Julie realized that she had a knack for all things music and art at the age of 28, so she pivoted from a steady job in the fashion business to embrace her creative pursuits wholeheartedly—refusing to let anyone’s perception of what was “normal” or “responsible” get to her. Her husband, Rich Roll, went through his own dramatic career shift years after, leaving behind his job as a successful lawyer to chase his athletic dreams. “We could get barely any work, either one of us. I was in my 40s creating my first album, and he was in his 40s doing triathlons—both of which make zero sense,” Julie says of the time. Looking at Julie and Rich today, you’d never know they teetered on bankruptcy for years. Rich is the two-time top finisher at the Ultraman World Championship and host of the mega-popular Rich Roll Podcast; Julie is a renowned spiritual figure, musician, and author of This Cheese Is Nuts; and together they’ve penned best-sellers The Plantpower Way and The Plantpower Way Italia. In this intimate interview, Julie dives into the belief system that got her family through those tight financial times, shares her uniquely spiritual perspective on wealth, and drops advice that every creative needs to hear. Now I’m in my mid-50s, and since then I have spent all of my extra income to fund my creative projects. This was not experienced with ease. It was experienced through a lot of trials, testing, and development of my creativity. This included a nine-year financial collapse that I experienced with my husband and my children. But during this time, I chose to foster my creativity and hold the vision that I would emerge from it, even though there was no physical evidence that I would. From a spiritual perspective, your divine blueprint is the reason you came into living, and inherent in that is the seed of creation. If you fail to nurture that seed, you will not realize your true mission, and you will end up having lived someone else’s life. And you may not realize it until you’re later in years or until disease visits you, or something like that. If you’re healthy and lucky enough to be healthy and have the opportunity to know yourself, that’s the No. 1 focus of life. We’ve been disconnected from the reason we’re in a body, and we’ve gotten into this rat race of competitive gathering of possessions, money, and bank accounts. Did Jesus have a 401(k)? Did Buddha have a savings account, just in case? Money is spiritual. It’s just another energy. During that time, I just showed them how to be a vibrant being even in the face of all those things. I met it as a spiritual challenge so they would see me preserve my humanity, joy, life force, even when these things were happening to me. They would ask me, “What happens when they repossess our car?” I was like, “Nothing. It’s a car.” That was my answer. Had I been, “Oh my God, they’re going to take the car. I’m not going to be able to get you to school!” If I did all of that, I would’ve been giving them that experience. It’s not the spiritual objects that help you connect, or the guru, or anything—it’s your heart. It doesn’t cost anything to be spiritual. If you learn a yoga practice, you don’t even need a mat. Yogis don’t have mats. Just do it on the ground, on your earth. So we risked. And everybody thought we were insane, by the way. If you choose to do this, you threaten other people’s safety, and they get angry. They take a stab: “Well, I pay my bills, and you’re a loser, and that makes me better than you.” It was not an easy thing. In our case, it bonded us like a tribe. My relationship was deepened by this experience rather than split apart. In the media, you see our journey portrayed differently. People are like, “Look at Rich and Julie. Easy for them to say. They live in a totally cool house.” Do you have any idea what I did for that house? I risked everything. I did everything against what everybody said. Ritual is natural to humanity. It’s been torn away from us, and we’re reawakening to it now. It’s super cool. It’s super fun for me to be in my 50s and to see the fruit of all this ceremony. Now it’s like it never happened. Want more from Julie? Check out her episode on the mbg podcast. Emma received her B.A. in Environmental Science & Policy with a specialty in environmental communications from Duke University. In addition to penning over 1,000 mbg articles on topics from the water crisis in California to the rise of urban beekeeping, her work has appeared on Grist, Bloomberg News, Bustle, and Forbes. She’s spoken about the intersection of self-care and sustainability on podcasts and live events alongside environmental thought leaders like Marci Zaroff, Gay Browne, and Summer Rayne Oakes.
