The Rich Roll Podcast - The Best of 2017- Part I

Episode Date: December 25, 2017

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 fifth 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 2017, 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 two-part episode is intended to inform and inspire your new year's trajectory. If you're new to the show, my hope is that this anthology will stir you to peruse the back catalog and/or check out episodes you may have missed. Links to the full episodes excerpted in this anthology are enumerated below. RRP #266: Navy SEAL David Goggins RRP #267: Kundalini Yogi Master Guru Singh RRP #268: Superfood Hunter Darin Olien RRP #269 Rock Icon Travis Barker RRP #272: Integrative Medicine Doctor Rachel Abrams, M.D. RRP #275: Marathon Swimmer Kimberly Chambers RRP #276: Cultivating Your Inner Jedi With Julie Piatt RRP #278: ‘What The Health' With Kip Andersen & Keegan Kuhn Thank you. I appreciate you. I love you. Here's to an extraordinary 2018. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich

I have a whole bunch of calluses on my hands from doing pull-ups. I also callused my brain through my life, through suffering, through not saying no, for not listening to the negative energy, to negative people. And when you continue to move forward through hell and move forward past your fears and insecurities and continue to push through this wall, your brain becomes really callous and you're able to see things that most people can't even comprehend because you've always, you never ran from the fight. You ran to the fight. And that built a different kind of mindset that allowed me to deal with very, very tough things. That my friends is the great David Goggins. And this is part one of the best of 2017 edition

of the Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? Happy holidays to all the good people out there. Welcome or welcome back to my podcast, the podcast where I do my best, my very best to have probing, meaningful conversations with the world's best and brightest across all categories of positive paradigm-breaking culture change. My name is Rich Roll.

I am your host. Thank you for listening. Thank you for subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Thank you for spreading the word on social media and at the dinner table with your nutty relatives. And welcome to my annual Best of Anthology series, where I feature excerpts from some of my favorite conversations of 2017. And as a broad lifestyle wellness podcast, I pride myself on trying to embrace and contemplate a wide range of important subject matters, varying perspectives, opinions, and attitudes. And I feel like we accomplished that in 2017. 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 the amazing lessons and tools that have been conveyed. It's really extraordinary. And these next two episodes are really just about excerpting some of those insights, basically a snapshot of the year, a refresher course, if you will, a little inspiration capsule to catapult you into January informed and motivated and inspired to hopefully take your health and your well-being and your life to the next level. So if you've been with me all along, then this will hopefully help bring some of these insights back into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams heading into the forefront of your consciousness as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes,

your dreams heading into the new year. And if you're brand new to the show, then this should provide a really excellent window into the world of my show, of my guests, and should give you a sense of what this program is all about and hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to the episodes in full or visit some of the shows you might have skipped over or missed over the course of the year. And I've provided links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes on the episode page for this episode, which you can find at richroll.com. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

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

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I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life in recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. Recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, I got to tell you guys, it's really hard to choose amongst my babies.

Not every guest could get featured in this anthology. And I love all my guests. Every single one of them has been an extraordinary gift. So this is an impossible task. It's a thankless task. Who do I include? Who gets left out? So suffice it to say that we just, we did the best that we could.

And know that if I left out one of your favorite guests i get it it breaks my heart more than it breaks yours to leave anybody out these are all my favorites so with that being said these next two shows should be considered should be digested should be approached as simply my love letter to all of you it's my way of saying thank you it's my way of saying i recognize you i appreciate you it's my way of saying thank you. It's my way of saying I recognize you. I appreciate you. It's my way of saying I believe in positive change. I believe in you, and I believe in the power that we all have to do better, to be better, to be better servants to ourselves, to our families, to our loved ones, and to humanity to quite literally step into our best, most authentic selves.

So happy holidays, and let's just dive in. Our first excerpt, our first guest, is one of the most remarkable people I have ever met, David Goggins. This conversation with David is the most downloaded, most listened to podcast I have ever created. And so it makes sense that it would go first in this pecking order. For those of you who are new, David is often referred to as the toughest athlete on the planet. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram at David Goggins. And he is the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces to complete SEAL training, including two hell weeks, plus the U.S. Army Ranger School, where he

graduated as enlisted honor man, and Air Force tactical air controller training. Again, one of the most extraordinary people on planet Earth. His message is very powerful, very palpable. So, with that being said, I give you my conversation with David Goggins. If you tell me what David's morning routine is, or if you tell me exactly what his training program is, or if you tell me exactly how he eats, then I can be David Goggins. Or I can approximate some aspect of, I can bring a little bit of David Goggins into my life. Right. And for me, it's missing the most important thing.

It's the mindset. Which is going back to mindset. It's like connecting with yourself. That's all it is. What is it that gets you out of bed? Like, how can you find that person? It's not about what David does in his morning routine or what his workout workout is it's about you and your relationship to yourself you said it right period dot it's not about what david's eating it's not about what anybody's eating once you figure out

who you are hopefully you get one thing from me today change the way you are thinking don't put but if you're but if you listen I'm just trying to get into the head of the guy who's sitting at his cubicle at work who's hating his life and David's telling me I gotta change the way I think what the fuck do I do with that

I don't understand what I'm supposed to actually do well what you do what you're supposed to do is everybody has issues you're a human being you're fucked up somewhere and that somewhere or several somewheres is keeping you in that same spot like the spot is this how do you lose 100 pounds how do you run 100 miles how do you how do you how do you how do you let tell you how. Stop asking these fucking questions is how. Stop.

You're delaying the fucking process by wasting my fucking time. How I did it, I wanted it. So my process was as I'm asking questions, I'm running to lose weight. I'm figuring out how to do it. Most of us sit back and say, God, I wish I could do that. And we wait and we wait and we ask more questions and ask more questions and prolong. David, what kind of watch are you wearing? What kind of running shoes? It's like, they're not going to go out and run until they got all the answers. I need to know

all this stuff or who's, you know, what is your approach to this thing and i look at you and i'm like this guy wanted to do bad water you know a week later he's running 100 miles on a track exactly nothing about nothing that's exactly you that you had you you had drive and you had a vision and you had passion and you went after it and you had not only did you not have the answers you weren't even asking the questions yet i don't care because and that's the thing about it like and that's what's so funny you and that's why i get so turned off by people like that i get it you have to have knowledge to be great at something and to lose weight to be a smart as you gotta have knowledge knowledge is power but i'm gonna tell you right now man how much damn knowledge do you need you can go on the internet right now and figure out how to drop five pounds tomorrow.

Everything is right there at your service. If you want it, you will achieve it. But if you want to waste time and figure out, ask all these fucking questions, I'm going to give you the same answer. Stop asking the question and achieve what you want. If I asked a bunch of questions, I would still be trying to figure out how to run 100 miles. So many people tell me,

I would love to run Badwater one day. Why the fuck haven't you done it? You told me that five years ago. I had an idea to run Badwater. I did it in four months. I qualified in four days and ran the damn race. I wanted to be a Navy SEAL, had to lose 105 pounds in 60 days to get in and do it. I lost the weight and became a damn SEAL.

I wanted to be a Ranger at 41 years old. People go, what do you want to do next? I don't know. I've already done it. Because the second I thought about it, I researched it. I didn't ask questions. I achieved it. I thought about it.

I researched it. I didn't ask questions. I achieved it. We waste tons of time not starting our journey for asking so many fucking questions on how to start the journey. Get an idea. Start walking and figure this shit out as you go. Vision quest. But David, you don't understand my life.

Exactly. I got, you know, I have to get up at five and I work till and I got three kids, and I'm barely making ends meet. It's cool that you can do that, but it's just not possible. What I love about that is people can come at me with all that crap all day long. When I say that right there to you, I was a full-time Navy SEAL. There's 24 hours in the day. I was doing ultra races, and how I did it was I had to be at work at 7 o'clock in the morning. I woke up at 3 o'clock

in the morning. I ran, and then I rode my bike to work, and I did the same thing, and I came home. If you want it, you will find time in your life to do it.

If you don't want it, you will continue to do exactly what you're doing now is give me excuses. You're going to make up every excuse on why you can't do it, and that's why I can't connect with you. That's why you hear the passion come out of me,

and you want to say it's anger? No, because I know it can be done. And you're telling me all this shit on why it can't be done. And then what you do is, he's crazy, he's a mechanic. No, you don't want it bad enough. If you want it bad enough, you want it bad enough you will figure out how to make this shit happen are you willing to like entertain the possibility that you do have like some talent doing this or is it all like you're chalking it all up to preparation of

mindset well like i said if anybody's familiar with sickle cell um it's a blood disease that pretty much um it's called sudden death syndrome a lot of african americans who have it they just pass out and die so you know my vo2 max is horrible my hermeticrit and all this stuff is horrible and also having the hole in your heart that the size i had it took away a lot of my the other. You're operating with only 25% of your capability. And that's what I'm trying to tell people. Right. I was trying to tell people.

Everybody thinks that they want to believe, and I wish I was. After every race, I was either in a wheelchair or whatever, because running with sickle cell is just not the smartest thing to do. Those distances. At mile 50 of every 100-mile race, man, I was destroyed. And I just had to find, but the feeling of the next 50 miles I had to go, I learned a lot about David Goggins in the wheel. It was always me against me.

So, no, I don't have any ability. See, this is the heart of the whole thing, though, because I think it's really important. Because if you are a genetic freak of nature, then it's very easy for somebody to shrug you off. Like, oh, yeah, well, he does it, but he's Dave Goggins. You know what I mean? Normal people can't do that. And for you to always anchor it and bring it back to, look, man, these are the challenges that I'm facing. I'm facing, I have to overcome more of these challenges than the average guy.

Like, I'm actually starting at a deficit with this. And I'm not going to ever let anybody make themselves feel better by telling me that I was some genetic freak. I'm not going to make yourself feel better about that. You, I suffered. And I always say suffered because that's what I did. It was miserable. The races, every single race in Hell Week, in Bud's, in Ranger School, I suffered tremendously.

I was not, I should never have been able to do it, which is why I'm so proud of myself. I don't care what place I came in. I don't care I walked 105 miles of bad water I did it that was the journey that was the mission it's not about oh well this guy is just a freak

if that makes you feel bad it's fine no you can do it off just a breath of air in the right mindset that's the message so you water down my message by putting me in a category of air in the right mindset. That's the message. So you watered down my message by putting me in a category of I'm crazy, I'm a freak, whatever.

Well, all of those arguments are comfortable arguments to allow people to stay stuck in whatever situation they're in. You know what I mean? Right. So it's more uncomfortable if they have to actually reckon

and wrestle with the fact that you are like them. Just like them. And people don't want to do that. so it's more uncomfortable if they have to actually reckon and wrestle with the fact that you are like them just like them and and no one people don't want to do that just like look in the mirror right and right so tell me about the the mirror thing is a big thing with you right it's a huge thing for me it's called the accountability mirror so i talked about my childhood and if anybody thinks i'm some great person listen to my childhood again i had to change my thinking process. And basically the accountability mirror is what did it.

I started shaving my head and my face when I was 16 years old. And I realized when I started shaving my face and my head, you have a lot of time to look at your reflection. And for some, it sparked in me. I'm like, man, I'm a piece of crap. Like I ducked school. I ducked school. I barely am graduating. I'm this, I'm this, I'm this. I'm all these things, man. And I had to really tell myself the truth.

And so many people, when you say you're dumb, the first thing people say, oh, no, you're not. If you're dumb, you're dumb. If you're fat, you're fat. But if you're not willing to tell yourself that, and everybody around you in your circle continues to give you this positive feedback, if you suck, you suck. If you tell yourself you suck, that is when you become great. Well, then you're getting into the solution. That is what I'm talking about.

So that accountability, Mary,, I got to become, I got to get to the surface of who I'm not. And I held myself accountable. I lied to this person today. I'm a liar. I'm a cheater. I'm this. I'm that. And I tell myself, and I fixed these issues and fixed these issues.

And that part was hard. It was hard to not be jealous of this person who had this and this and this had nothing nothing it was hard to tell this person yeah i'm jealous of you and i'm insecure i'm a very insecure guy and i have nothing it was hard to look at all that i'm not real smart and i had but i had to fix these issues and the accountability mirror was now looking myself in the mirror and say wow you fixed these issues right so that's a thing that you like consciously practice every day every day my life mirror every day my life even now so if I were to say some little white lie and

I go to the mirror in the morning time I shame hands like man why the hell did you say that to that guy? And he would get a call from me and say, look, dude, I lied. That's like 12-step, man. It's like doing your daily inventory and making amends for your bullshit. That's it. You know what I mean? Because you're only lying to yourself. So when you see this, we're in this cultural malaise right now where every kid gets a participation and like we have to tell everyone that they're great right you know what i mean it's all about like

feelings and everybody's a special snowflake and all of that like you know that must make you insane it makes me more than insane it really um it's the destruction of this of this country and i love this country i've i've fought hard for it I will continue to fight for it and hopefully through mental toughness it takes mental toughness to change how you look at things and giving a person a trophy saying you're great when you're really not if I had that growing up there would be no David Goggins. Zero. There'd be no tough people. None, which is why the world is where it is today.

A bunch of weak, some weak people. Right. There's a lot of weak people now. Right. So let's wrap it up with this. I mean, if there's one, if you can distill everything that you're about into like kind of one core message that you want people to take away? Like, what is it beyond what we've already talked about? Like, what is it that's holding people back, that's limiting them, that is, you know, that's keeping them stuck and in

their blind spot? And how can you kind of speak to that to perhaps, you know, shake it loose a little bit and get people to think a little bit differently about how to proactively approach their lives? The truth. Their truth. The real truth about who they are as a person. And I think it all really starts there, the truth. And knowing that you may not be a courageous person, you may not have this and that, but are you willing to or you may not have this and that, but are you willing to find it within yourself to go through the very hard journey? A lot of people in this world have died 80, 90, 100 years old, and they lived a great life. They had a lot of things.

But a lot of people who have died never really started the true journey that whatever you believe in, God, or whatever you believe in, if you believe in nothing, I believe we're all here to start a journey. And that journey is fucking hard. If you choose your real journey, most of us, we decide to take a different journey in life. It's a journey of least resistance. And so what I challenge people to do is to realize that in themselves that yeah I have taken a lot of left turns and I should have stayed straight because why I wasn't good at something and it embarrassed me to not be good at something or I wasn't the smartest person or this or that whatever all these excuses are that we built up find the truth of who you are go back to the start of your journey and go down that path. I guarantee you, if you

finish that journey and you don't fear and waver and go places that are very easy, the other end of that journey, let me tell you, is a peaceful end. Next up is master spiritual teacher and celebrated kundalini yoga wizard Guru Singh. This is a man who has an incredible capacity, aptitude for fusing eastern mysticism with western pragmatism. It's very wise. It's a beautiful consciousness. One of the coolest people I've ever met.

So without further ado, please enjoy Guru Singh. Ego is the glue that holds soul to body. So ego is an innocent mechanism through which you express life. through which you express life. The reason that ego has gotten such a bad rap is that ego has often, when life is very expressive, been also very exclusive or very greedy. But people like Jesus had a huge ego. People like the Buddha had a huge ego people like the Buddha had a huge ego people like the Dalai Lama Mother Teresa had a huge ego ego is what ego does so anything that has created an impact on the

planet is a massive ego but it's a massive ego used for benevolent purposes as opposed to a massive ego used for personal reasons trying to wrap my head around that because my understanding is like ego and i know i think you have to define ego like right talking about no no redefine ego okay because ego as i said has gotten a bad reputation because it's been defined by people that were using their power their human power their personal power for personal reasons but ego is not positive or negative ego Ego is not good or bad. Ego is an innocent participant, a tool that can either be used as a tool of benevolence or a weapon of destruction or a weapon of absorption,

of limited and only personalized and exclusive absorption but isn't it true that's that just by virtue of like an over an over an enhanced ego is going to lead towards that inflated sense of self that that will almost make um you know those those negative uh actions that come with an overinflated ego automatic right so not automatic but semi-automatic to use a weapons mechanism right the only thing that going in your extreme events is ego. Now, if you were only doing it to get known, there would be a problem in there. And it may even sap some of your energy so that you weren't able to perform as well. But ego is a performance mechanism that enables you, because what if you were not known by anybody? What if you didn't do extreme things publicly, but just did them very privately, and nobody knew that you did them? You wouldn't be able to have a podcast that had,

what, hundreds of thousands of people listening or millions of people that are listening. Whatever the number is, it doesn't really matter, but it's a big number, which means that you wouldn't be able to get these messages out, which means that you wouldn't be able to do the work that you do. That's an ego that allows you to do that. But it's a brand of ego, not a force of ego. There's an equal force of ego that could be on another brand. The brand of I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me, I, I, I, me, me, me, me, me. And you would also attract a big audience as many of them do, but it wouldn't get the same effect. And the seeds of destruction are baked into that.

So I declare, not the only one that's ever declared it, but I also declare that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts. But absolute power does not corrupt absolutely. And power does not necessarily have to corrupt. Absolutely. And power does not necessarily have to corrupt. Just like in a wind, the way you set your sail is going to determine how you make your way through the wind. Yes, big gusts of wind will tend to knock you over. But if you set your sail at a certain way, your ego can ride those winds for very beneficial reasons. And the practical real world way to properly set that sail is what? Like what are the practices? The Hippocratic Oath, cause no harm.

And for that, you need to have a higher awareness so as you're as you're learning to do this you're going to cause a lot of harm you're going to bump into a lot of people you're going to mess things up but as your awareness is raising you become more intuitive. You become pre-scripted so that you know the consequence of your action before you take action. Like in the 12-step program, you become more aware by making friends with the people that you've hurt, by asking for forgiveness for the things that you've done. We all intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us. Perfect. Perfect.

Exactly. And in doing so, you can use ego to become well known for the purpose of getting people to know the information of recovery. To get people to know the information of discovery. To get people to know the information of discovery to get people to know the information of extreme discovery right endurance kinds of discovery it's about intention and the motivations that fuel it right yes and and and this journey this practice kind of want to – we got to start to like wind this down a little bit. I know. We can go on and on.

We're good. Will you come back and talk to me more? Yeah, for sure. Because I could like go all night. We'll do another one. I just – I want to leave people with, you know, at least a tool or two that they can take away from this and begin to incorporate into their life. So beyond find a Kundalini, uh, you know, yoga practice in your vicinity, or, you know, go to your website and watch your videos and read your writings. And I'm going to talk about that in

a second. Um, and of course what you referenced earlier, which is developing a habit of waking up very early in the morning and the precious kind of beautiful like flowers that can bloom from commitment to that practice. It's something that I feel strongly about and it's difficult. Yes. But once you get used to it, I mean, I know that like my most creative time, my writing, everything comes in those precious hours before everyone else is awake. So maybe speak about that a little bit. Well, you asked for, in your lead up to this, you asked for some practicals. One thing that I want listeners to remember is Newton's third law of motion. For every action, there is a reaction that is equal and opposite.

And so if you live your life in that premise, that for everything that is happening to you, there's a way out, there's a way through, there's a solution. Because if it's a problem, there's an alternative. No matter what's happening, there's an alternative. And within, even if you go down into the quantum of physics, there's a way of reconstructing the moment. Deconstructing and reconstructing the moment. Which simply means, always have hope.

Always have hope. Always have hope. Then, go on from there. What are the ways in which I can help to instill hope? Every single day, go out onto the ground and get in your bare feet on unpainted pavement or on the grass or dirt and just stand there for at least three minutes and get in touch with your earth magnetic field, gravitational field, etc. Just get really grounded. Very practical. Three minutes and then do some stretching. So three practical things, one mental, one very physical, and one very exertive. The mental is know that there's an equal and opposite in every situation, a way out of every challenge, a way through every block.

a way through every block. Physical, get grounded every morning. And in exertion, stretch. Stretch into your body glove. There's not just kundalini classes, there's exercise classes, there's your trainings, there's so many different trainings. Learn to do stretching for another 10 minutes of your morning. Because the way in which your nerves and muscles and tendons and bones and fascia interface inside of your physical body, I'm not going to try to go into the technical details, but just trust me. I'm not saying to you because you know, but I'm saying to the listeners, just get into your body, get fully inside your body. And if you can handle it, take a cold water shower after your warm water shower to really

force the blood down into the deep glands and organs to flush them out because you used warm water to wash the skin. Now use cold water to force, it constricts the skin forces the blood down inside the body to flush out the inner part of your body and just end your five minute hot water shower with a three to five minute cold water shower it'll be cold only for the first few seconds and then your body will get used to it so cold water therapy as well so these are some practicals that very practical and very doable very doable very simple very doable very doable one of my most popular conversations of 2017 was with my friend darren o'leen who you can find on twitter at super life living darren returned to the podcast for a second conversation so that we could delve deep into next level nutrition insights that he's gleaned from his many unbelievably extraordinary adventures as an exotic superfoods hunter and environmental activist.

Darren is a friend. He's an inspiration to me personally. This is a guy who really walks his talk. He's a thriving embodiment of what it means to truly own and take responsibility for your health and for your life and for the planet that we collectively enjoy. So that being said, here's Darren. What's the number one thing people, you have to take responsibility for yourself and your life and your health period, You have to take responsibility for yourself and your life and your health, period. Regardless of what we're even talking about. You can't just throw it to some doctor.

And you can't just kind of divorce yourself in listening to advice. You have to be educated. This is your body. This is it. This is your vehicle. This is your deal if you don't think that that's an important thing to to have something that's out here and open your mouth and let it inside your body and if you're not looking at that as something really important then i don't know but that that's a that's a

big freaking deal and that's a big disconnect because that's what it's all about man it's out here in space and we need to bring it inside so we open our mouth and the fact that we're just thinking these Twinkies and this fast food and, and all this stuff is, is, oh, we're fine. No, I mean, come on. It's yeah. Every action has a, has a reaction. And in the same way that every decision that you make and behavior that you engage in either moves you in a positive direction or a negative direction. It is the same with every food that you put in your mouth. It's either making you healthier or sicker. And the idea that it's static or that it doesn't matter, or, you know, whatever you put in, it's all the same

because your body breaks it down in calories or calories is nonsense. It's nonsense. And that's where I'm like, you know, even before I was full on into this stuff and I never made sense to me to skimp on food. Right. Pay the money. Pay it. Because here's the thing. You're going to pay for it. You're paying for it eventually.

No matter what. The debt collector's coming. And, you know, luckily I got into this early because of challenges in my own life. And I'm formed that have. I have a great, I've got a fantastic addictive personality that luckily I turned and went this direction. And now I'm obsessed, but not obsessed in the sense that's all I think about. I'm obsessed to the point where I want my body to function so that I can live so that if you and I want to go to the beach and pull a log or jump in the

ocean or run up a mountain, I can do it without kind of dreading the last half of my life and, and, uh, barely kind of doing the things and barely playing with my kids and like that's no i'm not interested in that and i i'm not interested in fads i i just i just don't like i'm actually anti-fad because the reality is that um in order to make any lasting change and just for me being here and you being where you're at we didn't just turn on a light

switch and we were eating this way it was a slow burn it was a slow education and it's not sexy to market it because everyone wants the quick fix and i get it i can put a concoction together that will light your ass up and make you freaking climb a mountain. But what I'm really interested in is inspiring people to go listen. What you're doing, the choice you're making today for your breakfast or your meal or your every little choice. I want to inspire millions of people to be excited that today I'm sitting in my chair of my past choices and I'm proud of it and I want to to I want people to be stoked that hey you know what you're choosing today and maybe tomorrow you don't have everything you want and maybe you still have aches and pains and everything but i promise you if you decide to do this every day that a year is gonna blink by and your life is gonna be sustainably different and you're not gonna be yanked around by weird marketing and weird fads and yo-yoed around and be more shamed than you possibly can imagine. I hate that

shit. I just, I, I, I just, I don't like it. It's not real. It never works. So I know it's not sexy. I know it's hard to market because people want, but yes, of course you have wins along the way and you feel better and all that stuff. But I think the core of what you're saying really is that when you do, you know, decide to bear that mantle and take responsibility for your own health, that puts you in a position to no longer be necessarily reactive to these fads as they arise and just latch on to whatever the latest thing is and ping pong around, right? Because then you become your own sort of, you know, regulation device to make a conscious non-reactive decision as to what serves you and what doesn't.

And the only way that you can really make those decisions you know in your best interest and as consciously as possible is to do your own research and to use yourself as your own personal lap right well it reminds me of what you're saying too is if i'm someone that's honoring myself and following a day-to-day plan of how to what do i really know how to take care of myself i'm not really worried about that person when a fad comes down the road because they're kind of solid and they're gaining strength inside themselves and physically and stuff what i'm concerned about is when people are not taking care of themselves well and they have suffered and they've put on the weight and they have chronic disease and they're they're in pain and all that stuff and then this information

comes out they're desperate so then they grab on to it and then they're yanked around and then there's a bunch of other consequences to it dubbed one of the 100 greatest drummers of all time by Rolling Stone, Travis Barker, who you can find on Twitter, at Travis Barker, is a guy who rose from blue-collar roots to become one of the world's most talented, most prolific, and hard-working rock stars, a multi-hyphenate, most well-known as a member of the multi-platinum, Grammy-nominated punk rock band Blank 182.

This was an absolutely riveting incredible conversation with a remarkable human being and you're going to want to hear it in full if you missed it the first time around but here's a slice well can we talk about the the plane crash yeah of course you're okay with that i I mean, you know, it's well documented and everything like that, but, you know, it's quite, you know, it was quite the tragic encounter. I just, I can't imagine, you know, what that must have been like trying to, you know, overcome that, but maybe, you know, walk us through exactly what happened. So, it was one of those days where we had a a show it was for like T-Mobile and they

would pay us big money to go and play these shows and it was in South Carolina and remember before we left I was like I don't really need to go it's summer and and my my my baby's mama uh Shana at the time we weren't together together, but she was like, don't go then. Like, if you don't have to go, you don't need the money. It's like, why are you doing it? And I was like, I'm doing it because I love playing with Adam. And I think Adam was going through the same thing. Like, we don't have to go.

But it was just one of those things. It's booked. Let's honor what we committed to. So we flew out to South Carolina. Wasn't Shana going to come with you? Yeah. Shana was going to come. My kids were bawling, man. It was like, it was the weirdest thing. My kids were bawling. My little girl, Alabama was saying, she's freaking the whole time. She's never done this. She's crying saying the roof's going to come off. And I'm like, what

are you talking about, Bama? And she's a baby at the time. And she's just, the kids are crying, not normal, like like weird you know that is so trippy and yeah like like i said my gut this is one of the big examples of where i was like my gut told me not to go so i ended up going and she was going to go with us but she's like nah i shouldn't go just in case god forbid something was to happen we'd both be in that plane so we go and uh the flight out there is cool. I take my assistant, little Chris and, uh, and our, uh, we just had a big homie named Che who was like our good friend. And he was like, he was playing college football. Basically Chris and I were like, dude, instead of hiring security

for now, and we should just take Che with us. Che's going to be a security for now on. Cause it's, it's good having friends on tour with you too. And Che's big and, you know, intimidating. Che's never been on a private plane. Uh, you know, we go out there on a G4, everything's cool. We play our show. And then after the show, um, we had a flight booked for tomorrow. Everything was, everything was set up, but, uh, AM's like, like yo i want to get back tonight like you know what are we going to do in south carolina you know and then chris had just had his son sebastian who's my godson he's like yeah man we should just go home trav um and i was like well we have a flight book tomorrow don't trip let's just chill here you guys but it's like

majority rules anywhere we go if i get outvoted i'm rolling with the punches you know and everyone was like people skills yeah so i took one for the team i said okay whatever man let's book the flight whatever so booking flights like this usually like the the flight out there it's like i speak to a manager and i say who's the pilot what's the plane? What's the history? Is everything cool? Oh, wow.

So you're getting into it. Oh, I'm really, I'm terrified of flying. So, and ironically enough, the flight out there was cake, a piece of cake, man. We knew who the pilot was. He was super cool. He knew I was a little bit weird about flying, you know. Great flight, though. On the way back, you got to think, man, we just got off stage. It's 9.30, 10 o'clock.

And we make the phone call, get us a plane. So the plane is booked in an hour's time. There's no one dotting the I's or crossing the T's. It's like, yo, you guys want a plane? I'm going to do everything I can do to get this plane there so the plane gets there and so implying that like shortcuts were made on the checklist or i know my checklist wasn't done you know because gus who was our tour manager for blink you know usually there was like a you know there's a little checklist that goes and i know that checklist wasn't going to happen. It was an hour's time. And LV's like, dude, it's not going to be the greatest plane, but I'll get

it. Once again, rolling with the punches, you know, whatever for the team. So we get there, we pull up to the airport and it's like private airport and there's all these jets. And then there's this fucking leer over all by itself. And I was oh cold as ice tell me that is not our plane and sure enough the driver drives up to that plane and i'm just looking at it no you know bad bad feeling man bad feeling my gut's saying no it to the point where i actually call my dad who at the time now i say i love you every time i speak to him he's like 75 but growing up he's a vietnam vet he's tough man tough tough dad you know and uh i know he loved me but we wouldn't say i love you or be gushy you know it was like more tough love not a hugger yeah for

him and i so i call him and i'm like i'm bawling at this point i say dad like i have a really bad feeling but you were crying before you even got on the plane. I'm crying. My dad's like, what the fuck is wrong with you, Trav? Why are you crying? And I said, dad, I don't know. I have a horrible feeling. If something happens, pal, just do whatever you can to make sure the kids are cool.

Because I have a horrible feeling. And he's like, well, you're going to be fine. You know? And I take a picture of the plane. I send it to like, I think I sent it to my pops. I sent it to my boy, Rob. That's in the transplants with me. Weird enough, Chris does the same thing. I don't know that he does this, but he sends a picture of him in front of the plane to his wife. sends a picture of him in front of the plane to his wife um we get in the flight there's like a really young pilot and it kind of like eased off some of the pressure because she was really young and i was like wow you look really young i was like you fly the plane she's like yeah i'm i'm like getting my hours up or whatever you know she's basically you know she's with like an og captain that's you know flying with her you know teaching her so we get in there and she's basically you know she's with like an og captain that's you know flying with her you

know teaching her so we get in there and she's basically like okay well there's no room for a stewardess in this plane so i'll be up in the cockpit if you guys need anything you know just come knock on the door whatever so we get in the flight and i'm fucking baked man i've smoked so much weed and i've taken so many pills it's my normal concoction to get on the flight you know especially this one i'm going heavy you know um we get on everyone's like there's actually a video man i have the video of it am back in the day there was these flip cams i don't know if you remember they were like the coolest thing before every phone had one and he's on the flight and he's like what do you know about a drummer, a DJ, and a PJ?

Like, you know, kind of flexing a little bit. We're on a private jet, whatever, trying to have fun. And Chris is like, you know, what's up, Chris? Whatever. We're just goofing off. Like, you know, thinking we're just living in the lap of luxury on a private flight home. Everyone else is. I'm scared to death already.

So Chris falls asleep. Che falls asleep. We're still on the runway. And I'm like wide awake, man. I'm just sitting there. Adam's sleeping. We go up and down the runway. We're going the wrong way.

And they turn around. We're going the wrong way on the runway. Yeah. So right out of the gate. They're like, sorry, we went down the wrong way and they turn around on the runway yeah like so right out they're like sorry yeah we're uh sorry we went down the wrong runway and then i was like oh my gosh man what the hell you know and then uh and then i i'm kind of like dozing off and then finally you know you feel like the engines start up again and we go to take off and our landing gear, like the tire, basically, our tires explode. Sounds like gunshots, you know. Not very many people will know what it sounds like when your tires explode on your plane. So it sounded like someone's shooting at the plane.

Multiple tires. Yeah. Like if one went out. Yeah. It sounded like someone was, you know throwing rounds you know so i hear like these these loud bangs and then the plane is like skidding on the runway so we have no tires so now it's landing gear against the runway and then smoke just starts filling the cabin and fire immediately because the friction from the landing gear on the runway.

And then we go up in the air. Ah, you have liftoff. Yeah, and then we have liftoff. Are you hearing from the captain from the cockpit at all? No, I'm just screaming because I feel like I know something's wrong. Once the bang-bang happened, the plane kind of got out of control, and then we were up in the air. So I'm screaming, man, and it's just black in the plane bang happened, the plane kind of got out of control. Then we were up in the air. So I'm screaming, man.

And it's just black in the plane and smoke everywhere. And then the plane is basically going up high. And then it's dipping down and then going up and then dipping down. And then it started getting lower and hitting the cement, going up and down. Bouncing. Yeah, bouncing off the cement. And I'm screaming, man. I'm screaming.

But obviously, they have their hands full in the cockpit. Who knows what's going on? And then we go, and by this time, there's fire everywhere. And I'm looking at fire. No longer smoke. It's fire. And we swoop up. I think we swoop up and down like five or six times.

And then the last time we go really high in the air, it almost felt like we were almost like going vertical. And then all of a sudden the plane swoops down and we hit an embankment. And we stop and I'm somehow alive. You know, every time I'm just bracing myself because I'm looking out the window. I'm wide awake.

I'm numb. I'm on so many painkillers and whatever else. So I'm seeing a swoop down so I can kind of like brace myself every time we hit. Finally, we hit and I'm on fire. You know, there's literally I'm on fire. Yeah. Like my hands are on fire. I'm trying to move forward to see if I can get to Chris or Che.

There's four of you in the cabin? Yeah. And then my whole everything catches fire. My shirt catches fire. And then I turn to my left, and A.M.'s knocked out, and I grab him and I shake him. He wakes up. I can't get to Chris or Che.

It's just a wall of fire. I can't see anything. So I open the emergency exit, which I always, I forgot to say, but I always sit next to an emergency exit in any plane. I sit, I kick open the emergency exit. I jump out, and I land in the jet. So I land in the jet, which if anyone knows about like planes, like behind the, like in the jet stream behind the engine. Yeah. Which is filled with fuel. Right. So my whole body catches fire. I jump into a, basically a pool of jet fuel. Um,

my whole body catches fire. AM jumps out over the jet. He's not on fire and he's basically on the phone i'm running and he's screaming he's on the phone with our manager going our plane crashed he's like crying screaming he's like travis on fire so i'm just running and at this time the embankment was right next to a freeway so i have cars that are watching me run on fire and i'm just stripping off my clothes my gut tells me to strip off my clothes i don't know what else to do i don't you're in the middle of the road this at this point cars are coming in both directions yeah the cars are like facing us and there's no one on our side because everyone sees the plane there and um and i don't realize my my skin is soaked in fuel, so it doesn't matter what I take off. So I get to the point where I'm butt naked, and I'm just running, but my whole body's on fire.

And then I just hear one guy, man, like, I don't even know where he was. I know he's off to the left of me that just says, like, what you learn in elementary school, like, stop, drop, and roll. Drop and roll, yeah. And sure enough, man. Like yelling from a car? Yeah, yelling from a car yeah yelling from a car and i i just lay down and i start rolling and then adam comes out djam and he he gets his shirt and he starts patting me out and that's how he um got burnt a little bit got a little burn on his arm and on his neck but basically after a couple, he pats me out.

And then as he pats me out, the plane explodes. And you're the only two guys who made it out. Yeah. Yeah, we're the only two guys. I mean, later we found out Chris and Che, my assistant and my security, they weren't wearing their seatbelts. So they died immediately of head trauma. Probably the first couple of times the plane did the crazy, you know, up and down. I found out, unfortunately, the pilots were burnt. And we were the only two survivors. Okay, next up is with Dr. Rachel Carlton Abrams at Dr. Rachel Abrams on Instagram.

She's amazing. Rachel is a board-certified primary care family practice physician. She's an integrative health expert and an author with over two decades of experience in preventive and comprehensive care medicine. She's a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford. She received her medical degree from UC San Francisco and her master's degree in holistic health and medical sciences from Berkeley. She's been voted the best doctor in Santa Cruz County every year from 2010 to 2016. And she's authored a whole slew of books. But the focus of this conversation was on her latest offering, BodyWise, discovering your body's intelligence for lifelong health and healing. I love this conversation.

She's amazing. So please enjoy this little snippet with Dr. Abrams. You know, I would say that for me personally, in making decisions in my life, and this is what I try to teach in Body Wise, how to use what your body is speaking to you. And that could be a sensation or that could be a physical experience. It could be painful or it could be pleasurable. But the way that that is actually trying to guide your decision makingmaking because in a way it's the expression of your unconscious. It's, it's your, uh, inner wisdom speaking to you. And if you learn to interpret that language, you know, I said before that, I think that if you really want to be successful in your, you could be successful in your field,

ignoring your body. But if you want to be a leader, if you want to be a groundbreaker, if you want to be truly inspirational, you need to be connected to your body. Because from there, you get leadership qualities, you get insights, you get, you know, inspiration for the people around you as a manager, as a leader, as you know, as a business person, whatever you do in your life. And I think that the body intelligence is like the secret weapon. I really do in the best way, right. That allows you to both live a life that gives you joy and vitality, but also allows you to do work in the world in a much bigger way. And when you meet those people who are doing that work, you know, not the people with huge egos who are maybe successful, but you meet them and go, Lord have mercy, you know, great work. maybe successful, but you meet them and go, Lord, have mercy. You know it when you walk into a room.

You can tell when somebody's got it dialed in. They have that self-awareness to understand who they are. And there's a grounded power in that that defies language. You can sense it, right? Right. And one of the things you talk about in the book is, is kind of starting learning how to read these signals, like understanding that words like gut instinct and what my heart is telling me actually have great meaning. It's real. Yeah. These are real things that this isn't just woo woo new age, Santa Cruz speak. Right. And, and I know that you wrote this book predominantly for women, but I feel like women already are halfway there. If not most of the way there in terms of,

of having that language or having that aptitude for listening to their bodies in a way that men really aren't like men are much more shut down. Like I almost feel like this is, this is really as much a book for men, even though it's really voiced to women. Men are the ones who really need to hear this more. I agree. You know, culturally, we're kind of pushed further away from that. And it's less OK or less comfortable for a guy to talk about how he's feeling or what his heart is telling him than it is for a woman. I agree with you. And to be honest, I see men in my practice and boys and I see babies and I see

older people. It's a typical family practice. I see everybody. And I love my male patients. And I regret actually not writing this book for men and women. It was a conscious decision because it gets complex trying to talk about the body and women's physical experience of being embodied in our culture and around trauma and around sexuality. It's a little easier to speak to women directly, but for sure, the concept really important for men, absolutely basic. And I know in the current political climate and in the last year, there's been a lot of talk about, uh, men and women and patriarchal values. And, um, you know, what are we going to do about this? Uh, there's been a bit more of a shakeup. And I think that it's important in my opinion to keep in mind that, yeah, it's true

that being male gets you some privilege, but it also buys you this whole system of oppression of men, a big piece of which is shutting down your body, right? That being a machine for making money, being a machine for making a name for yourself and all these other things that really is about ignoring your body intelligence and not listening to those voices within. And I think that our way out is for all of us to be doing that. And, you know, I talk about this explicitly in the book, but I feel like once you're really actually connected to and listening

to your body and you get a sense of, uh, you know, being in touch with your own nature, that it is a natural extension to realize how connected you are to other people and how connected you are to the earth. Um, because there really is no separation. It's a crazy idea that we're separate from the earth we live on. Right? Everything we are comes from the earth. And everything we're exposed to from a health point of view. All the toxins and the pesticides. The things people clean their houses with.

And the food we eat. All deeply connect to our bodies. Right? The microbiome. The bacterial population of the earth that our food is grown in. bodies, right? The microbiome, the bacterial population of the earth that our food is grown in influences our own microbiome inside of our own guts, which is such a fundamental part of health. I don't know if you've talked about this on podcast before. Yeah, of course. Do you know Robin Shuttkan? Yeah.

Yeah. So I had her on. She's wonderful. I just love her. Yeah. And you can't separate them. We are intimately and everything we do to the earth, whether it's, you know, tearing down trees and, you know, creating a loss of oxygen and global warming, or it's the toxins that we're using. It all impacts us directly, directly. And if you look at the emerging illnesses, allergy, autoimmune, learning disorders, neurologic disease, cancer. It's all related to our environment. It really is. Now you're just crazy talking. Now I'm crazy. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm good crazy. Yeah. Kim Chambers. Can we talk about Kim Chambers? Oh my God. How inspiring. How amazing. At Kimberly Swims on Twitter.

Kim is one of the most accomplished record-setting marathon open water swimmers in the world. Her story is incredibly inspiring, and I love everything about this conversation. So please enjoy this little tiny nugget from my conversation with Kim Chambers. But underneath all of this for you is the current of joy. Like joy is fueling this for you. It's not like you're not coming into this with this hardened, like I'm gonna prove that I can do this coming from some kind of unhealthy place.

Like you just love it, right? Like this is what you're supposed to be doing, right? And when you're doing it, not only do you feel alive, you're completely in your, in your bliss. Yes. And I feel filled with purpose because all of these swims I do for charity. Um, and another great learning that I, I got from Vito and night train swimmers, because we do swims around the world all for charity and and that's what i've incorporated into my solo swims and so it's it's really making these swims bigger than about yourself um sure there you're the one that gets the accolades and um but i'm the first to say that you know i didn't do it alone and i share all of these achievements with my crew. And even the people that, you know, someone at the club or someone here in the city would just say, like,

I read that you're going to go do the swim, like, good luck. Like, just the fact that people are thinking about it. And then, you know, I have a GPS tracker on the boat and people can track me real time on a Google map. And I've had my colleagues at work on their big monitors like track me and and that helps you put them up on strava no i don't like i think you have the kom for the fairlawn we're like yeah nobody's gonna challenge that anytime soon yeah yeah so it's just the fact that people are interested as well in a sport that they might not understand they

they might not connect with like i never used to understand why people climb mountains but now i understand why people climb mountains and um and that's because their journeys they you are pushing the limits of your physical and mental self. And I think also many of us are afraid to do that because a lot of times it's scary and a lot of times it's uncomfortable. It's going to hurt. And human nature is to avoid things that could potentially hurt us, that could make us cold, could make us uncomfortable. But when you – and we all have fears,

but when you really push through those fears, and again, human nature is to retreat from fear. When you push through, there is the sense of self. There is a real, in my case at least, that's where the treasure lies. The treasure in life lies right on the other side of where you're most fearful. Super powerful. Yeah, not only do we sort of recoil from the uncomfortable, we're sort of haplessly chasing these emotions that you're experiencing, joy, gratitude, giving back through the charity, that sense of feeling alive. We're sort of encouraged to seek those out through material possessions or social status. And that's

what is encouraged in our culture and the messages that were sort of, you know, met with on every billboard and every television commercial and every magazine. Right. Right. And the truth lies in shucking that aside. Yes. And doing something that scares you. Yeah. Whatever that is.

And it doesn't have to be, you know, sweeping the English channel. You know, and it didn't start that way for you either. It started with you dipping your toe into Aquatic Park that first time. Yeah, yeah. And getting in that pool, I was most afraid of people looking at my scars. I mean, so silly. But we all have fears, and they're different for all of us. But I can guarantee that when you pick a fear you know we all have many fears pick

a fear and decide to challenge it face on and you get to the other side I I guarantee you will have a transformative experience that will serve you for the rest of your life because again life is not smooth sailing and I feel like through these experiences i've been able to equip myself with um skills and lessons and how to deal with certain things um and then also just dealing with people and and and yeah i mean i i i walk around every day with a heart that's full and I just want to give back. And I want everybody to feel just a little bit of what I get to feel in a day. I mean, I feel spoiled, spoiled rotten because I am in this world that is right where I am supposed to be. And then to be able to share it with people.

And I love talking to little girls. And you just see these sparks of possibility light up in their head. And just knowing that we're capable of doing far more than we think we can. And it's just about deciding that you're going to tackle something that might be uncomfortable, that might be a bit scary. We can't have a best of episode without featuring Julie Wright, aka Srimati, my wife. This is an amazing excerpt from Podcast 276, which was entitled Be Devotional, Not Emotional, an extraordinary conversation all about how to best bridge the emotional landmines of our expanding cultural divide.

It's basically about how to channel your inner Jedi warrior. So please enjoy Julie Pyatt. Yeah, I mean, the greatest human quality is empathy. You know, it's our ability to feel empathy for another. And we all as humans, we all need, desire, want the same things. It's not different because you live in a different country or your skin is a different color or your hair is a different color. I mean, this is so elementary, like that you would think that, you know, someone would be more desirable than another because of the color of their skin, or their sexual preference. So we're really getting

caught up in things that, you know, consciousness is just celebrating everything just because it exists at all. And, you know, I think that, again, like, you know, this moment is required for us to remember our divinity. Because if it wasn't this intense, we would just still be going on doing whatever it is that, you know, we do as a collective. struggling with these ideas or they're finding themselves reactive or, uh, challenged in their ability to, you know, remain composed, um, in light of, you know, the fear mongering and everything that's going on. Like, what is the path to, what is the path to, uh, creating more mastery of self around, uh, you know, these ideas? Well, I did, you know, these ideas. Well, I did, you know, a recent podcast on it. The title was, you know, transforming frustration into knowing, right?

Again, you feel into the energy of frustration. If anybody's been following the political, you know, play, it can just pull you into mass frustration, right? Because you can't understand how these things are actually happening, you know, in our country, around the world. And again, it goes back to spiritual connection. It's all about spiritual connection. Because if you understand that this earth and this life is for our evolution, it's for our unfoldment, it's so we can transform many energies that have been very out of balance. There's many energies that are happening on this planet that are not high vibrating. Violence, murder, slavery, it's been going on all along. And the only difference is it's like someone came in and

turned a huge light on and the cockroaches are scurrying left and right all over the place. This stuff has existed on the planet. I mean, make no mistake, it has been going on for thousands of years. So we kind of had it all sort of in a place where it wasn't really seen or you didn't really look at things that way. And now I think that, you know, we're really understanding that we don't really live in a world that we thought we lived in. So now what, you know, what is our choice? Our choice is to develop that spiritual connection, which gives you the knowing that this consciousness is playing out exactly the way that it is supposed to. If this is a new idea to somebody, though, the idea of cultivating spiritual connection,

how does one begin that? Well, I would say, first of all, it begins with your diet. So I would look at what you're eating, immediately cut out processed foods, consider adopting a plant-based diet, get rich in my cookbook, The Plant Power Way. No, but it's true. I mean, you asked me why and I'm just sharing, you know, I just spent the last two years developing a cheese book. This cheese is nuts all with plant based cheeses. The second thing is, and you know, really super important, get yourself on the mat,

get yourself to a yoga class. And you know, I know movement is really good, but it's not the same. I'm talking about really, really finding a connection to your spiritual nature. And this is, it is beyond religions, has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with the one breath that is breathing all of us. So yoga, just getting into the asana, starting to breathe, starting to practice pranayama, any type of yoga, find it in your local town, wherever you live. Follow Guru Singh on Facebook. He streams live his teachings and classings. They are genius. He's funny. He's uplifting. You will leave with a much more positive framework and some tools to start to loosen the frustration. Feel into your body where there's hardness,

where you're holding, where you're blocking, and consciously find a way to let go of those ideas, thoughts, feelings, traumas. We have to commit to heal ourselves. We have to really look at what's happened in our life and really commit to ourselves to release the trauma. I do healing techniques, you know, on my podcast all the time. You can listen to Divine Throughline. It's all free. And I am sort of going, leading everybody on a process of transformation through what I offer on that show. So this is a spiritual journey, folks. This is earth school. So we are spiritual beings having a human experience and everything that is happening is for us, for our awakening, for our remembrance into that which we are. And I am no more spiritual than any

other being on this planet. And everyone is potentially divine, potentially, because you have to exercise the free will and, and make the move, you know, it's not just going to happen just because you're you exist. So, um, I think that that that's a really important point. We all, we all tend to believe that we're exercising free will every day, all day long in our lives. And I think we're not as conscious as we should be to how our behaviors, our actions, our thoughts, our words are sort of embedded and programmed based on our life history, our buttons that were installed as young people, our past traumas, and all of these things that create cycles and patterns that become deep grooves that can almost be predictors of how we're going to behave or react in a given situation at the cost of free will, Right. So this path towards sort of

mastery and getting on the mat and getting conscious and doing that like deep interior work and the meditation and the mindfulness is a journey towards greater self-will so that you're not reactive, that you can create a new groove and change the narrative, right? Like right now, can create a new groove and change the narrative, right? Like right now there's a narrative going on culturally and there's the narrative of self. There's the narrative of the story that you tell yourself about who you are and chances are that's a false story, right? So, so it's a call to action to pick apart that story, to examine it, to get to a point where you can identify what is true and what is not true about the story of yourself and start to piece together a new story, a story of a story that can that can lead you towards greater agency, towards mastery, and towards that journey of finding a purposeful, meaningful life. Right. I mean, ultimately, you know, those stories, any of those stories that we tell ourselves are all illusion. They're all not really the truth.

The truth is that we are all consciousness, which is pure love. You know, that is, that is the there, and that really isn't a story. It's a state of being, you know, it's a state of awareness. Um, uh, but what I would say is, um, things are even getting weirder. Okay. So it's, it's not even, it's almost like gone to another level now. And the other thing that we have to continually ask ourselves is where are the thoughts we are thinking coming from? Well, that's what I was sort of getting at with free will, right? Like we think we're creating those thoughts, but all right, continue. But I'm not saying they're created from your past trauma that you had this lifetime. created from your past trauma that you had this lifetime. I'm saying that they're being impulsed and they're being pulsed through our human grid, through like an energetic grid around

the planet. So literally all this obsession with the electronics, with the, with the AI, with, uh, you know, uh, programs, TV programs, um, you know, Twitter, like all the social media, everything. I mean, we just experienced, you know, we have this thing flying around this fake news thing flying around. I mean, the whole paradigm is starting to crumble in many different ways. So I want to just propose that just because a thought enters your mind, that thought might not even be coming from you. Okay, it might be coming from some other force, some other vibration that is directing from you. Okay. It might be coming from some, some other force, some other vibration that is directing at you. Um, it could be from somebody you're, you're walking next to, it could be, um, you know, residual from some sort of media that you're addicted to.

So again, all these are impulses. Energy is something and everything that's happening is affecting our experience. So when I say thoughts are things like I'm like, it's, it's up to us to understand that the mind is a great tool that can be used for many things like coming up with programs and structures and getting places on time and, and these type of things. But your real mind is in your heart. Your heart knows and your body knows. And we have to switch the place where we're originating from, okay, out of the mind and place it in the heart. Get grounded in the heart. What the health? What the health? Oh my God, what the health?

What an unbelievable impact that extraordinary documentary had on culture in 2017. Unbelievable. Not a day goes by where I don't encounter somebody, meet somebody who said they were inspired to adopt a vegan plant-based lifestyle as a result of watching that movie. It's just amazing. And I had the good fortune of sitting down with the filmmakers, Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn, the dynamic duo behind not only What the Health, but also Cowspiracy. I think this was our third conversation and we conducted it right on the precipice of this unbelievable movie being released.

So please enjoy this excerpt of my conversation with Kip and Keegan, the documentary filmmakers behind What the Health. Yeah, I mean, the film is based on science, and that's, I think, the foundation, is that you have to look at real scientific information and what is science actually telling us when it comes to nutrition. And then when you look at that science, also have to look at well is it real science and who is it being funded by because you can look at a study and you can say well hey red meat is

directly caused to coronary heart disease like it's 100 everybody knows that but then you can find another study that says complete opposite and so people will say oh well you know that's a mute point then it's like well who funded that original study? And who funded the pro-meat study? And it's like, well, was it a, was it, you know, Cattlemen Association? Was it a meat board? So we looked at that. That was a big, that's the foundation is you have to look at real science and real research.

But you can, I mean, there's, yeah, I think anybody logically can understand that if you put foods that your body wasn't designed for into your body, it's not going to function. It's optimal. And so that's part of the film that we looked at is the anatomy of human body. Are we true omnivores? Are we carnivores? Are we really herbivores?

And that's actually one of the things that was kind of surprising while making the film was that, you know, I'm vegan. And so, like, I want it all to fit into my narrative of like, we're supposed to be 100% plant eaters. But something that we found is that actually, well, human beings, we can get away with eating some animal products without detrimental effects. And it's like, that's not something you want to hear as a hardcore vegan.

But the truth is, is that, yeah, maybe 5% to 10% you can get away with it. But the impacts that that has on the environment, the impacts that it has on people, the impacts that it has clearly on the animals is huge. And is that really worth it? But then, you know, looking again, going to the anatomy and what are we really supposed to eat? Well, we're not really herbivores. We actually had a whole section in the film where we had this whole animation about how we're herbivores and it shows our anatomy. But then we realized that, well, actually we're not herbivores, we we're frugivores we fit every characteristic of a frugivore which

so explain what a frugivore is so frugivore is is an animal that gets 90 or percent or more of its nutrition from plants particularly high carbohydrate plants so is that similar to us what's the difference between that and like a starchivore like a what mcdougall would call like a starchivore it's it's actually really really close so what you look at the the great apes they're all frugivores so you know gorillas uh chimpanzees orangutans they're they're frugivores and human beings being a great ape we've 100 fit into it so it's something we go into the film you know more in depth uh but i think it's really this, that's a great place to start. But I think that we have to, and what we do in the film is we start from the standard American diet and we just start to pick it apart and looking at all the different aspects. A big thing right now that's talked about in health and nutrition is

sugar. Sugar's like the big devil. You know, a few years ago, it was wheat. And I think wheat is still kind of like the bad guy, but sugar is the big thing. And so we look at it and we ask the question, you know, what role does sugar play in things like heart disease and cancer and diabetes? And the responses we got were actually really pretty shocking for both Kip and I. Yeah, it's super interesting.

And sorry, Kip, I want to hear what you have to say on this. But right now, it's all about sugar, sugar you know and which kind of contravenes this is an ancillary topic but it sort of contravenes a more holistic approach like it's it's not any one thing right we have to look at these things in the context of the matrix of everything right uh but right now you know sugar's on everybody's minds and you, sugar is the culprit, sugar is the devil. Certainly processed sugar is not a good thing. And when you see the sort of explosion of processed foods with sugar in them and, you know, high fructose corn syrup, all that kind of stuff, there's no question that these things are making us sick.

So what's interesting is this sort of contrarian perspective that you get from, say, Dr. Neil Bernard that contravenes, you know, what you would hear from Gary Taubes, right? Gary Taubes coming from it's all about sugar to Neil saying, don't worry about sugar. It's the animal products. And as a consumer watching this, it's very easy to get confused. You know, there's doubt, like these people are saying different things. They both seem smart. I don't know what to do. I'll just keep doing the same thing. So, how do you parse fact from fiction? And why do you come down on the side of someone like, you know, Bernard, as opposed to Gary Taubes?

Dr. Davis, Scott Davis, did you have, you had him on? Yeah, yeah. That was really good, actually. He sums it up in this one part right after, Garth Davis, did you have him on? Yeah, yeah. That was really good, actually. He sums it up in this one part right after, in the film, after Neil Barnard talks about how diabetes is actually not caused by sugar. It's caused by saturated fat. And then, Keegan, you might remember the way he says it. He says sugar doesn't cause plaque. Sugar doesn't, you know, it just kind of goes down this list. It doesn't increase inflammation.

It's not good for you. It doesn't increase inflammation. Yeah. It doesn't, like, lock your your, what the way he said it. I can't remember. He did this laundry list of what sugar doesn't do. It's not good. No one said it's good.

But like cowspiracy, we address fracking. We address other things that are happening. And as we address this, we compare it to eating animal, for this film eating animal products what's fracking and cowspiracy um the comparison of fracking to animal agriculture there's no comparison of how much water is consumed or uh taken from it and polluted the same thing happens in this film yes sugar is bad but how bad is it compared to meat and dairy um so so when you have these doctors who say sugar is bad yes but there's again there's just no comparison to to saturated fat especially from animal proteins and animal products yeah and again we just we kept coming back to the science it had to be based on hard

science um and so yeah you look at the studies and it's like well what are the studies actually saying and the research is saying and and you said it's like, well, what are the studies actually saying? And the research is saying, and it's really actually pretty interesting because even groups like the American Diabetes Association will say, if you look at their site and you dig a little bit, they'll say, oh yeah, high carbohydrate diet actually doesn't cause diabetes. They encourage all of their supporters

and anyone with diabetes to be careful of your sugar intake because clearly if you have diabetes, you should be concerned about your sugar intake. But it's not what causes diabetes. diabetes causes diabetes is your insulin system not working because it's clogged up with fat and so what's what's got more fat in it you know the sugar is what's like four calories per gram versus seven calories per gram for for uh fat so it's really it's looking at the impacts of of fat but it goes again, even beyond just that, because it's not just these isolated things, not just saturated fat, it's not just cholesterol,

it's not just, you know, carcinogens, it's all of these things put together. And it's how all those things work in our bodies. That is the real issue. And also too, as you said, where does, how can you tell fact from fiction? A good example is on the cover of Time, I think now it's two years ago it was a stick of butter and i can't remember the title but something butter is back and so that started a huge craze that you know bullet coffee all this and we go we look go back go back go back who funded this who did the studies go back and it was national dairy councilairy Council. National Dairy Council. The whole study, I mean, that's like that whole,

saturated fat isn't bad for you. It's based on basically two studies. Anybody who's listened to the Garth Davis interview will know about this. Well, presume people haven't. Yeah, I mean, it's really, it's based on two studies and they're funded by the National Dairy Council. So it's like they have a vested interest in protecting their industry.

So they're gonna fund studies that are gonna say that, no, no, no, our product isn't bad for you. And the leading source of saturated fat is from dairy products, not from meat. So I think it's a combination of a couple of things. First of all, my recollection is, isn't that those studies said that saturated fat is good for you? They just cast doubt on how bad it might be for you. And then journalists looking for appetizing headlines will take that and translate it into fat is your new best friend. And then there's books being written about it. And the average consumer who doesn't have time to drill down to the truth of all this stuff is just going to see the headline modify their behavior accordingly and this is not helping anybody you know it's a page out of the merchants of doubt it's it's directly out of the playbook

from big tobacco if you can make people uh sort of confused enough then you have them exactly where you want them we have a and that's exactly where the film leads into. Dr. Greger talking about that, about the tobacco industry. Doubt is our product. And that was right in there, right in there. Yeah.

And their mammoths. I mean, they really, it's about, yeah. I had to confuse the public enough where they don't know what to do and they just continue as business as normal. And so what,

what the health, the film does is it, it lays all this information out easily. And it's all, again, you can go back. We're going to have on our site all the original studies so you can source everything. You can see where all this information is because we really just want – this is just a starting point. You learn, you get your appetite for understanding nutrition, and then you can go deeper. and then you can go deeper.

All right, how are you guys doing? Are you hanging in there? Come on, it's so good, right? Well, get excited because next up, I got Leo Babauta, at zen underscore habits on Twitter. I love this guy. Leo is somebody who I had never met in person prior to the podcast,

but somebody who has had never met in person prior to the podcast, but somebody who has informed my path, has positively influenced my personal transformation for many years and continues to do so to this day. He's a beautiful guy, just an authentic example of the powerful ideals that he espouses. And it was personally a thrill to be able to sit down with him and talk about mindfulness and meditation and yoga and minimalism. So without further ado, here is me. I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about how you, how you convey these ideas in your own household. You got six kids. Some of them are grown and out of the house. You've got all ages. You're married. You're very

much living in the world. You're not like a single guy living in, you know, Ted Kaczynski style and woods. Like you're, you know, you got real life obligations and pressures um so how do you instill these notions into your children what is your you know i want to talk about education and parenting and and how you kind of navigate all that because it's super interesting um i i think i i was listening to a podcast where the two of you you and your wife talked about uh veganism with your kids and we have a similar philosophy is that they're on their own journey so with veganism we we went vegan like in the middle of my kids journey so i'm still in the beginning but like they're already meat eaters so what was the

impetus for you to go vegan i wish i could say it was you because i would be so cool by the way i'm not fishing for that but like genuinely interested in what i feel like saying that right now but it's not true um it was just a bunch of things i went into it as a vegetarian to become healthier um i was overweight and then i started reading about like educating myself and of course looking for inspiration and then then learn, as everyone knows, you learn about animal welfare and the horrible stuff that we do to turn them into food. And it's just like, I, you know, once you are awake to that, it's really hard to turn it off. So that was, it was a, it was a progress.

It was a progression. But you can apply the minimalism calculus to it right because you can say well is this serving me right it's not serving me is it necessary yeah what are the implications of making this choice on my life and the life of others yeah yeah absolutely and it's just the one of the things was like oh i thought i needed this stuff like i needed cheese or whatever and then that was like my 99 i was 99 vegan that was my one percent i would eat cheese once in a while and then i like let go of it and i realized i didn't need it all along like i don't miss it at all although i'm looking forward to your wife's uh the cheese book cheese book yeah vegan cheese

i actually i just had some nut based vegan cheese and it was delicious but i haven't missed it at all um and so yeah it's like that letting go like i think i need this as an attachment i thought i needed meat and then i let go of it it's like oh i don't need it anymore and for health reasons too like i often thought like you need this stuff to be healthy and i it turns out like you can i know it's a big surprise to, but you can actually be completely healthy as a vegan. And if you can be completely healthy as a vegan, then what's the justification for putting the animals through that kind of suffering? It's like your pleasure, basically. And so I just started to turn that spotlight on that, just like I did with minimalism.

And it was like, actually, it's not necessary. And I'm just going to go with what is necessary for my health and it's plants. So that's, that's, that was my journey. And of course it was actually supported by other influences of people on me. And then two friends who we met in London who are vegan. Um, one of them runs a vegan site now called plant shift.com. It's a little plug there, but, uh, they came and visited us and we spent, um, a week in San Francisco, taking them around to different vegan restaurants. And that was an influence on us was just having this vegan experience with two people who are very strongly believing in veganism. And yeah, when, when you see that influence that you have

on each other, like I said, we create each other. We co-create each other. And they created us who we are today because of that influence. It's amazing, right? It's cool. We are all influencing each other all the time, even sometimes without knowing it. And we're just creating the people that we are with this huge network, this mesh of influences. It's all one consciousness, Leo.

Exactly. No, no, don't, don't, don't tell them that. No, but that's,

that's my belief is that we're all that we're all constantly co-creating each other. Um, and we wouldn't be the people we are without each other. And we're completely enmeshed in this network of human hearts. Yeah. No, there's no question about it.

Yeah. Now, now more so than ever because of podcasts and blogs and all, you know, everything that the internet avails us of. We're so intertwined. So, but yeah, that's, that was my vegan journey. So you do that. And then you talked a little bit about your basic philosophy with your kids is similar to ours, allowing them their own journey. And then, and then where does the, the homeschooling and the unschooling yeah

into that again influenced by my by someone was my sister who was um homeschooling her kids and and our kids were um in school one of them was being punished by his teachers because he was reading in class like a novel and he was supposed to be doing something that he already understood and like was was bored with already and it like, that school is not meeting our kids needs. And not, not, of course there are amazing teachers in the world. I'm not saying all teachers are like that, but that it was just like, Oh, we can, we can actually meet his needs probably better. And my wife decided to like quit her job and, um our kids actually was homeschooling at first and then we went along the own unschooling route a couple years later explain unschooling for people

that might not be familiar with what that is it's a version of homeschooling so you do it at home but homeschooling often is doing school in the house just like okay we're doing reading we're doing math we're doing history and often you're following a curriculum with textbooks and you're doing exactly the same activity, but just at home. Which is a great experience. Not knocking that at all. But unschooling is like, what if we wiped this entire board clear and started from a clean slate? And like, what would it be if we didn't school our kids? kids. And it's just like taking a new look at teaching, like education philosophy and like,

do our kids need to learn X by this grade and X by this grade and Y by this grade and so forth. And like, who came up with that curriculum? Some like, you know, someone with a degree, obviously, but like in the education system who doesn't know my kid at all. And they've like decided the perfect route for them to, to do what, to become ready for college, to become ready for a day job. And so it's like a factory that it puts. And again, I don't want to make people who are putting their kids through school, uh, feel bad about what they're doing. Cause everyone is being the best parent that they can. But for us, it was like, we didn't quite, we, once you start with a blank slate, you throw out those goals. Like actually what we want to do is make them become good human beings.

And how do we do that? And one of the things, one of the problems with school, it's going to sound like school bashing, is it's a top-down approach. Like the teacher has the wisdom, they teach you. And unschooling is about you becoming your own teacher and deciding what your curriculum is. What are you excited about? Like you and I are

doing every single day. And it's actually preparing them to be like passionate creators and human beings and learner, lifelong learners, because, you know, no one is telling us what to learn these days, but we keep learning. And that's exactly what kids do naturally. And if we can just get out of their way and not like force them to learn certain things in certain ways, they'll learn naturally and they'll learn what's important to them. And they'll learn how to motivate themselves to learn if like they want to build a teepee or something like that. Like, how do you do that? Well, I got to go figure it out. And then you learn to be motivated and you learn to find resources and support and all of the things that we do as adults.

That's what kids would naturally do if you get out of their way. So that's what unschooling is. The executive director of the Good Food Institute and founding partner of New Crop Capital, Bruce Friedrich, at Bruce G. Friedrich, F-R-I-E-D-R-I-C-H, is a man who has devoted his entire life

to reforming animal agriculture and innovating the future of food and food systems. This conversation is about that very subject, food system innovation, how technology, urgency, and popular demand are rapidly converging to create healthy, sustainable, and compassionate solutions to help solve our current food, health, and environmental crises. So please enjoy this snippet of my conversation with Bruce Friedrich. So let's talk about clean meat. At the vanguard of this super fascinating movement is your friend Uma Valetti at Memphis Meats, who's doing some truly extraordinary work in kind of finding technological advances for this problem. I'm sure you listened to Sam Harris's conversation with Uma, which was absolutely fascinating. So, before we even get into that, maybe explain

in a little bit more in depth what you mean by clean meat. It's sort of anecdotally known as lab-grown meat. I know language is important. You're going to avoid that term, but that's sort of colloquially what people understand it to be. And I think there's going to be a learning curve here in getting people acclimated to understand exactly what this is. Yeah. I mean, let me start by saying the reason that we don't call it lab meat is the same reason that we don't call Cheerios lab Cheerios or Budweiser lab Budweiser. Like every processed food starts in a food lab.

So technically every processed food is created in a lab. But at scale, this will be created in a factory just like every other food that starts in a food lab is created in a factory. And what it will look like is it will look like a meat brewery. So you picture a beer brewery, those vats, instead of creating beer, they will be creating meat. And that has some huge advantages over the current system. It's three times more efficient than chicken, which is the most efficient meat, causes 95% less climate change, doesn't include all of the extra stages of production. It's exponentially cleaner, doesn't require antibiotics. I mean, according to

the Centers for Disease Control, there are tens of millions of cases of meat contamination, foodborne illness. There are more than 100,000 hospitalizations. There are tens of millions of cases of meat contamination, foodborne illness. There are more than 100,000 hospitalizations. There are thousands of deaths every single year. All of that goes away because the process is cleaner. It's also clean meat as sort of a nod to clean energy, the environmental benefits. So just like clean energy is more environmentally sustainable energy, clean meat is more environmentally sustainable meat. And the two sort of pioneers of this movement, one is this guy Mark Post, who is a former

medical school professor at Harvard Medical School. And now he's a tissue engineer. He's a PhD in tissue engineering and an MD. And now he's teaching tissue engineering at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, which is one of the top medical schools in Europe. And previously, he was, I think, about a decade at Harvard Medical School. The other one is also a medical doctor, Dr. Valetti, who was on Sam Harris's podcast, which I highly recommend. Really just a fascinating conversation. And Valetti is a cardiologist. He was trained at

the Mayo Clinic. He was a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota. He was the president of both the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, the Twin Cities chapter. Like, you know, these guys are brilliant. your lives into creating a more sustainable, healthier alternative that is exactly the same thing. So if you're eating a clean meat chicken nugget or you're eating a clean meat hamburger or a clean meat pork chop, whatever, it is literally the exact same thing. But instead of putting feed into an animal and causing the animal's cells to grow and wasting most of the inputs, instead you're just taking similar nutrients, you're bathing the cells, you're causing them to multiply and wasting most of the inputs. Instead, you're just taking similar nutrients, you're bathing the cells, you're causing them to multiply and grow. But instead of in an animal, you're doing it in a meat fermenter. And it takes away a lot of the problems of the meat industry.

So, essentially, the process is extracting cells from live animals that are sort of raised in a very healthy way and then culturing them, correct? In these brewery vats? I'm trying to understand kind of the logistical process of how this whole thing works. A sesame seed biopsy can feed the world. So you don't need like a herd of cattle for the clean meat industry. You need a sesame seed biopsy from one cow. What does that mean, a sesame seed biopsy?

So basically you take a teeny little bit of meat. Oh, a sesame seed sized. Yeah, sorry. I got you. Okay. Sorry, sorry. Yeah, so you need a biopsy from the animal the size of a sesame seed. And that can create literally billions of pounds of

meat. So, it's not like you need a herd of donor animals. You just need a tiny little bit. And you can certainly take the biopsy from a live animal, or you can take the biopsy from not a live animal, but it's a very little bit of meat that you then use standard cell tissue engineering techniques. So, it's common in all aspects of this are common in medicine. The problem is nobody's going to haggle over the price of a liver, you know, or an ear or whatever. So, we need to improve the processes so that we can get the cost down. But the cost is down more than 99% over just two and a half years. Right. It first started off as like $3,000 a burger or something like that?

Well, it was $300,000 for a quarter pound burger. Yeah. Okay. So some shake in UAE could order it and that was about it. Well, yeah. I mean, so it was $1.2 million for the first pound and it was $9,000 a pound last week. And I mean, you think about the first iPhone, the first iPhone R&D cost, I think, $2.4 billion. And iPhones are a lot less expensive than that. Sequencing the human genome, like the cost of that came down, I think, a million times over the course of a decade. So these processes are so much more efficient. It's inconceivable to me that we won't get to a place where because the processes are so much more efficient, as we get economies of scale from where they are now, which is just a couple people, not that many labs working on this, not that many companies working on this, as it scales up, the price is going to

come down. It will be cost competitive. I mean, Dr. Valetti and Dr. Post think that they will be cost competitive with expensive meat in about four years and cost competitive with cheap meat in about a decade. And that requires that the venture capital and the investments are there, but we think they will be. Imagine yourself running an ultramarathon. Suddenly you're surrounded by a brush fire. This brush fire closes in on you and your body is consumed in flames to the point where survival seems impossible. And yet somehow you're able to live, but your body is burned over the vast majority of your exposed skin. And yet rather than wilt and become a victim, you end up leveraging this experience to become a beacon of inspiration and female empowerment to millions of people across the

world. This is the amazing, powerful story of Taria Pitt at Taria Pitt on Twitter. I love this conversation. She is one of the most impressive, unbelievable people I have ever met. And this is a conversation all about facing life head on, about taking risks, about facing your fears and believing in yourself. So without further ado, please enjoy this snippet with Tariya Pitt. So in 2011, I was running an ultra marathon. So an ultra, probably your listeners would know what an ultra is, but it's larger than a marathon.

So a marathon is 42 kilometers um and so i was a quarter of the way through the ultra marathon how old were you at the time i was 24 and was this your first ultra that was my first ultra marathon yeah but had you run marathons like yeah yeah so and this was like in the bush right well i mean it's it's been portrayed in the media as being like an outback desert ultramarathon. It was kind of like that. Like it was a pretty remote area. So I was a quarter of the way through the ultramarathon. There was no phone reception on a trail. And I heard what I thought were trucks coming down the highway

because I knew that the next checkpoint was really close to the highway. So I actually started running a little bit faster because I just wanted to get to the checkpoint, have water, some food, and, you know, cool down a bit. It's pretty hot in the Kimberleys. That's in Western Australia. It's pretty hot at the time of year when the ultramarathon was on. And I was stuck in a – I came into a little gorge.

There was six people in the gorge and we could see a fire quickly approaching. Now that was the sound of the trucks. That was what I thought. I'll go back. When I say I thought I heard trucks, it was actually the rumbling of the fire. Now, I don't know if you know of the Venturi effect. So when hot air is funneled into a smaller space like the gorge, it actually sucks the fire through.

It increases the speed of the fire. So it's like sucking the air into it, right? Yeah, so we were at the start of the gorge and we saw the fire through, it increases the speed of the fire. So it's like sucking the air into it, right? Yeah, so we were at the start of the gorge and we saw the fire. We were like, oh, shit, like, what do we do? And so we all tried to run. So you just run back the way you came from? Well, this is the thing. Because it's weird.

It's like trying to understand, like, how do you get caught up in this thing without being able to run away from it yeah yeah well so don't forget that a fire can move it around 100 kilometers an hour so i don't think that even you'd be able to no run away from it and it's also weird because it's it's a day in my life close to six years ago so my memory is a little bit patchy but we were running through shoulder high grass dry spin effects so i thought that would be perfect fuel for the flames or the side of the gorge it was really rocky there was less vegetation but i also knew that the speed of fire accelerates going up a hill. So you had to make a decision like in the moment, like which way are we going to go?

Yeah. So I chose to run up the hill, run up the side of the gorge. And there were six other people there? And so did they go with you or? So two of them ran back the way we came from and they didn't get burnt uh two guys jumped through the fire yeah and uh what happened to those guys they got burnt they weren't as badly burnt and kate and i kate was the other woman who was badly injured we got burnt to 65 of our body wow and so you're

running up this gorge, right? Yeah. And what, it encapsulates you? It just surrounds you all of a sudden? It just surrounds me, and I just remember looking down at my hands and arms. I was both ablaze. And I just thought, this is it.

I'm never going to see Michael again. Now, once the fire had passed, I was... So how long did that go on for? Yeah, I think a couple of seconds, five seconds. I'm not sure. Did you pass out? No. How do you get the flames out?

Did you roll on the ground? How did I get the flames out? I don't know. You go into like a fugue state, right? Like some kind of crazy. Total shock. Like did that, is this a dream? Did that really just happen?

You know? And then I actually got this sense of elation because I was like, I've survived. Like, I'm going to be all right. I'm going to go to hospital. They'll bandage me up. I'll be back at work on Monday. I was in that semi-delusional state of mind,

which is probably just my body's reaction to try and save my life. Well, yeah, like the adrenaline rush adrenaline and i was just off my head i had no grasp on time or or space right so we actually were stuck on that hillside for four hours wow yeah and that we like all six of you all six of us and there were some other competitors as well because people coming up from behind are discovering you right yeah yeah yeah so we end up waiting for four hours a helicopter comes the helicopter has to balance on one skid first they take kate and i was like hello right i'm here like why why are you taking hello four hours that whole ego thing why did it take so long they didn't have they didn't know what

was going on or yeah i think just due to the location you know there was no not very good communication um like i said there was no mobile phone reception, that type of thing. How many people were in this ultra? There was, I think, around 50 people. Yeah, so it wasn't huge. Right. It wasn't huge. So when I got picked up in the helicopter, I went to hospital. I said to the doctors and nurses.

Hold on a second, though. For those four hours, do you remember? Like, what were you doing? Like, were you alert or were you passed out or do you remember? Like, I mean, that's a long time. It is is but when you don't have a firm grasp on reality four hours could have been four minutes it could have been 40 minutes it could have been well wouldn't it couldn't have been four days but you know i didn't i had no idea i mean the survival you know instinct must have kicked in pretty powerfully,

but there's only so long you can keep that adrenaline coursing through your veins before you kind of. So I think towards that end of the four hours, I was like starting to pass out. And the people who I was with were like, no, Tariya, wake up. They would talk to me about work or just something really mundane. Just to keep you awake. Just to keep me lucid, yeah.

And I think, though, if the helicopter wasn't able to extricate Kate and myself, I don't think we would be here. Right. Yeah. Because we were starting to swell quite badly. We didn't have any water no pain medication i i think the helicopter got there just on dark too and i mean full credit to that helicopter pilot though he wasn't a medical helicopter he was just a normal just like a

average helicopter a regular pilot guy not that helicopter pilots are, you know, ever average, but he was just. He's not a paramedic though. He wasn't a paramedic because he was a regular bloke. He had a wife at home. He had a six-week-old baby. They're not supposed to balance on one skid, you know? Right.

So he risked his life to save me. Wow. Yeah. So he gets you in. Again, another example of someone doing something completely selfless. And even when I was trapped by the fire, I was really scared. And I said to one of the blokes who I literally just met in that life and death situation, he had his son there,

and he saw that I was upset and he took precious seconds to comfort me you know again another act of total selflessness right that makes made a huge difference i mean i would imagine your life was very much in the balance i mean four hours with the extensive you know the extent to which you were burned yeah totally so we the helicopter landed in a little town of kananara i walked from the helicopter into in a little town of Kununurra I walked from the helicopter into hospital you walked I walked well they were they're kind of like stuffing around like trying to get the ambulance around and in the end I just thought stuff this all right you know I like hopped out of the helicopter and started like walking into the hospital because in my head

I was fine uh-huh I was going to be back at work in a couple of days wow that's the power of denial bandage me up and you know i want to go yeah i want to go home and in in the hospital they weren't really taking my taking me seriously i was like can someone call michael like i need to get out of here i want to get going wow you were really not tapped into what was no i was adamant that i was out of there like uh-huh and then did they have a burnt like a burn unit no so the town is really small kind of narrow there's probably about 5 000 people who live there so they put a needle in me and i woke up a month later in a hospital in Sydney. All right, I got to land this plane. We got one more person who's going to round out part one

of the best of 2017. Come on, you guys. It's going to have to be an RRP favorite. Maybe the RRP favorite. John Joseph. John Joseph at JJ Cro-Mag on Twitter. favorite john joseph john joseph at jj crow meg on twitter back by popular demand good friend provocateur at large this is john's i think his fifth appearance on the show and he returned to share a little bit more about his unbelievable story a story that really demonstrates the indelible power of the human spirit to basically face, transcend, overcome unimaginable, seemingly insurmountable obstacles, and ultimately transform one's life wholesale to essentially fully actualize. John's got a message for you.

This whole thing is about helping people. It's about getting people to wake up. This guy's hardcore. He's a survivor. he's a spiritual warrior, he's got one of the biggest hearts of anybody I've ever met. So without further ado, please enjoy this little slice of my conversation with John Joseph. Day one has to come and day one has to be like even after all the crack and everything else, I was still getting high and then like

you know started smoking weed again and then it would turn into doing ecstasy pills in the 90s and all this shit and then I finally said you know what I had to face the truth and the hard truth was that I'm an addict and I you know I have an I have addiction issues and I needed to have a day one where I could say from this point on, I'm never going to fucking touch any drugs. I'm going to work on myself every day. You know, the bad brains in HR, they were surrounded by a lot of very positive people who were into a lot of metaphysical yoga and philosophy and all so i had a good foundation and um i had to fall back on that and just and from my time living as a hari krishna and meditating and getting up i just had to have that day one where you say this is the day i'm not gonna fucking get high anymore and then it's every day you have and i said that to to somebody recently. I go, hey, man, I'm an addict. I'm just choosing not to fucking get high today.

I'm going to train for this Ironman. I'm going to I'm going to write. I'm going to do everything I need to do so that today, one day at a time, I choose not to get high. I choose to do the right thing. in life is is based upon it's the choices we make under pressure to find character that's the whole thing what McKee says in story too anybody could act like they got their whole shit together when there's no pressure when the pressure comes then you see true characters revealed and And, you know, what kind of story do you want to leave for the world about how, you know, like my whole thing and what I've seen, and I'm writing this book on PMA now, I mean, you know,

is I hope that my story, like I said at the end of the book reading, I go, look, man, I didn't write this book to get pats on the back, sympathy. Oh, you're so strong. None of that shit. I said I wrote the book and I put my whole story in. Well, McKee wrote in my storybook from him that I had him sign it after class. He goes, always write the truth. And that's what I did.

For people that don't knowbert mckee wrote a book called story he's the guy who's sort of known as the king of you know how to structure a screenplay and he does these seminars three days i've i did it twice i took his workshops he was depicted in the movie adaptation quite quite comically but i had a defining moment with him because I've been utilizing what happened to me as a kid for the main character. And then I walked up to him after class, and he had his little bantering going back and forth. Yeah, true character, you know, characterization. You see these guys with all the fucking tattoos to their eyeballs. Really, they're just marshmallows.

And he was talking about me. You know, he's picking on me, dude. Right. they're just marshmallows and he was talking about me you know he's picking on me dude right so after like i was like the second day i walked up and i was like you know i said mr mckee's you know everyone's allowed to ask questions i go as far as like you know a kid that was uh abused as a child he stopped me right there and he goes child abuse is the cliche of the fucking day. It's like writers use it to try to gain sympathy and empathy for characters that are weak. They're thin and we can give two shits about them.

It's not the abuse. It's what we do as a result of it. That's the fucking story. And I was just like, that was when I i was like i have to put everything into this story i can't leave out as embarrassing as it was that these motherfuckers put their hands on me like that i had to tell that story and um and and i said at the end ultimately that's that's the path towards you healing it for yourself yeah it was because that's why I always had addiction issues and everything else. It was like these old scars every time somebody did some really grimy shit to me that would,

whether it was a relationship ending or my band members robbing me, ratting me out, doing fucking grimy shit, these two clowns in the Cro-Mags, Harley and fucking Paris. And I considered Harley especially my friend. these two clowns in the chrome eggs harley and fucking paris and and i considered harley especially my friend and he just kept stabbing me in the fucking back and i would spiral out of control because it was just ripping those wounds open and it wasn't until i wrote the entire story and got it off my chest to the world that i was really able to heal and that's why i wrote that book because i've gotten thousands and thousands of letters. I correspond with people, emails and fucking all kinds of shit.

I just got one today. This dude on Twitter was like, your book helped save my life practically by your example. And example's better than precept. We have to live. These days, everybody talks shit. Everyone talks the talk. Who's walking the walk? That's who I look to. Guys like you, guys that, you know, overcame stuff in their own lives and pushed on to to achieve tremendous things in the world. I'm not I don't care. Everybody talks shit out of their ass these days. You know, I'm like I'm looking to see you know what actions how are people living their lives and that's the example and that's that's what i try to do too is is lead a positive life and show people you know no matter what you can climb out of any hole

you know no matter how far in the depths of hell you are and i've been down there i've seen crazy shit people mad people murdered in front of me i mean shit nobody should ever have to see but i was willing to like climb out of that and and surround myself by positive people that's the other thing is the association we keep who are you hanging out with that's it man if you hang out with rogues and thieves you're going to be a rogue and a thief or a fucking junkie or whatever it's people places and things i never went to the programs but a lot of the stuff they say is stuff that i just know to follow people places and things you know uh you know just i'm an addict i'm choosing not to get high today you know and the higher power and all that i i utilize all this stuff except you know it's like

we're training i do it that's part of my therapy too i'm not a great iron man uh but i don't do it to to you know to brag or anything else i just do it because it's part of my discipline in my life. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed part one of our look in the rear view. Part two with a bunch more awesome excerpted conversations is going to go up later in the week on Sunday night, December 31st, New Year's Eve to be exact. Because, hey, man, I never get a day off. I'll work on New Year's Eve. I don't care. If you want to support this show and my work, share it with your friends and on social media. If you're home with your family,

sit around that dinner table. Talk to them about the RRP. What else are you going to talk about? Always subscribe. Hit that subscribe button. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. We have a Patreon set up for people who want to support my work financially. Thank you, everybody who has done that. We had a great AMA the other day. I'm going to set up another one for the following month, for January, pretty soon. So stay tuned for that. Exclusive content for Patreon supporters only.

Again, we're offering 20% off our Plant Power Meal Planner with a promo code POWER20. This is an insane deal for just $80 a year. You will be supported for 365 days with thousands of plant-based personalized recipes, expert food coaches available seven days a week, handy grocery lists, and even grocery delivery in 80 US markets. It is amazing. It is an incredible deal. And it's only available through midnight January 6th.

And again, this is something we're not likely to do again. So you're going to have to jump on it right away. To do that, go to meals.richroll.com or click on Meal Planner on the upper right-hand corner at richroll.com and use the promo code power 20 power two zero at checkout for $20 off the annual membership fee. Again, that's meals.richroll.com promo code power 20 at checkout. I want to thank everybody who helped put on this show, not just this show, but over the course of this entire year, Jason Camiello for audio engineering production and interstitial music, Sean Patterson for help on graphics, theme music as, by Anna Lemma. I want to thank Moby

for allowing us to use some of his gratis music for our interstitial music over the course of the year. David Zamet, who helped out for a couple months with photo portraits and video. Who else has worked on this show? So many people. Thanks for the love, you guys. I will see you back here in a few days. Season's greetings. Happy holidays. Merry, merry. Peace, plants, grace, love.

Namaste. Thank you.