Curiosity Is A Superpower: Legendary Film Producer Brian Grazer on Beginner’s Mind, Getting It Done, & Why Conversation Matters

28:59To have a career as legendary as yours, I mean, like 47 Oscar nominations, at this point is just stunning. And so if you had to like, you know, deconstruct the formula for that success, like what is, how have you been able to consistently, you know, create mass media box office successes, movies that are beloved, that kind of withstand the test of time? Like what is the secret sauce there that you're, that speaks to like your strengths that's kind of fueled your success and empowered this track record that you have? Well, from these curiosity conversations, it's yielded my knowledge or insight, not complete knowledge and insight, but enough insight that it provides me with new rich arenas to put characters.

29:55So if I like brotherhoods, all of a sudden I start thinking about the selfless nature of firemen. I don't really know much about firemen at all. Like almost nothing, you know, just other than, you know, when there's a fire, you call a fireman. Yeah. You know, but I ended up making this movie called Backdraft that was very beloved by firemen. You know, so I think by reaching out to people and learning about what they do for a living or bigger subjects or unique subjects allows me a curation system to not do something that everybody else is doing. So I try not to follow anybody ever. I don't follow trends.

30:39I don't read data research. I never did. And I don't even prognosticate ever what's going to be successful. Oh, now in the box office, this is what's going to be successful. Or next year, everyone's going to want the Barbie movie. I don't know. I mean, in other words, it's having a curation system that is very broad gives you the ability to understand what in the world, what subjects are interesting to you. And what's interesting to me just happens to turn out to be interesting to other people. You have to be in a place where you can trust that gut instinct and that intuition though, right? Yes.

31:23Which you've developed through being constantly curious and always learning and meeting with all different kinds of people. But I would imagine that got lodged early because your first movie, Splash, everybody said this is never going to work. And everybody said no and blah, blah, blah. And you kind of like in a Sisyphean way push that boulder up a mountain and it becomes this hit which then tells you, oh, like I can trust myself. Even when everybody's telling me this is a bad idea. Well, thank you for studying that or knowing that, but it's very nice. That's true. It made me feel like, wow, nobody does know.

32:02I can trust myself. I can entrust my internal truth. My basic essence drove me towards that. Because ultimately, even though you might learn a subject, you do have to tap into your own needs or your own weaknesses often to find the character and what they want and what makes them survive. In that case, it was all about man's survival is through love. And it's hard to find real love. And so that was essentially just the basic truth of the movie. So you always have to have not – a producer's job is to be creatively and fiscally responsible. So for me, the creative responsibility is to understand the heartbeat of what the movie is and never lose track.

33:05And that's why we could make parenthood, for example, because it's about something that we really believed in. So the script would change form over and over again. Splash, the script changed form over and over. I mean, in other words, people would go, that's a terrible script, and I'd work on the script, and then I'd get different writers, and I'd just endlessly develop it, just often just tweaking things a little bit, you know, or rebalancing the script, but never losing sight of what my ultimate goal mission is. So you have to have a goal mission. Right. And that's the flame that keeps something going for 10 years, then you finally get it made.

33:52Sure. And the goal mission project by project is creating something universal that speaks to us in our inner humanity that we can connect with emotionally and doing that through something very specific that's compelling enough to lure us into the movie theater basically. Well, like Eight Mile, the movie Eight Mile. I knew nothing about hip hop. This is with Eminem. I knew nothing about hip hop. 10 years before I even met Eminem, I had this curiosity conversation with Old Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan. I was in New York, and I, you know, every week had to meet a new person, so I said, oh, my God, I'm going to meet this guy, ODB, Old Dirty Bastard.

34:38I thought it was an insane name, you know, because at that time people didn't have, you know, want to have crazy names like that that were kind of degrading at the same time. In any event, so I meet ODB. I learn about the language of hip-hop on the East Coast. And then I start to demystify what that language, why it was there, what it was, what it represented. It represented the inner voice of the street and what was going to become the language of the youth in America. And from ODB, I met with Public Enemy, with Chuck D, and then Slick Rick, then LL Cool J. And all of a sudden I start to think, wow, this is, hip hop is not a subculture.

35:25It is the, it's the culture. Right. So then I start thinking that. Then I later thought, then I much later, I'm struggling with this for 10 years. I had Spike Lee help me a little bit. I was going to do it as a series, then as a movie with, I meet Eminem. And I realized that within his story is overcoming shame. And I thought, wow, I could relate to that because I too had to overcome a lot of shame. We all have some shame. It's just sort of, did it stop you from something? And it stopped him from being able to look at an audience and, you know, wrap the way he, and to show his talent. And so that was really what the movie was about.

36:11It's like overcoming your injuries, your personal and real injuries and getting to your talent, getting over those barriers so you can actually express your talent. Yeah, you reflect back on that movie and you think it's about his rise to superstardom, but it's really not about that at all. It's about him owning who he is coming to terms with and having some peace about his background, his upbringing and being self-actualized in that through his performance in that culminating scene where he's just owning that truth, which is a universal thing. It's a very specific way of channeling into something that most people have to go through in their lives.

37:00And I think that's why it connected so deeply. But the story of your initial meeting with Eminem is pretty wild because he was very resistant to your wiles. Yeah, he was very resistant. I mean, I met with him in my office, and it took a lot of effort to get him in there. And he wasn't a superstar then. He was a rising star. And he just wouldn't look at me, and he didn't really want to talk. And so I had to go to great lengths to get him to want to speak to me and communicate. So how did you build that trust? How did you overcome that wall that he was throwing out? Probably ultimately when I got out of being, when I was, there was a moment where I was just super desperate when he was ready to leave.

37:51And by being that desperate, it might have represented something to him like, wow, this guy really cares. But I've never asked him and I don't know. but maybe sitting in my office just as I'm the movie producer and he's the rising star I don't know maybe the roles so I stepped way out of my role and again just before he had his hand on the door to leave and I don't want to say what I said but I just asked him like please stay you can communicate with me yeah you said animate yeah he did Yeah. And I thought, I said, come on, you can animate or something like that. And I thought, oh, man, he looked at me like he was going to kill me.

38:41But then he came back and talked. Uh-huh. So it was great.

38:47He's gigantically talented, like gigantically. 100%. Yeah. This book, A Curious Mind, it came out in 2015 originally, right? Then you wrote Face to Face, which is about the importance of personal contact. I think that came out in 2019. Yes. So why synthesize those two books and expand A Curious Mind and re-release it now? Okay. Because my publisher asked me to. Because I think people today are operating much more in the state of mind of curiosity. And if they're not, two things. I think they are that curiosity, the word curiosity, which overcomes I don't know, the shame of I don't know. The word curiosity is much more in our lexicon since the book.

39:44And I think that now we're entering a totally new chapter of what we have to be curious about, which is the state of the world politically. but more importantly on our personal lives and survival, AI. So can we use AI one-on-one to better our lives or is it going in some ways to break down our life, either our livelihood or economics or replace us? So the more curious you are about that subject right now or these subjects right now, the more successful you will be in your job and the more successful you'll be as a human being. And I think the basic principles of a curious mind and fused together with face-to-face of artificial human connection, which is really about just treating that face-to-face and eye contact as our human Wi-Fi.

40:41Because without that human Wi-Fi, nobody would have ever trusted me or sat with me for an hour to talk to me. They would have talked to me for a few minutes if I looked away or looked at my phone. They would have just, or if they felt I wasn't interested, or if my eye contact was not sincere, they would have left. Isaac Asimov, he did leave. That was the only one that did leave. But Edward Teller, I mean, I've met hundreds of Nobel laureates. They, I mean, just endless amount. Those people would not have left. Princess Di wouldn't have broken protocol and shared a bowl of ice cream with me at the premiere of Apollo 13.

41:28A lot has happened since 2019 and even more since 2015 when the first iteration of this book came out. The political landscape has shifted completely. we endured a pandemic, which just basically eliminated all of this face-to-face interpersonal, you know, interaction that you speak of. It changed the workplace. It changed how we think about how we interact with people. But, you know, Eminem is not giving you the green light to go forward on this movie if that meeting was conducted on a Zoom call. Like it's not happening, right? It's not happening. So there is a certain kind of timeliness, like, yes, your publisher, you know, encouraged you to do this, but, you know, frankly, and you say it outright in the book, like this is a very interesting moment that we find ourselves in where we have an untethered relationship with the importance of person, you know, in-person interactions with other human beings that has been tarnished by what we just endured.

42:31It gives us an appreciation for how much we need it, But at the same time, we're still disengaged from it. People don't go into the office and we are doing more Zoom calls than we were before the pandemic. That's just a fact. And that is fomenting this epidemic of loneliness. I had the Surgeon General on here and we went in deep on that. I heard that one actually. Yeah. That was amazing. So this is a very real thing. the antidote to which is being in communion with people, finding shared common ground, applying that curiosity as a vehicle or an engine for empathy, because empathy is what we lack and empathy is what we need most right now in order to resolve the very serious problems that are driving us apart from each other, threatening the fabric of democracy and our ability to really cohere as a society.

43:27Like these, yes, like engage people with curiosity, but what's behind that is something I think much more profound and fundamental that you're getting at with all of this. Well, thank you. I would trust you, by the way. I hope so. Well, you have a lot of, you're well-read. I could tell you actually read the books and you have so much humility. Well, I care about this and I'm a practitioner of these things that you talk about. And when podcasting during the pandemic all went to Zoom, like I had to do a few of those and I just, I hated it because I need to be, I need, it's not just, yes, the eye contact.

44:09We're sharing an energy here. We are, definitely. And you can't put words to it and you also can't place a value on that. That is at the center of everything. Like I have this phrase, like conversation matters Because conversation is a vehicle into another person's experience that allows you to breed empathy and understanding and overcome the baked-in biases that we all have. And it allows us to suspend our judgments and communicate more openly. And that's the only way that we can solve the problems that we face. True. It's a great reminder, actually, that we do when we're together. Because I'm just thinking about that.

44:50we operate on an energy or vibration. Whereas on a Zoom, you definitely don't have that. That's completely absent. And so your way that you would detect somebody's truth or the things that we were just talking about, those core values, they're not really, they live in that energy and they're not really living on the Zoom. The other thing about Zooms, because I spent a lot of time doing, you know, writing and producing comedies. No one's particularly funny on a Zoom, you know? There's not a lot of laughter on Zooms. Laughter is an important lubricant. It's really, you know, meaningful. And the writer's room was really one of the things that was under threat during the recent strike that just got resolved too, right?

45:39Like the magic occurs in the energy that's shared by a group of really talented, funny people. And when they're just doing it on a Zoom call, Yeah, maybe they can come up with a few jokes. It's not the same though. Yeah. And it's not a problem that AI is gonna solve. No, it's not. I'm curious to see what'll happen. I mean, what is your inclination around that? Around AI? Yeah. In relation to which, okay. Well, there's many people in the world of tech, and I'm sure you know, because you've interviewed them, that believe that we're gonna survive and succeed better with AI. but then like who will survive and succeed better?

46:24Will it be the common man or will it just, or will it be the elite man? You know, the, the, so I don't know the answer to that really. I, I use AI, I use open AI. I use a few other sources in testing the, a story. So if I have a story and then I want to state and I want to write about it differently or find a word that I might not have thought about in relation to the story. Well, I had to give a birthday speech for my wife the other day to my wife. And so I thought I'll write down all the virtues of my wife and then create and turn that into a narrative. And then I thought, why wouldn't I just feed that into ChatGPT?

47:16So then I did. And of course I couldn't read that because not that I'm above it or something. I just don't think I could, I'm just not good at reading speeches. You know, some people are. I'm not, I sort of try, I try to understand the base, you know, feel the basic principles of it and know that those truths live inside of me. And then like you pointed out earlier, or just talk about it. I own a bunch of spectacles and I made the grave error the other day of donning a normal non-Roka pair on my indoor trainer when I was riding my bike indoors. And I got to tell you, it was a disaster. Every three to five seconds, I had to take my hands off the handlebars and push my glasses back up my nose until I got so frustrated, I just tossed them aside.

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49:20You have a whole thing on public speaking, leading from the heart and like just being like how, you know, honesty and kind of being real is much more powerful than whatever words are coming out of your mouth. Yeah, because people buy that. They don't even buy your words. They're reading your energy. Yeah. And if you can show them your soul, which is something AI doesn't have, you're in a better position to win them over than through the cogency of your argument, right? Yes. And so AI being this kind of soulless thing, it can be this tool. It can actually be an incredibly powerful instrument. We use it for stuff here all the time.

49:58Yeah. But it doesn't have a consciousness. and so I think it's important to be cognizant of its shortcomings because creativity is our gift, right? And I think you, and you talk about this also, like how technology in general, not just AI, but even going online is great if it's actually nourishing your curiosity and kind of empowering you to dig deeper and really go further, but it can also work as kind of an impediment to your curiosity because you think your curiosity has been satisfied. So if you prompt ChatGPT or you Google something and you think that's the end of the story, you're not really engaging in your curiosity and you're not gonna find that innovative, creative solution that nobody ever thought of before.

50:56So true. Because it was my wife's 50th birthday and we're having it at a Friends of Art's house with about 70 people. And, you know, I think I'm probably a good speaker. I mean, I'm a good public speaker, but I get nervous every time. And so when I did the ChatGPT and I kept, you know, reiterating upon it, that does tell you what to say. I mean, it's using your words, your prompts for the most part. But it doesn't give you like what I didn't look to that at all. And instead of talking about my love, I was able to communicate it in a way that I was showing you my love. So showing her. And that's what worked.

51:59Like people cheered, you know, they all liked that because it was, you know, rudimentary, but it was from the soul. And people felt that I showed my love instead of, you know, from a distance just talking about it. Right, right. How has this new era of Hollywood where the streamers are front and center changed what you do? Because to me, it feels like on the one hand, there's never been more opportunity to tell stories because there's so many outlets, so many opportunities to get a project made or to have a story told. But it's become, our culture has become so diffuse. There is no monoculture anymore and that's probably a good thing.

52:48But at the same time, shy of a big Marvel movie, it's close to impossible now to create something that has a resonant cultural impact beyond like whatever's happening this week. It's hard. Yeah. Well, because there's so many deflections. There's from watching a movie, there's more live sports than ever. I mean, things like that. Well, there's just a lot going on. Oh, specifically to the point of streaming. it's harder to create a cultural moment with streaming i think now um there are times that something really were like a documentary the michael jordan documentary that was a streamer sure that was really amazing but i mean you have to be a plus plus to be able to create a cultural moment with something that streams, in my opinion.

53:53Because there's not external tactile marketing. It's all digital marketing. So you're not really feeling something, the marketing part, the framing of your piece. I mean, Oppenheimer, for example, or Barbie, those two of the biggest movies, there was outdoor advertising. They were in the elevator. It was on bus stops. There was all sorts of things. And you felt, you just felt there was a tactile kind of communication with you that helped frame seeing that movie. And that's why people, I think, like, you know, well, there's a Taylor Swift component or there's, you know, basketball or Super Bowl.

54:42Just being there makes a huge difference. and it lives those, the things that happen that are great happen in a more magnified way to the culture, I think. But does it feel like they're fewer and far between now? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And does that change the nature of how you approach a project or you still just do it the way that you know how to do it? Well, fortunately for me, a lot of the streamers, you know, whether it's Apple or Amazon or Netflix, you know they're all kind of streamers now but or Disney they fortunately they all want imagine movies of the 2000 which are you know like they go just make the movies that you used to make which are tour de force films meaning you know it's like one like a say a beautiful mind it was about John Nash played by Russell Crowe Or Denzel Washington playing Frank Lucas, an American gangster.

55:50Or, you know, those movies of the 2000s, I have so many more, that are just driven by, for the most part, a single performance about a subject that usually leads you to cry. You know, either because of the celebration of greatness or sadness along the way and then greatness. I try to have every movie that we work on have hope, even if it's hard. Yeah. Or some form of redemption. Yes, redemption for sure. Why is storytelling important? because it gets you storytelling is important because it's it should be entertaining but it should nourish your soul in the same way the one of the great books of all time could do but the beauty of storytelling in a cinematic and sonic form together or that it reaches you on every level you know on a cell on a cellular level like it really it can really be therapeutic You can learn so much about yourself.

57:07I mean, I got into the movies that I make because I saw, you know, I didn't know, I didn't go to cinema school. I mean, I teach at the cinema school, but I didn't go there. but the movie that really, really made a difference for me that I felt elevated my state of consciousness and elevated me as a person was E.T. I saw E.T. and the conventional, you know, you'd go to movies and you'd fight with lines and you'd fight with the vendor and you want to get popcorn and then you want to save your seat. You want to do all this stuff. It's a really, and people are honking and pushing And I remember at the end of the movie, E.T., nobody honked, nobody pushed.

57:57It was, the vibe was entirely different. Everybody was elevated to a more peaceful, more thoughtful state of mind. That was my experience. So I thought if I can have movies do that, take people on journeys or adventures in a story to get them to that state of mind. Today, I want to make movies that lead us to the state of mind of feeling that there's faith. We're grounded by faith and that we should be aware, attention to that. It's not religion. It's just faith. You know, it's doing things, abiding by the golden rule. You know, it's all those things just about one-on-one human connection. Also, this sense of possibility.

58:51Yeah. And that humans are fundamentally good. That seems to, you know, recur. I think that for sure. Yeah. and wars often end by having people get together. Seldom does that backfire where you get together to help demystify one another to realize we're here surviving on the same planet for similar reasons. Does that turn into something bad? It usually turns into something good. what's the movie you have yet to make that you've always wanted to make that needs to get made before you? I'm going to make a modern army movie right now. Well, you opened the book with this whole experience of going to Fort Irwin.

59:43I've done that. I've done that trip where you take the Blackhawks to, yeah, from Burbank. It's unbelievable. What got you to do that? My friend, Jesse Albert, hosts these for certain individuals time to time. And he, you know, asked me if I would come. And so I did, I didn't, I think you were there two days, right? I did a day with a bunch of people and did the whole thing where you go everywhere and you use all the stuff. Shoot guns, you go in tanks, you do the whole thing. It's wild. Yeah, it was wild. And now I'm going to go to Fort Campbell, which is all the aviation, helicopters and everything.

1:00:18Because it's part of this movie. The trick is, the movie isn't like the army. the movie is, like, what is it that you identified through that experience of visiting Fort Irwin and meeting with that general that got you excited about the story that could potentially be told there? It's so much about we stick together, you live, I live, you die, I die. You know, it's really about humanity, basically. and that it's hard being in any of the services is difficult, but it also is rewarding. And it also, there's times that because you're sharing, you're so intimate with your brothers or brothers and sisters at this point that you have a lot of laughs too.

1:01:14So it's a story about brotherhood. Yeah. Yeah. I only use four themes. Yeah. So the four themes are? Family. This is the big secret. The secret to Imagine Entertainment's, you know, many decade run. Okay. So it's brotherhood, self-respect. Like people all want, they thrive for self-respect. They are driven towards self-respect.

1:01:45And that's ultimately what 8 Mile was about, self-respect. It was self-actualizing to get there, but it's about respect. So family, brotherhood, self-respect, and I had one other one. Oh, love. Yeah. The smallest one. Anyway. On the subject of these curiosity conversations, I think it's important. I mean, first of all, I'm curious as to why you think we as a culture are like undervalue curiosity. curiosity, like why we even need to talk about it as something that we should cultivate because it's so obvious to me. And then second to that, like, I think it's important to point out that throughout your life where you've been pursuing these conversations, I want to disabuse people of the idea that they were like directly tethered to some movie project.

1:02:43Like a lot of these movies came out of conversations that you had with people. But they weren't on them. Completely unrelated to the subject matter of that. It's through osmosis, through just being engaged as a way of being, like being a curious person that has provided like a lens on the world and a way of filtering experience that creates the possibility for these ideas around movies that you've created. So first of all, I look at it like this. The reason I never did a podcast, because people did say, you ought to have a podcast, is I felt like the conversations I was doing shouldn't be commodified in any way.

1:03:30That they're really just, I was on this one-on-one curiosity path to learn. And I felt like many of the people that were sharing their story with me, like Carl Sagan and people like that, they might not have wanted to. There weren't podcasts at that time, really. And they weren't thought of as so favorably the early stages of them, as my recollection goes. And so basically, they weren't attached ever to a project. And I felt like if I approach a person and it's goal-directed, that means it's transactionally directed, I thought they would sense it was transactional. They wouldn't want to do it.

1:04:21I don't want to be transactional. I just want to have a conversation that's good, that helps me, Brian. And I always had a goal in mind was I am going to be interesting enough to them that they feel really good about this hour they spent with me. And they'll feel like it was the best date they'd ever had. And so I love these conversations. And out of the hundreds, if not thousands of conversations I had, not one person individually turned into a subject. It was really just the insights I gleaned from the conversations or the little nuances that I got out of the conversation that actually became – that just became useful to me in some way or valuable to me.

1:05:19Right. And an example of that, I think, would be the relationship between the Chilean dissident and a beautiful mind. Yes. Which are seemingly completely unrelated and yet informed each other almost perfectly for you. Yes. Well, because what happened is, and I'll tell this story quickly. I met a woman named Veronica DeNegre. I met her through Sting, who was an early curiosity conversation I had. So Sting the musician, I thought, this guy was actually like a school teacher, and now he's the biggest rock star in the world. I mean, I don't understand how that transition works. And so I thought, I'm going to meet this, I'm going to meet Sting.

1:06:02I meet Sting, you know, he might have liked me a little bit. I mean, not tremendously, but enough that he invited me a year later to go to a barbecue. I went to the barbecue and this woman named Veronica DeNegre was there that he took on the amnesty tour with he and Bruce Springsteen. She was held in prison and was tortured in prison for about six months in Chile under the Pinochet regime. And, of course, you gravitate towards the harshest word, torture. And you'll ask, like, what was it like to be tortured? But I thought, I did ask that for a second. Then I thought, I'm going to be more interesting than that.

1:06:46I'm going to say, how did you survive? Because that at least leads to hope. And it's probably a question that people don't ordinarily ask. Like, what was the process of survival? And she said that her process of survival, while she was unpredictably being tortured every day, was that she created a parallel story in her mind. She has one narrative of what's actually going on in real time, this torture part. And then there's this other story that's not going on in real time. It's an alternate reality. And that narrative is only in her mind, like a story that she's telling herself to give her the sustenance, the ability to survive.

1:07:34So I thought later, when I thought, much later, I thought, I want to make a movie that will help destigmatize mental disability. So that's very unrelated to Veronica de Negre and being tortured in Chile. It has nothing to do with that. But by doing these curiosity conversations, each human being that I met, whether it's Veronica de Negre or Carl Sagan, they served as being a dot on a greater constellation of dots that lived in my mind. And often that constellation of dots, although unrelated, found periodically would connect a dot. So her ability to survive was creating a story that would help her survive.

1:08:25What is this? And now I'm making a movie about a schizophrenic. What does the schizophrenic do? They live in alternate realities. So I thought, well, why don't I show what an alternate reality looks like in a schizophrenic's mind? And that will do several things to the movie of the John Nash story. One, it will make it horrifying. It'll show an audience really what it looks like to be in somebody's mind that is mentally disabled, either bipolar or schizophrenic or any other mental disability. It shows what that other narrative looks like. That will help us as a viewer have compassion for that person instead of just driving past them when we see them on the street screaming at a car or something or a street lamp.

1:09:23The other thing it did was it enabled me as a dramatist to make the movie instead of, in fact, a straight drama, we made it a thriller. So a thriller actually elevates the chances of commercial popularity. Thrillers have more propulsion drive in the narrative. So therefore, audience is going, oh my God, what's going to happen now? In a drama, it's slightly more melancholy. and so it changed the genre to a thriller which helped to become hugely commercially successful right the thriller genre acts as a Trojan horse to bring people in and show them a different perspective on mental health that helps like normalize the conversation around it exactly yeah yeah yeah so that so very very unrelated and then Weirdly, I was able to relate to Apollo 13 much better, which was later, because that was about survival as well.

1:10:36And I thought, you know, what's it like? It made me think of the subject of survival. And the subject of survival for them is just like coping with the difficulty, putting a square peg into a round hole, all those things. and so the subject of survival became a subject for me that I was able to expand upon in many different movies actually. Yeah, beautiful. Yeah. I have to let you go but the last thing I'll say is for somebody who's listening to this who's thinking about curiosity a little bit differently than they were an hour ago who's thinking, yeah, but I'm nervous to talk to people or I'm not Brian Grazier, I don't have fancy friends.

1:11:20perhaps a few words to leave people with around how to approach engendering a little more curiosity in your life by engaging with the people in your environment. Well, look, I did it for 20 years where I wasn't famous. So anyone can do it. You just, all the people that you know of or know or know of in your universe, why don't you just ask one of them to have a curiosity conversation with you. And so it's the teacher across the street or the insurance salesman down the street, whoever it is, you often think of those jobs as being really maybe not interesting or banal. But if you actually have talked to somebody, you will find the magic within them.

1:12:15You'll find something that interests you. I mean, we were on break for a couple of minutes, and I was super curious about how you got into being a podcaster, which you did before that. And then you told me you were a lawyer, and I thought, wow, I would have never guessed that. So just the surprise of that was interesting. And then you did Ultra Marathon. What are they called? Ultra what? Yeah, you got it. Ultras. Ultras. Yeah. You don't want to see. You're too humble to say. Ultra physical events. Yeah, that's it. You got it. Double the size of a marathon. I mean, I can't even imagine a marathon, much less double the size.

1:12:54I love it. Thank you. Okay, thanks. See ya. I appreciate it. All right. Cheers. Cheers.

1:13:03That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change and The Plant Power Way as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

1:13:47Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake.

1:14:25Portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.