develop some evidence and if it's going to be worthy of consideration, we publish it. And it's being reviewed by peers. And we don't publish it if it doesn't pass that muster. And my work was reviewed extensively. First off, in actually competing for funding. Only one of every six applications gets funding. And we just continued to get funding for 27 years for that one project.

I had a lot of success in getting funding. And so I had a pretty good name, actually, you know, in the scientific world for doing good science. Then when you publish, and I have over 300 and some publications that were peer-reviewed, so I'm held accountable for my words, let me tell you, even by my critics.

These people writing this stuff have nothing, none of that. That's a very important point to make. Good writers, great writers, but they don't have this background. They can say anything they want to say, and they say just totally untruthful things. But if we

come down, there's a couple of observations that the people who have all these Atkins-like diets, if you will, and paleo diet, all those books, different names, different authors, different times, they're all basically the same thing. They're all talking about a low-carb diet. That's become the mantra of the day. Well, since plants are the only kind of foods essentially that have carbohydrates,

really serious amounts of carbohydrates in them, this really has been an attack on the recommendation that we should be consuming vegetables, fruits, and grains as a means of health from the very beginning. I mean, Atkins came out in 1973 with their first book. That was following the McGovern thing that said eat less animal foods. So the low-carb diet, the better name for that, they should be called a high-protein, high-fat diet. And there is no evidence, I find no evidence in scientific literature or any place else that you can actually take that kind of diet and treat and reverse disease. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, Episode 80 with Howard Jacobson.

I don't think I could ever do one of those programs where you get a cheat day. Yeah. Because once I've kind of crossed that line, it becomes so much easier to cross it again. And it's easier. It's actually, it seems harder, but it's actually easier for me to tow a more of a hardcore line. Yeah. Well, one of the things I talk about when I help people to transition is this concept of decision fatigue, which is the more decisions you make, the less willpower you end up with. So if you're constantly, you know, they've done studies where they had people like picking out items for a wedding registry. And it was a fake thing that no one was getting married. You just

had to pick, you know, do I want the bone china or the other thing? And after they had all these decisions, they had people do the traditional test of willpower, which is stick your hand in a bucket of ice water for as long as you can. And the people who had other tasks, they just had to look and rate the stuff, or did they like it or did they not like it, did much better. They could keep their hands in the water much longer than people who had to choose between one or the other. So if you have a diet in which you're kind of using your intuition or your brain on a daily basis and you don't have set rules, if you're approaching it in terms of should I, shouldn't I, you literally deplete your willpower. So by the end of the day, you're like,

that cookie is much stronger than I am. Right. I've never heard that before. That's really fascinating. So in other words, if you have this rule system set up, that's just your guiding principles, then you're not really having to make decisions. You're just following these rules. So it's not, it doesn't involve a lot of mental fatigue, but if you leaving it open-ended, then every proposition involves a decision tree. Right. So for higher brain function, I want to, I'm clear that I only have a certain amount to spend every day and I want to spend it where it matters. So anything that doesn't really matter to me, I just don't care about or I'll set a rule so I don't have to think about it anymore. And that's the perception is that taking care of yourself is a luxury and it's dispensable when there are real life pressures on you to provide and just literally, I mean, for lack of a better word, survive day to day.

Yeah. Yeah. And so, all right. So, so where does the journey take you from there? So fast forward several years and it's 2003 and I'm at an internet marketing conference and I meet a guy who is eating a plant-based diet and he's a bodybuilder and he's working out. I'll give him a little shout out. His name is John Allen Mollenhauer. And we started talking and he was doing everything that I knew from 13 years ago that I should be doing. And I was really attracted to the results he was getting and to the philosophy. Was that incompatible with the curriculum that you were studying during your PhD?

Oh, sure. I mean, it's fine to be a vegetarian, but it's certainly not necessary. And it's kind of cute, but it's, you know, there's, there was no one saying this is the most important part of health is to eat whole plant foods. This is the foundation. No one was saying that people, you know, my, one of my main focuses of study was like indoor asthma. And so I would say I spent the better part of a year thinking about hypoallergenic pillowcases. That's important stuff. But it's not fundamental.

Right. All right. So Dr. Campbell calls you out of the blue to thank you for writing this review. Yeah. So we were going up to upstate New York. And we said, oh, we'd love to meet you. And we went over to their house and my son got stung by a bee in their back garden and they took care of us. And we just, we had a really nice time together. And it's like, one of the speakers on the cruise, Jessica Porter was going off on this riff. Like she has this fantasy about like which celebrities she could be friends with. Like, you know, I could be friends with Meryl Streep. She'd like me. We'd have a good time.

And I had had that fantasy about like Colin Campbell. Like, what? And then like. You're manifesting this in your life. Yeah. I'm like, I really do like this guy. You know, he's so humble. No matter what the claim anyone makes, he's just, oh oh could you show me the research on that i'd really i'm really curious um so we just started becoming friendly and then a year later we moved

down to uh to durham where he has a home and we just 2010, I think, he knew I was in marketing. He said there were some folks who may need some marketing help. They were working on a movie about him and Caldwell Esselstyn. And would I be interested in talking with them? And I said, oh, tell me more. And he sent me an email from the producer. And they're calling this movie Forks Over Knives. And I said, that's the dumbest title I've ever heard. I'm not even going

to waste my time. These people don't know what they're doing. This project is going nowhere. Right. Little did we know. Right. Yeah. I saw an early cut of it as well and I was unsure as to whether this was going to resonate. I just thought, I don't know if anyone's going to take to this. So I'm as surprised as you that it has become this force of nature, this movie. And I think it's a testament to just how powerful the information is that's conveyed. Yeah, I was talking to Lee Fulkerson, the director, and also to Brian Wendell, the producer. And I was, I kind of admitted that I had really serious

doubts based on the name. And they were like, yeah, we didn't think this name was going anywhere either. We didn't know what to call it. But I asked Brian, I don't know if you know. Yeah, I know Brian. You know, I said, well, how did, you know, what was your background? It was, you know, in film and documentaries. He says, no, I was a real? It was in film, in documentaries. He says, no, I was a realtor. I said, well, how on earth, why did you even try this? How did you think this was going to? He says, I just knew it was going to work.

I'm like, wow. I'd like some of that. That conviction. Right. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 81, with spoken word artist, NQ. But I was so struck by this man, and I knew that the instant that I met him, that I had to have him on the show. And it's not just his skills. I mean, he's a giant ball of talent with total command over his instrument and his art, but it was really his spirit, his energy and, and, um, this positive resonating message that he conveys through his art and his writing and his voice, uh, to kind of paint the picture before each dinner, they had these group dinners

up at summit. There were, you know, hundreds of people at these dinners. Enki would get up and he would deliver a poem to kind of set the energy for the evening. And these poems were just extraordinary. They were really almost more like prayers than poem or more inspirational panjurics than prayers even. And I simply had never heard anything like it before. It was remarkable, completely unique. And I was moved, you know, very moved by the experience of seeing this gentleman perform. And then Julie and I had a chance to spend a little time with him. And it was very clear that he's a special guy, a very special guy. And one of those people who's just touched and you feel it, you know it the minute that you meet him. To kind of give you a little bit of a background and flesh it out a

little bit, NQ is a national poetry slam champion who's shared the stage, I should say, with artists like De La Soul and Eminem and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and John Legend. And he's even performed on stage with Cirque du Soleil. I believe he's the first poet to ever perform on a Cirque du Soleil stage. So that's pretty cool. He's toured over 70 colleges with his one-man show. And he's also a musician. He's written hit songs for Miley Cyrus and Rock Mafia. And he co-wrote Selena Gomez's hit song, Love You Like a Love Song. quote, Selena Gomez's hit song, Love You Like a Love Song. So the guy is sort of multifaceted and multi-talented. He's been featured on HBO's Deaf Poetry Jam, Versus and Flow, the Discovery Channel, Disney Channel, ABC, NBC, A&E, Nickelodeon, et cetera.

I'm not going to give away his story. You'll have to hear it through our conversation, but it is one that you're going to want to hear, that you're going to want to stay tuned for the whole thing. And one that no doubt is going to make a powerful impression on you. Not only will it move and inspire you, it will help you reframe your perception on life. It will help you, in the words of the man himself, reimagine your truth. So let's dig his vibe. himself reimagine your truth. So let's dig his vibe. It's hard for me to say yes. It's easier for me to say next year when the weather's fine, when I have the money, or the time, or the relationship I want, or the career, or the house, or the car, or the watch.

Watch life pass me by waiting for an invitation when the world is greater than my nation or my occupation. The only thing I know is that we're all in this together. And the future of this earth depends on how we treat each other. But how we treat each other starts with how we treat ourselves. And how we treat ourselves starts with how we see ourselves. And how we see ourselves starts with context. Nothing can exist without its opposite. Remember this, the next time you find you're in an argument and both sides are talking shit and you forget your point except you're angry now and want to win, so

you continue yelling till they give it up by giving in so you can stand victorious because you're right on what again? Seriously, what are we talking about? That's why we send young people to war. Young people tend to die without asking what for. But one man's ceiling is another man's floor. Let's meet up in between, said the ocean to the shore. Hopelessly inquisitive. A mind without a master. I watched the

master on a tab of acid then performed after and yet my set was an unparalleled disaster because all my poems came out as... Do you laugh on impulse or do you choose to laugh? Do you ask because you care or do you merely ask? I ask you this because I care about how humans act. We're animals aware of our future and our past. And this can be an obstacle to traveling our path. Instead of just accepting where we're at, we analyze our tracks for what we could have had. Looking back, focused on the

memories instead of on the facts, hence what we attract. But it's hard to factor in how fast it really flashes past. It's an exponential graph from creation into ash. I'm sentimental one minute, then I'm making plans, staking claims, shaking hands, breaking out or breaking in. Staking claims, shaking hands, breaking out or breaking in. I have about a billion mimes hidden underneath my skin. And they pull my face into this grin or push my wrinkled forehead in. So pour the gin. Philosophize because no one has your awesome eyes. Your view is worth the lows and highs you go through on these coaster rides.

Control has got you holding on when letting go could be more fun. Hands up. Put your hands up. Wherever you are. Now feel the drop. Eventually it all has to stop. Level out then come back up until you reach the very top because one day all your wheels fall off. So take advantage of your shocks. Do something you've never

done. Do someone you've never done. Go someplace you've never gone. Someplace that could scare you some. Be someone you've never been. You feel all that adrenaline? It's medicine to jumpstart the spark inside your skeleton. See, everywhere you are is where you're supposed to be. So hopefully you're hopelessly as lost as me. Because if you're not, you ought to be. Beautiful, man. That's just magic. That's gorgeous. ought to be. Beautiful.

That's just magic. That's gorgeous. Yeah. Thanks. Lovely. I know. I feel like, all right, the podcast is over. What else needs to be said?

Right. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 85, with Julie Payette. I went out running this morning, and somebody was even running, and they turned around. This woman turned around and ran after me and said, Rich Roll, I've got to get a picture with you. And we're running, and she's holding her phone. And I'm like, wow, this never happens at home. This is cool. I think I'm going to stay in Toronto. I'm feeling the love so much. So,

I think that brings us to the real kind of overarching theme and what we wanted to talk about today, which is gratitude and being in touch with gratitude. Yes, that's right. And it's just, to experience it, it's almost like it's exponential when you touch into it and you experience it. It amplifies, like, many times over inside of you. And, you know, to meet all these people and to connect at this level and to sit with them and listen to their story and find out who they are, the transformation they're experiencing in their lives. It just blessed us, you know, a thousand times over for every single story that we heard. And, you know, I've just been literally vibrating for the last week with that immense emotion of gratitude and being grateful for being able to serve in this way and able to connect in this way. And I think it just, it really is an emotion or a state that also can

be cultivated as a part of everyday living and living for transformation and living in the highest vision of yourself. Because this effect is not unique to us or not unique to this experience. It's with everything in your life. And, you know, they always say if you can cultivate an attitude of gratitude, you know, there's a lot that can be experienced through that portal. And it's always a choice of perception. You can always find something to be grateful for. I mean, yeah, we find a lot to be grateful for in this situation.

But in every situation, you can always choose to find that nugget of gratitude, which will propel you into a heightened experience and a more expanded experience. What are some of the things that people can do who struggle with this to help them connect with it a little bit better? Okay, well, I mean, specifically, so all of experiences is simply a chosen perspective. It's a perception. You know, it's like people it's like, you know, people say, well, is your glass half empty or half full? You know, how are you choosing to look at it? So I think that, you know, it's great to acknowledge that, you know, a default is

not to be grateful and to be in resentment and to see the negative in everything. And then one step beyond that is to understand that we are all powerful creators, and especially at this time in history, at this moment, in this energetic field on the planet, we are actively co-creating our reality. So what you can do is if you find yourself in a negative looping pattern or you find yourself looping and you're looking at the lack in any event situation circumstance or person you can make the decision to stop the behavior yeah it's well see i think that's the thing what happens is people say well is your glass half empty or half full like make it you know make it half full and develop an attitude of gratitude but there's no what's the thing. What happens is people say, well, is your glass half empty or half full? Like make it, you know, make it half full and develop an attitude of gratitude. But there's

no, what's the roadmap? Well, the roadmap is first to understand that it is in your power to make the shift. I mean, it's, so if you're doing this as a default, I would say that possibly one thing to consider is that you've gotten lazy and you're letting your mind run you. So you're not your mind, you're your heart, and you're much more than just your brain. So the brain can experience looping patterns of thoughts. Explain what a looping pattern is for somebody who's not sure. It's like an automatic, like you're on automatic. You're like, well, I always do that.

When I see the dog, I always kick him. No, I don't mean that literally. But, you know, yeah, it's like, well, whenever I get tired, this is what happens, right? Well, I think a good example is we all know those people that are, they just, you know, there's a cloud over their head all the time. Or they're a professional victim and nothing ever works out. And they're always pointing their finger like, oh, I didn't get the job. I got fired again. and nothing ever works out.

And they're always pointing their finger like, oh, I didn't get the job. I got fired again. Or even like the guy who always seems to end up in a fight at the bar and it's always somebody else's fault. And it's like, what's the common denominator? The common denominator is yourself and what you're bringing into the equation. And if you keep getting that same result,

you have to look in the mirror and try to figure out how are you co-creating or how are you contributing to that? And more often than not, it's that looping behavior or attitude in your mind of, that guy is more than me, or why can't I have that? Or the world always wrongs me, or whatever it is, that story that you tell yourself that becomes reality because you're looping it so often that you are perpetuating this attitude that you then project out onto others and onto the world that facilitates that negative result. Welcome to the Rich Roll Podcast, episode 96 with Julie Pyatt.

there really is no stasis that's an illusion you're either in every moment with every decision that you make every action that you take or even every thought that you conjure you're either growing or you're regressing you're either moving towards something better or you're lapsing back towards something maybe not so good back into bad habits or assumptions or modalities or whatever, you know, certain things that might not serve you so well. And it takes a lot of focus and concentration and energy to not take things for granted. And for me, it requires a daily practice because I forget, you know, I wake up, everything's good, you know, everything's sorted, I can just move on throughout my day. And I have to really stop and remind myself, okay, what am I doing? Am I moving forward? Am I moving backwards? Where are the things that I need to focus my attention

and work and try to grow and be better? And creating ceremony around certain, you know, important aspects of your everyday life can be really helpful. I mean, that's kind of what the marriage vow thing was about. So, whether it's relationships or whatever, it really helps me understand that there's always improvement to be had and that it takes constant work and pressure and focus and concerted consciousness. a concerted consciousness. Instead of like applying yourself in a willful way, it's a surrender. It's a letting go and it's an allowing, and that's a very, very difficult, uncomfortable thing to do. And it is an allowing and it's a letting go, but it's not a sitting in a cave. No, it's not a do nothing thing. you know, without the numbers, without all that stuff. So, I mean, you were asking a minute ago,

how do I, how do I get in the zone or how do I flow? I mean, for instance, I will have experiences of that. I'm going to teach or I'm going to speak or, or I'm going to share something. And I, I don't over-prepare. Like I don't necessarily know, but I have an ability to connect with myself, with my heart, with my soul. And a lot of times the fun for me is to be in the moment and listen to what is given to me and trust it at that level. And that's crazy because, and it is, it can be scary and it can be terrifying, but. I can't imagine doing that. And it is, it can be scary and it can be terrifying, but. See, I can't imagine doing that. Yeah. But you know, you, but you could maybe at some point, you know, it's like you, you start to, you can start to, um, to enjoy the process.

And once you see that you're supported time and time and time again, if you will release your grasping onto your idea, it's really a mental setup that you have in your mind about, you know, this is what this takes and, you know, you have to bleed for it and this is how it is. And it's just understanding that all of the information exists at some level, some dimensional level. And if you can tap into it, you can be given any information at any moment, but you have to be willing to let it come in. So I would say, if you hold on too loosely, you'll miss the miracles. You're going to miss the gifts because you tried to grab it too hard. But if you have, how I do it is I have a vision and i make very concrete steps towards that vision

but i don't hold on so tight that i i'm so specific that i've created my own prison cell and so because my little human mind can never imagine the beauty that consciousness can deliver it could never ever imagine and you know, we look at our own lives. We didn't have, you know, a lot of this stuff, they were not on our vision list. And look at how things have unfolded through a lot of faith, a lot of extreme faith. And, you know, and you've had a lot of extreme faith as well.

You know, you forget because now you're in the function of what happened. But if you didn't have that faith, we never would have experienced what we experienced together. Right. And I couldn't have predicted what we're doing now. There's no way. And I wouldn't have imagined that we'd be sitting where we're sitting. And I also wouldn't have, you know, even before it began, I couldn't have fathomed that this is how I would be, this is the life that I would be pursuing even. So it's bizarre.

So what I'm saying is, you know, I'm in agreement with that idea that, you know, if you hold on too hard to where you think things should go, then you might just miss the miracle right in front of you or letting things unfold. then you might just miss the miracle right in front of you. No. And that, letting things unfold. And that,

you know, that alcoholic extreme mind or whatever, never imagined that you would have a life. It couldn't, it didn't have enough expansion in it because it would have told me and you every reason why none of this could have happened. And you would have had every reason in the book. You would have had it all figured out. There's no way.

And, but the interesting thing to me is, is that if you crawled inside your heart and someone did an inventory and like took pictures of what, what was existing inside the heart of your dreams, you're living that life right now. And that's because we had faith and we took risks and we kept dropping the external things and we risked everything. We risked our annihilation. Okay, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this look in the rear view. Once again, part two of the best of 2014 with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations will be up later in the week.

I'm going to post that late Wednesday night, New Year's Eve, Pacific Standard Time. So keep an eye out for that if you're not doing anything else on New Year's Eve. And I will catch you in a few days. Season's greetings, happy holidays, merry, merry, peace, and plants.