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

Episode Date: January 1, 2018

Welcome to the 5th 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. It's been an honor to share my conversations with so many extraordinary people over the course of 2017. Second listens brought new insights — and more reminders that that these evergreen exchanges continue to inspire and inform. For long-time listeners, this two-part episode is intended to launch you into 2018 with renewed vigor and intention. 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 #296: Dr. Neal Barnard, M.D. RRP #298: Meditation Master Sharon Salzberg RRP #302: Addiction Recovery Expert Tommy Rosen RRP #305: charity: water's Scott Harrison RRP #311: Ultra-Athlete Samantha Gash RRP #317: Bestselling Author Gretchen Rubin RRP #319: Chinese Medicine Physician Colin Hudon RRP #320: Healing Mushroom Expert Tero Isokauppila Thank you for taking this journey with me. I appreciate you. I love you. Here's to an extraordinary 2018. Join me, and let's do this thing together. Peace + Plants, Rich

To see the truth of it, you just have to look at a country like Japan or China, where these are non-dairy consuming countries. And they really weren't eating much meat. You know, meat was kind of a flavoring for the rice and noodles and vegetables and so forth. And back in 1980, diabetes was rare in Japan. It was between 1 and 5 percent of the adult population. McDonald's came in, fast food chains came in, meat came in in a big way, and cheese and dairy started to follow. Some of the people in Japan initially, and then China

afterward, started to say, okay, we need to drink milk so that we're strong like Americans are. And what they've gotten is diabetes rates went up to now 11 to 12% in Japan by 1990. Diabetes is massive now in China. Cardiovascular disease, I'm talking heart disease, huge in China. And it's not because of rice. That's Dr. Neil Bernard. And this is part two of the best of 2017 edition of the Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, how you guys doing? What is happening? Happy New Year. Happy New Year. I can't believe it. It's 2018 already. I don't know what it is, but I really believe that as you age, as you get older, time accelerates. At least that's the way it feels to me. That is my experience. That is my truth. I don't know if it's true, but I cannot believe that we've already gone all the way through

2017 and we're into 18 already. In any event, welcome to the show, to my podcast, the program where I endeavor to have long-form, in-depth conversations that matter, at least I hope they matter, with the most compelling thought leaders across all aspects of positive 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 to your friends and on social media. And welcome. Welcome to part two of my annual best of anthology series, where I feature excerpts from some of my favorite conversations of 2017. And the idea behind all of this is to hopefully provide you with a little inspiration to set the right mood, to create the right mindset to help you reflect back on 2017 and hopefully better contemplate the year ahead, to catapult you into January a little bit

more informed, a little better motivated, perhaps a little more inspired to take your health and your well-being and your life to the next level. This is my way of just saying Happy New Year, of saying thank you. Thank you for investing in my work. Thank you for being an incredible audience for this show, for honoring all of the guests that I've shared with you, and for implementing their work into your lives. I love you guys, and I promise to continue raising the bar in 2018. If you've been with me all along, then this part two in a two-part series will hopefully help bring some of my guests' insights back into the forefront of your mind

as you contemplate your trajectory, your hopes, your dreams, your goals heading into the new year. And if you're new, if you're brand new to this program, maybe you just stumbled upon it accidentally, then this window into the world of my guest should provide you with, should give you a little bit of a sense of what this show is all about and hopefully inspire you to go back and listen to the episodes in full, or at least some of them and visit some of the shows maybe you might have missed throughout the year if you have been a listener. And I'll provide links to all the individual specific episodes in the show notes, which you can find on the episode page 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. 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. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more.

Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. 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. 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 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. Again, I love all my guests. My instinct is to excerpt all of the episodes, but that would just be too long. I really wanted to just give you a flavor of what this show is all about to help jog your memory of this journey that we've been on. And so, of course,

I just had to choose only a few of the amazing people that I've been blessed to have conversations with. So consider this some of my best content of 2017. And to launch us into all of this, let's begin with the great Dr. Neil Bernard. At Dr. Neil Bernard on Twitter, D-R Neil Bernard, N-E-A-L-B-A-R-N-A-R-D. Neil Bernard, MD, is a preeminent authority on diet and nutrition and its impact on illnesses such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. He is the founder and president of PCRM, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, where he leads programs advocating for preventive medicine, good nutrition, and higher ethical standards in research. He also runs the Barnard Medical Center, which is a groundbreaking nonprofit primary care medical practice where board-certified physicians,

nurse practitioners, and registered dietitians help patients prevent and reverse serious health problems, leveraging a holistic approach that involves tackling the actual causes of illness. Imagine that, the actual causes of illness with extra attention, of course, on nutrition. I love Dr. Bernard. He's a good friend. He's been an amazing multiple guest on this show. And here's a little bit of my talk this past year from episode 296. Enjoy. The big picture that I see, it was relatively few people going to a plant-based diet, say, 20 years ago. Now it's like all over the place. This movement, I think, is unstoppable, even with this war of misinformation. And for every ridiculous industry-funded study, there are plenty of good

studies clearly showing the truth. But those studies aren't getting the kind of bandwidth that these other studies are getting. And is it a financial thing? It's like, you know, the kale and broccoli growers can't get together and pool their money to compete with the dairy industry and the meat industry. You said it. I got to tell you, it's true. They not only pour money into doing the research, which is costly, but then they've got their communications teams set to push it. And worst of all, the studies done in the U.S. have the backing of the U.S. government, because by law, the government must promote American agricultural

products. And they have specifically funded studies and they fund promotional programs, not only to make dairy products look healthy, but to actually promote more consumption of them, whether they're healthy or not. So that's all the bad news. The good news is, if you look at milk consumption, it's been falling. Despite all the milk mustache ads and so forth, it's been falling. Cheese is unfortunately going up. Meat has fallen. Meat consumption has fallen about 10% over the last decade. We're not where we need to be at all, but we are making progress. So this idea, you kind of touched on it.

It's called, what is it called? Government setbacks? Well, yeah, it's the checkoff program. The checkoffs, right. For every unit of milk that you sell or every cow you sell, you will donate money to a kitty that the government administers. And they pay for research, and they pay for promotion, and all this kind of stuff. Right. So there's that. They kind of touch on it in the documentary, What the Health.

And you spoke about it in your presentation at Moby's house the other week, when you see an ad for a Wendy's double cheeseburger or the newest version of, you know, the Pizza Hut pizza with injected cheese into the crust and all these sorts of things, that actually there is a relationship between those marketing campaigns and those products and the influx of government funding. So can you explain that a little bit? Because I think a lot of people would be shocked to hear that. By law, the U.S. and this has been the case for a long time. The U.S. government by law must promote American agricultural products. This is something Congress in its wisdom passed a number of years ago. And they promote products regardless of their health value and often in spite of their health value. So they take this pot of money and they pour it into research studies. And the U.S. government did work with Wendy's,

with a contract that I can show you, to market the Wendy's cheddar lover's bacon cheeseburger. I'm not kidding. It sold two and a quarter million pounds of cheese. They then worked with Subway to, Subway had two sandwiches that didn't have cheese on them. So on contract with the U.S. government, they stuck cheese on those sandwiches. They worked with Pizza Hut to put an entire pound of cheese on one serving of pizza.

They worked with Taco Bell, Burger King, all the others, so that cheese was promoted, for example. You go through the drive-thru, and you can't imagine that what they say over the loudspeaker is going to be government speak. Welcome to Taco Bell. Would you like to try our quesadilla today? They don't say you want a strawberry smoothie. It's like something cheesy. And so these are all done on contract. We got them through the Freedom of information. So those talking points are like upsells that are specifically kind of inserted into the talking points that that person at the fast food restaurant is sort of told this

is how you communicate with the customer. Yeah, that was part of it. The government has supplied advisors to McDonald's. I'm talking about people going to McDonald's headquarters and advising them on their business practices. I mean, don't you think every computer manufacturer would like to have the government promoting their product well for some it's it's wrong it should stop but that's where we are we live in a country which if this were a Latin American country you could imagine drugs it kind of infusing the their influence in the government right here it's agricultural products doing the same kind of thing. So what would have to happen systemically in order for the government to get behind sort of using that machinery to push fruits and vegetables instead of, you know, cheese and meat?

You know. Subsidies, eradicating subsidies or changing the structure of lobbying in Washington or I mean, it would have to be from the top. It would literally require an act of Congress. And I have to say that the fruit and vegetable people don't really want to be part of that. They want to fight their own fight, but they are not interested in subsidies for the most part. And none of this would matter if these products didn't have a health impact, but they do. And they have a surprising impact. And this is something else that gets swept under the rug. Let me give you a short example, if you don't mind. There's a woman named Catherine

Lawrence, who you may know. She lives in Texas, but her story is very striking. She was originally from Louisiana. She was in the Air Force. She was an aerospace engineer. She was one of the first people going into Iraq in 2003 to lay down American military bases. Anyway, she's working in this war zone. She's in the military, and you're not gaining weight eating military food and working hard. Her tour of duty comes to an end. She goes back home to Louisiana. All her friends say, Catherine, let's eat.

You're home. And what does she love the most? Cheese, mac and cheese, Cheetos, all this stuff. She had a friend who knew she loved mac and cheese. So they gave her a case of 48 mac and cheese boxes, those things that the college sophomores eat all the time. For 48 days straight, Catherine ate mac and cheese out of a box. Anyway, she gained weight, but she also started to have these pains in her abdomen. And as the months went by, it got worse and worse and worse. And her doctor diagnosed

endometriosis, which is a condition where cells that are supposed to be inside your uterus migrate out and they seed around your abdomen and they start swelling with your cycle. And the pain is terrible. The treatment can be, and it also causes infertility. And the treatment is a hysterectomy in a lot of cases. And she said to her doctor, you know, rather not have a hysterectomy, I'd like to have a family. And this was the treatment. And she was not getting better, so they scheduled it. Anyway, a friend said to her, why don't you try a plant-based diet? Because there's a lot of evidence that that will affect your hormones, your hormone balance. And what

you've got is a hormonal issue. And she was really half-hearted about it, but she thought, you and she was really half-hearted about it but she thought like what's my choice so she went 100 vegan no dairy like no cheese but no animal products at all and she started feeling better she started losing weight week after week she was losing weight and as time went on all of these abdominal symptoms started to just go away so she went back to the doctor who did a laparoscopy you look into the abdomen with a scope and he looks all around looks back to the doctor who did a laparoscopy you look into the abdomen with a scope and he looks all around looks all around the doctor's looking all around and then sends her into the recovery room and the doctor went out to the waiting room to talk to her husband and he said her endometriosis is practically gone and the husband said you know

she changed her diet she She went 100% vegan and she's been feeling better week by week and her pain has been going away. And the doctor said, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want to hear about that. Foods do not cause endometriosis and there is no way that a diet change is going to heal it. There's only one explanation

for this. This is a miracle. Because that's more plausible. That's more plausible. This is barely written in her medical record. But anyway, she never had the operation. She didn't have the hysterectomy. Her endometriosis is gone. She's got two kids. And in fact, her third child is on the way. And she has now become a food for life instructor working with PCRM to tell other women and men about how foods affect your body and to get healthy. So anyway, my hat is off to Catherine Lawrence for sharing

her story. But anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is you're going to promote, not you, people are promoting cheese. They're saying, don't worry about it. It has no effect. Cheese comes from milk. Milk comes from a cow who is pregnant. The cows don't give milk at all, but they don't make milk until they have been impregnated. They give birth, and then the milk that their calf was going to get goes to the dairy. A cow pregnancy is about nine months, similar to human pregnancy, and they're impregnated every year. So what that means, three quarters of their lives, they are pregnant. They are being milked during that time. The estrogen that the cow makes gets into the milk. And it's just, it's not much.

It's only a trace. But the milk is turned into cheese. The hormones go with the fat. And the average person eats 35 pounds of it every year. So researchers in Rochester, New York, looked at men. The men who ate the most cheese had the worst sperm counts, the worst sperm morphology, the lowest sperm motility. In other words, they're... Because of the estrogen content of that?

Well, that's the theory. The theory is you're consuming just little traces of estrogen with your breakfast, on your Egg McMuffin, the little cheese, and a little bit more at lunch, and quite a lot at dinner on your pizza. And could those little traces of estrogens matter? Now, we had all thought couldn't be. But I got to tell you, Rich, here's the worst. Here in California, researchers looked at women who had been diagnosed with breast cancer. And if you've had breast cancer in the past and you were treated for it, your concern is, is my cancer going to come back?

Of course. Well, the women who consumed the most cheese had a 49% higher breast cancer mortality compared to the women who eat the least. And the difference is small. The difference is one daily serving or more, less than a half a serving a day. So the women who eat little or no cheese and other high-fat dairy products, it's cheese, it's butter, that's where the hormones go. You compare to these low-cheese consumers, the ones who eat one or more servings a day, which is not a lot, the increased risk was 49%.

I'm talking about risk of dying of your cancer. So again, the amounts of hormones are small but it raises the question do you want to feed any kind of dairy I'm talking about cow's milk goat milk whatever do you want to feed it to your six-year-old daughter or your six-year-old son or your wife or your husband or yourself or anybody. And my thought is that dairy products are this cultural aberration that has stuck because people get hooked on it, but it has nothing to do with human biology and we shouldn't be avoiding it. Up next, we have Sharon Salzberg at Sharon Salzberg on Twitter. That's Salzberg, B-E-R-G. Sharon is a towering figure in the field of meditation. She is a

world-renowned teacher, a multiple New York Times bestselling author, and somebody who's played a crucial central role in bringing in introducing meditation and mindfulness practices to the West. She released a new book this year. It's called Real Love, The Art of Mindful Connection. And that was truly the locus of today's conversation, how to practice love, how to receive love, how to be loved. So, without further ado, please enjoy this little snippet from episode 298. What is real love? I have to figure it out. I usually talk about it as a state of really profound connection that needs to take that concept away from kind of the adornments, you know, and the elaborations that the culture puts on it, that it has to be romantic.

It has to have a certain flavor. Almost the whole book, actually, oddly enough, was born out of this one line in a movie, the movie Dan in Real Life. The line goes, Love is not a feeling, it's an ability. And, of course, we know it as a feeling. We yearn for it as a feeling. We think of it constantly sometimes as a feeling.

But what if we reconceptualize that as an ability, some capacity we have within us that's not in the hands of someone else, but is really part of us, and that other people may awaken it or enliven it or nourish it or threaten it, but it's within us. So, I realized that without that shift, I tended to think of love as a commodity, and it's almost like a package. And it's like the UPS person was standing in the doorstep with that package in his hand and changed his mind and went the other way and it'd be like hey wait a minute you

know right I've lost all the love in my life but really it's within us and uh that was a huge shift for me and how did you well I guess that's going to bring it back I want to get into the whole origin story we'll we'll work our way towards that that for context. But you break the book up into three sections. It's basically love for oneself, love for others, and love for all, right? And you kind of, it's a journey towards reclaiming this word and freeing it of all the baggage that we kind of associate with it. And, you know, of all the baggage that we kind of associate with it and placing it in a context really as a verb, right? And not something to be, not this sort of state or something that we're striving for or trying to get from another,

but trying to really kind of germinate and cultivate within ourselves. That's right. And I think that realization has every level to it, including the fact that maybe it's up to us then, which can be a little scary. Like, whoa, wait a minute. We don't want to take personal responsibility. That's no fun.

Yeah, so maybe the package is a better deal. But yeah, it has lots of levels. But when I first was thinking about this book and kind of creating it, and I talked to someone in publishing about it, they said to me, oh, the love market's really saturated. You know, it's like, it's so overdone.

And I thought about that, and I thought, well, maybe the how to fix your relationship market or how to find your relationship. Right, the romantic love market. You know, but this is something this is something very different it's not a mistake that that you know the first section is cultivating love for oneself right and and i think we you know in our current society think of

self-love as indulgent or selfish or narcissistic or an exercise of the ego. But really, cultivating love for oneself is a foundational component in actually even having the capacity to love other people. So can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, I think we tend to think of self-love as narcissism and being selfish and, like you say, self-indulgent. But I think it has two really amazing components. One is a sense of inner resource, not feeling so exhausted and bereft and impoverished within, but having a sense of inner sufficiency or even inner abundance,

which becomes like the source of being able to give and care and take care of others. It's like if you feel like you've got nothing going on inside, nothing to contribute, it's kind of a really bleak and hollow world within, you don't look at somebody in pain and think, how can I help you? It's like, go away, I'm really tired. It's too much. I can't bear it. And we truly can't bear it in that moment. But we have the capacity to have a very different view of our inner life and our experiences so that it doesn't feel so bleak and it doesn't feel so not good enough.

And the other part of the love for oneself is self-compassion, which really comes into play not in our triumphs, you know, in our great days, but when we've blown it and we've made a mistake or we've fallen off a course that we want to stay on or whatever it is, to be able to pick ourselves up and start over and have a sense of resilience really takes some examination. A lot of people think self-compassion is laziness. It's like, so what, I'll forgive myself. I'll blow it again in 10 seconds.

Like letting yourself off the hook for everything. That's right. We'll blow it again in 10 seconds. Like letting yourself off the hook for everything. That's right. But really, I think when we look at what's most effective and most efficient in making a change or getting something done, it's not going on a harangue towards yourself for like five and a half hours after you've blown it. It's like saying, okay, lessons learned or something like that. Or that doesn't feel very good.

Or what can I do to make amends? And then start over. that or that doesn't feel very good or what can i do to make amends and then start over most of us walk around with an inordinate amount of self-judgment and self-criticism and doubt and you know an undercurrent of worthlessness or you know i'm not worthy of love and and we play this tape in our mind right and and I think when you're in that spot, whether it's victimization or just sort of, you know, wallowing in your own fear or what have you, you tend to look outside yourself for love.

Like you look at another person as being the missing variable in that equation that's going to solve that for yourself as opposed to that inward journey of cultivating it within. But the problem, of course, is that nothing will actually fill that gap. Right. Nothing outside. And then I took in the book. We know that intellectually.

Oh, we do. Well, a lot of people do, but we still do it. Of course we do it. And it hurts so much. It's really sad. Of course we do it. And it hurts so much. It's really sad. Of course we do it. But that's worthy of some self-compassion right there. But we don't have to do it in as obsessed a way and as deluded a way, perhaps, as we once did.

Because we can see clearly. We can see for ourselves. I think the world is built of so many myths and just untruths. I think the world is built of so many myths and just untruths, and we're led to believe so many things that simply aren't true. And we incorporate them, we run around trying to find the perfect whatever. And sometimes we can step back and say, wait a minute, do I really need that, or what's the nature of that? And even love itself comes under that idea

because so many times people think of love as being stupid or sentimental or weak or saccharine. And what's really strong is like vengefulness or whatever. But when you look at those states, just look at them, it's kind of the opposite actually vengefulness is very narrow very much tunnel vision very much um not seeing any options uh hate hateful you know it doesn't feel really that good and it's kind of brittle you know it's not really that strong but love or compassion are states of tremendous spaciousness and presence and energy and generosity.

They are actually stronger than we think. A prominent recurring theme of my podcast is addiction, alcoholism, sobriety, and recovery. And so to walk us through some of those issues is my good friend Tommy Rosen, at Tommy Rosen on Twitter. Tommy is an addiction recovery expert who has spent the last two decades immersed in yoga, recovery, and wellness. He is the author of Recovery 2.0, Move Beyond Addiction and Upgrade Your Life. And he's also the founder and host of the Recovery 2.0 Beyond Addiction online conference, which I was privileged to be a speaker, a participant in. This is a conversation about Tommy's remarkable path to recovery.

It's an intense and at times profound discourse on the ravages of addiction and alcoholism. I really encourage everybody who missed this one on the first go around to go back and listen to it. It's episode 302. In the meantime, here's a taste. There's a level of shame that seems to go along with the dis-ease of addiction, alcoholism, what have you. The anonymity concept was created to protect the members. So that if you were one of these people who were in recovery, nobody in your world would know. Because you didn't want anyone to know. But that covets shame.

That protects the shame. Exactly. So at what point, at what point do you transcend this disease? At what point? Now, if you are going to hang on to a doctrine that says you never, you never will be beyond this, well then, you have, at least for the time being, relegated yourself to a way of thinking that deems you sick for the rest of your life.

What if one day at a time is the way everybody is in the world? Aren't we all on a 24-hour clock? Don't we all have to sleep every day, eat every day? What if one day at a time is just part of the human condition? What if addiction is just nothing more than a particular outcropping of the human condition that actually isn't shameful

at all? Now, the behaviors that come out of a person's addiction, yeah, we're all going to be ashamed of stealing, lying, cheating. Any human being will be ashamed of those things at some level of their being because you understand that it's wrong, that it's against the natural flow, that it's against the things that you believe in. But there's a healing of that once you get better. I could say to you right now, I've lied, but I'm not a liar. I've cheated, but I'm not a cheat. I've lied, but I'm not a liar. I've cheated, but I'm not a cheat. I've stolen, but I'm not a thief.

That's not what or who I am. There's been a transformation in me. I recognize that I behaved poorly because I was in a very dense state of consciousness in which I would seek to feel better from my disconnection and my disease through the taking of drugs that only made things worse for me. I did that.

I'm not ashamed of it. Not even in the slightest bit. I don't regret it. I'm not ashamed of it. And I'm not particularly concerned if you have a judgment about me for it. I'm comfortable in my character and my personality today. I've healed to the point where it doesn't matter.

So you see, I'm free. Now, if you portray freedom to people who say to you, it is not possible to be free, you will be threatening. You will be disrupting their way of being and a great outcry will be threatening. You will be disrupting their way of being. And a great outcry will take place.

And the way my friend described it is, you're in a barrel of monkeys and you're climbing out of the barrel and the other monkeys don't like it. And they will do everything they can to pull you back down. Now that's not to say that that's, I'm not referring to people in 12-step programs as a barrel of monkeys.

There's no end to my respect and love for anybody who's working at moving along a continuum of being free. The only thing I'm saying is, at what point do you become a human being on a path of discovery and not just a member of a fellowship? At what point do you move beyond all that? Yeah, no, I get that. I mean, that's beautifully put. I think the only caveat I would present you with is that that freedom is preconditioned or is contingent upon a continual commitment to progressively growing. Which is the case for every human being.

Right. So the sense that, I think baked into the word freedom is this idea, well, now you can just relax and take your foot off the gas and cruise. Right. That's so great. And I think the idea of freedom to most people who are either stuck in addiction or who are in recovery from addiction the idea of freedom or healing or having recovered means now i can drink with impunity now i can use drugs because i'm free now Now I get it. Before I was an addict, but now I'm free. You see, the way I'm looking at it is,

anybody who seeks to solve their life's problems through something in the outside world that ultimately is addictive is in a state of delusion. It's delusion. And it will be played out. You don't have to listen to me. It'll be played out in your life. Just like it was played out in my life

when I looked to the outside world through drugs, alcohol, sex, food, gambling, cigarettes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to solve my life's riddle. I was on, I had the right destination in mind. The right destination is connection, love, healing, recovery. But I was on the wrong train. I got on the wrong train. And so all I'm saying is. But I was on the wrong train. I got on the wrong train.

And so all I'm saying is we have to get on the right train. And when you've healed, and when you're free, you will know it because you no longer have any desire, any desire to go back to the behaviors or the person that you once were. It's like a snake that has completely shed its skin. It's not you anymore because it never was you. But to get to that place, there's a lot of work that has to happen. You got to wrestle with the dark recesses of your soul and really figure out who you are. It's a process of birthing the authentic self within so that you can stop jamming that square peg into a round hole and suddenly that peg fits perfectly.

And to get to that place means, you know, making peace with your past and mending those relationships and resolving these, you know, emotional wounds or overcoming these childhood traumas, to put it in Gabor's terminology, so that you can own your story, speak freely about it without shame, without being triggered emotionally. And with that comes a sense of not just self-esteem, but self-empowerment that allows you to then be this lighthouse who then is an attractive, you know, sort of person for somebody who is struggling or further down, you know, a couple of pegs further down on that path. But it doesn't come overnight and it doesn't come without, you know, you can't circumvent or find some way to growth hack that process. And think of the alternative. So you can just, you can continue.

No one is saying you have to do anything. You can stay on your train. You can stay on your train. And eventually, you yourself will become sick of it. Not because I say so or your parents say so or an authority figure of some kind says so, but because inside, you're not meant to suffer in that way. And you will wake up to it. And you will realize, this is unbearable. This is untenable for me. I'm going to have to change. What do I do? And it begins one day at a time. It doesn't happen overnight. It is a lot of work. But what are you doing in the meantime?

Being a human being, you think you came here and it's going to be easy? Whether you're an addict or anybody else on this planet, you think there's anybody who gets away from being human? I think we need to reconceptualize or redefine the word addiction in and of itself. I think that we think of addiction in terms of severe cases, the heroin addict or, you know, even the bulimic or something like that. But I think that the vast majority of people, if not everybody, falls somewhere on a spectrum of addiction. You know, how often are you checking your Twitter feed? Like, you know, why can't you stop going to the mall? How much ice cream are you eating? You know, what are you trying to resolve

within yourself through the relationship that you're in? Anything outside of yourself can be used as a vehicle for treating your emotional, you know, mental and spiritual state. And to the extent that you are doing that on even a very rudimentary level, there is an element, a kernel, a seed that is inherently addictive that can be redressed. Even if it's mild, it is there. Yes. There's no question that for me, this is a part of the human condition. And it may manifest itself in a variety of different ways and levels in different people. But at the end of the day, when you close the door and it's just you, you know. You know now. Here are the things I need to work on. Here are the things that are hard for me. Here are the pains I'm feeling.

Here's the difficulty of being me, the difficulty of being human. Like, you know what it is. And you know the things you do. The escape hatches that you look for every day to not sit still long enough to face those realities. Heal them. Well, first of of all you installed them so you know where they are

right they're in there somewhere maybe nobody else does but you know where they are yeah and the problem is you know the

the two two of the biggest addictions right now are the addiction to having the addiction to doing and you have to do to have so how can we convince people that actually the solution

is to stop looking for escape hatches and to sit still long enough to develop a true, a real and true relationship with yourself, a real and true comfort with yourself. with yourself. A real and true comfort with yourself. You can look for addiction and outlet. You can look for an escape hatch in anything.

You know it full well with athletics and you can go there. I've seen people use yoga as a full-on, full-blown way of avoiding themselves. So,

eventually we will be brought to stillness. And when we get there, it's an incredible day because we're like, wow, I'm contented just to be sitting still with myself. That's enough. Now most people never even could imagine such a place or imagine that they would want that for themselves taro isa capilla at four sigmatic on twitter is the co-founder president and marketing director of four sigmatic foods the company behind a wide variety of health promoting mushroom products he's also the author of a new book that came out this year called Healing Mushrooms. And this is excerpted from what I think is a mind-blowing

conversation about the mystical, magical, wellness-promoting properties of fungi with the original fungi himself, Taro, that will forever change how you think about mushrooms. So please enjoy this excerpt from rrp 320 with my friend taro isa coppola so let's go through it uh you know the more popular uh medicinal sort of adaptogenic mushrooms that you kind of uh are involved in are not just lion's mane but we've got shaga we've got reishi We talked about cordyceps a little bit. I mean, those are kind of the main ones, right? Yeah, those are the-

Let's parse those and what these do and why should we be including these in our diet? Yeah, so those are the most kind of research and most differentiated. And if you're in the health circles, you might have heard of reishi. But if you're just tuning in and you- Is it reishi or reishi? There's neither way and there's the you can it's a japanese word and uh you can say either way and but if you're tuning in and you're like hey what are these like i've never heard of any of them they sound so exotic i just want to before

we dive into what do they all of those do is just know that there are more familiar mushrooms that offer similar and equally good functional benefits the shiitake the maitake the enoki the oyster mushroom so not all of them are exotic as cordyceps but to just to kind of frame it um reishi or reishi is the queen of all mushrooms so it's probably it's the most studied of them for their health benefits. It's really like this motherly, calming, nurturing mushroom, especially good if you're highly stressed or if you need to improve your sleep quality. But all of these top mushrooms help with your gut health,

your gut biome. Reishi is great for that. They help with usually blood sugar you know and just managing but yeah gut health and immunity they're they're modulating your immune system but reishi particularly is this nurturing motherly uh calming mushroom and then there's pretty fascinating studies on how we could improve sleep quality so you can go into a deeper sleep and then cordyceps is even though neither of them are like sedative or stimulant, it's like somewhat the opposite.

It's like, it's like fire energy, go, go, go, like get more out of your workout, use for more of the lungs and the respiratory issues, but also sports and performance. And I actually in the, in, in, upcoming book there's a there's a recipe called quarter sex on the beach because it was used as an aphrodisiac for a long time so it's a kind of a playful fun way of making a mocktail and uh um using quarter steps as the as the booster but so that's like fire energy go performance one question I have about that is I use it not on a daily basis, but kind of pick and choose. Like, okay, I have a really big workout on Thursday, so I'll have it that morning. But I don't do it every day.

But I don't know, like, is it okay to do it every day? Or do you develop like a, not an immunity, but a tolerance to it? Like, is it something that should be for tolerance to it like is it something that is it should be for daily use or is it something that you should just use periodically so this adaptogen this concept of these 10 to 20 of the most studied powerful herbs and fungi in the world that balance our body um so the word adaptogen comes from it being helpful to adapt you to stress and difficult situation from exercise to just your normal daily life of being a mother to and to children or whatever.

Right. And just sorry to interrupt, but like in an Ayurvedic sense, it kind of reads your body and understands what's out of balance and correct and sort of naturally knows how to address that. That's exactly the point. So in order to be an adaptogen or as as diarrhea, they often like rasayana, or an emperor herb in China, or you have to be safe and non-habit forming.

So if it causes you an addiction, or if it's not safe daily, it cannot be an adaptogen. Second is what you just said, is it restores balance. So it's not really healing you of anything. It just restores balance, whatever the homeostasis and balance it is for your case.

So the same thing for someone might be a lot of energy and for the other person, it might be a lot of calming depending where you're on the spectrum. And then third one is that it's non-specific. So it works the body like a symphony versus an individual instrument. So those are things and um so yeah

cordyceps is um safe every day to answer your question that being said i all of these adaptogens i think they're better if you if you play with them seasonally and rotate them a little bit that being said the mushrooms have and actually oats in much smaller capacity, have one of the most studied compounds in the world called polysaccharides, these mini sugars. And even if you're on a ketogenic diet, they're not going to impact your blood sugar. But especially these beta-glugans

are among the most studied compounds for human health. And those beta-glugans are kind of like the chlorophyll plants in a way, the same ways that you don't have to eat spinach every day. You don't have to eat kale every day. But it's probably in your best interest to have chlorophyll in some capacity on a daily basis and on a regular basis. The same way it's probably good to have beta-glugans and polisaccharides every day but one day it can come from a shiitake one day it can come from cordyceps and then one

day it can come from goji berries or oats but um so it's safe every day but you're probably doing it the right way by just kind of rotating them a little bit i think that's an important point that has a macro application to how we live our lives and think about, you know, what we put in our bodies, because we have a tendency as human beings to, uh, you know, to want to just zero in on one thing and think that's the, you know, that is the, that's the thing that's going to make the difference. And those things tend to vacillate depending upon cultural trends. So for a while it's kale, you know, and then it's this, and then it's like, that's going to make the difference and those things tend to vacillate depending upon cultural trends so for a while it's kale you know it's this and then it's like that's the answer that's the thing and it's like it's not you know we as human beings and and part of this greater

ecosystem we are as cyclical as the plants that grow out of the the ground and i think we need to pay more attention to those circadian rhythms and modulate our our behavior patterns and our eating habits accordingly and i think that's a really important point so even though i'm you know gallivanting around the world talking and yelling about mushrooms and and i'm trying to be like a pr firm for this kingdom you're doing a good job oh thank you uh i at any point i don't want somebody to think that mushrooms are better than another kingdom or that mushrooms are like the ultimate superfood no they're just that's that doesn't that doesn't get clicks you know what i mean it's like in doing

my research for today it's like i look at the headlines of the press that you get it's like you know mushroom coffee is the new kale it's like yeah that's what gets people interested oh for sure and you know there's a value to that if you get it's like a conversation opener it's the same way as like i said like often on a daily basis somebody comes to me and it's like ha ha ha are these psychedelic or are these magic mushrooms never heard that joke yeah and so i mean if that gets the conversation going, let's roll with it. It's not a bad thing, you know. I'm sure you also don't want to be known as just this guy who does these ultra endurance feeds. But if that's a conversation starter to join you in a holistic. What gets people interested and what else you have to say.

Yeah, and like the whole lifestyle and just who are you as a father and and as a as a family man and and you know holistic and just you know spirituality and all that other stuff you have to offer but that might be the conversation starter is like right how many iron mans or you know it's like it's like um so the same with that is is mushrooms is is a kind of conversation starter you know i don't mind those headlines but as long as you kind of very quickly move the conversation to uh what they actually are is that they're a kingdom that is part of the planet the planet doesn't survive without them we probably will benefit the using them for our health and wellness um doesn't mean that all mushrooms are good and it doesn't

mean that mushrooms are better than good bacteria or good plants they're just part of a holistic smart lifestyle they're just very overlooked and there's like these immediate benefits and immediate clear things that you can get by just incorporating a little bit of them to your diet so that's probably going to help you live a life that you more want to live, you know, healthier life, more fulfilled life. Okay, next up, I've got the amazing, super cool, ultra athlete, humanitarian, Samantha Gash. She is so awesome. At Samantha Gash on Twitter. Samantha is somebody who is amazing for, I don't know,

I can't count how many reasons, but something I think is really cool about her is that she was somebody who had no athletic background, who then in a very short period of time became one of the most accomplished and inspirational female role models and ultra runners of our time. We had an amazing talk. We talked about self-belief, purpose, perseverance, the call to service, and the close kinship, the close relationship that exists between passion and suffering. Here's a slice from episode 311 with Samantha Gauch. What is it about, like on a broader level, like what is it about that suffering or that experience of pushing through?

You know, what is the allure and like, what does it mean to you? Like, what is it that you're connecting with and why does that give your life meaning? Do you know, I talk about this a bit in my like presentations but do you know the latin root of passion is to suffer i didn't know that yeah i love that and so often people go i'm so passionate i'm so passionate and i'm like oh are you willing to suffer the most in your life for that thing that you're talking that you're passionate about i, it doesn't need to be the thing that you do for your full time job. What we're passionate about can be fulfilled the most through the thing that we

do outside of work because we have the time and space and maybe financial freedom from our full time job. But I think when you are willing to suffer for something and you connect it for something that's for me outside of myself to a bit, that suffering doesn't seem so great anymore. I really do gain great perspective of it. I also choose when to suffer. Like I don't suffer. Like it's why I don't always race anymore because I know what it's like and how hard it is. And I want to make my footsteps count. And on the idea that maybe we don't have that many footsteps, And on the idea that maybe we don't have that many footsteps, what is the best use of my footsteps?

How do you think of the balance between mental and physical in terms of the strengths and requirements to tackle these types of events? I definitely think mental is a lot stronger. I've seen people who are physically very capable and pull out of these races the second day. And the worst thing about these races is you have to typically you have to stay with the race because you're in the middle of the sahara desert so you actually have to watch people complete the race that you dreamed about doing and time and time again i would see people and i just would see their like their head in their hands thinking why did I pull out at that

point like could I the thing is there's so many things you can do before pull out you can slow down you can take on more nutrition you can wait for someone to come and like bounce off their camaraderie um you can sit down for a moment but somehow all those alternatives become like we don't think of them when we're feeling in that crux of like discomfort and we're on the edge. We think our only solution is to completely take ourselves away from it. I can't actually remember what your question was. Well, it has to do with the mental game. Yes, I think.

And the barriers that we erect, I think, that prevent us from really connecting with our capabilities. Like, you know, David Goggins says it all the time. Like, he's got his 40% rule, you know, his famous 40% rule. Like, you know, when we think we're done, we've only tapped into about 40% of what we're truly capable of. And you meet that. Like, how do you – do you agree with that? Do you think of it differently?

I don't have a formula for it. But for me, I – for me i 41 or yeah 41 i'll be like damn mine's 43.5 percent i i definitely think mental plays a massive role in the creation of self-belief that you can do something like that and then the self-belief then requires you to have the commitment to do the training. So I think it starts with the mental side, but then that also empowers the physicality as well. But I think you have to really believe in yourself. You have to believe it's possible and you have to believe in your ability to do the hard work behind it. Have you had any of these kind of spiritual experiences that you hear about?

Like Dean talks about, you know, sort of having his visions when he becomes delirious and, you know, what is your, what is your kind of like ethereal connection to these endeavors? Oh, I don't know if I, in the expeditions, you have a couple of them. In India, I couldn't have been running in a more spiritual place. And, you know, I talked about spirituality a lot with my crew whilst I was out there because some of my crew were avid yogis and felt the departure of being out of practice yoga in a studio meant that they were void of their spirituality. And I said, spirituality isn't something, in my opinion, spirituality isn't something that you get in a room.

It's something that's inside you that you can bring into other parts of your life. And spirituality for me is to experience or to be part of what the majority of the population truly live their life like. And the way the majority of Indians live, daily survival, And the way the majority of Indians live, daily survival, moment by moment, not thinking ahead, to try and get into that frame mind takes me to my closest place of spirituality without a doubt.

And it's something that we're not used to. It's very hard to get to that. But these people live it not because of choice. And what does that spirituality look like for you like how do you how do you articulate that i think it's the it's when i actually stop fretting about what's to come and dwelling on what's past when i'm in the moment being in the moment now right i think that's how you you get through these ultras ultimately you know the more you can anchor yourself in the present that like fear of the future and reflection on how hard it's been or whatever difficulties you've had evaporates and allows you to just propel forward but and as i think i said earlier on but i don't

i i'm very careful when i choose to take myself there you know i don't not someone that just wants to beat myself into like discomfort all the time to constantly see what I'm capable of. Like I do back myself now. I know that I'm capable of going there, but I don't always need to go there. And I think that's something I've learned with maturity and getting a bit older. So then what is your relationship with balance? The balance is that I have to really believe in why I'm doing it to take myself there. And that, you know, my relationship with myself and my family and my partner and like my health and the pursuit of pushing the boundaries need to sometimes be moderately aligned.

And there'll be times when I push the boundaries out of the comfort zone a lot. So the last three years I've been doing that a lot with India and now I need to kind of like go back into like – The pendulum has to swing. It has to swing. It has to swing back so I can go back there and do it in the right way for the right reasons and with the right outcomes. So now I'm kind of like going back to that.

Yeah, you couldn't just launch right into the next thing. Yeah, which everyone goes, what's next? And I'm like, for the first time in my life, I felt comfortable going. Like for a moment, I tried to kind of say a few things because I've got ideas. Of course, I have ideas, but I'm like, no, there's no what's next. I'm just, I'm going to do little, I'm doing little micro adventures. I'm finishing my book, going to do little, I'm doing little micro adventures. Um, I'm finishing my book, which comes out next year. Um, we're going to make a document. We just got the funding

for the run India documentary. Well, I know that you made these amazing, there are these amazing videos on Vimeo that you can find on your, on your website. I believe those are, those were the ones produced by world vision, right? Those ones were produced by a guy called steve young who was hired by world vision um kind of at my request as the right person to come out on this expedition but there'll be a proper documentary proper documentary made by that guy who filmed that kind of content that's very cool and that was something that was hanging over me i'm like we have so much incredible content in the can that shows these stories of these people that we met and what we went through um it almost wouldn't be doing justice to the project to not be able to

showcase that stuff yeah beautiful so do you how is there an anticipated sort of release date for that or is it too early oh december oh wow so hopefully we'll um can take it into a couple of the film festivals um is jennifer then sort of taking a look at the footage? Are you in communication with her? I mean, Jennifer's one of my best friends now. I came to her wedding in Berkeley last year, and I'm going to go and visit her in San Francisco at the end of this trip. So she's definitely my soul sister

and has looked over every content that i've ever kind of put out and she's a very good guiding um i suppose figure for me on that stuff well we got to land this plane but uh i think the final thing i kind of want to explore with you is how you think about your role as a um you know as this sort of inspirational figure or role model for female empowerment. You know, this is a theme that kind of comes up from time to time on the podcast. And I kind of, my mantra, the thing I always say is like, there are amazing women doing amazing things all over the place. We don't do a very good job of shining a spotlight on them. And, you know, in America, the spotlight is keenly on the Kardashians and kind of all. And, you know, in America, the spotlight is keenly on the

Kardashians and kind of all kinds of, you know, figures that as a father of two young daughters, I would prefer my daughters don't model themselves after. And so I'm always so happy to be able to share the message of somebody who I think is a healthy role model and inspiring figure who is really empowering, you know, women and young women in particular, all over the world with your strength and your grace and your accomplishments. So how do you like think about how you carry that? I struggle with the word inspiration. I struggle with the word inspiration. When you get an email and somebody says you're such an inspiration, how does that make you feel? Like what is your emotional reaction to that? I used to cringe because maybe I think the places,

the people I'm inspired by are the ones that just do what they really believe in for the intention of doing the thing that they really believe in wholeheartedly. And then it's my choice to feel inspired by them, not because they've said that they're inspiring, but because they're doing something they really believe. And so if someone chooses to say, oh, I'm really inspired by your talk or what you did, like that's them, like that's how they choose to feel.

And that's awesome. But I guess I don't go about my business and I don't run across India with the objective of being inspiring. It's I'm doing this thing because I really believe it can make a tangible difference through a different type of way. And it's, I think it's soft, that run across India, I think was a really great example of soft diplomacy, which I think can be really effective. And if someone chooses to feel a certain way about it, I mean, yeah, of course.

But you're aware that that, you know, that this. But you're aware that this sort of sense about yourself is being cultivated. I mean, you go and you give talks at corporations and probably at schools and all kinds of places, right? So when you're delivering that message, what is the core idea that you're trying to communicate? Well, my core thing is to just show that I am really a normal person in the sense that I'm relatable, that anyone could make the choices that I've chosen to make and go down this path. It just comes from choice. And if I can open up people's minds to how they can pursue their choices, well, that excites me, particularly when it comes into the way of positively impacting the lives of other people one of the most impressive people i have ever met scott harrison at scott harrison on twitter is the founder and ceo of charity water which is this amazing non-profit that

is not only making a huge dent in solving the global water crisis, which is this massive problem, but is also this incredibly inspirational organization that has completely upended the whole charity sector altogether by redefining how we think about giving and ultimately how we give. I've become a proud supporter of Charity Water in the wake of this conversation, and I'm super grateful for all of your contributions over the past year. Together, we raised a whole bunch of money that ultimately is going to provide access to clean water for thousands of people for the very first time, with this amazing ripple effect on generations to come. I'm excited to share this excerpt with you. And if this is your

first introduction to Scott and to Charity Water and you want to learn more, please go back and listen to the full episode. That's episode 305. And go to charitywater.org to learn more about the nonprofit and to give. So without further ado, please enjoy this snippet with Scott Harrison. Without further ado, please enjoy this snippet with Scott Harrison. So let's talk about the water problem specifically. So a billion people, when you began this journey, lacking clean water. Most of that is sub-Saharan Africa. Is that correct, right?

And now that number's down to like... 660. Right, okay. Yep, 663 million. So it's sub-Saharan Africa. It's India. it's Southeast Asia, very little bit in Central and South America. Yeah, so the state of the crisis today, it's a tenth of the world. So one out of every ten people alive today is drinking bad water today

because of the circumstances they were born in. And this is kind of a profound concept that we've just wrestled with over the last decade now of charity water. And I was born in a middle-class family in Philadelphia. Water for me comes out of the tap. It's in bottles that we can afford. And in the places that we're working, women are often walking five, six hours a day to get dirty water from a swamp or a river, often risking their lives to do it. You know, I'll talk about the crisis. So if you don't have clean water, it makes you sick.

52% of the disease is because of bad water and sanitation. It's incredibly harmful to kids under five. So about a thousand kids will die today and every day just of drinking bad water. And you actually die of dehydration. So, you know, unheard of here in the West. Dysentery and diarrhea. That's right, because the way that you cure diarrhea is with clean water. We've all seen the Pedialyte, right? The kind of blue stuff at the Walgreens. Well, you don't have that.

So if your child gets diarrhea, you give them the same bad water, and they actually get so dehydrated that they just die worse so huge health implications worms parasites leeches uh bill hartsey a trachoma people go blind from water um huge education implications so uh at the time when we started i don't know the updated staff but when we started charity water 50 of the world's schools didn't have clean water or toilets so i'm sure there are people listening that education is their number one cause uh how can you imagine going to a school where there's no clean water or toilets and you've got to bring dirty river water with you and what was interesting was learning about how that that

has a disproportionate impact on young girls. On girls. And the toilets even more than the water because the girls will hit puberty and will stay home, you know, those four or five days every month, fall behind in their studies, you know, missing a week a month. And, you know, culturally, there's already resistance against them because they are the workhorse. They're the ones getting the firewood, doing the cooking, getting the water. Doing those eight-hour walks. Doing those eight-hour walks. Doing the eight-hour walks. And it really is.

For someone listening, it's just such a disconnect. It's so hard for us to fathom 663 million anything, an eight-hour walk. But that's what's happening. The women are getting up at four or five in the morning. They do the eight-hour walk, and then they come back for the second day of their work, cooking, cleaning, gardening, getting firewood. Yeah, it's just, it's really difficult to imagine that. So that's the third one, really, it's just time, just the amount of time wasted, there's health, there's education, 40 billion hours are wasted in Africa every year, just collecting water. So you think of the potential

there to turn that wasted time into productive time, whether it's family time, whether it's small business or entrepreneurial endeavors. We hear incredible stories when people get clean water. I've really seen a lot now over the years. I've been to 66 countries. I've been to Ethiopia 29 times since starting Charity Water. So a lot of my job is on the road, you know, stuck in, I don't know, seat 62H on a 14-hour flight. But it's the story probably that for me best personifies the water crisis or the emergency that is facing people is a story from Ethiopia of a woman named Leta Kiros. And I'd heard this story, let's say on my 24th or 25th trip to Ethiopia, staying in a crappy $5 a night hotel room with some donors. And the owner of the

hotel recognized me, comes in the lobby or this little restaurant that we were sitting in and says, hey, you know, I'm from a really remote village. Before I came into this town to run this hotel, there was this woman in my village and she used to walk eight hours with the other women. But one day she gets home and she slips and falls and she spills her water and she breaks her clay pot. So her whole eight hour walk is now undone he's like she hung herself from a tree and we found her body swinging there i remember he paused and he kind of watched the shock on our face and said uh the work you guys are doing is important he walks back into the kitchen i remember thinking definitely not true tell the you know white

international donor uh a sad story that makes them feel really good about the work. But it just nagged and gnawed at me. And is it possible that someone had committed suicide because they slipped on a rock and spilled their water? And I got a pass from my wife to go and explore this for myself and live in this village completely off the grid. I had to fly to Addis, fly up to the north, drive five hours and then rent a donkey and hike nine hours with a little solar backpack and a sleeping mat. And I found out it was true. I found 2,800 people living in this man's village called Meda. And they were walking eight hours to horrible sources. And, you know,

I met her mom, I met her friend, I walked in her footsteps, I saw the tree where they'd found and cut her down. I saw the little pile of rocks behind the church where her grave was. And I didn't know this at the time, but when I got to the village, I learned that she was only 13 when she died. She was a little girl. This wasn't a woman who'd walked her whole life and said, enough. This was a 13-year-old girl brimming with aspirations of wanting to get out of the village and wanting to be a doctor. And what was even more shocking was when I tried to figure out what the motivation was, her best friend said, well, she would have killed herself because of shame.

You know, she, she had screwed up. She'd spilled the water that the family needed to cook dinner. She'd broken the clay pot, which is a $3 asset. Um, so it would have just been too much for her to face her family because her carelessness would set them back. So, you know, you, you have an experience like that and you just, you're pissed off. I mean, you're fired up and I don't think there's anyone listening that thinks 13 year old girls should be hanging themselves from trees because they spilled their water after an eight hour walk. And, and, and, you know, the terrible irony is that in so many of these communities,

the solutions are simple. They're living on top of massive amounts of clean water. We're often able to drill 200 feet deep and get 10 liters per second of spring water. What the communities don't have access to is the $10,000 required to drill the well. They don't have access to a million-dollar drilling rig and compressors and trucks and hydrologists, which is what, you know, our community is able to provide. But the community will contribute stone and gravel and sweat equity.

Many of them will build roads over periods of months just to get the drilling rig into their village. They just don't have the money for the capital expense. Yeah, $10,000. And the transformation for the entire community is, you know, undefinable. Like, I heard you tell a story about a woman who said she feels beautiful now, you know, because she always had to make that decision. Where is this clay pot of water going to go? Is it going to go to my kids? Is it going to go to my husband to wash the clothes? And of course, never being enough to just sort of attend to her personal hygiene. Yeah, that's incredible.

And we never even thought of that, that water could restore a woman's dignity. We think of it typically in practical terms. But I was just in her village a few weeks ago, Helen Appio. And the women were all saying, we look so smart now, looking so neat because they, they have the water to, as you said, wash their clothes, wash their face, feel, feel beautiful. Next up is the super impressive Gretchen Rubin, at Gretchen Rubin on Twitter. Gretchen is many things. Former Supreme Court clerk turned Uber author. She is a member of Oprah's Super Soul 100. She was also named one of the most creative people in business by Fast

Company. She has sold over 3 million books on the subject of habits, happiness, and human nature. You might be familiar with her from her wildly popular blog, her runaway bestseller, The Happiness Project, or her new book, The Four Tendencies, which is the subject of this conversation, kind of the focus of this conversation, or, of course, her podcast, Happier with Gretchen Rubin. Here's a taste of episode 317

of the Rich Roll Podcast with Gretchen Rubin. Here's a taste from episode 317 of the Rich Roll Podcast with Gretchen Rubin. So the four tendencies are whether you're an upholder, a questioner, obliger, or rebel. So you and I are both upholders. So, and this has to do with how you respond to expectations. And all of us face two kinds of expectations. So there's outer expectations like meeting a work deadline, meeting a request from a friend. And then there's inner expectations. So, your own desire to keep a New Year's resolution, your own desire to start lifting weights again. So, upholders readily meet outer and inner expectations.

They meet the work deadline. They keep the New Year's resolution without much fuss. They want to know what other people expect from them and meet those expectations, but their expectations for themselves are just as important. Then questioners. Questioners question all expectations. They'll do something if they think it makes sense. So, they make everything an inner expectation. If it meets their inner standard, yeah, this makes sense, then they will do it, no problem. If it fails their inner standard, they will reject it. They tend to hate anything arbitrary, inefficient, unjustified. So, they always want to know why they should do something. Then there are obligers. Obligers

readily meet outer expectations, but they struggle to meet inner expectations. And I got my insight into this when a friend of mine said, I don't understand it. I really want to go running. And when I was in high school, I was on the track team, and I never missed track practice. So, why can't I go running now? Well, when she had a team and a coach waiting for her, she had no trouble showing up. But when she was just trying to go on her own, she struggled. And then finally, rebels. Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike. They want to do what they want to do in their own way, in their own time. If you ask or tell them to do something, they are very likely to resist. And typically, they don't even like to tell themselves

what to do. Like, they wouldn't sign up for a 10 a.m. yoga class because they're like, I don't know what I'm going to want to do at 10 a.m. So, those are the four tendencies. Now, you and I are upholders, and that's pretty unusual because the biggest tendency for both men and women, the one the biggest number of people belong to is a blighter. That's big. Second to them is questioner, also very big. Rebel is the smallest tendency. It's the longest chapter in the book, but it's the smallest tendency. It's the one the fewest people belong to. But our tendency, upholder tendency, only slightly larger. Those are the two kind of extreme polar tendencies, and they're pretty small. Not

that many people are rebels or upholders. Right. So before we get into the particulars of these four different personality types and the pros and the cons and kind of what we're supposed to do with this information, how did you arrive at this? How did it dawn upon you? Is this the result of just a continuing pursuit into the depths of what make people tick? Did you have like an epiphany? Did it come to you slowly? Well, both. I started picking up these patterns.

So my friend said that thing about the track team. And that really got me thinking like, well, what's going on? Because it's the same person. It's the same behavior. Like, why was it at one time effortless and now she can't do it? And let me just interrupt you to ask you this. When you hear that as an upholder, what is your reaction when somebody tells you that well see that's what's interesting and that's why i think it was an advantage to me to be an upholder in figuring

out this framework because to me i was like i don't understand that yeah that didn't make like i'm like just get on with it yeah yeah it's like i'm like that's interesting because i don't experience that and also people were saying other things that I was like, I don't experience that. So, like, when I would talk to people about New Year's resolutions, because I wrote this book Better Than Before that's all about habit change. So, I was talking to people about, I would also often ask people about New Year's resolutions as a way to get into their habits. And a certain number of people would give exactly the same answer.

They would say, I would keep a resolution whenever it made sense to me, but I wouldn't do it on January 1st because January 1st is an arbitrary date. And that really struck me because I was like, well, the arbitrariness of January 1st never bothered me. Then there were people who would say things like, well, why is it that busy parents like us can't take time for ourselves? And I would think, well, I'm a busy parent, but I don't have any trouble taking time for myself. And then there were some people who just, like when I talked about habits, to me, the idea of habits is energizing and freeing. I love the idea of a life full of habits. But some people were repelled by the idea of habits. Like, you could tell that the whole idea of trying to form habits was repugnant to them. And I was like,

so weird. They see the world so differently from me. So, all these things were sort of running through my head simultaneously. I had no idea how they fit together or if they were part of a pattern. And then one day, I was just glancing down at my to-do list, which was like, you know, all messy, half things crossed off, half things that I still needed to do. And all of a sudden, this idea jumped out at me, expectations. And I realized that was at the core of all these things. And once I focused on expectations, and I saw that was at the core of all of these things. And once I saw, once I focused on expectations, and I saw that it was outer expectations and inner expectations, then everything started sliding into place. All these patterns began to fit together and make

sense. And so, it was like I was pondering, pondering, pondering, kind of wandering around my head for months, and then suddenly it just clicked when I thought of the word expectation. And there can only be four, right? Because there's only four permutations of expectations that are either motivated, stimulated internally or externally. Yes. It's sort of like inner-inner, outer-outer, inner-outer, outer-inner. Those are the four. There can only be four because those are the four combinations. Did you wake up in the middle of the night and jump up and down? Well, you know, I was sitting there and part of it, too, was at first I was trying to make it into a two-by-two.

And I couldn't get it to work out two-by-two because it's like, how do they fit together that way? When I realized it was a Venn diagram of the overlapping circles, that showed me how they all fit together. Because, like, they touch each other so you and i are both upholders well upholders are like questioners and that we both resist that we both um meet inner expectations but upholders are also like obligers and then we also meet outer expectations so it showed me the relationship of the four how how they really intersect with each other um so that was another big breakthrough is when I realized it was a Venn diagram and a diamond shape of circles. It was like the visual. And then you constructed this test, this quiz. Yes.

And how many people have- I mean, I'm coming up on a million people. That's so crazy. Soon. Yeah. Happiercast.com slash quiz. If you want to take the quiz. Everybody should take it if you're not sure where you fall on this and so you have this massive data set yeah and i'm interested in in you know as you kind of dig into that are most people some combination of the two or are there people that are just purely you know in one camp like how does that look and break down well from my observation people almost everybody really is within one core tendency.

But like you say, you can kind of tip because you could be, like, say my husband's a questioner. He's a questioner. Now, some questioners kind of tip to upholders because upholders and questioners both meet inner expectations. But some questioners tip toward rebel because like rebels, they both resist outer expectations. And so, the flavor of your questionerness can change depending on whether you tipped one way or the other. So, it's not that you're a mix, but you sort of are leaning in one direction. You're tipping towards an adjacent tendency. But I really do think that people fit within a core tendency. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And let's talk a little bit about the pros and cons of each of these. I

mean, to me, like if I take rebel, or let's take questioner, like it's kind of easy to discern the pros. I mean, to me, tell me if I'm wrong, but a questioner who's going to ask a lot of questions, that's good because they want to make sure they're making the right decision and that's going to be based on logic and what's best for them. Yeah. But questioners, I would imagine, can also end up in some form of paralysis as a result of not being able, they just keep asking questions. Analysis paralysis.

And use that, like, allow that, you know, questions can be fear, right? Yeah. They're just afraid to move forward. As long as they keep asking questions, they have an excuse to not actually do anything. Yeah. Well, you see this in something like exercise where it's like, well, I have, like, I don't know what the most efficient, the very best thing. So, I'm going to do this exercise.

What shoe should I get? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I feel these questions all the time. Which watch? What's the heart? You know, and it's like, and they're going to research that forever. And days are going by where they could just go outside and at least go for a walk so if you're a questioner who's dealing with this or you or you're or you're around a questioner one of the

things you can do is you can remind them at a certain point it's not efficient so you know because efficiency is such a deep core value for questioners remind them at some point it's better to just start exercising than to find like the mythical perfect form of exercise or it's better to just get a shoe you don't need to get the perfect shoe you can also do things like hit hit um set deadlines like i'm going to decide by friday like best guess by friday or i'm going to visit i'm going to go to these three stores where the people you know um i'm going to look at this i'm going to look at these choices i'm not going to go every single place in the city or you could use go to a trusted authority you could say say like, okay, this person I know really thinks things through, does their research. If something is good enough for this person,

it's probably going to be good enough for me. I'm not going to just slavishly do what they say, but I'm going to be very guided by their judgment. I don't have to research this from the ground up. I can like take what they say and think about whether that's good enough for me. So, there's ways to sort of intervene in this analysis paralysis once questioners realize that realize that they're experiencing it because sometimes they don't realize that they've fallen into this black hole of Why why why why why but getting somebody like that to respond respond to a boundary requires them to be responsive to? external a boundary requires them to be responsive to external uh external motivators right well what what they're really responding to is their own inner sense of efficiency like at a certain point

you're just like you know what like you're just you haven't exercised in a year like you you've been researching it for a long time like you know you really need to start exercising so why don't you say that by the end of the week you're going going to pick a shoe, you're going to pick a class, you're going to pick a mechanic. And also what you can remind, questioners tend to love to customize and they love to experiment on themselves. So, you can say like, well, you know, this is the way people typically do it, but if you want to tweak it, tweak it the way you want. Or, you know, why don't you try it as an experiment and then you're going to learn something about yourself. Okay, try this form of training. If it doesn't work, then you can move on to something else, but you'll learn something about yourself.

These are the kinds of things that appeal to questioners, and so they can get them moving past that starting point if they're getting stalled out. Interesting. Did you do any probing into kind of the emotional underpinnings that create these archetypes, like the psychology behind it? Like, is it nurture? Is it nature? I think it's nature. Can these things behind it? Like, is it nurture? Is it nature? I think it's nature. Can these things be changed? Like, they're just set in stone? I think that they're genetically hardwired. I think we bring them into the world with us. I

don't think they're a function of upbringing or culture or birth order or anything like that. Now, the question about whether you can change, I think what you can do is with time and experience and wisdom, you can learn how to harness the strengths of your tendency and then offset the weaknesses and limitations. Because all of these tendencies have strengths and weaknesses, and they're the same. It's like the strength is the weakness. So, you can figure out ways to kind of hack yourself so that you don't, you're not hobbled by the weaknesses of your tendency.

I think it's very, it's, is it possible to change your inner nature? I mean, people dispute that. I think if it is even possible, it's extremely difficult, but it's very easy to change your circumstances. So, I'm like, don't worry about, like, trying to change your inner nature and trying to change your fundamental tendency. If that's even possible, it would be extremely difficult and take a long time. Take the simple, easy way and just figure out a way to deal with it. Like if you're a questioner and you're stalling out, don't try to turn yourself into a different tendency. Just say like, hey man, decide by Friday. Or, you know, I'm going to just, you know, here, my brother-in-law is like been doing this for years. I'm just going to do whatever my brother-in-law does and take it from there. Like I'll start,

I'll try it that way. If it doesn't work, then I'll have learned something, but I just need to get myself going, you know, rather than trying to fundamentally change your, you know, relationship to the world. Right. Yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, as I was, you know, kind of absorbing these ideas, it made me reflect back on my own path. Like, I've undergone a tremendous amount of change, professionally, emotionally, like a lot of change in my life over the last 10, 20 years. But I didn't change my core fundamental nature. Right, right. But I think what I was doing, and I think this might be something that's common to a

lot of people, is I was structuring my life in accordance with a tendency that was not my core. You know what I mean? Yes. in accordance with a tendency that was not my core. You know what I mean? I put myself in a situation that didn't allow me to fully embody and express the positive aspects of that core nature and that tendency. But see, this is the most important thing. Like you put your finger right on the key thing,

which is we all have to construct the life that's right for us. There is no one best way. There's no magic one sizesize-fits-all solution. Because what works for you isn't going to be what works for me. Because you and I are different. And so we always have to begin, if we want to be happier, healthier, more productive, more creative. It's like, okay, well, what kind of person are you?

Where do you thrive? What works for you? And not to try to jam ourselves into somebody else's conception of what we should be able to do or what is the best thing to do. It's like it doesn't matter what works for somebody else or what you should be able to do. It's like it only matters what works for you. And sometimes it makes me sad because people will say, well, I don't like being my tendency. And I'm like, all these tendencies have huge numbers of people in them. There's nothing wrong with you.

You don't lack self-control or willpower. You don't need to change who you are. You just need to set things up in a different way. And then you'll get to be able to go wherever you want to go. It's like, you don't need to change yourself. You don't have to feel bad about yourself. You just have to figure out how to work with yourself. All right. How are you guys doing? Are you settled in? Are you engaged? I think we're about halfway through at this point. Are you feeling good? Good, because the next clip is super amazing. It's with my friend Colin Hudon,

at Colin Hudon on Instagram. Colin is this amazing healer. He is a physician of traditional Chinese medicine and Taoist arts. He's also an herbalist, an acupuncturist, a tea master, and the founder of Living Tea, livingtea.net, which is this enterprise whereby he travels to all these amazing places all over Asia and imports the best, most exotic living teas to make them available to all of you. This clip is really powerful and it's excerpted

from Colin's presentation on living in alignment with nature that he delivered during our Plant Power Ireland retreat this past summer. I think you're going to want to listen to the entire presentation. If you missed it the first time around or you're new, to do that, it's episode 319. Go back and listen to it. In the meantime, please enjoy this clip with Colin Hudon. The beginning of Chinese medicine came from these emperors or aristocrats or different people in China trying to figure out how to live forever, how to have greater virility and strength or

power in the bedroom or wisdom or insight or knowledge. And the basis out of which all the practices came, Tai Chi, Qigong, meditation, herbs, different foods, they were attempting to find a way to optimize health. So it was really a study of health. And with Western medicine, it's really a study of both the functioning of the body, but also of disease.

And so in all my Western medicine classes, the emphasis was on pathology of the body and how to treat the disease. But it wasn't on how to optimize health. So we have some doctors in the room and some physicians, and that's an ongoing dialogue that would be an interesting one to talk about. But I ultimately came across a guy named Sun Tzu Miao. You know you're a real geek when your hero is, you know,

somebody who lived in the 600s or the 800s and was an old Chinese guy who broke the mold by living to 104 at a time when people died at like, you know, 30 years old. But he developed a philosophy that he calls Yang Sheng, which means nourishing life. And his belief and his ideas were about how do you really nourish health? How do you optimize health? How do you find out what would be customized and optimized for an individual

to be really robust and healthy and to extend their years, extend their life? And so those ideas are kind of the basis of Chinese medicine. So I'm hesitant to go too deep into Chinese medicine right now, because I think I'll start to lose people except for those who are really excited about it. But the basic idea is that we have this concept of yin and yang, which everybody here, you know, we have the sun and the moon and male and female and day and night and on and on and on. And that they're in a constantly cycling process of transformation and change. That movement is constant.

And life is movement. It's constantly in a state of change. And that it works in cycles. You know, we observe what we call the five seasons in Chinese medicine, the cycles of life from early age to, you know, puberty to early adulthood, etc. And the cycles throughout a day. And these ideas that different organs in the body are controlled by different elements. So, for example, the wood element corresponds to the liver and gallbladder, the fire element to the heart and small intestine, etc.

And so Chinese medicine is based on balancing these five elements. And it's also about looking at what are called the eight principles. And I'll describe that really briefly because it's actually got a practical application that you can think about in terms of your life. So when we look at a disease in a person, we look at is it internal and how deep in the body, or is it external, out towards the surface? We look at cold and heat, which you could think of as like inflammation or as a lack of circulation. Is it a cold condition in the body or is it something that's an inflammatory,

more heat condition? We look at deficiency and excess. So we look at is there a deficiency of an organ or an organ system or is there something excessive happening? A simplified example would be like hypothyroidism versus hyperthyroid. A simplified example would be like hypothyroidism versus hyperthyroid. And then based on those, we determine if a condition is a yin condition or a yang condition. So we look at that, and then we look at conditions like atmospheric, like wind, dryness, fire, cold, heat, dampness, which is like phlegm in the body. And we look at this relationship between nature out there,

the macrocosm, and nature inside, which is a microcosm. And we look to harmonize those so that a person's in balance. So a big part of that is living in balance with nature. It means eating foods that are truly seasonal, foods that are grown in the region where you are, taking herbs to help support and balance the body. In the summertime, we have more daylight. It's a very active, young, fiery time, so it's a time of far more activity.

Whereas in the middle of the winter, it's a time for sleep and introspection and quietude. And so it's also living in accordance with these cycles of nature. And that by doing that over time, you become harmonized between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and that constitutes real health, real true health. That also means that you're living in accordance with what I'd say are natural laws. in accordance with what I'd say are natural laws.

And we at this point in history are so far profoundly, so far away from living in those natural laws because we have artificial light. We're very young in the West, so it's like work more, longer, all the time, nonstop. It's a very fiery, young culture. And in a lot of ways, it's out of balance. And if you look at what's going on in the world right now, and a lot of the dysfunction of the world, I think it's because of these imbalances on a collective level. So where I'd like to end and then open it up to some questions is I'm working on a book which are, it's based on what I call the 12 vitalities or the

12 healths. And there are aspects of what I think it means to really live in health in a healthy way. But you can strip it down to five. So I'll leave you with five for today. The first is sleep. The second, diet. The movement, the fourth meditation, and the fifth tea. So I'm just going to say a little bit about each of those. There's actually a great book on sleep by Arianna Huffington that was just published recently. It's fantastic. My basic idea towards sleep is that different people have different needs and that we should sleep in accordance with the season. In the summer, you can stay up later and

rise earlier. In the winter, I think it's really important to actually get more sleep. If you go back and you look at a lot of the older Chinese the writers in Chinese medicine their ideal is to go to sleep with the Sun and wake up with the Sun I think the likelihood of most of us in here going to bed at 6 p.m. in the middle of winter is probably not very high but I do know that there have been times in my life where I really try to live closer to that and you feel absolutely extraordinary like we were saying the other night when we were adjusting to jetlag and we got like 12 13 hours of sleep one night you just feel like a superhuman the next day you know you feel like you could probably fly if you focused on it or something so I think sleep is so fundamental in

people who are having a lot of insomnia it's indicative of something going on either psycho-emotional or physiological in the body. Chinese medicine, both through needles and herbs, can be incredibly effective with insomnia. And then there are occasionally anomalies where there's something else going on, like sleep apnea or what have you. The other thing I want to say about sleep is it's incredibly important to be in a really calm space as you fall asleep, a really calm space as you fall asleep, a really calm and positive and peaceful state. Oftentimes we're like flipping through Instagram and then we're like, okay, time to go to bed. And so you're bringing in like way more

stimulation than anybody in human history has ever taken in. And all of those are impressions. All those impressions are going in, you know, our subconscious takes in 40 million bits of information a second, whereas the conscious mind only takes in like 10 or 12 or something like that. So you're taking all this information, like stuffing it into the subconscious and then going to sleep. And that's affecting your dream state. And who knows what other, in other ways, it's affecting you. So there's also the Taoists have explored dreaming a lot

and lucid dreaming. I've met some people who say that there's no difference between when they go to bed at night and when they're awake in the morning. In other words, they have 24 hours, and they say at night because they're not bound to the physical body, they're doing Tai Chi up in the clouds and who knows what other practices. And all of the people I've talked to about those kind of practices say there's something fundamental.

Tibetan Buddhism, they have a practice called Jogen, which is the same thing, it's dream practice, they say. All of them agree on one thing, which is that you have to get yourself into an incredibly deep meditative state before you fall asleep, consciously. So not accidentally, I'm really tired and I fall asleep, but to do some form of meditation

to quiet the mind before you go to bed. And to set the intention, I want to wake up tonight, or I want to remember my dreams. One way to do that also is when you wake up, immediately write down your dreams and over time it will start to create an effect that you remember them more easily. We're not going to go into dream psychoanalysis right now, but there's a lot to be said there too.

So that's it on sleep. There's a lot you can say about it, but I'd recommend that book, uh, by Ariana Huffington. Okay. Okay. So there you go. Just listen to Richard's podcast if you haven't already. Um, so the second one is diet. And, uh, I mean, I eat a vegan plant-based whole foods, organic diet. I make most of my own food. So obviously I'm a believer that you can have a very healthy vegan diet. Uh, but I do think that people sometimes have to customize. I think sometimes they need to supplement with Chinese herbs,

um, and, or to take sometimes some supplementation like B12 and iron and things and getting enough fats. But what I would say is to focus on organic and to eat seasonally. The earth produces the food that we need in the region we are to keep us in balance with nature and that environment and that climate. There's a reason that root vegetables grow in the middle of the wintertime, right? Or that apples grow in the fall or they're ripe. Nature is very intelligent and communicative. And, uh, you know, just because we can't eat mangoes in the middle of winter from Brazil or wherever, it doesn't mean we A true renaissance man and honestly one of my favorite people on planet Earth, Dan Buettner, at Blue Zones on Twitter, is a National Geographic fellow. He is a world adventurer. He is a longevity expert. And he is the New York Times bestselling author behind a

couple books you've probably heard of. The first of which is The Blue Zones, which evaluated the hows and whys behind the world's longest living cultures. And his new book, The Blue Zones of Happiness, which applies the same or a similar scientific methodology to determining the factors that contribute to the world's happiest cultures.

So this conversation was all about the extent to which your environment and lifestyle choices impact your happiness, what you can do to design your surroundings to stack the deck in favor of happiness, and also the impact of Dan's work on improving health and happiness in cities across the United States. Like I said, I love this man. I love this conversation. So please enjoy this brief excerpt from RRP 323 with Dan Buber. You know, you find these kind of silly articles about the 100-year-old who ate three eggs

a day and smoked cigars and drank liquor and uh had a six-year-old everybody loves those stories yeah but they they're they're hugely misleading because a centenarian no more knows how he or she got to live to 100 than a tall man knows how he got how he got to be tall the right way to do it is you have to find a population that has achieved either highest centenarian rate, highest life expectancy, or lowest rate of middle-age mortality. Once you identify the population, then you can find out what this whole group of people do. Because about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes. The other 80 80 is lifestyle and

environment so if you find a centenary it might just be because he or she won the genetic lottery and they can abuse their body for 100 years and still make it to 105 but that doesn't mean they have any useful lessons for us if you want useful lessons you have to find whole verified population reverse engineer and the big aha rich the big epiphany after almost a decade was places where people are making it to 100 and still water skiing or standing on their head or doing karate it's not because they tried it's not because at age 50 they got on a special diet or started taking a supplement or started running marathons. In all cases, longevity happened to these people. It was a residue of the right environment, an environment that nudges them into doing the right things all day long. And with that insight, we went about creating a program

that would help entire American cities live longer, not by trying to convince 800,000 people to change their habits and eat their veggies and get their exercise, but rather by shaping their environment so they're mindlessly and relentlessly nudged into doing the right thing rather than the wrong thing. Right. So healthy lifestyle is a byproduct of the environment, not a byproduct of conscious

decision making. It's an extrapolation of what's available to you at arm's length. It's the convenient choice as opposed to the more difficult or more expensive choice. That's right. So you have Herculean discipline. I mean, these ultra-marathons that you do that inspire so many people, they are for sure a positive force, but most people, if you look at the research,

who start off and start running marathons, they're no longer running marathons in two years. People who start off on a diet, no matter how much resolve they have on day one, 90% of them are off by the seventh month. And what do you, before we move off this point, like what do you make of that? Like what do you before we move off this point like what do you make of that like

what do you extract from that simple fact that people have trouble sort of staying on point our our minds are hardwired for novelty so we we crave new things uh our our attention can last only so long discipline is a muscle and muscles. And eventually you kind of revert to the mean of what you're doing or the baseline of what you're doing. So if you want that baseline, if you want people to perform better, eat better, move better, socialize better, have more purpose, you need to raise the baseline. You need to optimize the environment, which is exactly what we set out to do. And so when you go into these cities or you go to Hawaii, what are the talking points? How do you shift that paradigm?

First of all, the cities have to want us. So instead of a riot, we don't have a sales force. Cities come to us all the time. And we say, if you're sick of seeing 70% of your population overweight and unhealthy, we have a solution. But you have to prove to us, A, you're ready of seeing 70% of your population overweight and unhealthy, we have a solution. But you have to prove to us, A, you're ready for it, sort of politically. B, you have to show us your leadership works well together. And C, we have to collectively figure out a way to pay for it. Because the only way you make these changes is if I can get a full-time staff in there from three to five years? I would imagine it requires the political will to invest in the long term, right?

Because it's not about the next election cycle with whoever is mayor or governor or what have you. Like they have to think what is in the best interest of our electorate, of our population. And it's a solution that's not going to manifest itself overnight or in the next two years, perhaps even. It's going to require probably a large investment of capital and a long-term vision to raise that mean for everybody so that eventually everybody prospers. But it's not like a click-baity kind of immediate solution to what ails a particular urban environment. It's focusing on permanent or semi-permanent changes to the environment. And it also requires the political will.

You know, America, we have this obsession with freedom. And in order to be successful, we have to come into a city where they're prepared to limit our freedoms to do unhealthy shit. That's the kind of the bottom line. I wouldn't put it that way to them. But at the end of the day, we're trying to limit their access to junk food. We're trying to limit their access to always getting in cars. We're trying to limit the occasion where they're going to implode into their devices. So in every city, I have three teams, three squads, full-time. One squad just works with city council to adopt food policy that favor fruits and vegetables over junk food. That works with the built environment city planner to design their cities for humans, not just cars.

You can raise the physical activity level of the whole city by 30% by just making parks accessible, providing bike lanes, providing public transportation, provide means to walk places, to limit sprawl. And then lastly, we have an alcohol policy bundle, which brings in the evidence-based best practices to limit access to alcohol, not cut it off altogether. not cut it off altogether. The second squad goes to every restaurant, grocery store, workplace, and school with a Blue Zone certification program, which makes those environments 20% healthier. And we recognize them and drive traffic to them. And the third squad works with individuals to help individuals optimize their home. So their kitchens aren't as accessible to junk food, to optimize their social networks so they're making three or four new friends who are plant-based eaters and who recreate with physical activity, and then to know their sense of purpose and put it to work by volunteering. So when you bring all three of those together, you create the perfect storm. With enough intensity, three to five years, in every single city we see obesity dropping down and happiness going up.

Former American College of Cardiology President Kim Williams, MD, at Cardio Tennis on Twitter, 10S, Cardio 10S, as in Cardio Tennis. Get it? He's a tennis player. as in cardio tennis, get it, he's a tennis player, is one of the most inspiring, intelligent, and pioneering leaders in the growing movement to modernize how we think about, treat, avoid, and prevent our most onerous threat to human health, which is heart disease. And the impact of things like nutrition and lifestyle

have on heart disease's onset prevention and ultimately its reversal. This is an incredible conversation with a highly intelligent man. It's powerful. It's potent. I think it's important. So if you're new to the show, I encourage all of you to go back and listen to the full discourse. That's episode 325. In the meantime, in the interim, please enjoy this slice with Dr. Kim Williams. Please enjoy this slice with Dr. Kim Williams. I think you said there was I saw a quote from you like my job is to put cardiologists out of business.

That's exactly right and you know it would take a while and I have to say that it's timely. It would be great if other organizations were focused on these things as much as we do because and you know inside and outside of medicine because last year was the first time in 40 years that cardiovascular disease deaths in the country went up. And that is just something that we just can't abide by. We're always bragging about this decreasing curve. It's about 50% over 40 years in cardiovascular mortality. And it's bypass surgery and statins and beta-bloggers and AIDS

and all these medications for heart failure and decreasing sudden death because we put in defibrillators that shock people when they have a fatal arrhythmia and they come back to life. And we were so proud of all this stuff. And then the American population somehow has overcome. Making an end run around this, no matter what you do. Exactly. And when the CDC put those numbers out there, they said it was obesity and diabetes that's

driving it. And that's a nutrition. And so the fundamental issue that we've been dealing with for the last so many years is really at the core of all we do. And it will uproot and undo any success that we can do with devices and medications. Yeah, it's got to be a shift in priorities and focus, because it is amazing to reduce by 50% the mortality rate of people who are suffering from heart disease as a result of all this amazing science and technology.

heart disease as a result of all this amazing science and technology. But if that comes at the cost of really addressing the fact that the incidence of people who are becoming patients in the first place, then you're waging a losing war. Yep. Well, ultimately, yeah, everyone's going to get older and they're going to pass away at some point. Wouldn't it be nice if we were as healthy as possible until that happened and not have these chronic diseases that are completely avoidable by lifestyle? We would like to have more comparative data, but we have some. And it does say that that principle that you can't exercise your way out of a bad diet, there's some truth to that. I mean, you can mitigate a bad diet, but you're going to have a bad outcome ultimately. It's not going to absolve you.

And so I would say that nutrition is the most important decision that we can make. If we could change one thing, it would be to have heart-healthy information coming out and have that be a real definition. to have heart healthy information coming out and have that be a real definition. And so for the individual patient, finding out where they are and seeing what are the elements that are going to create more and more diseases similar to what brought them to my office in the first place. And I understand that this is not primary care, this is not family practice, these are people who already have heart disease when they're seeing me. And so I have a little easier job because they're already motivated. The fact

that they're in my office means that they're motivated to try to make some kind of change. They're expecting to come out of there with something different that's going to change their outcome. Not every physician has that advantage, but it's something that we all should take advantage of because almost everyone has had a family member who suffers from heart disease or has had heart disease or has sudden cardiac death. And so just trying to get them to understand that there is a relationship between your lifestyle and your outcome. Just make that connection. If we could do that, we would all be so much better off. Right. It's a great answer. And the final one, if you were to wake up in some strange parallel universe to find yourself the new Surgeon General, what's the first thing that you put in motion?

That's a good one. The previous Surgeon General was a good friend of mine, Regina Benjamin. She was very concerned about – she's African American, as you might recall, and she was very concerned about the delivery of health care and getting health equity. I would really want to continue the momentum that she had started in terms of getting people to understand the whole impact of healthcare disparities. We actually, and it's interesting that it's racial segregation and educational depression and all sorts of things that led to these healthcare disparities, not just genes, okay?

All of this can actually be improved by lifestyle. And if we could get that word out there, there was a wonderful analysis of this published in Circulation in 2015 called the REGARDS trial. If you look on their website and try to find the paper, it's buried in like 200 publications that they did. They're just so good at getting stuff out there. But the REGARDS study was looking at racial and ethnic risk for stroke. And what they found is not just stroke, it's stroke, heart attack, and death. And it is related to diet. And that southern diet, the African American, southern meaning the south side of Chicago, as far as I'm concerned, because that's what we were eating there. That diet is so damaging that if you could just fix the nutrition, the gap in healthcare

disparities would change almost on a dime. So there's this documentary, it's called Icarus. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past year, 2017. It was just shortlisted for this year's Oscars, the Academy Awards. And I saw it on Netflix several months ago, and it blew my mind. I just, I couldn't get it out of my awareness, of my consciousness. It's this incredibly powerful, gripping expose of Russian state-sponsored doping in Olympic sport that will forever color your perception of sport, of clean sport, of competition. After watching this movie, I was determined to get the filmmaker on the podcast to tell me more. You guys should all definitely check out this documentary. to tell me more, you guys should all definitely check out this documentary. And I was able to accomplish that.

So here is a slice of my conversation from episode 328 of the podcast with Icarus director, Brian Fogel. You're seeing that the actual organizations that are in charge of enforcing the rules really are going to do nothing that is actually in the best interest of the clean athletes and only protect their own business interests. And so it's been pretty… It's very disheartening. Disheartening because what it is doing is it's setting a message. It's sending a message to every athlete who grows up believing in the Olympic ideal. That, you know, as a kid, I know that I had this or anybody who was really serious about sport. You grow up and believing in this Olympic dream that you're going to somehow go to the Olympics, and you're competing under peace and harmony. And it doesn't matter whether you're Russian or American or from

India or from China, the world is coming together to compete. And it's all in the spirit of sport. And then what I've come to realize and what the film shows is what George Orwell clearly said is that sport is war without the weapons. And these Olympic Games or World Cup soccer, et cetera, are essentially just a place for a country to go to war with each other and assert its geopolitical and power through sport. Right. And these athletes are in essence gladiators for their country and the case of Russia and this program that went for 40 years in the case of the Sochi Olympics Russia has been using its sport program to assert itself geopolitically and show dominance and power so if you can go in and win the olympics you're actually showing that you're strong that you're powerful and and those olympic medals are

almost in place of its of its nuclear warheads or what it can do on a geopolitical level and and that is what countries are viewing the Olympic Games as. It's not about a country going in and competing peacefully and in harmony of sport. It's about hegemony. It's about going in and you look at those Beijing Olympics in China. And Gregory has told me repeatedly that he got the idea to swap out the urine, essentially from the Chinese at the Beijing Olympics. Now, these are allegations. I have no knowledge of this, but according to Gregory,

according to what Gregory told me, is that in China, the way that the system was set up is that the athletes who were reporting for the drug testing the chinese athletes would go and report to essentially chinese agents and these agents would give these athletes clean urine so when they went in to be tested and they you know and there's an inspector there watching them essentially pee uh that that these athletes had been given clean urine. And that's why none of the Chinese athletes tested positive. And if you look at the Beijing Olympics, China swept the Beijing Olympics. They won more medals than any other country. But you, again, you look at the geopolitics of that.

And what was on the line for China? It was China's coming out party to the world. It's 2008 and China is showing that not only can they pull off an Olympics, and those Olympic Games were incredible, what they did with the opening ceremonies and closing ceremonies. We've never seen anything like that in Olympic history. Not only can they pull off the Olympics, not only are they a global superpower, but they can win. And if they can win in sport and they can win in Olympics, what does this say about business? What does this say about war? What does this say about military strength,

et cetera, et cetera? And you look at that and then you draw the analogy to Sochi or all the other games. Of course, the 1936 games in Berlin was one of the pivotal moments in the rise of the Third Reich and of German nationalism and pride. And Hitler used those games to consolidate his power. And so we're seeing the replicating that in each one of these games where a country is using these games to basically assert itself on a geopolitical level. Yeah, and there's no political will for the truth to come out because the stakes are too high and the ramifications of that would be too disruptive. But when you see a situation like you've presented in the film where the evidence is so overpowering and clear-cut

and you have to butt up against a lack of that will, you can't help but walk away from that feeling a little bit hopeless about what the future may hold because these organizations that we've specifically vested with the authority and the responsibility of policing this, if they're showing disinterest or they're not going to actually, you know, act on it in the way that, you know, seems to be the morally appropriate response, then we're lost. And we're only talking about the Olympics. We're not even talking about tennis or the NBA or the NFL and, you know, the implications of, you know, unfair play on the professional level across the board? Well, I think that, to me, the bigger takeaway is sport is sport, and sport is always going to be a game in the sense that it is sport.

I mean, so long as you're paying nba players 40 million dollars a year to shoot a basket with the bat you know uh and and and so long as you're playing you know nfl athletes whatever 25 30 million dollars a year to play football there is always going to be the pressures to win. But to me, the bigger issue that we have to look at and what I want people to take away from this film is looking at are we as a country, the United States or other countries willing to tolerate a foreign powers meddling in our process, in our democracy, in our political affairs. And what you see in Icarus, in this film, beyond a reasonable doubt, is a country meddling into the global affairs of, A, the Olympics and sport to cheat and to collude and to create a fraud. And, B, the analogy can clearly be drawn into our current U.S. political climate and the meddling into our election of, okay, if a country like Russia was willing to do this to win medals, what else

are they willing to do? How far are they willing to go? And what we're seeing is no matter how much evidence is put forward, which we see in the film, where not only has this evidence been put forward, it's all been proven. And yet you still have the leaders of the olympics and and and and putin and russia and wada literally standing in the face of this evidence trying to deny that this actually happened and we're seeing the same thing happen in our in the current u.s uh political situation where no matter how much evidence is being put forward about election tampering and meddling, we're still getting naysayers.

We're still getting people going, this didn't happen. And I think we have to, as a country and a world, go, wait, what are we willing to tolerate? Meaning if we're willing to tolerate this in sport, well, I guess we're willing to tolerate this in terms of our own election, in terms of our own political process. We're willing to allow a foreign power to come in and meddle in our affairs and have that meddling go unpunished. And that to me is kind of the takeaway of Icarus that is incredibly upsetting, where all of this evidence is presented, and you still have the president of Russia going, not only did this not happen, I don't even

remember the guy's name who brought all this evidence forward. And not only do we know that this is not true, we just know it's an outright lie. And these are the takeaways for me from the film that are frightening. Doctors Aisha and Dean Scherzai, at Team Scherzai on Twitter, S-H-E-R-Z-A-I, are the husband-wife neurology team that serve as co-directors of the Brain Health and Alzheimer's Prevention Program at Loma Linda University Medical Center. Alzheimer's, huge problem, gigantic disease that affects millions and millions of people. Well, it's traditionally been defined as a life sentence, a life sentence without cure.

But according to Team Sherzai, in one of the most impactful conversations I've ever had, Alzheimer's is not a genetic inevitability. A diagnosis does not have to come with a death sentence. In fact, through simple diet and lifestyle changes alone, 90% of all Alzheimer's cases can be prevented. Think about that for a minute. So here's doctors Dean and Aisha Sherzai on the hows and the whys from RRP 330. For many Americans it's worse than death to know that you're having Alzheimer's and and the approach from the medical field is actually even worse. You have 20 minutes with a patient. Hi, how are you doing? How how is it going you do the cursory check of the heart tapping the knee and it then added you know last five minutes you have Alzheimer's and this what you have and this what you have to do and here are

some pills and the pills don't change the progression of the disease they just help you with the symptoms this is this is a process that's going to increase accelerate every family every family in America will be affected by it either directly or indirectly and we need to do some something to kind of either Kirby or have a new approach to it I think one of the most important things we can do and it started it has started started yes to say the way we're doing medicine right now is not health care. It is important. Sick care is important.

When a person comes with an infection, they need a medicine. When a person comes with a blood pressure of 200, you're not going to say go eat this. That's a long-term thing. You have to take your medicine. That's sick care. It's important. But there's another side, which is health health care which has to be incentivized there has to be a mechanism people can't just rely on goodwill where I'm gonna go at

nights to clinics or this or that or to churches there has to be a system created where we can prevent but you know what that system when it's created will reduce the cost of health care by 80 to 90% by itself. That's a pretty staggering statistic. Yeah, so we just have to make the choice as a society. And even the choice, you know, we get caught up in the politics of right, left. No, once there's enough information that overwhelms and everybody sees the benefit in this for their kids.

I mean, this book is not about just Alzheimer's end of life. I mean, our kids are overwhelmed by sugar. And then we tell them they have ADHD. Well, they might, but a great proportion just have a lot of sugar. Yeah, there's no question about that. And also, you know, I want to get back to the nutrition piece in a minute. And also, you know, I want to get back to the nutrition piece in a minute. But, you know, what I took away from it is that it's a book about how to live your life now so that you don't have to deal with this. Like if you're you could read this book as a 20 year old and say, well, I want I want to take care of my brain.

And this is the way to do it, because those amyloids and all this sort of stuff that goes into creating the dementia and the Alzheimer's, this is going on all the time, right? So it doesn't just suddenly strike you at age 65. Just like heart disease, you're working on this your whole life, and it has to do with the diet and the lifestyle. Absolutely. So on the nutrition piece, just so we're totally clear, nutrition piece so as just so we're totally clear as scientists who have uh you know studied this disease for a long time and treated a lot of people you're sold on the whole food plant-based

diet this is the this is the way to go absolutely as a scientist we say to the best of our knowledge today i that to me is the most powerful the most humble statement in english language i think forced certainty is the cause of a lot of our conflicts science is open to change i mean tomorrow if they say if you eat a steak i'm not going to because of other reasons but i would say okay it's sure i doubt that it's going to come. But right now, the data is just overwhelming. And a lot of times in discussions, any discussion, they fail you by falsely holding you to absolutes, saying, but there's not cause and effect.

Science cannot create cause and effect. It can create strong correlations, very strong. Even now, we can't create cause and effect with cigarettes because you can always talk your way out of it, even if you give people, even if it was ethical. But there's a tremendous amount of data that a whole food plant-based diet is overwhelmingly protective. Is there any positive benefit with respect to brain health

for is there any argument that there's something healthy about eating meat when it comes to cognitive health like well yeah go ahead sorry so nutrition sciences um you know has its flaws um the way we're recording diet right now is through food frequency questionnaires or diet, food diaries and things of that nature. And it has its strengths when you look at the different components of meat, the saturated fats and the animal proteins. Whether it's animal studies or human studies, they're not good. I mean, the data over and over comes back and shows us that saturated fat actually causes those plaques in the arteries in the brain that supply oxygen and nutrition to the different areas of the brain, and they get clogged when saturated fat is very high in your diet. Plus inflammation and everything else. Plus inflammation, plus affecting glucose

metabolism as well. And on the contrary, so in comparison to, you know, other types of fats, such as polyunsaturated fats and monounsaturated, they're actually beneficial. The most important element of the Mediterranean diet that everybody's been talking about for heart health and for brain health are those, you know, poly and monounsaturated fats, and they come from plants. So, you know, when you look at different comparisons of whether they're the types of fats that you eat or the antioxidants that you get from plants, it's quite clear. And, you know, when you look at meat, I mean, other than fat and protein, it doesn't have anything else. It doesn't have any fiber. And some of the minerals that are there, they're just minimal. So you get more

benefit from eating a whole food plant-based diet and and many studies we did four reviews which is these collecting all the papers and then coming out with what those said so which is the most painful kind of research and and on nutrition and parkinson's nutrition and stroke and nutrition and dementia and the thing that stood out the most was synergy absolutely Absolutely. So these micronutrients, whether they're vitamins or minerals, they don't work alone. You know, it's actually the combination and the levels of the different kinds of micronutrients that matter and they synergize each other's availability. So, and that makes sense. And that's why, you know, hundreds of studies on say, for example, vitamin E and brain health or vitamin C and Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease have come back with no results, with no particular correlation and effect.

And when you eat it in a whole form, when you eat it in a plant form, all of these micronutrients are well balanced and they're bound to other macronutrients. They're bound to the fiber as well, which increases their bioavailability. Decades of data that show that a whole food, which is unprocessed, plant-based diet, low in sugar, seems to be the best dietary pattern for the brain. And it affects all those processes that we just talked about, lowering inflammation, managing glucose metabolism, managing lipid metabolism providing the best source of macro and micronutrients for the brain to thrive to grow

to heal itself and you know study after study shows the same thing over and over again and by just looking at populations you know in the seven-day Adventist population, you rarely see dementia. And the ones that do have dementia either have it very late in life or they have had other uncontrolled risk factors in their life. Last but certainly not least is Tim Ferriss, because this episode is well on its way to becoming one of the most popular and downloaded episodes that I've ever done. Tim is a relentless experimenter. He is a virtuoso of deconstruction. He's a guy who has spent the better part of his entire adult life studying mastery and sharing what he has learned on his wildly popular blog, his string of four consecutive number one New York Times and number

one Wall Street Journal bestselling books, including his brand new offering, Tribe of Mentors, as well as his podcast, which is one of the top shows in the world with over 200 million downloads. But who is the real Tim Ferriss? Despite the fact that I have been enjoying this guy's content for many years, I never really felt like I knew the answer to that question. And I wanted to know more. So this conversation gave me the opportunity to find out. I think we're all on different journeys.

There's shared traits, perhaps, for many of us. And we hit different legs in different portions of our lives so for some people they start off say in the heart or in the gut and then move to the head later because they need to learn to manage finances or whatever it might be that's me right yeah and then you have other people certainly i would count myself among those people who, for whatever reason or combination of reasons, develop a lot of armor really early on. As I did in childhood, some reasonably bad things happened to me as a kid that I don't really want to get into specifics over. But that encapsulates a lot for a lot of people and put on this incredible armor to protect myself and only

realized in the last few years that, and when you put on really effective armor, you do keep things out, but you also keep a lot in. And there were, uh, certain ways that I'd handicapped myself very deliberately viewing emotion as a weakness, viewing attachment, emotional attachment in particular as a weakness. Uh, my priority for a very long time was to simply hone myself as a as an instrument of competition basically and to use that to validate myself to prove my worth and anything that detracted from that or remotely made me vulnerable i viewed as something that should be disposed of so that led me to the pro and con list, to the say clinical, that makes it sound really dry. I think it's a fun book, but it's very analytical. Right.

And very quantified. And I talk about how people should question certain assumptions they've made about what they can or cannot do, such as, well, my parents are fat, I'm fat, that's just the way it is. And they accept that as a partial completeness and they never challenge that. But I myself never even thought of my longstanding lack of interest in emotion as a gap. that make sense probably as a strength like i you know from what i've heard in in how you talk about your childhood there's a lot of similarities with my childhood um i was somebody who was a very awkward kid i'm very much a loner you know not a not by any stretch of the imagination, anybody who looked like they were going to be an athlete, eye patch, headgear, last kid picked for kickball,

and really had a lot of difficulty connecting with friends and classmates. And as a result, spent a lot of time alone. Then I discovered swimming. And I feel like, I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this And I feel like, I'm interested in talking to you a little bit about this. I feel like the relationship that I developed with that sport is similar to the relationship that you developed with wrestling at that time, because I approached it as, it was the first thing that I was actually good at, you know, and it was kind of this safe place away from school. And I realized very early and often that the more I put into it, the better I got. So that equation of being diligent and being devoted and working hard

had very practical real world results that were advancing my life in a very good way. But it was also a place where I could go and not have to deal. It was like not only a safe place, but a place away where I could just escape. So in some respects, I think I had a compulsive, obsessive, addictive relationship with it. And it was a means of not having to deal with some emotional stuff that I was going through. But when you become successful, when it's moving you forward, it's much more of a reason to continue to not look at that other aspect of your life because it's serving you yeah there's uh there's a huge amount of overlap so wrestling for me as a as someone born premature i was very very small until sixth grade. I mean, just gotten, uh, constantly on a daily basis kicked around. I was so small.

I was such a small kid. Uh, I would, I would generally not even opt to go out to recess because that was just like going out into the terrible, the, the open sky pen at like a federal prison. I mean, that was a dangerous place for me to be. I would just get dragged around and punched and so on. So I'd read books and that was the, the cover that I used to sit on the step right outside of the door that went out to recess and wrestling, which came to me really by luck because I was hyperactive and my mom was told

by other moms that kid wrestling would be a good way to drain my batteries. So I was put into wrestling. And then I think both of us realized that it was the one sport since it was weight class based that I had access to where I could end up being matched against another equally puny, nerdy kid, and at least one of us got to win. But to underscore something you said, which I think is very true for me as well, is that particularly at that age, but for a long time, in school at least, you have fairly siloed areas of life i mean you have academics and it's

easy to measure you do well you do poorly and then you have certain sports particularly if it's an individual sport where you feel like you have some this is another reason i gravitated towards wrestling a semblance of control there's so many things you can't control but part of the reason i always ended up leaning towards individual sports even though i did play soccer for a short period of time i played football for one season which i did not like for a host of reasons and wrestling on the other hand the all the credit or all the blame was on you lies on you yeah i mean swimming even more so yeah it's the ultimate in self-determinantism yeah determinism right it's just you against the clock i mean you're racing against somebody else i mean in wrestling you

have your opponent you have to anticipate what he's going to do and so that's a variable that you don't have in a sport like track and field or swimming but right but it's very much that idea of like you get out what you put into it and there's that equation right and you can like immerse yourself in that and that becomes an identity no and i liked the controlling of variables to the extent possible and as you get older at least just projecting forward, if we fast forward the film and get into twenties, thirties, certainly forties now where more and more of my friends have passed away, right? And the decisions you make in your personal life absolutely bleed over and affect other parts of your life and the decisions you make

in one area that used to be at least conceptually as a kid really walled off and siloed bleed over into every other and i think that many of our strengths in excess become or create glaring weaknesses. Yeah, for sure. So for me, it was this realization, and we could really dig into some of the tools that led to this realization, including supervised use of psychedelics, that led me to the conclusion that my current state of being was not only unsustainable in a lot of ways, but really not serving me. And that if I wanted to not just tolerate myself, which I think at best is what I did for most of my life, then I had to rewire quite a bit. And it involved going back and contending with some really old things. And that many of the seemingly disparate behavioral challenges or short-temperedness

or impatience with myself or berating myself in my own head or fill in the blank. It could be 20 or 30 things that I tended to view as inexplicable separate behaviors were in fact all easily traced back to a handful of things that I protect. I think by necessity protected myself against or felt the need to protect myself against early on by walling off myself emotionally. All right, we did it. That's it for 2017. It's officially in the rear view. It's all about 18 from now on out, you guys.

Hope you enjoyed that. If you would like to support this show and my work, just share it with your friends and on social media. Simple. Leave a review on iTunes and of course hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts. Super important and very, very helpful. We also have a Patreon set up if you would like to support us financially. I will be scheduling an Ask Me Anything session, a video AMA very soon. And that is exclusive content for contributors on Patreon only. To find out more,

just click on the Patreon banner ad on any episode page at richroll.com. Final reminder that our meal planner is on sale through midnight, January 6th, $20 off the annual fee. When you use the promo code POWER20 at checkout, it's an insane deal for just 80 bucks for an entire year. You will be supported with thousands of plant-based recipes, personalized grocery lists, expert food coaches available seven days a week, even grocery delivery in over 80 US markets. Really proud of this product. Very helpful tool in your toolkit to make 2018 your healthiest year ever. To learn more, go to meals.richroll.com or just click on Meal Planner at the top there on any page on my website. I want to thank everybody who has helped put on

this show and actually all shows throughout 2017. Jason Camiolo, my right-hand man throughout this whole process for all his great work on audio engineering, production, interstitial music, the show notes, the WordPress page. He's really my dude. Sean Patterson, who has worked tremendously hard on all of the graphics for the show, giving it the look, the feel, the aesthetic,

and theme music, as always, by my boys from Analema. Thanks for the love, the feel, the aesthetic, and theme music, as always, by my boys from Anilema. Thanks for the love, you guys. 2017 was the best year ever for me, and I'm excited about 2018. I think it's going to be extraordinary, and my hope, my aspiration for you is that it will be everything you aspire it to be, and I'm here as a resource to help you achieve that. See you guys back here soon. Until then, be well. Peace, plants.

Namaste. Thank you.