Dave Roll: Meditations On Character, Integrity & Leadership

For reasons both obvious and perhaps less so, this week's episode holds a very special place in my heart. There is something unique about sitting before a microphone that permits a species of conversation difficult to otherwise have. Done right, the inherent formality of putting it all on the record can countenance an experience of rare intimacy that scarcely transpires in the course of conventional human interaction. From the very beginning of this podcast journey, I've longed to host my father on the show. To provide a ceremonial opportunity to probe his life, uninterrupted. To learn things about him I've always wanted to know — but for whatever reason just never found the right occasion to ask. For years, I harbored the fear that if I didn't make such an experience a priority, it might never happen. And that would be something I would deeply regret for the rest of my days. My drive was never to share such an experience with an audience. I wasn't convinced the conversation I yearned for would be appropriate for public consumption. It's always been about creating a moment just for us. A document I could privately keep for posterity. And for my children. However, a compelling reason recently arose to transform this rumination into reality. A gentleman and a scholar, Dave Roll has spent the better part of his life studying history. The apex of this passion is an incredible new book entitled, George Marshall: Defender of the Republic*. An enthralling and deeply thoughtful chronicle of America's most distinguished soldier since George Washington, it's also a deeply prescient and timely meditation on selflessness, leadership, and the momentous importance of moral character in political and social structures. The embodiment of these ideals, Marshall influenced the course of two world wars, and helped define the American century. By way of background, my dad has enjoyed a very successful 35 year career as an accomplished attorney in the field of antitrust. Over the years, he successfully defended clients in investigations and enforcement actions brought by the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission. After government service at the FTC he matriculated to partner and ultimately managing partner of the prestigious Washington, D. C.- based international law firm Steptoe & Johnson. Later in his career, he founded the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, a non-profit, public interest organization that provides pro bono legal services to social entrepreneurs around the world. Now in his third act, Dave is enjoying a successful career as an author. Also historical biographies, his previous titles include The Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to Defeat Hitler* and Louis Johnson and the Arming of America*, a biography of Harry Truman's defense secretary. Enjoy! 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  The thing about Marshall, though, is character. Character matters, and if you have to say anything about the book, it's just, you say, what is it about? It's character. Everybody knew he lived by a moral code that was above most others, and they did not want to, you know, they did not want to displease him in any way. You know, he's called the man with a plan, but he did so much more. So I've had this great reverence for the way he conducted himself and the strong character he had, because he could have been, he could have been president, he could have been anything. Are we ever going to get back to the point where we have these kinds of people in our

• 1:50Speaker 01

  government? Are we ever going to get back to the era where we have moral people that will take stands on principle?

• 1:59Rich Roll?

  That's my dad, Dave Rohl, this week on the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Okay, so this one, for reasons both obvious and perhaps less so, is pretty special. It's a little unique. And I think there's something about the structure, the formality of sitting in front of a microphone that allows, that permits a certain kind of conversation and intimate experience that really just generally doesn't happen otherwise. There's this ceremonial kind of aspect of it, the inherent decorum that creates a kind

• 2:53Rich Roll?

  of undefinable window to go places with people that you otherwise perhaps just wouldn't. And from the very beginning of this podcast journey, I've wanted to have my dad on the show, to have a reason to sit down uninterrupted and ask him all kinds of questions about his life, things I've always wanted to know about him. But for whatever reason, I just, I never asked, and maybe it just was never the right time or the setting wasn't correct. And I think I had on some level this fear that if I didn't make it a priority, that it might never happen. And that's something that I know for sure that I would regret.

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  And to be honest, I didn't do it earlier only because I was super busy. On some level, I think, I just thought it wouldn't work for the show, but nonetheless, that at some point I would do it anyway and perhaps just not share it, just so that we could have that moment and I could keep it, you know, for posterity and for my kids. But a pretty compelling reason arose to turn this rumination and procrastination on this thing into a reality. And that reason is that my dad, who has always been this avid, fanatical student of history, I mean, this is a guy who...

• 4:16Rich Roll?

  On countless weekends would pile my sister and me into the station wagon to go visit some, you know, Civil War battlefield. He's gone on to write this incredible new book. It's called George Marshall, Defender of the Republic. And it's this amazing, compelling chronicle of the life of General Marshall, who was America's most distinguished soldier statement, arguably since George Washington. So it's a historical biography, but it's also this very timely, prescient, at times, meditation, meditation on selflessness, on leadership, on moral character, and how

• 5:00Rich Roll?

  this man's embodiment of these traits, you know, traits that I would contend are quite lacking in our current political climate, influenced not just the course of two world wars, but, but really and truly helped define the American century. But anyway, by way of background, my dad's a guy who has enjoyed a very successful 35-plus year career as an accomplished attorney, mostly in the field of antitrust. Over the years, he successfully defended clients in investigations and enforcement actions brought by the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission.

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  And after government service at the FTC, he was a partner and then managing partner of his law firm, this prestigious Washington DC law firm called Steptoe Johnson. And then later in his career, he went into public service. He founded the Lex Mundi Pro Bono Foundation, which is this nonprofit that sources legal services for social entrepreneurs around the world. And now he's enjoying this incredible third act as, as an author. Marshall is his third book. His previous titles were also historical biographies. He wrote a book called The Hopkins Touch, which was all about. This guy called Harry Hopkins, who was the most powerful man in FDR's administration.

• 6:26Rich Roll?

  And then he wrote Lewis Johnson and the Arming of America, his first book, which was about this guy, Lewis Johnson, who was an important figure under Truman and Roosevelt. But with this Marshall book, he's really, I think, positioned, poised to join the ranks of the great historical biographers like Robert Caro and Walter Isaacson, who, incidentally, actually gave him an amazing blurb for the book. I mean, my dad also got blurbs from General Stanley McChrystal, General Petraeus, William Hitchcock. It's insane. Anyway, the book comes out July 9. It's available for preorder now on Amazon. I'll put a link up in the show notes on my website.

• 7:10Rich Roll?

  He's got all this national press lined up and I'm just, I'm like, I'm getting emotional, but like, I'm super proud of him. And it's all coming up in a couple few. But first, you know what I want to do? I want to share a listener email with you guys. Okay, so this is from Charles and Greta. Hello, Mr. Roll. I'd like to begin by saying your journey has inspired me in many ways. So for that, I'm grateful for your courage and discipline to get through your struggles. A little over two years ago, I met my girlfriend, Greta, who had been a vegan for six years. I hadn't known much information about what vegan was, and I was naturally curious about what living a vegan lifestyle meant.

• 7:53Rich Roll?

  I began doing my research, and like many, I couldn't deny what I learned. Shortly after, I began my transition and have made one of the best decisions of my life. During this time, I was working as a special needs teacher at a school called Learning Length School in Miami, Florida. I've always loved working with kids, but as somebody who graduated in recreational therapy, my ideal setting was outdoors and wasn't in the classroom, and I felt like I needed to make a change. I struggled with this for years until, one day during lunchtime, I noticed one of my students eating donuts and a large chocolate milk for lunch. I was outraged and went straight to my director, who later spoke to the parents. To be honest, the student's lunch barely improved, and even worse, he wasn't the only

• 8:38Rich Roll?

  one. I had the idea of starting a lunch program where I could cook healthier meals for our students. I hadn't met Greta yet, and doing this alone while having a full-time job was not working out. Fast forward, I meet Greta and we decide to start a plant-based lunch program called Everyday Foodies at our school in August of 2018. During this time, I continued to work at the school full-time. Greta has her own job and we run our business. We cook, we package all the food ourselves after our jobs. And to our amazement, it was an incredible success. Kids that hadn't even tried a vegetable are now eating broccoli. We even had a young girl that was on a 100% puree diet and is now chewing and eating solid foods. We now decided to go all-in with our program and dedicate ourselves full-time and expand to

• 9:23Rich Roll?

  as many schools as possible. We want to reach as many families as we can and educate them on the benefits of a plant-based lifestyle. So, anyway, what an incredible letter. I mean, it doesn't get any better than that. I mean, this truly is the why behind what I do. To see that this message that I'm propagating and putting out in the world is helping to inspire and connect with people who then go out and actually make tangible, amazing changes with ripple effects that impact many, many people. It's just, it's beautiful. I don't take this stuff for granted at all. And I just, I love sharing letters like that. So, thank you for indulging me.

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  Okay. Dad. Dave. David Lee Rolle. It's my dad. He's on the podcast. So, you know, we've gone through it over the years. What can I tell you? I've definitely put him through a lot. I think it's fair to say, I think you would agree, that he's put me through a little bit here and there as well. And there's been moments, extended periods of, not really estrangement, that's too strong a word. Let's just say detachment or disassociation, the strained years. But I gotta say that-

• 10:46Rich Roll?

  We're in a really good place right now. We've grown quite close over the last several years, and that's good. It feels good. It's really nice to feel like I'm in an intimate, healthy relationship with my dad right now. And so I think the timing for this, for him to join me on this thing that I do here, is rather perfect. So, this conversation is a balance of many things. It's a conversation about his life, the history of our relationship, which gets a bit emotional. I'm going to get emotional right now talking about it. And also, the life of Marshall, you know, this book that he's written about this incredible

• 11:29Rich Roll?

  historical figure, and what we can learn from this extraordinary man's example, how it relates and informs to how we think about current politics, and America, and character, and leadership, and morality, really. So, I'm excited, a little bit nervous to share this one with you guys, but I think you're gonna dig it. In the meantime, please pick up Marshall, Defender of the Republic. You can find it on Amazon or your favorite bookseller. Link in the bio as well. It comes out July 9th, currently on preorder. And I really think

• 12:12Rich Roll?

  it's this important and impressive work of epic proportions. Dave is a gentleman. He's a scholar. And this is our conversation. This is me and my dad. I love you, Dad. So proud of you. Welcome to your very first podcast. Thank you. We're rolling. I'm so excited. Thank you for having me. This is a momentous occasion for a number of reasons. I mean, the first family member that I've had on the podcast, and I've been looking forward to this for a very long time.

• 12:53Rich Roll?

  I mean, the occasion is, of course, this remarkable achievement of writing this incredible book, the George Marshall book, Defender of the Republic, that's coming out in July, and we're gonna talk about that. A big plug. This is a serious book for serious people.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like 600, I mean, the note, it's like so, how, how long is this?

• 13:17Speaker 01

  604 pages.

• 13:19Rich Roll?

  604.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Without the notes.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  I'm intimidated. I've just started to read it. And it's amazing.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  I'll explain that.

• 13:26Rich Roll?

  It's gonna take me, it's gonna take me a while to get through it. But first of all, congratulations.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 13:31Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's no small thing. And the early feedback on this book has been quite spectacular. You have the Ryan Holiday stamp of approval. He loves it. And you have incredible blurbs from Walter Isaacson and General Stanley McChrystal. It's been quite something, right? Petraeus, didn't he also, it looks like you're gonna do an event with him, perhaps?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're doing it in New York in, uh, next fall.

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  Wow, like the 90s.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  He'll do like an interview thing like you're doing.

• 14:01Rich Roll?

  Right. Like, I think 92nd Street Y is what it is.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  No, it's gonna be at the New York Historic Society, uh, which is, I don't know, different place.

• 14:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Um, but he, uh, yeah, he likes, he, he wants to do it, so.

• 14:14Rich Roll?

  That's gotta be gratifying.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  So, no, I didn't ask him. He just sort of said, let's do this, so.

• 14:19Rich Roll?

  Right. But you, how do you, how do you even like, reach out to those people?

• 14:23Speaker 01

  Various ways.

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's quite wily, um, how you've done that.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  With Petraeus, I had a friend who, um, you know, your, your cousin's, uh, roommate at West Point, uh, heard about the book and started, we started corresponding an email. He was head of the army in, uh, Europe, uh, and just, just, just retired. And he contacted Petraeus, uh, and Petraeus got in touch with me.

• 14:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  And said, you know, I'm headed to the Southeast Asia, you know, send me a digital copy of the book, so.

• 14:56Rich Roll?

  And then here you are. So, uh, the third book, I feel like this book is gonna really be the book that's gonna break out.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Hope so.

• 15:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think so. Well, we're gonna talk about all of that, but I, you know, I have, I have this opportunity now, um, to talk to you about a lot of things that I've always wanted to talk to you about. I think the formality of this kind of allows us to explore that a little bit. Um, you know, like questions that you always have that you just never feel like. It's the right time to ask about your life, you know?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:32Rich Roll?

  And how you got to this place like, you know, I think, um, when I think back to, to my grandparents, like Everett and Garnett, like my memory of them as is as of old, you know, when they were old. And I don't feel like ever really. Yeah, it feels like, you know, in my memory, of course, is, is, you know, far from perfect. So I remember them being quite a bit older. But I'm curious about, you know, how you grew up and, and what kind of parents they were and kind of what kind of kid you were, you know, when I think, when I think back, you know, for what it must have been like for you as a young person.

• 16:15Rich Roll?

  I know at one point you mentioned that, um, there was, there was that movie that came out, that Terrence Malick movie that came out called Tree of Life. Do you remember that with Brad Pitt? And it was, it was of that era. And I remember you saying to me, like, that's, that's what it was like when I was a kid.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  In the 50s.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  It stuck with me.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I had a very, you know, uneventful, but very pleasant, you know, perfect childhood.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And I, I grew up in a suburb of Detroit.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Called Ghost Point, lived there until I, you know, went away to college. And my parent, my father, uh, came off a farm, a farm town in, in the middle of Illinois, very poor.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And I never knew, I never knew his parents. In other words, that part of my grandparents, I didn't know. There was a farm in Illinois that we visited a couple of times.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  So he was a guy that, you know, came through the depression and, you know, made his way to the, you know, University of Illinois where I met my mother. My mother was from a much more middle-class family. And they met at the University of Illinois, right after the Red Grange era. But they, you know, they graduated right near the depression.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Actually, on the, on the cusp of it, the beginning of the depression. So my father was lucky to get a job in Detroit as an accountant. And that's what he studied at Illinois and, and worked for the Detroit Edison Company. We were up, I would say, a middle-class family and a middle-class, upper-middle-class suburb.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  So we lived on a street with, you know, lots of kids. This was, you know, post-war baby boom.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  Right. GI Bill, everyone can buy a house and have a car.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, they all, yeah, and Detroit's a big car city. So we, you know, we knew every single car that would come down. And when a Studebaker came that looked, you know, the front, you couldn't tell the front from the back, that was like the biggest thing in our neighborhood. So we put on a carnival when we were kids, seven, eight, nine, 10 years old for polio. Polio was a big deal. When we were growing up, so we had a friend that lived in the next, over the next block, who died, you know, of polio. So it was, it was kind of a threat. And everybody thought it was coming from the water, you know, in the lake. The lake, we lived right near the Lake St. Clair, so they closed all the swimming. I just received a call

• 19:08Speaker 01

  three days ago from probably my oldest friend, who I, who lived behind us, across a field.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  His name was Charlie Harris and, you know, he was a, he was a wild, wild kid who loved chemistry and he became a tenured professor at Berkeley.

• 19:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  And head of the department of bio-physics or biochemistry. Very, now he's very famous, but he has Parkinson's, he just called me the other day, he left me a voicemail for my birthday.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  You know, it was amazing.

• 19:47Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's one of the things that, that I really admire about how you've lived your life is you stayed really close with these friends that you've had your entire life. Like, it's not just Charlie, you've got like four or five of them that you visit every year and you really are in contact with in a way that, that I don't have in my life. It's not my experience.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Well, I, my book, you probably didn't read the, the dedication, uh, which is in the first few pages of the, of the book, this is the George Marshall book. And I dedicated it to Mike and Charlie. And they are two of my oldest, not the Charlie Harris, uh, who's the guy I knew when I was four years old, but another Charlie. And Mike, who I played football with in high school, um, and they are, you know, two of my closest friends. And we still see each other, like next week I'm gonna go have birthday dinner with them.

• 20:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and Charlie went on to become a successful Washington lawyer and Mike was a, was a frogman, which is kind of the prototype of the Navy SEALs, right?

• 20:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it was the, the, the, sort of the special ops group that preceded the SEALs and it turned into the SEALs. So, yeah, he was in two, two. Two trips to Vietnam.

• 21:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  And then hunting diamonds in Brazil. So he's like a stud, you know?

• 21:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  And

• 21:19Rich Roll?

  Still is.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, you know, now he's seventy nine years years old. So so Charlie is a Charlie and I both kind of turned away from the law when we were, you know, fifteen years ago. Said, we're not going to do this anymore. And so Charlie went to grad school. Got a master's in English or, yeah, no, American history. And then I started writing books. So

• 21:47Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  We kind of went that way.

• 21:49Rich Roll?

  Well, Charlie's an amazing guy.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:52Rich Roll?

  You know, a true Renaissance man.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  Connector.

• 21:54Rich Roll?

  A gentleman, a very charismatic individual.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Right, right. Good friends.

• 22:00Rich Roll?

  So you grew up with these guys. You end up playing football in high school.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's it's an all American story in many ways.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  And, yeah, high school, you know, girls, I met your I met your mother when she was sixteen.

• 22:15Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Actually, I met her when we were in ninth grade, but when we were on a trip out west together, I can get into that later. But

• 22:27Speaker 01

  You know, I met, so I've known I've known my my wife now of fifty plus years since high school. So that's like unusual.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, most of my friends' parents are divorced. You know, you guys have really, you know, made it work over the long haul. Like, when you think back on how that unfolded and how you continue to, you know, work on your relationship and, you know, keep the love alive, like, to what do you attribute that?

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't know. It's, you know, it's not it's not like it was it's it's not like it's easy to have, you know, a smooth relationship over that amount of time. And of course, it's morphed, it's changed, it's, but it's, you know, it's pretty amazing.

• 23:15Rich Roll?

  It is.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Pretty amazing. So, you know.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  How many years is it?

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Well, we got married in nineteen sixty three, right, you know, while I was still in law school. So ever since then, when I was, it's

• 23:29Rich Roll?

  Long time.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's getting there. Yeah, mid fifties.

• 23:33Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  So. Actually about your age, you know. So that's, and, you know.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  My wife is sitting not far.

• 23:48Rich Roll?

  She's right off camera over here.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  So. No, I mean, we, you know, when we were growing up, the idea of a divorce was scandalous. And my mother, my mother was a real gossip and, you know, at, at dinner table, there would be all kinds of disparaging remarks about people who were either seeing psychiatrists and there was one woman in our neighborhood was seeing a psychiatrist, like a huge scandal. At least my mother built it up to be, you know, a sin. And then, you know, divorce was just, and that, and that happened to Mike, my, one of the, one of the two guys that, the frogman guy, in the, in the midst of high school.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And it was front page newspaper news. Well, I remember one morning came over for a ride to school with my father and myself. And that was the day the headlines came out. His, his, his family was somewhat, is somewhat prominent in the history of Detroit. So they, it was like front page news.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  His parents were getting divorced and that made, that made the newspaper.

• 24:55Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:56Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  I think it was in the Detroit news. It's like, you know, and Mike felt, you know, it was terrible, it was a terrible thing for him.

• 25:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that must've played on your psyche over the years as an impediment to divorce. I mean, you don't, you don't, you don't stay married for that long without having moments where it looks like it might break.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So, and you don't, you don't let that happen. So, yeah, exactly. That's exactly right. And I'm sure it's, you know, with, Charlie and Mike have been married as long as, as I have. Charlie Harris, the other, the other guy, the Berkeley professor, you know, has been divorced three times, so.

• 25:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, to be clear though. You know, I don't want anyone to get the impression that you're you're in it just because like you've you've said to me many times, even over the last year, like, you know, I'm really in love with your mom.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:51Rich Roll?

  You know, and that's no small thing.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  No, that's right.

• 25:54Rich Roll?

  You know.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  And she's in love with me.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Was Everett a taskmaster or what kind of dad was he?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Everett was, I think he was laconic in a way. He was, he didn't say a lot. Part of it was, my mother, my mother was a gregarious, social person and he was much more, much quieter, but you know, he had a commanding, you know, way about him. Part of it, though, was just due to the fact that he had a hearing defect. And, you know, it, so it, it hindered him in sort of socialization.

• 26:31Rich Roll?

  Like laconic in the sense of being emotionally disconnected and distant?

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, not, not really, yeah. You know, but when he said stuff or criticized me, which is rarely, rare, but he did, you know, that was like, oh, my God, what if I, you know, I've, you know, losing his respect. So, you know, and I had a, a very extraordinary older brother, much older than I was, eight or nine years, so, and he was, you know, he was, as we were growing up, you know, he was like Mr. Big in terms of having a, I think they even, they, they used to take us and have, we had our IQs, you know, done, so I, his IQ was like.

• 27:13Rich Roll?

  And everybody knew what everyone's IQ score was?

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Well, he's, he's an academic, you know, he's a, he's of a prodigious academic. He's a nuclear physicist and a, and a extraordinary French horn player, so, you know, but, you know, sort of had real problems with social, social skills. But anyway, so he was always the, you know, the, the, the person that, you know, that I, that I had to live up to in some ways intellectually, but I was never, you know, in his league. I don't think.

• 27:50Rich Roll?

  Did that make you resentful?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  No, the one thing it did was I said, I'm not going to the same college he went to. And, you know, I could have gone where he went and decided to go to, you know, where I could, you know, excel, you know, not a, I wanted to play football, you know, so I went to go to a division, division three, didn't back then, it wasn't that way, but it was a small school.

• 28:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Amherst College.

• 28:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  Well, what, you know, one of the things that I think we share is, you know, we're both, we're both competitive and we're both ambitious.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Driven.

• 28:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very, very driven. And I feel, I feel like you had this sense that you wanted to, you know, get out of Detroit and make a name for yourself and do something different on your own terms. Is that fair?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  Well, except I didn't get out of Detroit at first. You know, what I, what I really wanted to do was get out of law school fast and start making money and see, you know, whether I could make a name in the legal profession. But, you know, and I didn't have, I went into the law school without a lot of circumspection about, I gotta be a lawyer. That was always what I wanted to do. I always wanted to go into court or something like that. You know, it was a good profession. You could, you could, you know, make a living at it. And it was a big deal to have a job, you know, getting out of college. And my parents, you know, that was a huge thing with them, was you, you gotta get a job.

• 29:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  You know, so.

• 29:27Rich Roll?

  So, so after Amherst, I mean, you fast-tracked your law school experience, right? Didn't you start in the summertime?

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Started the day after I graduated from college. Literally, we drove all night. I remember from Amherst to, to Ann Arbor, Michigan.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  And they dropped me off at the law school at eight in the morning, you know, and I had an eight o'clock class. It was first class in law school.

• 29:54Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And that's where I met the famous Kurt Luddke.

• 29:59Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Standing outside the door of our classroom, smoking cigarettes.

• 30:05Rich Roll?

  It's a classic story. So for those that are listening, Kurt Luddke is kind of a notorious, famous character who was your roommate for a period of time and ended up, he became a journalist and then became a screenwriter in a second act of his career, kind of famously announced, "I'm going to be a screenwriter now." And everybody laughed and his first, his first screenplay was called Absence of Malice that ended up getting directed by Sidney Pollock starring Paul Newman and Sally Field. And his second screenplay-

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Was nominated for, that one was nominated for-

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  For Best Original Screenplay, Oscar nomination. His second screenplay was Out of Africa.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Right. And the third one was a bust.

• 30:48Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah, Random Hearts. And then he kind of never came back from that.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Well, he just didn't want to do it.

• 30:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And he also never, he refused to go to Los Angeles, right?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  He calls everybody in Los Angeles scum.

• 30:59Rich Roll?

  I think he like made Sidney Pollock come to Michigan to meet with him.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  I mean, Sidney Pollock, like a legend of, you know, Hollywood filmmaking at the time. But at that time, when you met him, he was kind of a carousing notorious character.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Right. We had, in law school, we, there were three of us, four of us actually, living in a, in a, in the law quad, as they called it. But Kurt, he never, he never went to class, except if the class was in the mid to late afternoon, he would go. Otherwise, he didn't go to any classes.

• 31:35Rich Roll?

  Right. Wasn't he dating like a nurse?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, she didn't get off until midnight. So it was kind of a difficult, you know, I had to kind of get out of there to, to study. But anyway, we had, we had a good time.

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  And.

• 31:53Rich Roll?

  And so you, you then end up getting a job at a law firm in, in Detroit.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:59Rich Roll?

  Back to Gross Point. You meet my, well, you reconnect with mom because she was, she was an undergrad at Michigan when you were in law.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  When I started law school, she was still, you know, in her senior year. Uh, and then the, uh, this, the second summer I took off rather than stay in law school and we got married that summer in 1963.

• 32:19Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Um, and, and then we lived in a little apartment near the stadium, the University of Michigan.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  For my final year and, and my wife Nancy.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  Was, uh, studied, um, speech and hearing and got a job right away as, you know, in a local, uh, school. So we finished that out. Then I got a job. Started working in Detroit. We lived in Detroit, um, for a couple of years and then moved into Gross Point where I grew up. And that's when I started thinking about going somewhere else.

• 32:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, a couple of things. First of all, over the years, you, you, you always had a knack for having like an iconic car. Like you had a Dodge Dart and then we had a, we had a VW Beetle. And then I remember you had that like Navy, that, that like midnight blue Navy, uh, Mustang.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Mustang. That was a beautiful car. Yeah. 19, uh, what is it? 1964, 65, I think it was. I think they came out in 64. We got one in 65.

• 33:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  And there's a great photo of you, uh, in your diapers, uh, you know, when you're two or one and a half, helping me wash that Mustang.

• 33:36Rich Roll?

  I know that photo.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  And, uh, you know, that was a big deal. Uh, I think for you, I think more, more for you than for me.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  Well, I look at that photo and I'm like, oh man, if you'd only hung on to that car.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  But the first car I had that when I went to Amherst, you weren't supposed to have cars. Amherst is in Amherst, Massachusetts, a small, uh, all men's college. So I had, my mother didn't realize what she was doing, but she let me have her English Anglia. This was the worst English, it was an English Ford. And I don't know why she bought it. It was the cheapest car you could possibly buy in the United States, I think. And it was like almost made out of cardboard.

• 34:20Rich Roll?

  I've never even heard of that.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I had it at Amherst secretly, you know, parked in town somewhere so I could use it. And actually, when Nancy came to visit me for, you know, the annual big weekend, she came with another, another young lady from Gross Point who was dating my, you know, one of my best friends. They came to Amherst for the weekend. And while we were in that English Anglia, we got arrested.

• 34:55Rich Roll?

  What happened?

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I forgot exactly how it happened. We were, I guess I was speeding or something. And then we ended up in the Amherst Police Department Headquarters, this little police department. And they, oh, because I was, because I was supposed to have a car. And, you know, I was an Amherst student.

• 35:17Rich Roll?

  It was actually against the law?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Well, it was against the regulations of the, of the, of the college. And I had to go before, before a court, a court of, an honor court at Amherst. And I don't know, I was suspended or something.

• 35:33Rich Roll?

  Judicate this transgression of...

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, driving a car without permission of the, of the college. And then I think you could have a car when you were a senior. But anyway, we used to drive that, that, that car back and forth from Amherst to, to Michigan. And it was, you know, an adventure because it would, it would constantly break down.

• 35:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  And so forth. We didn't have enough money to go on the turnpike. So we would drive the back roads in English Anglia all the way between.

• 36:02Rich Roll?

  Break down on some country lane next to a cornfield.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  I can't imagine anybody's interested in any of this.

• 36:09Rich Roll?

  I am. Well, I mean, so when is the, you know, when is this idea of like moving to to Washington like enter your consciousness? I mean,

• 36:20Rich Roll?

  was there a sense like this is where the action is like, I want to be involved in, in, you know, this is where things are happening and important people are making important decisions.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And this was Nixon, the early Nixon. And actually, there was a lot of reform going on in Washington. Of course, it was preceded by Kennedy's, ask what you can, you know, you can do and so forth. But I was, I wanted to be a big time antitrust lawyer, which means, you know, litigating against corporations on, you know, economic issues and breaking up, breaking up big business, that kind of thing. I was really entranced with the idea of, you know, there's too much monopoly power in the, in the American economy. And it was, it was, you know, it was an exciting field and I couldn't get enough of it at the law firm I was with in Michigan.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And then this book came along, who now this, one of my really good friends, a book called, the first, the first expose of the big law firms in Washington. And it was called The Super Lawyers. So it was about a bunch of the guys at, at the big law firms in, they weren't big then, but the major law firms in Washington. And it was about what they did. They did huge kinds of interesting pro bono work. You know, they were arguing Supreme Court cases. They were breaking up companies or defending the companies. It was written by a guy named Joe Goulden. And Joe Goulden now is in his 90s, but he's one of my really good friends and he's been mentoring me on writing books ever since I started.

• 37:56Rich Roll?

  I never knew that.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  And he just lives like two blocks away. So he's, you know, been my big fan, you know, I wrote an op ed piece a few weeks ago about NATO.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  And I wanted to get it published, you know, in a decent newspaper. And, you know, you send it to the Times or the Post and they don't know who you are.

• 38:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  But he helped me get it, uh, published, not in the greatest newspaper of all, but it was the Washington Times. Uh, it was the first time I got an op-ed piece and, you know, he, he made it happen. Anyway, so then I had a really good friend from Amherst who was, uh, working in Washington. He called me one day and said, "If you ever want to come to Washington, call this guy." Uh, so I called-

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  Joe Golden?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  No, this was a different, different guy, yeah. Uh, a friend of mine that I went to Amherst with who was working in the Justice Department. He said, "If you ever want to, uh, do antitrust in, in Washington, call this guy." So I called the guy and he was an FTC, uh, guy, you know, recruiting lawyers. And at the time Ralph Nader, and nobody who's listening to this has probably ever heard of Ralph Nader, maybe not.

• 39:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, he's, you know, famous, perhaps most famous for the Pinto thing.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, right, right. Ralph Nader, uh, had, had this group of hotshot young lawyers that were called Nader's Raiders. And they went into the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission and they identified all kinds of scandals and corruption and so forth. The FTC, uh, pre-Nixon was, you know, filled with a lot of southern guys that were just kind of living off the land. And they, so that, as a result, they had a lot of investigations. They cleaned house, they brought in a, a really respected, uh, chairman of the FTC, Miles Kirkpatrick from Philadelphia. And he was staffing the FTC with all these young hotshots and I wanted to be a young hotshot.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  So I got a great job there. I just, I was just very lucky. And I was headed, I headed up- You know, a quarter of the antitrust cases that they were doing, I had 28, suddenly I had, I was 32 years old, I had 20, 28 or 29, 30 lawyers working for me. And we were investigating the oil industry. It was like heaven, you know? Or that we, we went after Xerox at the time, which had 99% of the market in, in, in copying. So, you know, we were, and we had economists and we went around.

• 40:27Rich Roll?

  And there was like a new energy in that organization to really like affect change.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  And it was the best job I ever had. And we, I probably should have stayed in it longer, but stayed in it for three years. And there was a lot of esprit. It was we versus them. The best lawyers in Washington were always on the other side. So, we were the young guys that were trying to break them up. We probably wasted a lot of taxpayer, I'm sure we wasted a lot of taxpayer money on our cases. But we, you know, we, we sued, we sued the oil industry, which were the big eight companies under a new, you know, shared monopoly kind of theory. So, it was lots of fun.

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  How long were you at the FTC?

• 41:12Speaker 01

  About three years.

• 41:13Rich Roll?

  Three years? I thought it was longer than that.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  No, it was 70, so I was out, I was, went in, it's in 1972, came out about three years later and I, and I thought, I always thought I'd go back to my law firm in Detroit because I was a partner in that law firm. And, you know, they wanted me to come back and so forth, but I decided to interview. So, with law firms, from the FTC, you had to be careful ethically about starting the interview process, but the big law firms were looking for people, you know, coming out of the FTC and coming out of the Justice Department, you know, to defend the companies that are being sued by all these guys. So, I interviewed, actually came close to working for Sidley and Austin, which was the

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Chicago-based firm that was handling all the ATT. After I left, at about the time I left the FTC, they were going after the whole AT&T telephone system and breaking it up. So, Sidley and Austin was defending all those companies and they wanted, you know, people like me. So. I went to Chicago, interviewed them. And then I also was interviewed by the firm I ended up with going to was Stepto and Johnson because I had met the head of the antitrust practice at Stepto when I was in the FTC. He was on the other side of a case.

• 42:35Rich Roll?

  But ultimately, this presents a scenario in which you're jumping the fence and changing sides, right? Was there any kind of ethical dilemma around that?

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Didn't cause me a lot of problems. Yeah, at that, you know, this was a very prestigious law firm in Washington. They were bringing me in as a partner. You know, if I'd gone in that firm as an associate, I don't know whether I would have made partner. I didn't go to Harvard or Yale Law School, which is where most of them came from, Harvard, Yale, Stanford. So Michigan was, you know, it was a top-ranked law school, but it wasn't in the, you know, in the higher.

• 43:17Rich Roll?

  Right. So this was your entree, your opportunity to kind of be with the big boys.

• 43:22Speaker 01

  See if I could swim in that, in that atmosphere.

• 43:25Rich Roll?

  And how old were you? Like 35?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  No, I was 35. Yes, but that was the one about the age when you became partner at that point.

• 43:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  But I had to prove myself when I got in there, so.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  So I think I was six or something when we moved to Washington. So I must have been 10 or something like that when you joined Stepto?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, or nine, right? Nine or 10, right?

• 43:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  And yeah, you were thrown into the, you know, to the Washington scene, so to speak, and getting beat up on the street corner while you were waiting for the bus.

• 44:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I had a well-documented.

• 44:13Rich Roll?

  I mean, you know, I'm interested in, in, but in, and how you remember me at that period of time. Like, I just remember myself being kind of a sensitive kid who was a little bit awkward and uncomfortable in my own skin and sort of kind of bumbling around, a little, a little bit confused. Like, I was a sweet kid. I was a little introverted and, you know, kind of had difficulty making friends unless I was in like, you know, an optimal social environment.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, but you had, you know, your best friend was Eric Melanie that lived right behind us.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  We had a neighborhood. Yeah. It was like you, you know, you ride your bikes around the neighborhood and all that kind of good stuff.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  And, you know, you went to the Bethesda Elementary School. It seemed like you were doing pretty well. But I know you were somewhat awkward.

• 45:04Rich Roll?

  I think at Bethesda Elementary, I didn't really know what was going on. And then I don't think I was off to an excellent academic start. But perhaps around the time that you joined Steptoe, you know, suddenly we went from, you know, very much middle class to you then, you know, having, you know, making a much better living. And then you were able to send me to St. Patrick's and that was like an incredible environment in which I thrived.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:31Rich Roll?

  And I kind of, you know, came out of my skin at that period of time.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  I can't remember how you got to St. Patrick's.

• 45:38Rich Roll?

  I don't, I have no idea.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  A bus or your mother drove you?

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  I mean, it wasn't close to home. I think there was, I think you, you drove me or took me to a, I think there was a bus stop. There was one of those, like at one of the circles, Westmoreland Circle or something like that where you would drop me off and I'd take a bus.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  But I remember when you were waiting for the bus, or was it? Yeah. Well, you were waiting for the bus. And there was that guy that, that used to, you know, make your life miserable.

• 46:03Rich Roll?

  Well, that was Bethesda Elementary, I think, taking my hat and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. There was a lot of that.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  We were worried about, you know, there was this tough kid in the neighborhood, you know, that was harassing you. But we were, you know, I think it was, from my perspective, I, you know, I didn't think you were. You know, having, certainly not having academic problems or, you know, learning or anything like that. You were a smart, smart kid. You liked to read. You, you know, you were picking up on everything. You know, I, we, we, we played around with sports because I was, you know, interested in that, you know, and soccer, that didn't seem to go so well.

• 46:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I played soccer for a number of years, but I was absolutely, you know, hopeless.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  But of course, you know, the minute you hit the water, that was like, you know, that was where you belonged. And, and I think, you know, and you were incentivized by just getting a trophy, you know?

• 47:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, there's nothing like, you know, success to, you know, inspire a young person. I mean, I was naturally good at it. And then of course you gravitate towards, you know, what you're, you're, you know, sort of getting accolades in. And I was naturally good at it. Although I think, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think I was on a swim team when I was like seven or something. I didn't, it wasn't until like I was 10 and then I started getting good.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Getting serious.

• 47:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then it became like, kind of really serious. But, you know, I remember those St. Patrick years, like in elementary school very fondly. And then I went off to Landon and that became a whole different story.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. I know. I'm sorry about that.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  There's nothing to apologize. I mean, I remember being very excited to get into that school. I mean, it was like this prestigious prep school and you had to apply and, you know, it was a big deal, you know, and I wanted to do well, but I, you know, in retrospect, looking back, like, I don't think it was the right environment for me.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Well, St. Patrick's, those are the ones, they are the ones that said you should go there.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  Is, did they say that?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. They said, well, you know, we don't think you should go to St. Albans because I don't know what, because two, and, and Sidwell doesn't give you enough structure, you know, and they were the ones, I think, that sort of directed you there. And

• 48:21Rich Roll?

  So it's their fault?

• 48:24Speaker 01

  I think they had a lot to do with that. But anyway, it was in and it was not far away and it was, you know, and I felt for you in some of those situations.

• 48:35Rich Roll?

  I mean, looking back on it, I've made, I've really made peace with a lot of it. I think I held on to a resentment about it for a long time. And, you know, I've exerted a lot of energy to kind of work through all of that. And I would say that reconnecting with Tom Scott and then participating in the Nantucket Project last year and seeing a bunch of people from my class who also attended that was incredibly healing and has given me kind of a revisionist perspective on it. That's allowed me to feel a lot better about it. And the truth is like, look, these are, you know, 1%er, you know, problems.

• 49:20Rich Roll?

  Like I had the privilege of growing up in a family where you guys could provide everything that I needed and, you know, send me to these, these amazing academic institutions that gave me an incredible, you know, head start.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  But I think, I think one advantage of it that you're, you know, you're, you have real, you know that you had, that came out of it, some, a real, you know, look, your life was not that tough.

• 49:50Rich Roll?

  No.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  In, you know, in, in almost all respects. But, you know, the one thing that they said was, you know, you can't, you know, swim with this club team because you're going to miss mandatory football in the, in the fall or baseball or lacrosse in the spring. And they had this very rigid sports program at, at Landon. And you can't miss that. Whereas if you want to be a top swimmer, you got to work out in the morning and then you got to work out in the afternoon. And it's, you know, you just have to do that. And you took it upon yourself. To go to the administration and make your case and say, look, I have to do this.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  And if I can't, you know, if you can't, if you won't let me, I'm going to have to leave the school.

• 50:41Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Big threat.

• 50:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm sure they were quaking in their boots over that.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  No, they were.

• 50:47Rich Roll?

  Ultimatum.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  But they, but you were doing it well academically, very well academically, and they didn't want to lose you, you know, you were going to be one of the kids that's going to get into Harvard or, you know, Stanford or whatever, swimming or not. So, you know, and they, they respected somebody who was coming, make his case. I think he did it in writing.

• 51:09Rich Roll?

  Well, I had, I had an ally in the headmaster.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Well.

• 51:13Rich Roll?

  Malthus Coats, who, who actually, you know, liked me and was a fan and was a support system for me. The athletic department was not, you know, looking upon that as kindly.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  And who was the coach again that?

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  Well, it was Lowell Davis was the athletic director, and he just had it in him that he was going to defeat me no matter what. And I'm like this little skinny 15 year old kid who's just saying like, I want to go swim with this club team, swim in the morning, swim in the afternoon. I don't want to do sports at Landon. I'm not going to, like, I remember the headmaster saying, well, what happens later in life when, you know, you, you go to the club and you're going to play tennis? And I just thought, well, that's not my life. I'm not going to be that. That's not the guy that I'm going to be. I want to do, I really am committed to trying to be excellent in this regard. And it confounded me and confused me and angered me that they couldn't see that and wouldn't support that. And so I really did, like, I put it in writing and you helped

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  me, like, you helped me make a case. Like, we had to litigate this and it was not an overnight thing. At first they said no, and it went through all these iterations until finally they relented. And I think if I'm.

• 52:23Rich Roll?

  If I'm correct, that at least at that time, I was the only person they had ever exempted from their athletic department to allow me to go do this thing, which I then did. And

• 52:35Speaker 01

  They're gonna, they said, if this kid gets away with it, what's

• 52:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, what's the precedent? It's a slippery slope argument.

• 52:43Rich Roll?

  And then I think junior year is when I wanted to participate in the high school, the local high school swimming championships, Metros. And in order to do that, your high school had to have a swim team. And my high school did not have a swim team. So I started one. It was, there was one member. It was the only one.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Wasn't there one other guy?

• 53:01Rich Roll?

  I don't, I don't think so. But I had to piggyback on these other high school meets in order to like, go through the ramifications of qualifying. And then ended up, you know, doing well at that meet. And to this day, there is a swim team at Landon now. And I feel like I helped birth that in my own, you know, kind of inelegant way. But that was quite a saga. And I will say, you know, also, you know, I have to thank you for supporting me in pursuing that dream because it was, you know, it was like an off-center thing. And it required you waking up with me at 4:30 every morning and driving me to swim practice.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Secretly hoping you wouldn't get in.

• 53:43Rich Roll?

  And you did that. You in the little MG and you would drive me to some practice and you would sit in the car while I was training in the dark cold and like mark up these briefs, like work in the car until I was done. And you did that until I could get a driver's license. And that was a huge thing. And I think about that all the time. I think about that when, you know, now we're in this, this situation where, you know, our home is fractured and Julie and I are living in two different places during the week. And, you know, we're trying to support Mathis in art school and it's not easy. And I think, well, my dad got up and drove me to swim practice at 4:30 in the morning. Like, this is the least I can do to pay it forward for my own child.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  But the good thing is you don't have to go to swim meets every Saturday.

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's.

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  That's the harder part, right?

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. Oh, yeah.

• 54:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Driving out to Bowie and sitting in a steamy chlorinated auditorium for seven hours.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  I used to actually take boxes of docu-- this is in the days, you know, way before computers, when it, when we did all our antitrust cases with documents and it'd take a box of documents to the swimming meet. I could finish a whole box during the, during a swimming meet. Because people who aren't used to that don't realize it, but their child only has about, you know, two minutes of glory during an entire day.

• 55:04Rich Roll?

  Eight hours, you know, and driving to these, you know, places way out in the middle of nowhere. But you did that.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  We, well, yeah, and we became kind of, you know, the kind of parents that, you know, that are aggressively, you know, involved with, not like we were screaming at anybody or anything like that, but we were, we were pushing it, you know, and we wanted you to succeed and we, we knew how happy it made you. And of course, not just you, but our daughter as well. So.

• 55:38Rich Roll?

  I felt that, I mean, you, you were never like the, you know, the, the crazy parent on the, you know, in the stands yelling or anything like that, but there was definitely a sense, if not an expectation, that you will succeed.

• 55:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:55Rich Roll?

  You know, and I felt that and I shouldered that and I was able to fulfill that, I think, in certain respects, but I also think I paid, you know, I paid a toll for that as well.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it, it, I think it, it also exempted you from some of the knocks, the knocks that you would might otherwise receive going through high school, you know. Uh, like, you know, you gotta maybe get a part-time job, maybe learn more about girls, maybe learn more about social stuff, maybe get into a little trouble, uh, you know, with alcohol or whatever, uh, but

• 56:34Rich Roll?

  Earlier.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  Yes, uh, and learn, you know, not being exposed to, and Landon, of course, is, you know, there was a social scene at Landon that you weren't in.

• 56:45Rich Roll?

  No, I, not only did I exempt myself from the athletic program, I exempted myself from the social environment there completely. And I lived a very monk-like existence. I would wake up ridiculously early. I'd go to swim practice. I'd, you know, get through school. I, whenever there was a study hall, I would fall asleep on a desk. I was exhausted all the time and would go to swim practice after school and then do my homework and be asleep by nine o'clock every day. And there was, and then weekends were swim meets.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:16Rich Roll?

  And that was it.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And the kids at Landon knew, knew, knew that that's, that's what you were doing. Uh, so, you know, the proms, the dances.

• 57:25Rich Roll?

  I didn't get in trouble. I didn't like to, I didn't do any of that normal stuff.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  And so you had to face up to it.

• 57:30Rich Roll?

  But I was, but I was very driven. I was like, I'm gonna get into all these schools. And I got into all of them. And, you know, that was like, uh, you know, I mean,

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Twelve for twelve.

• 57:40Rich Roll?

  It was pretty epic to get into like basically every college you applied to, you know? And I think, you know, there was a, you know, obviously that's gonna make you feel good, but I'd also, I felt, you know, I felt like the weight of that too, I think. Like, what does that, what does that mean? And like, what is, how does that impact like the choices you're gonna make later in life with what you're gonna do with yourself?

• 58:04Speaker 01

  I thought, an interesting thing, you know, that I always thought you and Neil Phillips would go off to Harvard. And, you know, talk about Neil Phillips and, and how he was regarded at Landon, how you were, and how you came together.

• 58:20Rich Roll?

  Sure. So Neil Phillips was the best athlete in our school. And Landon School was a boys' prep school. It was small and exclusive. There were only like 60 people in my class. Neil was African-American, a very gifted athlete, an incredible, an incredibly charismatic individual and intelligent, the best basketball player, the best football player. He played, he played all three sports, baseball. Gets into Harvard, I mean, just, you know, on this incredible trajectory towards success. And he has blazed quite an amazing path for himself. He is now regarded as a

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  great civil rights leader on behalf of, you know, he's championing underprivileged African American boys. And he now founded and runs this school in Florida and travels a lot. He's an incredibly prolific public speaker. At the Nantucket Project this past fall, he interviewed George W. Bush on stage and it was riveting. It was absolutely riveting to see two people from very different perspectives come together for, you know, compelling talk was something to behold. And, you know, he's marched with John Lewis and he's done a lot of amazing things. And I have so much respect for, you know, what he's done with his life. And, you know, to be able to reconnect with him this past fall.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  But you connected with him back then, didn't you? When you both got into Harvard?

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I got into Harvard. I ended up not going. And there are, listen, there's plenty of times where I think, you know, maybe I made a mistake, you know, I know that you would have preferred me to go there. And look, for good reason, you know, who says no to that? Like, who am I to decline that opportunity that nobody gets, you know? And how would my life have been different, you know?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  It's hard to say.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  It's hard to say. And I can't spend a lot of time, you know, entertaining that. But, but it definitely would have been different, I think. But I was happy, you know, at Stanford. And that's when I started, you know, making all of these mistakes and kind of sowing some wild oats that I never did in high school.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:36Rich Roll?

  And, you know,

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Same thing would have happened at Harvard.

• 1:00:38Rich Roll?

  But I think a lot of it is a, was the expression of, you know, repressed emotions that I didn't understand and really didn't know how to process about like what I was doing and like, what makes me happy? I was on this path towards success and upward mobility without ever taking a moment to stop and say, well, like, what am I, like, what do I want to do? What do I want to be? What, what makes me happy? Because I do think that I was an offbeat kid. And I think I, you know, had I not, had I not gotten into any colleges, I would have done some kind of, you know, offbeat artistic thing, you know? But I was on this path towards being a Consultant, or an investment banker, or a lawyer, or a doctor.

• 1:01:21Rich Roll?

  And then, you know, alcohol entered the equation, and then all bets were off. You know, and hence, you know, ushered in a very painful period, you know, not just for me, but for you. I mean, what I put you guys through, you know?

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  That was painful.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Talk about, for a second, I'm interviewing you.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  No, I mean, about Michigan, because Michigan was always on the horizon because of your grandfather, and you went there. And is that the first time you started drinking?

• 1:01:55Rich Roll?

  I think, I mean, I don't know that it, it's the first.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I'm gonna put on my Michigan hat.

• 1:02:00Rich Roll?

  You're gonna put your Michigan hat on. I went on a, I went on a recruiting trip to the University of Michigan. I was, I was recruited there by the great John Urbanscheck, who was the coach at the time, still like my favorite swim coach ever. I think, I just think he's the best. And he was really rebuilding the program at that period of time, and trying to create something, you know, noteworthy and remarkable.

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, he got that guy, the guy younger than you that made the Olympics, right? From, from Washington?

• 1:02:31Rich Roll?

  Tom Dolan.

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  No, no, it was the other guy.

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  Well, Michael Phelps.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  No, it was before that. There was a guy that did the canoeing.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  Oh, Mike Barrowman.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  Barrowman, who got, who got a medal.

• 1:02:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, Mike Barrowman, famous Olympic swimmer.

• 1:02:45Rich Roll?

  And, you know, for those that didn't read my book, or are kind of coming into this, you know, green.

• 1:02:52Speaker 01

  No, I forgot it's in your book, right?

• 1:02:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I mean, a lot of people who listen to this haven't read the book.

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  My mother, who's sitting right over here, her father was a champion swimmer at the University of Michigan in the late 1920s and early 1930s. I believe he was captain of the team in 1929. An Olympic hopeful.

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Tried out for the Olympics in 32.

• 1:03:19Rich Roll?

  In 32, and he got third or fourth, whatever the one, I think they were taking three at the time and he got fourth, so he missed by one slot, if I'm not mistaken. He actually held the American record in the 150-yard backstroke, which is an event they don't do anymore. I mean, he held an American record. It's really quite amazing. And when you visit the University of Michigan Nautatorium, it's called the Matt Mann Nautatorium, that was his coach at the time, legendary swim coach, and along the hallways, they have all of the old team photos, and you can find his photo on the wall. And now it's hanging in my container office, there's a picture in the book. And I never had the opportunity

• 1:04:01Rich Roll?

  to meet him because he passed away before I was born. He died of a heart attack at age 54. And I know that that was, you know, a very traumatic experience in my mother's life and Nancy's life. And I never really thought that much about him. I mean, I would hear stories about him, but I didn't really connect with his legacy emotionally until, you know, I went on this, you know, my own journey with alcohol and then, you know, later on, the second bottom of like, you know, reconfiguring my lifestyle, that I started thinking about him a lot more. And now at 52, I think about him all the time

• 1:04:43Rich Roll?

  because I'm two years shy of when he passed away. And in so many ways, I feel this kinship with this person that I've never met. And so certainly, that was part of the allure of, you know, attending Michigan. And I thought, you know, long and hard about, about doing that. But to get back to your question, yeah, I went on a recruiting trip to Michigan, and there was a swim meet going on during that visit. And then after the meet, there was a, there was a big party. And I remember being in somebody's apartment, and there was a keg party. And, you know, everybody's drinking, and I think maybe I'd had a beer or two. It wasn't like my first beer ever or anything like that, but this was the first

• 1:05:25Rich Roll?

  time that I was in like, an environment where I really wanted to be part of this social community, you know? I really like looked up to all of these athletes. And there was one moment in particular where there was the diver.

• 1:05:43Rich Roll?

  Bruce Kimball.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Oh, Bruce Kimball was that?

• 1:05:45Rich Roll?

  Who was the most famous diver in the world, other than Greg Louganis at the time.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  Olympic medalist. His father, Dick Kimball, was the diving coach.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:56Rich Roll?

  And Bruce Kimball.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  They were from Ann Arbor, yeah, right.

• 1:06:00Rich Roll?

  Bruce Kimball had a beer in his hand, and he did the most amazing thing that I've ever seen to this day, where he did, he was holding his keg cup of beer, and from a flat foot, he did a, he did a, he jumped up in the air and did a backflip and landed on his feet, holding this cup of beer, and he didn't spill any of it. And I thought, that is the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Whatever that guy has, like, I want it. And I was like, I'm in, let me have a beer, you know, and I got loaded that night, and ended up partying with him. Of course, you know, the, the sort of postscript to that story is Bruce

• 1:06:42Rich Roll?

  Kimball would later careen his car into a crowd of people, killing

• 1:06:49Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 1:06:50Rich Roll?

  at least one person, and going to jail, you know. He's, he's an alcoholic.

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  Destroyed his life, destroyed his career. You know, when I say, like, I want what that guy has, like, I did, you know, and then I ended up going on, you know, a less tragic version of that trajectory, in a way that I couldn't have foreseen.

• 1:07:11Speaker 01

  Do you think our band check knew what was going on with the team? When you were recruiting?

• 1:07:16Rich Roll?

  No, I mean, listen, you know, I think all of these coaches, whether they're swim coaches, or, you know, football, they know, they know these kids are partying, but, you know, they, they cast a little bit of a blind eye. They have to keep a loose grip on this. Like, they have to let these kids, you know, do what they're gonna do in college. They can't over police it. So I think, on some level, they kind of know, and they make a choice to not get too involved. And I don't know what it's like now, but, you know, it was a free for all when, when I was in school.

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Do you think Skip knew?

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's the same thing, you know, I think he kind of knew.

• 1:07:52Rich Roll?

  And kind of decided to, you know, not make too, too big of a deal.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  You guys weren't doing drugs there, mainly drinking, right?

• 1:08:00Rich Roll?

  It was drinking. Yeah. I never, I never saw, I mean, once in a while you'd see some kid doing hard drugs in college, but it wasn't part of my experience, you know, it was just a very, it was a drinking culture. And at that time at Stanford, I mean, you could roll a keg into the stands and just, you know, have at it and go crazy. I mean, they, they don't let you do that anymore.

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  It was the same when I was at Amherst.

• 1:08:21Rich Roll?

  You know, it was, you know, whatever you wanted to do was, was fine. And it was just bananas. And I went crazy. I think I, you know, coming from a very structured environment to having that kind of freedom, I was ill-prepared for that. And I wasn't mature enough to, to handle it. And I just went full on. But I think there was a, you know, something tweaked inside of me because my relationship with alcohol was just different from everybody else. And I had a, if not a conscious awareness, a semi-conscious awareness of that from the very beginning. It just would take a very long time before I would do anything about it. And, you know, it just progressed over time until it got, you know, really dark and, and terrible, you know? And I put you guys through a huge amount of pain for what

• 1:09:06Speaker 01

  Every time I cross

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Terribly sorry.

• 1:09:07Speaker 01

  Every time I cross Pico Avenue, coming from the airport, I think about, you used to live up there.

• 1:09:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I lived on, I lived on Marine off Main Street. And there was that time when you came and visited me where I was really at my nadir. And it was after, you know, the wedding that went awry and all of that. And it was just a super dark moment where I was like drinking in the morning.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  It was a Rose Bowl. It was a Rose Bowl.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  We went to the Rose Bowl.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  That's the last time Michigan.

• 1:09:33Rich Roll?

  I can't, I can't even think about that weekend without getting really upset. It was really, you know, it was hard. Not because, not because of the pain that I was in, but because of, of how I conducted myself with you, you know? But I think ultimately that, that precipitated, you know, the solution.

• 1:09:56Rich Roll?

  Because that was after that visit, you were like, I'm done. Like you're, you're, you're kind of on your own. You know, we know what's going on. And if you want help, we're here from you. But, you know, we don't, we don't, we can't really, you know, participate in this anymore.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Well, we helped you get some help.

• 1:10:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:10:14Rich Roll?

  You did.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Which was, you know. But I'll never forget that because it was the, partly because of Michigan. It was the Michigan National Championship game. They ended up sharing it with Nebraska. But it was Woodson in the, and so actually had a pretty good time that day.

• 1:10:31Rich Roll?

  After the actual, after the actual game.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you got me out of the field. I was standing in the end zone, you know, during, during the third quarter of that game.

• 1:10:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:10:41Rich Roll?

  But anyway, you know, I wanted to, you know, just publicly acknowledge that, you know, the support that you showed me during those difficult times, like really allowed me to get the help that I needed and to change my life. And, you know, it was just a, it was a really hard time for all of us.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Very, very hard for us. Nancy and, and myself. Yeah, we, because we had, we had never experienced, you know, a problem in our family like that. We had death, you know, Nancy's father died. That was, and, you know, but.

• 1:11:23Rich Roll?

  Well, and then her brother.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  And her brother too, on, yeah, on top of it. But, you know, but sort of a, you know, a, a breakdown, you know, in the, in the family dynamic was, was very, very difficult for, for us to deal with. And we didn't know how to deal with it. And we didn't want to talk about it a lot, you know, with other people. You know, it was our son, you know, really in trouble with alcohol, seeing, fortunately seeing a guy that, you know, got you into the rehab, which, and then we all traveled to that. And that was like, an amazing eye

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  opener for me and Nancy and Molly, who, your, your sister who also.

• 1:12:11Rich Roll?

  Family week.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Who went. I was. Chairman of the law firm at the time and you know, part of the, you know, part of the reason I stopped doing it as long as I could have was that I, you know, this whole thing, you know, upset my life a lot, not in the, not in the sense that I, you know, I wanted to quit law or, you know, anything like that, but it was just like, hey, you know, there's more out there and there are other things I can do than just, you know, keeping my head down and doing my 3,000 hours a year or, you know, trying to run the law firm.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  So it was, it was a time for, it was a, you know, it actually was, for me personally, in the end, it was a positive thing to go, to have gone through that. So I don't feel, you know, and I felt, you know, you think about more, a lot more about life. So part of me also regrets the call I made. You know, I sort of triggered this whole thing in a way, in terms of your path, because I remember when you were on the waiting list at Cornell Law School, and I think waiting list somewhere else, Georgetown or something.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, and you were spending the summer in New York and got onto a, a movie project where you were helping out with a, a production of a movie. And I called you up, it was almost Labor Day and said, you know, if you want to go to law school, and I'm not suggesting that you should or shouldn't, but you're going to have to get your stuff together and be there in three days. Yeah. If you want to go. And, you know, that was sort of like, You know, what if that didn't happen?

• 1:14:13Rich Roll?

  Well, that was one of those pivotal moments. I mean, I was, you know, I had been a legal assistant at a big law firm in New York City and that kind of ended and I'd applied to law school. I got rejected everywhere. I was on the waiting list at these two schools. And in the meantime, I was a production assistant on this low budget independent movie, which I was

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  About abortion.

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  Right. It was called, it was called Rain Without Thunder. Nobody saw it. But I actually, that was like the greatest job ever. My job was to drive the talent around. So I got to pick up Jeff Daniels from the hotel.

• 1:14:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:14:46Rich Roll?

  And drive him to set. And I got to ask him all these questions about working with, you know, this director and that director and the theater company that he had in Michigan. Who else? Like Steve Zahn was in that movie. Linda Hunt, remember from The Killing Fields?

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:02Rich Roll?

  The really short woman. She won an Oscar for that. I got to drive her. I mean, it was, you know, I was getting coffee. It was a, you know, like low on the wrong job, but it was really fun. But I was not in a good way. And yeah, I didn't even have an apartment anymore. I was like couch surfing at Friends. So you didn't even know how to get a hold of me.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  But I had to be there right away. And I literally, you know, when I, when somehow you got in touch with a friend of mine who, my friend Chris Hildon Brown.

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  The guy was Ty Brown. Yeah.

• 1:15:33Rich Roll?

  And then I had to get, you know, from, I had to like pack my bag and go down to DC and get a car and figure out where Ithaca was and drive in there. And like literally, I was in a law, a law school class like the next day. I didn't even have an apartment. I didn't know that I was going to, I, at that point I had written off that that was even going to be the path for me.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  Pablo was there though.

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  Um, not at that time because he had started there and then he had stopped out to train for the 92 Olympics in Barcelona. He then finished when I finished. So we did our final year together. But. I think about that, too, like, what would have happened had that not happened? But I don't think me freewheeling it in New York City would have ended well. I think in certain respects, like getting me out of Manhattan and into Ithaca in a structured environment was probably a good thing. And I, you know, I actually enjoyed law school. Ultimately, you know, being a lawyer in a law firm was not the path for me.

• 1:16:33Rich Roll?

  But the academic aspect of being in law school, I actually, you know, I have fond memories

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  I've never heard you say that.

• 1:16:40Rich Roll?

  You have it?

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  Because I didn't like law school, but...

• 1:16:42Rich Roll?

  I enjoyed it.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Rich Roll?

  But yeah, I mean, that could have been, I mean, you know, life could have been very, very different had that not happened. But, you know, here we are. You know, I think it's also, even in sobriety for me, it's been, it's been a challenge for you to see me make choices that are kind of a little bit, you know, far afield from what perhaps you imagined.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It's not Georgetown DC.

• 1:17:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so it's like, I'm not, you know, I didn't move back to Washington. I'm not driving a Volvo around with stickers on the back window with the schools that my kids go to. Like, I chose a different path. And I think that's been, you know, a process for you and mom to, you know, acclimate to.

• 1:17:38Speaker 01

  Well, yeah.

• 1:17:39Rich Roll?

  I think we're okay now.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  Showing up at the wedding.

• 1:17:43Rich Roll?

  It's been a journey.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  Showing up at the wedding when you got married to Julie with, in my sewer sucker suit.

• 1:17:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  And...

• 1:17:51Rich Roll?

  With Bhagavan Dha standing seven feet tall in sandalwood on his forehead.

• 1:17:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you know, I know. It's a lot.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Julie was, she was, she was seven months pregnant.

• 1:18:04Rich Roll?

  She was pregnant and she had a Hannah tattoo on her belly.

• 1:18:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:09Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's a lot for, you know, inside the Beltway lawyer.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right. No, it was, it was, but, you know, this, yeah, it, we, today, I mean, still, your lifestyle is so much different than, than ours. But we were talking last night, we just, you know, loved it. We think it's so great and we love the kids. Julie is, is an amazing, you know, she continues to astound me with her stuff that she does and she comes up with. And last night Nancy said the nicest things to Jaya aftermath. I said, love, she,

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  she just, Nancy is, is just enamored with, with Jaya and what a free spirit she is. So, she's a cool kid.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Come a long way.

• 1:19:04Rich Roll?

  We've, you know, we've made some, you know, choices about how to live that are, you know, a little bit different and, you know, that comes with, you know, we're not always making the right decisions about that. But, you know, I feel like we're, we're trying to, you know, live in an authentic way and, and do it, you know, as responsible.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  Nancy always says, how does he make any money?

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  And I constantly explain it as best I can, but it is somewhat of a mystery.

• 1:19:33Rich Roll?

  Well, there's no, you know, there's no edifice or boss, you know, from which the paycheck comes and it's a different, you know, it's, look, it's, I, I understand.

• 1:19:43Speaker 01

  You don't get a W2.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  No. Well.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Well, maybe you do. I don't know.

• 1:19:48Rich Roll?

  No, I don't get a W2.

• 1:19:51Rich Roll?

  Well, we can, I can explain all of that to you later. But she did say, it was funny, she's like, do you pay the guests to come on the show, on the podcast?

• 1:19:59Speaker 01

  I'm hoping to get paid.

• 1:20:02Rich Roll?

  I'll send you the check later. Um, yeah, so, and I try, I try to be, you know, empathetic and sympathetic to that because it is so different, but I think we're, we're in a good place now, aren't we?

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so, I think so.

• 1:20:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, I feel like we, you and I have grown a lot closer over the last, you know, two years or something like that, and that, that's, warms my heart, and I would like to, you know, continue that evolution.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 1:20:30Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  I, you know, I'm, I'm reserved about stuff like that, but.

• 1:20:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  I, I.

• 1:20:37Rich Roll?

  What do you mean, reserved?

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  Well, I, I have more trouble talking about our relationship and, you know, how much I love you and things like that, uh, so, it's just.

• 1:20:49Rich Roll?

  Just, we don't have to do it in a public forum.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  It's the way, it's the way I am.

• 1:20:53Rich Roll?

  Well, let's talk about, let's talk about George Marshall.

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Are you ever gonna get to it?

• 1:21:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the book, this is why I'm here.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  I know, I know.

• 1:21:03Rich Roll?

  Um, well, first of all, uh, you know, it's your third book.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:08Rich Roll?

  And, you know, tackling something like this, you know, is such a huge commitment of time and resources and energy, like, how do you settle on your subject matter? Like, why did you decide, like, George Marshall is the person I want to spend the next five years with?

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's sort of, it's a progression because of the, the, all three books actually have a common person that runs through them, and, and it's the founder of my law firm, Stepton Johnson.

• 1:21:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  The first book was about Louis Johnson, who was Secretary of Defense under Truman, fired by Truman, uh, famously, uh, and replaced, uh, by George Marshall. So, yeah.

• 1:21:52Rich Roll?

  There's a through line.

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  That, that through line, and then, um, Harry Hopkins, the second book, was, you know, Roosevelt's, uh, one of Roosevelt's closest advisors, who lived in the White House for three and a half years. And was a, you know, a former social worker. But he and, he and Marshall, of all people, became really close, close friends. And that, Marshall used Hopkins to get to Roosevelt, or he was a, you know, a form of communication to the White House, because George Marshall did not want to get real close on a social or intimate relationship with Franklin Roosevelt. It was, it was a moral code that he had.

• 1:22:35Speaker 01

  So, I, you know, I almost abandoned the Marshall project because my first agent and publisher, you know, did not like my original proposal. Actually, it was a much shorter treatment of Marshall. But they, you know, they didn't, I don't think my agent really got it. And she didn't really know, you know, sort of that era, that time, that timeframe. So I switched agents and, you know, they encouraged me to make it a big book. And they encouraged me, you know, I said, you've got, you know, you've got talent as a writer. And, you know, you can do this.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  So they, that's why it got to be as big as, you know, as long a book as it's possible.

• 1:23:21Rich Roll?

  Well, also, there was like this treasure trove of documents that were recently discovered, right?

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of stuff, well, the question, you know, there's been biographies about Marshall. There's a four-volume, you know, 2,000-page biography that was sort of the, you know, the, the standard thing back in the 80s by a guy named Forrest Pogue. So everything, you know, you have to start with that. But all the, you know, all the letters, the, the family letters and so on were donated to the Marshall Foundation, you know, three or four years ago. And then we happened to meet with George Marshall's, would be his step, his step-grandson.

• 1:24:08Speaker 01

  Marshall had no children and he had this favorite stepson named Alan Brown, who was killed in the war, World War II. That's a whole, that's a big story, part of my book. But his, the guy that was killed, his son lives up in northern Massachusetts. And he, you know, we went up, Nancy and I went up to visit with he and his wife in this little farmhouse, it's up on the border between Vermont and Massachusetts on the Connecticut River. And he pulls out this box of documents underneath a, you know, a bench in his, in his den, you know, started pulling things out, you know, and that just went nuts, you know.

• 1:24:50Speaker 01

  Letters that had, you know, in these thin envelopes that were written during the war, the so-called V letters, back and forth. So, he loaned that, that whole box to me. So I, you know, took them home. And I actually started getting nervous that I'd lose them or something like that. So I, I made records of all of them and gave them back. But for example, you know, the, the battle, the battle map that was in this guy's father's hand, when he was leading a tank on the way to Rome, shot in the head with a sniper, but the battle map itself just gave me a chills because I had a piece of, a piece of Marshall's history.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  So, the thing about Marshall though is character. And if I, if you have to say anything about the book, it's just, you say, what is about, what is it about, you know, what is it, it's, it's character.

• 1:25:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, look, we're talking about a guy who's, you know, arguably the most distinguished military leader since George Washington, right? And, you know, a guy who, who, you know, five-star general, who had a career that spanned 50 years under 10 presidents and all these different incarnations from great military leader to...

• 1:26:12Rich Roll?

  You know, being Secretary of Defense and

• 1:26:15Speaker 01

  Secretary of State.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  Secretary of State and, you know, winning the Nobel Prize and, you know, being a leader in World War I and World War II, and then ultimately all the way through the Cold War. I mean,

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  This guy's legacy is just, you know, it's insane, but he's always kind of been perceived as this austere, you know, stoic.

• 1:26:34Speaker 01

  Alouge.

• 1:26:35Rich Roll?

  Nobody could really kind of get a handle on his, his personality or his character. And that's kind of what you've been able to crack here with this.

• 1:26:43Speaker 01

  I hope so. But it's not easy with him. He is a very, very difficult character to get a handle on. But with the, with the letters from his, you know, to and from him, his favorite, the son he never had, the stepson.

• 1:26:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  He married.

• 1:27:01Rich Roll?

  His first wife couldn't have kids, right? She had a heart condition.

• 1:27:04Speaker 01

  Right. And died.

• 1:27:06Rich Roll?

  And then he, then he marries this actress later.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Rich Roll?

  And, you know, gets this stepson Alan, who was kind of the son he never had.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  And ends up sort of pulling some strings to make sure that he got into this tank battalion that ultimately lends, leads to his demise.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Right. So there's that ironic thing. Yeah, Marshall pulled strings. He never would do one a favor for anybody, but he did for this kid, headstrong, stepson that he really loved, got him into the first armored division, which had just finished with Casserine Pass and was going into Italy. And, and of course, Marshall, from a strategic point of view, would never want to be in Italy anyway. He had this fight with Churchill over that. So, but anyways, stepson, they pull strings for, gets into Italy and then gets killed. And actually, his wife, Catherine, the, the mother of Alan, knew that, she found out

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  that Marshall had pulled strings to get him into this armored tank unit. And she was mad.

• 1:28:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  You know, she was.

• 1:28:18Rich Roll?

  I mean, that could be considered an unforgivable.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  And he wrote, he wrote Alan, and he said, keep this confidential. Your mother is really angry about how I got you into this stuff, but, you know.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  And, you know, when he was killed, it was, you know, obviously a devastating thing for his mother and everybody else. But, so, that story is that sort of a backstory that goes into talking about Marshall and all of his accomplishments, setbacks, you know, mistakes. But, you know, probably his greatest moment, and the moment he'll be remembered for, was a speech at Harvard in 1947, where he, he was not a great speaker, but he gave the, the speech that introduced the Marshall Plan, which what became the known as the Marshall Plan. He never called it the Marshall Plan, but it was called the Marshall Plan, and it

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  was the economic plan that the United States financed that saved Western Europe.

• 1:29:22Rich Roll?

  Right. Rebuilding Europe. It was originally called the Truman Plan, right? But Truman's popularity was in the gutter at the time.

• 1:29:30Speaker 01

  Well, Truman said, you know, I don't call it that. Anything, it's, anything that they send up with my name on it is gonna, what did he say? Anything that they send up to the Hill with my name on it is gonna quiver a couple of times, fall onto its belly and die, he said. Even the worst congressman, even the worst Republican will vote for something if it has Marshall's name on it. So, anyway, his name, he's, you know, he's called the man with a plan, but he did so much more. So, I, I have this great reverence for, for the way he conducted himself and the strong character he had, because he could have been, he could have been president, he could have been anything.

• 1:30:15Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  He turned down the job of, of, you know, leading, well, Eisenhower became president because of Marshall. Marshall could have had the job of leading the Normandy invasion.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Which incidentally, it's the 75th anniversary in June. But Marshall could have had that had he asked for it, and he wouldn't ask for it.

• 1:30:39Rich Roll?

  The president wanted him in Washington at the time. And he was able to kind of, you know, set aside his own personal ambitions and his ego for, you know, what was required to do the job, which goes to that, you know, issue of character. I mean, do you think, you know, time and time again, this is a guy who's like so disciplined in how he compartmentalizes his personality in order to kind of do the job, and he's continually, you know, you know, from, from like building, you know, the military complex as we know it today, from scratch and, you know, reinvigorating the officer corps, like all of these things,

• 1:31:21Rich Roll?

  like the legacy of the work that he did back then, we're still living with. But do you think, like, had he, like, what is the price that he paid for, you know, ascribing to this, you know, ego is the enemy kind of, you know, stoic mindset? I mean, could he have been president? Like, what, you know, what would his, his path have been had he allowed himself to?

• 1:31:46Speaker 01

  Probably, he probably wouldn't have been a great president because he was so, he had this moral code that was, he was very, he was much more inflexible, I suppose, with respect to politicians. He had a, you know, I-

• 1:32:00Rich Roll?

  He just wouldn't play the game.

• 1:32:01Speaker 01

  A form of contempt, yeah. You know, toward the political side of things. And he, he had a terrible temper, which he managed to control most of the time, but sometimes it let loose. The, the people that have blurbed the book, and there are about 10 of them, I think now, you know, some famous authors and, you know, the generals and so on.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  The, what, you know, what they're, some of them are saying, some of it's just implicit, is that, you know, in this, they say things like, in this era of failed leadership today, you know, this, this man, George Marshall, you know, stands out, or wish we had a Marshall today, that kind of stuff. So there's a political, you know, I think the reviews and so forth of the book are going to probably be looking at that.

• 1:32:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the timeliness of it, because the juxtaposition of his moral character, you know, in contrast to what we're seeing, you know, currently.

• 1:33:08Speaker 01

  The amoral.

• 1:33:10Rich Roll?

  Like, kind of, you know, hoist him up as this example, you know, that, or this, this kind of archetype that we need to reconnect with.

• 1:33:20Speaker 01

  And probably the person today that most resembles Marshall in terms of his behavior and character is, is, is General Mattis, who of course resigned because the president, I forget exactly what the president didn't do that he wanted to do, but there were serious, serious things.

• 1:33:42Rich Roll?

  So many things have happened since then, it's impossible.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Mattis was kind of a monk-like character. He wasn't even married, or isn't, never married, but is kind of regarded as the same sort of person who, you know, is above it all.

• 1:33:58Rich Roll?

  But do you think that a person of, of, you know, Marshall's kind of ethical stature could even survive, you know, Capitol Hill right now?

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Probably not.

• 1:34:09Rich Roll?

  I mean, without, you know, somebody who's going to say, I stand on this ground and I'm not going to play, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to submit to the histrionics of daily politics, isn't going to last a week.

• 1:34:21Speaker 01

  It's not to say he wasn't. I mean, in order to get the Marshall Plan passed through Congress, it was a Titanic job. As you're talking about, post-war America, we're trying to get our economy back on their feet, and they want to spend, at that time, $13 billion on saving a bunch of countries in Western Europe. So the selling of that Marshall Plan was a hugely political exercise, and Marshall was, because he was regarded as nonpartisan, had a huge role in, in basically lobbying the congressmen. So it wasn't like he... You know, was, one of the reasons why Roosevelt wanted him in Washington was because he was good with Congress.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  So, I'm just saying, you know, the political situation, his political expertise, it was a different kind. Now, if he were Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State under Trump, I can't imagine it would last, you know, for more than six months.

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  You know, he might have let a few things go by, but if he's getting continually undermined or contradicted or belittled, you know, either that, or somehow he would have captured Trump as he did Truman. Truman just, you know, revered Marshall. I mean, anything Marshall wanted, but Trump would never do that, in my judgment, so.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, what are the, what are the kind of lessons that we can draw from this guy's example that are relevant to, you know, helping us kind of understand, finding our way forward in this climate?

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  You know, character matters, you know, you know, we, you know, it just, in magnanimity, I mean, you know, David Brooks wrote a great little book about character.

• 1:36:25Rich Roll?

  I just heard him on a podcast the other day. He's had quite a revelation in his personal life.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  I know, I know. And the recent book, and people are wondering whether he's Christian or Jewish and all that stuff.

• 1:36:38Rich Roll?

  That's kind of beside the point.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  I know, well, but they are. And so, in any event, you know, character matters. Is, are we ever going to get back to the, to the point where we have these kinds of people in our government? You know, the last, we've been hearing a lot about the Bush family recently because of Susan Page's book about Barbara Bush, and Susan Page is a good friend of ours. And, you know, the last kind of president that bore any resemblance and had a cabinet that bore any resemblance to...

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  The way it was with Marshall is George H. W. Bush, probably. So, and are we ever gonna, you know, are we ever gonna get back to the era where we have moral people that will take stands on principle?

• 1:37:35Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a, there seems to be a split, and I'm interested, you know, in your perspective on this as somebody who's lived in Washington for a very long time and is steeped in, you know, politics as, you know, a Beltway insider. There's the perspective that what's happening now is, is an anomaly.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  That's what we hope.

• 1:37:55Rich Roll?

  And we have to, we have to weather it out and, you know, that ballast will find, you know, its neutral point, you know, that it will swing back towards some semblance of normalcy.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:38:06Rich Roll?

  And the other camp, which is, things are never gonna be the same.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:38:09Rich Roll?

  You know, we've created a different system and we've accepted certain things and created precedents for which, you know, it's unclear.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  I'm afraid.

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  What the future holds.

• 1:38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm concerned about that, and.

• 1:38:22Rich Roll?

  And what, so what do, like, your colleagues, you know, on, on Capitol Hill, like, what is the, you know, kind of inside banter on all of that?

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  You know, I think that the communications that we have now in getting the information out and how quickly it gets out, you know, by tweet and, you know, and all the, all the social media has changed it probably forever, you know, and we're react, we have to react much quicker to everything. There's, and, and so, you know, I, I do think that we're never gonna get back to sort of the old days of George H. W. Bush and that kind of, you know, it's a little, it's

• 1:39:09Speaker 01

  elitist, it's a, you know, you know, the Brent Scowcroft's and, and, and those kinds of people and, you know, Cheney and Rumsfeld, I think, you know, in terms of the cabinet that eight, that, that George, George W. had, you know, took us part of that way in terms of, you know, not having, not having the, I don't know, the, the standing, the strength of character that somebody like Marshall or the predecessors.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Have had. So I think, I think there, there's probably a permanent shift that isn't good and we're not going to come back to it. So I'm not, the identity politics, the idea that we now have, you know, 20, probably more than 20, I think de Blasio is going about, is about to move into the Democratic candidacy. Everybody's running for president all at once. It's unbelievable.

• 1:40:16Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  One-term senators.

• 1:40:17Rich Roll?

  I heard a joke the other day, somebody said like, they could just throw in a name with a stock photo of somebody to see if they could just, if it would just fly under the radar. Till somebody said, wait, who's that guy? The guy from the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog?

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I haven't even heard about Howard Schultz lately, but you know.

• 1:40:35Rich Roll?

  I haven't heard anything about him lately.

• 1:40:37Speaker 01

  So, you know, everybody thinks, well, if Trump can, can pull it off, you know, somebody else, you know. So, you know, and I'm worried about what will happen when Trump loses, which, you know, a good chance he will next time around, you know, the transition. And, you know, when he's out of power, he'll be, he'll be in it, he'll be causing just about as much trouble as he is now.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's not, he's not going to go quietly into the night, no matter what happens.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:41:12Rich Roll?

  And what is that going to look like?

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Terrible transition. And yeah, it's, so I don't want to be, you know, overly, you know, sounding like an old grouch about, about, you know, how things are going these days and so forth.

• 1:41:29Rich Roll?

  And the good old days.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  You know, there are some great candidates among the Democrats. I'm not sure, you know, who I would choose at this point.

• 1:41:38Rich Roll?

  It's early days. So, you know, but when you, when you look at, you know, back to Marshall, like.

• 1:41:46Rich Roll?

  When you look at his character and his incredible capacity for leadership, like what are, what are some of those leadership skills that we can extract from his example that you'd like to see more of? Like if, if somebody's listening to this and they're running a small company or they're a coach or a teacher, like what are these, you know, I'm, I'm interested in kind of like how you distill down what it was about him that made him so effective?

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think that, you know, his, his choice of people to be put in various jobs, um, you know, he didn't like self promoters. He, he didn't, you know, he, he, he was selfless himself to a, to an enormous degree. And, and, you know, so he chose people that weren't self promoters, chose people that, that, uh, well, that, that, that replicated his own, his own abilities. Terms of leading, leading people, a lot of it has to do with, uh,

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  I think Dean Acheson used to try to describe it. Dean Acheson worked with, with Marshall a lot. Dean Acheson was Secretary of Defense or Secretary of State after Marshall. He had a sense when he entered the room, there was a, everybody in it knew that he was entering the room.

• 1:43:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a sense of controlled power. Now, what was that? It was, you know, he, he didn't, he, he ran meetings where he basically let everybody talk before he, he, he would then render an opinion. He had this amazing gravitas, you know, and people didn't mess around with him. How did he do that? Uh,

• 1:43:42Speaker 01

  The best, the best words that I could remember from, were Acheson's words, controlled power. He was under control. Everything was businesslike, rapid fire. It was all serious stuff. No joking around, no, you know, bullshit. Or if there was bullshit, he would call it out. But he always, he let everybody else talk, you know, until they were done. And then he would say, okay, this is what we're gonna do. Right. He was not, you know, he was not a good speaker, public speaker. Notorious, red speeches.

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  He was more effective in, in small groups. I think, I think he, everybody knew he lived by a moral code that was above most others. And they did not wanna, you know, they did not want to displease him in any way. You know, he said, you know, he used to say to the guys that worked for him, women. Actually, he was a fairly important promoter of women later in the, in, when he was Secretary of State. But he would, he would say, you know, don't, don't, you know, don't worry the problem. Don't worry, you know.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  I, I don't want to hear about how you, you know, the trouble you're having with my, with my assignment. Solve the fucking problem. Just do it. Yeah, yeah. You know, I, I don't want to hear about that stuff. I hit, you know, when he, when he, when he, when he was trying to figure out how to design, design the Marshall Plan, he didn't design it. He found the guy, the brightest guy, you know, in the State Department, George Cannon.

• 1:45:38Speaker 01

  And he pulled Cannon out from the war college or wherever he was and said, and brought him into Washington, this right after he became Secretary of State. He set up a policy planning thing. Anyway, he explained his vision of a Marshall Plan to help Western Europe. And he said to Cannon, you've got three weeks to come up with a plan. And Cannon said, well, you know, what do you want? You know, do you have any guidance or whatever? He said, yeah, avoid trivia. Now, he may have said a few more things than that, but Cannon, Cannon already knew that,

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  in fact, Cannon, what Cannon wrote back in 1946 about Russia is so, so far, it's such a perfect analysis of the way the Russian, you know, people and their governments are and have been ever since. They're doing the same thing today that Cannon talked about back in 1946. In what respect? Marshall found, well, that, that they were paranoid. There was a paranoid, not just, you know, not just Stalin, Stalin at the time, but now

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  we're dealing with Putin and all the people since, between them, borders. It's all about border security. And when NATO is expanding now from, it used to be 12 countries to 29, surrounding, surrounding the Soviet Union, now today, Russia, you know, right on their borders, you know, it drives them crazy. And, and you can make an argument that we should never have expanded NATO the way we have, because it just exacerbates the problems that we have with Russia. But also, their desire to destabilize, this is back in 1946, he was talking about that.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Now, today, we're using, you know, cyber, cyber methods to destabilize the United States. But Cannon was predicting it back then. But Cannon was such an intellectual, it was always hard to ever pin him down, because the minute you started talking, well, it's all about, you know, we've got to have more missiles or whatever. No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about containing them through, through economics. So, I'm just saying, Marshall picked Cannon.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Put him in, the first thing he did when he came to the State Department, he said, "Nobody around here is thinking about, you know, problems that we may face in the future. We need..." He got Cannon, he brought Cannon back from Russia, or from wherever he was, I think it was at Russia at the time, and set up a policy planning thing. And Cannon basically ran the State Department, you know, foreign policy, under Marshall.

• 1:48:33Rich Roll?

  But he crafted the essence of what became the Marshall Plan.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, well, there were three different people, actually. It was Marshall's thoughts, a guy named Chip Boland actually wrote the first draft of the speech. He was a young interpreter, but a very smart guy. And then Cannon, Cannon was the big brain.

• 1:48:56Rich Roll?

  But what I hear in that is, in Marshall, this guy who would, you know, approach these problems by finding the smartest people who knew more than him, and he wasn't afraid to push them out front, and to sublimate his own personal aspirations or egoic tendencies in order to get the job done.

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, you say that better than I do, that's right.

• 1:49:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the lesson in that is, you know, ultimately, you know, at the end of the day, like, this guy's one of the greatest statesmen of all time, and we all know who he is, and yet, that was forged through, you know, a persistent refusal to, you know, make these decisions based on his own personal advancement. Like, the irony in that, you know what I mean? And I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of, there's a lot to be appreciated about that, you know, that, that, that level of

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  Selflessness.

• 1:49:54Rich Roll?

  Humility. I mean, this is what Ryan talks about in this book, you know, it's, ego is the enemy. Like, if, when you're, when you're being driven by your ego versus sublimating the ego for, you know...

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  Sublimating the ego in order to be of maximum service to getting the job done properly, without forethought for who's getting credit for it, ultimately results in the advancement that you're probably seeking anyway.

• 1:50:21Speaker 01

  That's right. And it happened to Marshall in two iconic moments. One, when he grabbed General Pershing in First World War, grabbed him by the arm. Because Pershing had come and had criticized the training of the First Division when they were, this is when they were still trying to get ready to go into the First World War. They were over in France, training. Pershing came and ripped everybody apart. And Marshall was, at that time, a major, not a general. And grabbed Pershing's arm, literally. It was like, you know, grabbed the head of the army.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  The whole, the whole of the American Expeditionary Force was Pershing. Grabbed his arm and said, "You don't understand what's going on here. We're getting bullshit orders." He didn't say that, but he said, "We're getting these orders from your people and back where they are, and they don't make any sense." And he went, "Blah, blah, blah." And it went on. And everybody said, "You're done." And Pershing came back a few days later and said, "Let's sit down and talk about this. I think you hit..." Same thing happened with, 22 years later, he's in a meeting where he wants to be appointed by Roosevelt, Chief of Staff. He's up for being Chief of Staff.

• 1:51:46Speaker 01

  But he's sitting in this meeting in the back of the cabinet room in the White House, and Roosevelt's talking away and doing his usual, and coming up with a plan. This is in 1938. You know, how many planes they should build or whatever. And he says, what, don't you think so, George? Trying to get, everybody else in the room had agreed.

• 1:52:12Rich Roll?

  On board with his.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  Everybody else in the room had agreed and said, oh yeah, that's right, Mr. President. And Marshall said, first of all, he's irritated that the president called him by his first name. But Marshall didn't like that. If you didn't know him, if you knew him, it was okay. Patton called him by first name. But, so, he said, you know, I don't agree with that at all, Mr. President. And, and Roosevelt was shocked. He was startled, you know. And the meeting ended. And so all of Marshall's friends said,

• 1:52:50Rich Roll?

  Right, he's like,

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  You've just ruined your chance to be.

• 1:52:53Rich Roll?

  But there's multiple examples of this, where he speaks truth to power in a very blunt and frank way, in a, in a career-ending way. And yet ultimately, he keeps sort of, not just surviving that, but advancing himself as a result.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  You know, if he, if, if, you know, he did that to Trump, you know, Trump would never confront him personally, but it might be the end of him with Trump. I don't know.

• 1:53:18Rich Roll?

  What was, what was the, the most surprising thing that you learned about him and all of this research that you've done over the years?

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose that, you know, the inner life part of it, it was, you know, there

• 1:53:33Rich Roll?

  He's actually a human being.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and around his, he had a few intimate friends, you know, and I relate to that. You know, not, he wasn't, you know, he didn't like to go out in Washington and, you know, socialize and all that stuff. But he, you know, he had this intense love. You know, one of the things I didn't even put in the book was,

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  They sent Alan, the favorite stepson, to a prep school in Virginia called Woodbury Forest. And on one of my trips down to Lexington, I decided I'm gonna go to Woodbury Forest, the prep school, and see what they have in terms of letters from Marshall, or Marshall's wife, to this kid while he was in prep school. And the kid was always getting in trouble. He was, I knew he was, you know, but he was a great athlete. And that's what Marshall loved, you know, to go fishing with him and, you know, monitor his progress at Woodbury Forest. So I couldn't believe it. The prep school let me look at everything that was there.

• 1:54:44Speaker 01

  And I didn't find anything, you know, I found out about how he stole a car one night and, you know, escaped and almost got kicked out of school, and then the letters that go back and forth, and how he, the various exploits, but, and how Marshall and his wife reacted to that. So, you know, here, they're just parents, you know, they're just like everybody else.

• 1:55:11Rich Roll?

  Yes, to put his pants on, one leg at a time, just like everyone else.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he, and they, they had this relationship with a young girl, Rose, who they met when, when he and his first wife moved into Washington, they moved in this apartment building, and Rose was only eight. And she was precocious, and she started, she saw Marshall in his uniform and started talking to him in the elevator, and, and he just, you know, he, he established a relationship that went for the rest of his life with her.

• 1:55:44Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  She had, she was his goddaughter, she had, you know, all this stuff. And she wrote, actually wrote a book about it, so, so you can find out, and, you know, how he confessed to her when he lost his first wife, you know, so there was a whole human side.

• 1:56:05Rich Roll?

  Right, like this more robust interior life than you would have imagined.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:56:10Rich Roll?

  And this book is really kind of the first place where, yeah, where you're able to weave that.

• 1:56:15Speaker 01

  I think so, yeah, but, you know, I don't, you don't wanna get... There's so much in terms of his accomplishments that you want to also, so you got to figure out the balance.

• 1:56:26Rich Roll?

  Balancing that.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  Of, you know, what he's doing in the Marshall Plan versus, you know, and then there was a year in China, which, you know, defies, you know, description where he's supposed to negotiate a coalition government between the communist and the nationalist.

• 1:56:41Rich Roll?

  Right, like between Shanghai Shaq and Mao Zedong, right?

• 1:56:45Speaker 01

  So, you know, it's, so, and how hard he tried and how.

• 1:56:51Rich Roll?

  That ultimately was a failure, right?

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  Terrible failure, terrible failure, but he, you know, and he spent too much time trying to do it. But again, and that was where he wouldn't take no for an answer. Everybody said, "You're never going to be able to do this." Of course, they were right, but, so, he made, he made some, he made a big mistake in terms of civil-military relations. He almost crossed the line with Roosevelt. And, you know, he had all his reasons, but he, he engaged in a sort of resistance to civilian authority for maybe three or four weeks when he, you know, you know, because he stands, you know, he stands as an example of, you

• 1:57:37Speaker 01

  know, he observes the distinction between civilian authority and military authority, but he violated that.

• 1:57:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  That code, but he came back from it.

• 1:57:48Rich Roll?

  What do you think, I mean, Truman sort of famously sounded this morning, Bill, about the impending problematic nature of the growing military-industrial complex.

• 1:58:03Speaker 01

  Well, that was really Eisenhower, but.

• 1:58:04Rich Roll?

  Oh, right, it was Eisenhower, I'm sorry.

• 1:58:06Speaker 01

  It was really Eisenhower.

• 1:58:07Rich Roll?

  That was Eisenhower.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  That was his famous speech.

• 1:58:12Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, that famous speech. What do you think Marshall would think of what that has become today?

• 1:58:19Speaker 01

  Well, I think he'd probably have some of the same reactions that Eisenhower had. But the one thing that he, that, that he began promoting, and it's why Stanley McChrystal likes this book so much about Marshall, he believed that as a result of what happened in the Depression, in the Depression.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  One of Roosevelt's brainchild was creating the Civil, uh, Civilian Conservation Corps, where they took all these young, at that point, it was all men, young men, eighteen years old, who were, whose parents, you know, didn't have jobs, twenty-five percent unemployment. So he took all these young men and moved them into camps around the country, and the army ran it. It's like a New Deal thing? Oh, yeah, this is the New Deal, nineteen thirty-two. Actually, by the summer of nineteen thirty-three, this plan was put together, and they were moving them all over the country, putting them in tents, and they were chopping trees down, and they were planting bushes in parks, and they were building dams, and they were doing all kinds of stuff.

• 1:59:28Speaker 01

  Well, Marshall was involved in that during the Depression. First of all, he ran the Southeast Division, and then he did, but he loved the idea of how these men from all walks of life would come together, and, you know, it was a unifying thing, and it was also about being a citizen. So he took that concept from the Depression, and he started promoting it, and it actually got a lot of traction right after the Second World War with a bill, Universal Military Service, you know, as a way to avoid a large standing army.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  And of course, you know, we have the voluntary army today, but in other words, instead of having to draft these people from scratch, if you ever get into a conflict, you'd have a, everybody, it would be like Israel, you would have two or three years of mandatory They're kind of ready, they're ready to go. Now, that doesn't, you know, in today's world, it might be more national service, and that's what Stanley McChrystal is promoting today, not getting anywhere with it very far. But the idea of having citizens, you know, that learns about citizenship by helping, by doing something, helping something, getting paid by the government, maybe, which is, would

• 2:00:52Speaker 01

  be hugely expensive, but he always, he always loved the idea of national service. And He had great, great respect for how, you know, if you get everybody together in some project, you know, when they're young, they come out of it and we have a more informed citizenship.

• 2:01:14Rich Roll?

  And an esprit de corps and a, and a sense of community and purpose and, you know, there's a lot that comes out of that.

• 2:01:21Speaker 01

  And the guy from Brooklyn and, and the, you know, the, the Native American from Arizona and, you know, the, you know, the, all that sort of thing melding together with a citizenship. It may be, you know, too altruistic and too, but, but it was something that was ingrained in him. And it was.

• 2:01:43Rich Roll?

  But that's quite, that's quite, you know, quite far afield from, you know, the current reality in which we have this intersection between, you know, the, the defense contractors and, you know, the K Street lobbyists.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:59Rich Roll?

  And the legislators that are, you know, really, for lack of a better word, this cabal that, you know, creates policy at the highest level that drives our foreign policy.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:10Rich Roll?

  And that was what, you know, kind of the crux of my question, like, like, what would Marshall think of that? Like, that's very different from the esprit de corps of some kind of national service.

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:22Rich Roll?

  Where, you know, the amount of money and influence that gets peddled into decisions around how we're ramping up our, our military and our spending and how that trickles down into decisions that we make overseas is, you know, it's, it's disturbing.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  And, and yeah, it of course has, it, it's driven by, you know, having projects in the congressman's local districts.

• 2:02:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:49Speaker 01

  And it's a jobs program, you know, rather than what do we really need for national defense?

• 2:02:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  And trying to shut down any of these programs is impossible.

• 2:02:58Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's troubling.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  Yes, it is. And I'm sure would trouble Marshall. There's no question about it. You know, he.

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  He was so far removed from, you know, the, you know, he used to do budgets and all kinds of things like that, but you know, he never had a, he never went out and, you know, had to have sort of a regular, a regular job. His wife, you know, bought, his wife had money.

• 2:03:28Rich Roll?

  A second wife or the first?

• 2:03:29Speaker 01

  Second wife, yeah. She, she came from a family of, of, you know, back in the Civil War, they, they made money in the South. But she financed, she bought the houses, you know, she bought a house.

• 2:03:43Rich Roll?

  Well, there's that, that famous house.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  The Dedona House in Leesburg. She, that was her, you know, she bought that. And I don't, you know, Marshall was offered tons of money to write his memoir. This is another thing about him. You know, everybody writes a book today.

• 2:04:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  But he, he had all kinds of people after him all the time to write a book memoir. He could have made, you know, untold amounts of money and most of these generals are doing it. It'll be interesting to see.

• 2:04:15Rich Roll?

  But he had a rich wife and he was living in a really nice house.

• 2:04:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so he didn't need the money. I don't, you know, I don't think they, they ever lacked the other, although they, they had a, she bought the house in Leesburg and then they bought this one story house, part of the way down South in North Carolina, where, where he spent a lot of the later years. But, you know, they, you know, he was getting a salary from the army until he, you know, until he died.

• 2:04:48Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 2:04:49Speaker 01

  So, but he famously did not, he said, if I, you know, if I wrote my memoirs, I'd have to, you know, talk about some people that I'd rather not talk about or some issues. I won't, I won't, I don't want to disparage anybody.

• 2:05:05Rich Roll?

  He had a wonderful. Unbefitting of a man of that, you know, kind of moral latitude.

• 2:05:11Speaker 01

  But, you know, he, he was, he was friends with George Patton and Patton really, you know, went after Marshall to be close to him. And, and, but, you know, he understood Patton. You know, Patton, you know, understood Patton needed to be, uh, he was the combat general that, you know, that everybody had to have. And so when Eisenhower was, was trying to decide whether to get rid of Patton because of the slapping incidents, um, that got in all the newspapers, um, Marsha said, no, we got to use him. We'll use him, we'll use him after we, after we get into Normandy, as soon as we get into Normandy, we're going

• 2:05:52Speaker 01

  to put him back in. So they used him as a decoy, uh, before Normandy. Um, so he understood people like that, but he, yeah, he didn't, you know, he didn't, he wasn't, he didn't respect Patton for, um, his, uh, well, his, his peccadilloes.

• 2:06:09Rich Roll?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  And his, uh, self-promotion. Um, so.

• 2:06:15Rich Roll?

  Which was highly effective.

• 2:06:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Uh, and, uh, yeah. Uh, Patton, yeah, Patton, uh, once had an opportunity when Marshall needed a place to live, you know, Patton took him into one of his apartments or one of his houses and he wrote his wife, he says, boy, if I pulled off a big one, I'm going to get a lot of, you know, I'm now close to Marshall and, you know.

• 2:06:41Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  And he said, and then he says to his wife, but I'm not getting out much anymore.

• 2:06:46Rich Roll?

  You know, it's just like. He won't let him out to do his thing.

• 2:06:50Speaker 01

  So, anyway, it's, yeah.

• 2:06:53Rich Roll?

  Well, good. Um, let's wrap this up.

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Rich Roll?

  Going for two hours. Um,

• 2:07:00Rich Roll?

  it is an amazing accomplishment. I'm super proud of you.

• 2:07:03Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:07:04Rich Roll?

  It's going to take me a while, like I said, to, to work my way through it, but I am looking forward to it.

• 2:07:08Speaker 01

  Don't worry about it.

• 2:07:10Rich Roll?

  No, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm more enthusiastic now about reading it and, um, I'm, I'm just delighted that you accomplished this. I mean, it's no small thing and I'm super excited, uh, for everybody to, um, have a, have a chance to read it. So it comes out July 9th.

• 2:07:28Speaker 01

  July 9th.

• 2:07:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, and we're, we're hoping to have an event up in the, uh, at the Chief of Staff's house in late June. I'm not sure that's going to work yet, but, um, where we kind of launch it. I'll have some books available by then. But I like to go and, you know, talk about it at various places.

• 2:07:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:46Speaker 01

  So we'll do that.

• 2:07:47Rich Roll?

  No, you'll be doing the book tour and I'll put on my website and on the episode page in the show notes, not only links to buy the book, but any appearances that you're doing. I'm happy to share with everybody. I love you.

• 2:08:03Speaker 01

  I love you too.

• 2:08:04Rich Roll?

  Very much. Super proud of you and this was really fun, so thank you.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  All right, and tell Ryan hi.

• 2:08:11Rich Roll?

  I will.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:08:12Rich Roll?

  What's up, Ryan? Good. And this is the point where I say, and you can, you can follow Dave on Twitter.

• 2:08:18Speaker 01

  That's not gonna happen.

• 2:08:21Rich Roll?

  He hasn't done any of that stuff, so I guess you can hit me up if you want to get to him. But thank you.

• 2:08:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:08:27Rich Roll?

  All right. Let's go see the kids.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  All right.

• 2:08:29Rich Roll?

  All right. Peace.

• 2:08:34Rich Roll?

  So what do you guys think? It was, I don't know, I'm still collecting my thoughts about it. I'm really glad that I did it. I am emotional about it. There's something beautiful about the fact that we got to sit together and have that conversation and I really am, I really, really am proud of him. So, thank you, Dad. I love you. And everybody pick up his book. Marshall, Defender of the Republic. You can find a link on my website. Go to Amazon. Check out the show notes on the episode page.

• 2:09:17Rich Roll?

  I normally say, hit up the guest and let them know what you thought of the conversation. My dad is not on social media, though. So rather than that, yeah, just read his book, I suppose. I think it's a masterpiece. I'm excited that it's just about to be birthed into the world and I can't wait to watch this journey that he's about to go on. In closing, if you're struggling with your diet, are you trying to eat better? Most of us are, right? It's tricky, though. We get off the plan. It's hard to get back on. That's why we created this meal planner program. We did it to solve one very basic problem. How do you make nutritious eating convenient, delicious and affordable? And the result is something that we're really proud of,

• 2:10:02Rich Roll?

  the Plant Power Meal Planner. We've put together this digital sort of platform where you have access to thousands of delicious and easy to prepare nutritious, plant-based recipes. Everything's customized. When you sign up, you enter all this information and it basically runs this algorithm. So you only get the types of recipes that appeal to you. And it integrates with grocery lists and grocery delivery in most metropolitan areas. So everything just shows up at your doorstep. We have incredible support, seven days a week, from a team of really savvy, educated nutrition coaches. And you get access to all of this for just $1.90 a week when you sign up for a year. It's so affordable. Again, did I say I'm proud of this?

• 2:10:47Rich Roll?

  Everybody really seems to be loving it. It's making an impact, a significant impact on people's lives. So if you want a taste of this, again, go to meals.richroll.com, click on Meal Planner on the top menu on my website. You can learn more, you can sign up and do all that good stuff. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the podcast, a couple of simple ways to do that. Tell your friends about your favorite episode or just about the show in general. Share the show on social media, screen grab it, or do whatever you do, tag me. Sometimes I reshare that stuff. Subscribe, that's the most important thing, on Apple Podcasts, on YouTube, Spotify, Google, wherever you listen to this. Leave a review on Apple Podcasts or leave a comment underneath one of the videos on YouTube. That's always very helpful. And if you choose, if you are so inclined,

• 2:11:30Rich Roll?

  you can support us financially on Patreon. And you can find that by just going to richroll.com/donate. Thank you very much to everybody who's done that. I appreciate everybody who helped put on this show today. Jason Camiolo for all your services on audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, the WordPress page, all that kind of stuff. Blake Curtis for additional audio engineering, as well as videoing the show and editing it in conjunction with the talented Margot Lubin. Thank you. Jessica Miranda for graphics. DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. Ally Rogers for her beautiful portraits that go along with each episode. And theme music is always by Ennelema.

• 2:12:15Rich Roll?

  Appreciate it, you guys. Like I said, it's kind of heavy having my dad on, but I feel good about it. Even if no one listened to this episode, I am very proud of sharing it with all you guys. And just to have that kind of conversation with my parents, it was just, it was a great thing. So, thank you for listening. I will see you back here next week with a great conversation. It is with Miguel McKelvey, who is the co-founder of WeWork. It's a conversation about entrepreneurship and community. I think you guys are going to really dig it. Miguel's super cool. He's into all the kinds of things that I'm into, sustainability, the environment, et cetera. So, until then, pick up a book.

• 2:13:00Rich Roll?

  You might just learn something. Pick up my dad's book, how about that? All right, you guys, peace. Plant, be well, do good. Namaste.