The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best Of 2015 – Part I

Episode Date: December 28, 2015

This is the time of year to pause. It's the time of year for reflection. For gratitude. And for giving back. So let's do all those things. Welcome to the third annual Best of the RRP Anthology — our way of taking a moment to reflect on the year, express gratitude and give 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 2015, it's amazing how many incredibly dynamic conversations and perspectives I was honored to share. Second listens brought new insights. Another reminder that this show is a gift that just keeps giving. For long-time listeners, this and the following episode will bring certain insights back into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your new year's trajectory. 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. What a stunning year. Thank you. I appreciate you. Here's to an extraordinary 2016 — the year we manifest our greatest dreams into reality. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich

We all have so much more in our reserve tank than we think we have. And his saying, one of your saying that you've, you know, it's resonated with you is that when your brain tells you you're done, you're really only 40% done. That's Jesse Itzler. And this is part one of a very special best of 2015 edition of the ritual podcast. 15 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast.

Hey everybody, what do you know? What is going on? Do I even need to say my name? You guys chose this podcast. You hit play, not me. You must already know who I am, right? Well, I'm going to say it anyway. My guys chose this podcast. You hit play, not me. You must already know who I am, right? Well, I'm going to say it anyway. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. Welcome to episode 204 of the podcast. 204 episodes. What a mind blower. I can't believe it. This is the podcast where I do my best to have meaningful conversations with the best and the brightest across all

categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for subscribing to the show on iTunes. Thank you for spreading the word on social media, for subscribing to my newsletter, and of course, for always clicking through the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases, particularly over the course of this holiday season. It really does help us out so much when you guys do that.

And I really appreciate everybody who has made a habit of that practice. Thank you. And on that note, happy holidays, everybody. What is this time of year all about? What is at the core of the holidays? Well, this is the time of year for gratitude, right? For giving back, for celebration, and of course,

for reflection. And this week on the show, I'm doing all of these things. This is my way of giving thanks to you guys, of expressing my gratitude and reflecting back on this journey that we've all taken together, because it's just been an amazing year, an extraordinary year. So many incredible guests on the show. The audience has grown by leaps and bounds. It continues to grow like crazy. And I'm just so grateful for your support, for everything that I have experienced. And I really hope that you are too, because it's just been a really amazing ride that has shaped and shifted my life in countless unpredictable and amazing ways. And my hope is that it has had a meaningful and positive impact on you guys as well. So over the course of 2015, we have conversed

on an incredibly wide range of topics, so many incredible guests. And as a broad lifestyle and wellness podcast, I really pride myself on trying to embrace and contemplate a wide range of important subject matters, varying perspectives, differences of opinions and attitudes. And I feel like we accomplished that in 2015. Because when I look back, even I'm surprised at what we've covered, what we've accomplished, the diversity of guests, how many interesting and unique people and perspectives we have entertained. how many interesting and unique people and perspectives we have entertained. And these next two episodes are really about excerpting some of those insights,

a snapshot of the year, a refresher course, if you will, a little inspiration capsule to catapult you into January, not only informed, but re-energized, motivated, inspired to take your health and your well-being and your life to the next level. Putting these next two shows together has really inspired me to grow and build on all this momentum into 2016 and beyond. I've got a lot of great stuff coming in January and February that I can't wait to share with you. If you've been with me all along,

then this episode will hopefully help bring some of these insights back into the forefront of your mind as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams heading into the new year. And if you're new to the show or relatively new, then this window into the world of my guest should hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to the episodes in full or visit some of the shows that you might have missed throughout the year. I've provided links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes, which provided links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes,

which you can find on the episode page at richroll.com. And I gotta say, it has been super hard to choose amongst my babies because I love all my guests. Every single one of them has been a gift. And over the last couple of weeks, as myself and Dean Menta, who is the producer I'm working with

to help craft these next two shows, it's been difficult to try to figure out what to leave in and what's got to go. It's almost impossible to choose who gets to stay. And we did the best we could. That's all I can tell you. So know that if I left out one of your favorites, I get it. It breaks my heart to leave anybody out. They're all my favorites. Believe me.

Anyway, these next two shows are simply my love letter to all of you. My way of saying thank you. I recognize you. I appreciate you. I believe in positive change. I believe in you. And most of all, I believe in the power that we all have to do and be better. To step into our best, most authentic selves.

So, you ready to dive in? Let's dive in. 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. 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 tailored to your personal needs.

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To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. First up is Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn, the amazing filmmakers behind the groundbreaking environmental documentary I'm proud to be involved in called Cowspiracy, which is executive produced by Leonardo DiCaprio himself and currently streaming worldwide on Netflix. If you have not seen this movie yet, please make a point of checking it out. This is a great conversation with these guys. So let's just jump right into it. Enjoy. jump right into it enjoy it's informative but also you know there is levity as well and that was the whole goal of it from the very start when keegan and i were working on it is let's let's make this humorous and keegan was like what yeah i mean there's just in the punk rockers oh we gotta go hardcore it was the bizarre thing. You can see the look in his eyes. Like this is not serious. This is not funny whatsoever. It's like, you know what? There's, there's humor in this cause it's so bizarre.

It's humor. It's humor. It's like we're living in a parallel world in this crazy world and to do, uh, just to show it in, in the reality of what it is, but in that bizarre weirdo kind of way, the humor really comes out. Yeah. I mean, it's, it was absolutely correct. I mean, is, but in that bizarre weirdo kind of way, the human really comes out. Yeah. I mean, that's, and Kip was absolutely correct. I mean, it's like, it works so well because it's completely bizarre.

Yeah. It's the, you know, the 70 billion animals in the room that no one wants to talk about that, you know, and again, climate change is such a huge issue. It's like, gosh, here's, here's a huge component to climate change. And no one's talking about it. Right. Let's break it down. Water, 600 gallons of water to produce a quarter pound patty of beef, 2,500 gallons for a pound of beef. And dairy is not much better,

1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of milk. It's crazy. One to two acres of rainforest being destroyed per second uh you know land use carbon emissions species extinction water pollution from runoff right creating these like uh giant algal blooms and dead zones where they're so oxygen deprived like nothing can live uh the animal abuse i mean you just go down the line, like in every category, like it's just a huge catastrophe. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's, it, it literally touches any issue you could care about it. Animal agriculture plays a role, whether it's environmental issues or humanitarian issues of, you know, starvation, uh, resource depletion.

Yeah. Animal cruelty means like healthcare costs. I mean, that's a whole nother game talk. It literally has a hand in everything so one of the amazing things for me too was to also like understand like yeah but we got to feed everyone like okay so this is what it is but we got to eat right and then to understand like actually um uh you know starvation is not a uh is not is not a problem of bounty. Like we're producing enough food to feed 10 billion people already, right? So it's more of a distribution and allocation issue because all the food that we're growing is going to feed livestock. So it's this secondhand sort of thing, right, where we're getting the food from the food.

It's this incredibly inefficient system. We have to pour all these resources into these animals to then eat them. Why don't we just eat, eat lower on the food chain, cut the middleman out and we can solve so many problems. And what's funny is the middleman is this processing system that turns incredibly healthy food into incredibly unhealthy food. You can take these. Kip, there's a lot of money to be made. 16 pounds of grain that has no saturated fat, no cholesterol, high in protein, fiber, essential nutrients.

You can then run that through this machine called a cow and fill it full of cholesterol, saturated fat, and you only get one pound out of it. And antibiotics and hormones and pesticides and everything else. So yeah, I i mean it's the total inefficient i mean yes the other thing too is that you know going back to land use is that you can grow 15 times more protein on any given area of land with plants than you can with animals so people say oh well this area you know if the world can only grow you know can only raise cows or goats which isn't true it's like you know take

the resources that are you're putting into those animals and put it into vegetable production. You're going to produce 15 times more, even if it's degraded land. Yeah, I mean there's so many facts in the movie and also at cowspiracy.com in the facts section. You just scroll down forever and there's just all these amazing facts. But there was one, I can't remember exactly what it was, but it was like one acre of land can feed

a certain number of omnivores and that same parcel of land could feed like some incredibly disproportionate number of plant-based. It's about eight, a plant-based diet uses about one 18th of the amount of land that a American omnivore uses so even just yeah just land use it's about one-sixth of an acre to feed a vegan for a year and then that's again it's just because of efficiency you know you can on one and a half acres you can raise about 375 pounds of meat or you could raise on one and a half acres you know 37 000 pounds of plant food right that was the one yeah i mean i mean it's just astronomical so yeah i mean you know food shortages and starvation issues are is exactly it's an issue

of allocation and you know a lot of that has political but you know when you look at you know ethiopia during its massive famine in the 90s was still exporting grain and animals to life to europe to feed them right there yeah it's like you have populations who are starving, but because there's such a high demand for meat and dairy products in the developed world that literally third world children are starving because there's money to be made off animal agriculture. And that's not to say that animal agriculture is causing starvation, but the simple fact that we're allocating these massive amount of resources

to feed non-human animals is a major, major issue. It's kind of a mind blowing thing, right? So we all kind of operate on this premise that the biggest contributor to kind of greenhouse gas emissions and carbon emissions and all and the like is, is basically our use of fossil fuels, right? Like if we can solve the transportation problem, then maybe we can do something good for the planet. But this UN report that you come across that was published in 2008, I think,

sort of speaks differently, right? It paints a very different picture of what's actually going on. Yeah. I mean, again, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, animal agriculture,

raising animals and their feed crops for food is a larger contributor to greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector, which is huge. But there's actually been more research and other analysis on greenhouse gases that actually put the figure much higher,

that actually 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions could potentially be coming from animal agriculture. 51%. And where is transportation on that? About 13%. Yeah, 51% to 13%. Yeah, so it's huge. And how much of that is,

because when you're talking about carbon emissions, there's all different kinds, right? Like animal agriculture, there's methane, and then there's the sort of carbon emissions that come with the transportation and the manufacturing aspect of it. So when you're saying 51%, I assume that's like an

all encompassing number that takes into account the whole kind of like, um, you know, chain of production. Yeah. And so, yeah, it's the life cycle analysis. So you're looking at every aspect of animal agriculture from, you know, gray, raising the grains, uh, the CO2 emissions that come from tilling soil, the methane emissions that come from the animal's waste, even respiration, the emissions that come from transportation, refrigeration, I mean, the whole life cycle of that product to get to your plate. But yeah, I mean, carbon dioxide is the big focus. That's what everyone looks at when they're talking about greenhouse gases and global warming. But we have to look at all the other gases like methane, which has a global warming

potential 86 times greater than co2 on a 20-year time frame and we make fun of that because basically it's cow farts right but that's a real problem yeah yeah burps too yeah it's actually is farting and how much of it is burping it's it's i think it's like 80 or 90 percent burping really yeah yeah the farting just gets more attention because it's funny yeah um but you Yeah. But, you know, a big thing, too, it's their waste. You know, their waste is full of nitrous, you know, produces nitrous oxide, which is 296 times more destructive than CO2. And then, you know, there's sulfuric oxide. There's these ammonias that come out of it.

I mean, there's just so many damaging gases that come out of animal agriculture. But one of the biggest things is the fact that these animals need so much land either to graze on or to have their feed crops grown on. And so they have to clear forests and forests are these natural carbon sequestering, you know, parts of our ecosystem. And so they clear the forest to grow grains. And so now you've lost the ability to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere. And that's the, that's a huge, huge part of the problem.

Right. I mean, right now it seems like it's quite popular, you know, this idea of eating grass-fed beef, right? Like, oh, it's just like I have friends that will say, you know, I understand where you're coming from, but I make sure that the meat that I eat is sustainably raised and it's ethically raised and it's all grass-fed. is sustainably raised and it's ethically raised and it's all grass fed. And with that comes this idea that, um, that's less deleterious to the environment. And in fact, maybe even further than that, that they're actually doing some kind of good, right? So can we talk, can we, I want to

talk more about the, you know, the movie and all of that, but I would like to like plant a flag on this issue for a moment. Yeah, definitely. Well, so that's the ironic thing. You that, but I would like to plant a flag on this issue for a moment. Yeah, definitely. Well, so that's the ironic thing. You know, I eat grass-fed beef, and ironically, it's actually worse in a lot of ways, and it's not just with the greenhouse gases.

A big, huge one that really affects me as far as personally is I really care about the wildlife. It takes, on average, for factory farms, only around, I believe, what believe what two two acres per cow because it's just so efficient you can grow a huge right there's one thing that factory farming does really really well is create economies of scale they're going to use the least amount of resources the least amount of land water food everything like that to blow up an animal big enough to eat

exactly and that's what people don't realize it's so efficient and that's what it's efficient with all the natural resources. It's terrible for the cows and terrible for the animals, but for the rest of the rest of the wildlife, rather than two acres per cow, now you're talking grass fed, you're talking anywhere between 10 acres to 50 acres, which the farmer said on our film, 50 acres in Wyoming or Montana Montana and that's 50 acres for one single cow imagine going on 50 acres and the entire the only wildlife on there's one cow you have no other wild horses no other bears no other wolves and this is why all the wildlife is being depleted through these pastures right because you can't you got to get rid of all that other wildlife in order for the cattle to safely graze and not be preyed upon.

And it's not only predators, but it's to compete with the resources of which few we have left for the grass and now the water. You just can't have wild horses right now. There's more wild horses in captivity that gets rounded up than there are free roaming. Right, to remove them so the cattle can graze, right? So my understanding is that there's all this sort of state or federal controlled land that gets leased to cattle farmers so that they can, you know, sort of graze their cattle on these grasslands, even though they don't own it. You know, they, they, they lease it from the federal government, it's subsidized. So they get a great rate on it and the federal government or the state comes in and kind of clears the land. Or if there's a problem with wild horses or other

predators, they can have them come in and have them removed. Is that a fair characterization? Exactly what's happening. Um, I mean the, the USDA has actually, um, I forget what they call it now, I think it's called the Wild Animal Services. And they will, if a rancher has a problem with their cows being attacked by mountain lions or bears or coyotes, they can call up the USDA and say, hey, I'm having a problem. And the USDA will come out and exterminate those animals. And they do it. I mean, they've done it in Washington. Cows were attacked on public lands.

They've done it in Washington. You know, cows were attacked on public lands. And the USDA in Washington completely eliminated an entire pack of wolves because, you know, one cow was attacked. So, I mean, this is one of the leading causes of species extinction and eradication in the American West is from cattle. Because, yeah, the ranchers see them as perceived threats. And then, yeah, but the, you know, it goes all the way down to, you know, ravens and, you know, ground squirrels and, you know, prairie dogs. I mean, just animals who you would never see as a threat to this industry. Well, the industry sees it as a threat. And so, you know, they can't coexist. They've got to be eliminated. And that's grass fed. When people talk about grass fed, it's like, well, you know, the wolves being annihilated, the reason why wolves are, you know, allowed to be hunted in Idaho and Wyoming and Montana is because of the cattle industry.

It's not because they're, you know, a threat to human beings. There's been no reported attacks of deaths of human beings by wolves in the United States. So it's like, why are we hunting them? Right, right, right. So it's like, why are we hunting them? Right, right, right. And beyond that is the simple, obvious fact that, you know, the whole grass-fed thing is really kind of, it's not a solution to our problem. I mean, we just don't, there's, I mean, 50, what did you say? 50 acres per?

10 to 50 or even more. Yeah, I mean. Like we don't have the land to do it. It's just, it's ridiculous. There's no way that we could marshal the resources to make that available for everyone. So it becomes kind of an elitist thing, right? Like, yeah, that's what we had. Uh, it's not, it's not, when we, people talk about sustainable, they really should be talking about privilegeable, you know, because they can afford it be that you have yeah some other resources to to be able to well big one is

afford it yeah and then yeah what you're saying about land use it's right now about half the united states lower 48 is used for growing animals whether it's growing their feed crops or their actual grazing and again you know factory farming is relatively very efficient compared to, you know, grass fed or open range grazing. So yeah, if we switched over and everybody wanted to do grass fed, we simply don't have the land for it. And then the other thing too, is that most of the United States land is not suited for grazing livestock. You know, there's, there's sections in the Midwest that are, you know, native prairies that could potentially sustain, when they did historically sustain, large herds of herbivores. But those soils have been degraded, and they're now all grown with corn and soybeans that are fed to livestock.

So it's like we don't really even have that. The American West really isn't designed for having livestock, didn't support large herds in the past. So we don't live in the ecosystem. And so what they end up doing, yeah, is they clear forests on the East coast and they, you know, run animals on degraded land in the West that were never designed to have wild animals or to have large herds. Um, and so, yeah, it just continues this degradation. Yeah. And not only that, I mean, in the, in the, in the Midwest or the breadbasket of America, you go, oh, this is how we're feeding everybody. But I don't know what percentage of those crops, I know it's very high, is not going to humans at all, right?

It's going to feed livestock. And some of that is getting exported overseas, right, to feed livestock in foreign countries. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think it's about 90% of the U.S.'s soy is fed to livestock. I think it's about 60% or 70% of the corn is fed to livestock. I mean, it's just crazy. I mean, the alfalfa in California where all the water is going. It's 100 billion gallons of water is exported out of California every year in the form of alfalfa to go to China.

China, Korea. To feed livestock in China. Humans don't eat alfalfa, not on a large scale at least. So, yeah, I mean, we're exporting resources. We're also exporting animals too, you know, to other countries. So it's all the resources that went into, you know, raising that animals are then being exported. So yeah, I mean, it's just a huge, huge issue. All right, next up is James Lawrence, aka the Iron Cowboy. This past summer, James redefined the limits

of human endurance when he accomplished the impossible. 50 Ironmans in 50 states in 50 days. That's just insane, right? Like, how is that even possible? I think it's truly one of the greatest achievements in the history of adventure sports. I was proud to introduce many of you to this incredible story in Family Man by way of two podcasts that I did in 2015, one just before his attempt and one right after. He is undoubtedly one of my most popular guests of the year, and this excerpt includes two segments. The first is from my initial podcast with James just before the 50-50-50, where he lays out the entire plan. And the second is from my conversation just subsequent to him completing his goal. So let's hear all about it.

All right, so tell us what's going on. June 6th of this year, 2015, I'm going to embark on a journey to where I'm going to attempt to do 50 full-distance Ironmans in 50 consecutive days, one in every state. So we're going to start in Hawaii and Alaska and get those difficult flight logistics out of the way. It was funny. I was thinking about it today when I was riding, and I was like, well, Hawaii either has to be first or it's got to be last. And that was a question, like like how did you make that decision yeah initially we had it put out that we were going to do hawaii last because i thought oh hawaii home of the iron man kind of world championships let's finish there um but then i thought well what if something happens and we get 49 yeah so i thought you know what if something happens in the first two,

we can hit the reset button and kind of go over. So that's why we kind of flipped that around and ended up deciding to go with Hawaii and Alaska first, then hit the mainland where my family will be waiting, my wife, my five kids with a motor home. And then we're going to do the remaining 48 and kind of do a cool summer vacation for the kids. Well, an interesting summer vacation at least, you know, and unique in that regard. Well, that is quite, that is really quite something. And as somebody who's dipped my toe in that world, I'm super excited for you. I'm intimidated and I'm amazed because, you know, I just did five

and it almost killed me. So the idea of doing 50 is really, uh, really, uh, something to behold. And I applaud you for the attempt and I can't wait to see how this pans out. All right. First of all, how are you feeling? You know, shockingly good. I think I felt worse after the 30 Ironmans in a year, just because it was a year long. And I had to transition from athlete to father, athlete to father. And this was just, the 50 was obviously way more intense,

but it was in such a condensed period of time. And I don't know if I just managed my body better or if I just didn't give it time to go through injury, but I mean, really, I don't have any stress fractures. I don't have any torn muscles. Literally, the two things I'm dealing with is numbness in my pinky and my ring finger. Is that from pinched nerves from riding the bike? It's the ulnar nerve, yeah.

So my dexterity, like tying my shoes. I can't open a jar of pickles right now. Right. And then I've just got some swelling and numbness in my feet. But soreness? No soreness. You're not sore. I'm not sore at all.

I mean, it was crazy just the way that my body adapted in that last event in Utah. We calculated my moving time, and it was an 1130 Ironman, and it was the fastest of the 50. Yeah, that's crazy. Which is nuts. It's mind-blowing to me the 50 yeah that's crazy which is nuts it's mind-blowing to me yeah that's crazy i mean the crowd i'm sure helped and just being home and well knowing you could knowing i didn't have to do anything the next day right i was going to my bed and not a motorhome bed was a huge incentive well on the run like that last lap that you took before the 5k i was like what is going on you were we were like i think we're running like

seven minute pace or something like that all of a sudden we dropped into low sevens and dipped right under seven minute mile there for, for a minute, the last three miles before the final five K, um, we were sub 22 minutes. Well, I can say from my, you know, my experience doing one 10th of what you did that my fifth one felt the best, you know, and it's weird. It's a weird thing. And I, and I talked about it in my book, you know, how the, it's almost like the body finally goes, okay, like I get it now. Like, why didn't you tell me, this is what you were trying to do to me. Like, you know, now I can, I can, it adapts. It's incredible.

It's crazy. And that's what, that's exactly what I experienced out there. The first 15, 20, I mean, it was just hell. Just because my mind knew what it was doing, and it kept trying to tell the body, and the body just didn't get it until we passed a certain point. And, you know, if you look at the last 20, I was just a robot metronome. I mean, I would start and finish at the exact same time every day. I mean, we could predict when I was coming in on the bike, off on the run, I'd have the same amount of miles done before the 5K.

I mean, it was just like clockwork, and my body finally caught up to what my mind had been telling it, this is what we're doing. And it just took me a little longer than five. Right, right, right, right. Just because, I mean, 50 is just so big and uh so it took 20 for my body to go oh there you go that's what we're doing right right right to finally click in well it's in survival mode like it thinks you're trying to kill it i remember i got super bloated and i actually gained weight because my body was thinking i gotta store this food because i'm running out of

fuel like it was weird and then like a week later I got super skinny because it was almost like the body is saying, it's trying to hold onto that. Like it's trying to live, you know, and it thinks you're trying to kill it. Yeah. I went through all these things that you're explaining just on a, just on a bigger level. Um, the, you know, I lost seven pounds the first week and we went, Oh man, we can't sustain this. Like there's no no way and so we just started throwing food at me and then i went through that phase where i was just like bloated and just like just i looked like an ethiopian just just super skinny but my stomach was sticking way out and then we figured out that we had to adjust our proteins. My body was just like craving protein.

And then once we got all that back in check, I ended up putting that seven pounds back on. Interesting. And we maintained our weight the whole way through. Yeah, I mean, you look the same as you did when you started. I mean, was there any weight loss from beginning to end? Were you weighing yourself every day? Yeah, it was just that seven pounds in the first week. And then we put it all back on. And then I just maintained and held steady the whole time.

Right, right, right. So what was the fueling strategy? Just as much food as we could get in me. So just for example, breakfast was two bowls of oatmeal with walnuts, coconut, some agave or honey. Then I'd go do my swim, and then I'd come out of the swim and i would have some variation of um either a breakfast sandwich or burrito um i mean sometimes the the ambassadors would have just a spread and i would come out and i would pound two to three plates right yeah there's pictures on facebook yeah massive plates of food plates of food and i would just shovel it in so i was getting in like 3 500 calories just before going out on the bike right Right. Just because in the evening time, it was very difficult.

My number one priority was getting to sleep, just because it ended up being four to five hours a night. And so eating just wasn't high on my excitement to-do list. Right. And so when I woke up in the mornings, I was just like starving. And I just couldn't, I couldn't consume so much before the swim. So we'd get in those, those two big bowls of oatmeal and then just post post swim pre-bike. I was just so hungry. And you can't really eat on the run, right? So what do you eat? You got to be eating when you're on the bike though, right?

Yeah. Well, actually we, I would take a break probably about right before the 5K. I would come in and I would eat a whole meal. This one day, you went running with this giant hoagie and he held it in the middle and just pounded it through the run.

The entire hoagie, it was bigger than a 12-inch sub. Well, let's take it back to the beginning. All right, so you start in Kauai. It's Kauai, Alaska, Washington, Oregon. You stack the deck against yourself from the get-go because you got three airline, two airline flights? Three airline flights.

Three, including flying to Honolulu. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I ended up flying from California, too. That was a huge drive from Oregon to California. Right, because you had to get to Santa Cruz. Yeah, because it was a 10- ended up flying from California too. Uh, that was a huge drive from Portland. Right. Cause you had to get to Santa Cruz. Yeah. Cause it was a 10 and a half hour drive and we didn't have enough time to finish the race and then have me travel 10 and a half hours.

So we sent Aaron in a car a day ahead of us and then I flew after the event. And so, I mean, there was in those initial three, I had flights four yeah you know those in between the initial four events we had three flights and um you know had anything gone wrong i mean we were under like commercial like time deadlines right you know we had you miss your flight you're in big trouble yeah right especially if i mean had we had to do that 10 hour drive with me i mean that would have ended up being 12 because we hit San Francisco traffic. So it was 12 and a half hours. We didn't get there until 1030 in the morning.

I mean, that would have, that would have had me starting at 1030 and then you're just way behind. And the next drive was long to Vegas. So we needed that travel time as well. Yeah. The Vegas was eight and a half hours. And then on top of that, we're dealing with massive exhaustion. I mean, in those first three events, I had a total of seven and a half hours of sleep.

Right. All of which was on an Airline because we started that one in Hawaii at midnight So no sleep the night before because you just amped up you're about to start 50 Ironman so I'd like you're gonna sleep So I do no sleep. I start at midnight. I do an Ironman I get three hours sleep four hours sleep getting to Alaska we land lose all that time zone time right land at six I'm in the pool by seven finish that one fly out of alaska at midnight land at six in the water at seven and then we had to start the

oregon one at 5 a.m because i had to catch that that flight right you got to get it done in time so those first four so yeah dealing with just like insane exhaustion right right right so i'm thinking and you know and i was frank and open about this from the get-go. Like when I looked at it and I knew what you had done previously, but I didn't know you personally. And I was like, he looks super fit. He obviously knows how to crank out tons of Ironmans. He's going to be able to do 50 in 50 states. But I'm thinking, after that first five or six or seven or maybe even nine or ten, if he's lucky, he's going to have to take a rest day.

It's just like I just don't see any way around it. And if he meets one sort of unforeseen obstacle that even pushes him back an hour or two hours, that's going to cause a major ripple effect that's going to affect your ability to do the whole thing, right? And it's not like you didn't meet obstacles. I mean, in Hawaii, from the get-go, you had the cops. You had stuff happening. You had flats. You had a bunch of flats.

You had four flats. So it's not like this was obstacle-free by any stretch of the imagination. You're meeting obstacles every single day. Well, it's crazy. We had all those things happen in Hawaii, and I'm like, oh, man, this is number one. Yeah. Like, we're up against it. And I knew what was coming in the next several states. And so I was like, man this is number one yeah like we're up against it and I knew what was coming in the next several states and so I was like man

just hunker down yeah I feel like this really was a social media experiment you know when you guys started how many people did you have on your Facebook page eight thousand or something like that yeah and then we're you're at like 60 60 something 60-something thousand. 60-something. So you were picking up like 1,000 to 1,500 people a day in the last month. It was crazy. And meanwhile, no television coverage.

I don't know what it was like when you were in the various states. Maybe there were some local TV stuff. But on a national scale, nobody knew what was going on. And this was really playing out on Twitter and Facebook. And people from all over the world were gravitating to your page. And I know from my personal experience and some of my friends, like I'd call them, like, they're not even athletes. And they're like, yeah, my aunt, you know, in wherever called me and said, do you know about this cowboy guy? And like, you know, so people were like people that have no relationship to sport

let alone triathlon that was one of the were hip to what was happening as it was playing out and it really was this thing where every i mean i know that i was and i know lots of other people like when i woke up in the morning and opened up my laptop like first thing iron cowboy page what's going on where is he is he alive you know it was like it was like a reality show and that was that was the did you have a sense of that you know i was in this giant bubble um and i started to get a sense of it probably between 40 and 50 um and it was it was during one of those states i can't remember which one but there was a 60 yearyear-old lady that showed up at the pool. And she just said, I just want to swim 50 meters with you. And I was like, that's so cool. I'm like, you know, because I respect my elders.

And I'm like, this woman who is just like wise in her life. Right. She's not on the slow twitch forum. She's not. And she's outside of that triathlon world that we've crossed over into. And I just thought you know, she's, she's, she's out, she's outside of that triathlon world that we've crossed over into. And I just thought, man, this is the coolest thing. And so she jumped in my lane and I just swam, I just matched her stroke and we swam 50 meters together. And I gave her a hug and she got out of the pool and I finished my swim. Right. But it was just a

real cool moment for me to just say, oh man, this lady just wants to swim 50 meters with me. And, and that impacted her day, which is cool. That's cool. So where does the drive come from? Where does the focus come from? What's, what's fueling this? Like where, when you, when you first had the idea to do this, what's behind that? I just thought it'd be fun, man. I like, like, I mean, I said it in the first podcast that I wanted to find my mental and physical strength. And you said, Oh, you're going to find it. Um, and you did. Yeah, absolutely. I did. I mean, there's, there's no question there was, although you could have done another, you look pretty good when you were finished with 50, you could have gotten up the next day and

done another one. Absolutely. I could have, there's no, there's no question. Um, I mean, sitting here one week removed, it's like, man, how did I do that? When you're in the moment and you have to get a job done, had someone said, hey, you've got to do that again tomorrow, I'd be like, oh, this sucks, but okay, I can do it. And I probably could have kept going. And who knows, I joked and tortured myself. Like the ultimate test would have been, okay, the goal's not 50-50-50,

it's how many Ironmans until you stop right you know and i was just like what like like to really find your is that what's next no it's not but like that that's that's truly that's the breaking point like well how many like well how many is it yeah it wasn't 50 right you know and i'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that was easy and and i and i walked through 50 um but it's like well what what is the number like what is it and is what did i make it through 50 just because mentally that's what i said i was going to do and that's why i made 50 but you know you know back to the back to the thing that that you know people say that i'm special or have a gift or I'm not average,

I don't know what it is. I guess I'm still trying to figure out how I did that and what it was that allowed me to do that. And I think it's a space between your ears. I mean, that's what it has to come down to because there's no test out there that can quantify what that is. And that's what I've been trying to figure out how to articulate is the space that i occupied and and what it really took for me to accomplish that um yeah to be determined, I guess. Considered the Jamie Oliver of meditation by the New York Times and the international poster child for the modern mindfulness movement, Andy Pudicombe is a meditation and mindfulness expert, as well as the co-founder and voice of all things Headspace, the super popular award-winning mobile app and digital health platform that provides a wide range of accessible, simple, secular guided meditation sessions. Andy is an extraordinary guy. On a

personal level, he has been very inspiring to me. So have a listen. Number one, I would say I never tell anyone they should meditate. I would just say from a scientific point of view, look, there are these research studies that have been done. And in these research studies, there have been many, many benefits that have been discovered. I would recommend that you have a look at those. If you're inspired to try, give it a go. Like base it on, don't do it because someone else tells you to do it.

Do it because you feel motivated to do it and then continue to do it because you recognize the benefit yourself. In terms of the medicine internally, they're not obviously with us in the recording studio today. I would always defer. We have a chief medical officer, Dr. David Cox, and we also have a neuroscientist, Claudia. And both of them are far more adept in talking about this stuff. But as you mentioned earlier, there are over 5,000 papers,

peer-reviewed, published studies, showing that meditation and mindfulness can help us with everything from reducing anxiety, reducing depression and the relapse of depression, decreasing the incidence of insomnia, improving heart health, decreasing our cholesterol levels, all the way through to suffering chronic pain. There's increasing levels of empathy.

And sometimes you look at the spread of this and it's like, how is this even possible? How can one thing like have this impact on so many different things and i think we just underestimate the the power of the mind the body and mind aren't separate we know when we get stressed in the mind that we feel it we experience it in the body we know when we're really relaxed and happy we feel that in the body so it's maybe not such a surprise that we see these kind of benefits arising. Well, when we look at the amount of time, energy, and money spent on sort of taking

care of other things that are less important, whether it's like shampoo for your hair or brushing your teeth. Speak for yourself. Yeah, right, right. what do we do to tend to our mental health? Well, I guess, you know, when we get home, we pour ourselves a cocktail and we watch Dancing with the Stars. And that's our way of relaxing or watch a football game or something like that. And that's not tending to, you know, that's not doing sort of mental push-ups. Not at all. And there's, you know, there's different ways. push-ups not at all and this just you know there's different ways some people like it's interesting when i look at you know we work with professional sports people and sports teams and corporations and for them it's more about focus productivity um and for them it is about it's

like training the mind that you say it's almost mental push-ups for a very specific purpose exactly right um and then i think for i actually believe for a bigger demographic, it's more like, you know, how can I sleep better at night? How can I feel a little less stressed? How can I have better relationships with those around me? And those things, they're huge. Make even a small shift in one of those areas in life. And that is a life that's transformed right away. life and that is a life that transformed right away so i take it that although your doctor before you left on your your adventure to become a monk had suggested that you take prozac that prozac at

some point did not become necessary i never took prozac you're happy you seem like a affable happy guy you know yeah i i never went down that route. Well, that's very tempting sometimes when, you know, a doctor, a person, an authority tells us to do something, it can be tempting to go down that route. I mean, when you look at sort of the state of mental health and the extent to which we're so quick to medicate people to deal with their, you know, sort of happiness issues depression etc i mean what do you make of that yeah i'm definitely not anti-medication i feel that there are times

when there is extremely important and very very helpful so i don't think it's meditation versus medication but i do think we have a tendency and i would say this is especially true in the US having lived in a lot of different countries to over medicate and to medicate a little too quickly someone joked me when I said I was moving to to LA and they said wow over there you can hear people rattle as they walk down the street the the pills in their pockets kind of uh shaking around and i am constantly astonished not only how many people self-medicate but also how openly people talk about it kind of that yeah there's no stigma there's no stigma whatsoever and there is in some countries i would say so i would love to see a shift i'd love to see a shift in terms of prevention

so i think far too often in our society we wait until something happens until trying to kind of fix it and that's what the medication kind of thing is you know there's already a problem if we can get into a pattern in society, whether it's ourselves, the next generation, preferably both, where we're taking preventative care of the mind, where we're actually carving out, prioritizing 10, 15 minutes in a day, whatever it might be, to look after, to clean the mind each day, we don't even need to get to the point where we have to decide whether to medicate or not. That's, I think, the potential. That's beautifully put. And to me, that's the future of medicine, you know, functional medicine, preventive medicine,

you know, in the physical realm as well. And it's no coincidence. You know, we have 54 research studies on the table right now, 34 are in motion, and these are all reverse engineered. So these are hospitals, clinics, universities coming to us and saying, we believe that mindfulness and meditation can be a meaningful intervention with these types of symptoms. Can we test it? And we're seeing time and time again, it makes a difference. And the more the medical community embrace that, the more I think we'll see it move from, right now it's being seen more of a treatment, of management treatment, but I think over time it will move from treatment to management to prevention. Next up is gastroenterologist Robin Shutkan, MD, a graduate of Yale and Columbia and on faculty at Georgetown University Hospital. Robin is a specialist in the very hot and of the moment topic of the microbiome and the inextricable impact the quality of our gut ecology has on everything from overall health to disease to cravings. I just love Robin. She's whip smart and very gifted when it comes to explaining the nuts and bolts of this fascinating

and quickly evolving field of study and medicine. So listen in, pick up her book, The Microbiome Solution, and thank me later. I'm a physician. I'm a conventionally trained physician with an open mind. And I am very happy that there are hospitals out there. I'm happy that there are neonatal ICUs and well-trained OBGYNs for when we need them. But this is sort of the essential point for when we need them. And what we're seeing, not just with the antibiotic use, but with medical care in general, that we're not using these resources judiciously. And there's a huge commerce factor here, right?

I mean, you make a lot of money doing things a certain way. So when I was having my baby 10 years ago, my amazing daughter, Sydney, I was kind of amazed. I mean, I had so many monitors going in and out, and I hadn't fully had my awakening then. So I somehow thought this was all great that i had a intrauterine monitor threaded up to my uterus and an external monitor and a epidural in my back and an ivy and you know was just sort of lying on my back incapacitated by all of this and not surprisingly ended up with a c-section but i thought this was great that there was all this technology you know just in case i was a completely healthy woman who arguably could have done this at home

in the bathtub maybe not advocating that either necessarily but but it was it was a lot and it actually was a big part of what inspired me to write the book which is that I had the flu when I was giving birth and I had a high fever my My baby was fine. But the doctor said, well, just in case you have a fever, we're going to put her in the NICU. We're going to do a sepsis workup, which basically means you're going to look to make sure she doesn't have infection. That was all fine. They did a spinal tap. They drew blood cultures. They x-rayed her. But what they also did was gave her two very strong intravenous antibiotics just in case. And it's this just in case thing. And we're really stuck with having to figure out how to interpret that. I mean, I was a physician with, you know, a couple decades of experience.

And I actually thought that was a good idea. Because when people say, well, your newborn baby, you had a fever, maybe she has an infection. Of course, all you think about is, you know, my baby's going to get Ebola, like quickly treat her prophylactically prescribing powerful antibiotics and now we know that the risk of doing that particularly to a newborn where the microbes are just getting going far outweighs in a situation like this the benefits and that really started her on this course of multiple antibiotics and the cycle of illness that continued till she was really a preschooler of air infections, pharyngitis, strep every month. She, you know,

her little microbes were just completely depleted. And I didn't realize that because again, I thought that illness equal antibiotic, and I didn't really have an understanding that most of these air infections, pharyngitis are viral and that they'll be self-limited. But when your new baby is screaming and has a temperature of, you know, one Oh two at four in the morning, you'll do anything. You want to do something and you believe that this is what you should do. So, and that young age is very precious in terms of kind of how the microbiome starts to sort of seed itself, right?

It's a crucial time. I mean, by about age three, which is still really young, but by about age three, the child's microbiome starts to look very much like the adult microbiome and not surprisingly like the mother, because that's where a lot of the microbes come from, but like other members in the household. So giving antibiotics to newborns and to young babies. And now in my field in gastroenterology, we're seeing this unfortunate trend of babies, infants being treated for reflux with acid

suppressing drugs, powerful drugs that block all the acid and create a nice alkaline environment for the wrong kind of bacteria to grow. And there's some very simple alternative ways to treat that. Just having your baby, holding your baby upright after you fed them, ideally after you breastfed them, because all it is is really spitting up. It's not this dangerous thing, but it's hard to hold your baby upright for half an hour. You might be feeding them four or five times a day. But again, you know, we have to sort of reevaluate things and sometimes decline this quick fix solution and really consider the ripple effect of something like that. Right. In terms of, you know, quick fix solutions, I mean, that applies to breast milk versus

formula as well, right? Like there's got to be all kinds of cultures of microorganisms in the breast milk that are important for the baby. One in particular called H human monogolic oligosaccharides which are the third most common ingredient in breast milk but completely indigestible by the baby because they're not there to feed the baby they're there to feed the baby's bacteria they're there to feed the baby's bifidobacteria so if you're not breastfeeding your baby and you're giving them giving them soy formula which is equivalent of about five birth control pills a day or some other sort of you know manufactured formula you're not getting the hmos and numerous other ingredients that we probably don't even know about that are there to feed the microbes to really encourage the growth of the microbiome

so it's uh you know again it's great that formula is there for those instances where mothers and milk goes south and they're really there is nothing. But encouraging that or suggesting that that is an equivalent option to breastfeeding just implies, I think, a real lack of understanding about the importance of this stuff. Somewhere along the way, you might have heard of something called the blue zones. Well, that term was coined by my friend Dan Buettner, a catch-all term in reference to certain distinct slivers on the planet Dan discovered that boast the highest per capita populations of centenarians, people who live to 100 and beyond. Places where people seem to live the longest and places where by all accounts also seem to be the happiest. A National Geographic fellow, world adventurer, longevity expert, a New York Times bestselling author, Dan even has three world records in endurance cycling. He is a true renaissance man. This guy is my hero. I'm proud to call him a friend and a mentor and even prouder to share his powerful message about how to not just sort of defy the statistics in terms of longevity, but also

are living more fulfilling, happier lives, right? Like, I feel like there's a lot of emphasis on the centenarians and how long they're living, but I think the key kind of thing here also is quality of life. People are a little drawn to three digits in their age and 100 year olds do an extraordinary thing that tends to capture people's imagination but the average american if you got rid of all chronic disease cancer heart disease diabetes these are all avoidable diseases largely the average american could hit about 92 women may be able to hit 94. And that is the value proposition. In blue zones, people are coming close to that. They're living a long time. They're about a decade younger biologically at every major age milepost. Suffer about a sixth

the rate of heart disease, about a fifth the rate of certain cancers one of our blue zones there's about a tenth the rate of dementia that we have here in america and they achieve this not by the way we think about health they don't diet they don't have exercise programs but they live in places where the culture makes the right decisions for them. And it turns out that there is this whole network of factors that come together that help them live along. And to your point, Rich, it's not just about the discipline of staying on a diet or an exercise regimen. It's about a lot of the things that also derive a happy life not only a long life and so we're talking about these hill regions of sardinia right we're talking about uh an area of costa rica nicoya peninsula loma linda california ironically which we'll get into and And where are the other regions? There's a place, a Greek island off the coast of Turkey called Ikaria.

And then the longest-lived women in the world live in Okinawa, Japan. So there are five of them. Right. And what are the sort of unifying factors? Because one of the things is you would think, well, these are cultures that are somewhat removed from the gestalt of kind of Western progress, I suppose, and have maintained a certain lifestyle over generations. But what is it that kind of ties them together to create themes that you can extrapolate lifestyle principles out of?

themes that you can extrapolate lifestyle principles out of? So we've discovered nine common denominators. First one is they live in environments where just about every trip occasions a walk. Their houses are deconvenienced. They tend to have gardens. They have vocabulary for purpose. Deconvenienced meaning what specifically? There's not a button to push for yard work and another button to push for housework and another button to push for kitchen work.

They're getting in there with their own hands and doing the work, kneading the bread, grinding the corn. They're going out back to their gardens to get food. and doing the work, kneading the bread, grinding the corn. They're going out back to their gardens to get food. They have yards, but they're doing yard work by hand often. So, you know, we're kind of deluded in this country to think that we can sit in our offices all day long and then go to the gym for a half hour or do a half hour run at the end of the day and get the exercise we need when you look at the cultures of longevity around the world these people are nudged into physical activity about once every 15 or 20 minutes so their metabolisms are kick-started

if you sit for more than about 90 minutes actually it's about 75 minutes without moving your metabolism drops into a hibernative state and whatever you had for breakfast very quickly goes to your midsection so we should keep this podcast under 75 minutes or we can stand up halfway yeah we can do that but as you know i'm part italian so you'll see my hands moving all the so this is this is your metabolism's always going this is a yes Yes, it's an exercise. So essentially the circumstances of their environment dictate a more active approach to their life. So it's not about going out and pushing it or going running or the things that we kind of entertain ourselves with. But it's really just a defining aspect of how they live their life

every day. They're kind of always on the move. Yes, gentle, low-intensity physical activity. Their lives tend to be imbued with purpose. They live in places where there's actually vocabulary for it. There's a time to downshift every day, which is really important. Almost every age-related disease finds its root in inflammation, in chronic inflammation. Chronic inflammation wrinkles your skin. It atrophies your brain. It wreaks havoc on your arteries. These people suffer the same stresses that we do. They worry about their kids.

They worry about their health. They worry about their kids. They worry about their health. They worry about their money. But they have either through meditation or through prayer or through happy hour, sometime during the day where they're reversing it all. They're taking that moment. Again, these are culturally provided. They eat a plant-based diet. I want to talk more about that later. But in general, it's plant slant. About 95% of what they eat come plant-based diet i want to talk more about that later but in general it's plant slant about 95 of what they eat come from plants they do eat some meat which i know is an inconvenient message to some people but um um we did a worldwide global average and there's some meat in their diet but not, but a lot less than we probably think. They keep their aging parents nearby, invest in their families. They tend to belong to a faith-based community, which is not to say they're spiritual or necessarily holier than thou,

but they have this network of friends that often are imbued with some sort of spiritual faith. And then finally, they tend to either be born into or choose, curate, so to speak, a social network that helps them practice these healthier behaviors without really thinking about it. I love this idea of purpose. There is that term. Is it the Okinawans that have the the word

that kind of defines ikigai ikigai kind of sounds like that creepy guy at the end of the bar but it actually means the reason for which i wake up in the morning and this is culturally like a mandate for them right like everybody sort of knows what their ikigai is if you were to pull people traditionally when you're about five years old, your parents will match you up with a half a dozen other five-year-olds, and there'll be a ceremony, and then there's kind of cultural pressure that you travel through lives with those people. And they're there to, if you run out of money

or there's a death in the family or a kid gets sick or you get divorced, you have this social safety net that you can count on. But likewise, you've got to step up to the plate when somebody else in that moai. And it's really powerful. Actually, here in America, if you are lonely, if you meet the definition of loneliness, which means you have fewer than three friends you can count on on a bad day, your life expectancy is about eight years less

than it would be if you have a strong social network. That's amazing. I think that's a huge problem. I think we're getting, with the sort of advent of the internet, ironically, we're getting lonelier and more isolated as a culture 15 years ago the average american had three good friends we're now down to about 1.5

and incidentally we have a we have this true happiness test that people take it's 66 questions and it measures their happiness but we don't capture people's specific or individual information but we can we can get the aggregate so we've had about 280,000 people take it so it's a big data set and we can see very clearly that the more time people are on social media facebook twitter except of course for rich roll but but they're seeing what blue zones. But they're... Seeing what Blue Zones is doing. They're actually less happy. They have...

Well, actually, social media, Twitter and Facebook, brings you a little bit more happiness if you're using it between zero and 45 minutes a day. But after about 45 minutes a day, the curve makes a U-turn. And the least happy people we find,

i.e. the loneliest, I would argue, are on social media up to eight hours a day, we were seeing. Eight hours a day. Well, I mean, do you think that they're lonely because they're spending all that time there? Or they're spending all that time there because they're spending all that time there because they're lonely. I mean, it's sort of a cart and horse thing.

It is a cart and horse. But I think authentic friends require effort. We evolved face-to-face like you and I right now. There's a completely different dynamic we're having right now because we're six feet away from each other as opposed to if you called me up on the phone and we were talking on the phone um we evolved as social creature and we're successful as a species because we collaborate it feels good to collaborate feel it kind of puts our genes at rest and um it requires effort to to see people, to be there when they're hurting, to lend a helping hand.

And when you're just depending on social network, it's sort of the easy way out. It's too easy to not make that effort and build those authentic relationships. And there's where you get in trouble. Artist, entrepreneur, filmmaker, YouTube sensation, daily vlogger, and now tech entrepreneur with his new social media video sharing platform called Beam, Casey Neistat is one of the most influential, inspiring, and wildly popular people on the entire internet. A friend and podcast favorite, he's chock-a-block with solid life advice on everything

from creativity to productivity, work ethic, and the value of honoring process over results. There is no destination. There is only yourself and the journey. So there's this girl, I'm digressing right now. I hope that's okay, Rich. There's this girl that I know, and she talked to my brother Van and me. This is years ago. She's probably 25. She's absolutely the most beautiful girl, super rich girl. And she had this like, what do I do with my life thing that she came and talked to Van and me about. And I remember, I don't know if it was Van or it was me who sort of laid it down, and we said,

stop taking money from your parents. Like, close or get away from your trust fund. Get a job in a restaurant waiting tables. And she looked at us like, how dare you? That sounds like the worst thing ever. And we looked at her and we looked around like you want to be a writer how are you supposed to write if you don't understand life like if you have no actual exposure to life do you know what percentage of people actually get to live this dilettante

lifestyle that you've that is all you know like instead get out there like understand what it means to live like when when werner herzog says that the application process for his fictitious film school would be to walk from Paris to Berlin and keep a diary, and that diary is your application. I understand where he comes from. And when he says that he won't teach filmmaking in his film school, he'll teach you how to box.

I get that. It's the Hemingway school. Oh my god, yeah. So, I mean, this idea of vacation really, I mean mean i think that that when you're when you're doing what you love when you're actively engaged in your life you don't feel the need to escape that you know but when you're stuck in a job that you hate you know that's where the idea of like taking a break or escaping to go to some beach starts to crop in and sound attractive yeah and i get it's, look, a lot of this,

a lot of this diatribe that I'm laying on you right now, like is risky to say, because I think it's really open to misinterpretation. And it means that everyone should drop what they're doing and go become an artist and travel the world. And that's wrong. I just think it's about finding what you truly love. And I look at my very best friend through high school,

who remains one of my closest friends ever, and he's worked in a restaurant the last 17, 18 years. He still washes dishes one night a week, and he has a family, and he has a small house, and he has two cars and a big screen TV. And I look at him, and it's hard for me not to look at him and be like, why don't you leave that job and go find your passion?

But the truth is, how passion manifested for him was having this sense of security and having his family and having a wife that he loves and having two children now that he loves to watch and grow up. And I look at him and he is a guy who's living his dream. And he's very, he's most certainly lower middle class living in a small house, living in a crowded neighborhood, working in a restaurant. But he's happy most of the time. He's found his dream. So that happiness and that dream can manifest in myriad ways. It doesn't mean you have to be traveling the world and jumping off of bridges and being sensational.

But I just think it's being true to yourself and making sure you're doing something that you do actually love. Right. But I think that that process, like kind of unpacking, you know, unboxing, like what is your passion? Like what is it that gives you a heartbeat? I feel like most people are so disconnected. We're just on a habit trail track that there's not a lot of emphasis

on kind of looking internally to try to understand what that might be. So a lot of people say, oh, I want your life, but they may not really know what it is that is the thing for them because that takes a little bit of work. Yeah, and you described it very well. I always say in life you should only be doing one of two things. The first is figuring out what it is you love, what your passion is, and two is realizing it.

And the truth is very, very few people ever do the first thing because figuring out is much harder than actually doing it. If you know what you want, you just do it. Like if you can see those goal posts at the end of the field, you just kick the ball through it and you've done it. But if there's no goal posts, you have no idea where to go. And what happens is during that search, you do things like you go to school, you do things like you go on trips, you do things like you find experiences and you have relationships and you get dumped and you have these ups and downs in life. But then what happens is life takes over and all of a sudden you're not a student and all of a sudden you have obligations and all of a sudden you have bills and all of a sudden you have a wife and then all of a sudden you have kids. And all of a sudden you're 43 years old and you've got a mortgage and a house and babies and cars and car payments and school payments. It's not an option anymore.

And the option's gone. And it's no longer, the idea of figuring out is no longer there because life has handed you something else. Life has made the determination for you. And I think that's why it's very important to sort of always hit the reset button and say like, am I happy? Do I love what I'm doing? button and say like, am I happy? Do I love what I'm doing? And that answer can be yes for someone like my best friend that I described, who's like, yeah, he, he, he waits tables and he is a bartender and he's a dishwasher. He's also a people person. He loves being surrounded by people. You know, he makes an okay living. He doesn't worry about money. Like he stops, looks at his life and says,

yes, I love what I'm doing. And he's not flying, you know, first class to Dubai. Cause that's not where his passion is. His passion is being at home with his family so I think it's about asking yourself that question and that and being true to yourself I think it's also about paying attention and I think that when you know we're talking about obstacles or low moments it's about valuing those rather than like you said so eloquently trying to sidestep them or avoid them right like my wife always says like don't you know if somebody's being dismantled like they lost their job or they lose all their money or something terrible happens in their life like that's their sacred moment like don't rob them of that moment because that is fertile ground for really doing that kind of inward work to try to say,

all right, well, what now? Like, what is meaningful to me? Like, what can I, how can I move in a different trajectory where I can express something

that's more authentic to who I would like to be? Like, I think those are amazing opportunities to change your life as opposed to travesties or disasters. I mean, not to, like you said, like take away from

the real life kind of, you know, pressures that things like that entail, but. I also think it's really easy for us to sit here and be dismissive of them in retrospect, because we're right. In retrospect, they're not a big deal. But when you're in the middle of those moments of the tough times in life, like the last thing you want to hear from some fucking guy with a podcast. It's like, this is the most treasured moment of your life. It's like, how dare you? But the truth is, it is. Is there some idea out there floating around about you and your life that you would like to disabuse people of?

Yeah, I mean, everybody thinks I'm really rich. And that's one that I know you're laughing appropriately, but that's one that I think is really like funny and sort of weirdly flattering. And I, you know, just because I've been in my life so poor that I've had to choose between buying cat food or buying food for myself. Those cats went hungry, by the way. I thought about eating the cats, but like I have been truly destitute in life, destitute with a child. And that's very real for me and certainly now like I live a lifestyle that is wonderful and I would never complain about anything but to characterize me as rich or like millionaires or like some kid tweeted at me

yesterday because I posted a picture of what was like a $400 plastic cover board. It was like, you're so rich, it's not even funny. It's like a little bit crazy. Like I definitely don't pay off my credit cards every, like I definitely carry a balance. I've got a kid who's going to college next year. And in the last decade, I've saved up enough to maybe cover the first year. There's not much beyond that. There's like mortgages and there are debts and

there's scary stuff. And I mean, I've never been beholden to finances ever, no matter how poor I was, that I would let it dictate my decisions in life, especially as it pertains to my career. But let's just say like, if money was my goal and if I did want to be rich, there's no way I would have dropped everything in the advertising game, which is such a lucrative place to be in and a place that I was really finding my footing in to start this company like my 2014 to 2015 um pay decrease will be like you know 70 percent yeah wow so it's like again... But you're doubling down for the long haul. Of course, of course. And even if I don't care, like, it doesn't matter.

I always wanted to be, I always wanted to be, like, rich and have Ferraris and stuff when I was a kid. And the minute I got to a place in my life, financially, where I didn't have to worry about how I was going to pay for my next meal, and didn't have to worry about how I was going to pay rent, I stopped caring about money. Because it's just like, I don't care. Like me having everything I need means that I can

afford dollar pizza whenever I want it. It's a convenient notion for somebody because they look at your life and you know, you watch the videos and it's an, it's an aspirational lifestyle and it's easier to make the assumption that, oh, it's just easy for you because you have money or what have you. Because to consider otherwise is to flip the mirror and have that person have to look, you know, look at themselves and say, oh, I could make that choice too, or I could do that. And that's the harder thing to consider. Yeah. And look, that's what's, that's the sort of the ugly side of like people when I laugh, because people say how rich I am. That's the ugly side of like people when I laugh because people say how rich I am. That's the other side of it, which is a little bit more harsh, which is like I can't and could never

fault people for it. Because when I was like when I was really, really poor, when I was struggling, really struggling financially, the only solution that I could see to all of my problems was money. And the truth is like when you're really poor, most of your problems can be solved with money. And then the second they're solved, like all your real struggles in life just come into focus. So I have real money problems just like every other human being. But that's no longer sort of my number one priority, like I said, because I don't worry about where my next meal is coming from. I've got that taken care of. So I just like, I just, you know, I'm also, you know, 34 now. So I've sort of been in a place financially for what I would say is seven or eight years

where I haven't had to worry about my next meal. I think I have to worry about like, if I were to not have any income for starting today, in two weeks, I would literally be up Schitt's Creek. And that's still a very scary prospect. But I don't let that bother me. So yeah, I don't think I'm that different from most people. Most responsible adults by my age have some sort of consistent income. So yeah, I think that I'm fairly average in that regard.

And I certainly think that maybe my happiness factor in life or my satisfaction level in life is disproportionate to my income. And I think that's something that, yeah, most people might take conflict with and they love to sort of associate happiness with wealth, which is something I wouldn't know much about because I don't have enough wealth to tell you whether or not it's true or not. So we're sitting here, Mathis is here, my daughter, my 11-year-old daughter, my assistant, she's laughing over there and uh come here mathis you say hi to casey mathis has a really awesome temporary she put a temporary tattoo on her neck yeah which i'm not crazy about but uh mathis you should get that tattoo made permanent when your dad's not looking and just i know she

instagrammed it and she said what do you think dad you know like oh my god um if i could just describe it it says thug life in heat i'm just kidding it's a very cute design um so mathis is uh you know she's a creative person and i thought it would be a good opportunity for you like if you if you could you know speak to her directly about you know if you were to sit her down and say all right here's what you need to know to embark on a creative life here are the principles or the main things that you know are that you're going to be that you're going to need to rely on to make your way in the world like how would you crystallize that um i would say probably the most valuable piece of advice i could give and

this is very general uh i'm thinking mathis that's why i'm not making eye contact with you right now i'm thinking uh is that no one knows anything and the trouble with respecting the fact that no one knows anything is that you don't really have an appreciation of that until you've achieved a level of success. And then when you arrive at success, you look back and you're like, shoot, the only reason why I got here is because I ignored everyone and I followed my own instincts.

I wish I had just known to ignore, I wish I just knew to ignore everyone from the beginning because it would have gotten me here faster. But you figured that out pretty early. I didn't have much of a choice. I didn't figure that out until I was like 40. I was at war with everyone in my whole universe until I moved to New York City. And that's when I figured that out, is that like, it's not that I was wrong, which is what Howard characterized the first 20 years of my life, is everyone telling me I was

wrong. It's that I was just in the wrong environment, surrounded by the wrong people. telling me I was wrong. It's that I was just in the wrong environment surrounded by the wrong people. But certainly like in life, like a good rule that I have, Mathis, is listen to everyone, listen to what everyone says, and then ignore all of it. And yeah, yeah, just give me the thumbs up. Because what happens if you do that? Like I always listen. I always have an open ear and every once in a while, I mean seldom I hear something that matters to me and this is true with movies that I watch this is true for television that I consume this is true for books that I read this is true for everything that's incoming advice from friends thoughts of people that I trust like I listen to everyone and at the end of the day you have to ignore most of it because our capacity, our capability to sort of

understand all of this information is impossible. But every once in a while something hits you that's really relevant, that really affects you and you hang on to that. And the aggregate of that over time is that it's who you are and who you are creatively as an aggregate of things that have really touched you. Climber and high-altitude mountaineer Conrad Anker is one of the most respected adventure athletes of all time. He's summited Everest three times, as well as the most technically challenging ascents across the High Himalayas, Antarctica, Alaska, and the big walls of Patagonia. An exemplary ambassador of the outdoors and a passionate environmentalist working to combat

climate change, Conrad is deeply grounded, deeply mindful, and connected to nature with a truly palpable and laudable humility. I really love this man. Listen in and watch his new film, Meru, one of the most compelling documentaries you will ever see. You know, our whole society is sort of founded upon this idea of, you know, security and having the good life and trying to create, you know, extra ease in our day-to-day existence. You know, at the same time, we herald the heroes. We herald the risk-takers. You know, we love to enjoy those stories.

But the message that we're getting is really not so much to pursue that. It's like, oh, you know, the life of moderation is best. And, you know, you'd be best served by having this big screen TV or getting a nicer car or a nicer house. And so I'm always thinking about, like, how to reconcile those two worlds you know what I mean like like you know a big part of your message is to go outside and explore right and at the same time you know we're telling school children you know we're putting helmets on them the minute they walk outside the house because we're a fear-based culture. So, you know, how does that play into how you communicate, you know, to the world and to young people? Because I know you talk to young people quite a bit.

Yeah. People, we are so conditioned. And the media is a big part of it. They want us to buy a bigger house, a more comfortable car, more more and they don't they want us to be less take on less risk they want us to be consuming member society which means you're productive and you have a job and you can afford more things and status is accorded with fancier cars and all this and any sort of these material measures of life that are there. And we relate it to the children.

We have it at a very young age. And on my part, there's people that are like, send me letters. And they're like, you're irresponsible. You can't be a parent. Alex already tied climbing. And come on, you're doing this to the kids again. And you're just incredibly selfish it's the wrong thing to do and get a life grow up all these things and so i'm one i don't

like to pass judgment on other people and i accept everyone is good and and i won't and say okay that's fine that's that's your point of view but we we have this we have to constantly be growth in our society. We need 4% annually. We need to catch up with China. They're growing faster than we are. So this growth versus quality is a thing. So it's that quantity versus quality of life type thing. And so rather than every time I go shopping for something that isn't essential i.e it's not

food i i hold it and i go do i really need this whatever it might be and am i just getting it because it's a newer one and that there's a there's like the shopping crave that that urge that that reward or and i deserve it i've earned earned it. Or I mean, life is hard. I should treat myself to these really nice headphones. Right. I'm always like, yeah. And so there's like that, there's that, um, and then push and pull. Yeah. And yet I go over to the time I spent in Nepal and the Nepali people are some of the happiest people. We go out into these villages, and they're really happy people. And yes, there are many people that are happy in the United States, but oftentimes there's people that you interact in a public space,

and something's wearing at them. and they're just, they're not, something's wearing at them. They just, I mean, they're walking around with this weight of unhappiness. And sometimes I want to say, hello, guess what? Life is really short. You can't go through thinking like this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you see these people, these sadhus in India, the monks in Tibet,

and so they're living in the moment, and they realize success in life isn't equated to material acquisition. What else about that culture do you think informs their happiness quotient? In Nepal, they're very resourceful people. I mean, yeah, certainly there's unhappiness. There's tragedy and there's things that happen. Certainly recently. Yeah. And they tend to be... It's simple.

Yeah. I'm struggling for words because I really don't know what it is and I guess I'm still trying to answer that when I go over there and so a lot of them do want to have a new pair of jeans and a better cell phone and things like that and it's easy for us having all these things that make life comfortable and life easy to say oh wouldn't it be great to just go

sit on the side of the mountain in a cave? But I think part of it is that in Nepal, it's a pedestrian society, so people are walking. And when you walk on the trail, you interact with everyone. You see them in their eye, or if it's a friend or something like that, you say hello. And when you're walking with a friend from Nepal, and you see how they interact in their eye, or if it's a friend or something like that, you say hello. And when you're walking with a friend from Nepal and you see how they interact with their people, it's way different than we're driving in a car or in a bus or something like that,

where you don't have that sort of connection. Families are very connected and very tight with it, so maybe that has an underlying part of it. And that there's this, for most of Nepal, is pretty rural. I mean, Kathmandu is a teeming metropolis, an overcrowded, polluted Southeast Asian city, like Jakarta and Bangkok. I mean, the world is full of those places. But the people, when you get out into the sticks, there's roosters and there's a simple life. And so there's some happiness there. Interprofessional cardiologist Joel Kahn, MD, has performed thousands of cardiac procedures. He lectures constantly,

has authored over 130 articles on atherosclerosis, and has been advising patients on healthy heart programs for over 20 years. In other words, when it comes to treating, preventing, and reversing heart disease, Joel knows what's up, and it does not involve putting butter in your coffee. Here's Joel's message for you. There was this kind of concept until the 50s that heart disease was an age-related disease, that you lived old enough, you got it, and it wasn't something under your control. And that was at a time that maybe people were living 50, 55 years, 60 years is the average lifespan. A couple of forces challenged at the Framingham study in Massachusetts, started studying 6,000 people that lived outside of Boston

and determined who got heart disease and follow-up and what were their habits and what did they eat and what was their lifestyle. And out of that, in about 1960, came the first publication, the Framingham Heart Study, that actually clearly connected smoking to heart disease, diabetes to heart disease, blood pressure to heart disease, high cholesterol to heart disease, a close family relative that had heart disease to your own risk.

And we realized about 1960 on that heart disease wasn't just an age-related thing, that there were factors that influenced your chances, and that suggested there were factors that you could take control of. You could work to avoid diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking, obesity, and the rest. That was kind of a whole new concept in 1960. And part of that was the nutrition issue, which was kind of going on simultaneous. And we get back to the famous figure of Dr. Ansel Keys, who was far from the only person, but probably the most prominent.

And again, I'm not sure when I was on your podcast before we talked about that, but I've read a lot about the man. And I mean, the man's incredible. He lived a hundred years, died in 2004. He didn't just have one PhD. He had two PhDs, one from actually right here, Southern California, actually in oceanography, his first PhD. And then he went to Oxford and got a PhD in nutrition. And he came back to Minneapolis, his hometown. That's a bizarre switch. Oceanography? How does that work?

He was out here studying health of animals and then changed it to health of humans. Went back to Minneapolis in the early 40s and started studying. He did one of the first studies of executives in Minneapolis and their risk of developing heart attacks and relationships with food and all. And this was really kind of novel work. And as some of the listeners know or not, another thing he did, because he was at that point a pretty well-recognized expert in starvation, a well-recognized expert in nutrition, he developed for the Army the K rations, and the K is for keys.

It was a 3,500-calorie kit that a soldier could carry with them and survive for three, four days with enough nutrition to make it in service and undoubtedly saved lots of lives in that. But he started studying executives in Minneapolis, and I believe he had a trip to Naples in the very early 1950s and discussed with some professors in Naples that they just basically never saw heart disease. And he was so intrigued by that concept after having studied executives in Minneapolis who had heart attacks and heart disease. And really, the very first

seeds of what the Mediterranean diet might do for heart disease came in that early part. He published this very famous study in 1953 where he analyzed the rates of fat intake in the diet, the rates of heart disease in six countries. It was not a prospective study. It was governmental data, something called the FAO organization, which had a database of data on the topic. And he presented that he seemed to see a correlation between increased fat intake. I'm purposely not saying saturated fat because that wasn't even on his map. Increased fat intake in the diet, increased heart disease risk, and he presented it. And he got this

incredible pushback that wasn't correct. And that was 1953. That is not the seven-country study. As it turned out, as many people have heard this story, there were actually 22 countries in the database. And he later wrote why he didn't use 16 of the 22. A lot of it was unreliable data. For example, Mexico was one of the 22 countries. Mexico didn't have death certificates at that time. It's pretty hard to judge who died of heart disease when you're dealing with a country that didn't have death certificates. Did it still correlate, though?

So in 1957, two other researchers by the name of Yeroshalmi and Hillebrew published a paper that criticized Key's data. They added those 16 countries, and they showed that there was a correlation between fat in the diet and heart disease. They showed it a little bit weaker, but it was still statistically very valid. They actually didn't disprove anything. What isn't discussed much is when you looked at all 22 countries, which were not cherry-picked by Keyes, but were picked based on scientific and valid reasons, that actually animal protein was even more strongly related to heart disease than fat. And animal fat was more strongly related to heart disease than plant-based fats. In fact, plant-based fats were not. So indeed, in some way, Hillebrew and Yershaumi,

these critics that the paleo and Western price people rally around, actually moved the field ahead also by pointing out it maybe was a more, a point you could get more specific about, animal protein, animal fiber related to heart disease in all the data. All of that led Ancel Keys to try and scrap together a few dollars at a time that there was very little research going on. The NIH was funding almost nothing. And in 1958, he kicked off the seven country study. And at the time, nobody appreciates how unusual it was to do this kind of research. And there was very little of it ever done. Went to, I want to say, 16 communities, 12,000 men, and they sent these forces into the field.

They would go to a city in Italy, and they would go to every male in the city, and they would draw blood. They would do an EKG. They would do urinalysis like just mass epidemiologic associations of data points way before computers everything's on paper everything's on cards and over the years in fact from 1958 it took 12 years they published a paper in 1970 with just phenomenal amount of data that supported in a prospective, on-the-field way that there indeed was a relationship between animal saturated fat intake and coronary heart disease. The seven-country study, which is not what everybody points to in 1953, that was a different paper, that was six countries, that was just a retrospective analysis, is actually still ongoing. There's still data points being accumulated on these people from 1958 even to the current day.

There's updated publications. It's been a phenomenal basis of research. And by about 1970s, 1971, the American Heart Association, seeing this gigantic database come out, adopted over the time the philosophy that americans should try and decrease the amount of saturated fat in their diet to decrease the amount of coronary heart disease i don't see any problem with any of that that's gone along the other interesting thing that started to happen i'll just bring is that um anybody ever talked about north karelia on your podcast

no i don't think so at that time, Finland had the highest rate of heart disease in the world. I mean, absolutely blew away every point that was out there. And a province in Finland called North Karelia, which is in South Finland, and I can't tell you why that occurs. The entire province, and I believe there's about 100,000 people that live there, they got together as a community because, you community because it's easy to say they had the highest risk of heart disease in the world. What that actually means is people your age and my age were dropping dead of heart attacks like flies. These strapping farmers working in the fields, thin and fit, were dying of heart attacks. It didn't take much effort to realize why. They were adding butter in their diet, typically 10 teaspoons of butter a day on bread.

They had a reasonably high smoking rate. They drank whole milk like banshees. It was the culture of Finland. Not a high-carbohydrate culture, right? Not much spirulina in there. Fish-based. I would imagine a lot of fish in that diet right um probably probably you know being close to the water there probably was i can't

really tell you that for sure but animal saturated fat was sky high and as a community effort first in this province of north karelia ultimately the entire country they got together as a community health project to say perhaps you should use um use polyunsaturated margarine instead of whole butter. Perhaps you should try skim milk instead of whole milk. Perhaps you should quit smoking and some other hygienic measures. They dropped around the same time the risk of heart attack very quickly by 85%. 85%. This is all published in peer-reviewed literature. The data still is

coming from North Corelia. It's by far one of the most compelling databases to say that reducing animal saturated fat in the diet reduces coronary heart disease. You know, there's so many other points to talk about, but when you take QIES data, the North Corelia data, the American Heart Association got on board with this concept that it should be a principle to limit animal saturated fat. The Indiana Jones of superfoods, Darren O'Lean is a widely recognized exotic superfoods hunter, a renowned authority on nutrition and hydration, a supplement formulator, and a wellness and environmental activist devoted to optimal health and global sustainability practices. Darren's got a great story. He's got really warm energy, passion, and enthusiasm for what he does.

And I think he comes across in this conversation. So check it out and check out his book, Super Life. The whole thing is crazy to me. All I have to do is look at like my friend, Michael Arnstein, who is like the fifth fastest American at the New York City Marathon a couple of years ago. And the dude's fruitarian. Like he basically just eats bananas, you know. And he's like, he looks fit and healthy and happy and he's been doing it for years. And he's like, he looks fit and healthy and happy, and he's been doing it for years.

And not to say that everybody's going to just immediately become a fruitarian, but you cannot look at that and not try to rethink like, well, what is really going on with this obsession that's being pushed that the average consumer must be, you know, taking in these extreme amounts of protein just to be able to climb out of bed in the morning. All you have to do is go to the grocery store and look at the food labeling and it's complete insanity. Exactly. And there's so many just misunderstandings of culturally with meat and high protein is that some sort of red blooded testosterone American, it, you know, it will lose our testosterone if we don't, if we don't increase our protein intake, when in fact it's completely the opposite. All of the studies go that if you wipe out the protein and the meat specifically, that your testosterone testosterone we even did a study in-house and the the guys who we took them through 21 days and the first week we weaned them off all meat and dairy and the last two weeks kind of like two and a half weeks uh their testosterone went up by over

33 percent and that's also peer-reviewed so that's matched in peer-reviewed studies. What is the catalyst for that? Like what is the causal factor? Well, there's not just one linear fact. I mean, health is achieved in two ways. Eliminating the estrogen effect of some of the processed foods, that's going to increase a lot. And also that acidification, that onslaught that you're getting from all that meat and dairy is severely affecting. Not to mention, of course, probably some of that meat that they're consuming is riddled with hormones and pesticides and all that stuff, which is completely endocrine destroying for the person.

So if you eliminate that kind of food that your body's really attacking rather than receiving, which is crazy, then your body then regulates itself because your body's innately designed to thrive. If we get out of the way and give it what it needs, it's going to thrive.

And so anyway, that whole idea of protein is just a cultural... It's going to thrive. And so anyway, that whole idea of protein is just a cultural. It's cultural, yeah. This deeply ingrained idea that somehow sort of exerting domination over an animal equates to what it means to be a man in our society. Which is so ridiculous because, you know, we just go to the grocery store and buy it in a prepackaged thing. It has nothing to do with me. And it's along the lines of thinking like, well, if I eat brain,

it's going to make me smarter. You know, it's silly. So how do we, you know, what are we doing here? Like how are we overcoming this? Yeah, well, I think just the continual education of the pseudo, getting rid of the pseudoscience that is kind of propagating the cultural idea of it. And, you know, a lot of this science just doesn't make any sense. Even going with your buddy of like, you know, subsequent to that, when you have this high protein, then you have, seems to me that people get this fear of carbs then, right? So then you have your buddy eating nothing but bananas and like, he's not fat. And all of that research.

You need glycogen to function. Of course you do. Absolutely. And that's how the cell works. You spark it through oxygen and then normal metabolism is using that glycogen. And all of the science, and this is going to probably fire a lot of people up, that did you know that the whole insulin thing with sugar is completely backwards? It doesn't make sense because when you look at calories for calories, if you eliminate any of the macro, if you, let's say, eliminate carbohydrates

and you have proteins and fats and people just consume that. Do you know that insulin goes up, matches the amount of insulin that people supposedly are being spiked with the carbohydrates? It not only matches and sometimes even goes up. Insulin is not just left for sugar. Insulin regulates protein, regulates fat. All of it in consuming any of that insulin is involved. So the whole theory of insulin is the kind of the fat creator is completely wrong.

Well, that's interesting. I've never heard that before. So if you're eating like this low carb, high fat, high protein diet, you're saying that's still going to trigger this insulin spike. So what is insulin pulling out of the circulatory system then if it's not glucose? I mean, it's still pulling glucose out? It's still the – it's still – If you're not ingesting that, then what is it removing?

It's not – what do you mean removing? Well, so insulin is – when you have this insulin response, right? So that's there to pull the sugar out of the bloodstream. Right, regulate it. But it's not a matter of too much. It's like too much protein, it's doing the same thing with protein. Not in the same biochemical way, but the insulin is there for the protein and it's also there for the fat.

chemical way, but the insulin is there for the protein and it's also there for the fat. When calories are calories, there's no difference between someone taking out the carbs or someone taking out the protein. There's no significant fat loss. The fat loss comes when someone changes their eating program. And it really comes down to the amount of calories they're taking in or not taking in. Yeah. Part of the argument that fuels this kind of low carb movement, high fat movement is this idea that the dietary guidelines that have been in place for however long that have been promoting a low fat diet don't work. Like, well, that was a big disaster because we're fatter than ever. And look, you know, we've been telling people that they should be eating a low-fat diet, but that presupposes that people were actually doing it. Exactly.

Because they weren't. They weren't. They're going to McDonald's. Exactly. They're not eating a low-fat diet. Did you realize, before that, we're eating about 12% fat. During our low-fat phase, guess how much we were eating fat? 20%. 12%. 20%. 12%. So the same amount. So the theory is completely wrong to say, well, hey, everyone, we tried the low-fat thing and we got fatter. No.

There's this other thing called reward and palatability. We increase the reward and palatability food, i.e. processed food, that bypasses your biological stopping point of eating. So you're consuming all of these empty calories and you're just – all of a sudden, now I've just increased my calorie consumption. It has nothing to do with the macro breakdown of everything. It has to do with the – you've simply not even changed your fat and now you've increased your calories based on kind of these made up manufactured foods. Rapper turned successful entrepreneur, philanthropist, ultra runner, husband, dad, and part owner of the Atlanta Hawks, Jesse Itzler only eats fruit till noon,

has never had a resume, and despite his extraordinary success in business, when he felt his life becoming too routine, he invited legendary Navy SEAL David Goggins to move in with him and his family. What happened next is equally inspiring and hilarious, and it's the subject of his new book, Living with the SEAL. Here's Jesse. I was at a 24 hour race in San Diego a couple years ago and I was running the entire race as part of a six person relay team with friends. And the guy next to me literally set up

his little station next to me, was running the entire race alone. And he caught my eye because he was about 265 pounds, which is a lot of weight to carry in a 24-hour race that you're running by yourself. And the race was unsupported, so we had to bring all of our own supplies. And at the time, I had just sold the company, and I probably overdid my supplies. I had a tent, a masseuse, bananas, like I think Whole Foods pulled up and this guy next to me literally sat in a folding chair with a bottle of water and a bag of crackers with his arms crossed with this like don't even think about

messing with me look and i was just like who is this guy and at mile 70 he had broken all the small bones in both of his feet and had kidney failure and i watched this guy literally just on pure guts finish this race and I was like who in the world is this so I googled him he had a fascinating backstory which we can get to if you want and I decided I wanted to meet him I cold called him and I literally just picked up the phone called him he wasn't super chatty so I said you know what let me get on a plane and come see you. And after about 10 minutes of just sitting with him, I said, my life would be a lot better if whatever he had psychologically, whatever made this guy tick, rubbed off on me a little bit. And I invited him to move in with my family and I. And three days later, he was at our breakfast table. And the idea was, he's gonna live with you for 31 days,

and the only rule is that you've gotta do everything that he says or he asks of you. Yeah, and I wanted to get in great shape at the time. I was in a good routine, or I thought it was a good routine, and so many of us live our life on routine, and routines are great, but they definitely could be a rut, and I wasn't getting better. My routine was great, but it was, I wasn't improving in any of the buckets in my life. And that, but, but you're such a high performer in so many other

areas of your life. Like your bar is already set pretty high in comparison to the average person. So I, you know, to me it would take some, you know, it takes a deep level of self-awareness to go. No, I can still there's still room there. Yeah. I mean, at the time I was I was doing a bunch of marathons. My times weren't getting better. My training wasn't I was just doing it. I was going through the motions, but I wasn't at all giving it my all. And I couldn't get that mojo.

It's hard. You know, the one thing that he really taught me, and I'm sure you can relate to this through everything you've done, is we're all disciplined in our own ways. But to be consistently disciplined, consistently disciplined is so hard. That's the hardest part. Right. And he was the most of the most, or the highest level of consistency and discipline.

His name is David Goggins. It's since, you know, in the book I refer to him as SEAL. But his name is David Goggins. And he came in and he just turned everything upside down from day one. physical, great physical condition versus, you know, beyond that, like sort of the mental discipline, the emotional discipline that would spill over into other areas of your life? Like, were you thinking about that at the time? Or was this purely like a fitness boot camp? At the when I first kind of put my hand out and shook his hand across from the table and said, let's move, you know, move in with me. It was predominantly I wanted to get in great shape but after two hours of him at my house it it flip-flopped and the psychological side of it and what makes him tick and how is he so driven became 80 to 90 percent of it so I knew I was going to get in good shape that was unavoidable

I mean he's a he's a machine but I really wanted so much more because you know you go in and out of shape you go through these peaks and valleys up and down but the mental side of it you can really can last a lifetime right so i i and i got all these different little sound bites and tidbits of living with him i mean the first day that he came here in two hours into our journey we went down you want to see how many pull-ups i could do and by the way he has set the guinness book of world's records for most uh pull-ups in the days on 4030 and 17 hours so pull-ups for him weren't that difficult pulps for me a 200 pound guy that doesn't do any was very tough so i squeezed i did like eight so i get off the bar try it again in 30 seconds. Got back on the bar. I did like maybe

six. So I one more time, wait 30 seconds and try it again. And I barely got four and he turned and I was done like lactic acid built up. My arms were like at a 90 degree angle. And he turned to me, we're not leaving here until you do a hundred more. And I said, I can't possibly do a hundred, like impossible for me to physically i might want to do it i can't do it i said no you can do it and we're gonna i'm gonna prove it to you we're not leaving this gym until you do it so i would do one walk around the gym do another but what he taught me and i did it but what he taught me is we all have so much more in our reserve tank than we think we have and his saying one of your saying that you've,

you know, it's resonated with you is that when your brain tells you you're done, you're really only 40% done. And he, and he taught me that right there. He kind of, when he walked into my house and this is in the book, I said, you know, look, go ahead, take your bags, make yourself at home. And he said, nah, he said, I don't have a home. This is your home. And I said, no, make yourself at home is an expression. And he turned right to me and he goes, I don't operate in expressions. I was like, okay. It's going to be a long 31 days because you're like a jocular fun guy.

You must be thinking like there's got to be a way into this guy. How am I going to crack his emotional core and get to the reality of like who this person is? Right. I also thought, look, we'll run, we'll watch some football games, we'll go to some dinners, you know, like I was the thing, you know, that got thrown out the window. He literally took, we lived at the time in New York City in a great building on Central Park West. He took all the furniture in the guest room where he was sleeping, moved it to the side and blew up an inflatable tent that takes the oxygen out of the room to increase your like red blood cell, whatever, and slept in a tent in our apartment. Like an altitude tent. Yeah. And so tell me the first thing that happens when he comes in.

So, well, first of all, he only had a naps you know he came for 31 days with nothing all his belongings were in a small backpack which was amazing because it was the winter and um you know i showed him to him like i told you we went down and did these pull-ups uh did that pull up challenge and um that was right out like right when he arrived right out of the gate and then that night he told me that i'd be sleeping in a chair to get out of my comfort zone. And he wanted me to feel what suffering to start to feel what suffering is. So, you know, I could enjoy it as he would say.

And, um, but no, every day, you know, he had an expression every day we have to do something that sucks. And we did. And, um, you know, he know he just wanted me he wanted me to take my baseline which i thought i was operating at a high level and just really reset it and raise the bar because once it gets reset your baseline just gets raised you can't really go back and and all the challenges all the workouts you know we did crazy stuff, jumped in a frozen lake, we did insane runs and blizzards and all this other stuff.

But it was all about raising the baseline to get better and getting out of your comfort zone. That term is overused, but the only way to really get better is to experience pain, to get uncomfortable, and to go to places that you don't want to go and improve. I want to end this episode with an excerpt from one of our Ask Me Anything episodes where we field listener questions. This is sort of a call to action because life is not some future event. Life is in session. Life is happening now.

What's your advice for someone who wants to change their life path like you did? I know it must have been hard to leave your career and pursue a health-related career. I think about it every day. I'm just too scared to throw away a great job in school for a career which requires debt and uncertainty. requires debt and uncertainty. To me, this is almost like a no brainer. And I understand, you know, the fear and the uncertainty and all of that. But, you know, it's like, you don't get a do over life. You know, you have one life, you have one, you have one opportunity to pursue the thing that's going to make you happy. And had you said, you know, I don't really know what I want to do. I just know that I'm like not that happy doing what I'm doing right now, but it pays really well. That would be a different matter. But what you're saying here is you know what you truly want to do. So if that's true, if you really do know what you want to do and you know it would be something that you would enjoy doing every single day, then to me, that's a pretty strong indication that that's something

that you should pursue. Now, that doesn't mean that you have to quit your job tomorrow and do this new thing full time. And I don't even know what the new thing is. But to the extent that there is a way to express that, you know, maybe in a small way at first and incrementally over time before you end up leaving your job or decelerating out of it. That's what I would suggest that you do. But, you know, simply because, you know, you're nervous and there's uncertainty about it, I think that implies that because you have a good paying job now that seems to have a clear track as to where you're going, that implies security and certainty. And the truth is, there is no certainty in life. Just because that seems to be safe doesn't necessarily mean that in

reality, that's the way that it will play out. Many, many things can happen. And I think that to premise these massive decisions about how you're going to live your life, you know, based on doing something that's less uncertain than the other, maybe is not the best decision tree to focus on. Yeah, I agree with that. You know, I also think that you can kind of start to test the universal heart connection waters a little bit by starting to set up some entry points into your new way of being, starting to take some actions maybe on the weekend or maybe in the evenings to get the structure set up.

So get the infrastructure set up, possibly website, your contacts, the name, any kind of copyright that needs to be done, all of this kind of stuff, get all of that set up, and maybe shift your spending habits now and start saving some money, possibly. And then kind of, you know, check it out and see how the energy feels. Like, how do you feel when you're in the process of setting up those new things or in the process of doing that thing that you know you're supposed to do? And then I would try to cultivate repeating that feeling as much as you can, because if

you can be in the energy of expressing from your heart, from that thing that you love, it will amplify and it will magnetize more opportunities and more resources to you that will support you in making the transition. Now, you may experience some universal help in that you might get fired unexpectedly. That would be like universal help or your company could fold or the department could exist no longer and this big secure track that you've seen, you know, ahead, you know, may be revealed that it's not actually what you thought it was, you know, or you may be called to make that decision at that point in the road. Like, you know, you may have to stand up and take responsibility and say, okay, I'm going to jump and this is the point that I'm going to jump.

I'm going to jump and this is the point that I'm going to jump. And, you know, it can be any spectrum of experience after that. You know, it might be some struggle and you might be tested. And, you know, it's in our experiences is definitely not an easy landing all the time. But I think if you can focus on that feeling that you feel when you're doing the thing that you love, that will inform the rest of your decisions. But never make a decision based out of fear. So there's two forces in the world. There's fear and there's love. There's also different kinds of decisions. The decision not to make a change is based on fear.

That's a decision in its own right. Like a decision of inaction is still a decision. So, you know, like not making a decision based on fear, you know, he's saying that he's scared to leave, right? So it seems like not making a decision to just stay is like to perpetuate the stasis of staying. But that's basically a, you know basically a decision based on fear, right? It's a different kind of decision. Exactly. So the other thing I would say is that,

well, two things. The first thing is, did I interrupt you? Are you still in the middle of your thought? I've lost my thought now. Oh, you did? Sorry about that. You know, what's the worst thing that can happen? You could die.

That's the worst thing. Let's just put it out there right now well like i'm that's that's part of the second point that i'm going to get to but in like realistically like if you make this decision to go pursue this thing that that that apparently really makes you happy it's what you want to do and would be something that you would enjoy every day um i gather that there's some kind of price that you're going to have to pay for that well what is that price like how bad you know how bad could it potentially be and just kind of price that you're going to have to pay for that. Well, what is that price? Like how bad, you know, how bad could it potentially be? And just kind of camp out there and see how that feels like, what would happen? Oh, I'd have to give up this or I'd give up that. It's probably

a lot of material stuff. But if you get to wake up every single day and enjoy what you're doing, my experience is that a lot of that other stuff doesn't really carry the meaning it does. Like when you're working in a job that you don't like that pays really well, that stuff starts to take on meaning because those are the things that you're chasing to help you feel better about being in this situation that isn't really making you happy

and you're kind of doing it for the money, right? Then like what car you drive and the clothes, whatever it is that you're into, that stuff starts to get heightened and becomes much more important than it needs to be or should be. But when you're doing something that stuff starts to get heightened and becomes much more important than it needs to be or should be. But when you're doing something that you really love and you look forward to get up in the morning and doing it, all that other stuff kind of like fades away and becomes not that

important. Yeah. And the second thing is, you know, it has to do with this idea of like of the do-over life. Like, you know, we're like, well, I'll do that next time. Like, I'm going to do the safe thing now. I'll do the thing I really want to do when I have this other life.

We trick ourselves. And behind that is this idea that we're not going to die or that if we do die, well, that's just a temporary thing and then we're going to have this other opportunity to make the decisions

that we're too afraid to make now. But I don't really think most people live in this culture with the idea that they can do it next life. I don't think that they believe in multiple lifetimes as a, you know, as a mass. I'm not saying that. I'm saying there's a denial that death is going to happen. Okay. Right. There's another one. Exactly. You know, I'll do that thing later. It's like, no, your life is happening now. It's not some future event. You know, your life is in session in this moment and and you will die we will all

die and the clock is ticking so how are you maximizing this time to you know express what's most important to you and you know this is something that we're we're not encouraged to do and there is a lot of fear around it and i'm empathetic to that i've been in that prison and that cage for many many years i know what that feels like and there are a lot of you know real human experiences that are very scary and very, you know, full, rife with suffering. So it's not being disconnected by, you know, disconnected from the human experience because the human experience is very intense and especially in this, you know, world of polarity that we live in. So, but again, going back to as you examine

your decisions and hopefully you do this in a meditative state, in a moment of quiet where you're alone and you can really connect with your breath and go into a deeper, deeper place of your consciousness, I would look at every decision and sort of inquire into every decision and really look from where is it arising. Is it arising from fear or is it arising from love? And I would use that as your tool of sort of maneuvering your way through the process and through deciding what you want to do. And the other thing that could happen in your life is you could end up living like an amazing life. That could happen too. That could happen. Yeah. And I want to be, you know, sympathetic to somebody. I mean, Scott is a guy who looks like he's got options, right? And he's weighing those options.

And I think it's very kind of cavalier to just sort of cast off this inspirational, like, hey, quit your job and, you know, chase your dream and all of that. And it's, you know, it's, that's not everyone's reality. Like if you're stuck in, you know, a situation where, you know, you're a single parent, and you have a couple kids, and you know, maybe you don't have the education or what you're stuck in a job situation, you're just trying to make it through the day. Like, I think it's, you know, irresponsible to like, tell somebody that they should just, you know, you know, cavalierly, like cast that aside and chase some pipe dream. There are real-world constraints and concerns and responsibilities that come into play.

So it's just not as simple as that. I'm just focusing this on Scott's inquiry. Well, everybody and everybody's journey is completely unique. Everybody has a completely unique circumstance, karma, blueprint, and soul mission. So you have to really get in touch with you again. It's about getting in touch with you. And I mean, what I can feel from this email from Scott is that he happens to have a very expanded, actually very positive energy field around him.

And so, you know, he probably knows exactly what to do and he'll probably be successful in, you know, executing whatever he chooses to do and he'll probably be successful in you know executing whatever he whatever he chooses to do and he honestly probably already knew the answer to this before he even sent the email so that's the kind of the vibration and the feeling of the whole question but again getting back to yourself that's why you can't look at another person and say I'm going to live my life exactly the way that other person lives because it's a different life form. It's a different blueprint. It's a different plan. So once again, we're brought back to the core of how do you know yourself in addition to eating a plant-based diet is

meditation. Again, connecting in deeper with your heart's soul blueprint. All right, we did it, you guys. How'd you like them apples? That was pretty good, right? I enjoyed that. Hope everybody had a good time listening to this episode, part two with a bunch more

awesome excerpted conversations. We'll be up later in the week, late Wednesday night, December 30th. That is Pacific Standard Time. Don't forget to check out this week's comprehensive show notes at richroll.com on the episode page for this episode. Lots of stuff to delve into there, including links to all the full length interviews for all the guests that came up in today's show. If you want to delve

into the entire RRP catalog, the whole beyond the most recent 50 episodes that are available on iTunes, well, I've got an app for that and it's totally free. Just search Rich Roll in iTunes or the app store. It should pop right up. Don't forget to subscribe to my newsletter. No spam, just awesome goodness. Thanks for supporting the show, you guys, for telling your friends, for sharing it on social media. Yes, I love that. And for always using the Amazon banner ad at richroll.com for all your Amazon purchases. I appreciate you guys so much. You have no idea. Catch you in a few days. Season's greetings.

Happy holidays. Merry, merry peace and plants.