Rich Roll, Ultra-Athlete | Reclaiming Your Vitality with a Conscious Lifestyle | 2017 CEO Summit

hey everybody I'm so delighted and pleased to be able to take the stage today to talk about my favorite subjects health nutrition diet and most importantly human potential unlock unlocking and unleashing human potential before I get into it though can I see a show of hands are there any runners or triathletes out here I've got a couple of you guys good that's good are there any vegetarians a couple vegetarians how about vegans are there any dreaded vegans yes John's raising his hand proudly just a couple of you how many of you think that the whole vegan thing is a bunch of weak hippie [ __ ] raise your hands we're all friends here okay I know there's a couple of you out there well I'm gonna take you on a journey today and maybe we can convene afterwards I'm just going to tell you a story it's my story my story begins with me coming to out of a blackout hallucinating shaking uncontrollably sweating profusely confused terrified stuck to plastic sheets in a strange room that I didn't recognize only to slowly come to the realization that I was in rehab now this was not the plan for my life I can tell you that there was a time when I was somebody who had a tremendous amount of potential of promise out of high school I got into every college that I applied to I got into Harvard and Princeton and I went I end up going to Stanford where I swam and Stanford University swimming team somehow I snuck through Cornell Law School but addiction ultimately robbed me of everything until I was morally and spiritually bankrupt because addiction does not discriminate the end of my drinking career it was not a pretty picture I was somebody who would start the day with a vodka tonic in the shower I would sneak drinks throughout the day hide my empties lied everybody around me about this crazy second life that I was living of course everybody already knew it that point and at the end it was really the nadir of a 15 plus year career as a professional alcoholic that was not romantic by any stretch of the imagination it was a career that left me really broken alienated from friends and family untrustworthy unemployable sleeping on a bare mattress in an otherwise unfurnished room my best thinking got me institutionalized in a mental institution and that was a home that was a place that I made home for a hundred days which is a long time to be in rehab but that experience saved my life and in the wake of that as I made my way back into the world I spent the next eight or nine years trying to repair all the wreckage that I created as a result of my drinking and using and I was successful in that regard by the time I was in my late 30s I had all this stuff I had all the trappings of the American Dream that had been the primary driving force of my entire life if you were to look at my life from the outside looking in it all looked pretty good you know nice car in the driveway building a beautiful family nice house on the partnership track at a prestigious Los Angeles law firm it was all good but along the way I overlooked a couple key things and the first thing is I wasn't taking care of myself physically so by the time I was 39 I was about 50 pounds overweight I was never more badly obese I was never somebody that Jillian Michaels was gonna yell at on a TV show or anything like that I just looked like a guy who's riding an elevator up and down too much and you know eating a little bit too much take-out food in the law firm but on the inside I was sort of dying there was no consciousness in my capitalism I was suffocating depressed and disillusioned by this all-consuming professional career that I was realizing was quickly becoming at odds with this person that I was growing into and all of this came to a head this existential crisis that I was kind of harboring in the back of my mind collided with a health scare late one night on the eve of my 40th birthday I've been lake I've been working late that night and I came home my family was asleep I started to make my way up a simple flight of stairs up to my bedroom and I had to pause halfway up the flight of stairs I was winded I was out of breath I tightness in my chest I was buckled over sweat on my brow and really tremendous fear in my heart that I was on the precipice of having a heart attack it was really quite scary and it was a confusing moment and it left me wondering how did I get here how did this happen and what I've realized in retrospect in the wake of this is that I'm not alone in having this kind of an experience because diseases and deaths related to nutrition have claimed more lives than in all the world wars combined and when you look at the statistics it's really quite astonishing right now 70% of Americans are obese or overweight cancer claiming millions worldwide heart disease remains America's number one killer one out of every three people will die of a heart attack one out of every three and they're predicting that by 2030 50 percent of Americans are gonna be diabetic or pre-diabetic just like meditate on that for a minute it is shocking these are truly the epidemics of our era and it's also bankrupting our economy seventy-five percent of all health care costs get funneled towards treating these chronic lifestyle illnesses but the thing that is so heartbreaking and ironic about all of it is that 75 to 80 to 90 percent of these conditions are preventable or reversible through some pretty simple diet and lifestyle alterations now I didn't know any of this at the time I was just wheezing and confused on the staircase but I realized that my life had gone awry for the second time and I really needed to take stock and control how I was living and make some significant changes and I knew that those changes needed to be specific they needed to be somewhat dramatic and they needed to be immediate I knew that in the same way telling myself well I should just drink a little bit less that didn't work I knew that because I'm an extreme personality that's saying well you know what you should eat a little bit better and go to the gym I just knew that wasn't gonna work so the first thing that I did was I whoops got ahead of myself there was I adopted I did this like seven-day juice cleanse which I don't recommend it was terrible I didn't enjoy it at all I remember laying on the couch sweating profusely starving ready to chew my arm off I'd never gone a single day in my entire life without eating solid food but I this was like my way of wiping the slate clean and trying to reboot my operating system but an amazing thing happened in the course of that experience which was that by the fourth fifth sixth day of doing this you know rather extreme protocol I started to feel the vitality return to me again and by that seventh day I actually felt quite extraordinary I couldn't believe in a period of just seven days of going from somebody who was subsisting on what I like to call the window diet basically this is how I ate throughout my adolescence and most of my adult years that in a period of just seven days I could feel so dramatically different I was sleeping better my vitality had resumed and I thought well I'm just gonna drink juice from now on I'm not gonna eat food I found my solutions thinking like a good alcoholic my wife had to disabuse me of this notion but I then became very interested in food and the impact on health and how it would make me feel and I was determined to find a way of eating that would allow me to feel as good as I felt on that seventh day of that juice detox cleanse experiment so I spent the sixth next six months trying on all different kinds of diets and protocols and I wasn't really having much success I would always lapse back into bad habits or it just wasn't really clicking with me and I just could never recapture that sense of vitality that I had experienced the end of this six month period I kind of had settled into this vegetarian diet but it was my version of a vegetarian diet which meant Pizza Hut pizza just don't put the pepperoni on it or bean and cheese burritos at Taco Bell obviously this was not working out very well for me so there I was back on the couch fatter than ever lazier than ever more depressed than ever watching a lot of late-night Law & Order reruns like an expert on Law & Order zoning out in front of the TV and I was ready to give up on this whole healthy eating experiment I thought well maybe at 40 you're just not supposed to feel that good like maybe I could live with that like this is just what aging is and you know I'm just gonna go back to eating the way that I was eating before and forget about this whole thing but as I was sitting there watching television my eyes sort of glazed upward above the television to this photograph that was hanging there that my mother had given to me for my birthday some years prior and it was a photograph of this guy Richard spindle my namesake my mother's father I was named after him in certain respects he's sort of my doppelganger much like me he had been a champion swimmer in his youth he was captain of the University of Michigan swim team back in the 1920s when it was kind of a dynastic Empire of collegiate swimming he narrowly missed making the Olympic team he held an American record at one point he was a contemporary of the great talents of his era like Johnny Weiss Miller who went on to stars Tarzan on the silver screen and Richard spindle remained a lifelong athlete he was never overweight you never smoked continued to stay fit by swimming in Lake Michigan and nonetheless he fell prey to America's number one killer at age 50 for many many years before I ever had the chance to meet him and this was a situation an incident that really devastated my mother and she never really fully recovered from it and her whole life she would tell me you got to watch what you eat rich heart disease runs in the family you got to be careful but when you're young it's in one year and out the other but in this moment as I was sitting there on the couch it really hit me like a ton of bricks and I I knew in that moment that I really did need to figure out how I was gonna live and how I was gonna eat if I didn't want to fall prey to what had taken his life too soon and I knew that I was headed in that rection probably a lot sooner than he did given the way that I was treating myself so I thought well what's left to do what have I not yet explored and there was one thing that I hadn't tried yet I wondered let's get rid of all this processed crap that's in my diet that's a given I need to get rid of that but also what would happen if I got rid of all the animal products on my plate I wonder what that would look like it sounded crazy it sounded super severe and extreme and I think the reason I hadn't tried it prior to that is because it sounded terrible like what's left to eat you know I imagined crawling around on the yard like chewing grass out of the front you know it's like it just sounded terrible like I was gonna be just eating grass and lettuce for the rest of my life but I figured a joyless life is better than being dead and I'm gonna try this protocol anyway so I went ahead with this experiments my expectations were low not only did I not think it would work I didn't really want it to work but it was undeniable that within seven to ten days of adopting what I later discovered was called a whole food plant-based diet this is the subject of John's book that I had finally recaptured that sense of vitality that I was searching for that I had experienced on the latter days of that juice cleanse I felt incredible this resurgence and energy my sleep was better my mental acuity was better it seemed that every aspect of my well-being throughout the days and into the nights was being impacted positively by making this change and for the first time in many years I suddenly had this impulse to exercise again I'd been such a lazy couch potato it just didn't it didn't it wasn't something that I was interested in doing and suddenly I wanted to again I pulled an old pair of running shoes out of the closet I went back to the swimming pool here and there my wife actually bought me a bike for my 40th birthday because I think I was driving her crazy because I was like vibrating with energy she's like please get out of the house and that was it I started enjoying myself physically for the first time in a long time and Mike my goals were modest I had no designs or desires to return to becoming a competitive athlete in my 40s all I wanted was to connect with myself physically to lose that gut around the mid such and I'd be able to enjoy my kids at their energy level that was really it you know a middle-aged guys aspirations but each week that went by the melt the pounds just like started melting off of me I got fitter and stronger at a ridiculously rapid rate I just felt really fantastic it was undeniable and then what happened was about three or four months into this chrysalis experiment experience I went out for a run I've been kind of getting out there and getting fit in an unstructured way for a couple months at this point but I hadn't done anything crazy or extreme and I went to a local trail near my house one of my favorite trails and my idea that morning was I was just gonna run for you know maybe an hour at most it was a weekday morning and it was one of those days where if you're a runner maybe you've experienced this or a creative person who's lost herself in the creative process pursuing you know that creative thread where everything just clicked it was like I think they call it a flow state now the cool kids call it a flow state like I was in the zone and every mile that I ran I felt better than the mile before I just felt like I could run forever I just had this boundless energy so I just kept going and I kept going and I kept going and that day I ultimately ended up running about 24 miles which was insane it was so much further than I'd ever run before I didn't know that my body was capable of doing something like that and I thought man like either I've just unlocked some crazy dormant gene or there's something about eating this plant but he's diet that is like agreeing with me in a really bizarre crazy way that I would have never anticipated and more importantly even beneath that I started to feel joy in my life again because I was reconnecting with this part of myself that had brought me so much happiness as a young person and it was around this time that I had friends my friends my co-workers my fellow lawyers would come up to me and they they were like rich man you look pretty good like you lost all this weight you have a smile on your face your skin looks really clear and good and when your guy friends come up to you want to talk to talk to you about your skin like you know something [ __ ] weird is going on right this is not normal behavior like what are you doing and I said you know I'm just I'm eating plants I'm like working out more they're like eating plants like what does that mean I don't know I'm just I'm like eating lots of plants right that's it and that look of eager anticipation like what kind of butter are you putting in your coffee and how much grass-fed bacon are you eating for breakfast when that when that sort of anticipation wasn't met I would see these this look of expectation would just sort of deflate into like ashen disappointment and that disappointment would slowly morph into like this Stern look of grave concern for my well-being so I had a lot of conversations that went a little bit like this I'm going to McDonald's that's sweet hey let's go for a smoke that sounds good let's go get drunk that's even better sounds awesome but if you tell somebody you're going vegan you are a baby killer does not go over well the hilarious thing is that when I was eating McDonald's every day nobody once came up to me and expressed concern about my dietary choices but now suddenly all of my friends overnight had graduated from nutrition school and we're very eager to express their opinions about what I was doing and these conversations would always sort of devolve into one penultimate questions you guys know what that question is where do you get your protein dude where's your protein and Duke come on bro where are you getting your proteins where are you getting your protein where are you getting your protein I got asked this question so many to this day I get asked this question almost every single day and I could spend an hour talking about this issue of protein on a plant-based diet I don't have the bandwidth or the time to do that today suffice it to say that there are so many misconceptions about proteins where do we get it how much do we need most people who are sedentary eat about 2 to 4 or 5 times the amount of protein required they exceed the RDA in that amount there's no evidence that I'm aware of that that excess amount contributes to athletic performance or health in fact the signs suggest the contrary this whole question of protein is kind of the wrong question it's a red herring non-issue of a debate but I got asked this question so many times even though I was feeling fitter and I was like able to go out and run long distances and I had awesome skin I started to think you know I must not be getting enough protein it's insane you know but like human beings are insane so where do I get my protein well I get my protein in the same place these poor starving malnourished guys get their protein I get my protein in the same place all of these guys get it some of the fiercest strongest animals on the planet or herbivores for some reason nobody asked them where they get their protein I get it where they get it just lower on the food chain grains and beans greens legumes nuts and seeds funny thing is my whole life I was thought beef is what's for dinner milk does a body good and here I was feeling better and performing better and as long as I could remember without the very foods I've been told my whole life are essential to be healthy and of course crucial if you want to perform as an athlete so my whole world was suddenly upside down and after abusing myself with drugs and alcohol and horrible lifestyle habits and the wind diet and too much Law & Order and workaholism and all of these things in a matter of a few months I had felt reborn and I was struck by the incredible resilience of the human body to heal when treated properly and this realization led me to a question and it's a question that would soon become an obsession of mine which is one of the other areas of potential that I'm not looking at where else have I been blind to what I'm capable of and it's this question this obsession that ultimately lured me towards the world of ultra endurance sports which in many ways is a beautiful tableau or template to test the outer limits of human potential so in 2009 I set my sights on this crazy race it's called Ultraman you guys know you guys have all heard of Ironman right as know what an Ironman is well an Ironman is a very long triathlon widely considered the ultimate test of human endurance which over the course of the day you swim 2.4 miles and you ride your bike 112 and then you run a marathon all in one day crazy long super difficult well I stumbled across this race that I'd never previously heard of before called Ultraman and Ultraman is almost twice the distance of an Ironman so three hundred and twenty mile three-day circumnavigation of the Big Island of Hawaii you know why they call it the Big Island is it's super [ __ ] big I found this out the first day you swim 6.2 miles and then you race your bike 90 miles you go to bed that night you wake up the next day you race your bike 177 171 miles and the third day you celebrate this whole insane affair by running fifty 2.4 miles the double marathon I'm reading about this race and I'm thinking hold on a second like human beings can actually do that like it I just couldn't it blew my mind not only that people were capable of actually completing this crazy race but that they actually willingly signed up for this kind of suffering it just fascinated me and it was like this switch was flipped and I just knew deep inside me that this was the race that I needed to that I needed to do it made no sense I'd never done an Ironman I'd never even completed a Half Ironman there was no logic that went into this but it was just I was lured into this with a crazy tractor beam and I said about preparing for it I trained as hard as I possibly could and as a result of this preparation which you know resulted in a lot of my stick that your friends having a lot of questions about my sanity and my level of personal responsibility like rich you started drinking again I think you should call your a sponsor nonetheless I was able to go from this window diet addicted couch potato guy into this dude fitter stronger faster than I had ever previously been even when I was swimming at Stanford it helps when you have a photographer who like knows where to put the light and everything like that so it looks looks super epic and you get all their shadows but you know it's not it wasn't about the physique for me it was like again like I said this internal compass had been righted inside me and I was suddenly living in more authentic alignment with with who I am and who I was at the time but nonetheless there were a lot of questions surrounding my ability to finish this race my friends again like I took like I said and and I had my own doubts as well I wasn't sure this 43 year old corporate lawyer had much a shot much of a shot at completing this thing so I showed up with a great deal of humility at this race on Thanksgiving weekend in 2009 and I had one goal and that goal was don't die just like don't die don't do anything crazy but when I got out of that first 6.2 miles 6.2 miles swim I had a 10 minute lead on the next competitor and I held that lead throughout the rest of that day one to win that stage day one stage of that race ten minute lead on the next competitor this corporate lawyer who really had no business being here in the first place it was like the craziest thing that had ever happened to me and I remember going to sleep that night thinking once again I think this plant-based diet is working out okay for me I better not tell anyone about it let's just keep that a secret lots of stories came out of this race the second day I ended up crashing my bike which took me out of contention and it was amazing that I even was able to finish that day and the third day on the double marathon run I could barely bend my knee it was so swollen from that crash and ultimately had to just jog or walk the first couple miles and that walk turned into a jog and then I started working my way back up the field as things loosened up and I completed that race to finish six and the fastest American that year so it's not like I won thank you but it's not like I want or anything it's funny though because people say to me all the time what do you think would have happened had you not crashed you think you could have won do you think you could have got on the podium I don't care that's not why I got into this I didn't get into ultra endurance sports to win races or beat other people or get medals I got into it to more deeply connect with myself to learn about what makes me tick and what's important because in ultra endurance you're really forced to meet yourself to meet to meet the outer limits of your capabilities in your bit in your and your potential because it just strips you down to the very core of who you are that's what I was seeking and that's what I receive and in the in the context of athletics if you are in a game or race and everything goes your way it's great for the ego but what you actually learn from that it's when things go wrong that you're presented with a teachable moment you're presented with an opportunity a decision and the decision that you make that's what reveals character that's what I was searching for that's exactly what this experience delivered to me and so to me it was the perfect race and I wouldn't change a thing but back to that question what am i truly capable of and had I answered that for myself had I satisfied myself that I had really thoroughly explored that topic and I felt like I had I was like I think I got a lot out of that I don't know if I need to do another one of these races I think it's I think I'm good I think I'm good and then I got a call from this buddy of mine Jason Lester who's an amazing athlete somebody I had raced with and trained with throughout my endurance career he's incredibly inspiring human being because he does all these crazy races without the functional use of his right arm he has a right arm but he doesn't have use of it so he swims with one arm it's absolutely stunning imagine swimming six miles with one arm that's what this guy does and he said calls me up he says rich I got this idea I want to do this thing I'm calling it epic five I want to do five Iron Man's on five Hawaiian Islands in five days and I said that sounds awesome for you I will sit in the nosebleed seats for this one but whatever you need I'm here to support you and he's like no no no we got to do this together come on I want you to do this with me I want to have this experience with you so I don't know you know I want to get back to my family and this is like a family decision it sounds this sounds really painful too like I don't I don't know if I want to do that it's like just think about it just think about it okay I'll think about it and I didn't as I thought about it I thought about all the amazing things that human beings have done in the context of endurance and adventure the human spirit just being so boundless and yet it seemed like everything had already been done every peak had been summited guys have Kai act across the Pacific Ocean people have raced their bikes across the United States essentially without sleeping three dudes even ran all the way across the Sahara Desert every box had been checked and yet here was a challenge that on its face seems so kind of obvious in elementary it was amazing that no one had ever attempted it let alone completed it and I knew that I couldn't sufficiently answer that question for myself about my potential unless I took this on that this was being presented to me for a reason and it was another opportunity to go deeper so in May of 2010 Jason and I set out to test the outer limits of human capability by tackling this crazy epic five adventure and there are so many amazing stories that came out of this but I'm running out of time and I'm just gonna leave you with one so this is on day four we're on the island of Maui and we just finished the bike leg and we were staring down the Barrell having to run a marathon this evening and at this point the the the wheels were falling off the wagon there was sleep deprivation the saddle sores were so bad I couldn't sit on my on my saddle on my bike anymore I was dehydrated exhausted I just the last five miles of this bike ride I was actually weeping out loud I was so tired that by the time I finished it I dropped the bike and I was like there's no way I'm running anywhere it's it's not even a matter of will or determination it's just a it's a physics issue it's a it's a physical impossibility that I would have the energy to be able to do something like that and as you can see Jason here he doesn't look so good either but we're tough guys and so somebody's gonna have to say out loud that they're calling it off so there's like a game of chicken going on here like who's gonna who's gonna call it off and say I'm going to the hotel doesn't look like Jason's about to say anything I look like I'm just about to say something it's over with and right at this moment this amazing thing happens we're in this parking lot by the beach where we had begun that Ironman that day and we had a couple volunteers with us four or five people maybe six people who are kind of surrounding us keeping their distance at this point because we're a little prickly and often the distance from the corner of my eye I suddenly see this woman coming up the beach walking towards us and she became illuminated when she stepped underneath one of those halogen street lamps and I could see her keel tank top and her dark skin somebody who had been in the Sun too much kind of leathery probably not as old as she looked and a little bit draggled as she held like a paper bag with a bottle in it she kind of sauce here it was about 10 o'clock at night at this point so I think she was just curious like what are these people doing in this beach parking lot in the middle of the night and she approaches us gets about a couple feet away from our group and she just kind of surveys us back and forth she's looking at us like what are you guys doing she's looking at each person trying to determine what exactly is happening and then for some reason my eyes meet her eyes and we lock in like a tractor beam and at that moment she starts walking towards me just like this until she's standing right above me and I'm thinking I don't need this right now what is this woman doing and I could tell she was drunk and she stares right into my eyes and bends down and says hey man do you want to party with me like do I want to party with you no I do not want to party with you when you're that exhausted even the slightest external stimuli is so overwhelming I was like please just leave just walk away I kind of wished her well she's like Haggard voice of the alcoholic and she started to disappear didn't I and I thought thank you now I can get back to the business of calling this thing off and then another thought occurred to me and I realized you know that woman her and I we're not so different in fact how I made couple decisions just a little bit differently than I had I could so easily be living our life that part of the way she lives her life is still attractive to me to that alcoholic that continues to live inside of me and I choose to believe that that was not a random occurrence that in that moment where I'm about to call this thing off that this person intercedes and disappears into the night I look at that and I see not a drunk woman I see an angel in angel who had been delivered to me at that very specific moment in time to remind me that my life had been saved twice first through sobriety then through this change in my lifestyle and my diet she reminded me that I had traveled such a distance from that loss broken soul laying on those plastic sheets in that rehab to the midst of this incredible fantastic adventure living life full out and then my thoughts turned to Richard spindle the grandfather that I never knew with whom I shared so much in common and was deprived of ever having a relationship with and how much I would imagine that he probably would have loved to have not only seen me swim it's a college student but also to be a witness to this crazy adventure that we were in the middle in that moment I could feel his presence it was like he was there with us on the bumper I thought about all my stick figure friends who told me I was chasing a fool's errand and then I thought about this other guy his name is David Goggins he's a Navy SEAL he's somebody who has been personally inspiring to me a guy who was conquered a tremendous number of obstacles in his life as well as endurance challenges and something that he once said that has always stuck with me and that is this when you think you're done and you can't go one step further you've actually only tapped into about 40% of what you are truly capable of and armed with that the next thing I remember is going into this like few states I don't even really recall exactly what happened next it was like a black out like a silver black out and when I came out of it Jason and I were no longer sitting on that bumper we were walking down this road and that's a walk that turned into a jog and a jog that turned into a run until we were running through these Keene fields on the island of Maui that were under a controlled burn we had our t-shirts wrapped around our faces to prevent the smoke from getting into our lungs and the sky was a light in this crazy orange hue there was like a surrealistic Salvador Dali painting or a scene out of Apocalypse Now and just before dawn broke we finished that marathon we ran 26.2 miles throughout the night something I didn't think I was I didn't think was physically possible for me to do the next day we got a good night's sleep took a little break and did the fifth and final Ironman on the Big Island and all I remember about that was that it was like an afterthought it was like a picnic a celebration of the four that preceded it in fact I felt better on the fifth one than I did on the first and it was like my body was saying to me oh now I know what you're trying to do I thought you were trying to kill me I get it now the resilience of the human body cannot be underestimated and when we finished that fifth and final Ironman Jason and I had done something that no human beings I've ever done before we did it fueled on nothing but plants and by 44 I had exceeded my wildest expectations as an athlete but my greatest accomplishment is in athletic my greatest accomplishment is that I healed myself not just in body but in mind and in spirit the truth is nothing special I'm just an ordinary guy who happened to do a couple extraordinary things but my point the point of this story is that people say people don't change systems don't change and I think that's [ __ ] I changed people do change and not only Ken's system change Ken's systems change systems do need to change I alluded to the incredible healthcare crisis that we find ourselves in the midst of right now but in addition to that as population continues to swell we need to find new and better ways of feeding the planet right now our system for feeding the planet industrialize animal agriculture factory farming and it did it in addition to catalyzing all these crazy negative health impacts on humans is also wreaking havoc on our environment animal agriculture is a massive contributing to mass species extinction - ocean acidification - rainforest destruction - water table pollution about 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions are tribute Abal to animal agriculture that's more than the entire transportation sector combined requires about 18 times the amount of land and nine times the caloric input to feed a meat-eater versus a plant eater we need to find a better way to feed the planet and this event and you people are the stewards of the future you are the people who are captains of industry leading it with consciousness into the next decades so my message to you is to carry this mantle with forethought and with consciousness and with intention to how we can solve these problems for the betterment of humanity so the truth is my opinion adopting a plant-based approach to your plate even if it just means moving a little bit more in that direction of more plants and less animal products is perhaps the single most powerful most positively impactful compassionate conscious thing that you can do as a conscious capitalist but also as a conscious consumer it is the medicine that will prevent and reverse all these diseases that are debilitating and killing millions of people and necessarily it will significantly reduce your carbon footprint and help preserve our earth's bounty' for not only ourselves but our children and our children's children's and our animal friends alike you change your plate your relationship with your plate it will change who you are it will change how you are and it holds the potential to change the world and it might just might even turn you into a superhero so thank you guys [Applause]

Channel: Conscious Capitalism

Views: 150,127

Rating: 4.9096656 out of 5

Keywords: Rich Roll, Conscious Capitalism, ultra-athlete, ultra-endurance, vegan, breaking addictions, health, unlocking human potential, vitality, 2017 CEO Summit

Id: khQgecnGzlc

Length: 40min 54sec (2454 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018