So, this is kind of part of your core philosophy, right? Like breaking things down into the sort of smallest components so that you can digest them one by one. I think it's essential, Rich, for me in my life, yeah, it's breaking, not only breaking, say a race, breaking it down from a tree to tree or rock to rock perspective, but even breaking down the outcomes. When I go and race, I never feel any pressure and I never really get nervous, man, because in my mind I've broken that race down into two outcomes. I'm either going to break my body or I'm going to achieve victory or cross the finish line. That simplifies it so much for me. And is that philosophy advisable? Well, I don't know. I think that's a choice for every individual to make, but for me I look at these races as missions, almost like missions in my life and I'm willing to accept the fact that I could potentially break myself to accomplish this mission. Right. Well, the other option is to quit. The other option is to quit. Yeah, but you just don't put that on the table. I don't put it on the table, man. And by no means am I trying to sound super tough or I subscribe to this saying, it's, "Be hard when it gets hard." And at Ultra it gets hard. So that's when I liked hunker down. Yeah, there's this ethos out there. I saw you kind of speaking about this on Instagram out there, like stay hard you gotta be hard 24/7. And I think people in general need a kick in the pants. And that's a worthy message that I think is helpful to a lot of people who've gotten a little too cushy or comfortable in their lives. But staying hard all the time is not a sustainable lifestyle philosophy, is it? It's not sustainable, Rich. And I really feel like for me personally, it's a dangerous philosophy because if you think as a man or a woman that you have to be hard all the time, we said it's not sustainable. So you're gonna fall short of that mark. And when you fall short of that mark, you're gonna beat yourself up about it. And it just causes problems, I feel like for me personally. And it causes problems in relationships, man. When I was active duty, I could be out on the road or be on deployment. Well, when you come back, you gotta be able to love your family and love the other people around you and show compassion and emotion. And those aren't components of being hard all the time, they're components that are necessary to living a healthy lifestyle. What's the point otherwise, right. But they're not teaching that to you in BUD/S. No, that's something that I had to learn. Yeah, I mean, they turn you into this, I don't wanna say monster, but they turn you into what I guess society would call an alpha male in BUD/S. Yeah, right. So stay hard when it's appropriate to be hard, when you need to be hard. Have a place inside of you that you can go to when it gets hard and you can get the job done. It's all right. So you're in BUD/S, is it what you thought it would be, expected it to be, harder, easier. I would say seal training is probably like the one thing in life that surpassed its reputation. In terms of difficulty. In terms of difficulty. Intensity. For sure. And there again, I'm talking about the whole picture right now. What is the main thing that you take away from that experience? There's so many things that we could talk about that were born in that experience. I'd say the one thing that I utilize the most right now is the lessons that we learned that revolve around, I call it the power of the spoken word. The things that we say, how the things that we say impact our direction in life and the outcome of our situations. And one of the earliest times I'll remember seeing this work was in first phase, my best friend came to me one day and he said, "Chad, I don't think I'm good enough "to make it through this training anymore." And I had known prior to that statement that he had been having some thoughts of doubt, but when he kept those thoughts within his own head, he was able to continue from day to day. But as soon as he came to me that morning and spoke it out loud, that statement, he created that re reality. It became real. It crushed him, man. He was crushed by that single statement, I don't think I'm good enough. And shortly after he made that statement, he went and quit. And I thought, this guy, my buddy, he was completely physically capable of doing everything that we had to do that day and every single day until graduation. But those words crushed him, man. It was like the Rubicon. Once he crossed that, there's no return. Once you give voice to whatever it is, whatever demon is swimming around in your head, it gives it a power that you can't take back. There's something about the spoken word, man. And I think the written word has similar and equal power, but a lot of my stuff, lessons revolve around that spoken word and now that's transferred, that lesson has transferred into ultra running. And I've seen that power of the spoken word push people beyond their conceived limits. So, what do you make of that? Like what is that about? Like, how is it that the spoken word can carry that kind of power. For me, a thought that's in your head, it's just a thought, it's not tangible to anyone else except for you. But when you speak something out loud, it actually becomes something real, something that can be measured. So it becomes something that's part of this reality that we live in. And I feel like that's what gives it the power of the spoken word. I feel like that's why it's so powerful because as a thought, it's essentially it's not part of this reality that we're living in, but as soon as you speak it, it becomes real. That's where I find the power at man. Cool. All right, well, let's end this with a final thought for the person who's out there who feels stuck. They're in a rut. Maybe they're not happy with their job or they're trying to get off the couch and move their body for the first time in a long time. Like, how do we cattle prod that dude or that young lady to get after it a little bit more. Come on, man. oh my God. Bring us home. Rich, man, I am not much of a... I may hire you as my life coach, come on man. I am not much of a cattle prod. That's the thing, Rich. I mean, like I say, I'm so hesitant to give advice or to try to tell someone what to do. I mean, I guess I could just keep it super simple and go over the things we talked about, simplify things, don't be afraid to put yourself in adverse situations because that's where you're going to grow as a human being. The decisions you make in times of adversity, self inflicted or totally out of your control are the things that diff... Those decisions define who you are as a human, but don't fear inflicting that adversity on yourself because that's going to help you grow as a human being. So I would say, go put yourself through a little adversity. It may be only running for five minutes to start with. It may not be running, it may be something completely different than that. But don't fear it because I feel like it's essential for us as humans to experience that in life. And the last thing that I would say is if you're struggling emotionally from that kind of aspect is, take a look at your body, soul and spirit. Look at those three aspects of your humanity each as a single lane and think about what are you doing on a day-to-day basis to master nourish and maintain your body, your soul and spirit. And usually that can be used as a diagnostic to see, okay I am lacking here, I'm lacking and I need to get some help with my emotional side. My will, what I want and don't want to do. Do I wanna get out of bed in the morning, do I not wanna get out of it? That type of stuff. And then the spiritual side, that can be, it doesn't matter what it is. It could be spending time in nature. For me, it's spending time in God's word. It could be anything. Well, a lot of people's new year's resolutions pivot around movement. And that's what you're writing about in this new book. So let's talk about movement. I'm super interested in hearing your thoughts that you explore in this book about what's happening with us psychologically and biochemically when we move our body. oh, let's start with the biochemical 'cause some of this is so fascinating. Can I explain the whole molecule thing? Yeah, oh, trust me, I wrote that down. Like these hormones, recent, the myokines. Isn't that amazing.
This is super interesting. I know when I found... So I came across this paper, I think it was maybe a 2016 paper where the scientists talk about this research and they just sort of throw out the term hope molecules. And I remember circling it. I think I said to my husband, "oh my gosh you're not gonna believe this term." It encapsulates so much about why movement is amazing. And I feel like nobody else is using this term, it was just this one paper. I'm gonna ensure the scientists have used it again, but let me explain what it is. So this is the idea that our muscles are like an endocrine organ. And that when you contract your muscles in any type of movement, they are secreted chemicals into your bloodstream that are really good for every system of your body. I mean, they're great for your heart health and your immune function. And some of them can kill cancer cells. All the stuff we know exercise is good for. But that a big part of these proteins, the chemicals that are being released by your muscles which are called myokines, they have profound effects on the brain. So you go for a walk or a run or you lift weights and your muscles contract and they secrete these proteins into your bloodstream, they travel to your brain, they cross the blood brain barrier. And in your brain, they can act as an antidepressant like (indistinct). They can make your brain more resilient to stress. They increase motivation, they help you learn from experience. And the only way you get these chemicals is by using your muscles. It's like, this is part of how we become our best selves, is we have to use our muscles. And then the scientists called them hope molecules because in this one study they found that exercise could protect rodents from experiencing depression and post-traumatic stress disorder if you severely traumatize them. So this idea that these molecules are giving you hope even in very difficult times. So it's not innately human, there's existence of it-- That's right, it's not innately humans. It is in other mammals. So I don't know how many species this has been studied in. It's like in this field, you tend to go from mice and rats to humans. There's like not a lot in the middle, but it should be pointed out that rodents are very social species. And that's one of the reasons why they can be really great models for human behavior 'cause they look a lot like us in some of the very basic social and psychological ways. So extrapolating on that idea, what do you make of that? Like, what does that mean? Well, first of all, a very practical level, it means when I go for a walk or I exercise, I will literally say to myself, you are giving yourself an intravenous dose of hope. I think this is how we should frame movement. That it's something you can choose to do to really powerfully influence your mental health and your resilience. And every time you move, you're doing that. I think to know that, to look at your own muscles and be able to say, thank you legs, you're tired now. That was hard work, but like, legs, you are a pharmacy of antidepressants and resilience and hope. Then sort of thinking in a more philosophical way. Again, one of the things that I feel like the anthropology and the science is pointing to is that movement is how your brain knows you are alive and engaged in life. And when you move on a regular basis, your brain basically says, I guess we have to be the best version of ourselves because we're in this thing called life. And so, you mentioned some other things too. Like when you exercise, you see increased levels of neurotransmitters that tend to increase our willingness to cooperate. And the pleasure we get from connecting with others that give us hope and courage. I mean, even that lactic acid, that metabolic byproduct of exercise, that lactic acid seems to have an antianxiety and antidepressant effect. This is a crazy stuff. It's not just an endorphin rush, it's like at every level of our biology. When we move, our brain is like, I guess we have to do this thing called life. And so, for people like me who've struggled with anxiety or depression, this idea that you can convince your brain to wanna fully engage with life and in a brave way or in a hopeful way through movement is so phenomenal. How does competition play into this? 'Cause, if we talk about movement, a subset of movement is sports, sports being inherently competitive. There has to be healthy aspects to this, but also unhealthy aspects to this. Yeah, I mean, so competition is a major human drive and there's a lot of psychological benefits to it. So when people tell me that they love competition, like my sister is more like this than me. It's like one of our fundamental differences. She loves to compete, she loves to improve, she loves mastery. And I just sort of, I don't know, that doesn't motivate me at all. So I think the really healthy, positive sides of competition, one is if you're competing as a team or with a group and the tremendous bonds and what you learn from cooperating in order to compete, that seems like it has tremendous benefits. And that even if you look at children who are teenagers who are engaged in different types of sports, it looks like there are more psychological benefits to being involved in team sports than individual competitive sports because there can often be so much pressure on the individual to be the best without some of those other social forces that come into play when you're working with others. And I think the other thing that's so helpful and healthy about competition is when it's really more about mastery, that you have a sense of setting goals and moving toward them. And that they're personally meaningful. And you sense yourself as somebody who can set goals that are difficult and work toward them and meet them. And that a whole chapter about overcoming obstacles and the very definition of hope is to have a goal that's meaningful, to believe you have the resources to meet it and there are steps you can take. And I think there are forms of competitive movement that will really allow you to access that whole experience of hope. All right, well, I wanna bring the focus back on to new year's resolutions. And I think one thing that happens with a lot of people is they're faced with this decision of like, oh I have this goal, I wanna do this thing. Do I just go whole-hog all in overnight or do I take little bites out of this and do it slowly in a way that doesn't completely upend my entire lifestyle. Yeah, I'm mystified by people who believe there's an answer to that question. Of course, it depends. You must get that question every day though. Yes, and the thing is is you start where you are and you do what you can do, and you do it in the way that feels like the right way to do it for you. And whichever path you choose, you don't tell yourself that's it or I failed. There are some people who will take the baby steps. They get that goal down to the tiny thing they can do tomorrow and feel successful. And then they find that they don't actually feel successful because they don't see the benefit of it or it doesn't have a deep meaning to them. So you should give yourself permission. Okay, you need to go harder on this. What's the version of this that when you finally get to do it you're gonna feel like that's a triumph. And then you give yourself as much time as you need to to get to that point. If you feel like you wanna go all in and then you find out a month later this is not working the way you had intended, that it was a learning experience. I think people shouldn't believe that there are these tricks to behavior change that are beyond what your intuition can lead you to. If you are clear about what you care about and you're willing to experiment and not give up the first time it doesn't go as planned. Right, I think that's super wise. I think that these things are all about getting caught up in some kind of future tripping or tripping over, stories that we tell ourselves about the past. And the truth is all we have is what we're doing right now. And I kind of love the way 12 step does it. It's just like, you don't have to, like you don't have to worry about whether you're gonna stay sober for 10 years. Like, what are you doing right now? Is your head gonna hit the pillow tonight or you're gonna drink before you go to sleep tonight? Like, that's all you got to worry about. Like those tiny and perceptible things that in the grand scheme of things seem small, but actually are the levers that move everything. Yeah, I think one example I often think about. So one of the most difficult things to do is to quit smoking. There are some people who can do it cold Turkey and I've talked to people who they made that decision and they just did it. And for whatever reason it worked for them, it was an aha moment. But there's research showing that if you can delay the first cigarette of the day by five or 10 minutes, that that increases your chance of quitting. So like that seems totally possible. Delay the first cigarette by five minutes and that's something you could choose to do tomorrow. And to know that both of those are pathways to the same place. And you don't always know at first which one's gonna work for you, and there's a million paths in the middle that looked like something else. Well, let's talk about what it is that you do. Like, in your estimation, what are the most important things that... And again you can preface this with whatever caveats you want. But what do you think are the most important things that people should be Doing or looking after on a daily basis to kind of take out an insurance policy against aging, given the current state of knowledge and understanding. That's well put. Okay, now I feel free to speak 'cause I don't endorse and I don't recommend. I think the most important thing for anybody to live healthier for longer. If there was just one thing I could say, it would be eat less often. Don't eat three meals a day. I literally think that that people who recommend three meals plus snacks, trying to keep your glucose levels always at a pretty high level are doing the world a disservice. And I'm gonna go out on a limb to say that a lot of nutritionists would disagree with me. But I've been doing this for 30 years, I've seen what happens to people and animals when you restrict their food. And it it's all good. I mean, you don't want malnutrition or starvation, of course but putting the body in a state of want every day for as long as you can do it. I do it, like I said, hopefully till late afternoon dinner. That's the easiest and best thing you can do. Other things are the high intensity interval training or jumping up and down with weights in a swimming pool, almost drowning, that's pretty good. You're going back tomorrow, right? Well, I will do it again actually. Now I actually think I know not to go too far into the deep end. But honestly we now know we all have the power with the scientific basis to actually live at least 15 years longer. So there are actually, and I talked about this, I think on Twitter recently that there are five things that are pretty obvious and easy to do that'll give you 15 years. And that's just off the top of my head. Things like, exercise, the fasting, don't eat too much, eat the right foods, try to be plant-based, get sleep, have social network. That gives you 15 years, that's amazing. That's not even going delving deep into my book, which takes it to another level of what the best exercise and supplements probably are. So that's the good news. I do list a lot of things. We could talk for hours about what I do. Page 304, you'll see more. I'm conscious that we have a microbiome that needs to be healthy. So I'd make my own special yogurt, which I mix my reserve trawl in. I think I'll release the recipe of that pretty soon to the in the newsletter, if anyone would like to make it. So these are the things. On the, sorry to interject, but you sort of said, eating plant-based, predominantly plant-based. I mean, a lot of that is informed by the relationship between excessive protein intake and that impact on aging, correct. Well, it's both-- From your perspective in the work that you're doing. So the Plant-based food. I think a little bit of meat is fine, especially if you work out and you're trying to bulk up some muscle. But I think that what we've learned is by studying the Sardinians and the Okinawans is that those diets are the best for humans. And they are mostly plant-based with a little bit of meat like fish. So why does that work? Okay, why do we think that works? The two reasons, one is that you don't want to overload on some types of amino acids, which you'll find in meat. Leucine, isoleucine, valine. These turn off our body's defenses through a pathway called mTOR. There'll probably be a Nobel prize awarded for that stuff by the way, it's big deal, mTOR. But if you're always eating a lot of protein in terms of meat, then you'll never really optimize your body's defenses. So I try to eat plant based foods, but there's another thing that most people miss, which is the Xeno hermetic molecules from plants. You get those, you don't get those from meat as much. So what do you make of the carnivore diet? Yeah, I'm on the other side. It is an interesting phenomenon. Just sort of culturally to go how did this suddenly happen? And there's a cohort of people who are all about just, that's all they eat. This hasn't been going on for very long. This story very much has yet to be fully told. But if somebody is listening to this and perhaps was flirting with the idea of that, I mean, what would be your response to that person? Well, so I'm a scientist, so let's talk some science briefly. What you do when you activate this mTOR pathway is you're telling your cells in your body, the times a good, you've just caught a mammoth, basically. And now's the time to build your body and actually fix things, heal things and grow. And it turns out that there are two things your body can do. There's grow and then there's on the other hand, the other side of the balance is to protect. Growth, protect, growth, protect. And if you're always in this growth mode by telling your body, now's the time. You got your amino acids, grow. That's great when you're young and middle-age, you'll bulk up. You'll feel good, you'll actually bone energy more. You'll lose bit of fat. But longterm, you're gonna sacrifice your longevity in my view because you're not turning on your body's defenses, which typically it turned on when your body senses that there's adversities. There's a need. Yeah. So being hungry and eating plants are gonna be telling your body times are not as good, we've run out of mammoth meat, let's hunker down. But you could-- We're on our own, so we're gonna have to do the heavy lifting here. It's basically catalyzing these systems, these biological systems to protect the body. And in turn, promote longevity versus, oh we've got an endless supply of food coming in here, we can just shut everything down because we don't have to worry about it. Right, think of it this way. When we're young, our defenses are on hyper alert. Our bodies don't get diseases. You don't find babies with Alzheimer's disease. The cells know how to repair and defend against issues. By eating a lot of meat, I think what you'd likely to be doing is accelerating that process towards older age. So 'cause your body will be in a growth state but you won't be turning on your body's defenses. And actually as you get older, your defenses go down and down and down. And that's one of the main reasons that we end up getting old. So you gotta get your defenses up like you're baby. Speaking of which, I've been on much healthier diet the last few years including intermittent and fasting, including the supplements that I've got written on page 304. People say, "Oh, I'm not noticing anything," after maybe two weeks on the supplement. Of course, you're not gonna see that. I've been doing it for, some of them for 10 years. But what I've noticed most recently with my current lifestyle, all of these things combined the biggest things that has changed for me is that I don't get sick anymore. That's amazing. I used to be the kind of guy that would go from one cold to another. I haven't had a sniffle in years. I can't remember the last time I had a cold and I'm on planes, people are sneezing on me. I'm shaking hands with people pretty much all the time. So my immune system must be on hyper alert. And why is that good. If you ask a centenarian, "What about your younger years "in your '50s, '60s," They'll say, "I never got sick, never got a cold. "My father's like that, he doesn't get colds either." Yeah, I mean the kind of underlying theme in the book and in your work is this idea that there is no biological law that we need to age. Like we just sort of accept that as a truism. But in fact, that doesn't necessarily hold water. No, no, nobody has any reason to say that we have this clock that cannot be changed. In fact, what we've learned going back to the Hogarth clock is that about 80% of our lifestyle, 80% of our health in old age is due to our lifestyle and how we live and only 20% is genetic. And actually that that's done by studying twins, who some smoke, some don't, some do all the stuff. Your genes are not your destiny. That's the good news. So what that means is it's up to you. And if you wanna be frail or to be honest, dead at 80, go for it, we know how to do that. Do everything that the marketing people want you to do. Eat the cake, sit on your fat ass and watch movies. That'll get you there pretty quickly. But fortunately, in part, thanks to new media like this, we can actually all talk about what we think are the ways to extend lifespan and not be frail in old age. Like my father, I talk about him a lot. I'm very proud of him as a beacon of hope. At 80, he's still running around like he's 25. He's got no aches or pains, very sharp minded using all sorts of high tech, lifting more weights than I can, actually. And our trainer who's currently training the two of us together. He says, "You know what?" I think my dad was dead lifting, what was it? Something like 180 pounds, something a lot. And he said, "The last 80 year old that I trained "was learning how to get out of a chair." Yeah, you post something on Instagram. He's in the squat machine or whatever just killing it at 80. The guy's in his second career, he's had this kind of resurgence and vitality as a result of finding new purpose and meaning. And he's also somebody who's been on your kind of protocol for a while at this point. And to see him in the gym at 80 crushing it, it's very inspiring. Well, I think most of us can achieve that in life. Now there will be unlucky people, of course, diseases still hit us, but most of us are wasting our lives because we're basically, not you, but most people don't think about their longevity. They think, oh, when I'm old, I'll deal with that when it comes. But now in early in midlife is the time to invest because it'll pay off dividends later in life. There's something about running and that solitude, that accompanies, that gives you the space and the capacity to kind of wrestle with those things and get clarity for yourself. I mean, there's a monologue in the film, I think it's after you've left Aspen and you're in the snow and in the Rockies where you say, look running was about competition for most of my life, measuring myself against others and a clock, but it's become a process of not just connecting with other humans, but a process of self discovery. And that's a huge theme in everything that you do and in this beautiful movie. Yeah, and I think if most of us that do run or walk or bike or pursue something with consistency year after year, I think if we really look at what it's doing for us, I think that a lot of us will find the same things. And this is something that I tell people and running has been my thing, but I don't think that's necessarily the thing for everybody. I think that knitting could be that thing, crochet, badminton. I just think for me, I chose this activity over 20 years ago, 25 years ago and I've stuck with it for 25 years. And when you stick with something for that long, whether it's an activity or a person, you're gonna continue to learn so much more about that. But also in more importantly, you're gonna learn so much more about yourself and this thing just keeps changing and changing and changing. And it's that consistency that allows for that to happen. So lots of people have run across America. Yeah. I had just had this guy, Ravi Balanger on the show who did it last year. He did it in 75 days. My friend Mike Posner just walked across America. But most people that do this, do it with an RV and a lot of support. And that support tends to be off camera. You know what I mean? Conveniently, yeah. But you decide to do this unsupported. And for a vast majority of the entire expedition, it's just you with a very light backpack and a tarp and a ground cloth and a little bit of food. And basically that's it. Yeah, so, I mean, I've been at this sport for quite a while. I wouldn't say that I have a huge following but I do have people that are paying attention to what I'm doing. And for me personally, it doesn't seem right to put this project out there in a way that I don't think is accessible to a normal person. And by that, I mean I don't think most people can pull together an RV in the funds to pay for a person and gas and food for multiple people for months on end. Conversely, I do think that people, a lot of people, ideally, if you're younger and you have the physical capability, can put together the funds and the time to do it in the same way that I did. And maybe you're not doing it-- It's funny, 'cause there's a little bit of an irony in there because you're like, I'm gonna do this super extreme thing to show how doable it is for everybody. And maybe not everybody, but I do believe they've got several thousand people starting the Appalachian trail these days. And I think the Appalachian trail is awesome. Like there's no doubt about it, but how much are you really gonna learn about, you're gonna learn a lot about yourself and you're gonna learn a lot about trail culture. But how much are you really gonna learn about the United States in this greater context? It's a form of escapism and that's sometimes exactly what we need, is to escape what's going on outside of our front door. But for me personally, I needed to explore something a lot deeper than just myself and just the physical capabilities of something like that. So, I set a budget for myself. I did $1,000 a month $5,000 total for the five months I slept outside. Most nights, I'd get a hotel or a motel once a week or once every 10 days. That increased more towards once every couple of days towards the end as I started kind of losing it a little bit. And I simply needed to go into a room and lock the door and turn the AC on and turn some mindless television on. But for the most part at what I wanted to do was to put it out there that this is something that people can do and that there's alternatives to these to do in the Appalachian trail or go into Europe for four months. Like you can just pack a very light backpack and see what's out there. And it's really incredible when people see that all you have is in your backpack and they ask you if you've got a gun to protect yourself and like, no I don't have a gun. To just putting yourself out there in a vulnerable position. The amount of warmth and generosity that I experienced was something that I never could have anticipated in a million years. People giving me every last dollar from their wallet. There's the guy, what's his name? James Steel, yeah. Gives you 80 bucks or 160-- I said 180. I said 80, it was 160. It was $160 and... He wasn't taking no for an answer. No, it was amazing. And that's when I kind of, I realized that people in their own way want to participate in this thing. A few years ago, so this is kind of something that I think about. And the best way for me to tell this is to talk about someone else running across the country. And that was Pete Kostelnik who did across the country in 40, I'm gonna say 44 days, it could have been a little quicker. This is in 2016, so a year before or a few months before I did mine. He did this and he was doing 60 to 70 miles a day for 45 days and broke the record that had stood for-- Unsupported. That was very supported. That was two or three RVs with several people. Yeah, it was a big effort on for a lot of people and he's sure to give them credit as well. But for me personally, so I was in Wisconsin at the time and I saw that he was going through Northern Illinois and I got in my car and drove two and a half hours just to run with him for few miles. 'Cause it's like, I just felt like it was seeing this mythical creature when someone's doing something like that. And even now to this day, now that I've done this big journey, I still think it's a mythical creature. It's like seeing a mountain lion or something. And so I think that for me, that's what it was for kind of when I came to realize that some people, when they wanted to give me money or just stop and talk, it was like, it is something rare. There's the one guy who it looks like he turned his car around when he saw you and he got out and he's like, my friend's gonna freak out. I read about you. Like when you cross the state line or something like that. So there was some awareness as you were passing through of what you were doing. Totally, in certain areas. I don't know why it was in certain areas. It was Oklahoma and Arkansas where I received the most amount of generosity and warmth. And then when I got to California, ironically, it was nothing. It's interesting like that. I think what I appreciate most is there's a vein of humility and vulnerability that infuses this effort and the other things that you've done. And this trans-Americana journey is almost like this performance art piece that is part de Tocqueville, part Henry David Thoreau. Like I'm gonna light out on America and learn about democracy and connect with people to try to better understand them, better understand myself and better understand what is required to unite us and bring us together. Totally. And you took your time, like the priority wasn't the running, the priority was the connection. Yeah. And the funniest thing that I encountered or the most interesting thing that I encountered when I went across the country is that I thought I would be talking politics all the time and it never came up. It was just like when you're doing something like that, when people see something like that, they don't wanna ask you what your political views are, they wanna ask you about like what you're doing and what you're seeing out there. And it just becomes really incredible that so much of this stuff just kind of dissolves away. And you realize that... And I think I say the same thing in the movie coming out is that I think, I don't think so, I know so. We're way more similar than we are different. I think that we're 90% similar and 10% different. And that 10% difference has become inflated so that we think that it's 90%, but it's not. Right, it's exploited. And it's leveraged by the media to further divide us. Totally. And I subscribe to my own media and a lot that's been brought to my attention over the past couple of years with talk of fake news and all of these things is coming to terms with that the media that I pay attention to is also biased. And it's not just Fox news, like NPR is also biased. We've all got these biases. And we like to think that we're right about our convictions, but the reality is that there's a million different paths out there. And if you grew up in Kansas, on a farm in Kansas and you had that lifestyle and I just see their voting habits, their convictions as every bit as valid as mine. And that's probably the biggest thing that I gained from my run across the countries is coming to terms with that. Yeah. So let's talk about Beauty Counter. I mean, walk me through the inspiration for this and what gave you this idea? You know, there wasn't one specific thing, but it was actually last night my friend Lila Rose is in town from New York visiting. And it was Lila, Lila had watched an Inconvenient Truth and became super passionate about the environmental health movement and said to me, "You need to watch this film. "You're loud, you're direct, you are connected. "And I think you should pay attention "to what's going on with the environment." And so I watched "An Inconvenient Truth" and for whatever reason that movie rocked my world. It was just the first time, I know it's almost embarrassing to admit this, but it was the first time that I truly paid attention to the fact that things that I was doing, that were doing in my daily life, that my very existence was wreaking havoc on the earth. And so I became focused on the environmental health movement and started to really make changes in my life. Over the next year or two, I also had a situation where I had a woman who was taking care of our kids or Phoebe at the time, my oldest, who was our nanny. I was working, full-time running best in company. And at 31, she was diagnosed with a non HPV related cervical cancer and within 11 months she had died. And so I was watching this young, beautiful amazing woman die in front of me. I was watching all these friends of mine struggle with fertility issues or giving birth to kids who had pretty significant health issues. I looked at what was happening in the environment. I thought like something's gone terribly right and maybe I need to do something about it. And it wasn't about beauty or Beauty Counter at the time. It was just, how do I start to become, how do I educate myself on what's actually going on? That's there so that can be a vocal point for change. And there's kind of this epiphany moment when you're using products on your kids, thinking 'cause they have the words natural on them or you think you're using the right brand or whatever. And then looking at the ingredients label and doing a little research and realizing that the gap between what you're being told or sold and the truth is pretty vast. I thought I was that has that whole foods shopper. I was the mom that was going to local farm stands as eating organic. I mean, I thought I was doing all the right things. I gotten rid of all our plastic. I was washing my floors with water and vinegar. And then I was looking at this and my kids, I had two kids in the tub and it was a natural foaming oatmeal bodywash from a leading drugstore brand. And I thought, I mean, it looks like oatmeal, it smelled like oatmeal kind of to me. And then someone told me about the environmental working group, skin deep database. And I took a look at it and I was like, holy shit, it was like eight out of nine for toxicity. And I was pretty outraged. So that really was another trigger point for me. That's when I started switching all of my family's products. But the one thing that I couldn't find for myself was just I couldn't find any skincare cosmetics that I wanted to use. And there just wasn't anything out there. And the more that I learned, the more that I realized that we had laws that were incredibly outdated, the more I realized that there were harmful chemicals in our products, I wanted to do something about it, which is really why I started the company. I consider myself to be somebody who's fairly up to speed on environmental issues. And certainly I'm the first to say that governmental regulatory bodies are not necessarily looking out for your best interests, but even I was shocked when we were talking. You were telling me last year about the extent to which the FDA is just this paper tiger when it comes to protecting people on the cosmetic and kind of skincare front. Yeah, I mean, I think that... Someone was asking me the other day, why people worry, why they feel safe. Why do people feel safe in the United States in terms of the products on the shelves. And I was saying that in the food industry, there are two things I think that are different about skincare and cosmetics. And just for clarity purposes, I know you have a lot of men that listen to you talk about things. This, isn't red lipstick, this is deodorant, sunscreen, body lotion, anything that we're putting on our bodies, any of those things. I think that two things are different. When you eat something that's really bad for your body, you typically get sick. Like right away. You feel it whereas-- There's an immediate direct reaction. Whereas if you're putting on sunscreen or body lotion, you could go your whole life and you would never necessarily know that it was harmful to your health. And then the second thing is, I mean, yes if you have an allergic reaction, but in the absence of allergic reactions, people would just continue to put stuff on their body. They wouldn't know about it. And I think the second thing that's different is that the FDA in the food industry has the ability to recall product when it's known to be harmful to health. If there's a seminal outbreak or whatever it is, they can immediately pull it from the shelf. But what people don't realize in the United States is that when it comes to skincare and cosmetics, they do not have the ability to recall product. They can suggest, but they cannot take action. That is shocking to me. So play that out. Like there's a cosmetic product or some skin lotion that's on the shelves at every store. And it's got proven toxic chemicals that have been established to link directly to some kind of poor health condition. And the FDA is absolutely powerless to compel the industry to remove it. Correct. And so there are a couple of things that are not happening with the FDA. First and foremost, we are not screening chemicals for safety before we put them into the products that we use. Also shocking. Yeah, so less than 10% of the 85,000 chemicals that have been introduced into commerce have been tested for safety. And about 10,000 of those are commonly used in personal care products. So let's just say a solid 9,000 plus have never been tested for safety on human or environmental health. Then you combine that with the lack of regulation where people can claim natural pure botanical, whatever they want in skincare and cosmetics, and there's no regulation. So for example, a year or two ago, there was an article about aloe based products. They tested 38 aloe based products across department stores and drug stores. And they found that not a single one of them had one little drop of aloe in them. And then the third type of scenario is this scenario. And an example would be Brazilian blowout or there's one called wen haircare, where they've had over 20,000 complaints of hair loss, permanent hair loss for children and women. And yet they can't-- Is that a shampoo or something? Yeah, and it's still on the shelves. And same with Brazilian blowout where the people who are administering that hair straightening treatment were getting incredibly sick, but they can't do anything about it. 'Cause it had over 40% formaldehyde and think about you're heating up formaldehyde and blowing it all over and everyone's breathing it in. The FDA can't do anything about it. And that's why at Beauty Counter, we're so focused on our advocacy efforts because we need to update these outdated laws. How did we get to this point? I mean, look, I think there are a number of things. I think first of all, there was a brief moment in time in 1938 when the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act passed where Americans were protected. But that was prior to these 85,000 chemicals coming into commerce post World War II. And so a lot of the leading companies that are manufacturing products, a lot of large conglomerates started making these products when they probably thought they were totally safe. Why wouldn't they have thought they were safe? And now I think that the challenge becomes how do you undo this? And how do you, when you're sitting with relentless capital markets and you take your share price down or whatever you do, do the right thing and you take a massive hit. I think people are scared to change. And I think that we haven't updated major federal laws since 1938, I mean, it's been over 80 years. So-- The governing law in this that kind of covers this entire landscape is one law that was passed in 1938. One and a half pages of legislation that govern an $80 billion industry that still allow for chemicals of concern that are known to be cause, that cause cancer, linked to endocrine-disrupting, all those things, neurotoxicity. Those chemicals are in our products and the government has not taken action on the federal level. So a big part of your mission and why you founded this company is this advocacy piece of getting these laws changed. And part of that has been, you go into Washington DC and banging on doors to get people to pay attention to this. There's a new bill that you're trying to advocate for vote. But this has been going on for years, like since 2015 or something like that. So when we launched, from the very beginning I said, there are three things that we need to do that are really important. We need to educate because we knew that less than 20% of Americans had any idea that there are chemicals of concern. And I didn't look, I've always said, as we needed no one needed another beauty brand. And I mean, I'm not even a beauty. I wasn't even a beauty person. Like I never even... It wasn't my thing, but what we needed to create a movement for better cleaner safer products for everyone. And so education's always been a core component of our business. And using commerce as an engine for change has also been a core component 'cause I do think that consumer brands can move markets faster than legislative reform that will ever happen. On the advocacy side, we started from right out of the gate when I was raising capital, I said to all of our investors we're gonna take this all the way to Washington. You need to be comfortable with that. And we started immediately, the minute we had any skill. In 2013 we started to go out there and talk about it. And we started on the state and federal level. And now we do this in Canada as well. I didn't say this earlier, but not only have we not updated the laws since 1938, the EU banned or restricted depending on the chemical about 1400 ingredients well over a decade ago. When I started Beauty Counter, we had 11 to their 1400 and now we're up to a whopping 30. So we had to get out there and pound the pavement in Washington. We needed to let them know that it's time to change. The reality is we are just the tip of biology on the earth. The microbiome was always for life. It's never against life. If it appears that the microbiome is threatening us or killing us, it's because we have misaligned ourselves with nature at a large level and we need to realign ourselves with that. And we need to start to think about what it looks like to be within our moment, living as light beings at a high vibration in space and time with high consciousness. With a respect for human life, with a respect for animal life, that's not happening on the planet. People are right now saying again, oh China makes this happen every year because they have all these animal markets and food markets and everything else. And the reality is, yes, that actually is a problem. When we're killing 60 billion animals a year for human consumption, that's a global problem. And that's not a Chinese problem, that is a global problem that we're killing 60 billion animals. But a bigger problem that those 60 billion animals are largely being held in captivity in these extreme toxic inhumane levels of management. And so if we see viruses coming out of that, well that's the microbiomes check on the reality that we live in. There are checks and balances and biology, certainly that work better than the checks and balances in our government. And life is gonna have to be redirected if we oppose health and ecology on that level. Really what you're getting at is developing a healthy dose of humility. And the recursive theme and everything that you've been talking about comes back to having in there being equanimity in terms of our relationship to the planet, whether it's our food systems, whether it's how we interact with each other, we are out of whack and it's, nature's way of reminding us that we need to reset and pay attention. And again, I keep saying this, but I don't wanna minimize what's happening. There are a lot of people who are scared and there are many people who are suffering and people are dying. But I think if we can really connect with this humility, we have an opportunity to embrace the opportunity to return with a more sort of synergistic relationship with our planet. I mean, Farmer's Footprint is a perfect example of that. By returning to what is natural and cyclical with the planet, these farmers have been able to find new life and with that a new happiness and a new lifeline for their families. And the domino effect of that is profound. And if we can extrapolate on that example to reflect back upon our own relationship to the planet and our behaviors and our consumer choices, I think I can be highly instructive going forward. At the same time, many of these things that we're talking about involve systems that are out of the control of the average consumer. How much impact can I really have on our global supply chain on our food system, on policy, on economics, on what Big Pharma decides to do, et cetera. But what we can do is seize this moment of solitude and Seaquest duration to really inventory and reflect on our own behavior patterns because the ecosystem that resides within each of us is just a microcosm of the macrocosm that we're experiencing externally right now. And for me, I've been kind of thinking about this through that lens, like how am I living? What in my life is not in balance, where can I live more in alignment with nature's cyclical rhythms? Where can I find more balance in my day to day routine. And where am I blind or in denial about things that I'm that are perpetrating a problem that recurs in my own life. And I think the more that we can all adopt that practice, I think we all kind of emerge out of this assuming that we can emerge out of it healthy, more empowered and stronger and more capable and humble. And in a better position to create that world that we all can imagine for ourselves. And yet seems so out of grasp at the moment. Absolutely, that's beautiful. So, wanna just close with reaching out to the physicians and nurses and nurse practitioners and PAs that are out there right now on the front lines in New York and Philadelphia and all the other cities that are starting to see the impact of this, the situation we're in right now. And I just wanna acknowledge your effort and the fear that you're feeling and the exhaustion you're feeling and a state of overwhelm that you sense and the vulnerabilities that you're so poignantly aware of right at the moment. And I just want you to know that we so deeply appreciate your commitment and your efforts in this time. We know the extremity of the situation you're in and look forward to the end of that and the coming weeks as this passes over us. And in the meantime, I just wanna reflect for a moment about, again, redefining your role just like we did with the garden. We need to let go of maybe the expectations that you're gonna heal everybody and you're gonna save everybody's life. And we need to really look at both sides of the physician or care team's experience. On the one side, we are all trained to be technicians, how we're trained to adjust the knobs on the ventilators, were trained to adjust the drips on the IVs. We're trained to read all the data and we're trained to write all the notes and look at all the risk factors and fill out the insurance forms. All of that is coming to a crisis point. It's not working. And that happens every day in an ICU where all the technology at hand finally fails and there's nothing more we can offer. And the patients die. And then there's a second half to the journey that is the definition of that being a physician state, or being a caretaker, being a nurse is when you set down the machinery and you sit down with the patient and say, we've done our best, we have done everything we know how to do. And we acknowledge that you are alive and we acknowledge that you are here with us in this moment. And we acknowledge that you're gonna likely expand to the other side of this rebirth that we call death. And in that time with your patients right now, I want you to know that we see the greatest victory right there, 'cause ultimately as physicians and practitioners, we don't actually save lives. We don't have that level of capacity or responsibility. Life is something much greater than human. Life is a gift and it's not your responsibility to maintain it. It's your responsibility to show up and bring the highest level of compassion skill capacity that you can, but you will do your highest work when you recognize that this miraculous life that we live, this miraculous gift of life is transient. It is temporal, and it is our calling to be present with that and acknowledge it and see the beauty in every phase of it. And when you've got a young person who's dying or an elderly person who's dying, it's easy to get caught up in the emotions of the loss, but we need to get better and celebrate the moment of acknowledging the gain. This is a life well lived. This is a person who has created in their lifetime, this is the person who's loved in their lifetime, this is a person who's really in it for the big big story of what it means to be human. And this was a soul that came in on purpose and has lived some version of that purpose. And we acknowledge that. And so I hope that in the same way that the messy garden can start to look like a victory, the mess of healthcare can be very victorious if we recognize each other's humanity. And if we really embrace the beauty of human life and consciousness, that becomes often most poignant and most obvious when we're about to lose it. And we let go of that human consciousness to plug into something much, much bigger. And I hope that you get to see as the veil thins with your patients right now, you get to get to see that other side and realize that they have no fear on the other side of that veil. And so their coming back and forth out of cautiousness and back into consciousness in those last few minutes and hours and days, I hope that you get a glimpse of the beauty on the other side, and a state of being that's free of fear, free of sense of loss and only sees the opportunity and expansion and light. And so take this opportunity to let down the expectations on yourself and give up on a sense of failure. Let go of your sense of failure in those moments when the ventilators failing, actions failing, the numbers are going south. Don't let that define your success. Be present with your patients right now. Let, let them not die in vain, let them be part of the message that this virus is trying to teach us. Let their journey be part of you. Reach out to them and hold their hands right now and give them a sense of deep purpose in this extreme thing that they've been called to. If they're called to pass right now, let them know it's not in vain, that we're gonna learn from this, that we are realizing that we have taken too many steps away from our purpose, our real nature, our real potential and that they are doing their highest work right now in walking the journey of dying in this situation to teach us a deep lesson of what it means to be connected and disconnected and a pathway towards reconnection. And let them know that their highest victory is at hand and that they are part of the rise of human consciousness and not the collapse of biology on planet. That's what I want you to grab right now and just know that I had just deep gratitude for your courage to keep showing up. Love you, brother. Thank you. First of all, congratulations on the success of the "Blue Zones" kitchen cookbook. I mean, once again, there you are at the top of the bestseller list. It's pretty cool to see. Well, I spent years writing deeply research books that were, I like to think artfully crafted when it came to the pros and only to discover what America really wants is beautiful pictures and bean recipes. That's it, right. But this is not an ordinary cookbook. I mean, this unfolds much like one of your expeditions. This is a deep dive into these cultures as much as it is about here's the thing you can make in your kitchen. Well, yeah, I, I cringed at the title cookbook because actually we tried to make it more like a 250 page national geographic article. So I wrote... The introductions are all science driven, the science of why these foods are helping these people make it to 100. I think we have the best national geographic photographer in this genre, David McClain shot all the photos. There's no studio shots there, it's all editorial photography. And the recipes, none of them are recopied down. I sat on a stool and watch these old ladies cook and captured the recipes and then sent them here to Los Angeles actually where they were corrected in test kitchens. They don't have tablespoons and measuring cups up in the "Blue Zone". You sent the actual people or just... No, just my observation. But the thing is, this is a 500 year old food tradition that is disappearing because in all these Blue zones, the American food culture is coming and replacing this way of eating that has produced this statistically longest lived people. 20 year olds, aren't eating like this. So I was sitting with 70, 80, 90, even 100 year olds watching them cook the foods of their youth. So this is almost say a project of anthropology as much as a food book. Creating an historical document. I like to think it is. And when you look at these Blue zones pillars movements. Plant-based, plant slant diet, faith, friendship, connectivity, all of these things, are they relatively evenly balanced? They're interdependent with each other, but is there one that stands out. Did you write this Blue zones kitchen book because the diet component of it is so important or how do you think about how the interplay of all of those? Yes. To your point, it is a mutually supporting web of factors. So people eat wisely, they move naturally every 20 minutes because their life is underpinned with purpose. They have a social network that makes this easy. Their friends are doing these things and they live in environments where the healthy choice is the easy choice. So they are definitely connected. But the most important variable there is eating. Americans probably lose six years of life expectancy eating the standard American diet. This is that middle age, by the way. Overeating say a Blue zones diet which is largely beans, whole grains, greens, nuts and tubers and fruits and vegetables as well. So the problem is except for a few people like you with heroic discipline and a great community supporting you, it's very hard for Americans to go plant-based and whole food plant-based by the way, it's not Twinkies and chips. You need this whole foods plant-based diet is the most important factor. But the only way to do that for the decades necessary to avoid a chronic disease is have the right social network, live in the right place. Having that sense of purpose where it's important enough for you to be around that you're gonna make the sacrifices every occasionally to not order the hamburger. Also in this is stuff about portion size, time of day, when to eat. Like one of the things you noticed is like, well, the size of the plates that these people are using is this different than in America. And how does that dictate long-term how we... So I'll spin out a couple of the insights that I captured for Blue zones kitchen on how they eat. First of all, they're cooking, no matter where you go, they're only using about 20 recipes or 20 ingredients rather over and over and over. Because they know how to combine these ingredients to create a symphonic deliciousness, but not of different crazy foods or super foods. No super foods, except for beans. Beans is probably the super food. Number two, they tend to consume all their food in about an eight hour window. Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper. Number three, they tend to say something before the meal that marks a punctuation between their busy life and now we're slowing down to eat, like a prayer Adventists or the Sardinians or Hara Hachi Bu, which is an Confucian adage that the Okinawans say before every meal to remind themselves to stop eating when their stomachs are 80% full. They tend to eat with their family. They tend to not have electronics in their kitchen. So they're not eating to their favorite song or eating to their favorite TV show. They tend to cook at home as opposed to going out. These are all things that I would argue, add to the ecosystem of eating that produces long lived people and the core of which being this, knowing how to make plant-based food taste delicious. Amazing work. How's Kathy, is she good? Kathy Freston, my cruciferous girlfriend who says hi. She's the vegan vixen. She's been a great influence on really an early pioneer in making plant-based eating cool. For sure, huge, huge influence on mainstreaming. What we now kind of almost take for granted, like, oh vegan options, pretty much everywhere you go. But Kathy played a huge role. Yeah, she got to Oprah to go vegan for awhile. I know. And Ellen Degeneress and Crossword Kitchens which I argue is one of the best restaurants in Los Angeles is all plant-based. And that would have been seen as a heresy 15 years ago. What, kind of also a big influence on you personally. Like I think even in the time that I've known you, you've had an evolution in terms of your plant-based diet relationship. Yeah, I've come to a plant-based diet by observing that the diets of the world's longest lived people. And 95% of what they put in their mouth is whole plant based food, but she comes at it sort of the animal cruelty. And I never even thought of that, the occasional piece of meat I ate occasioned, just horrible pain and suffering from another sentient being. My favorite statistics, she told me that an adult pig has the intelligence of a three-year-old human, spends his entire life in a cage he can't turn around in, lives in its own feces, connects with its it's young the same way we connect with our young, wants to socialize, feels pain in the same way. Yet lives a miserable life and has a horrible death at the end all in the service of bacon or pork chop. And when you add that to the fact that eating a plant-based diet is probably worth six to eight years over eating a standard American diet, it's just so overwhelmingly right that you can't avoid it. Not to mention the environmental considerations. That's the third problem, yes. What is the right question to ask right now? Like if you're speaking to a white person, like what are the things that they should be thinking about and how can they contribute and participate in this in the most effective way? I think a great question is should be asking how did we get here? Because I listen to a lot of people speak as if they have the answers, again because of this event and recent events. And the anger that you see is not just because of these events. This is anger that stretches back 400 years. Because as an African-American, in our community when we see something happen, it's never just about the thing that happened. It's typically about the history, this is another thing that's happening. So it like this is a natural thing. We don't just look at Arberry's situation, we don't just look at George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. We literally, it's like a file that you just recall the faces and names like that. Or I could go back to Emmett Till immediately. And your own personal experiences. Yeah, personal experiences. So I think a good question to ask is how did we get here? And I don't think enough people ask that question. I think for one reason, it's gonna force people, particularly white folks, to look at this country differently. It's gonna force them to talk about white fragility. What DeAngelis told talking about. It forces them to look at themselves because to be American, subconsciously is to be white. And everything else is measured against that. I've had people in conversations where the guy would say, "I was in this room and it was a bunch of people's, diverse. "Americans were there." And then he began to list the African-American or the black folks, Hispanics. They weren't American, I guess. But when he was saying American, he was talking about the white folks that were there. And he wasn't a bad person. It was a great guy, but subconsciously, he just associated American with white. And that's typically what happens. And so to look at how we got here is to now have to open up yourself to seeing this country differently. 'Cause I always asked the question, when you say America is so great, what's your definition of greatness and when. Because if you're talking about power and military might and prosperity, certainly. If you're talking morally and being a just society, you have to go back and help me understand when was that. Because there's always been systemic and legalized oppression in this country. There's never been a decade, had never been a time in history and our history that it wasn't the case. And so I challenged that notion of greatness. Do we have the potential to be, absolutely. And so I think how do we get here is a great question to ask. And in addition to that, also I think people have to, this is a time of courage, a time of intestinal fortitude, where white people also have to confront their ignorance. When we don't know and that's exposed, that's vulnerable. And it doesn't, I mean, this goes beyond race, this is just human nature, human condition. If we don't know something and our current idea or point of view or answer that we thought was true is shown not to be by just based on evidence, that's a very vulnerable position to be in. No one likes their ignorance exposed. But if you look at that, even that term ignorance from just the sheer educational definition, ignorance is the beginning of enlightenment. It's learning. You can't learn until you confront and rustle through your ignorance. That's the foundation or the fundamentals of learning. So adults have to embrace the fear and the risk of being vulnerable. What they may say out of just sheer ignorance is proven to be untrue. Well, it requires a certain humility too. And I'm uplifted because I'm seeing a willingness to embrace this conversation in a way that I can't recall in my lifetime and that gives me hope. But it's juxtaposed against a climate and a culture that is more deeply entrenched in being right. And there are silos and the division that we're seeing right now, it's sort of a war between those two things right now. Social media fomenting this division across America where people just wanna yell at each other and no one is taking a pause to actually listen and take stock and perform a little bit of forensic self analysis. But I think these events have led us to a point where we are seeing a certain portion of the population doing that. I'm attempting to do that here today. And I think that's really the only path to healing and to really reconstructing society around more equitable lines. Rich, I think you're totally right. You hit the nail on the head. You have to be willing to have those kinds of conversations. When intelligent people are stuck in their silos and their echo chambers and spend more energy trying to defend their position than admit that this is a multifaceted complex problem that is going to take rigorous and consistent attention to in order to really right, in order to really solve the problem. Until we're willing to really embrace that, then it's gonna be an uphill battle, it's gonna be hard. Because we feel more comfortable when we think we're right or when we have the upper hand. And so when you have people on all sides digging in and having good points on every side, but spending most of our energy trying to point out where and why the other side is wrong as opposed to instead of being on opposite sides of the table, coming together on one side and actually pouring all of that energy into the problem, I think that's the heavy lifting that has... And conversations like this is a start. But I think what a message we wanna continue to really advocate is after the protesting, after the news cycle has died down, after the shift in attention moves to something else, will we have enough boots on the ground committed to wrestling within the trenches to right the wrong that we clearly see right now. Yeah, that energy has to get channeled into some kind of productive change that is architected around strategies and tactics to actually enact the changes that are necessary rather than just sort of outrage that just dissipates into the atmosphere. Which is again, why you hear people really pointing the spotlight on the dysfunction within the justice system. And you get a lot of people on one side saying those are just bad apple cops and deflecting the attention on no, this is just, if we look at it in terms of a virus, this is just a flare up of something that is still alive on the inside. And what we're seeing is just a flare up happening. But if we just deal with the surface issue and not deal with the root cause on the inside, it's just gonna be a matter of time before this little thing heals, but in months, weeks, years, another flare up happens. So we definitely to take this opportunity to now do some some deep dive surgery into the systemic issues that allow this thing to exist. Switching gears a little bit, another narrative that's out there is that this problem is not for black people to solve, it's for white people to solve. So what is the role of white America in redressing this, other than that you talked about the Els and we need to educate people, we need to appreciate the complexity of this. We need time to heal, we need a longer conversation that isn't bifurcated around political lines. Like, how do the white people listening to this wrap their heads around how they can be a most productive member of this movement? I go back and forth because I believe that is voices of color that need to lead because we feel it, this idea, you can't lead me someplace you've never been or you can't give to me what you've never had. 100%. It's preposterous to think otherwise. So there's a learning from voices of color. But I think taking the power and the privilege and being a part of helping to reach the broader white community, I think right now, that's whether it's in government, those congressmen and women using their positions to reach them, family members on the family level reaching them, in corporations, reaching them. I think, because we can't reach them, our job we can share we can put pressure on, we can protest. We can do all these things. We can write books, but they're not gonna listen to us necessarily. So I think one way, this is just one, it's not the only one. This is one thing is, I ask white friends, "You have to be the voice to reach the people "that we're not gonna be able to reach "on all these levels, wherever your influence is." That's one way because I don't know what else we can do. I really don't. If you look at literature, you look at music, you look at movies, you look at marches, we've done it peacefully. We've done it angrily, we've kneeled, we've knelt. We've fist in the air. We've used our bodies in ways. That's one of the primary resources we have, our bodies. We've done everything we know to do and we're still here, not just incidents but a culture. I think it takes the white allies or whatever word you want to use for that to be the voices advocating in solidarity to the white community, because they're not gonna listen to us necessarily. Not all, some will, but the masses won't listen to us. I think beyond the virus itself, it's really pulled the veil on the fragility of our systems, economic and political. The fact that everything has ground to a halt and our economy is basically frozen in time at the moment and in essentially free fall. And we're now seeing what happens when an economic system that's premised on carrying large loads of debt and businesses that are overly leveraged. You know, this is potentially cataclysmic and could send us into a depression, at the very least a moment of repression that we don't know how long it's going to last. And it is opening up the conversation about what a better economic system would look like. Again, this is something that you spent a lot of time thinking about. You've written a book, "Sacred economics." So how are you thinking about this moment in the context of your economic thinking? Yeah, it could go either way. Just like on the medical level, it could go either way, toward doubling down on where we've already been going and finally getting rid of all that alternative and holistic stuff or it could be like, wow, this wasn't working, let's try something really different. Why are we so vulnerable? Why is our healthcare system so fragile? We could go into this big reckoning and housecleaning and reassessment of everything all the way down to the bottom. Same thing with economics, if nothing changes, if we just continue on the path we've been on, then this crisis is accelerating a long existing trend of concentration of wealth and the destruction of small business and the concentration of economic and political power in fewer and fewer hands. Because the crisis is decimating small and medium sized businesses. So the big ones can get bailed out, they can get supported by the government. It's a lot harder to do that for your local movie theater or yoga studio or whatever. People are getting along okay without a lot of these small businesses. Some of them will probably come back, but we're looking at massive devastation for small businesses and the self-employed, even medium-sized businesses and everything that depends the brick and mortar world, like the local kinds of businesses. So we could see a extension of this longstanding trend of concentration of wealth. People talk about, with the stimulus checks and stuff, a universal basic incomes could be the start of a universal basic income, which could be a wonderful thing or it could be a terrible thing. It could be, well, sorry, you can't get a job anymore unless you're a part of a shrinking elite, but we'll give you your monthly pittance as long as you do as you're told. And don't misbehave and wear your ankle monitor to make sure that your electronic hall pass to make sure you're not at some unauthorized on a central place, et cetera, et cetera. And so most people are kind of on the door except for a small elite. And they can't get off it because the independent economy that's not controlled by government and huge corporations has been destroyed, like we could see that. Or we could see analogously to a holistic revival. We could take stock and say, wow we don't wanna keep going down this road, what do we do to bring economic power back to the people to redress the concentration of wealth. And that could go along the lines of... And this is a moment where we could take a different path. We could institute some form of a debt Jubilee, debt forgiveness, student loan, forgiveness refinancing mortgages at zero interest. There's many ways to bail out the debtors rather than bailing out the creditors and the banks and the large institutions. And I hope that this is one of the things I'd like to put onto the radar is that we don't have to go back to normal. Normal sucked. Normal was like a road to hell. Things were getting worse and worse for more and more people. And not just people, but for ecosystems. For soil, for water, for the whales, for the elephants, for the oceans. We don't wanna go back to normal. And now that normal has been interrupted, maybe we can make a conscious choice to go in a different direction. That's the gift. And that's what makes it an initiation. Yeah, that's the gift. It is the initiation. I mean, you've talked about and written about yourself, being somebody who is sort of always perceive that just around the bend, something like this would be coming and it never seemed to come. And now here it is, this moment in time that is so unique and unprecedented and yet rife with so much opportunity. I mean, the argument certainly can be made that this is the greatest opportunity for consolidation of power and wealth in our lifetime certainly. And we're seeing that happening right now and the large corporations are going to get their bailouts and there's gonna be a decimation of small businesses across the board. And if that scale tips too far in that direction, that becomes a scenario in which revolt and revolution becomes a potential reality. Short of that, we're also seeing on the other side indicia of this gift economy. We're having conversations about universal basic income in a way we never have. We're seeing people on social media just getting out their Venmo and sending money to people and over tipping and doing all of these kind of... Engaging in these beautiful acts of humanity that are casting a spotlight on the beautiful aspects of what a different type of system could produce that would bring us together and cultivate that community and eradicate some of the separation that's... Like you said, this is all an accelerant of these trends and things that are already happening. It's just being exacerbated right now. And that's allowed us to have a heightened level of attention. And with that, my hope is that we can take stock of that and really seize this moment where we're forced to stop, when we're in repose to conceptualize this better system for all. Yeah, I do see both of those things happening on the one hand, this outburst of humanity, solidarity. That's what always happens when the confining routines of normality waiver or dissolve. Rebecca Solnit writes about this so beautifully in her book, "A Paradise Built in Hell." When there's an earthquake, when there's a flood, when there's some natural disaster that sweeps away the structures of society, it's not what one might expect dog eat dog, looting and chaos and the strong preying on the weak. It's people getting together to take care of each other. Whoever has some, a kerosene stove they set up an outdoor kitchen and whoever has food brings the food and people, they start to take care of each other. This natural altruism and community and solidarity emerges. And you realize that it's been repressed all the time by our systems and ideologies of separation, but it's always laying there, waiting for its moment to come back. And this is such a moment. As soon as normality waivers, people can act on their long repressed impulse to live the lives that we are in fact here to live, which are not to maximize self-interest. That is a substitute, a bribe to keep us away from the lives that we're really here to live, which are lives of service to life and service to beauty and service to something meaningful to us. That's the only meaningful life and the only full life. And to sell that off, to mortgage that to mirror survival, safety, security, self protection, that is a poor bargain that we make. That leaves us feeling that we didn't even live life. Instead we lived the life we were paid to live, but what about my life where I'm not afraid to die, at least, yeah, maybe I have that fear but there's something more important. So that gets liberated in times like these. And it's also showing us when you take something that's happening unconsciously and put it starkly in front of your face by showing us the extreme of it, then the unconscious choice becomes conscious. And that's what we're seeing. It's like, okay, here's our destination, here's where we were gonna be going. A world of isolation, of distancing, of separation, of polarization, of concentration of wealth of no human contact, of no community. Like we've been silently helplessly, unconsciously moving toward that as if it were an inevitability for a long time. And now it's like the alcoholic waking up and his spouse has left him and and he's in the hospital or something like that. And it's like, wow, this is taking me to a bad place. And so it's a moment of reclaiming our sovereignty and our collective ability to choose our future rather than merely adapting to something that we see as inevitable. And what future will we choose, it's being shown us by precisely this humanity and solidarity that is breaking through the cracks in the system. That it's showing us the future we could go to, a future where we're all in this together, where we understand that your wellbeing and my wellbeing are connected. And even the wellbeing of other creatures and that health and happiness and even real wealth does not and cannot exist in isolation, but only in community. And so we can say, yeah, enough of this trajectory of separation, now is the time to rejoin the community of humanity and the rejoin the community of life. That's the crossroads that we're at right now. Taking pause and thinking how other people might feel is not only one of the calls to action for this moment that hopefully will go forward, but I think that that's the work we need to do now. So really think how do I make space for other people? How do I make other people feel comfortable? Again, to to say in running or something like that, like how do we create a more just space in our communities. I'm interested in kind of what unity and allyship looks like to you. Like, I'm just sitting here thinking I'm a white dude I'm privileged, I come from a certain background. We're in this moment and I really wanna be as open as possible and as teachable as possible. I wanna fully understand the breadth and the depth of what we're contending with right here. And I wanna be an ally. And I'm very, I find myself feeling cautious or somewhat paralytic around what to say and what to do for fear of misstepping in a culture in which a slight misstep on Instagram or in public is met with, we were talking about before. And not that I really care that much about any of that. What I do care about is getting this right. I'm interested in what that looks like from somebody of your perspective. That's an interesting thing. And I think that's something that a lot of us are thinking about. And one of the things about double consciousness is that I wasn't really thinking about that situation you just described, like I don't think a lot of black Americans that I've been in conversation with over my life have been really talking about paralytic white guilt. Yeah, yeah. So the wave of communications in the past several weeks has been really fascinating. Let me make it about me. Yeah, I got, it was like. Here's the thing, like is so funny 'cause all the white dudes are freaking out right now trying to figure out what to say and what not to say. And my black friends are like, relax man. Like, we've been waiting for you, it's cool. How do I get it right. I was like, well I'm counting on you to get it right, don't worry. Like just chill out, join in. Yeah, the whole paralytic idea of getting a right. So I didn't even know, like when after the George Floyd killing, when, before we were really aware and it was happening daily. Like our experiences that our understanding of the moment was setting in. So when there was like so much white silence, I was like, oh, okay, cool. White people don't have anything to say, okay, cool. And it was actually a real vacuum, a real deafening silence. It was actually really incredible because I was able to just think about the life of a modern Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd without so much noise. And I was able to reach out and connect to other black people in that space and just have these emotional connections. And what were those conversations like? They were uncomfortable because you really have to, I mean like everybody has a divestment that they need to consider. So you really have to let go of machismo or these kind of like chauvinistic ideas of our own vulnerability and fragility. I keep coming back to this idea of love. I know that's super obvious and basic and people talked about it from time, but Ahmaud Arbery's best friend say that it was weird every time he would like leave from hanging out, he would say like, I love you, man. And he wouldn't leave until they said it. And these are like young brothers sitting around in rural Georgia at the carwash leaving work. And like, that's a really insane and rigorous process practice to do. So when I called up all these brothers and told them I loved them, it was rigorous from my end. It was tough to reach out. And man, for all the mistakes that I've made and then I'm gonna continue to make as soon as I walk out this door, I just wanna keep thinking about love and I wish that I would hope that this would be a moment for people to reset and reflect on what that is. And for all the little microaggressions that we engage in or all the times that we take around chitchat. And anytime we just serve as a detractor to someone else for no reason, all these things are adding up to this giant feeling of psychic pain that you can just feel. Whether you're feeling it in America's cities or you're feeling it in Ahmaud Arbery's killers, like how abject were these guys that they went into seek and destroy mode. You know what I mean? Like it's not too early to kind of think about the spiritual poverty, the imaginative poverty that racists feel. You know what I mean? So if we can kind of at least consider what an ethic of love looks and feels like, if we can just kind of like reset and refer back to those basic civics that maybe we thought we were gonna pursue as we got older, that's really what I'm thinking about. And I'm thinking about that, honestly in like a really corny kind of social media way. Like it's okay to be a white ally with 1047 followers. And like here's the list and you're banging on at white people. But if then you're like going and getting into the DMs and detracting from someone else, if you're the purveyor of suspicion or innuendo or kind of things, like you gotta think if our own white supremacy is uninvestigated until very recently. And that's black people, like black people have a social sickness that we've inherited from 400 years of experience in this country. So everybody is on the docket right now to investigate our own internalized white supremacy. This is our chance to see beyond the speeches that politicians are making. This is our chance to think a little bit beyond what our mainstream media is telling us. And what does it mean for us? And strangely, this opportunity has been a reset on so many levels, but it's been a recent on like my mindfulness practice. And going back to the beginnings of that and then just thinking about the ways in which a mindfulness practice helps us just think of things more clearly. It's interesting. You kind of think that meditation is like about I come a guru on a mountain top or something like that, but I've been reading and hearing some things lately that it's like it's not even about this Nirvana state of an empty mind, it's actually about more practical than that in some ways. It is about being able to navigate thoughts and see things clearly. And I think that's a tremendous gift that is at our disposal right now to work through it. And I think that kind of work on a personal level is what's gonna equip all of us to kind of work our way through. And yeah, that's what we're seeing in the comment section, to take it from a spiritual idea down to like a super absurd example. But before you might see all comments sort of unified. But now if you're seeing all these kinds of disparate voices, you're seeing like the fragmentation of people thinking their way through it in the past few weeks. In 1992 writing was bad or why would these people burn their own neighborhood? Well, in Los Angeles, it was an update of '92. They weren't burning their own neighborhood, it was like a strategic move to burn non-black neighborhoods. The conversation that's happening with white people about the difference between protesting, peaceful protesting, looting, and rioting. That's an interesting conversation to have instead of just kind of watching your TV screen glow in the night and kind of like making assumptions on what you think it is.
