YouSaid · the spoken record

Rich Roll

lines on the record: 108
first: 2022-01-05
most recent: 2022-01-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“At some point, he said, Hey, I know this book agent, like you have such an amazing story. Let me introduce you to this person. And at that time, I hadn't thought of writing a book. It wasn't on my list of things that I was thinking of doing. And that conversation with that book agent basically made me feel comfortable giving it a stab. And it was kind of a charmed thing where I wrote a proposal. I worked really hard on it because I recognized the unique and amazing opportunity it presented. And that led to getting a book deal really quickly. And so suddenly my life priorities changed because I was able to recognize that this could be a lever that would propel me into an entirely new universe of opportunities and trajectories with my career. So prioritizing the writing of that book was like the”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually a really interesting story. So, what happened was I had been doing these races and getting some notoriety for it and some press. And an article came out in the Stanford Alumni magazine and it had mentioned what I was doing. It had also mentioned that I had had this struggle with alcoholism and had been sober for a while. And somebody who I only knew very tangentially sent me an email and said, hey, I read that article. I'm recently out of a treatment center like he was an alumni. I'm recently out of treatment center and I'm the CEO of this company. My board doesn't know like I need somebody to talk to. Like, can we just talk? And so I struck up a phone relationship with this person and was just trying to help him and, you know, guide him to make good decisions about how to conduct himself in early sobriety.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Occurrence that I could have never predicted happening in my life. And I just felt so grateful to even have the opportunity.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was a little bit of both. At that time, I had already been scaling back on my law practice. I was balancing training for these crazy races, which we can talk about, and becoming less and less interested in being a lawyer. And at that time, I was self-employed as a lawyer. I had made the step of getting out of the big corporate law firm hustle and had a couple different incarnations of my practice being solo, being with a couple partners, et cetera. So I had flexibility over how I was allocating my time and the four-hour work week was actually really helpful at that time in helping me wrap my head around how I could straddle these both worlds and still get things done. So the truth is I had already begun to take my foot off the gas a little bit on the law practice, but the opportunity to write this book was such a remarkable.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That started a little bit later. It was sort of precipitated by the crash in 2008, and it continued through years after publishing Finding Ultra. Like it was a very extended period of time of being challenged to even put food on the table”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pass and become ephemera. And so that was really the moment that catalyzed kind of everything that followed. And even the fact that I'm talking to you today, it all tracks back to that very specific incident.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Likely headed in his direction and would meet my demise probably sooner than he had because there was no McDonald's and Jack in the box when he was kicking around. It was sort of like a second bottom that was very reminiscent of the day I decided to get sober, like this very crystallized moment in time where it's almost like a window of opportunity presents itself like a crack in the door or a line in the sand. And you have this opportunity to harness it, take advantage of it and take contrary action or not, right? And because I was so aware of how that simple decision of going to that treatment center had changed my life so dramatically that I was being once again visited by just such a moment, I realized that I needed to take action swiftly because if I didn't kind of grab onto it immediately, I knew it would just”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I had to stop halfway up a flight of stairs. Like I was too winded to just walk all the way to the top. And I had tightness in my chest. And like that sweaty pallor on my face from a flight of stairs and thinking I'm like this person who had swam at Stanford and would look in the mirror and see that person reflected back to me. I realized I was harboring a whole other level of denial that I needed to look at. And it was a scary moment because heart disease runs in my family. My mother's father had been a champion swimmer and captain of the University of Michigan swim team in the late 1920s and early 30s and a guy who had an American record and somebody who he's a guy that I'm named after. And in many ways like my doppelganger, but he had died of heart disease at a young age. And I had this flash where I realized if I didn't course correct how I was living that I was”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're not energized, not enthusiastic about my life. And I think in the back of my awareness was this percolating existential crisis because I knew that this career path that I had chosen was really not for me. And I could will myself into doing it, but ultimately it was not only not making me happy, it was making me more and more miserable, like this square peg in a round hole kind of thing. But I was too afraid to really look at that or think about how I could change that trajectory. I guess what I'm saying is there was a confluence of poor health on the one side and this spiritual existential crisis that I was harboring on the other hand. And they essentially collided with each other shortly before I turned 40 when I had this specific moment of walking up the flight of stairs in my bedroom after a late night at the office.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wanted to do rather than thinking what is Mental process in any way. And so a lot of those addictive personality traits, although I was not using substances anymore, were channeled into workaholism. And in turn, some pretty unhealthy lifestyle habits. So basically 80 hour weeks working as a lawyer and hitting the fast food drive-throughs on the way home and Chinese takeout for late nights at work and the like. And really, despite the fact that I had been this swimmer in college, not exercising, just not really attending to or taking care of myself physically. And so over a 10 year period, that accumulates, such that by the time I was 39, I was about 50 pounds overweight, you know, never like an obese person or anything like that, but just kind of like a heavy guy who looks like, you know, he works too much in a law firm and subsisting on junk food and just feeling progressively worse and worse, lazy.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just, I couldn't hang out or go to the places that I had been going to before. And with that was also unpacking the shame that I had about being this person who had all of this potential and all of these opportunities that I had squandered. And I felt compelled to repair all of that and get back to becoming that person that I was before I started drinking. And I did that with blinders on in my mind the best way to do that was to go back to the law firm and work my ass off and become a partner and get all the stuff so that the world would smile upon me and my parents would think that I was safe. Alcoholics Anonymous's spiritual program and I was developing spiritually, but I had not yet reached the level of maturity where I could really look inward and ask myself those fundamental questions about what it is that I actually”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After getting sober at 31 and emerging from that treatment center where I lived for 100 days, which is a pretty long time to be in a treatment center, and being told by the counselors that you have a very serious case of alcoholism, the kind of case that we typically only see in lifelong drinkers, like guys in their 60s, it was impressed upon me that I really needed to get this right or I was going to die. That point was made to me very clearly. And I was able to hear it and take it seriously. And so I was super dedicated to creating this foundation of sobriety because my life truly did hang in the balance. And so that became my main priority for many years after that experience. So I returned to Los Angeles. I was going to multiple meetings a day. I was doing like all the stuff and building a new community of friends because I needed new people.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is the thing that catalyzes the state change? And in my case, or anybody who's a runner, they'll tell you when they finish the run, they're always glad that they did it. They don't generally regret it. And then they feel better. And I think that that example is applicable to all areas of life.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I literally think about this every single day, and it was validated recently in a podcast that I did with Andrew Huberman, who I know has been on your show, where he studied the neurochemistry of this and realized that behavior has to come first and thoughts, perceptions, emotions follow from that. And when you think about that in the context of our daily lives, like let's just use running, for example, like if you wake up in the morning and you're supposed to do a run because you're training for some race and you don't feel like doing it, we all resort to that state where we think, well, I don't want to do it right now. I'll just wait until I feel like doing it and then I'll do it then. And when we engage that way, we end up never doing it, right? Like if you're waiting until you feel like doing something, chances are you're probably never going to get to it. But to take the action despite how you feel about it.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love that one. That was something that my first sponsor said to me very early on in sobriety. I think I was complaining to him about some commitment I had made to sweep the floors or make coffee or something along those lines or something that had happened to me that day that I was annoyed with. And I couldn't see my way through. And he just said mood follows action. And what he meant by that is you can't think your way into the mood that you seek or the state of mind that you aspire to inhabit. Action is the only thing that can trigger that change state.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Helpful because this is an era in which more people have been become addicted than ever before with substances and behaviors. And so to have a conversation about this, I think is super important.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about addiction more broadly because of the devices that we all have in our pockets. And so with that, I think it's helpful to people to understand that there are tools available to help you decouple from whatever that thing is that is holding you hostage or creating that obsessive compulsive behavior that you can't seem to transcend despite your best efforts. And the 12 steps, yes, like they are crucial and instrumental in helping people get off drugs and alcohol, but they're very helpful to anybody, you know, just to be able to do an inventory of your life and to see yourself more objectively and to understand that you can redress these shameful incidents in your life because we all have them on some level. I think is really profound and to the extent that we are talking about addiction in this broader context right now, I think is super.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Becoming convinced that addiction lives on this incredibly broad spectrum. And it's a spectrum so broad that almost anybody can find themselves somewhere along the line. So on the one hand, you have the guy who can't pull the needle out of his arm, but on the very far other side of the spectrum, you have people who find themselves repeating the same tired, self-defeating narrative about their life and can't get outside of themselves to see an objective truth about themselves or the person who is repeatedly in the same bad relationship time and time again or the person who is addicted to whatever it is, like video games or social media scrolling. I mean, the social dilemma has really foisted this conversation onto mainstream audiences in a way that I think is allowing us to really”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I could just interrupt you, can I just interrupt you? Sorry to do that, but I think there's one kind of final important point that I wanted to make about. Addiction. I think you're correct. Like a lot of people might be listening and saying, well, I'm not an alcoholic or a drug addict and I don't know anyone in my life that is either. How is this relevant? But as somebody who's been kind of steeped in this world for many, many years and like yourself, I've had many guests on my podcast to discuss this. We are both very cavalier in how we define addiction. Like I'm a chalkaholic or I'm a shopaholic. It's a throwaway phrase, but at the same time, we're also very rigid in how we define it in that addiction is like heroin addiction or opioid addiction and alcoholism. But I think”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a case study for how to structure an organization that's trying to do something good and not fall prey to the lowest common denominator of human power dynamics that tend to fell even the best intentioned people who are trying to create something good. And it's interesting that it hasn't been replicated to my knowledge in any other scenarios because I think there's so much to be learned about how it was formed and how it's continued to not only survive but thrive.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“External corruption or power dynamic that could capsize the whole thing. And the fact that it has not only sustained itself, but grown over the many, many years that it's been around is truly miraculous. And I think a case study.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'm sure there are those things that exist. I don't know any offhand. I know there was that movie that James Woods did a while back where he played Bill Wilson, but I don't know that I would recommend that one. I'm sure there are, and there's plenty of kind of ancillary books around recovery. Like there's a book called A New Pair of Glasses that sort of practical applications of the 12 steps for people that are suffering. I don't know that there's the definitive history of alcoholics anonymous or the definitive documentary. But I think your point on decentralization is so fascinating. Like it was blockchain before blockchain. You know, like the way that it's structured is truly remarkable that these guys like Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob knew that they had to decentralize it in order to immunize it from any kind of”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make any kind of like minor amends or adjustments in your life. And then on top of that, meditation is a step in the 12 steps. So daily meditation is super important as well. And there's a lot more in there, but I would say those are kind of like the fundamental tools”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And reckoning with that and then addressing it by going to these people and figuring out how to make those wrongs right is a huge relief that is like a pressure valve release on a lot of that shame. And the more that you engage in this process, you kind of emerge from it where you can make peace with your past and it no longer holds all of that power over you. And you can talk about it freely without it creating all of those challenging emotions that are so inextricably related to the errant behavior itself. So that's a huge piece and that's something that I continue to practice all the time. It's something that you return to constantly, including the 10th step, which is basically do it like a daily tent step where you do a daily inventory of how you've conducted yourself, where you might have gone wrong if you have.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that you do a resentment inventory. You do a fear inventory where you itemize everything that you're scared of. And you do a sexual inventory where you hold yourself accountable for how your sexual energy has created havoc in your relationships. And I think the more comprehensive that inventory, the more clear the picture is of how you have conducted your life. And from that themes emerge where you see these recurrences of like, oh, when I'm in this situation, I always behave this way or this type of person always makes me feel resentful. And you can kind of go behind that and you get a better understanding of your fundamental blueprint, which is revelatory, frankly. But that inventory is only helpful to the extent that it then allows you to itemize all of the people to whom you owe. Amends because you're carrying around with that”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the whole alcoholics anonymous thing is shrouded in anonymity for a reason. So I don't want to get too specific about that other than to say that the steps are the steps for a reason and it really is this incredible roadmap for unpacking a lot of that underlying pain and providing you with tools to redress it in a meaningful, practical way that alleviate that burden and that shame and allow you to mature into somebody who can look somebody in the eye and show up when you say you're going to show up, et cetera. And a big piece in that is there's lots of pieces, but one of the crucial pieces is doing an inventory, which is the fourth step, where you literally go through your life and you itemize out all of your resentments towards people, institutions.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And he was very helpful to me in addressing that underlying trauma piece and my resistance to really go there because I love my parents and I don't want to blame them and he was helpful in helping me understand this idea that it's not their fault. They're good people. They parented you with the tools that they had, but that doesn't mean just because you weren't homeless and impoverished or abused in any particular way doesn't mean that you didn't suffer some kind of trauma that ultimately is related to the behavior that you pursued later in life. And I think to your other point of tools, certainly. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't able to stay sober when I was a tourist in Alcoholics Anonymous because I was sitting in the back just waiting to get my court card checked. That's very different from engaging with the true process of recovery. And I'm a 12-step guy.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First, on the subject of Gabor, like I had him on my podcast and, you know, he flips the table on you and suddenly it becomes a therapy session, which is like amazing. That's exactly what you want, right?”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they lack the tools that other people, normal people, take for granted. And I think the more that we kind of understand this, it allows us to have a little bit more compassion for the people that suffer and a way to kind of hold them in our hearts and a little bit more lightly when they slip up and do the thing. Because for people that don't have direct experience with this, it defies logic. Like how could you do that? Like after everything that's happened, he went and did that thing again. Like it's so difficult to understand. So I think to the extent that we can peel back the layers of the onion and really understand what's fueling that behavior to begin with allows us to kind of be more compassionate to those people.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Helping people create new neural pathways and emotional relationships with how they engage with the world. And that's a very slow nonlinear process. And that's why so many addicts and alcoholics have a lot of relapses in their story. And relapses are always treated as failures, but ultimately their learning experiences because you're trying to reorganize your entire life in accordance with new ways of living that are very foreign to somebody who has been engaging in a behavior or addicted to a substance for so long. So there's a saying in recovery, like your emotional development gets stunted from the moment that you begin to use. And when you remove the substance, you're left with that young person at that stage of life. And you have to treat that person with that in mind.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the world. And it works for a while. If it didn't work, people wouldn't do it. But what they miss is that it is solving a problem for them. Of course, it progresses and then things go sideways and it's no longer the solution, but that's how it begins. And when you remove those behaviors and substances from those people, they don't know what to do with themselves. They're like a live emotional wire without any kind of tools for addressing the underlying problem that has fueled the addictive behavior for so long. And the process of recovery is really about providing tools some tactical, some strategic, some practical, and some very ephemeral, spiritual that can be guideposts in”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's important for people to understand that for somebody who is addicted and who's behaving poorly or all of the stuff that addicts do, it's not a referendum on moral character. It's like they're suffering from an illness that wants to kill them. And when they get sober, we think of drugs and alcohol or gambling or whatever behavioral addiction that someone might have as the problem that has been eradicated. But in truth, the behavior or the substance is the solution to the problem. There's a level of psychic pain within a human being. And they search out a substance or a behavior that gives them some level of solace. Like the substance or the behavior is the solution to the problem because it allows them to feel okay so that they can function.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a lot that I can say about this. I mean, first, with respect to my personal story, if you Google my name, there's a lot of misguided narratives out there that me adopting a vegan diet is what got me sober or that ultra endurance training is what got me sober or keeps me sober. And those are all wildly inaccurate. I mean, I was sober for almost 10 years before I made these lifestyle shifts. I had a whole chapter in between where I created a foundation of sobriety. Sobriety and addiction stand outside of those things. And those other things have a role in my life. But addiction and recovery are a very separate thing. And that's the way that I kind of think about it. And I think in terms of addiction and recovery more broadly,”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little bit and allow people to have their process. It's like inception. They have to come into this awareness on their own. You cannot compel somebody to see themselves as they really are. And of course, I relapsed, crawled back into his office. And because I was considered myself such a man of my word, I said, well, I made a deal with you. So, okay, now I'll go to treatment. You know, I called him after this one bender and I said, I'm ready. And he got a bed for me. And I immediately go online and I'm researching treatment centers and I'm looking for the spa resort one, you know, that has really nice accommodations. He's like, no, no, no. Here's where you're going this place in Oregon. I got a bed for you. Get on the plane today. And that's basically how it began.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because they were so terrified of all of this. They had found an addiction medicine psychiatrist in Los Angeles. And they said, we have this guy. It might be great if you go and see him. So I started seeing this addiction medicine specialist. And he just rang my bell immediately and was like, here's the deal, dude. You're an alcoholic and you need to go to treatment until you do that. Like nothing's going to change and your life's going to continue to be terrible. And I would try to negotiate with him and say, well, I think I can do it in AA. So I was kind of in and out of AA doing my own self-experimentation with trying to get sober. But every time I would crawl back into his office and I was honest with him, I said, yeah, I relapsed again or this happened. But at some point, I made a deal with him because he was like, are you ready to go to treatment? I was like, let me try one more time. And he said, okay. And to his credit, I think that's a really interesting approach. Like you have to back off a little bit.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When my drinking got more and more dire, my parents had reached the level of their tolerance threshold with me. And basically my dad said, listen, we love you, but we just can't continue to watch you destroy yourself like this. And we can't have anything to do with you. But if you're ready to get sober, we're, of course, here from you. But until then, we're not available to you. However,”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, prior to that, I had been court ordered to Alcoholics Anonymous. So I had been to meetings, but I wasn't doing it because I wanted to get sober. I was doing it because I was compelled to do it. And I think that's an important distinction, especially for people who are struggling or have people in their lives that are struggling with a substance issue. You want to help them. You want to intervene. You can create, you know, interventions and things like that to get people into treatment, but ultimately if that person is resistant to it or isn't interested in getting sober, that's going to be a very tough hill to climb. Willingness is like crucial. So when I was attending those AA meetings, I lacked that level of willingness. It was more like I just need to get people off my back so I can go back to living the way that I want to live. And why is everybody bugging me? But in the wake of that wedding experience,”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the night of the wedding when we went back to the honeymoon suite, that did not go well. I'm surprised that we even went on the honeymoon, but I think in my mind I was thinking I'm going to try to make this right and it's all going to work out. That was its own level of delusion. And while we were on this honeymoon on a Caribbean island, it was clear that this relationship had no future. And ultimately, we were able to have a conversation about it. And she ended up leaving early. And at that moment, I was left with myself with no tools and having been sober for six months, but unable to really process the emotional devastation of having just basically had everybody that I cared about in the world with like 12 groomsmen in this wedding in Palo Alto bear witness to a marriage that clearly wasn't going to work out. And it was really devastating to me.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, it's so hard to describe this and have it make sense. But essentially, what happened was I had been drinking quite a bit. I got engaged to this woman. I was living in San Francisco at the time. She was living in Palo Alto and is from Palo Alto. But in the kind of lead up to this wedding, because we had gotten engaged, I had taken a job in Los Angeles. So we were living in separate cities. And I think during that interim period when she got distance between me, she realized like maybe this isn't the guy I want to marry. And I had come clean with her about the DUIs. And I think that was very scary to her. So even though I had been sober for a number of months and told her that I was committed to this path of sobriety, I think in her heart of hearts, she really wanted to get out of this relationship, but she was unable to muster the strength, to break it off herself. And I think that she wanted me to break it off. And so there was so much energy behind this.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I harbored this notion that this was a problem for me, but you're also protecting it because you want to be able to keep doing it. And that's what leads to this sort of double life where you're hiding your behavior from other people and deluding yourself into thinking that they don't know what's going on. But ultimately, you realize like everybody knows what's going on. And on some level, it's a process of stripping away those layers of denial until you can really face the objective truth of what you're doing. And that's a very terrifying thing. And so that's kind of what was going on inside of me until this day in 1998 where I was like, okay, I've had it. Like I'm ready to really take this seriously and do something about it.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have the emotional tools to process them. So I continued to drink for a while. I mean, the wedding was really, you know, the nadir of the whole thing and a reasonable person would have woken up and gotten sober at that time. But I needed to medicate myself through that emotional shitstorm until one day I basically woke up and I was hungover, but it wasn't like I had reaped any kind of chaos the night before. But it's just that moment of realizing like I've had enough. Like I can't live this way anymore. It's just so lonely and desperate and it only leads in one direction. And I think that's what it takes for anybody who has experience with addiction, particularly substance addiction, you have this sense, like you asked me earlier on, Tim, like, when did I know I had a problem? Like I knew I had a problem very early on in my drinking career, but that's very different from the willingness to do anything about it.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“While there were a couple important inflection points, one of which was getting two DUIs essentially in a row with ridiculously high blood alcohol contents, looking at jail time, my boss finding out at the law firm and being on the precipice of getting fired, that's a whole rabbit hole, you know, sort of chaotic disaster that I weathered. Another one was a marriage or I should say like a wedding that went awry. I got married and that relationship ended on the honeymoon, which is a whole crazy story that is inextricably linked to, I mean, I was sober at the time, but it's very much linked to my alcoholism. So there's big events like that. But I think those situations created such a deep level of shame inside of me that I wasn't able to shake alcohol in the wake of those experiences because I didn't.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but and if you love it, if that's your thing, then more power to you. But I just remember walking the halls of the various law firms that I worked at, being confused that there seemed to be certain people that enjoyed it because I was just gritting my way through it thinking, I'll just apply these tools that I learned in the swimming pool about suffering and pain tolerance. And I just thought everybody was having that internal experience I'm sure many were, but there seems to be some people that seem to enjoy it. But I just know that the more that I kind of looked around, certainly with respect to the partners, it was clear to me that I didn't really want that life. And yet I felt very stuck in that career path and unsure about how I could ever get out of it and do anything else.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To who I was. But I'm a good student, and I actually enjoyed law school. I enjoy the intellectual pursuit and all of that. But the practice of law is very different, at least in the corporate law firm context, very different than the law school experience.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that was a situation that should have told me immediately that maybe this wasn't the right path for me. But I think that I chose it not out of some kind of deliberate idea that it would be something I would be interested in or show some proficiency in, but more as a reaction to social and familial pressures, this idea of not really knowing what I wanted to do, but hey, I can always go to law school and society will smile upon that and I can put a nice suit on and have nice lunches and have interesting conversations with people and make a good living. I mean, my self-inquiry really didn't go any further than that. And there was nothing about like my interest that would have indicated that law was a good path for me. But I was so disconnected from myself that even asking myself that question at the time was analogous.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right out of college, I moved to New York City and got a job as a paralegal in a big law firm in New York called Scadnarps.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was never suicidal. I didn't have suicidal ideation. But my life was getting smaller and smaller and more lonely. So if I was able to kind of maintain that lifestyle over an extended period of time, I'm certain that I would have reached a level of desperation where that would have seemed like a good idea.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ultimately, there's no one left, and you're just alone. And I was a guy who would drink alone in my apartment or wake up in the morning before work and have a vodkatonic in the shower. Like it was all very leaving Las Vegas. And I was only 31 at the time, but my disease had progressed to such a state where there was really only a couple things that were going to happen either I was going to kill myself, kill another person, or end up in jail or some kind of institution. And that's really kind of what ultimately led me to getting sober.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I would say that there was nothing like cool or rock and roll about any of it. It's just lonely, sad, and kind of pathetic and deeply embarrassing. I would drive drunk and wouldn't remember where I parked my car and would have to wake up the next morning and try to figure out where my car was when I was living in San Francisco, when I was fresh out of law school. One time I woke up one day, didn't want to go to my law firm job and like flew to Las Vegas and lost my wallet and woke up not remembering anything that had happened and trying to figure out how I'm going to get home, stuff like that that's just I was the guy who was the last to leave the party and when you're in college you know maybe it's cute but when you're 25 26 28 you know nobody's living that way anymore and you have to find other people to do that with what they call lower companions in the parlance of recovery until”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That way for a very long time until ultimately things got really dark and scary. And I hit that bottom that you hear about with people in recovery.”
2022-01-05 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #561: Rich Roll — Reinventing Your Life at 30, 40, and Beyond · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT