My Biggest Life Lessons from Traveling the World with Lisa Ruoff

Jennifer Norman:
Hello, beautiful humans. Welcome to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. I'm Jennifer Norman, founder of The Human Beauty Movement and your host. I created The Human Beauty Movement to help inspire radical self-love, radical self-acceptance, and radical self-expression. Together, we have open conversations about diverse aspects of the human experience. To discover the sole beauty that connects us all. Take a moment now to subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode. I'm so glad that you're joining me for today's show.

Jennifer Norman:
So, okay, I have a question for you. Would you consider yourself the black sheep of the family? What is it that labels people the black sheep? In mild cases, it might be that you didn't behave or fall into line. And in other more extreme cases, it might be that you've completely rebelled and went your own way. Well, I want to make a case for the black sheep, the brown sheep, the purple sheep, the green, orange, and blue sheep. Because dancing to the beat of your own drum can be an extremely brave act of self awareness and self acceptance. It may be the curiosity of our souls yearning to learn and discover more. I invited my next guest to the show to talk about her life path, which included extensive travel on some crazy international adventures that could often be described as chaotic abandon. Meet Lisa Ruoff, otherwise known as The Galavanting Goddess.

Jennifer Norman:
Now, I grew up as a New Yorker, and Lisa grew up in New Jersey. So from a New Yorker's point of view, growing up in New Jersey was proof enough to label anyone a black sheep. But aside from that, I find Lisa's story really inspiring for those who may be questioning their internal drive to get out there, explore, and live their lives freely. Lisa is an author, a former chef and restauranteur, and what I'd consider a fulfilled human being. Welcome to the show, Lisa.

Lisa Ruoff:
Hi, Jennifer. Thanks for having me.

Jennifer Norman:
I am so delighted to have you here. So, girl, you've got some stories.

Lisa Ruoff:
Yeah, that's an understatement.

Jennifer Norman:
Right. All right. But first, we have to ask you, why do you think that you are considered the black sheep of the family?

Lisa Ruoff:
Oh, well, there's six of us, and I have to say, out of us six, there are two of us. So me and my sister have been very close or pretty much best friends, and we are the black sheep. So I do have company in my black sheep. Dumb, I guess. But definitely, I have always walked my own path. I have always done my own thing. I guess. As you were saying, in my younger years, I was not an easy child.

Lisa Ruoff:
I give my mother credit for that. We don't get along on a lot of things.

Jennifer Norman:
Where were you in the birth order?

Lisa Ruoff:
I'm the youngest. You could judge me. I get it.

Jennifer Norman:
No, I actually asked this question because I, too, was also the youngest of six. And I think out of all of us, I was the most rebellious. And so I'm curious if there was a similarity there.

Lisa Ruoff:
That's funny. And New York Jersey thing, we've got the east coast thing going on, so I didn't know that. Yeah. And I was a lot younger than the rest of my siblings, so they were all, my oldest sister is 16 years older than me, and then the one next to me is seven years older than me, but they're all a year or two apart. So I kind of grew up on my own with a whole bunch of parental units. And I just. From the very beginning, even as a young child, it was always a question, not only for me, but for everyone else. Like, where did you come from? You're here and you're in this family, but how did you get here? How did this happen?

Jennifer Norman:
Did you feel like there was like, a level of exhaustion? By the time that you arrived, your parents had so many children, and then all of a sudden there's a gap, and you're growing up with other people around you that behave differently.

Lisa Ruoff:
And so your family, as any child of six, but especially the last, I'm sure now as an adult, I can say any parent is going to be, even after two, got to be just exhausted, but six. And then it happened to be me, like, wow, I'm sorry. It must have been exhausting. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
And we can look back now with empathy, but while you're going through it, all you can be is like, my parents are being pains in the asses. They don't understand me. Why can't they just let me be?

Lisa Ruoff:
Of course. And it was a huge generation gap at the time. I was born in 71, and even for that, like, now, that's another generation. But it almost was like having grandparents instead of parents at that point. My mom wasn't super old, she was only 36, but it was a different time. Women didn't have kids at 36.

Jennifer Norman:
It's true. I was thinking about it because I was born in 70, and by the time when I arrived, three of the youngest children were actually adopted. So there was also just culturally something else in our dna, and we were adopted from different places. And so my mom was 35 with six children. Now I think about people these days that are just getting married at 35, and they don't even think about having kids in some cases, because you don't have to. It was almost like a requirement or something that people felt that they must do if they're going to get married. Of course, you have children, and so things are just so different now. And I'm thinking about, wow.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, I can't even imagine. I was having my first child at 35. And even at that time, I was considered a geriatric mom.

Lisa Ruoff:
Like, wow, that makes me feel great.

Jennifer Norman:
I know. It's like, oh, thanks a lot. Anyway, so what it was that made you, aside from your own innate feeling of marching to the beat of your own drum, what was it that made you want to start adventure seeking, and what was your first adventure?

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, I kind of had a really good basis from growing up because my parents did a lot of traveling. My mom and dad really liked to travel, and we did a lot of trips with the family and stuff. I had already been overseas with the family a couple of times, so I kind of grew up thinking that that was normal. But of course, those were family trips. That was completely different than what I chose to experience as my own adult. I was the kid that was always asking 50 million questions, and if I was told not to do something, I had to ask why. I needed a reason for everything. And so as I grew older, it was just those questions turned into this discovery, this explorer kind of quest seeker.

Lisa Ruoff:
Like, I had to go see everything just because it was there, and I had to find out. Yeah. So when I started traveling on my own, it's kind of one of those things now me and my husband talk about, because I've kind of pulled him into this travel thing, too. When you go to places and you love them and you feel really good, it's amazing to experience it. But then when you leave for me, I'm like, I'm pretty sure I won't be back there again. Not because I didn't love it or because it didn't resonate with me or I didn't have a great time, but because there's so much more to see and there's so little time. Okay, I've been there. I've done that.

Lisa Ruoff:
I know. I like it. Let's go explore somewhere else.

Jennifer Norman:
You know, what's interesting is that my siblings will. There was a period of time where for years, they would get together and go to Lake George, and they would all meet up, and year after year after year, and I'm the one that actually moved to Los Angeles. I live in Los Angeles now, and I've been here for about 20 some years, and everybody else is still on the east coast. And that was their thing. And I have my own life out here. And I was thinking, gosh, there would be no greater torture for me than...

Lisa Ruoff:
To go the same place over and over. I mean, exactly. I'm alone in that.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, there's so much more to see. There's so much more to do. But it became their tradition. And, yeah, there is a comfort in that. And it was something where they could all bond over something familiar. And so I understand that for them. But for me, I'm like, I would rather see something new each time. I very seldom like to even go to the same restaurant twice.

Jennifer Norman:
I like to do different things and try it. There's so much more. Former restauranteur. You can understand that as well. But, yeah, okay, so you had this desire, and we know that it's curiosity. We know that curiosity is such a fundamental part of being a human being. Like, if you don't have curiosity, you don't have growth, you don't have innovation. And so, yeah, you were seeking to want to expand all of the things that were in your life and your awareness and your knowledge and see some beautiful new things.

Lisa Ruoff:
And I think you put it perfectly that I'm just going to. Because something just really caught me there. Growth. The word growth is really, for me as an adult now has become really important because growth is kind of like this non ending expansion. But growth doesn't live in a comfort zone. Growth lives outside of your comfort zone. Growth lives in vulnerability. Growth lives in new experiences.

Lisa Ruoff:
So there's two different aspects, kind of extremes to that level of growth and comfort. Like going to Lake George every year. That's a comfort zone. It's not a growth zone. It doesn't mean it's bad. It's just the opposite of growth.

Jennifer Norman:
So let's talk about what your first adventure was. Can you remember what exactly it was and where you went?

Lisa Ruoff:
On my own. Yes. The books, not to get into them right now, but the book series starts with me traveling on my own internationally. But the first trip that I took on my own, I had moved from Jersey to Colorado, lived with my sister for a while, and then decided I wanted to go on a road trip. And nobody really wanted to come with me. Everybody was working different time frames, whatever. So I hit the road by myself. And I did.

Lisa Ruoff:
From Colorado down to Phoenix, over to southern California, and then up the coast to Oregon, and then back down again. And it was probably about a month, I guess I took on my own. And one of the first friends in Phoenix that I stopped at. So that was kind of a comfort zone. And then from there I went to LA and I stayed at a hostel in LA for the first time by myself. And I got bit, I think by a spider or something like that. The night that I was in the hostel.

Jennifer Norman:
Sounds about right.

Lisa Ruoff:
So literally for two days, I'm driving my Jeep up the coast and I could hardly move one side of my body because I had gotten bitten by something on the neck. And it had given me this massive reaction. Of course, I'm like 20 years old, I have no health insurance. Like, I just got in my car and started driving. I'm kind of like, I hope I'm going to be okay because I don't know where I'm going. I don't know where I am. I don't know anyone around here. I don't have health insurance, and I can't really move this side of my body.

Lisa Ruoff:
And it turned out I was okay. I mean, it took me like two days to kind of come back too, but I turned out fine. And I don't really know exactly what happened, but it was really, at the time, it was my first trip. I was young, I was very impressionable and quite scared. And I thought, well, it worked.

Jennifer Norman:
Realized that you survived it and it was okay, right?

Lisa Ruoff:
Not the end of the world. But at the time when something like that happens, it's pretty easy to freak out and go running home or to somewhat like some kind of level of comfort. And I didn't have it, so I didn't have that option.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. And sometimes that's it too. It's just like, I have nothing else else to do. There's no other alternative. There's no safety net. And so he's like, continue going forward. Wow. Wow.

Jennifer Norman:
And so then in your first book, which is Galavanting Goddess Alaska to Cuba and back, at what point did you go to Alaska?

Lisa Ruoff:
So that was part of my travels, I guess I was about 28 when I moved to Alaska. Once again, I went up to visit friends in Anchorage. I had brought a bunch of stuff because I figured I would stay the summer, and I just didn't leave for eight years. I was like, hey, I like this place. I think I'll stay. And that was. I had. I opened my first restaurant up there.

Lisa Ruoff:
I was a sea kayak guide for a wilderness lodge that was off the grid. I was living. That's where I started in this book. It doesn't really go into Alaska a lot. That's the next one that's coming out. But it was incredible. And Alaska has and will always have a huge place in my heart just because I think, without getting too much into detail, it was probably the hardest part of living and the most rewarding because I lived off the grid. I didn't have running water.

Lisa Ruoff:
It was a hike in. There was no electricity, like that kind of stuff that was normal up there for everyone. So you really had to know. I mean, it really taught me how to live. Literally live. Not just, like, get...

Jennifer Norman:
Survival live. Yeah. Not just be comfortable live.

Lisa Ruoff:
And it was like, that was the comfort part was always questionable, but the validation part and the fulfilling part, it was just outstanding for me. I also knew people that would go up there for a summer and be like, I'm out. I'm not doing this. So for me, it just resonated with me so much that I stayed for eight years and just, like, everything, I mean, I still have friends up there, but I live in very much gratitude now. I guess it's kind of one of those you don't really know the light unless you've seen the dark kind of thing. So when I came back from Alaska, it became a joke for me because we had an outhouse, didn't have running water, and we had to haul in five gallon buckets to use water. So when I came back down to the lower 48, back down to Colorado...

Jennifer Norman:
The lower 48!

Lisa Ruoff:
The lower 48 is what everybody up there calls the rest of the world. The lower 48. But when I came back, it was just so funny because I moved into my sister's house in Colorado with her, and it was kind of like, wait, like, you guys go to the bathroom inside? That's disgusting. Take that outside. Here's this whole new perspective on things.

Jennifer Norman:
Not challenged.

Lisa Ruoff:
I'm like, five gallons of water. A plush. It was a while ago, but still I could use five gallons over a span of five days. That's insane.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it's funny, the perspective that you get when you have to work for everything that you live for.

Lisa Ruoff:
Yeah. It's a whole new level of appreciation.

Jennifer Norman:
So you're a sea kayak guide. You're doing these adventures. Can you tell us some of your more memorable or funny experiences?

Lisa Ruoff:
Oh, jeez. There are so many, but just analogies kind of thing, like comparisons. When I first opened my restaurant up there, it was just a little 15 seat, almost like a deli kind of thing. But it was really funny because we were across the street. We were in the same kind of parking lot, but across the street from a saloon, a bar, and the guys in the bar were the ones that would help me through. Like, if I needed anything, I'd just go over to Earl's and ask somebody, just send somebody over to help me or whatever. Whether it was like carpentry or hanging a sign or something, somebody ultimately would come across, hopefully wasn't too drunk, and he'd get the job done. But my mom came up to visit at one point, I actually went back to Jersey to be in a wedding from a friend from high school, and my mom came up to Alaska to watch the restaurant for me for a week.

Lisa Ruoff:
It was, like, for five days or something, and she basically got her ass kicked. I was like, I'm sorry. Of course, you've had six kids. Of course you know how to cook and you know how to take care of people. But it's a restaurant. It's different. And even though it wasn't a full on, it was service at the counter and more like a deli kind of thing. But it was a restaurant, and I heard stories after the fact, and I was forever grateful for her for doing that.

Lisa Ruoff:
But after she left and went back to Jersey, and I was forever hearing stories of the guys that would come in and be like, oh, your mom's so cute. Like, I ordered a tofu sandwich at one point instead of actually making the tofu. Tofu's hippie crap. She doesn't do that. She didn't know how to do it. So she just took a hunk of tofu and chopped it up and put it on a sandwich. Like, oh, God, I'm so sorry that my mother did that. My customers are telling me this.

Lisa Ruoff:
I am so sorry. That's not how it was supposed to be, obviously. And this one guy was like, you know what? We all have mothers. It's fine. She was so cute. I'm like, thank you. Thank you. Just for this community, because you run a business, you don't normally get that kind of empathy. You don't get those second chances. And in communities in such a place as Homer, Alaska, you're just part of the family.

Jennifer Norman:
We're skipping over something that I think is really also important, and that is that you started a restaurant, for goodness sakes. And from just going up there and traveling and figuring stuff out, you also figured out how to operate a restaurant. So, I mean, that is nothing to sneeze at. I have actually worked at a couple of restaurants myself. It is hard. I mean, your mom, God bless her for even trying. It's hard.

Lisa Ruoff:
I don't think that she had any idea what she was getting into because she was like, I've raised six kids. I understand what it is to cook for people. Yeah. No, it's not playing your experience, but this is different. It's a business. No, man.

Jennifer Norman:
Lisa. I actually remember working at one restaurant, and I was like, a bus girl, believe it or not. And then I thought, oh, I can waitress. Of course, this is easy. And so I go to this other place, lying and telling them that I had waitressing experience, and I was just fucking up. I was just messing everything up. And I think I got fired after, like, two weeks when they discovered that I really didn't know what I was doing. And so I'm like, every time I see a really good waiter or a waitress that just knows how to serve and multitasking, I am just like, that is a special gift that I just clearly did not have at the time.

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, and also like, to go back to, how did I start a restaurant up there? I had been working in restaurants forever, but not necessarily in the back of the house. So even though that restaurant in Alaska was the beginning of 25 years of an ultimate career for me, that was not the plan. I had no idea what I was doing. I was a lucky fool is what happened, because I remember sitting around with a friend one night, and I'm like, I had decided to stay in Alaska instead of leave after the winter or after the summer, going into the winter, and I didn't know I was bartending. And I'm like, I could keep doing this. It's not a big deal, but I'm trying to get out of that. I don't want the drunk party lifestyle anymore.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah.

Lisa Ruoff:
So I just remember we had, like, this big, dry erase board, and him and I were just marking stuff up. Okay, well, what do you like to do? What are you good at? Like, stupid things. Like, I could darn socks. He's writing on board darning socks. You live in Homer. You could do that. People need socks. So this is reality. So we came up with this whole list of stuff, and having a restaurant was one of them.

Lisa Ruoff:
It's just one of those. Maybe I could open a restaurant. Oh, whatever. And he wrote it down. So lo and behold, two months later, I rented out this space. It was not a restaurant. It was totally, like, an open building that didn't even have walls yet. So I built the whole thing.

Lisa Ruoff:
And then we were supposed to open January 1, and I think it took, like, two months to build the whole thing out. And by the middle of December, somebody was like, oh, so what's the menu going to be, like, the menu, like, I have to cook. I don't know how to cook. Oh, shit. So I cooked, and it was good, and I was really lucky. That's really how my chefing started. I was an idiot, and somehow I pulled it.

Jennifer Norman:
That. I love that. I mean, for me, I went to Georgetown for an MBA. There are so many things that I would be like, oh, no. Oh, no. There's so many things that get inculcated in you on how to do business. And I think that's almost the problem.

Lisa Ruoff:
Yeah. I had gone to, I don't know, the chamber, whatever. They have all of these freebie kind of help things. You could go to people for starting a business in Homer. So I did. I made an appointment with one of these chamber people, and I sat there for half an hour while they asked me all these questions. Okay, what's your location? Like, what's your demographic? I want to know if you're going to buy. How much capital do you have to start with? And I just sat there like this.

Lisa Ruoff:
22. I guess it was 28 at the time, year old. Like, what? I just want to open a restaurant. What are you talking about? So I left, and I had two choices. Like, I could panic and be like, oh, my God. I don't know what I'm doing. Or I could be like, who cares what they say? It'll be fine. And that's what I did.

Lisa Ruoff:
I was like, screw them. They don't know me.

Jennifer Norman:
All right, so then you had your restaurant, and then after a while, I know that there's a lot of different adventures that happened. You ended up traveling to Cuba, too. And was this when you wanted to learn how to sail?

Lisa Ruoff:
Yeah. So a couple of years in, I had had my restaurant, and then I had closed it down. I had been a sea kayak guide across the bay in Homer. It's across Catchmack Bay, which is, like, there's no roads. You have to either get there by bus or by boat or by plane. And I had kind of done the wilderness thing, and it was like, we're on the ocean and it's cold. So I had learned how to do that. But the ocean, it was this big anomaly to me.

Lisa Ruoff:
Like, the ocean kind of scares me. It's big, it's scary. And for me, when I encounter fear, I have to kind of encounter it. If I have a fear and I'm aware of it, okay, the ocean scares me, and I am a sea kayak guide, which is kind of ridiculous. Maybe I'm being a little bit too honest, really. But I think that I need to confront this. So I had a girlfriend who had been in kind of the sailing world, and she kind of filled me in on all of these different publications of where to go and put a classified at if you want to be crew or how to learn for free. So she kind of pointed me in the right direction.

Lisa Ruoff:
And as it happened, her ex owned a sailboat in Mexico, and he was going to go down for a couple of months and retrofit this sailboat while it was on dry dock. And I was like, ok, I'll go help you. Do you want some help? I'll go down with you. So that's how it started. I went with him to go down to Mexico to help him with his boat. We never got that far. So he got called away on work and his plans changed. And then all of a sudden, I was on the east coast getting all dressed up to be a deckhand on some mega million dollar yacht off of Fort Lauderdale.

Lisa Ruoff:
And then that didn't work because I was like, what am I hit? Like, this is not what I want. So I ended up on just a boat, like through a series of events, I just ended up on a privately owned boat by, in the sailing world, what they're called is cruisers. So there's a whole bunch of different categories. There's racers, there's bay sailors, there's whatever. Cruisers are people that live on sailboats. The just kind of give up their life. They buy a boat and a lot of them are evading taxes because that's a really good way to do it. Who's going to find you? Anyway, this guy was a South African.

Lisa Ruoff:
He had come over. It was his sister's or brother's boat or something, he had sailed over from South Africa with them, and then they had gone on to live their lives. And this was his last trip before the was going to go back to South Africa. So he was looking for a deckhand, and I just jumped on board. And so we had kind of figured this out over a span of a couple of weeks of me meeting him and seeing if we could get along and making sure that it wasn't like, I'm not paying you with sexual favors, because it's also another big thing at that point, I just want to learn how to sail. I don't want to learn you. Which we had decided, yes, okay, this could work. And then the night before or the day that was like that day or the night before, something he'd said something to me about, oh, and we're going to meet Elizabeth and she's going to be coming with us.

Lisa Ruoff:
And I was like, who? What? What are you talking about? She's going to come with us to store to get provisions. Well, he had met this girl at the bar the night before and invited her along for our two month trip on the boat. And I was like, what? Oh, my God. So it was kind of crazy. And that was kind of the beginning of this story. And ultimately, she and I became really good friends because he and I ended up not getting along so well. But being on a 44 foot sailboat with a couple that has just started the day before for two months was quite the adventure.

Jennifer Norman:
I can only imagine. And by the way, beautiful humans, I am not endorsing buying a sailboat and getting away just to evade taxes or...

Lisa Ruoff:
Sorry.

Jennifer Norman:
No, I think that that's brilliant because I wouldn't have even thought. But, yeah, I laugh only because it is humorous and it is funny. But yes, do it for the adventure. Don't do it for evading taxes. Pay your taxes, ladies and gentlemen.

Lisa Ruoff:
I agree. I do.

Jennifer Norman:
It's totally funny. Okay, so it sounds like a lot of this just comes about without very much planning at all. It's like you seem like you're living your life forward and just letting things unfold as they do it.

Lisa Ruoff:
Really, for me, now that I'm older, I have realized in my younger years, this did not fit. This did not conform into society's norm, which most things I had to get through because most of me didn't fit to society's norms. And for a while, that was a very big problem point of contention in my life. And what I found is I'm really good at starting things, whether it's businesses, ideas, adventures, I can start. I have all of this energy and passion for starting things. I don't have so much in following through. So I've had tons of businesses, tons of relationships, which is a whole other story. But it's the newness and creativity that I'm really good at, and that isn't something that is nurtured in our society.

Lisa Ruoff:
You're supposed to have one man, you're supposed to have one job. You're supposed to have one house. You're just supposed to find the thing and then be happy with it forever. And it took me decades to realize that that's just one story, and there's 50 million more out there to choose from. And it doesn't make it wrong just because it's not something that's conforming. So, yes, most of my life has been about what's next? What do we do now? Okay, that was fun. Let's move on.

Jennifer Norman:
I relate so much, and I think that a lot of people who are listening might be able to also resonate with that too, because there is this curiosity and the once it's satiated, it's kind of like, okay, I figured that out. I know what that's like and what else is out there? Let's continue. Let's go and try something new. And I often would say a lot of people would look at people's LinkedIn resumes or profiles and whatnot and be like, oh, you were at this for six months, what happened? Or, oh, you were only at this for a few months, what happened? As if that was a problem, right? Yeah. Rather than saying, I tried it, I did it, it wasn't for me, or it was like, I got everything that I needed to out of that and I was ready for something new. And that doesn't mean that if I'm going to get into something else that it's going to only last me a few months, or maybe it will, but there's nothing wrong with that. It just might be like leaning into what works for you and making the most of it, which is definitely what I think that you've been able to, because you're surviving, you're thriving, you're happy, and things work out. The universe always answers your call. It always says, I'm giving you these things to make the most out of your life. What are you doing?

Lisa Ruoff:
And I really think that it's being part of a team, too. In our society, in our world, we're part of the human race, which everybody has its own cultures, its own societies. And in that, we also have our individuality. And each person in that individuality brings something to the team or to the society or to the community or whatever that is. And if we all had the same thing to bring, we would collapse. So we have to be different. We have to embrace our differences in order to make this all work together.

Jennifer Norman:
I think most people understand the benefit of diversity, but it's not yet all very easy to live that out for a lot of people. A lot of people are like, oh, why can't they just do what they're told?

Lisa Ruoff:
And once again, I didn't have to.

Jennifer Norman:
Deal with all the humans in my company.

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, and growth happens out of your comfort zone. And that's not just for humans. That's for corporations, too. That's for business, too. If you're a good business, person, you have to get out on the ledge and do something new and innovative, or you're going to die. But if you want employees, that's a different story. They're supposed to stay in the regular Norman kind of scheme of how we've been raised and what corporations are. It's changing a little bit now, but you get a group of employees that are just supposed to do the same thing forever and stay with you and be good for the next 30 years, and I don't know.

Lisa Ruoff:
I don't see that working as a whole.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, I agree with you. And so you, over the course of your life, have traveled so much. I would love to have you tell us what were some of the places that you've gone to, and was there anything specifically memorable or something that you would want the world to know about any of these places?

Lisa Ruoff:
Oh, jeez. There are so many. I really believe after traveling so much and seeing so many different places over the years, it also depends on your perspective, too, because my perspective and what I'm looking at either getting out or offering in these travels has changed so much with age, really, with what my focus is. But I would say when I first started traveling, obviously in my partying, it was about meeting people. It was about having fun. It was an egocentric kind of thing. And over the years and travels, what traveling has taught me is that if you're open to accepting what traveling has to offer you in all these different places, it becomes about giving. It becomes about sharing, not just what fulfills me, but what am I doing here? How can I somehow make an impact on these people, on these places where I am? And this is kind of what goes into the environmental thing a little bit, but a lot of it, too, is why I have really come to love traveling through third world countries because of the people, because their lifestyle is so different.

Lisa Ruoff:
And what I grew up to believe was that if you didn't have money, life was hard. You needed money. That's the whole point. You need to go get a good job and get money so that you're secure, you're stable, and you're happy. And what traveling taught me was it doesn't have anything to do with money. Some of the most amazing people and societies and communities that I have seen have nothing. They don't even know where they're going to eat tomorrow. And I don't mean what restaurant, are we going to die tomorrow or not? And this is just how they live, and they're happy and they're loving, and they're giving and they're trusting, and the world has done nothing for them at all.

Lisa Ruoff:
But to see that kind of hope and faith in life, it changed me. They were giving me a gift so that I could live my life on a different perspective, because, okay, who doesn't want money? But it's not necessary to be a good person. Actually, I found the opposite.

Jennifer Norman:
And so it inspired you after seeing and coming into whole different cultures, this paradigm shift. And so then you talked a little bit about how they changed you and how they made you more conscious in terms of what you needed to live, what you needed to be happy, what you needed in terms of environmental give and take. Can you share a little bit more about that?

Lisa Ruoff:
A couple of things on the environmental level? I could go off on lots of tangents, lots of perspectives, lots of lessons, all of that, but a couple of the social, more one on one things that really kind of got just were emblazed in my brain were a couple of instances in Africa, because the African people had nothing. Some of the places that I was at, it was literally, there were women walking with water buckets on their heads for miles every day just to make sure their kids had water, let alone food. That's something totally different. But we would be. And I was backpacking. There was no tour. Usually there wasn't even other people involved, but me and this other English girl kind of hooked up along the way. And we were backpacking through this village in the middle of nowhere, in the woods.

Lisa Ruoff:
And we had learned along the way that they don't have anything. So we wanted to figure out, how can we, even though everything we own is on our backs, what can we bring to help these kids? They don't have anything. So we thought, okay, well, they all are interested in school stuff, so we can't carry books or notebooks or anything because they're just too heavy. But we decided pencils. We can bring a couple of boxes of pencils with us everywhere we go. And when we reach these little villages where all these kids run out and they try to grab their hands and they've never seen a white person before, we'll give them pencils to which we implemented our plan. And we're out in the middle of nowhere, and all these kids come running out, and we're like, we get to give the pencils out. This is so exciting, right? So we start handing pencils out, and all these kids are just like, wow, we got this.

Lisa Ruoff:
Like, this white woman gave me this thing and the go running off, and it was just really amazing for about three minutes. And then we ran out of pencils. And in our white, privileged naivete, this scene unfolded in front of us that the kids started beating each other up over the pencils because they didn't all have one. And I literally was like, oh, my God. I did this out of what I thought I was doing as a good act. I created this strife and this war in front of my face. It was such a slap. My ignorance just overtook me, and it was almost like, oh, my God, it's everything I could do right now to not just get on my knees and cry.

Lisa Ruoff:
I am so sorry. I was just trying to help. But instances like that, we don't know. As humans, that's what we do on every level. Whether it's me handing pencils out to some little african kid in a village or some scientist in a lab, we think that we know what's best, and we just don't. We have the best intentions, but we are not. And I hate to bring it to this level, but somehow we're just not part of this natural cycle. We just don't understand the bigger picture.

Lisa Ruoff:
We don't get it, and we keep messing up, not on purpose. We think we have the best intentions, but it's just not working for us.

Jennifer Norman:
That is so profound.

Lisa Ruoff:
It really was one little instance, and that stayed with me for decades. That was part of what is my makeup now. Whenever I make some kind of decision, like, those little instances that happened along the way have made me a logical thinker. Instead of, oh, let's just do this. Let's just think about it first. What are the repercussions?

Jennifer Norman:
But unless you had seen that and experienced it and emotionally had that response in terms of what the reaction and what the repercussions were, you would never have known.

Lisa Ruoff:
No. And that's part of the whole experiencing, whether it's travel or anything, you need to experience life and get out of your comfort zone because it makes you grow. I mean, not only grow in life, but it expands your brain.

Jennifer Norman:
It absolutely does. So on the contrary, what do you think would have been a better solution to that for people do have this intention. Everybody wants to help. Everybody's like, oh, throw money at it, or, let's go down and help build wells or build schools. From the outside, we applaud the organizations. We applaud the people that go down and do these things because it seems like they are doing it with loving and compassionate intention. What is helping versus what is hurting?

Lisa Ruoff:
That's a really hard question to answer. I don't know that there's an answer because it's a moving target, too. So not only do we have the best intentions that we just don't know, but the circumstances keep changing. So I'm not saying that you shouldn't do something because you think it's good, but we just, as humanity, we need to put a lot more thought into it and not give ourselves as much credit as we think. From what I saw, too, a lot of that is egotistical. I've lived in areas where there's a lot of money in Colorado, there's a lot of money here in different areas. I catered for those people for years, and you see lots of money being thrown at an issue or an organization, but you don't see a lot of compassion. Like, these people who are going to easily give thousands of dollars to the starving african children of the world are not going to hug an african child.

Lisa Ruoff:
They're not going to get down in the dirt and give them love and empathy, but they'll give the money. So I think it's more everything that I've learned on the Traveling thing is it's from the heart. Anything that comes from the heart is going to be real authentic, just to use that term, that's been so overused. But really, the one on one, personal, empathy, loving, compassion thing with other people is really, people want connection. We all do. We want connection. And that doesn't come through a dollar. Yes, a meal comes through a dollar, but you don't get that connection that I think we're all kind of craving for.

Lisa Ruoff:
There's just this disconnect in the world that for me, it became, let the little kids, they all want to hold a finger. Like in Africa, they all come running out, and if they haven't seen, we're Mizungus over there. Mazungu, mazungu, mazungu. They're screening it, and all these kids come from all these directions. And at first it's like, whoa, I got to hide. Like, whoa, I can't deal with it. It's too much. But just let the hold you, let them touch your hair, give them a finger, let them walk for a couple of miles.

Lisa Ruoff:
And that's what I could give just my presence to let them do that without being like, don't touch me. Like, oh, my God, here's 10 bucks. Leave me alone. They don't want my 10 bucks. They want interaction.

Jennifer Norman:
Wow, that's really, really powerful. Thank you so much for sharing that and so much richness in understanding that message unto itself. Wow.

Jennifer Norman:
And so I know that that was a life changing experience for you and there were occasions where you were traveling alone versus traveling with groups. And can you tell us what you felt were the differences between the times where you decided, you know what, I just want to go on this adventure by myself. I'm a single woman.

Lisa Ruoff:
Oh, yeah, caution to the wind. It started that way. I started on my own and I met lots of people on the way who I do like a day or two or a month with, really. And then ultimately what I realized in traveling, not in just myself, but in meeting other people was most people who were my age at the time doing the hostel thing. If they started with a friend or a group, they didn't last with them very long. And a lot of the times, lifetime friendships did not last through an adventure, a trip. So even though I might have liked to be with someone else, it didn't work for me that way. And I wasn't going to not do my trip because I couldn't find someone to go with me.

Lisa Ruoff:
After being out there and having these adventures on my own and having the opportunity to choose who I wanted to be with and how long I wanted to be with them, it was really kind of freeing if someone wanted to join me on the same adventure. We did it together because we both wanted to do it, but there wasn't any compromise. I could pick and choose whatever I wanted to do and it was no big deal. There was always usually someone around to have fun with if I wanted to do something, which is the beauty of using hostels, which is something that we're not very used to here in the States. Hostels, youth hostels all over the world were full of lots of traveling people, whether they were young, even now, older as well. But I did spend a better part of my three months in Africa with two travelers that I met along the way. One, his name was Derek and he was from Australia and the other is Pippa and she is from the UK. So we kind of made up our little three musketeers for a while and had a great time together.

Lisa Ruoff:
And I still am friends with them today. And that was 25 years ago. Not closely, but we still get in contact every once in a while. But they were fantastic. And I think that we had other people come and go into our little group, but we could all choose exactly what we wanted to do and when we wanted to do it. And at one point during that, Derek was like, well, I have these other plans. I'm going to go see the gorillas in the Congo and we didn't have those plans, so we kind of parted for a little bit. And then, funny enough, we met up again in the middle of a safari.

Lisa Ruoff:
It's another part of my book, too. It was not planned. Derek had taken off on his own, and me and Pippa were out doing our thing, and we were on this safari truck looking at elephants in the middle of the crater, which is.

Jennifer Norman:
You're like, hey, there's Derek, right?

Lisa Ruoff:
And literally, we look over, and he's in the truck over across the field. And I almost got out of the car because I was like, Derek, oh, my God. And of course, the guy's like, what are you doing? There's elephants! Get in the truck! Like, what are you doing? You can't do that. So it happens when it needs to happen. But definitely traveling on my own as a single female sometimes scared the shit out of me and ultimately completely empowered me. We're taught in this world, as women to fear everything.

Lisa Ruoff:
And there's a certain part of that that you really need to listen to. But what I learned on traveling is that we all have intuition. We have to get in touch with it. Like, if I didn't get in touch with my intuition in some of my travels still, I'm kind of questioning, like, how am I here after the things that I've been through? I shouldn't. There's just no logical reason why I should be sitting here. But you learn. You learn how to deal, you learn how to feel things, you learn how to take care of yourself, and you learn that you can take care of yourself instead of having to rely on something else. And that's the empowering thing.

Lisa Ruoff:
As a single female being in some of those situations, we individually can do whatever we want. Anything is possible. It may be highly improbable, but anything is possible if you really put your mind to it.

Jennifer Norman:
And speaking of intuition and natural tendencies, I wanted to talk a moment about green witchcraft and being a witch and what that means to you in terms of intuition and natural harmony.

Lisa Ruoff:
And that's exactly what it means to me. The term witch or witchcraft obviously brings up a lot of emotions for a lot of people and judgments and perspectives. For me, being a witch is. It's empowering. It's very feminine oriented. There are male witches, but for the most part, it's feminine.

Jennifer Norman:
People would call them wizards rather than witches, if it's a male female sort of thing? But...

Lisa Ruoff:
It depends. In the witchcraft scene, everybody's got the own judgments, names, whatever.

Jennifer Norman:
What does it mean to you?

Lisa Ruoff:
For me, yeah, definitely. It's a feminine empowering goddess, natural thing. It's way more being in tune with the natural cycles, which is also I learned in Alaska, too. Everybody up there was very in tune because we lived on the coast. So the tides and the moon. Even if you weren't a fisherman, everybody knew when the tides and what phase of the moon it was because that's directly affected to the so. And here in normal life, I sometimes have to remind myself, oh, be aware, look up. In a perfect world for me, there wouldn't be a clock.

Lisa Ruoff:
This thing of time and numbers that we follow, God, it's completely inert in life. It's just something that we have these schedules that we follow. If you are in tune with nature, who cares what time it is? You don't need to know what time it is. You wake up when the sun comes up, you go to bed when it gets dark, you're awake when the moon is full because it's bright. You know what seasons there are, you know, when it's time to plant and when it's time to reap the crops. And, you know, medically too, is another huge one for me, which in my world is green witchcraft, which is kind of the epitome of why women were hung. Because if we're empowered and we don't need all of that external stuff, especially pharmaceuticals, and I will go there because I'm pretty strong about this, there's a balance, not like totally antivaxx or anything. There's some good things that come out of our modern medicine, but for the most part, we don't really need it.

Lisa Ruoff:
I have never had insurance. Little bits here and there. When I do, I try to get stuff done, but in my own life, I don't take pharmaceuticals. I make my own lotions, even to the point of, like, at times I brush my teeth with baking soda. I make coconut oil and essential oils for lotions. We compost here, everything. And because of my 25 years as a chef, leftover food, we don't throw away anything. This is one of those things.

Lisa Ruoff:
My husband is really, really. We have this in common. There's so much energy put into each of our lives, not just with the clothes that we're wearing, with food that we eat, with the cars that we drive. We just seem to take and take and take and take, and we're not even aware of it. We don't even understand the impact that it takes, not only on this planet, but energetically. It takes so much to grow an apple for you to eat and then throw away. If you don't want it. To me, that's completely disrespectful for the earth.

Lisa Ruoff:
And that's where, for me, witchcraft is all of that combined reverence for the earth. Being somewhat in tune with your natural cycles as a woman, especially because of menstrual cycles, too, but just being closer to our natural world, if we don't have this planet, we're not alive. So having some kind of reverence for what's supporting us, I think, is basic, and we're missing a lot of that in our society.

Jennifer Norman:
Did you find that it differed from place to place where you went in terms of your attunement to either natural cycles or what the energy of that environment would do? Was anything like man made, literally obstructing, perhaps intuition?

Lisa Ruoff:
And this might not be exactly the answer to the question that you're looking for, but when I moved, it doesn't really have anything to do with travel. But when I moved back to the state, to the lower 48 from Alaska, when I finally moved back, it was to Portland, Oregon, and it was right downtown. And I loved Portland, Oregon, but I had a roommate, and we had this two bedroom apartment. And the first, like, two weeks that I moved into this apartment, and granted, I'm coming from Alaska, I'm coming from the middle of the woods where I didn't have running water or anything, and I was totally in tune with the cycles of the moon and the tides. So I moved to this apartment in Portland, and for the first week, I guess I was just like, wow, this is so cool. Because at night I'm laying in bed and I'm like, oh, my God, the full moon is out and it's shining in my window. And I'm like, whoa, I'm so thankful for that because I'm in the middle of the city. This can be really over the top for my brain to kind of handle.

Lisa Ruoff:
And at the second week and I'm still like, the moon is still shining in my window. That's so incredible. How is that possible? Wait, this is going on two weeks now? How is this possible that the moon is shining in my window and I look out the window, first time in two weeks, and it's the freaking street light. And I started crying because I was so upset. I'm like, oh, my God. So it's silly, things like that. I was just a little out of tune. I wanted something that wasn't there.

Jennifer Norman:
That's brilliant. It's interesting because I was in New York and I lived in New York City for a time, moved out to LA. And it wasn't until I bought a house in this part of LA that some people know about, a lot of people don't, called Topanga, and it's not far from Malibu, but everybody was like, oh, Topanga is where all the hippies live. And I was like, but I loved the house. And so I ended up moving in. But there was something about living there. I don't know if it was the culture or the people or just the environment.

Jennifer Norman:
It was beautiful hills, beautiful hiking trails. Very much Portland esque, if you will. Because to us in LA, the Pac-Northwest is like green and harmony and very natural, very eco mindful. Being in Topanga somehow opened up this intuition and this conscientiousness, this consciousness in me. And I didn't know what it was until I met some friends that lived up in the hills. And they would consider themselves witches as well. They essentially were like, oh, there's a crystalline core in this area. The energy is so vibrant here, and there is this spirit.

Jennifer Norman:
A lot of people would agree that there's this indigenous spirit there. It's the land of the chumash. And it is so profound when you go through, you can just feel this energy, this harmony with nature, that you don't really get in a lot of the other places. Like, if you move over towards Hollywood and Beverly Hills, very different. And it's amazing how in the span of one county, in the span of one city, there's such variation.

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, and I think that that's normal anywhere. There are definitely places on the planet that are known for that.

Jennifer Norman:
Sedona.

Lisa Ruoff:
Sedona, right? The vortexes. And the thing about that is, the Funny Thing is Shasta. Especially Shasta. I love Sedona. I love the vortexes. And whenever I see trees that are kind of curled as they're growing, that's a really good sign of energetics in the earth, in that space, because they're being pulled as they grow up, so they curve. But the one night that I actually stopped in Shasta, I was on my road trip, and I was camping, and Shasta is supposed to be this energetic mecca and stuff. And I got there.

Lisa Ruoff:
This is my personal experience. But I pulled up to this out of the way campsite, just kind of out there in the woods, which is stuff that I was finding. And I got out of the car and I was like, oh, my God, get me out of here. This is not good. Like, the energy that I got from Shasta was like, nope. I got back in the car and I drove for another 4 hours and it was like midnight, it was so strong. If I stay here, I don't know what's going to happen to me. This is really heavy, ominous kind of energy.

Lisa Ruoff:
So that's been my only experience with Shasta. So when people are like, oh, shasta is amazing, I'm like, maybe for you, certainly wasn't for me.

Jennifer Norman:
Energy might have been at the time that you had driven through it because you were in your early twenties or your later twenties. Yeah, I was, yeah. It might have just been a different type of vibration.

Lisa Ruoff:
It could have been, but everybody resonates with something different. But yes, I totally believe that there are areas of the planet specifically geologically that hold different energies. And depending on the people that are there, whatever energies come and go, they may mix, they may blend, they may be like oil and water.

Jennifer Norman:
All right, so I want to talk about the environment for a bit because you did allude to it very strongly about the wastefulness, about the respect and whatnot. And in speaking about climate change, there's still climate deniers out there...

Lisa Ruoff:
Which is amazing to me. Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay. I would love for you to say a few words about... Because of your experience and what you've seen in your travel, a lot of people are not as well traveled as you are. Don't necessarily believe what they see in the media or what science says about what's going on with the earth. But from your point of view and from your experience, what would you say in terms of climate change?

Lisa Ruoff:
So I actually end of my second book, which is Bite of The Travel Bug, that's the one about Africa. I put a whole section I put as afterthoughts because I needed to add something after the fact. Because of course these travels happened for me 25 years ago. Now I'm in my early fifties. And what I have seen then compared to now, it's mind blowing for me actually. Specifically when I was traveling through Tasmania, the Tasmanian devils that were there, there was tens of thousands. I don't even know what the numbers were when I was there, because it was a healthy population. I was there, I saw it, I witnessed it.

Lisa Ruoff:
Super cool. They scream unbelievably blood curdling screams, but they're not dangerous to us. Here we are now, 25 years later, there's almost none left in Tasmania because there was some kind of cancer, which I don't at time of writing, this was last year. They still hadn't figured out what it was. It was a spreadable cancer that has been wiping out tasmanian devils. They don't know if it's because of climate change or whatever, but it's something that's real. It's changing in our environment. So that's one thing.

Lisa Ruoff:
They're almost gone. They're pretty much on the edge of extinction now. Like, if you go to Tasmania, finding a Tasmanian devil is almost impossible. When I was there, they were everywhere. They were part of my trip. Another huge thing, which is definitely a scientifically based deal, is coral reefs. So when I was in Australia, I was on the Great Barrier Reef, and I couldn't go diving because I had an ear infection thing. But I did go snorkeling many, many times and spent a week on a boat out there.

Lisa Ruoff:
And it was incredible. And the experience that I had of that living coral reef, huge, millions of fish, so many life forms, these different corals, the noises that you would hear underwater from just this ecosystem, awe inspiring. And the experience that I had there will never be available again on this planet, anywhere, to any human. Coral bleaching started in 2015, I guess, scientifically speaking. And basically, coral bleaching is because the waters are getting warmer, because our ocean temperature is rising. So I specifically wanted to talk about the whole global warming thing because for me, I'm flabbergasted as to how we could still even be asking if it's a thing. Somebody had asked me in a previous podcast if I believed in global warming, to which I was like, is that a trick question? Whether I believe in it or not has no bearing on it being a fact. I could say, no, I don't believe in it, but it doesn't mean that it's not happening.

Lisa Ruoff:
It's a scientific fact that our globe is warming. I've seen it with my own eyes. I'm not a scientist.

Jennifer Norman:
I think some people are arguing over whether or not it's man made or whether it's just a natural cycle because the earth went through a freezing and then it went through the warming again. I think that that is more the question about whether or not there's something that we as humans in manufacturing and carbon emissions can do something about it, or whether we were receiving.

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, and that's a key, too, is what you just said. Can we do something about it? Because then I started thinking, I'm having these conversations with my husband about the global warming thing, because it really kind of perplexed me as to how I could be asked if I believe it. Like what? But then I thought, okay, yes, I do believe that we have an effect on that, because there's also carbon footprint of everything we're doing in the ozone layer and blah, blah, blah. It could be natural, it could be a cyclical thing, but I don't even care at this point. It's a mute point to me whether it's human caused or not, because we're humans and we live on this planet. So how we got here is not so important as to where we're going. I don't want to fight about whether there's global warming or not, if we did it or not, when we're humans living on a planet that's going to die if we don't do something about it. That's insanity to me.

Lisa Ruoff:
Why are we so busy? Yes, we do need to look back and see how it happens so that maybe that can fix, be part of the solution. But even whether it's human caused or not, to me is like, I don't care anymore. I just want to know how to fix it. Can we move on and look forward instead of looking backwards?

Jennifer Norman:
And I can see the validity of that point. I also do see that amount of industrialization has been ramped up over the past 100 or so years to this place that has never, ever been on this planet before. And so understanding what kind of impact and measuring what impact that had helps us to course correct and know that, yes, it's helpful for us to think more regeneratively, more respectfully, to understand that humans and planet are in harmony with each other. And so whatever we do unto the planet, we're doing unto the people. Whatever we do unto the people, we do unto the planet. I've talked before on my podcast about how if as consumers or if as companies, because companies are consumers and we are people, we are all human. If we disrespect the planet, if we think that our resources aren't precious, then we treat them in a certain way. We kind of treat people that way, too.

Lisa Ruoff:
It's not one aspect.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah, it all goes into the same value proposition. And so if we can understand and appreciate ourselves, because it starts with ourselves, if we understand and appreciate the attunement and the power that we have as human and that we do matter, a lot of people are like, oh, it doesn't matter. I'm just one person. I'm just one household. I'm just one anything. It doesn't matter how I live because I won't make a difference.

Lisa Ruoff:
I feel like that's a cop out. I really feel like that's a lack of responsibility.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. If you take radical responsibility for yourself, for loving yourself, for treating yourself with respect for treating yourself as if there's only one you and you want to keep it on this planet for as long as possible, then it starts to spill out to how you behave, how you treat others, how you live, how you make choices and decisions. And so little by little, it's just, let's think about. I agree, our impact really is making a difference. You do matter. You do well.

Lisa Ruoff:
And I think as a whole, too. Our money runs our marketplace. My money runs our marketplace. Everywhere that I spend a dollar, we all spend a dollar. If we didn't do that, they wouldn't be in business, whatever that is, whether it's Walmart or whatever. But if we bought locally, we'd have more local stores. That's a personal responsibility thing that I agree with you. If we all just decided to make one change, we could make huge change.

Lisa Ruoff:
Yeah.

Jennifer Norman:
I think of the cash register as a ballot box. You're making a vote for what you want to succeed, what you want to win. And so if you are buying something that was made with a whole heck of a lot of plastic, with cheap labor, maybe it was done with labor that exploitive. Who knows? It might have been exploitive labor. Those things have an impact on our economy, on the whole economic system. And so aside from the environment, yes, I think that you make some valid points about what are we going to do in our own actions to make these changes. What can we do as to understanding that we don't have that much time. We can't leave it to the next generation.

Jennifer Norman:
And the next generation is really upset with us.

Lisa Ruoff:
Well, the should be, we screwed up. I mean, maybe not me specifically, but that's the part of, like, if we can all decide collectively that we're in this together, then maybe we can get out of it together. But just because I didn't drill the oil wells doesn't mean we don't have a problem.

Jennifer Norman:
Yeah. And to your point, it's like, okay, let's not look back and play the blame game. And we understand that, okay, we got here now that we know better, because we didn't know better. A lot of times we didn't know better. Now that we know better, we must do better. It's really our responsibility to do better.

Lisa Ruoff:
Especially if you have children. I don't have kids, so I don't have that legacy thing that I need to carry on. But you have kids. That's a big deal.

Jennifer Norman:
Okay, Lisa, I have some rapid fire questions for you that I want to end our beautiful show with. The first one is, what do you think makes a person beautiful?

Lisa Ruoff:
Integrity and humor. They're the first things that I think of.

Jennifer Norman:
Great answers. I feel most fulfilled when, oh, I'm in the woods. Beautiful. Name one place in the world that you'd want to be on everyone's bucket list.

Lisa Ruoff:
That's hard because I would immediately say Colorado, but I don't want anyone coming. But I love it. I mean, I think that Colorado is beautiful, and when I show people can't show them enough.

Jennifer Norman:
What is your favorite dish to make?

Lisa Ruoff:
It depends on the day. I mean, really, it changes all the time. Sometimes it's as simple as, like, a fried egg sandwich, and then other times it could be crepes or creme brulee. I just love to cook, so there isn't one, really.

Jennifer Norman:
Right. And this next question might be equally as difficult.

Lisa Ruoff:
Do you have a favorite book besides mine? Any of mine? They're not my favorite, but I would say I have a couple that have been on my shelves forever, but there's one that I really will never get rid of. And it's called The Fifth Element by you've never. It's an oldie, but it's kind of a dystopian kind of, but. And it's set in between San Francisco and LA, so it's something that you might find interesting. But I love it.

Jennifer Norman:
Hey, everybody, this is Lisa Ruoff. Thank you so much, Lisa, for joining me for today's show. What a wonderful conversation.

Lisa Ruoff:
Thanks, Jennifer. It was fun. Thank you.

Jennifer Norman:
Thank you for listening to The Human Beauty Movement Podcast. Be sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you stream podcasts. The Human Beauty Movement is a community-based platform that cultivates the beauty of humankind. Check out our workshops, find us on social media, and share our inspiration with all the beautiful humans in your life. Learn more at thehumanbeautymovement.com. Thank you so much for being a beautiful human.