Log Off, Turn In, & Tune Up

0:00I want you to pause for a moment because I want to tell you about my friend RJ. Now, you might know this guy as the founder and CEO of Rivian. He's certainly that, but he's really so much more. He's one of those rare people who actually walks the walk. I've watched him over many years, and I know him to be this incredibly deeply committed person, committed to preserving wild spaces while also inspiring people to explore responsibly. And that's basically Rivian in a nutshell. Their mission, keep the world adventurous forever, comes from this understanding that adventure and a healthy planet, these are not separate things.

0:38They're the same thing. Here's what gets me. Every generation deserves wild places to roam, to climb higher, to run farther, to be changed by the journey. But obviously, that's only possible if we're not destroying those places in the process of getting there. So yeah, Rivian builds electric vehicles. But really, they're building something bigger. Momentum toward a future where exploration does not come at the expense of nature, but actually inspires us to protect it. It's like, why create the ultimate adventure vehicle if we're not protecting the adventures themselves? And that's why I'm so proud to align forces in partnership with Rivian.

1:19This isn't just about transportation. It's about building a world worth exploring for our kids, for their kids, and for generations to come.

1:39The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. Today, we're gonna do something a little bit different, and I wanna preface this special episode with a bit of context and introduction. At the end of 2022, as I reflected on a decade of hosting conversations over 740 to date, I expressed both extreme gratitude for all that has transpired over the course of this journey as well as this creative urge to experiment. Because to my mind, podcasting really is still a new medium. And although there are of course strong incentives to continue doing the show in the way that I always have, the truth is, is that there really are no rules.

2:28I will of course continue to host weekly long form conversations with the people that most inspire me as I always have. but I do have this impulse to innovate, to try new things and play a bit with the format because stasis is death. And so two weeks ago, marked the first instance of this impulse in the form of a documentary style podcast in which my Roland compadre, Adam Skolnick and I spent the better part of a month endeavoring to get our heads around the rapidly developing world of artificial intelligence, perhaps the most powerful and transformative technology to emerge in our lifetime and to talk about what it portends good and bad for all of us in both the short and the long-term.

3:15Creating that episode was interesting. Putting it out was even more interesting because it was met with a predictable mix of both enthusiasm and lament. Many people, perhaps most appreciated it, but others were less enthusiastic. And for them, I suppose it was sort of like attending your favorite band in concert, expecting to enjoy the hits to instead have to weather or sit through the new album. And I get that, it's fine. But growth requires getting out of your comfort zone to explore uncharted terrain, physically and mentally, but also intellectually and creatively. This is a current and recurring theme of this show.

3:58I can't just talk it. I also need to demonstrate it, to live it myself, to walk it. A walk that respects and nurtures the inner spark, even if it risks alienating an audience or a portion of an audience, I've perhaps trained to expect something different. Growth requires the courage to scratch the creative itch, even in the face of fear of how the result will be received and turning that spark of inspiration into something shared publicly is always scary. It's inevitable, but allowing that fear to mute one's voice is the death of creativity. It's antithetical to growth. It's at odds with both the person I aspire to be and the sensibility I strive to encourage in others.

4:47And so, although it may not have been everyone's cup of tea, I'm really proud of the AI episode. It provided an opportunity for Adam to flex his investigative journalism muscles. It presented a new challenge in storytelling and it gave my talented team a new and nourishing creative opportunity to shine. I suppose this is all a long preface to saying that today I am once again, tiptoeing, venturing out into the unknown to try something new. As I've previously mentioned on a number of occasions, I find the moments where I'm speaking into a microphone alone without a partner like I'm doing right now, or for example, during the introductions to my guests, deeply, deeply uncomfortable.

5:35And many a podcaster, including my wife, feel absolutely at home doing this. And ironically, given that I talk into a microphone for a living, this is not me. But rather than avoid or minimize this discomfort, I thought I would beat this fear head on, step out of my comfort zone a bit, do something I've never before done on this show. And for the first time, offer up some thoughts in monologue format. That monologue is coming right up in uninterrupted form. But first a word from the sponsors who made this episode possible.

6:21Okay, so the subject of my thoughts today, focus on our evolving and complicated relationship with the digital world, met with a call to action to reclaim our innate humanity, to exert greater agency on how we direct our attention, to shoulder responsibility, to live our lives more present, more connected, and with greater conscious intention. The internet as it exists today, specifically, but not exclusively social media is of course, both a tool of miraculous proportions and a highly addictive distraction. On the one hand, it presents a repository of extraordinary knowledge at our fingertips, a source of inspiration, a device for self betterment, for community building, and this excellent lever to organize and manifest positive change in the world.

7:16I myself have reaped its benefits. It's provided me with a vocation previously not possible. It's allowed me to connect directly with an astonishing number of inspiring people I could have never before accessed. And in turn, share that inspiration with others. And it's allowed me to build and participate in a global community of like-minded seekers and souls. On the other hand, social media, and in fact, the internet as a whole, is almost entirely organized around a business model that deeply undermines its positive attributes, a superstructure owned and controlled by a very small grouping of corporate behemoths that prioritize growth, prioritize scale, and most of all, engagement for the purpose of data mining behavior and in turn selling all that data for the purpose of perfect targeted advertising.

8:13As was so astutely stated in the Social Dilemma documentary, we are not users of social media as much as we are being used. Indeed, we are the product. Unfortunately, this model, architected for maximum engagement, time spent on your platform of choice, has created a pernicious misalignment of incentives. Instead of creating a useful and healthy experience for the end user, what we instead have are ecosystems, very specifically and scientifically designed to hijack and addict our attention. Highly sophisticated algorithms encourage outrage and conflict, down-regulating sanity and instead upvoting provocation.

9:00When matched with the addition of an endless scroll in the dopamine-inducing anticipation of external validation in the form of likes, comments, and follows, the result is an extremely potent narcotic that quite reliably deepens our noxious and addictive relationship with social media, activates something primal in our lizard brain that overrides rationality, renders us powerless to set it aside, and over time, obscures our ability to evaluate situations objectively and denigrates the very quality of our lives. Social media, with its utopic promise of bringing the world closer as this infinite repository of community and wisdom has evolved beyond the anodyne era of using it to simply stay in touch with old friends into this potent crucible of division, a mind virus that erodes civility to instead reward our most base and reactive impulses, a tool for bad faith actors to manipulate at scale, and we, it's willing denizens.

10:19But the real problem reveals itself when the worst of these impulses and ideas produced by the internet escape their digital confines, make their way into the analog world and produce very real, very negative consequences on the vulnerable or undiscerning, on those bereft of critical thinking skills, on the angry or disenfranchised, on our young, and on our collective consciousness as a whole, because in truth, none of us are truly immune. Over time, as the algorithms learn to know us better than we know ourselves, our sources of information become increasingly siloed. bespoke and highly tailored to what we have most engaged with historically.

11:13The result is both distortion and calcification, a retreat into discreet and isolated spaces of comfort that entrench and affirm an already cemented worldview and further solidify the zero sum game war of ideology, religion, politics, nutrition, sports. The subject itself matters less than the sense of virtue produced by tribe alignment. A dopamine hit of superiority experienced by shouting down the opposing view as at best summarily wrong and at worst downright evil. As a result, constructive conversation is eroded. It's no longer about truth or even a good faith attempt to listen, let alone truly understand.

12:09Our post-truth world isn't about a collective effort to get things right. It's about exacerbating the fissures and fractures of separation. It's about scoring points, owning or dunking on the other side. When empathy is so thoroughly supplanted with righteousness as is most certainly the case, nobody wins. And together we suffer. What becomes of us when we can no longer communicate constructively? When we can't tolerate an opposing viewpoint or when truth is irrelevant? Conversation matters. I say this often. I believe it to be true to my core and the evolution that we desire, the solutions that we seek and desperately need to the many problems we face from the personal to the global to the existential, always and in every instance, begin with conversation.

13:11In fact, conversation is truly all we have as a bridge to a better self and a better world. It's why I do this podcast. it's why I believe so urgently in the medium of long form conversational podcasting. But so much of what I would consider real conversation, a respectful good faith exchange of perspective, shared and debated in a healthy marketplace of ideas has been denigrated on both social and mainstream media to slinging epithets on talk shows or incendiary diatribes on Twitter. and the squawk box of soundbite shouting heads on cable news competing for precious airtime. He or she who shouts loudest and with the greatest conviction wins.

14:03A competition that once again incentivizes outrage and division at the cost of shared values and at the cost of appreciating that what unites us is far greater and more important than the few issues over which we squabble and at the cost of creating healthy resolution to the issues over which we disagree for the betterment of all. This does not portend well for the future of liberalism or the future of democracy, for an open and free society, for cultural cohesion, or even our own personal evolution. As a by-product, we've all borne witness to the rapid deterioration of our mental health. The human connection and community promised by our social media overlords has instead, and quite ironically, architected a deep sense of isolation.

15:00One in three Americans now identify as lonely, a statistic that rises to an astonishing 61 % among young people. One analysis likened the negative effects of loneliness to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Meanwhile, rates of depression continue to escalate. This is not to say that social media is entirely to blame. Widening economic disparity, the pandemic, and other factors certainly shoulder responsibility, but there is something uniquely alarming, pernicious, and perhaps even Shakespearean about social media's unique culpability as this instigating accelerant in the steep decline of emotional wellbeing that we are currently bearing witness to at scale.

15:52When quiet reflection and boredom, the sacred spaces for rumination have all but been eradicated and replaced by the impossible to deny urge to always be scrolling, we in turn welcome this poverty of creative expression, a culture of instant impulsive reaction over considered response, a denigration in agency, and quite notably, a precipitous decline in mental health produced by incessantly comparing the quality of our lives to the endless feed of idealization, an onslaught of the most curated polished versions of others and their filtered performances skillfully crafted to maximize external validation.

16:39And because we can't help but measure ourselves against what we train our attention on, we are willingly inviting a chronic persistent state of feeling less than into our lives, a sense of not being good enough, of perhaps never being able to be good enough because comparison is the thief of joy. In other words, the connection promised by every login instead engineers loneliness, depression, chronic anxiety and a level of despair at just massive scale. This despair or loss of hope is in turn breeding and reinforcing a global society that is becoming increasingly bereft of empathy, which is a noxious emotional cocktail, stoking anger, producing violence and rendering millions of people vulnerable.

17:42Vulnerable to self-harm, vulnerable to bad ideas, vulnerable to false promises, false narratives, and false quick fixes to happiness, wealth, beauty, romance, fitness, health, serenity, you name it. It's a predatory yet effective tactic because pain, let's face it, is an easy marketing target. and shortcuts sell and sell very well. So if you find yourself vulnerable to or compelled by the quote, secret truth, they don't want you to know, end quote, carefully gated behind a paywall or the click funnel email baiting you on the newest miracle solution that's gonna solve your wound or heal your pain or render you attractive or give you six back abs or fill that unfillable hole in your soul please resist the temptation to bite and just pause, step away, turn inward and try to locate the source of that compulsion.

18:50What is the locus of your vulnerability? What is the nature and origin of the hole that is seeking to be filled? and where and what is the why behind the need? The answers all of us seek, that sense of wholeness, acceptance, love, compassion, meaning, purpose, and fulfillment can't be found on the very same platforms that are contributing to that whole, that anxiety, that depression, loneliness, and despair, that too many people are experiencing. And nor will the answer be found in the job, the car, the house, or the romantic partner. You're not gonna find it in a financial windfall or a psychedelic trip.

19:44And the work is not reading the latest inspirational quote on your feed. And it certainly does not exist behind a paywall. No, the truth that you yearn for the peace, the self-love, the sense of direction, of meaning is much more complicated. It's hard earned, it's messy, it's non-linear, it's one step forward, two steps back. It's very unique to you. It's this process without a destination. It's incredibly painful and hard and probably the most difficult adventure of your life, but it's also beautiful. And it's always, always worth it. There is no one or right way to engage with the inward journey of acceptance, healing and actualization.

20:33And it's really not by place to prescribe the form your journey towards awareness, towards wholeness should take. That's yours and yours alone to struggle with, to determine, to decide and ultimately pursue. But what I can offer are some very basic and simple guideposts based on experience, which I'll share with you with the caveat that you very well may find what follows embarrassingly obvious or perhaps even disappointingly banal. In defense, I would argue that what might sound basic and simple is in fact quite challenging to practice with any modicum of consistency. And even with great discipline would require a lifetime to master.

21:17So reflect on what resonates and discard what doesn't. As much as I'm grateful for your attention, my first recommendation, not shockingly, is to log off, step away from the device, go outside, create rules around the use of your technology that provide ample time and space to seek inward. In other words, make room for boredom. I'd also like you to consider sobriety or at least minimizing alcohol and other mind altering substances for the purpose of cultivating clarity. Because to numb oneself out is to arrest growth in its tracks. Prioritize quiet, prioritize rest, prioritize sleep, and important one, prioritize meditation, key.

22:16and then take your mindfulness and your mindfulness practice off the mat and into the experience of your daily life. I encourage you to consciously strive to be present even for the most banal of moments and really connect more deeply to your body. What is it telling you? Listen to the signals that it's giving you. Pay attention, particularly to the faint whispers, especially when they recur. What are they saying? I tend to hear them best with a slightly elevated heart rate while alone in nature and consider them messengers, sacred foot soldiers dispatched from my future higher self. They are catalysts for transformation, delivering magic when translated into action.

23:09So listen to them and act upon them. And as you begin to connect more deeply with yourself and your natural surroundings, allow yourself to be more open and more vulnerable with a circle of trusted friends. Because what is hidden cannot be healed. It is in the light and the sharing and the trust and the vulnerability that together we get better. And because we are spiritual beings having a human experience, it's my belief that engaging with a spirituality of your choosing through prayer, ceremony, or other means that you discover or become comfortable with is really paramount. Journaling, another obvious but important big one, challenging to do with consistency, but so crucial in terms of connecting with and being in relationship with and indulging your creativity.

24:09and taking it out of the journal into the world to give yourself permission to be creative, to express yourself, to build something, to make something, to share something is a great practice. Another great practice, practicing random acts of kindness, practicing them until they become reflexive, cultivating gratitude by making a handwritten list each day of things you are thankful for. Seek out awe, seek out wonder by both investing in unique experiences, but also by just identifying it in your everyday lives. When you're present and you're noticing, you can find awe and wonder in everything. Practice becoming an excellent listener, not just to yourself, but to others, because the greatest gift that you can give another is your attention.

25:09It's a gift that will be rewarded tenfold. Pursue joy. And finally, find a way to be of service to others, preferably that also channels that connection with joy because we all have something of value to give and acting on it unlocks the door to purpose. The list of obvious things we don't adequately honor or practice as long. I could go on and I should add before closing that everything I am expressing here is a needed reminder to myself as much as to you because I am certainly no master. And so to end, I wanna really encourage all of you to find the strength, find the fortitude to go inward or to go further inward, to push past the fear that keeps your pain private, to reckon with your demons and your darkness and expose them to the light and heal because you deserve the peace and the freedom and the fulfillment that will bring.

26:21And because what you discover along the way will be of tremendous value when shared with others. And because the rest of us, not just your family and your friends, but truly the world needs the best, most fully actualized version of you now more than ever. Meanwhile, have more conversations, real conversations, old school campfire conversations because conversation matters.

27:04Thank you for listening. Thank you for indulging me in this experiment. I hope you found it of some value and I'll see you back here in a couple of days. Peace, plants.

27:32Thank you.