Roll On: Owning The Matrix

Cryptocurrency. Blockchain. Digital trading cards. Burnt Bansky & NFTs. And of course, flying cats with pop tart bodies. These are just a few of many internet developments dissected in today’s edition of ‘Roll On’, wherein Adam Skolnick and I usher you into the digital age with droll repartee, raillery, and shrewd observations on concepts, issues, and matters relevant and whimsical. We share good news and bad. We perform a bit of show and tell. We banter and blather. And as always, we answer your questions. Aside from serving as my cogitative, neighborly, and magnanimous sidecar hype-beast, Adam Skolnick is an activist and veteran journalist best known as David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me, co-author. Adam writes about adventure sports, environmental issues, and civil rights for outlets such as The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, BBC, and Men’s Health. He is the author of One Breath and is currently using the ‘new dad’ excuse to avoid working on his novel. Other topics we explore in today’s conversation include: Adam and Jason’s 4 x 4 x 48 Goggins’ challenge recap; an update on the Iron Cowboy’s ‘Conquer 100’ challenge; Rich’s new cold plunge routine; NFTs and the way the internet is upending finance; Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the future of digital assets; and the nuanced ways in which human beings are becoming human avatars. In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do you stay motivated in your fitness journey? How can you be a lighthouse of conscious living for your children? What are the best ways to prepare for high-altitude endurance races? Thank you to Will from Portland, Oregon, Tanya from Lucerne, Switzerland, and Christopher from Boston, Massachusetts for your questions. If you want your query discussed, drop it on our Facebook Page, or better yet leave a voicemail at (424) 235-4626. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll588 YouTube: bit.ly/rollon588 Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Roll on is back and coming right up. But first...

• 1:29Rich Roll?

  Okay, so we got a lot in store for you today. Adam and I recap his recent Goggins Challenge experience. We dive into the bizarre and quite fascinating world of NFTs. We take listener questions and a bunch more stuff. So, let's do the thing.

• 1:49Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Thank you for allowing us to, once again, hold you pod hostage for another rendition of Roll On, wherein my cogitative, neighborly, and rather magnanimous sidecar hype beast, Mr. Adam Skolnick, and I indulge you with drôle repartee, raillery, shrewd observations on concept issues and matters of importance, both great and probably not so much.

• 2:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, usually.

• 2:24Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 2:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:26Rich Roll?

  We also do a wee bit of show and tell and of course answer some of your listener questions from our voicemail. You can leave us a message at 424-235-4626. So lean back or lean in, smash that subscribe button, hit the notifications bell, wherever that is. Click the like, leave your comments in the comment section below, as all those YouTubers are fond of saying. And let's get into it. Adam, how you doing?

• 2:53Adam Skolnick?

  Doing great, man. Feeling good. Enjoyed the rain a little bit. Got in the water yesterday.

• 2:59Rich Roll?

  It rained pretty hard.

• 3:01Adam Skolnick?

  Rained this morning, pretty hard last night.

• 3:03Rich Roll?

  You don't want to be getting in the water right after a rainstorm.

• 3:05Adam Skolnick?

  We snuck one in yesterday. It was nice and crisp, 55 degree Fahrenheit.

• 3:10Rich Roll?

  That's pretty good.

• 3:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Rich Roll?

  How thick is your webs- your wetsuit? Your website?

• 3:14Adam Skolnick?

  My website's so thick. My, I have a few different ones, but the one I used yesterday is like a triathlon suit. So it's, it's kind of piecemeal. So there's a five millimeter in the chest, four in the thighs, and then it's like 0.5 in the shoulders and, you know, just different places.

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  So you're not wearing your swim run wetsuit for your adventures around the point?

• 3:38Adam Skolnick?

  No, but then when you're, when you do a few dives, after a while, like the area where it's 0.5 starts to, like you feel the cold there first and it just starts to radiate down. But it's fun, you know, I, I wear, I wear some weights. So the swim out and back against the current with weights is kind of a challenge.

• 3:54Rich Roll?

  Around the, right at the end of Zuma there, where you go around the, the,

• 3:59Adam Skolnick?

  The point?

• 3:59Rich Roll?

  The point, yeah.

• 4:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. We started different places. Yesterday, we walked down to the last lifeguard tower and launched from there. And then I went out and back. My friends usually go around the point, but for me, I have the family on the beach, so I try to, you know, it means I don't get to see big doom, but if I can grab an hour at the reef, that's like.

• 4:19Rich Roll?

  Also, you're, you're more likely to steer clear of predatory marine life that way.

• 4:25Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know if that's true.

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  Going around that point is dicey. When I tell people that I swim around that point with you, they look at me like I'm a crazy person. We've talked about this before.

• 4:34Adam Skolnick?

  Right, but, but like where even the, the pinnacles themselves have so much life that anything that could get you. Around the point can get you at the pinnacles because that's where the like the main reef structure is.

• 4:45Rich Roll?

  That's not making me feel better about my next outing with you.

• 4:49Adam Skolnick?

  At this moment, though, it's like the beginning of the whale migration. I mean, it started a few, you know, a few weeks ago, but it's becoming more and more every day. There's more whales coming through. So if you can go, so an out and back, you have a better chance of seeing them because you often see them off the beach where the waves are more often than where the pinnacles are.

• 5:08Rich Roll?

  What about the sharks, though? How are the sharks impacted by the whale migration?

• 5:12Adam Skolnick?

  There is a shark season and you start to notice it when the sea lions wash up on the beach with bites taken out of them.

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  But also a confidence booster when you're putting on the wet suit.

• 5:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, but I think I have to, I have to look at it, but I think that the shark season is coming up. I think the main shark season is like in May, June. It doesn't really dovetail, as far as I know, in terms of the breeding. Because what's happening is just not too far offshore and in Santa Monica Bay, I mean, Sunset, where the surf break is, like a half mile out there, that's a shark nursery, as far as I understand it. And there has been more juvenile whites this season than they've seen in a long, long time. At least that was what the reporting was, excuse me, last season. So I'd have to look, you know, offhand, I forget when the, when the breeding season is, but that's the pupping season because they're live birth, you know, they're like

• 6:07Adam Skolnick?

  one of the fish that actually gives live births.

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  I haven't heard of any attacks in recent memory, though.

• 6:13Adam Skolnick?

  No, we don't have a great history of like fatal attacks. You know, we have had some bites and stuff. Usually it's, again, it's, it's connected to a swimmer swimming under the pier and the fisherman had a juvenile white on the line and it was angry and it, it hit the swimmer. That was the most recent one.

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  What is the conventional wisdom about how long you should wait after a big rain to go in the ocean? Because there's so much toxic runoff.

• 6:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Rich Roll?

  So I know that you're not supposed to do it for a couple of days.

• 6:44Adam Skolnick?

  Three days.

• 6:45Rich Roll?

  Three days.

• 6:45Adam Skolnick?

  Seventy-two hours is what they usually do.

• 6:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. If it's rained a bunch in a row, probably you can get away with two days because it's not like the first coat of that slick grime from the streets. Because what happens is that all that gets into the storm drains.

• 7:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:01Adam Skolnick?

  The storm drains end up in the ocean and that's the main reason.

• 7:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:04Adam Skolnick?

  So it's like the toxins and the fertilizers and things like that.

• 7:08Rich Roll?

  Have you ever gotten sick because you got in too early after?

• 7:12Adam Skolnick?

  I have not. I have not. I've been lucky, but I usually do abide by the 72 hours.

• 7:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 7:16Adam Skolnick?

  I don't mess around. Surfers are less likely to abide because they have to surf when the waves are there. And, but they're not underwater the same way. So like they're mostly above water. They're not getting a lot of water in their ears.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  But what would be the symptoms? Like what would you catch?

• 7:31Adam Skolnick?

  I think ear infections would be the first thing. Ear infection could be sinus infection.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Diarrhea, dysentery.

• 7:38Adam Skolnick?

  It could be. If you like to drink seawater.

• 7:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I just remember when, when I was, I've probably told this story before, but it's been a really long time if I have. When I was living in New York City, right after college, like 89, 90, 91, my roommate, Matt Nance, who was a teammate of mine on the Stanford swim team, decided that he wanted to do the Swim Around Manhattan that they hold every year.

• 8:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 8:08Rich Roll?

  At that point in time, I was not interested in endurance sports, so I opted out of that. In fact, he wanted me to crew for him and I had a family vacation in Michigan, so I missed the whole thing. But I remember when he was training for that and getting ready for it, they send you like a binder full of information that includes, you know, all the shots you have to get before, you know, because you're literally swimming in the Harlem River.

• 8:33Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  You know, you're going all the way around Manhattan. And he had to get all these shots. And then he told me that, you know, especially up in the northern points, he would just run into garbage like constantly as he was swimming in. And then he got a terrible urine infection afterwards that he claimed had nothing to do with the swim, but I can't imagine it didn't.

• 8:55Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  And I also remember that.

• 8:59Rich Roll?

  Near, sort of near the George Washington Bridge is this, I don't know if it's still there, or if this is still a thing, but there was this giant like suck hole, like there's something under the water that was like, you know, basically creating a vacuum effect in this whirlpool, and you had to steer very clear of that, or suffer the consequences of getting sucked down.

• 9:20Adam Skolnick?

  Get sucked down into the black hole of the, is it the, was that the East River?

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  No, no, in the Hudson, in the Hudson. I think like a little bit south of the George Washington Bridge, if memory serves me. I could be wrong about that.

• 9:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that's the East River to Harlem River to Hudson, right? Isn't that the route or something like that?

• 9:35Rich Roll?

  You start down, you start down near Wall Street.

• 9:39Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 9:39Rich Roll?

  And I think you go up the East River first, and you come down the Hudson.

• 9:43Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 9:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And he got second place, I think he, I think at the time, it was probably 90 or 91, he broke the men's record, but he got beat by a 15-year-old Australian girl, who was like this, the queen, whose name escapes me, but she was like the queen of open water swimming.

• 10:00Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I mean, that was the Triple Crown, right? So for many years.

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  And his crew was comprised of like my hungover buddies.

• 10:06Adam Skolnick?

  Whoever he could find. Dude, I need you to just hand me water every 30 minutes.

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  Right. Who had no idea what they were in for. And now I feel I have tremendous regret that I wasn't there for him to support him in that way.

• 10:19Adam Skolnick?

  You didn't bear witness.

• 10:20Rich Roll?

  But anyway, I don't know how we got off on that tangent.

• 10:22Adam Skolnick?

  Open water swimming.

• 10:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, speaking of the rains.

• 10:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 10:25Rich Roll?

  I, in anticipation of it raining last night, I had to go and get a new tent, because, which is something I have to do like every six months, because the sun.

• 10:35Adam Skolnick?

  Really?

• 10:36Rich Roll?

  Beats down on my.

• 10:37Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  Cheap tent.

• 10:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  And it becomes like tissue paper and it frays, so there were all these holes in my, it was like raining in there, I was getting wet, and.

• 10:46Adam Skolnick?

  You slept through the rain?

• 10:47Rich Roll?

  Well, there were portions of it where like water started to pool, and I was just too busy or lazy to go replace the tent. So, you know, I had like, the bottom of my sheets would be wet when I wake up in the morning, and I was like, I gotta fix this. So I went and got a new tent, and I was kind of taking everything out and setting it up and putting everything in, and I realized some stuff has mold in it, like this is not good, so. The thought occurred to me, since I am sleeping in a tent basically every night, like, why am I spending $400 or $500 on a new tent every six months? I should get like a proper outdoor like canvas glamping tent that could stand the test of time. So I've been researching, like, I could just get a huge tent and like create like a whole room.

• 11:31Adam Skolnick?

  So you're going from REI to Vegas Cabana?

• 11:36Rich Roll?

  Something like that, yeah. So I'm looking into like some cool tent designs. If there's any canvas, high-end glamping canvas tent manufacturers out there that want to talk to me, I'd love to, I'd love to hear from them. Because, yeah, these tents just get shredded, like, they're just, the sun beats down on them and then literally they just rip and tear.

• 11:54Adam Skolnick?

  Wouldn't canvas also kind of take a beating up there? Or no, not really?

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  Well, I would imagine, but, you know, they're gonna last a couple of years.

• 12:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, like a yurt. You could put like a yurt up there.

• 12:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we have a teepee, but it's way down afar away from the house. I don't know, so anyway, just that's what I'm thinking about.

• 12:12Adam Skolnick?

  Teepee could be cool.

• 12:12Rich Roll?

  A glamping tent, Adam. Imagine the possibilities.

• 12:15Adam Skolnick?

  Want to glamp on the roof?

• 12:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so we're sort of constructing this new little section of our home, like on the side, where, which is where my container office is and where I have this tent. And we just got a cold plunge. We're gonna talk about that in a little bit. I guess we could just talk about it, could just talk about it right now.

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  These guys, Michael Garrett and Ryan Dewey, who are out of Sacramento, have this new company called The Cold Plunge, thecoldplunge.com. And they reached out to me and just wanted to gift me a cold plunge, which is one of the side benefits of hosting a podcast, I suppose. They create these next level cold baths that are really beautiful, like these beautiful tubs that have a filtration system and a temperature gauge on them. So you can just set the temperature and it has a cover on it and it's always good to go. So you don't have to worry about buying tons of ice or trying to jerry-rig, you know, a top door freezer so that you don't electrocute yourself,

• 13:22Rich Roll?

  which is what a lot of people do, which that's what I was thinking of doing. Cause I've done cold plunging before, but never consistently, because I don't have it at my house and I'm not gonna be... You know, just going to the store and buying bags and bags of ice all the time.

• 13:34Adam Skolnick?

  So most people like take one of those freezers, the top drawer freezer?

• 13:38Rich Roll?

  The top drawer freezers, yeah. And you, you have to customize them. And I think you have to put like a lining. It's like a, it's a little bit more of an elaborate process than you might suspect, rather than just filling it with water and getting into it because it's not built for that.

• 13:50Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 13:50Rich Roll?

  Um, but these guys just created like a standalone situation that is very aesthetically cool. And it's cool. And works really well and doesn't require like almost any maintenance whatsoever.

• 14:03Adam Skolnick?

  Must be so easy to clean.

• 14:05Rich Roll?

  You, you, I think you just have to put, they were telling me, you just have to put, I can't remember how much, like a quart or two of hydrogen peroxide in it every two weeks or something like that, but it's filtering the water all the time.

• 14:18Adam Skolnick?

  So it's always filled with water?

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  It's always, yeah. No, it's always filled with water.

• 14:21Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 14:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's filtering the water all the time. And then it has a temp gauge on it, so you can set the temp wherever you want it. It will go down to 39 degrees. And I hate cold water so much. Like this is, part of why I'm doing this is because I have such an aversion to this.

• 14:36Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 14:36Rich Roll?

  Um, that I started it out at the wimpy temperature of like 58. And I've been going down two degrees every day. So I'm down to like, today will be 48.

• 14:45Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  It's a pretty good place.

• 14:46Adam Skolnick?

  That's great.

• 14:47Rich Roll?

  And I'm digging it. It's been really great.

• 14:49Adam Skolnick?

  How long are you in there for?

• 14:51Rich Roll?

  So I do three rounds of four minutes. And we also have an outdoor tub right next to it. So I fill that with hot water. I eventually want to get a barrel sauna, like a proper sauna. We don't have that now. But until that point, just alternating between getting in the cold plunge and then getting into the hot tub and then doing three rounds of that.

• 15:10Adam Skolnick?

  I love it.

• 15:11Rich Roll?

  Four minutes each, which has been great. And it's so refreshing. It is addictive. You hear that?

• 15:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  And it, it's not that it gets easier. There's always that like, I definitely don't want to get in this freezing cold tub. But

• 15:23Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  I've gotten better at it. And it's really a great kind of meditative practice because it forces you to be present. Like you can't be thinking about anything else except your breath.

• 15:33Adam Skolnick?

  The brain gets wiped, right?

• 15:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:35Adam Skolnick?

  The brain is wiped.

• 15:36Rich Roll?

  So I wanted to thank those guys publicly, Michael and Ryan. If you want to learn more, you can go to the coldplunge.com. It is an expensive item and it was so gracious of them to gift it to me. And this is not a sponsored thing.

• 15:51Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 15:52Rich Roll?

  They didn't ask me to do anything.

• 15:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 15:54Rich Roll?

  But I just wanted to acknowledge them and let them know that I really appreciate it and that I'm putting it to use. So that's been really fun.

• 16:02Adam Skolnick?

  What's that been doing physically for you?

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  I definitely sleep better. You know, sleep's like my whole thing.

• 16:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 16:12Rich Roll?

  Always trying to optimize that. So I've noticed that it's not that I, I don't have problems falling asleep, but like around the middle of the night, I'll often wake up and I found that I'm sleeping more soundly throughout the night and in a deeper state, according to my Whoop, which is good. It also has, you know, because it's so anti-inflammatory, it's really been helping my back.

• 16:38Adam Skolnick?

  Really?

• 16:39Rich Roll?

  So when I'm like in the hours after doing it, like my back feels better than it's felt in a long time. So that's another initial, I mean, I've only been doing this for five days or something like that, but.

• 16:50Adam Skolnick?

  But you're already feeling stuff.

• 16:50Rich Roll?

  I'm making it a daily practice and I can definitely feel the difference. And it's also a mood enhancer. Like, you know, when you kind of in the middle of the afternoon, you're a little, you've worked and you're kind of burned out, you're a little bit tired. If you do it midday, it's sort of like taking a power nap. Like you just feel completely fresh again. So that's been cool, too.

• 17:10Adam Skolnick?

  It is cool. I love it. So you do it in the morning and then also sometimes midday?

• 17:14Rich Roll?

  Well, it's just been based on my schedule. Like yesterday I did it after a long bike ride. Doing it in the morning is great, but I did it in the afternoon the other day. I'm like, I haven't had a consistent, like I do it at this time every day. It kind of catches catch can, but I'm digging it. It's been fun. You'll have to come over and check it out.

• 17:32Adam Skolnick?

  I gotta do it. Yeah, I love that thing.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  Kevin Roos went up on the podcast. That was super fun. I felt like I was cheating on you a little bit.

• 17:40Adam Skolnick?

  Not at all.

• 17:40Rich Roll?

  Fellow New York Times writer.

• 17:43Adam Skolnick?

  He's, he's, he's a tenured professor over there.

• 17:47Rich Roll?

  He is. He's a, he's an, he's an elder statesman.

• 17:50Adam Skolnick?

  I'm a, I'm an associate professor.

• 17:51Rich Roll?

  He's higher up in the New York Times pecking order.

• 17:54Adam Skolnick?

  I'm not on the pecking order.

• 17:56Rich Roll?

  But it was really fun. Actually, there were moments during that podcast where I felt like. It would have been good to have you also on the mic.

• 18:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Rich Roll?

  So he's got an open invite to come on the show next time he finds himself in LA. So maybe if and when that happens, we'll do it as a threesome.

• 18:13Adam Skolnick?

  Perfect.

• 18:14Rich Roll?

  But that was really cool. Since we talk about his work so often on the show. We've been such champions of rabbit hole. It was really fun and cool to talk to him. I should also mention that Alex Honnold dropped by.

• 18:27Adam Skolnick?

  I've heard of him.

• 18:27Rich Roll?

  Late last week. For those that don't know who he is, he climbed a very steep

• 18:34Adam Skolnick?

  Quite steep.

• 18:34Rich Roll?

  Wall in Yosemite without any ropes. They made a movie about it that won an Oscar.

• 18:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Rich Roll?

  And that was really cool. He's been on the show before, long time listeners know, but it was cool to have him back on. He's got this podcast that he's starting called Climbing Gold. It's about the history of climbing and also about the upcoming introduction of climbing into the Olympics. So we talked about that. But what was a couple of cool things about that experience. He brought the van. So the van was here at the studio.

• 19:07Adam Skolnick?

  He's still driving that van around.

• 19:09Rich Roll?

  And it's got the little, the little finger grips inside the door that he does his workouts on. And, you know, he was doing like two finger pull ups with one arm and stuff like that.

• 19:18Adam Skolnick?

  Crazy.

• 19:19Rich Roll?

  Which was crazy to see.

• 19:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Rich Roll?

  And that interview was cool. It was a little bit different from, I think, most interviews he has done of late because it's not about Free Solo. It was more about kind of what he's up to now. How do you move forward from something like that?

• 19:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 19:37Rich Roll?

  He recently spent a month in Guyana for a Nat Geo project. So we talked a lot about the environment, all the work that he's doing with his foundation, the Honnold Foundation, solar energy, renewables. And that episode is going to go up, I believe, March 29th. So everybody has that to look forward to.

• 19:56Adam Skolnick?

  It's very cool. I can't believe, I'm really surprised he's still driving around. I don't, it shouldn't be based on watching Free Solo.

• 20:02Rich Roll?

  I think it is his second one though. At some point he upgraded it.

• 20:05Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 20:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, it looked, it didn't look new. I mean, it looked like, you know, he was staying, apparently he was going to sleep in it.

• 20:12Adam Skolnick?

  I'm sure he is.

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so.

• 20:16Adam Skolnick?

  Like he parked it here.

• 20:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:18Adam Skolnick?

  Hopped a flight to Guyana, came back here.

• 20:20Rich Roll?

  No, he was, he lives in Vegas, so he drove here.

• 20:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Rich Roll?

  And then he had some other press stuff, but his plan was to just, he was gonna see some friends and I'm sure he told me he was just gonna sleep in the back of the truck.

• 20:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, right.

• 20:33Rich Roll?

  So, of course, right?

• 20:34Adam Skolnick?

  It's comfortable for him.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Rich Roll?

  Should we recap the Goggins Challenge?

• 20:39Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 20:40Rich Roll?

  It's been a week. You've had time to reflect on the profundity of this endurance feat that you accomplished. How are you feeling?

• 20:49Adam Skolnick?

  You know, I feel good. Like, my body feels totally fine.

• 20:55Adam Skolnick?

  I'm, I'm, it was, it was fun to do. It was, uh, I mean, I, I, I'm very appreciative of, you know, you came out to, to visit. I had other friends pace me. You paced me on your bicycle. Other people paced running. I was getting messages galore from listeners and their interest, encouragement was just like, I didn't expect it.

• 21:22Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:22Adam Skolnick?

  And so it was really cool. It was cool to be a part of. I mean, I think early on, after the first run, the first run, I was kinda too keyed up. And so eight o'clock hits and my legs have kinda, are heavy and lactic acid on that very first run. And I'm thinking to myself, that's okay, cuz after this first run, I can take care of my body, hydrate up, and, and then that'll be over. And then, cuz, cuz you're gonna get tired eventually, so

• 21:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:50Adam Skolnick?

  It's fine if it happens early on because the point is to run when you're tired. So that first run, I was a little bit not feeling that great, uh, but, but pushed through. And then, from then on, it just was kind of like a clockwork thing. And, uh, yeah, I, I was able to get through each phase and Jason Camiolo.

• 22:11Rich Roll?

  Who's right behind me right now. He did it as well. So you guys were, I know you guys were on the blower with each other throughout the whole thing.

• 22:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, messaging after every single one. And, and, and I'd say like the, the second run, I stayed up till midnight the first day.

• 22:25Rich Roll?

  Well, let's take a second and just, if somebody's brand new and they don't know what we're talking about, the Goggins Challenge is this challenge that David Goggins proposed as kind of a crowdfunding, not crowdfunding, but a participatory challenge where you run four miles every four hours for 48 hours straight. It starts on a Friday night at eight o'clock.

• 22:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 22:46Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 22:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 22:46Rich Roll?

  And you go through late Sunday afternoon.

• 22:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 22:49Rich Roll?

  Basically.

• 22:50Adam Skolnick?

  And, and so like the first run, kind of, I was a little keyed up and my, my calf, my left calf was tightening up a little bit. But, uh, you know, that was fine. I had a bit of an adrenaline, adrenaline crash after, and I didn't want to sleep before the first midnight. I wanted to stretch and be ready. And so I didn't slept. The second run was a lot better, slept a little bit after. And then it was like, you know, the, the, the 4 a.m. run, which was, which was not very fast.

• 23:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Adam Skolnick?

  Sleep, I was running past people who sleep in their vans.

• 23:21Rich Roll?

  How much did you sleep before that run?

• 23:24Adam Skolnick?

  Probably, uh, two and a half, three hours. That was probably the longest sleep of the entire situation. And then the fourth run, found a rhythm again. And, and I was listening to earbuds for the first time. That was 8 a.m. on Saturday. And I found that it kind of took away from the experience. Like I was, I thought I would get through all of Bravie or something, or like, like the whole, I was just going to listen to books. But I found that it just wasn't working for me. Like I'd rather have the quiet. And, um, and so I stopped doing that. Uh, April ran two of the segments with me and she, usually I pushed the pram, but she was pushing the stroller the whole time. So she did, I think I, I pushed it for maybe a half a mile at one point, but she, she was,

• 24:08Adam Skolnick?

  uh, she did 16 of the miles. So she was with me and she rocked it. And, um, the fastest of the weekend was that sixth run, the 20 to 24 miles. And then, um, all of a sudden, people started calling me wanting to pace me. My, my buddy, Adam Dole.

• 24:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 24:25Adam Skolnick?

  Calls me.

• 24:25Rich Roll?

  I know Adam, early podcast guest.

• 24:27Adam Skolnick?

  Early podcast guest, yeah. And, and, uh, and shout out Adam Dole. And he called me like, hey, do you want, or texted me, do you want a pacer? It's okay if you say no. And I'm like, sure. At that point, I'll take any help.

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:40Adam Skolnick?

  Um, and so he came in, another friend, Reese Pacheco, who, um, runs WSL Pure, the environmental organization. He came in for noon and for the last day. Adam was at 8:00 PM, then he came back for 4:00 AM. I mean, just incredible.

• 24:56Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 24:56Adam Skolnick?

  And, uh, yeah. And so through it all, I like, I didn't sleep much the second day. I slept after the 8:00 PM to midnight. And that was the craziest time because I, I set my alarm for 11:30 instead of 23:30. And so then I slept through the midnight.

• 25:11Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 25:12Adam Skolnick?

  And I woke up just like in a start, like drenched in sweat at 12:20 PM, uh, AM. And I'm like, fuck. And so then I had to.

• 25:18Rich Roll?

  Disqualified.

• 25:20Adam Skolnick?

  And I had to like race to get my shit. Cause at that point I knew Adam was coming at four. So there was no pushing the 4:00 AM run. So at that point, that's all off.

• 25:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:28Adam Skolnick?

  So I just ran out the door. And so then I stopped kind of like, my legs started tightening up. My knees started to hurt a little bit, but, um, for the most part, my body held up really well. And, uh, you know, it was just a great experience. Like I have to say, it's, it's the, it's my, the greatest athletic feat, I think of my lifetime that I've ever done.

• 25:50Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 25:50Adam Skolnick?

  So, um, and I didn't, you know, go into it thinking that was going to be the case. But looking back, I have to say, I don't think there's anything close. Maybe Kil, I climbed Kilimanjaro, but that's, I think less people have done this than have climbed Kili.

• 26:03Rich Roll?

  How would you compare those two? I mean, it's apples and oranges, but in terms of.

• 26:06Adam Skolnick?

  This is way more demanding. I mean, if you're in shape, Kili is, is not a killer. You know, it's, it's, it's a couple, you know, there's, there's difficult moments. And, um, you're going into altitude. So altitude is a game, like anybody could suffer from altitude at any time. So there's some, there's some variables that are beyond your control with, with altitude. But if you're in shape, um, you know, you're, you're, it's not like that hard of a thing to do. But this, you know, 48 miles in two days. I don't know, is that an ultra?

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  Anything, well, I don't know.

• 26:41Adam Skolnick?

  It's a fake ultra.

• 26:42Rich Roll?

  Technically, an ultra is defined as anything longer than a marathon, but I don't know when you break it up.

• 26:47Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 26:47Rich Roll?

  How that, who cares?

• 26:49Adam Skolnick?

  It's like, you know what?

• 26:50Rich Roll?

  You did a hard thing.

• 26:51Adam Skolnick?

  It's like.

• 26:51Rich Roll?

  You wanted to put a label on it.

• 26:53Adam Skolnick?

  It's, you know what it's like? It's like the, the, the breaking, the breaking it up made it easier for sure.

• 26:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:58Adam Skolnick?

  No question about it. And that was the accessibility that you were pointing out. That's what's so cool about it.

• 27:04Rich Roll?

  Right. And that it sneaks up on you because you're like, I could do, I could run four miles every four hours.

• 27:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Rich Roll?

  Slow.

• 27:10Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  But then, you know, it incrementally, the, the degree of difficulty gets notched up, you know?

• 27:16Adam Skolnick?

  The second night is.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  As the sleep slips away.

• 27:19Adam Skolnick?

  The second night's tough.

• 27:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Adam Skolnick?

  Second night's tough, but you know, like, I think there were a couple of moments, I think after the first 16 miles, I looked up and I was like, okay, 32 to go.

• 27:30Adam Skolnick?

  You try not to check the scoreboard.

• 27:32Rich Roll?

  No.

• 27:32Adam Skolnick?

  But then, once you get past the first day.

• 27:34Rich Roll?

  You just focus on what's right in front of you to do, which is get through those four miles.

• 27:38Adam Skolnick?

  That's it.

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, I, you know, I rode my bike down.

• 27:40Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Rich Roll?

  On Saturday afternoon to do a temp check on you.

• 27:44Adam Skolnick?

  You did.

• 27:44Rich Roll?

  And you were in good spirits and April was out there with you pushing the baby and you were all smiles and laughs.

• 27:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, I tried to keep it that way. You know, the, I think, look, a couple of things, I didn't go into it saying, I'm going to try to do this. I went into it, you know, feeling like I'm going to do this. So it was never really, and especially once I realized how many people were paying attention. Like, there was no.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:06Adam Skolnick?

  There's no graceful bow out.

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, then it becomes a whole other thing.

• 28:10Adam Skolnick?

  Which I did to myself, of course. But I did it casually without realizing.

• 28:13Rich Roll?

  Well, that was part of, you know, me posting it on Instagram and the stories too. It's like, you can't back out, man. This is like, public.

• 28:20Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I never was going to. And, and, um, and, you know, in terms of like, the why, because, uh, Misty from Nantucket called in, she's not gonna, we're not gonna play her question, but her question was basically, did I, did I find a why?

• 28:34Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:34Adam Skolnick?

  Because I couldn't answer that. And she said, you scolded me. And, uh.

• 28:37Rich Roll?

  Did I scold you?

• 28:38Adam Skolnick?

  Well, she said.

• 28:39Rich Roll?

  I was challenging you.

• 28:40Adam Skolnick?

  You challenged me.

• 28:43Adam Skolnick?

  So my why, I still didn't really figure it out in the moment, partly because the Pacers take some of that introspection away, which I don't think is a bad thing. It's just the way it goes. When you have a friend next to you.

• 28:54Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:54Adam Skolnick?

  In life, you're just not thinking about yourself as much. But listening to Stephen Pressfield on your podcast and just thinking about.

• 29:04Adam Skolnick?

  And what you guys were talking about around finding your hero's journey and going through that hard thing and thinking about my life, which, you know, for a long time was defined by, you know, travel and going to different cultures and being kind of alone in those scenarios and having the pandemic come through and that's completely wiped out. And then, of course, life changes. You know, I do think there was part of me was just hungry for some test like that, a test of self. And, and so I do think that was like this subconscious pull. I didn't realize it. I didn't even think about it when she, when I got her message. I thought about it, listening to, to you guys talk about it. And I do think there's

• 29:47Adam Skolnick?

  something there that there was a call to action and to find out what was inside me to see if I could do it. And the fact that I could do it, stay good humored and stay positive, I think is a, is a good, it's a good feeling.

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  I'm satisfied with that answer. I'm not going to scold you on that. I think what happens is, yeah, you have that pull, that call to doing something hard and then you do it. And what that does is put another brick in the wall of this identity that you craft around being somebody who does hard things. Like I do hard, like I do hard things, I can do hard things. I, I'm not afraid of the degree of difficulty or the unknown of something I've never experienced before.

• 30:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  I welcome that into my life. And each one of those experiences that you have is like another like notch in the belt that I think leads to greater self-esteem and kind of how you, you know, navigate the world in every other facet of your life.

• 30:51Adam Skolnick?

  I do feel like I got a self-esteem bump. Like I felt it like the next couple, the day after I was a bit of a wreck, you know, and I had a deadline.

• 30:58Rich Roll?

  Did you ever have any like grumpy, grouchy moments where you were like short with April or like?

• 31:03Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 31:04Rich Roll?

  No?

• 31:04Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 31:05Rich Roll?

  That's what happens to me.

• 31:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. But you, I mean, I think part of that is I didn't push myself to the edge in terms of pace. I was very relaxed in my pace. So.

• 31:14Rich Roll?

  I was worried about you at one moment because you were talking about how your knee was acting up. And I just didn't want you to bury yourself and injure yourself.

• 31:22Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 31:23Rich Roll?

  Because you felt the public pressure of completing this thing.

• 31:26Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I would have kept going, you know, even if the knee was a problem, I would have walked, you know, I wasn't going to stop. So.

• 31:34Adam Skolnick?

  You know, when you, when you work with David Goggins, you don't stop when your knee cries a little bit.

• 31:39Rich Roll?

  And since you are working with David Goggins, you can't not, you couldn't have not done this anyway, right?

• 31:45Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I could have. I mean,

• 31:46Rich Roll?

  I mean, David didn't put any pressure on you personally.

• 31:48Adam Skolnick?

  No, I brought it up to him. And then, once I brought it up to him, it was, it was basically a done deal.

• 31:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 31:56Adam Skolnick?

  But, um, he was really, I mean, let's, let's put it this way. In this time where everyone's so polarized and at each other's throats, he creates this thing, some 30,000 people.

• 32:07Rich Roll?

  Is that how many people?

• 32:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's like in the 20 to 30 range, I think closer to 30, um, signed up to do this thing. This really hard thing altogether. There's a real feeling of unity among the people that were doing it, um, camaraderie. And, you know, it just shows what, what if you focus in versus focusing out, the positive repercussions are, I think, impossible to calculate. And it's just a ripple effect. And, uh, you know, so kudos to David for recognizing that, seeing that, leading that. And yeah, definitely he was leading. I was checking in with him on his Instagram stories every time. And then afterwards, I had a little debrief with him, but not during, you know, during I kind of was left to my own devices and him too.

• 32:52Rich Roll?

  And he was doing a bunch of pull-ups and push-ups in addition to all of this too, right?

• 32:56Adam Skolnick?

  So he, he was doing a combo of, of like a circuit because he's, he's recovering from injury, which I'm sure he'll get into at some stage. But, um, but so he did a circuit.

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  He wasn't running because he's got a run injury?

• 33:09Adam Skolnick?

  He was on treadmill sometimes and then he was doing stair mat, he was doing a circuit. Yeah, yeah.

• 33:14Rich Roll?

  Got it.

• 33:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Rich Roll?

  20 to 30,000 people. I think it also speaks to, you know, we're in this moment where there's no races, right?

• 33:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Rich Roll?

  Normally people would be signing up for this or that. And, um, you know, without that. Being available to people, they have turned to these virtual events and that kind of digital community that can be created this way. It's pretty cool.

• 33:37Adam Skolnick?

  It is cool. And people raised, you know, millions of dollars for different charities.

• 33:41Rich Roll?

  Right. So everyone was kind of raising money for their own various whatever?

• 33:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And he put out a story like last year, he's always said, if running, if you can't run, get on a bike. If you can't bike, you know, do, do whatever you can. He pointed out to a guy who was 500 pounds when he heard about this last year. And his whole goal every four hours was just to get up out of his chair as much as he, as many times as he could every, every four hours. And so he did that. A year later, he's 300 pounds and he was running it.

• 34:12Rich Roll?

  Wow. That's cool.

• 34:13Adam Skolnick?

  So it just shows you, you don't have to do it that way. You could have done, you know, if you have a Peloton at home, go do that at a low pace or walk around the block, you know, 10 times, whatever it is.

• 34:23Rich Roll?

  So where does that leave you? You've got some momentum now. You just did this hard thing. Does it, does it make you enthusiastic to keep it up, continue it, put it into figure out another new challenge?

• 34:35Adam Skolnick?

  Well, yes. So shout out also, also to Nicholas Ramirez, who I've been talking to about my goals.

• 34:44Rich Roll?

  Your Envol coach.

• 34:45Adam Skolnick?

  The Envol coach, the team Envol, who's a champion swim runner and has this, or this team, swim run team called Team Envol. And you could join it for a pretty cheap price. And he gives, he gives kind of group workouts, or you could work with him personally, and he can give you some personalized stuff. And I was telling him, my goal, one of my main goals is just to get faster at zone two. And he told me this little tale that many years ago, his whole thing was to try to get a sub three marathon. And it was like, took him to his ultimate limit to barely get under sub three. And then last Saturday, on an empty stomach, a little bit hung over, and just delivering something across town

• 35:26Adam Skolnick?

  in Stockholm, he decided to run there and back instead of driving, ran a marathon in zone two and a little bit in zone three at under three hours.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 35:35Adam Skolnick?

  And just the, the fact that the human body can do that. And it just inspired me a bit more. So I'm definitely interested in continuing that zone two journey to see, to see how comfortable I can get running. Because for so many years I was uncomfortable running.

• 35:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:49Adam Skolnick?

  Do it anyway. And but in terms of activities, we're looking at cactus to clouds. Hopefully, you know, my wife can break away from the baby long enough to where we could do that together.

• 36:00Rich Roll?

  What is that?

• 36:00Adam Skolnick?

  And that is a 10,000 foot elevation climb from the desert to the top of San Jacinto Peak. In Palm Springs.

• 36:09Rich Roll?

  Out in Palm Springs, yeah.

• 36:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 36:12Adam Skolnick?

  I'm thinking about that for the fall and then Otlo Catalina.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  Right, that's in November, right?

• 36:16Adam Skolnick?

  That's in November, yeah.

• 36:18Rich Roll?

  Are the pools open in Santa Monica? Is Santa Monica College open? You don't, you never go to the, you never swim in the pool, do you?

• 36:25Adam Skolnick?

  I don't go to pools.

• 36:27Rich Roll?

  You might want to think about that.

• 36:28Adam Skolnick?

  I know, that's my next, my next talking to.

• 36:31Rich Roll?

  Team Envol might have an idea or two.

• 36:33Adam Skolnick?

  No, he doesn't mind me going in the ocean.

• 36:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:35Adam Skolnick?

  He's like, just do my drills in the ocean. And I'm like, so far my drills have just swum there.

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  The great thing about Point Doom is that it's the only like part of the coastline in our vicinity that approximates a swim run experience. Because you have, you know, that steep ascent, you know, up the cliff and all of that. Whereas most of the shoreline around here is very flat. So it's hard to really get a proper swim run workout that's going to approximate the kind of terrain you're going to have in one of those races.

• 37:07Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, most of my, if I'm just swimming, I usually just go right, right down in the Palisades somewhere. But Doom is kind of, I did, when I, when I was training for Catalina, I did use Doom. And that's probably what I would do again, yeah. Are you gonna do Catalina this year?

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  I think so. I've done no swimming, though. Like, I, you know, unlike you.

• 37:28Adam Skolnick?

  That's your, that, you don't need to.

• 37:30Rich Roll?

  Yes, I do.

• 37:31Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you will, but you don't need to now for November.

• 37:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would like to be able to do that. I mean, there are some pools open, but you gotta fill out these online forms and schedule your time way ahead of time. And my week, the way it unfolds, every day's different. And I would go through periods of, you know, filling out time slots throughout the week and then only hitting like one out of the five or whatever. And it's just, you know, that's my own stuff or whatever. There are pools open, you just have to be, I have to be a little bit more organized about my training than I have been.

• 38:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  And they only let you in for like 45 minutes.

• 38:06Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And that's not enough for you?

• 38:08Rich Roll?

  Not enough. But you know, it's better than nothing. I mean, I've just been, I've been, I've been really enjoying gravel riding. That's been my thing lately. So I'm just building a base on the bike right now and exploring all these trails that I've never experienced on two feet. Like this whole world has opened up to me, which has been really fun.

• 38:28Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe a sandy Tijuana to Vancouver ride is in your future.

• 38:34Rich Roll?

  I don't know what's, I don't know what is in my future.

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  I do, shifting gears a little bit, I do want to shout out the Iron Cowboy.

• 38:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 38:44Rich Roll?

  We're, today's Monday, what's the date today? The 12th? No.

• 38:48Adam Skolnick?

  The 13th.

• 38:49Rich Roll?

  The 13th, the 15th. Today's the 15th.

• 38:53Rich Roll?

  James is on, as of today, day 15 of his attempt to do 100 Ironmans in 100 days. He's been sharing all of this on Instagram, like the stories, I watch them every day. It's pretty cool. Like to see him just get up every single day and do an Ironman. He's been going strong and he's not without his challenges. I mean, he, like, I think on like the third or fourth day, his ankle had swollen up such that anybody in their right mind would have pulled the plug on this thing. And he was just walking the marathons until in his mind, the way he articulated it, like his body, you know, sort of clicked in and adapted to what he was trying to do.

• 39:33Rich Roll?

  And now he's back to running and, you know, this is all happening in, on the outskirts of Provo, Utah. So the other day, the whole thing, it was snowing and sleeting like all day and he's out there with a smile on his face, high vibes, tons of community. It's cool to see so many people turn out every single day to do a leg or a portion with him. And he's getting it done. Like the guy's just an absolute machine. But I think most impressive is, is like this positive attitude that he's been, I mean, he's like, he's, he's on his 15th consecutive Ironman. But he's still got 85 to go, you know, like, how do you, it's just unbelievable to wrap your head around that.

• 40:16Adam Skolnick?

  I now have a, like a minuscule taste of that kind of thinking though. Like that, that must be the, in any ultra event, that's how it is, right?

• 40:24Rich Roll?

  You've, you've, just here we go. This is what we're doing.

• 40:26Adam Skolnick?

  You ran a marathon. You're, now you have to run still 110 more to finish Badwater.

• 40:31Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 40:33Adam Skolnick?

  It's crazy.

• 40:33Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 40:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 40:35Rich Roll?

  He did have, I think with all the weather, the inclement weather, that definitely presented some challenges and he posted on Instagram a caption, "Today James Lawrence goes away and the Iron Cowboy comes to life." And I love that, that idea of the alter ego. This is something that I spoke about with Todd Herman, who's an author who was on the podcast a couple of years ago. He wrote a book called The Alter Ego Effect, which is all about this idea of kind of transposing your identity into this, you know, superhuman like avatar. And this is something that David does, Goggins does, right?

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  It's like, there's David and then there's Goggins, right? And he goes into, he goes into Goggins when he does these things. Like it's, it's almost, it's not fair to call it a character, but it's something outside of the self that allows you to create like an arms-length relationship with the feat that you're trying to accomplish that I think is empowering and instructive in terms of how you, and it's not like somebody told David, "Create an alter ego for yourself," or told James, "Create an alter ego for yourself." It's like these were just natural like survival tactics that they crafted in order to survive these difficult challenges.

• 41:57Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  And I think it's cool. It's empowering as a means of helping you, you know, exceed your sense of personal limitations.

• 42:07Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Rich Roll?

  So much love to James, AKA The Iron Cowboy.

• 42:12Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing. That's an amazing, amazing effort. How, how long are his times? Is he sharing his times?

• 42:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's all on Strava and there's a live tracker and they're very transparent about all of it. I mean, he's going slow, like, you know, his marathons are like six hours.

• 42:27Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 42:27Rich Roll?

  You know, or, you know, five and a half hours or something, or his bike rides. It's like, it's just about like, "Look, I got the whole day to do this. I just have to do it such that I get enough sleep."

• 42:37Adam Skolnick?

  Like, that's enough.

• 42:38Rich Roll?

  And recovery in between. And he's got so much community around him. Like tons of people are showing up every day. And then in his house, he's got PTs and his family and his kids are involved. Like his daughter is always on the Instagram talking about the live tracker and where you can meet up with him. So if anybody wants to go and support this guy, you can just show up in Linden, Utah. And, you know, go ride your bike with him or go run with him.

• 43:04Adam Skolnick?

  Incredible.

• 43:05Rich Roll?

  So very cool.

• 43:06Adam Skolnick?

  This party, you want to get out there?

• 43:09Rich Roll?

  I might at some point. We'll see. I mean, I did it last time when he, when he was finishing his 50. I showed up in Utah and ran the final marathon with him.

• 43:17Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 43:18Rich Roll?

  Either way, whatever happens, he's definitely coming back on the podcast to tell us about it if he survives.

• 43:22Adam Skolnick?

  No doubt.

• 43:23Rich Roll?

  And I have no doubt that, that he will survive.

• 43:25Adam Skolnick?

  He's gonna make it.

• 43:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he is. It's incredible.

• 43:27Adam Skolnick?

  It is incredible. I've never even heard of anything close to that.

• 43:30Rich Roll?

  Unbelievable, right?

• 43:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  And he's just banging them out like, oh, another Ironman, another Ironman every single day.

• 43:35Adam Skolnick?

  It just becomes normal.

• 43:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, on the same loop, like the mental drudgery of all of it as well.

• 43:41Adam Skolnick?

  You know, the same loop is good, though. Like I use the same loop for my, I mean, terrible comparison, but for my little thing.

• 43:47Rich Roll?

  Are you comparing yourself to the Iron cowboy right now?

• 43:50Adam Skolnick?

  But the point is, is like, some people said, one piece of advice was use different routes. But I found that I used one different route and it was just, it was actually distracting.

• 44:01Rich Roll?

  You always know what to expect.

• 44:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 44:03Rich Roll?

  And you can mark, you know, how you, like mentally, you take notes like this is how I felt last time when I crossed this intersection. And this is how I feel now.

• 44:12Adam Skolnick?

  But again, thank you to everybody who's support because like I was really surprised and your community was like fully rallied.

• 44:19Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a huge accomplishment. I'm proud of you.

• 44:21Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks.

• 44:21Rich Roll?

  I'm proud of Jason, Jason Camiolo, who also did it as well. So lots of love here for all you guys.

• 44:29Adam Skolnick?

  It was nothing for him. He's done 100 milers.

• 44:31Rich Roll?

  He has, but his whole thing is like, he just shows up and does it.

• 44:35Adam Skolnick?

  Pretty impressive.

• 44:35Rich Roll?

  Which is its own form of very impressive. Yeah.

• 44:38Adam Skolnick?

  I think he was worried about me after the midnight, the second midnight when I didn't turn up. Like, he's like, what happened to him?

• 44:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Well, let's take a break.

• 44:48Adam Skolnick?

  Cool.

• 44:48Rich Roll?

  And we'll be back with the big story.

• 44:51Adam Skolnick?

  The big story.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back. Adam.

• 45:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, sir.

• 45:05Rich Roll?

  Do you know what an NFT is?

• 45:08Adam Skolnick?

  I do now.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable what's happening with all of this, isn't it?

• 45:13Adam Skolnick?

  It's literally unbelievable. I could not believe it when I heard about it.

• 45:17Rich Roll?

  Right. I'm fascinated by this. I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive. I will couch the conversation to come with a disclaimer that I am the furthest thing from an expert in the blockchain or anything crypto. So this is definitely coming from a layperson's, you know, perspective in every regard. So to the extent that we get anything wrong here, and I'm sure that we will, you know, don't at me with this.

• 45:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Rich Roll?

  You know, all the crypto heads who get pissed off because we've mischaracterized something here, which I'm sure we will.

• 45:51Adam Skolnick?

  Don't bother us with our own ignorance. We're aware.

• 45:53Rich Roll?

  Yes. I am self-aware of my limitations. All right, NFTs. For people that don't know, this is all about ownership rights to, at least right now, digital art, ephemera, and media. It's really one of the craziest aspects of an already insane year. And I think under, maybe not underappreciated or underreported, but perhaps not discussed enough is the complete upending of finance that we've been seeing, not just with the insane swings of Bitcoin and crypto and all these surges, but also with the whole Robinhood

• 46:34Rich Roll?

  GameStop thing and the kind of crowdsourcing of energy around stock purchases, the advent of SPACs, which are special purpose acquisition companies that are like the new hot thing in M&A. We don't need to get into all of that, but like, there's a lot of interesting things happening.

• 46:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but can I say something about that?

• 46:54Rich Roll?

  Right now.

• 46:54Adam Skolnick?

  Like, SPACs, like, there was literally the Jay-Z story about how he started his own SPAC and all the stars were doing it. And then immediately, it's wiped off the front pages of business when the NFT story breaks. Like, you're not even hearing about them anymore.

• 47:08Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of SPAC activity, though, and I only know the, you know, the very surface level of like, what all of that entails. But we're going to talk about NFTs today.

• 47:19Adam Skolnick?

  What is an NFT?

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  So an NFT is, it's funny, I was riding bikes with a buddy of mine the other day, who's a big private equity guy, and I was like, "Let's talk about NFTs." And I started talking, and he was like, "I don't know what that is." And I'm like, "You're a money guy." Like, it's amazing, like, this finance guy, this was like news to him, which made me more enthusiastic about talking about it today. Because I think there's a lot of people that really have either never heard of this, or only caught, you know, a headline about a crazy, you know, price that was paid for a piece of digital art. So an NFT, NFT stands for Non-Fungible Token. It's an asset verified using blockchain technology, in which a network of computers records transactions

• 48:04Rich Roll?

  and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. The current boom is mostly for digital assets, like images, gifs, songs, videos. And it's different from crypto, in that crypto is fungible. You can use it as a mode of, you can use it as a currency, as a, as a method of exchange. But an NFT cannot be traded at equivalency.

• 48:26Adam Skolnick?

  Because it's unique, it's one of one.

• 48:28Rich Roll?

  And in diving into the history of all of this, I mean, I, you know, I don't know about you, but the first time that I came across an NFT was watching Feels Good Man, when it got to the Rare Pepe's thing. And I was like, "What is this?"

• 48:41Adam Skolnick?

  I didn't quite put it together there, and then, and then it jumps to this story with Beeple, which we'll get into, but like, that's when it kind of first hit my face. But now, now that you mention it, yes, we heard about it in Feels Good Man, but I just didn't think about it in that context.

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  And I, and I, I thought like, "Well, that's gotta be the craziest, most fringe thing ever." And in the, the period of time in between that documentary and now, like, it's become a completely different can of worms.

• 49:08Adam Skolnick?

  Now Matt should, should, should drop Pepe as one of one.

• 49:12Rich Roll?

  I think that he is, like, those guys did post something. I wish I'd looked at it before we were talking today, but they posted something on Instagram about how somebody, you know, somebody did an NFT around something related to Pepe and it garnered an amount of money that would have financed their entire movie.

• 49:33Adam Skolnick?

  Really?

• 49:33Rich Roll?

  But Matt should make all of his artwork, even the print that he gave to the studio here, to us, that should definitely be an NFT.

• 49:43Adam Skolnick?

  Well, here it is. "Rarest Pepe, most important NFT in art history." I'm looking it up right now, and it sold for 320 grand.

• 49:50Rich Roll?

  Wow. Yeah. So, real money is getting exchanged for these things. And diving into the history of all of this, like all things internet, of course, it started with cats, because everything important about the internet begins with cats, right?

• 50:05Adam Skolnick?

  And ends with cats. It's going to end with cats.

• 50:07Rich Roll?

  It's going to end with cats, right? So, the technology has been around since the mid 2010s, but it didn't hit the mainstream until around 2017 with CryptoKitties, which was a site that allowed people to buy and breed, quote unquote, "breed," limited edition digital cats with cryptocurrency, right? Which sounds so weird, but fast forward to now, and Christie's is auctioning Beeple's, you know, piece of art, and it goes for, how much did it go for? 63, 69 million?

• 50:37Adam Skolnick?

  69 million.

• 50:38Rich Roll?

  69 million dollars.

• 50:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 50:40Rich Roll?

  And I was trying to wrap my head around what that means. Like, what exactly is being conveyed in terms of ownership? What's interesting is there is no acquisition of trademark, or copyright, or even sole ownership. It's really bragging rights and knowledge that your copy, if you purchase something, is the quote unquote "authentic one," which is a mind bender, given that these works don't exist in the three-dimensional world.

• 51:11Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 51:11Rich Roll?

  These are digital works that are easily replicated. Like, you could just take that JPEG and copy it a bazillion times, slide it onto your desktop. But it's the idea that this is the authentic one, and it's locked on the blockchain, and you're the one who has the certificate of authenticity or ownership of that.

• 51:31Adam Skolnick?

  The internet is the museum. The art is in the museum of the internet, and everyone can see it, because they're also at the museum, but you're the one that owns it.

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 51:43Adam Skolnick?

  Which is still weird.

• 51:44Rich Roll?

  It's still, yeah, it's like it bends, it bends the noodle completely.

• 51:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, like why on it?

• 51:49Rich Roll?

  Right? What's also interesting is that you can then sell portions of it like a stock. You could sell like a percentage of ownership of your NFT.

• 52:01Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 52:02Rich Roll?

  To a variety of people.

• 52:04Adam Skolnick?

  So it becomes like, uh, like the mortgage.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Well, could you, yeah, I mean, it becomes a financial asset in a very interesting way, I think.

• 52:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Rich Roll?

  And, and, you know, as a 54 year old man trying to wrap his head around this, it's very easy to be dismissive or cynical or just think this is all insanity. But when you think about it, this is the future. And I think it portends much more than a change in how we think about the art world. It really brings up a broader conversation about what ownership means in the digital age as we, you know, slowly progress towards this matrix like existence exacerbated, of course, by the pandemic where we're all at home and we're living our lives more and more online than ever. Right?

• 52:55Rich Roll?

  So rather than, you know, going to the fancy store and buying a wristwatch that's going to impress your friends.

• 53:06Rich Roll?

  The version of, the digital version of that is owning a piece of artwork on the blockchain.

• 53:11Adam Skolnick?

  Right, because you're.

• 53:12Rich Roll?

  In the digital world, because we're all interacting digitally now.

• 53:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and it's interesting that you're saying that. It's like, uh, because if it's, if it, if it changes the way, like, would you rather own a piece of a multinational company or some digital art piece and trade that as your commodity? You know what I mean? Like it changes what commodities are too. It actually democratizes art ownership in ways if they're going to start taking away pieces of the $69 million thing and you can own a piece of it.

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:40Adam Skolnick?

  And, um, because I don't think you can do that with, with art on a wall anymore. Or before. I don't know, I think it's interesting. It's, uh,

• 53:51Adam Skolnick?

  At the same time, it's kind of like the epitome of manufactured need.

• 53:58Rich Roll?

  But that's what all consumer goods are on some level. Like if you look at, like, look at, look at the companies that are thriving, particularly during the pandemic, and they're the ones that are very good at manufacturing demand by, by sort of messaging around limited supply, like a sneaker drop, right? Like, like, the sneaker that goes for $500 because it's a limited run costs the same to manufacture as the one that's at the outlet store. It's like $5 of plastic or whatever, and, you know, rubber.

• 54:33Adam Skolnick?

  It's a great comparison, yeah.

• 54:34Rich Roll?

  And yet, one is lauded and coveted, and the other one is, is, you know, basically considered, you know, not valuable at all. Why is that? It's all imagined.

• 54:47Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Like, it's like baseball card values.

• 54:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:50Adam Skolnick?

  It's all, but baseball card values are-

• 54:51Rich Roll?

  Baseball cards are limited because there's only, there's only so many players, right?

• 54:55Adam Skolnick?

  Because like the Honus Wagner card, which is the most valuable card, he only allowed a certain amount to be printed because he didn't want to do business with the cigarette companies.

• 55:02Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 55:03Adam Skolnick?

  And so, so he, and so because of that, it was this need that was created by the moment, and there's only a few. And in all of their cases, there's so many, but only a few survive because people throw them away. And so then it becomes collectible. Or like the same idea with, with, what's it called, action figures and that kind of market.

• 55:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 55:22Adam Skolnick?

  And in sneakers, similar idea.

• 55:24Rich Roll?

  But in the digital landscape, there's no limitation on supply.

• 55:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  Right? It could be anything. And right now, all the attention is around art, and in particular, this work by, this artist called Beeple, he's got this piece called "The First 5,000 Days." It's a collage of 5,000 images that he created, like, using some kind of, he's like a digital artist. And each one of these little images that are a composite of this larger work are all very interesting in their own right. Christie's, the, you know, white shoe auction house, auctioned off, it's not the first time that they've auctioned off an NFT, but it's definitely the, the, the biggest one that they've done. And this thing went for 69.3 million. It was purchased using Ethereum, which is the preferred crypto for-

• 56:17Rich Roll?

  NFTs in this NFT like economy by, I mean, it just gets weirder by a guy called Metacovan. Like, we don't even know his real name, right? Who claims that he got it at a steal.

• 56:30Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 56:30Rich Roll?

  And that makes Beeple the third highest selling artist alive.

• 56:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And no one had ever heard of Beeple, really. So like-

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, street artists did. There were people in the digital art world knew who he was, but it's not like Jackson Pollock or Picasso.

• 56:47Adam Skolnick?

  No, Picasso, no, Picasso never did that well on One Piece, I don't think, until he died.

• 56:54Rich Roll?

  He missed the NFT boom.

• 56:55Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Adam Skolnick?

  You know, I think you're, you've hit the nail on the head with, with the pandemic playing into this because art galleries were closed, art dealers didn't know what to do. Artists didn't have an outlet to sell their wares in any way. NFT has created a way for digital artists to sell something without having to put it in a gallery. And not only sell something, but sell something at such a high price point that they never had before. And so now everyone's, look, Pepe the Frog, everyone's going for it because it's a gold rush.

• 57:27Adam Skolnick?

  There's one aspect to it that is getting a little bit of buzz, but not as much as like the big price, price tags. Something I never knew was native to blockchain and, and all cryptocurrency, but just the fact that there is a huge carbon footprint associated with blockchain.

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:45Adam Skolnick?

  Which I never knew about really until I started looking into this. Basically, the idea of mining, which is what you do when you have, when you're creating cryptocurrency or any sort of blockchain is you have a huge amount of computer power being sucked by this network of computers that are running millions and millions of cryptographs, which is basically checking each block in the chain for sequencing errors, making sure they're all original and minting a transaction, a transaction, meaning here's this new string of letters and numbers that is completely unique. Blockchain is, is being used not just in art and in currency, it's been used, there's people who want to use it for voting.

• 58:28Adam Skolnick?

  There's people who want to use it for, or it is being used in fish, in fisheries right now to be able to authenticate where certain harvest is coming from and which fishery, I know that's happening. So, you know, the fact that it's being used all this way and there is a carbon footprint is interesting.

• 58:46Adam Skolnick?

  Ethereum is really bad. It's not the worst of the cryptocurrencies, but it's really bad when it comes to its carbon footprint. And a Turkish digital artist named Memo Akden, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly with a PhD in artificial intelligence. So a pretty smart dude.

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:03Adam Skolnick?

  He started seeing everything in the NFTs and he was excited about it like everybody else. And then he started looking into the crypto carbon footprint. And what he found out was a single NFT transaction demands the same amount of energy an average European Union household would need for an entire month.

• 59:24Rich Roll?

  Right, the average NFT.

• 59:25Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 59:26Rich Roll?

  So that's gonna, that's gonna run the gamut, of course.

• 59:27Adam Skolnick?

  Right, but that-

• 59:28Rich Roll?

  But the, the main point just being that like, there's a huge carbon footprint here. And it just seems like, oh, it's all happening digitally.

• 59:34Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 59:35Rich Roll?

  And what we don't see is what's powering this whole thing, which demands a tremendous amount of energy and computing power.

• 59:42Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and the sum of all these 18,159 NFTs has consumed an average EU resident's electricity consumption of 2,000 years. Using a laptop for 54,000 years, boiling a kettle 78 million times. I mean, just crazy. And this is all from Memo's great, great Medium post. There's another artist who, a French artist who became a climate activist. His name is Johnny Le Mercier. He's, and he's based out of Belgium. And he has been an artist for a long time, digital artist, has had, has his own studio in Belgium. And, but when he became a climate activist, he uses art to kind of highlight issues with climate. And, but he dropped some NFTs.

• 1:00:26Adam Skolnick?

  And he was approached by Memo and explained what was happening and how it kind of impacts. Cause he's, he's taken his studio and he's done a lot of work on that studio to make it as energy efficient as possible. And he found out that his first NFT drop consumed more energy in 10 seconds than his studio had in almost two years.

• 1:00:46Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:00:47Adam Skolnick?

  So like, it's a crazy amount of energy.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Adam Skolnick?

  Who knew?

• 1:00:50Rich Roll?

  For something that doesn't exist in the real world.

• 1:00:52Adam Skolnick?

  For something that doesn't exist.

• 1:00:54Rich Roll?

  That's a, that just bends the noodle even further to even like appreciate or understand that-

• 1:01:01Rich Roll?

  That just because something is online, like we think it's just, there's, there's a seamlessness to it.

• 1:01:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Rich Roll?

  And there's no kind of real world repercussions to it.

• 1:01:11Adam Skolnick?

  But there's real world repercussions, but there's no real world thing.

• 1:01:13Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Yeah, exactly. Which is even weirder.

• 1:01:16Adam Skolnick?

  It's, it's.

• 1:01:17Rich Roll?

  I do know that, that Ethereum is, is, is working or planning to cut this absurd energy consumption with plans to reduce it by 99%. And I don't know enough about blockchain to know how that would be accomplished or how realistic that is. I would suspect though, with, with advances in technology and, and, and creating greater scale, that they will figure this out at some point. Do you have a sense of where things stand with that?

• 1:01:44Adam Skolnick?

  So, uh, basically the pushback from Ethereum and SuperRare, which is one of the platforms where you can buy these NFTs, is that, you know, if you read that, you're assuming that there's no carbon footprint associated with regular art dealing, which there is with, you know, miles of travel and airfare and all that. But in reality, that still would pale in comparison to what's happening. Ethereum has a new software they've been working on. I think it's called 2.0. They wanna, they wanna cut their carbon footprint. This new software will allow them to do that. It's not out yet. There's no, there's no, you know, two years ago, they were told, we were told it was happening. And now it's two years, now, now it's two years away from being two years away, which is probably where it stands. So.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Adam Skolnick?

  I don't, I'm not an expert in that. Um, I can't really say when it'll be available, but they're not saying it's coming around the corner. So they're saying they're working on it.

• 1:02:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:02:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Rich Roll?

  Hopefully they'll figure that out. Um.

• 1:02:40Adam Skolnick?

  And the idea is if it scales, it should be able to be worked out. But that's like the excuse we use for a lot of things as human beings. It's, it's, you know, yes, it's a problem now, but when it scales, it's going to be a lot easier.

• 1:02:51Rich Roll?

  This is something I talked about with Alex on the podcast the other day. That's an argument that comes up. To poo poo renewables, right? Because when you have a renewable, you still have to sort of supplant the old technology. And there's going to be, you know, a carbon footprint to that. That's going to exceed what it will eventually become if you just continue to push it forward. So that's part of the evolution as well.

• 1:03:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:18Rich Roll?

  It's like a transaction cost that's built into it. I don't know.

• 1:03:22Adam Skolnick?

  Well, that's what they say.

• 1:03:23Rich Roll?

  I don't know enough about it to know.

• 1:03:24Adam Skolnick?

  The super rare people are saying that same thing is that like, people are using the climate deal as an excuse to not change the world. But my question would be, do you know how this world changes from here? Because what happens is it's the unintentional consequences of good intentions. Like, I'm not saying the intention is to ruin the environment. I'm saying it's an unintended consequence of something that they think is great for the world.

• 1:03:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:03:53Adam Skolnick?

  And that is like basically the recipe for a lot of disasters that we've had. So, you know, the idea of thinking 100 years down the line is not something that's happening in Silicon Valley.

• 1:04:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And it never has in America, really, since, you know, the native cultures are kind of subjugated. Because that, you know, thinking what happens after you're gone, three generations, seven generations later, right? Seven generations.

• 1:04:21Adam Skolnick?

  That's something that we don't do. It would be nice to start doing that, considering where we're at in the environment and climate crisis.

• 1:04:30Rich Roll?

  The, uh, the energy around, um, NFTs has been in the context of, of art and the art world. But I think what's more interesting, that's just like NFT 1.0, which is where we're at right now. With pieces being auctioned, there's all these sites where you can, they call it minting. Like you can upload your work and then, uh, hold it out for sale or auction. All these sites like Foundation, foundation.app. But we're also seeing Twitter posts being

• 1:05:07Rich Roll?

  Turned into NFTs. Jack Dorsey is turned his first tweet into an NFT and it's at like 2.5 million for charity. Logan Paul did a run of like collectible cards, you know, and musicians Deadmau5, Grime, Steve Aoki, Kings of Leon, 3Lau, this guy like got 11.7 million on NFTs related to like an old album where he was also providing access to new music and and like a vinyl version of some of his work. So I think that it's we're gonna see it expand into other areas of creative expression beyond just like digital visual

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  art, right?

• 1:05:53Adam Skolnick?

  So like the first episode of the Rich Roll Podcast?

• 1:05:55Rich Roll?

  And I think, well, it's funny because I thought about that. Like Kevin Rose just launched a new podcast called Modern Finance, which is all about like crypto and NFTs. And he made that initial episode an NFT. And I thought, oh, it'd be cool. Maybe I should make the very first episode of this podcast an NFT. The environmental considerations that get packed into that are probably going to prevent me from doing that right now. But it would be cool, right? Just to experiment and see what would happen. I really want to understand the the environment implications of that before I do that. But I think where we're going to see value is in artists or creators who create an NFT that isn't just

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  the thing itself, but also packed into it are all these other kind of benefits. Like if you're a band or a musician, if you purchase this limited run of NFTs, you also get a backstage pass, or you get, you know, you'll you'll get the new you'll get access to the new music first, or all these other things that can be built into the blockchain. Because part of what the benefit of the blockchain is, is you can create these contracts, right? That that work in lockstep with technology. So when when X happens, then Y gets this. And as we see this kind of ecosystem become more robust and mature, I think the the broader

• 1:07:20Rich Roll?

  implications on culture beyond just, oh, this painting, you know, this digital work of art sold for this much, this much, is going to be impacting all of us. And I think To kind of telescope out even more, it's an interesting philosophical exploration of what ownership means. And we were talking about supply and demand. Like, how do we think about the material world and the digital world in terms of our relationship to it? And this is bringing up a new way of seeing all of that. And I find that to be endlessly fascinating. I mean, there are these guys called Burnt Banksy that own Banksy paintings, at least one of them, and like burned the Banksy,

• 1:08:03Rich Roll?

  like scanned a work of Banksy, burned the original, and then minted the scan as an NFT and sold it for like three times the value of the actual original physical three-dimensional piece of art. So what does that tell you about how we think about ownership and value?

• 1:08:23Adam Skolnick?

  What does it tell you?

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that it's changing. I think that we're, I think it's, I think that it is an indication that we are inching closer and closer to the matrix. Like, we're entering into this liminal space between the material world and the digital world, where we're grappling with, with, you know, how we want to live our lives. Are we living them here in the here and now in the tactile world? Or are we living them as avatars in this digital space? And the pandemic has accelerated something that I think was an inevitability. But the fact that we're seeing more people value these things in the digital space more than they value things in the real world is a very interesting concept.

• 1:09:08Adam Skolnick?

  It's fascinating because like, really, in the end, you and I can still go and see these same things online with a click of the mouse.

• 1:09:17Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:09:18Adam Skolnick?

  And

• 1:09:18Rich Roll?

  But the argument is you can see, you can do that with the Mona Lisa as well.

• 1:09:22Adam Skolnick?

  We have to go to the Louvre.

• 1:09:24Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, but you can see a JPEG of it.

• 1:09:26Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:09:26Rich Roll?

  Like, why would you, why do people line up in front of the Mona Lisa and take a photo of it?

• 1:09:33Adam Skolnick?

  It's Leonardo da Vinci's charisma.

• 1:09:35Rich Roll?

  Is that what it is? You know what I mean? Like, there's plenty of photos of it.

• 1:09:41Adam Skolnick?

  It's, yeah, what really...

• 1:09:42Rich Roll?

  And why would you want to, why would you want to own that painting? When there are images of it? And you can, you can eat with one click, you can find, you can enjoy an image of the Mona Lisa.

• 1:09:51Adam Skolnick?

  Right, yeah, like, like...

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  So how is this different?

• 1:09:53Adam Skolnick?

  It's, it's like, our, our art is freighted with history and stories, right? So we're told, we're told things about where a piece of art comes from and who made it. And all that together creates a certain amount of value, right? Plus the rarity aspect of it. And I guess the same thing is true in the digital world. We're just, I just have a hard time, like, because you can also get an NFT of sports highlights. And they're selling for a lot of money, like, a lot of money, like a million, millions of dollars in NBA highlights.

• 1:10:20Rich Roll?

  Right, the NBA.

• 1:10:21Adam Skolnick?

  So you can own a highlight, like a poster. You, like, I used to put a Michael Jordan poster on my wall. I can now own a Michael Jordan highlight in NFT. But what is that? Like, I can go on YouTube...

• 1:10:31Rich Roll?

  What is the value of being the original certified, authentic owner of that clip?

• 1:10:37Adam Skolnick?

  In my, in my estimation, it's zero. Like, that does nothing for me in my life, like, but, but, you know, I...

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  Could the argument, and I'm just saying this from a perspective of, of, of being a devil's advocate, how is that different from, from owning the Mona Lisa? When it's a ubiquitous image?

• 1:11:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's a good question.

• 1:11:04Rich Roll?

  It goes back to feeling and ego more than anything else, right?

• 1:11:09Adam Skolnick?

  The ownership ego?

• 1:11:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  I think there's also a crypto punk sensibility that's at play here, too. Like, let's blow up the system and, and we're gonna, you know, I'm, you know, Mr. Ethereum Gajillionaire is gonna buy this digital work for an insane amount of money as a, as like a, as like an F you to everything you ever thought about the art world.

• 1:11:36Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:11:37Rich Roll?

  Because he can. And that's very punk rock.

• 1:11:40Adam Skolnick?

  It is.

• 1:11:41Rich Roll?

  And there's something cool about that also, like, let's blow up the system and just reimagine this entire structure.

• 1:11:49Adam Skolnick?

  It's all online and digital and it's unhackable. Because that's the idea is like blockchain, that's why it's it's good is that it's unhackable, right?

• 1:11:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:58Adam Skolnick?

  You can't you can't hack it.

• 1:12:00Rich Roll?

  But but it's also important to understand that this is very early days and there's no question that this is like a crazy bubble. It's like internet 1.0, right? Like, this is gonna blow up. There's some people that are gonna make a lot of money and there's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna lose a lot of money and this will sort itself out and over time mature into a more kind of robust ecosystem. But right now, I find it to be very like, if you were gonna spend an insane amount of money on a digital work of art right now, like, that is so risky.

• 1:12:33Adam Skolnick?

  I agree.

• 1:12:34Rich Roll?

  Crazy risky, right? So Seth Godin wrote about this. I don't know if you saw his piece.

• 1:12:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 1:12:38Rich Roll?

  He's basically saying, the title is "NFTs are a Dangerous Trap", which is basically walking you through this bubble idea.

• 1:12:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he thinks it's a bubble. And there's another aspect of it that's dangerous in that even though the NFT itself will be certified as one of one, you actually don't know if the seller is the creator. So there's a rights aspect to it because it's it the it's what's lagging behind is the authenticity of the seller.

• 1:13:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:04Adam Skolnick?

  Because right now, people are using, you know, avatars and handles and you don't know who they are.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  But I do think what what if there if there's another thing to celebrate about all of this, it's the empowerment of the creator, right? Like, the artist no longer has to be hat in hand. It puts the creator of artistic works in more of control over the destiny of the work that they create.

• 1:13:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  And it allows them to get value for it. And, you know, this can be anything, like, you could write a series of short stories or a book and do a limited run as NFTs. Like, there's so many different variations on this that I think we're gonna start seeing. So this is just the very beginning.

• 1:13:47Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  And I think it's only gonna continue to get more and more fascinating.

• 1:13:49Adam Skolnick?

  So like the on the road scroll as NFT?

• 1:13:53Rich Roll?

  On the road scroll.

• 1:13:53Adam Skolnick?

  You know that? There was a famous, Jack Kerouac.

• 1:13:58Adam Skolnick?

  glued or taped pages together so that when he was writing High on Benzadine, his first draft of On the Road, it like came spooling out of him in a matter of like, you know, a couple of weeks or something. And he had it on a scroll so that he never had to add type paper to his typewriter. And he just kept going, kept going. And that scroll ended up getting edited down over the course of months or over a year, and it became the manuscript. But that scroll itself was, and the scroll itself was republished eventually, but it was bought by a collector. The guy who owns the Indianapolis Colts bought it. And he, and the scroll has all the characters as the people who they really were, Jack and Neil Cassidy and all those.

• 1:14:42Adam Skolnick?

  And, and so that scroll is the original because it's the one of one.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  Right, but that's the antithesis of what we're talking about.

• 1:14:48Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:14:49Rich Roll?

  Because that is like a relic that exists in the real world.

• 1:14:53Adam Skolnick?

  But you were saying like, like an author could do that with his first manuscript, could mint it.

• 1:14:58Rich Roll?

  Or anything. Like an author right now could just say, I'm not going to publish my book with a traditional publisher. I'm going to, I'm going to make it an NFT.

• 1:15:07Rich Roll?

  And whoever wants to buy it can buy it.

• 1:15:10Adam Skolnick?

  And then those-

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  Like if you're, what if Malcolm Gladwell said, my next book is going to be an NFT? And then on pub day, he uploads it, he mints it on one of these sites, and then that's, that's it. That's the, I mean, it's, it exists in the digital world so you can copy it, right? But who, you know, would that, at auction, would that go for a lot of money? I bet it would.

• 1:15:33Adam Skolnick?

  Just one of one? Just publish it, one copy of his book?

• 1:15:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Adam Skolnick?

  And then let it replicate out?

• 1:15:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and then let it replicate out and see what would happen.

• 1:15:40Adam Skolnick?

  Would he still have the rights to-

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because he's not transferring copyright.

• 1:15:43Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:15:44Rich Roll?

  So it doesn't give the owner, the buyer, permission to replicate it.

• 1:15:48Adam Skolnick?

  Just have the-

• 1:15:49Rich Roll?

  Only a certification that they have the authentic, original copy of this.

• 1:15:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:15:53Rich Roll?

  Even though originality is like the wrong word because something that exists in ones and zeros that can be duplicated with, you know, absolute precision begs the question of what original means to begin with.

• 1:16:12Adam Skolnick?

  You are bending my noodle right now.

• 1:16:15Rich Roll?

  Do you think, do you think if Kerouac was around now that he would be into crypto?

• 1:16:20Rich Roll?

  Like NFTs?

• 1:16:23Adam Skolnick?

  No, I don't. No, I don't.

• 1:16:25Rich Roll?

  All right. Maybe we've talked enough about this for now. Anyway, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this. I think it's super interesting. This came up with my conversation with Kevin Roos too. Cause he was like, I want to learn more about this. I want to write about this. I was like, you should write, you should write a book about NFTs and release it as an NFT and it would be like this weird Charlie Kaufman adaptation, like meta experiment.

• 1:16:52Adam Skolnick?

  Was he into it?

• 1:16:54Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Maybe. We'll see.

• 1:16:57Adam Skolnick?

  You know, it does show that like, like we had talked about on the phone earlier, Rich is like, it's the cleaving of culture from, you're right about that. Like the crowbar of the digital world is cleaving culture from the, from the original owners. So the creators, but creators narrowly defined, like the creators that choose certain new mediums are the beneficiaries. And then people like your buddy, the hedge funder, or my friend, the screenwriter, or whoever, these people who are used to things the way they used to be. And all of a sudden, they don't even know, you know, PewDiePie on YouTube is the most powerful person in media or whatever. Or Joe Rogan is in podcasts.

• 1:17:34Rich Roll?

  And when they get hip to it, that train has already left the station and they're going to do everything that, that is in their power to hold, hold on to the reins of, you know, the traditional mechanisms. Because all of this is a threat to business as usual.

• 1:17:49Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:17:50Rich Roll?

  And that's frightening. If you're like, when I see Christie's doing what they just did with Beeple, like they're trying to be current and modern with where all of this is going. But if you're, you know, the competitor stodgy auction house and you're like, NFTs, that's bullshit. We're not doing that. You're going to get pushed out and antiquated pretty quickly.

• 1:18:10Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:18:10Rich Roll?

  Cause this is where culture is heading. And the fact that this has been around for 10 years, it's now hitting this, this really interesting and strange inflection point, but the blockchain is not going away. And it's going to continue to revolutionize so many of, it's not just crypto and it's not just art. Like it's gonna, it's gonna have massive implications on how we do pretty much everything.

• 1:18:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's already is in different ways. This is, in this way, it's like, It still has that that whiff of individuality, individualism, not individuality, individualism of look at me, look what I own, and which the internet is really good at.

• 1:18:52Rich Roll?

  Right, I know. Can you imagine having enough Ethereum lying around that you could just shed $69 million worth of it for a piece of digital art? I mean, how much Ethereum does Metacoven have if he could do that, right?

• 1:19:10Adam Skolnick?

  Well, less now.

• 1:19:11Rich Roll?

  Which is insane.

• 1:19:12Adam Skolnick?

  Less now.

• 1:19:12Rich Roll?

  Because, you know, if you were hoarding crypto way back in the day, like, the amount of money that that a lot of these people have right now is absolutely bananas.

• 1:19:22Adam Skolnick?

  Do you have crypto?

• 1:19:24Rich Roll?

  No, I had like three or four Bitcoin years ago when I picked them up for like under, when it was like under a thousand, and then I was broke and I had to get rid of all of it to like pay some bills. But I never, and I have friends way back who are always telling me, you've got it, you've got, you should be, you should be in Bitcoin, you know. And it's always that like, you know, FOMO meets, it's too late because now it's so high, but I think it's going to continue to go up.

• 1:19:54Adam Skolnick?

  I know. Well, when, there was a period where we bought a little bit of crypto and we were like, we don't want, even Ethereum was like, it was so high, like, you end up with like, a couple of Ethereum or something like that, yeah, or percentages of Bitcoin. Instead, we're like, no, let's find the one that might pop. So we have Ripple, but it hasn't popped.

• 1:20:14Rich Roll?

  It hasn't popped. Well, I have other friends that spend way too much time just watching the graphs all day and trading in all these smaller cryptos and then putting it into Bitcoin, and it monopolizes all their time and energy.

• 1:20:27Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:20:28Rich Roll?

  Anyway.

• 1:20:29Adam Skolnick?

  I'd rather be in the ocean.

• 1:20:30Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, you're, yeah, all right. Okay, boomer. That's the ultimate okay boomer. All right, let's switch gears here. We got, we have a little news piece here that I know you wanted to share about.

• 1:20:41Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yes. Just a few minutes about it. I don't know if you've been keeping tabs, but there are mass protests in Myanmar. They've been going on for quite a while. Myanmar is a country in Southeast Asia. It borders Thailand, China, India.

• 1:20:59Adam Skolnick?

  Bangladesh. And I've covered it quite a bit. There's been humanitarian crisis in Myanmar for generations. Basically, what happened after World War II. You know, it was an English colony after World War II. General An Sun tried to get all of these different ethnicities that were all part of this country called Burma at the time to come together in a democratic, self-governing way. And he got all these different warring militias and ethnicities to come together and do it with the majority Burman population. And then he was murdered, right on the eve of the Constitution kind of happening.

• 1:21:41Adam Skolnick?

  And ever since then, the military has controlled the country in various degrees. And for much of our lifetimes, it's been a straight-up military dictatorship. I've covered it in that the same military has been running people off their native lands and exploiting the natural resources for private gain. And when I mean private gain, I mean, they're actually taking, the generals are actually taking money and just filling their bank accounts with it. And, you know, the crisis. Anyway, so fast forward to 2007, 2008, there was a big uprising.

• 1:22:22Adam Skolnick?

  An Sun Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time, and she was the Freedom Fighter. And there were mass protests then, but they were stomped down pretty quickly by the military government. But a few years later, they decided to allow for voting again. And so they've allowed the political parties to engage in debate. And 25%, I believe, of the parliamentary seats are reserved for the military. But everyone else is competing in voting. And that was the way it was. And An Sun Suu Kyi, this hero, was elected president. She's been president ever since then. But then on February 1st, after another landslide victory for the NLD, National League

• 1:23:01Adam Skolnick?

  of Democracy, which is Su Chi's party, she was arrested along with other leaders in the NLD, and the military took over again for the first time in years. And basically, they've been using all sorts of cybersecurity technology to crack down on pro-democracy activists and party leaders, and people have taken to the streets ever since February 1st. And at first, there was tolerance of these peaceful protests, but then rubber bullets came out, tear gas came out, and now they're literally shooting into crowds. And dozens of people have been murdered by security forces, and that's where it's at right now.

• 1:23:39Rich Roll?

  What is America's foreign policy stance towards Myanmar?

• 1:23:44Adam Skolnick?

  So for years, when the military was in charge and Su Chi was under house arrest for, you know, and Sun Su Chi is the daughter of General Aung San. And so she was this hero that came, that rose up at different times to speak truth to power. She became this, she won the Nobel Prize Prize. As president, she's been, she's had her own problems because of the, what's been happening in, with the, why am I spacing on the Rohingya population? She was in power when the Myanmar military was running the Rohingya off their land, and she didn't speak up for the Rohingya at all. And all of a sudden, people were calling for her Nobel Prize back. So she's kind of, she sided with the military in certain ways,

• 1:24:27Adam Skolnick?

  and she was doing that, I think, to preserve peaceful power sharing, but it didn't work. So not only did she sell her soul, but then she ends up getting under house arrest. And so for years, when she was under house arrest the first time, it was a sanctions policy. So we sanctioned Myanmar, we weren't helping them whatsoever. We were helping with some humanitarian stuff in the ethnic states that were at war, because there was active war. Like, there were militias in Shan State or Karin State, where I visited, many times, going to see displaced people in their displaced people's camps, spending time with rebel

• 1:25:06Adam Skolnick?

  military. There was active war, and there was some aid, but for largely, our stance with the Myanmar government was, you know, sanctions. And then when... Obama was in power and they gave power back to the people at in various degrees. At first it was like 50% of the parliamentary seats, then it was 25%. You know, the Obama was engaging and not just Obama, but Europe too. Europe started engaging with Myanmar. Myanmar's economy was growing and it was actually a really vibrant place to be because the people are wonderful and they want to engage and they want to grow and they all just they just want freedom.

• 1:25:45Adam Skolnick?

  And now it looks like it's coming back to where it used to be, where certain people get rich and everyone else suffers.

• 1:25:52Rich Roll?

  And what is is the UN doing anything about this?

• 1:25:55Adam Skolnick?

  Right now, everyone's sitting on their hands like, what can you do short of invading? You know, like, what can you do? And we never did invade because China has interests there. You know, for the UN to come up with a peacekeeping force, you need to get the UN Security Council needs to vote in favor. And any one dissenting vote kills the resolution. So that that means China, China does business with Burma or Myanmar and China's not alone.

• 1:26:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:24Adam Skolnick?

  But yeah.

• 1:26:24Rich Roll?

  So how does this play out in your estimation?

• 1:26:27Adam Skolnick?

  It's a good question. I'm kind of flagging it just so people kind of pay attention to what's happening. You know, thanks to right now, at first, after the coup, and I think it's still happening. The news got cut off, cable got cut off, internet access was was spotty. You have to find it in all of Yangon, the main major city. There was one hotel that internet internet access for a little bit. You know, I don't know. I've been thinking of the business owners there and what they're going through and what they're thinking. Like, imagine sinking your life savings into a business there. You can't leave because there's no money to leave with.

• 1:27:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Is there is there any grass, though? Are there refugees that are fleeing?

• 1:27:10Adam Skolnick?

  No, I have I have not heard of mass refugees fleeing yet, but but if they do, it'll be the Thailand border. That's how I always accessed it, you know. I would go to Thailand and then get into the ethnic provinces from there, which a lot of journalists do. And you can do it legally.

• 1:27:28Adam Skolnick?

  So we'll see. There's already refugee camps on the Thailand border that have stood for 20, 30 years. But people have left them and gone back and started businesses and and done well. But now it's all coming back around and those same villages that people went back to are getting overrun by military again now.

• 1:27:47Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, well, we'll keep an eye on this. Yeah, sorry. I feel like I'm talking too loud. I think you're all right. Okay. Jason will modulate you. You'll end up sounding like butter.

• 1:28:00Rich Roll?

  Always.

• 1:28:09Rich Roll?

  Let's do some listener questions. Let's do it.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Hey, guys. This is Will from Portland, Oregon. I had a question. I was vegan for a while. I was inspired by Rich when you first started the podcast. I read your memoir and all that. And did my first marathon about seven years ago, probably after my father passed away. And as life happens, you kind of just lose all motivation and stopped being vegan, stopped running completely. And I'm a lot heavier than I used to be. And I just wanted to know, for heavier folks who are trying to get back into a game or just start it, there's not a lot of information out there of how to do it. It's hard to ego check yourself and know that you can't do what you once used to do. I just wanted to know if you guys had any advice on starting over for folks who have kind of lost it all and are trying to grasp the reality of where we're at and where we once were and just the mind game that that plays sometimes.

• 1:29:08Speaker 02

  Feel free to play this clip. Thank you, guys, so much. I love listening to you, guys. Big fan. Bye.

• 1:29:14Rich Roll?

  Thanks for your question, Will. It's a good question. I think it's a question that a lot of people can relate to. And I have a few thoughts on this. I mean, first of all, the only day better than yesterday to begin something like this is today, right? And the good news is, you've done it before. So you actually already know what to do. You mentioned that there's not a lot of information out there on how to do it. I disagree. I think there's plenty of information. I don't think that we're you know, thirsting for information that doesn't exist on how to you know, make this kind of transformation. So information, in my opinion,

• 1:29:57Rich Roll?

  you know, you did this before, you read my book, you went vegan, you ran a marathon, like, information is not your malfunction. Action is your problem. And I think that you're a victim of your own kind of shame at the moment. So my suggestion is to find a way to bury that shame spiral and to put an end to the pity party and just begin by putting one foot in front of the other. What is right in front of you to do right now? Can you go out the door and go for a walk? What is your next meal gonna be? And I think with that, with those tiny steps, you start to create a little bit of momentum. And there's huge power in momentum.

• 1:30:37Rich Roll?

  If you can create just the tiniest positive change, that's a little bit different from your daily MO, that will help free you from this position that you're in right now, which is being stuck in a negative cycle. So

• 1:30:54Rich Roll?

  the focus should be on

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  what can you do right now? You can't run a marathon. You haven't been vegan for a while. You put on a bunch of weight. You can go for a walk. You can eat a salad and you can celebrate those tiny wins until you slowly get more emotionally connected to this arc of improvement. And with that, the path will present itself, right? You don't need somebody to deliver you an information packet with your plan for the next two years. What you need to do is to take action. And I think

• 1:31:32Rich Roll?

  At odds with that, right now, this enemy that you're facing is comparing yourself to this person that you were seven years ago. Comparison is the thief of joy. So, stop comparing yourself to your past self, or to other people. It's this idea of not training where you think you should be. Like, if you go out for a jog and you get tired after a block and you feel like you have to walk, and then you're beating yourself up because "I used to run a marathon and look at how much weight I put on." It's not about that. It's not about training where you think you should be. It's about accepting and embracing where you are right now, and doing what you are capable of doing. Because that's the only way that you get anything done, or make any progress.

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  So, you have everything you need, and I think you need to disabuse yourself of this idea that you're gonna stay in your status quo until you experience some windfall of motivation. Like, you're waiting to be motivated. Like you said, "I just don't feel motivated, I don't have any motivation." And I think when you're in that mindset, you're waiting to feel motivated to do something. And that's not how it works. Like, that's, in fact, a trap. You don't need to be motivated to make change, you just need to do. Like, mood follows action, which is what I always say, right?

• 1:32:57Rich Roll?

  So, a day at a time, just like they say in 12-step. Like, what can you do today? Can you eat a little bit better? Can you move your body in a way that you didn't yesterday? Can your head hit the pillow with a little bit more self-esteem because you exercised some self-care and some self-love by moving the needle ever so slightly in the right direction? And when you start to string some days together of doing just that, it doesn't take long before you wake up a little bit more excited for that walk that turns into a jog that eventually, over time, will turn into a run, and just might bring you back to the starting line of another marathon.

• 1:33:38Adam Skolnick?

  I love it. It reminds me of like, you know, baseball season is around the corner. It reminds me of like those hitters that are in a slump. What do they do is they just focus on their approach to each at bat because you can't control getting a hit, you know, because there's so many bad bounces or the way the ball, you know, you just don't know. Balls and strikes are called differently every day. But can you change your approach to each at bat and then start stringing some good ones together and then eventually you start seeing a couple of hits and the momentum turns and your confidence turns.

• 1:34:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I just can't stress the importance of tiny little actions. Like if, if, if Will's running shoes are, are in the closet, pull them out of the closet and put them in the hallway. Like if all you did was that, well, that's more than you did yesterday. Next time, put them next to your bed. The next day, like, why don't you put them on when you sit up in the morning and like, you know, walk to your front door. Like, what can you, what can you do? And then do those tiny things that are very digestible and doable. Count them as wins and build on that momentum.

• 1:34:38Adam Skolnick?

  That's great advice. And the fact that you're listening, Will, shows that you're still, your head's still in the game.

• 1:34:45Rich Roll?

  Right, of course.

• 1:34:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. All right. We're going to Europe for this one.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Hey, Rich and Adam. This is Tanya from Lucerne, Switzerland. I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. So I've been living plant-based for over five years. I try to mostly buy things like in hand. I always stop to question if I don't want to buy something that I really need. And I do this partly because I'm really concerned for our planet's future and its resources, but also because I have a one-year-old kid and I really want him to grow up living consciously and making deliberate choices. So I try really hard to remind myself that I'm in control only of myself. I often struggle with older people from other generations who live very frivolously with like seemingly little concern about the impact they're having on the planet.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  I know that grandparents can have a massive influence on their grandchildren. So have you found good talking points to address this? Or do you try to not think about it too much and let people live how they want to? Thanks so much. Yes, it's okay for you to play this on the podcast. Thanks, guys. Take care.

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  Tanya from Lucerne.

• 1:35:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, Lucerne in the house.

• 1:35:53Rich Roll?

  Isn't that where they make the butter? Is that where they make the butter?

• 1:35:56Adam Skolnick?

  Is it? Shout out Lucerne.

• 1:35:58Rich Roll?

  I think so. Thanks for your question. This is tricky.

• 1:36:05Rich Roll?

  I think it's important to, of course, make the best choices that are in alignment with your values. And that's what Tanya is doing. She's conscientious about her needs and her wants and tries to make sure that her consumer choices are in alignment with her values. And that's something to be celebrated. And certainly, that's healthy modeling for your child, because it's not about what you say, it's about, it's about what you do, it's about your behavior. But I also think this question has a lot to do with controlling the controllables, understanding what you can control and what you can't control, and really having a healthy mindset around how you calibrate all of that. As a parent, you

• 1:36:49Rich Roll?

  lead by example and action. Again, you model this behavior for your kids. But it's also important to not be a martyr, especially if you're, if part of your interest is in trying to inspire the next generation. If you're suffering, then that doesn't become an aspirational way to live your life. And ultimately, that's going to set you, set you up for your kid to just rebel, saying, I don't want to live my life like that. That doesn't look like any fun. I want to thrive. And, you know, why was I deprived of all these things? I'm going to go out into the world and get them. Like, kids are always going to differentiate in that way. And they're going to want to explore the opposite of what they've been presented with. So you have to be mindful about that a little bit.

• 1:37:34Rich Roll?

  And I think it's important to not overly, in an unhealthy way, attach to how your child's moral compass will evolve. And I say that as a parent of four and two teenagers right now. Like, I've experienced a variety of permutations on this. Everything from, we love the way that you parented us, and we want to model our own value system based upon how we were raised, to, I don't want anything to do with this.

• 1:37:59Adam Skolnick?

  Keep that vegan, get that vegan butter out of here.

• 1:38:02Rich Roll?

  And a lot of that just has to do with how they come out of the womb. You know what I mean? Like, but my point being that you only have, you only have so much control over these things, right? Yeah, exactly. The ultimate blockchain.

• 1:38:15Rich Roll?

  And I guess I would also say that I can appreciate how can at times feel dispiriting that perhaps you feel like you're not making enough of a difference. Like you make these small choices in your life, but how much is this really moving the needle? But I do think they hold symbolic power and they do model for other people in your orbit, like what's important to you. And it sends the message out that this is something of value to you and perhaps would be of value to other people. But because there's so little we can control in the kind of climate trajectory of our planet, there are other ways that

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  you can contribute through activism or charity or organizing. Because ultimately, the real change, the big change, is going to have to be systemic. And that's going to come through legislative and regulatory changes, not by a few isolated people sacrificing all of their happiness and well-being on the altar of like martyr sacrifice. So I think it's important to, thinking about all of this, to reframe how you approach the mindset of your parents, I assume your parents, your child's grandparents, this idea that you're going to change their minds or that

• 1:39:31Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's in-laws.

• 1:39:32Rich Roll?

  Is it in-laws?

• 1:39:33Adam Skolnick?

  I'm sensing in-laws.

• 1:39:35Rich Roll?

  We don't know. We don't know what's going on in Lucerne.

• 1:39:38Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:39:39Rich Roll?

  Is it butter or in-laws?

• 1:39:41Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's in-laws.

• 1:39:42Rich Roll?

  You know, that's, you're setting yourself up for a losing battle there. Like, these people are set in their ways. It's very unlikely that you're gonna get them to see things differently. And you don't want to leave yourself frustrated and irreparably eroding a relationship that is perhaps healthy in other ways. I think that you have the opportunity, as your child gets older, to contextualize where your grandparents are coming from and their life experience for your child as he gets older. But in the meantime, all I have is like my own kind of approach to all of this, which is Less about being in the business of trying to change other people's minds and more about

• 1:40:26Rich Roll?

  just being a lighthouse. Like if you could just be a beacon of positive energy and positive change and living your life in accordance with your values, that's much more attractive. And I also think magnetic and powerful than bitching about how other people, you know, don't get it.

• 1:40:42Adam Skolnick?

  No doubt.

• 1:40:43Rich Roll?

  You have in-laws.

• 1:40:44Adam Skolnick?

  I have, I don't really.

• 1:40:45Rich Roll?

  Do they live in Lucerne?

• 1:40:46Adam Skolnick?

  I don't really, I have, I, my, uh, my wife is like Jason Bourne. She comes from nowhere.

• 1:40:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, really? Interesting.

• 1:40:54Adam Skolnick?

  She's got, she's got a past. Um, so no, we're not really super, we do have, I do have in-laws, but it's not like it's a close thing. They're all in Australia, but she has in-laws. I'll tell you that. My wife has in-laws.

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  Right. So maybe she should be sitting here.

• 1:41:09Adam Skolnick?

  No. Um, you know, I, I think, and she's vegan, but you know, it's, it's different. Like my, my parents aren't trying to, um, yet, uh, feed, you know, he's obviously still nursing and he's just getting into people food and, um, and so at some point he'll be spoiled with ice cream and things that she won't feed him in that exact way, I'm sure. Um, but that's not really on our, on our plate. I, I think this is interesting. I think you made a really good point in that, um, all the people I know involved in environmental activism from a consumer perspective, like the marine plastic pollution people, like the real professionals, Five Jires and other organizations like that, they will tell you

• 1:41:51Adam Skolnick?

  the fight is upstream. It's not about, you know, learning how to do everything with reusable. It's not about like, you can't erase all plastic from your life. It's about stopping the production of future plastics, stopping those plastic plants. Exactly like you were saying. The fight, the changing of the world is upstream. It's not necessarily in your daily life. Now, on the other hand, I can see how having a certain ethos is a lifestyle in and of itself, and it can actually be a confidence booster for you, but you're flagging that it could also be repellent for the child as the child grows. Child's one years old.

• 1:42:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:29Adam Skolnick?

  It's not a problem yet, but like.

• 1:42:31Rich Roll?

  More will be revealed.

• 1:42:32Adam Skolnick?

  More will be revealed, but I think those are all interesting points and great points. And, uh, you know, the boomers are the boomers.

• 1:42:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:42:40Adam Skolnick?

  What are you gonna do?

• 1:42:41Rich Roll?

  Boomers gonna boom.

• 1:42:42Adam Skolnick?

  Boom, boomers gonna boom.

• 1:42:44Rich Roll?

  All right. Let's go to Christopher.

• 1:42:46Adam Skolnick?

  Shout out boomers. We love you.

• 1:42:47Rich Roll?

  Let's go to Christopher from Boston.

• 1:42:49Speaker 04

  Hi, my name is Christopher Hicks. I am currently living in Boston, Massachusetts, but I'm from Montana. But nonetheless, big fan. I'm an alcoholic and in recovery for quite a while, but nonetheless catching the endurance bug and finding endless inspiration from your story. Right now, currently training for the Route 50K, a skyrunning ultra endurance race in Big Sky, Montana. Some friends and I are racing from around the country. But my question is, how to optimize training for altitude? The race is actually ranging between 7,000 up to just over 11,000 feet. But living at sea level, how is it that I could optimize my training here at sea level in order to benefit my race coming

• 1:43:30Speaker 04

  up in September? So anyways, any tips, tricks, or just opinions that you have, that would be great. Thank you.

• 1:43:37Rich Roll?

  Good question, Christopher. Thanks for that. There's a couple of things that you can do. Some are expensive and some are free. And I'm sure you've probably already heard of these. I mean, you can, of course, purchase an altitude tent, right? And sleep in that every night.

• 1:43:54Adam Skolnick?

  What is an altitude tent?

• 1:43:55Rich Roll?

  You haven't watched Alexi Pappas's movie?

• 1:43:58Adam Skolnick?

  No, I have not.

• 1:43:59Rich Roll?

  Tracktown.

• 1:43:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:00Rich Roll?

  She, her whole bedroom is set up as an altitude tent in this movie.

• 1:44:03Adam Skolnick?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:44:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's basically a pressurized tent that you can put in your bedroom and sleep in that approximates the, what it's like to be at altitude by like, you know, it's a reduction in the amount of oxygen, basically, that acclimates you to altitude. And then when you go out and you go out of the tent and then you train, you're obviously at sea level. So you get this boost. So it's the back and the forth.

• 1:44:31Adam Skolnick?

  Like a decompression chamber, kind of.

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  Sort of like that, yeah. And I actually don't know how expensive those things are. I just assume they're probably crazy expensive. Hardcore endurance junkies swear by them. Of course, you could take a weekend trip to altitude and try to get, you know, some training in, you know, at 7,000 feet. I don't know if that's possible, especially during a pandemic. And obviously, that's something I'm sure you, that's occurred to you.

• 1:44:58Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:44:59Rich Roll?

  At some point. So I don't know how helpful it is for me to mention that. Another thing that some people Have expressed positive results from is wearing a training mask, which is basically like it kind of we're all wearing masks right now, but it has like a gauge on it and it reduces the amount of airflow that you get. I think it's just trainingmask.com, but.

• 1:45:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, there's running in your mask alone could do, could do some of that, right?

• 1:45:26Rich Roll?

  Basically, but, but there is a difference between at true altitude, there it's a low, there's a lower oxygen content in what you're breathing, but you're not restricting airflow.

• 1:45:35Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:45:35Rich Roll?

  And there's something different about restricting the airflow while the oxygen ratio remains the same that scientists have basically said this is not, this is a pretty ineffective way of approximating altitude training. There's an article on Train Right about this. I'll link it up in the show notes. Basically, do altitude training masks work for endurance athletes? The essential conclusion is really not so much. It might be good for mental training though, to like feel what that feels like, to have a little bit of a reduced, just to sort of prepare yourself for that experience. But short of an altitude tent or being able to train at altitude,

• 1:46:19Rich Roll?

  there are certain things that you can do in training. You might want to overindex a little bit more than you would ordinarily on interval training and hill training. You're training for a 50K trail race. It's probably, you know, a pretty zone two approach that wouldn't require a lot of interval training or like hill repeats, high intensity stuff. But there are indications that weaving that kind of work into your daily routine, not your daily routine, your weekly routine, can have some benefits in how your body's going to process altitude. I also would suggest arriving at the event as early as possible, you know, as many days in advance as you possibly can.

• 1:46:58Adam Skolnick?

  What would you say would be ideal?

• 1:47:00Rich Roll?

  Well, seven days, it really takes seven days to acclimate. You may not be able to go a whole week ahead of time to. Reap that benefit, but every day I think is going to be a little bit better if you can do that so that you can get used to it a little bit. I also think you're going to have to boost your hydration and your caloric intake at altitude. Your needs are going to be different. So over indexing on hydration and carbs is going to be important. And short of all of those things, as you just go out and train on a daily basis, anticipate that the suffering you're going to experience is going to be different than what you're experiencing in,

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  you know, in Boston, running around Massachusetts. It's going to be harder. So just start to wrap your head mentally around that and adjust your expectations accordingly because nothing really compares to training at altitude or racing at altitude. So you got to let go of whatever goals you have around pace and time and focus on exertion, right? Because that's really the only metric that's important in trying to train at sea level and race at altitude, right? Like your, whatever your Garmin says about your pace like is meaningless because it's just going to be a lot harder and you're going to suffer.

• 1:48:20Adam Skolnick?

  Is your hydration 2X, would you say?

• 1:48:22Rich Roll?

  That's a good question. I think it's a personal thing. I wouldn't, I wouldn't say 2X off the bat. I think it's something that is going to be different for everybody. But just to be mindful and ahead of it, I think is going to be important.

• 1:48:36Adam Skolnick?

  Because you get that lung burn when you first run at altitude, right?

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  It's the worst. And then you feel like you're the only one who's feeling that. Like, there must be something wrong with me, or I didn't train, or this is going to be terrible. So I think just mentally, you know, preparing yourself for that is, is, is something that would be wise to do.

• 1:48:55Adam Skolnick?

  And if he gets there seven days early, how many runs should he get in?

• 1:49:00Rich Roll?

  Well, I think you should go, if you get there seven days early, go to the highest point that you can because there's probably a variety in elevations, you know, once you get to the venue. So the more time that you can spend at the highest altitude possible and doing your, your training leading up to the event, I think will be beneficial as well.

• 1:49:18Adam Skolnick?

  Cool.

• 1:49:19Rich Roll?

  All right. We did it.

• 1:49:21Adam Skolnick?

  We done did it.

• 1:49:21Rich Roll?

  How are you doing? How you feel?

• 1:49:23Adam Skolnick?

  I feel good, man. I feel, I feel good, man.

• 1:49:26Rich Roll?

  Do you feel like a podcaster?

• 1:49:28Adam Skolnick?

  I do. I feel like I could be NFT'd right now.

• 1:49:30Rich Roll?

  Do you?

• 1:49:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:31Rich Roll?

  Just NFT your body?

• 1:49:33Adam Skolnick?

  Just NFT me. Yeah.

• 1:49:35Rich Roll?

  We could do a digital scan.

• 1:49:37Adam Skolnick?

  If it wasn't so environmentally-

• 1:49:38Rich Roll?

  And 3D print you.

• 1:49:39Adam Skolnick?

  If it wasn't so environmentally intensive, I would just become an NFT.

• 1:49:43Rich Roll?

  Well, that is the future that we're all looking at right now.

• 1:49:47Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:49:47Rich Roll?

  Especially if you read Kevin Reese's new book, Future Proof.

• 1:49:50Adam Skolnick?

  I can't wait to read that book.

• 1:49:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you should read it.

• 1:49:53Adam Skolnick?

  I might NFT one breath at some point. You know?

• 1:49:56Rich Roll?

  That's really at odds with your environmental activism, Adam.

• 1:49:59Adam Skolnick?

  I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:50:00Rich Roll?

  I can't see that happening.

• 1:50:01Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:50:03Rich Roll?

  Unless you buy carbon offsets, right? You can always balance it out. The other thing about NFTs is there's all these hidden costs as well, because you have to, you have to pay for the computing costs, I think. So people who've sold stuff or bought stuff then get these bills that they didn't expect for-

• 1:50:21Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, because you have to keep it going? No.

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  I don't know exactly. I read something about that. I should just stop talking because I really don't know what I'm talking about.

• 1:50:29Adam Skolnick?

  Signing off.

• 1:50:30Rich Roll?

  All right, let's sign off. We'll be back here in two weeks. Until then, you can find Adam on Twitter and on Instagram, at Adam Skolnick. I'm at Rich Roll. Leave us a message if you'd like your question fielded on a future edition of Roll On. The number is 424-235-4626. Check out the show notes on the episode page. We'll link up tons of articles on all the stuff that we talked about today. You can find that at richroll.com. Again, please subscribe to the show on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the places. And that's it. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show.

• 1:51:08Rich Roll?

  Jason Camiolo for producing today's podcast, as well as audio engineering it and doing all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. Blake Curtis for videoing the show for YouTube and all the clips that we share. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ali Rogers on portrait's duty today. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships. And theme music by my boys Tyler Trapper and Harry. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for the love. See you back here in a couple of days with another awesome episode. I don't even know what we're putting up next, but it's gonna be good. I think.

• 1:51:43Adam Skolnick?

  Will it be one of one?

• 1:51:45Rich Roll?

  It will be, it will be a one of one, yes. What if you just made everything that you did on the internet an NFT? Like every tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram.

• 1:51:58Adam Skolnick?

  Sounds exhausting.

• 1:51:58Rich Roll?

  Just NFT your entire experience.