Roll On: What A Decade of Podcasting Has Taught Me About Life

Welcome to the 2022 season finale of ‘Roll On’, our semi-bi-weekly version of the podcast where we indulge in some good-natured banter and ramble on matters of interest across culture, sports, politics, literature, art, self-betterment, and more. Today Rich and Adam talk endurance news, concerning politics, streaming selects, answer listener questions, and more. Rich also expands on the lessons he’s learned after ten years of podcasting and the wisdom he’s gleaned from some of the brightest minds on the show. Watch on YouTube Show notes + MORE: bit.ly/richroll716 Newsletter Sign-Up: https://www.richroll.com/subscribe Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

  It's kind of an amazing thing. For listeners of the show, all you special people, we're offering an exclusive $20 off an annual subscription right now. To get it, go to meals.richroll.com, take your quick personalization quiz, and enter promo code RICHROLL20 at checkout.

• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:17Rich Roll?

  All right. You have your head in the game?

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Dude, I'm so here. I'm so happy to be back.

• 1:22Rich Roll?

  Good. Well, we're about to hit our Zone 2 stride, but first...

• 1:33Rich Roll?

  Adam, are you sure you have your head in the game?

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38Rich Roll?

  Should we do the show?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  Let's do it.

• 1:40Rich Roll?

  Fuck yeah.

• 1:44Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome or welcome back to Roll On, where Mr. Adam Skolnick and I are back in the lime green chairs to banter across this absurdly long table. What are we gonna do today, Adam? You know what? Before we even get into anything, I'm gonna say straight up, I'm underprepared for today.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  You are?

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's an experiment.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  Well, I've overprepared.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  I think I've generally overprepared for these Roll Ons, and then I end up looking at my iPad the whole time instead of making eye contact with you.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Let's do a segment where we just... It's called uncomfortable eye contact.

• 2:18Rich Roll?

  And we just... I'm an expert at that.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  We can just... We just can't look away.

• 2:23Rich Roll?

  It's called the uncomfortable. This will create an exceptional listener experience. Yes. You don't have to speak. You just look at each other. Yeah. Great pod. Great pod. You know, awesome dude. What are we gonna do today? Well, we're gonna celebrate a couple of milestones. Yeah. Probably get a little bit random here and there. Less focus on newsy type stuff. That was the result of a creative meeting we had. We'll see how that goes. Is that, is that, was that real? Well, I'm the executive producer here. You are. So I'm making that executive decision. Yeah, I don't know. Like, do people really want us delving into the headlines? Some people do. Maybe. Some is some enough. I think more on the life lesson-y type shit. I like that.

• 3:07Rich Roll?

  That's what we're gonna focus on today. Of course, we're gonna answer a few listener questions and then call it a day, bro. Nice. Cause it's raining out and we have other stuff to do. I mean, you, you might. Yeah. Well, you got a few things going on. Why don't you check in? But actually, before you do that. Yeah. I wanna make a little bit of a request or an ask to the listeners and the viewers. For longtime fans of the show, you know that last year around the holiday season, we did this special episode around listener stories where people called in. They shared their experience of the podcast, how it has sort of benefited their lives and some storytelling around that.

• 3:49Rich Roll?

  And so we're gonna reprise that episode. It was really special. It was very cool. And if you would like your experience or your story considered for inclusion in this episode, leave us an extended voicemail at 805-421-0057. That's 805-421-0057. Last year, this was really meaningful to us and I think also to you guys, the audience. Everybody who listened and reached out seemed to really enjoy it. So we're excited to do it again. We've already gotten a huge response, but obviously we can always use more. So if you missed it last time because we haven't been doing that many roll-ons, get

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  on it. So last time, and I'll include this in the show notes as well, of course, the number is 805-421-0057. Love it. Yeah, man. So how you doing? What's happening?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Well, um.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  I've just started my new business. I don't want to, it's not launching just yet, but because we've, obviously we just hit this inclement weather season is upon us, but we're excited to debut it next spring.

• 4:56Rich Roll?

  It's drizzling in 65.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:57Rich Roll?

  Sorry.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  It's my new Instagram picnic collab with LeBron James.

• 5:03Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, LeBron and I have been working on our driftwood shelters and our wildflower wreaths. And we're gonna have romantic picnics available for anybody who wants to, you know, pay the price tag.

• 5:20Rich Roll?

  Right, to join the two of you.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  No, we're the ones that put on, we cater. He's quite the patisserie. I mean, I don't know if you knew that about him.

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere that I don't get, because maybe I don't follow basketball enough.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 5:33Rich Roll?

  Explain.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  You know these picnic collabs? Don't you see these like, don't you see these Instagram picnics around the beaches?

• 5:40Rich Roll?

  No.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  You've never seen one?

• 5:41Rich Roll?

  I'm 56 years old, Adam. I am not in that like silo of Instagram or whatever it is. There's like a weird, there's a weird thing where like people share picnic photos? Like, I'm confused.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yes, there's romantic, there's a thing. It is a pandemic business that popped up and there are these, there's Instagram picnics. Like you pay and someone has like created a habitat for you to enjoy like a nice romantic meal on the beach. And then you take the photos and you're like sipping whatever and eating your fine food.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  Do they take the photos of you for you?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I don't, I haven't gotten that far.

• 6:16Rich Roll?

  Does that include uploading them for you as well?

• 6:19Speaker 01

  I think you probably upload yourself.

• 6:21Rich Roll?

  And where does LeBron come into this? I don't understand.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I just, you know, I pitched him the idea and he was in, he was over at the, at Ben and Jerry's the other day.

• 6:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  And so, yeah. And so while I was there, I just, he thought, he thought that I had a genius idea and, you know, he's a businessman, so.

• 6:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I pitched him.

• 6:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  I'm hoping to get him. I might be premature with announcing.

• 6:42Rich Roll?

  Maybe table, table this one for now.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  You don't like this one?

• 6:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  All right.

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  Go back to scooping the cream.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 6:49Rich Roll?

  You can indulge the dream, that dream is not the dream.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  I'm a lifetime scooper.

• 6:53Rich Roll?

  But with your feet firmly planted on the ground and back to a three dimensional reality, you do actually have some pretty exciting news.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  I do, I do. So on December 6th, the sequel to David Goggins, Can't Hurt Me, his second book is launching. It's called Never Finished, and it is finally finished. There were times there where we wondered if Never Finished-

• 7:15Rich Roll?

  There's a little irony in there.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  For a while. We had, we worked really hard on it, man. We've been working on it for, we worked on it for about a year and a half. And then obviously it encapsulates not just this, but the last four years, how he's, you know, his life over the last four years, plus stories and episodes from his past life. So in that way, it's almost like shades of Sedaris at this point. Like, he's, he is, or Sedaris, I should say.

• 7:41Rich Roll?

  David Sedaris?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Sedaris, yeah. And you know how he can unpack his life and deliver it. David has got that.

• 7:47Rich Roll?

  The comparison ends there, though. Like, I can't think of two people less alike than David Sedaris and David Goggins.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  But in a way, they aren't, because I don't know if you knew this about David Sedaris, he is like a psycho with his steps, and he walks-

• 7:58Rich Roll?

  He collects trash for eight hours a day.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Thirty thousand steps, yeah. So, but, well, my point is, is that he's got this corner of the literary world now, that is really about, it's his memoir, it's his life that he can continually unpack and shape and entertain, as well as educate-

• 8:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  -readers, and so that and listeners. And so it's kind of like, I'm just trying to figure out how you compare it, because there's nobody that's doing that. And so it's like shades of that, and it also meets kind of the Last American Samurai kind of book of philosophy. It's like Goggins' graduate school. So if you loved Can't Hurt Me, this is like his true philosophy. That's how he describes it. Can't Hurt Me is like Rocky, this is kind of like how he actually does it.

• 8:38Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  And it's the same kind of concept. It's stories from his life in chapters, that's the main story. And, you know- How he's dealt with the ups and downs the last four years and where he's going. And I think people will be very surprised and impressed. And then in between that, instead of challenges, there's evolutions. And so it's all about kind of evolving and these life lessons that he's learned throughout his life and kind of uses today. So that's it. It's the audiobook, once again, is interesting. We do the chapter, we do an evolution, we talk, unpack it further.

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  Right. And do you read the chapters like you did last time?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  I am the narrator in the chapters and then we talk in between. Goggins has some, a bit of narration as well. And then it's just incredible. So all of that's happening. It's spectacular. Really honored to have been a part of it. We're really excited about it. And so we'll see what happens. We got some competition in Prince Harry.

• 9:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Michelle Obama again, but we'll see.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, is Michelle Obama coming out with a book again at the same time that?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Three weeks earlier again.

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  Ta-da-ta with Michelle once again. Very interesting. Well, I know that you've been working on this book very hard for a very long time. We've been cagey about it on the show. You'd come in and you'd say, well, I'm deep in this project, but you wouldn't, you couldn't really talk about what it was. So, you know, obviously you've shared a little bit more with me about what you've been doing behind the scenes. And this is certainly a long time coming, super exciting. Clearly there's a massive audience who is anticipating, you know, what this next book is going to be. I did see David's announcement on Instagram where he published that little video. And he told this story about, you know, how people's second books usually suck, or that's what he was told.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:22Rich Roll?

  And how he shared this book with some trusted advisors and friends. And they were all amazed that this one is actually better than the second one. The first one was sort of a teaser. He was playing it a little bit on the surface because he didn't want to go too far because people might not be able to handle.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  Like the full 100% Goggins. And once he realized like, oh, I tested this, there is an audience and an appetite for what I have to say. Now he can go deep and is seemingly very encouraged by this book that you guys worked hand in hand on.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:54Rich Roll?

  That is crazy exciting. So, you know, soon he's going to be everywhere, I'm sure.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Rich Roll?

  And it's, and also, let's not forget. Once again, self-publishing, right?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, self-publishing.

• 11:06Rich Roll?

  They should be teaching his, his model in, at Harvard Business School. Like, what he's done as a self-published author is completely unprecedented.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  We think, I mean, the words I've heard is that it, it, nonfiction, it's the biggest self-published book ever. I'm not sure if that's true, because I don't, I haven't looked at the numbers myself. Four, over four million now, it's like going towards four and a half.

• 11:28Rich Roll?

  And does that include audio, or is that just?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  That includes everything, that includes audio.

• 11:30Rich Roll?

  And what is the percent, I would, I would think, audio might be like, it's probably usually like forty, but it's gonna, it's gotta be over half for this one.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think, I don't exactly have the number, I think it's like sixty, I'm pretty sure.

• 11:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And, um, but that, you know, he's, he's been a product of the audio space, you know, like, that's like, in terms of how he kind of got his fanbase, I mean, that's how it happened, so it's not surprising. I, I think, um, you know, he set the standard to try to exceed Can't Hurt Me, not in terms of sales, but just in terms of quality of the book, you know, you know, it's never been about sales, because if he wanted to do sales, he could have put, put a book out two years ago. And, you know, it's never been about that, it's about delivering something to the reader, and having the reader in mind, and having something, you know, it's very much about thinking of how the reader is going to come out of the experience of this book. And I think that's special, you know, and, and it's challenging. And when he first said, you know, he wants to be better than Can't Hurt Me, I thought,

• 12:26Speaker 01

  wow, I mean, I, I didn't think that was a reasonable goal, to be honest with you.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  With you, but, you know, he's not about reasonable goals, and he tends to exceed the unreasonable goals, so, uh, so I believe.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  But that must have been daunting, from your perspective, entering into that, with that objective.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Well, it was to, you know, look, so, the way I, I try to make writing as easy as possible for me, so I don't think, I try not to actually think about the endgame, because all I can do is the process of it, and make it the best it can possibly be. I didn't think we'd get there, um, but now, there, I mean, It's we'll see how people respond to it. I love this book. You know, it was there's so much love and put into it. When you when people I can't wait to talk about it more like when the book is out and we can talk about it more. But like what he has done and achieved some of the most incredible athletic accomplishments I've ever heard of what he how he's dedicated his

• 13:25Speaker 01

  life and in the direction it is now. I think it's going to surprise a lot of people and it's just another level, you know, there's lessons on leadership, there's lessons on day to day living, there's lessons on how to kind of overcome obstacles from being at the bottom of the barrel, of course, there's darker stories than I think even some are darker than you've heard and can't hurt me. So just to be a part of it is obviously was a thrill for me and I learned a lot from it and I can say I feel like I'm a better writer for having done it. So all of those things make me really excited to share this.

• 13:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, super exciting, man.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 14:01Rich Roll?

  I'm proud of you. It's great. I'm excited for you. I'm excited for David.

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 14:05Rich Roll?

  And, you know, it's a powerful message that clearly resonates with a lot of people and needs to be more broadly amplified to the culture.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  No doubt, no doubt, no doubt. I mean, I think that the lessons in here, you remember, like the last four years. So we're talking about the pandemic, we're talking about, you know, X, Y, Z. So like a lot, you know, we're not, we don't dwell on any one thing like that. But there is, you know, Goggins will explain how he dealt with it in his own way.

• 14:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool, man. So again, the the date that it comes out is December.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  December 6.

• 14:36Rich Roll?

  So we'll put a link in the show notes, preorder it.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, we're excited and and look forward to hearing how people respond to it. And thank you to all the Goggins fans and Rich Roll fans who are on the train with us.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:51Rich Roll?

  You got recognized up in Big Sur.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  It happens every once in a while.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  I love that when that happens for you.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, man. It's fun. I don't know how to hand, I don't know where to put my hands.

• 15:02Rich Roll?

  You don't know.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  I keep them myself.

• 15:03Rich Roll?

  Put them on the phone for the selfie.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  That's it, the selfie.

• 15:07Rich Roll?

  There you go, right?

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:08Rich Roll?

  Alright, buddy.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  How are you, man? What's going on? I know you were at the Formula, you were in the pits at the F1.

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I had an exciting experience in Austin a couple of weeks ago. There's a lot going on. Julie's in Egypt right now. I think she's got another five days there. She's been gone like two weeks or something like, almost two weeks. She's hosting a retreat there and is having an amazing experience, but, so I'm kind of at home with all the kids and being a homebody at the moment. But I did take Tyler and Trapper, the boys, to Austin for our first inaugural Formula One experience at the Austin GP.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Was it like a happy birthday to me type trip kind of thing?

• 15:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was my birthday, so we flew on my birthday, which was October 20th, turned 56.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Happy birthday.

• 15:52Rich Roll?

  Thoughts on that as well, and I thought a little boys' trip could be fun. The boys are super fans. I had always found Formula One to be kind of an impenetrable, you know, sort of sport.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:04Rich Roll?

  Like, I knew about Schumacher and how he got paid a lot of money, and clearly this is a big deal in Europe. But to me, it was sort of like football, soccer, you know, like I didn't really know that much about it other than that there was a massive fanbase and those people are extremely passionate about it. And then Drive to Survive, the Netflix series, occurred, and I was all in on that. Like, I found that series to be incredibly captivating and created this emotional connectivity with all of the different characters and gave me just enough information to understand on a very base level what was occurring. It's very surface level, that series, but.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Is that how the boys got into it? Like, by watching that series?

• 16:42Rich Roll?

  They were already kind of into it, and that kind of. Deepened the connection, but they're so into it now. They subscribe to the streaming service and they get up in the middle of the night to watch the races that are in Europe. Like they follow it very intensely, much more so than me.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:57Rich Roll?

  But I'm up to speed enough where I would consider myself a fan and I thought it would be really fun. So we went and we bought general admission tickets, but I knew a few people and I was like, I don't know if we can, what we can kind of, you know, finagle here. But I've had sort of an internet friendship with Angela Cullen, who's Lewis Hamilton's performance coach for a number of years. And she invited us to come to the paddock on Friday, which is practice day. And she got us into the Mercedes garage and gave us a tour, which was like unbelievable. We met Lewis briefly, got to check out engineering

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  and really observe the mechanics and the engineers and how they work together. Got to meet Toto Wolff, who's the team director. Met Lewis very briefly. Brad Pitt was around with Jerry Bruckheimer. They're having meetings about the Formula One movie. Like it was crazy.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  When is that happening?

• 17:55Rich Roll?

  They're going to be shooting it next year and they're going to be shooting parts of it at the races. I think next year there's going to be a race in Las Vegas and they're going to shoot at that race. So that was cool. Like Lewis Hamilton is a producer on that movie. Tim Cook was at the race because Apple TV is financing the project. So there's a lot of like interesting characters walking around. And once you're kind of in the paddock, it's sort of this VIP kind of red carpet experience where you can mingle around and you know, the garages are all in a line and they have hospitality suites on the opposite side of each of the garages. And people are just kind of going in and out of these all day, including journalists and team directors and you know, drivers and crew and all that

• 18:38Rich Roll?

  kind of stuff. And it was just amazing to be a fly on the wall and observe all of that and to be privileged enough to be in the garage and kind of not only watch. Them assembling the car and like, you know, taking the undercarriage off and putting it back on and having somebody who explained to us why that's important and what goes into the science and the engineering of that. And then to have Angela gave us headphones and we were able to hear the drivers communicating with engineering, giving feedback while they were doing practice laps, which was like crazy.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 19:10Rich Roll?

  The amount of science, engineering, teamwork, communication that goes into Formula One is like beyond. And then shout out to my new friend Sean Doss, who is an endurance athlete who's coached by Chris Howth. He ran Marathon de Salle and is a sport agent. He's a sports agent out of London and one of his big clients is F1 and he's in charge of this hospitality experience that they are curating and creating at Formula One. And he was able to get us paddock passes on Saturday and Sunday to watch the race and kind of co-mingle around what was going on there.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  You know a few people.

• 19:48Rich Roll?

  And like, well, he was a new friend. Like, we went in expecting nothing and we ended up with like the most privileged experience you could possibly imagine, which was pretty cool. And it was fun to see some other friends there. Dan Churchill was there, who's a podcaster, friend of mine, New York City restaurateur, has a restaurant called Charlie Street. He was doing some food and beverage stuff for Sean at that hospitality suite. And Mike Gervais was there. It was cool to see him, some other folks and just really kind of enjoy the race from a beginner's mind perspective. And like sort of reflecting upon that experience, there's some interesting kind of takeaways, other than just like me sharing this fun

• 20:30Rich Roll?

  birthday weekend. It left me thinking a lot about the genius myth. And the genius myth is something that I've also been thinking a lot about because I just saw the movie Tar, which is all about the genius myth. I don't want to spoil that movie. It's certainly an Oscar contending motion picture. Please go check it out if you haven't seen it already. It stars Cate Blanchett as this heralded maestro, this conductor, like the greatest music conductor, living music conductor, who's very celebrated, conducting.

• 21:05Rich Roll?

  The Berlin Symphony, and it's a story about her life. Fictional character. But it really upends this genius myth in that we, as a country, sort of like to hoist up these incredible high performers and delude ourselves into believing that they are outliers that are able to kind of do what they do in isolation, right? And the truth of the matter is, whether you're conducting a symphony or you're driving a Formula One car, you are supported by gigantic teams of people who work very diligently and hard to make you look like a genius. And when you're in the garage of Formula One and you just see dozens and dozens of people, and then you're in engineering and all these people on laptops running diagnostics, and

• 21:50Rich Roll?

  the hundreds of people who are back at the headquarters for the team who are working on the car and improving the car and communicating with the engineers and the mechanics, like, it's insane how many cooks are in that kitchen and the kind of flow of communication that is required in order for that driver to sit in that car and perform at the highest level. We all see the pits where they come in and the pit crews who operate so flawlessly and sort of magnificently, but behind them are all these other people who are kind of doing the same thing in a way that's a little bit less sexy or romantic.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Or accessible.

• 22:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, accessible, right? And I was like able to watch this and I was like, my head was exploding, right? And then seeing Tarr, and it's really about the same thing, like all of these wonderful symphony musicians that support the conductor and make the conductor look good and all the behind the scenes kind of stuff that goes into, you know, creating the quote unquote genius and then the kind of narrative spooling that the quote unquote genius does themselves to brand build and create that idea that they are a genius. And then to kind of upend that and deconstruct that and realize like... It's not to say that there aren't extremely talented, gifted people, but nobody, you know,

• 23:07Rich Roll?

  sort of excels at the highest level, at the elite level in anything, without an unbelievable foundation of support from lots of people who are not in the spotlight. And that goes for this podcast and everything that I've achieved. I think you would probably concur. So I've just been thinking, you know, kind of a lot about that subject matter.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  There's no doubt about that.

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  You know, we're all, the interconnection just doesn't go away. You know, even if you're, if you're involved in a project of like sitting, you're writing and you're tapping away, even if it's, it's a project of my own, it's, you're still dependent. Even if you're just reporting a story for New York Times, you're, you're dependent on sources, you're dependent on editors, you're dependent on an operation that keeps a publication alive. You're always just tapping into some sort of part of the interconnected matrix in some way. And now, you know, in some places you can see it much more easily. I mean, the fact that the conductors are like, considered the genius is pretty funny in that because they're not actually playing the music. And like, you know,

• 24:06Rich Roll?

  But they're interpreting the music. They're making choices about how that music is expressed.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  And they're arranging. Yeah. And they're seeing things you don't necessarily see. So you need those kinds of soothsayers. I mean, we have them, we have kind of the curse of the genius now. Like we're seeing the dark side of genius is like, is kind of our era now.

• 24:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of that. I don't want to go down that sewage drain hole at the moment. But I, but I will say that I think there's something inherently American about the whole idea as well, because this is a country that's built on this notion of rugged individualism. And we prioritize individual success and excellence over, you know, the kind of collective, you know, the collective success of the whole.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:50Rich Roll?

  We love those stories. And even if we can poke holes in them and say, yeah, well, that person did that. But like, like we could take Elon Musk and say, well, he's a self-made man. But if you really, Rigorously analyze that, you do realize that is that it is a myth in many ways. Like he had help from lots of people and some of the stuff about the way that Tesla came to get, he wasn't a founder of Tesla. Like, there's a lot of things about that where you realize like, oh, he has worked with teams of people and benefited from that and has been a builder of teams or whatever. But the idea that the sole genius idea is never truly meets rough scrutiny.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  Hard scrutiny.

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Right. The idea of the rugged individualist bootstrapper, you know, you have the vision, you can make it happen, kind of thing.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  But in America, we love that. And we don't want to hear it differently.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  We love, it's almost like it's part of the fabric and it came out of, I don't know, the birth of the country where people, the first settlers who moved here were like, felt kind of cloistered and there was too many laws and too much law and order in England and a king and tells you what to do. And here you can just visualize it.

• 25:57Rich Roll?

  If you want to do it, do it.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  And that lasted, of course, that was never 100% true because there were people that were enslaved here pretty quickly.

• 26:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  And then there were Native American people who were here that didn't get quite a voice to do as they want.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  But this notion of manifest destiny and the kind of, you know, Mark Twain idea of like lighting out on the frontier and all of that is inherently American.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And because of that, I think that's in there. And there is, you know, there is, that goes to why we're so obsessed with, kind of like, people are obsessed with individual freedoms, why like some people were really offended by the mask thing or the vaccine recommendation, other people were like...

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  Any inroad on individual liberty is seen as a transgression.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  And it's not responsibly calibrated against our responsibility to the collective.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 26:49Rich Roll?

  Like, I talked about this with Ryan Holiday on the podcast and I shared a reel where he articulated that notion very concisely. And it's, and it was met with, not derision, but I would say controversy. Like, people don't like to hear that. But, you know, your liberty is only as valuable as the responsibility with which it's sort of packed in with, right?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Right. Well, April says it all the time, coming from Australia where there is a sense of collectivity. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who chafe against restrictions and aren't interested in individual freedom anywhere. I mean, there is people rebelling against restrictions.

• 27:24Rich Roll?

  Well, historically, we've had that, like during periods of duress, you know, for this country, whether it's World War II or whatever, where we've endured, you know, a kind of a communal stressful experience for the nation, we've been able to cohere and come together and recognize that level of shared responsibility to each other. But that seems to be something bygone. Like, I'm not sure that we could recapture that.

• 27:48Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, but there, like, if you go to Australia and you rent a car and cruise around, you'll notice if you're the American, you're the one speeding. Like, there's things like, there's rules that are adhered to in a much more kind of communal way than we have here. I'm not saying that's better or worse, I'm just pointing it out. So she sees that, like, people speeding or breaking the driving rules, like, we just take that as, okay, yeah, why not go a little faster? It's fine. It's not that way there. People are just more ingrained to the collective over there. That's just the way it is in the majority.

• 28:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  And it's interesting. I was thinking, you know, same thing with people who are interested, you know, I saw Teddy McDonald the other day. He's now spending, you know, his family's moved to Austin, he comes back and forth. And he was saying, he talked, he met up with someone who's from San Diego and was so loving Texas because you can open carry there. And I thought, a good solution to the open carry, I'm not saying we shouldn't open carry if you want to open carry and that's your state. What I'm saying is, you have to commute by horse.

• 28:46Rich Roll?

  Well, if you're a strict constructionist, Adam, that would be construed as an impediment on the expression of your right to bear arms.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  What about spurs? Can they wear spurs in their Honda Civic so that when they get out? I just want to hear them coming.

• 29:03Rich Roll?

  Can they, or do they have to?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  They have to.

• 29:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. No, it's not gonna work.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  We're not going there?

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  No.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  I gotta see Tar. It's at the top of my list. I think

• 29:13Rich Roll?

  Tar is amazing.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Cate Blanchett is like, right.

• 29:15Rich Roll?

  I mean, she's, she's, she's gonna win the Oscar for that movie. Like, her, her performance is just luminescent.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  As always.

• 29:23Rich Roll?

  It's quite an extraordinary movie. It's probably different than what you might expect. I don't know what people expect going into it.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  It's a cancel culture movie, isn't it?

• 29:30Rich Roll?

  Well, there's an aspect of that. I wouldn't say it's a movie about cancel culture.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 29:35Rich Roll?

  There is, you know, sort of a component to the narrative that entails, you know, that kind of experience. I don't want to spoil it beyond that. But the other movie I would recommend, and I don't know why I'm recommending it, because I haven't seen it yet.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  That's what we do on the internet.

• 29:50Rich Roll?

  But I know, because I've done some reading around it. This is bad, right? I'm gonna like, talk about a movie I haven't seen.

• 29:54Speaker 01

  This goes right into a future subject.

• 29:56Rich Roll?

  I'm only gonna say positive things, though. Banshees of Inisherin, which I know you're excited to see.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  I'm very excited.

• 30:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, like, who doesn't love McDonough? Like, this guy's a genius. Have you seen In Bruges? I know that's one of your favorite movies ever.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  In Bruges, yeah.

• 30:10Rich Roll?

  He's pairing, he's pairing these two guys again, together. Colin Farrell and, um, what's his name again? Is it, what's that?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Colem.

• 30:19Rich Roll?

  Not, not Colem, meaning.

• 30:23Rich Roll?

  Look that up, somebody on IMDb.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then we'll cut it in.

• 30:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. I feel terrible. I can't remember his name. But anyway, like, I, I do know, and I don't want to spoil this, even though I haven't seen it. I know that one of the themes is, it's basically about a fractured lifelong friendship, where one guy is sort of a happy-go-lucky dude, played by Colin Farrell, and the other gentleman.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Brendan Gleeson.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  Brendan Gleeson, yes, thank you. Has decided that he wants his life to be about something more meaningful and can't hang out with Colin anymore, and he's gonna devote his life to his art, which is music, right?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:58Rich Roll?

  And so, it's, the theme being like, the split within all of us about what it means to live a good life. Like, what is a life well-lived? Is a life well-lived, one that is devoted completely? Like, I'm sure McDonough struggles with this in his own mind. Like, should I just devote myself to my work and my legacy and these plays and these movies and these screenplays that will live beyond me after I die and just put all of my best energy into that? Or should I be the guy who goes to the pub at 2 o'clock every day and has a laugh with his buddies and goes home, like, feeling connected to his community? Like, what is? Like if you're just gonna, you know, create a binary around those two things.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:41Rich Roll?

  Where do you devote your time and your energy? And this is a movie that I believe, from what I understand, grapples with this and, you know, is about that struggle that I think is very relatable. We all think about that sometimes. Should I just, like, if you think, like, life is relatively meaningless, then you should just fuck off and try to have as much fun as possible.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 32:01Rich Roll?

  Not stress about too much.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Well.

• 32:03Rich Roll?

  Or if you take yourself seriously, or you're buying into this genius myth, or you think that you're here for some kind of purpose, then you should be, you know, at the, at the expense of community, friendship, love, family, relationships, be investing all of your creative juices into your work product while your brain is capable of doing that.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  You know, it makes me think two things. First of all, Ernest Hemingway used to write from like 5:00 AM to noon and was at the bar every day.

• 32:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Every day.

• 32:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  So he figured it out.

• 32:38Rich Roll?

  Trying to bar a little bit too much.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  And he has a bit of a legacy.

• 32:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, and also, all of that other stuff was part of his writing.

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 32:44Rich Roll?

  Like, he merged those two experiences.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  But I, I do relate to that because I think life is seasonal, right? There's these seasons that you have. And I just look at it that way, more of a continuum of seasons. And it's like, I have, I have another book I could add to this pile in my car. It's like a Buddhist, kind of like, everyday read a passage type thing. And one of them that really stuck with me because of the season I'm in is that life is basically in seasons. Sometimes you're gonna be free to go diving with your homies every day, and sometimes you have to sit in an office and stare at your computer. And then you have to be kind of committed to your family and you have to, you're growing a kid, and you're, you know, you're, you're watching him grow and enjoying that. And there's just, there are restrictions on the seasonality.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  And in, within those restrictions and tensions, genius comes through. So when you have too much time and you're, you know, so I, I think that... I shouldn't have used the word genius, but like moments of transcendence come through. So there could be moments of transcendence in the wide open escape. And there could be moments of transcendence within the seasonal pressures that you're under. And you can't access everything all at once. Like, life is just not like that. So the more we can embrace the conditions that we're in is probably better. And, you know, if that, I can't wait to watch this movie. Because In Bruges is, like I said, one of the best written movies of all time. And so maybe the best written comedy I've seen in, you know, I don't know, who knows how long.

• 34:09Speaker 01

  Maybe ever. And, but I love, I can't wait to see how Brendan Grease and Colin Farrell go back and forth where his one buddy has decided, no, I'm a musician now. It's gonna be hilarious. But I do understand that.

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  Colin Farrell's just confusion over like his buddy's sudden, you know, decision.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  I understand the pulling back. I've done it in different ways over the course of my life. It's not always a great idea because in the end, that interconnectedness exists. And we do need all these different kind of support systems. So I can't wait to see how it plays out. I just hope there's an evil Ray Fiennes in there.

• 34:47Rich Roll?

  I don't know if he shows up.

• 34:48Speaker 01

  Not this time, not this time.

• 34:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. All right. Well.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  What do you think to that?

• 34:54Rich Roll?

  I have some more thoughts and it kind of dovetails into turning 56 and, you know, having this birthday. But let's take a quick break and we'll be back with some more thoughts.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  All right.

• 35:13Rich Roll?

  And we're back. I do wanna share one thing before we get into like sort of reflections on getting older. And that is the.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Welcome to the Getting Older Podcast.

• 35:25Rich Roll?

  We're just gonna get grizzled and gray and like.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  Wait till you guys hear.

• 35:28Rich Roll?

  Mash our teeth about the young people.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Yes. You can hear a foot story coming up, which is very exciting.

• 35:34Rich Roll?

  Speaking of exciting.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:36Rich Roll?

  Should we talk about Fuzz Bubble?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Fuzz Bubble!

• 35:39Rich Roll?

  So Jason Camiolo, longtime audio engineer slash producer, sitting right over there.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  He's the heavy around here.

• 35:46Rich Roll?

  He came up in a band called Fuzz Bubble. They had their moment of fame back on MTV on P Diddy's label. Jason ended up, you know, kind of moving in a different direction with his life after that experience, but Fuzz Bubble is getting back together and they are going on tour, which I'm super excited for.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  And they got an album coming out. When's the album coming out?

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, where is the?

• 36:11Speaker 03

  20th.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  The 20th of November, Fuzz Bubble's new record.

• 36:14Rich Roll?

  Is that gonna be on Spotify and all that kinda stuff?

• 36:17Speaker 03

  Everywhere, all the places.

• 36:18Rich Roll?

  What's the, what's the album title called?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Cult Stars from Mars.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  I love it. I love that. I love that album title.

• 36:25Rich Roll?

  Excellent. And you're gonna be playing Huntington, New York on November 19th?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 36:31Rich Roll?

  Any other shows or just that one show?

• 36:32Speaker 03

  Pleasantville, New York on the 18th.

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  18th and, alright, cool. So we'll, we'll link up.

• 36:38Speaker 03

  Alright, thank you.

• 36:40Rich Roll?

  Very cool.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 36:41Rich Roll?

  Never too late for the dream, bro.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  No, man, you gotta keep it going, right? You gotta do what you love.

• 36:46Rich Roll?

  Exactly. So here we are, I turned 56. That's fucking old, no matter how you slice it.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  Is that why you're wearing?

• 36:52Rich Roll?

  The gray is coming in hot.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  Is that a cardigan?

• 36:55Rich Roll?

  Yes. This is what older gentlemen wear.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  I'm wearing kind of like a cardigan-esque thing.

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  A little bit, a little bit. And it's had me kind of, you know, reflecting on getting older. I don't, what?

• 37:09Speaker 01

  You're like, that's old, bro.

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  It is old. Like, I'm closer to 60 now than I am to 50.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  You are.

• 37:15Rich Roll?

  That's fucking crazy, right? And it's inescapable, cause now when I look in the mirror, I'm like, damn, that gray hair, it's all over the place now.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Are you kidding me? You look fabulous.

• 37:24Rich Roll?

  No, it's, it's really coming in hot.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  You know what, though? You know what? Can I stop you right there? From the chest down, Steve Martin. Just pure Steve Martin from the chest down over here.

• 37:36Rich Roll?

  Just all white, you mean? You're talking about you. Talking about you, okay.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:41Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Go on.

• 37:42Rich Roll?

  You got a lot of, you have a lot of dark hair in your beard still. My beard's basically entirely white.

• 37:46Speaker 01

  I'm like Santa Claus.

• 37:48Rich Roll?

  I do feel, I don't, I don't know what you're supposed to feel like at 56. I do feel physically quite good. I have a lot of energy and I want to be able to channel that energy in productive, positive, fun, community building ways while I can. You know, I had a great time at this Formula One experience and it was great to be around a lot of people that was different from me. Like I'm kind of this lone wolf guy who just kind of does his own thing. And, and I'm having serious FOMO about the New York Marathon, New York City Marathon, which was yesterday. We're recording this on Monday, it was on Sunday. Had tons of friends participating in that race.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  I know you were in Malibu and April ran the half marathon. Congrats to April.

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:37Rich Roll?

  Ted McDonald was down there as well.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they both finished really fast. Ted, he was like 130 something and April was 143. And I couldn't do it. I was signed up for that race and because I'm also getting older, I'm 50. I tore my post tibial tendon in training. And it was like, it was like a slow unwinding of a rubber band in the middle of my foot. It felt like a cramp in the connective tissue with that little

• 39:02Speaker 01

  and I ran home, it was like a mile and a half run home. And I'm like, that's not good. And I waited like a week and finally went to the doctor, had the MRI. My foot's been fucked up for a long time, so it's probably heading that way. But I couldn't do it. So I'm like, I ended up getting PRP injections. I'm going to get some more. Hopefully no surgery, but I couldn't run it. So I know the feeling, you know, you wish you, I wanted to be, I wanted to do it, man. I was like, my body wanted to do it, you know, I was there.

• 39:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 01

  And I thought, I can run in these hiking boots.

• 39:29Rich Roll?

  No, that would not have been smart. But I had the same feeling about New York City. I wanted to run that race. My back issues prevented me from training for it. And then I had to kind of watch it on Instagram, watching, you know, Alexi Pappas and Shalane Flanagan. Oh, so many podcast guests, like Alexi Pappas, Shalane Flanagan. Hella was there kind of covering it. And he did, he like, I think it a day or two before the marathon was his 2,000th day in a row of running on his run streak. And his shoe sponsor, Hoka, gifted him with like this golden shoe, like a trophy. And he had a big group of people that he was running with. Casey Neistat ran.

• 40:11Rich Roll?

  So that's the latest podcast that just went up. Casey, we recorded that last summer. Davy running 350.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 40:19Rich Roll?

  Not here today because he's still in New York City. Shout out to Davy. William Gooch, he came, he was out at the house the other week.

• 40:25Speaker 01

  Was he?

• 40:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he was in LA for a couple of days and came out.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  He's a stud.

• 40:29Rich Roll?

  O's running 240. I mean, come on.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  O's told me that that was what he was hoping, that that's what was his goal was 240. But he felt like he has more to give and he's like, gonna, inspired him to get, get after it even harder. That's what he told me.

• 40:41Rich Roll?

  This guy is unbelievable. And he blew up. He had this big viral moment from being with the Seahawks. Did you see that?

• 40:49Speaker 01

  Well, no, I didn't. I haven't seen the Seahawks one yet. And there's the Tampa Bay one too, right?

• 40:54Rich Roll?

  Well, the Seahawks one was huge. So there's all this video of him. It's Pete Carroll and he's with the Seahawks team and he's, you know, doing what he does. And he, he guesses like the, the security code to one of the guy's phones. So he, like, and these guys are like pissed. They're like, they can't believe it, right? And that video, like ESPN shared the video, Barstool Sports shared it. Like Dave Portnoy, like, wrote a blog post about it. So like, suddenly O's was in a different like stratosphere of kind of recognizability. And then, you know, just relentlessly like goes from one thing to the next, throws down a 240.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nothing.

• 41:33Rich Roll?

  A casual 240.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Cas 240.

• 41:36Rich Roll?

  At the New York City Marathon. Robbie Ballinger was there. Again, my boy.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Did they all run it?

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  Churchill, Dez Linden was leading the race. Like, yeah, like tons of people ran it. And I was like, fuck.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  I didn't know Robbie ran it for some reason.

• 41:48Rich Roll?

  He showed up, yeah, with his wife and, and ran it with her.

• 41:54Rich Roll?

  So anyway, it looked like a lot of fun.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 41:57Rich Roll?

  And I was like, never again.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  Kutcher did sub four.

• 42:00Rich Roll?

  To get back into it, like, I want to be there next year, for sure.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Dude, that's your goal?

• 42:05Rich Roll?

  Just to have fun, like, not to like, I mean, my goal is really to be pain free and to be fit and solid enough so that on any given day, I can go out and run a marathon, or ride a century, or do a swim run, or do something, and just have fun with it.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:21Rich Roll?

  You know, not to be like, rubber banding in and out of shape and all that kind of stuff, but just to be in like, a constant state of fitness, preparedness and readiness, to be able to go have fun experiences with other people. Like, that's a big goal of mine for the next year.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have the same goal, is to like, get more full body. Goggins has ordered me into the gym, and so, to lift weights, and just to get more, he thinks that my problem was a hundred mile months, three months in a row without, like, I wasn't really, I'm just wonky, and so it wasn't really ideal for me, and I should have topped out at 80 mile weeks during that period, and I probably would have made it to the race day. And just by doing that, by pushing a little harder when I wasn't fully, like, balanced in my body, like, muscular wise, um, so I've been ordered into the gym.

• 43:06Rich Roll?

  Good.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  And so, I'm gonna be doing that, and, uh...

• 43:08Rich Roll?

  I'm in the gym, too.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Good, good, good, good. What about the pool? Is the pool okay for your back, or not really? Is it the pushing off that's not so good?

• 43:15Rich Roll?

  I haven't been swimming very much, the flip turns, I think, are, are really the, the inhibitor there.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:20Rich Roll?

  Um, it's not the swimming itself, but I'm just trying, I'm, like, my focus really is the gym right now, to get as strong and as stable as possible.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  For the same idea, right?

• 43:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So we'll see how it goes. We can trade notes.

• 43:31Speaker 01

  My money's on you, buddy.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  I want to see the workout that he wrote up for you.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  He hasn't written them up, he's, he's, I'm, he's given me ideas, and then, I think I'm not ready for his workouts.

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  Come on.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  I think, I think, I think.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  Come on.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  I know, I know. How about 70.3, dude?

• 43:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so Christian Blumentfeld snapping back after Gustav clutching the Ironman World Championship victory out from beneath him.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 43:59Rich Roll?

  Following week, Christian says, yeah, watch this. Pulls it right back.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Was it just one week or two weeks? Two weeks.

• 44:07Rich Roll?

  Was it two?

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Or two, three weeks?

• 44:08Rich Roll?

  Two weeks, not three weeks.

• 44:09Speaker 01

  Two weeks.

• 44:10Rich Roll?

  I think it must have been two weeks, 10 days, something like that.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  But on their podcast with you, there's a foreshadowing of this because Gustav said to you that he, that he takes him a long time to recover. Whereas, and Christian said that he can go week to week to week and just keep grinding out these races.

• 44:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he like doesn't accumulate lactate.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Right, and so Gustav, so Gustav kind of, in two ways, kind of tipped this off. One way is that his focus is now all the way on Paris, so he wasn't even thinking about 70.3 anymore. He had, seems to have like, I hit 70.3, I did Kona Ironman, now I'm gonna get that gold medal, and that's where he's at, whereas...

• 44:46Rich Roll?

  Well, and they just did Bermuda, I think it was yesterday.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:49Rich Roll?

  Which is short course, Olympic distance, and I think, I should be up to speed on this, I didn't read up on it as much as I should, but I think Gustav was top 10. So to go from Ironman to Olympic distance and be top 10 at the elite level without, you know, any kind of training modification in such a compressed period of time, like bodes well for Paris.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:11Rich Roll?

  I don't know where Christian ended up in that race.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  It just shows that, but like Christian, you know, he's so hungry, he just wants race after race, and he lost, and so he wanted this win. I just find it interesting how they, on your podcast, they basically told us, Christian recovers better, he can race again two weeks after an Ironman, easier than Gustav, and...

• 45:30Rich Roll?

  Right, well, but what's also, another added interesting wrinkle to that is that I think Gustav is actually, like, has a higher kind of threshold, so he's technically should be faster, but if it takes him longer to recover, how does that work?

• 45:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  I don't know, because they're very different athletes.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  It's, a fascinating discussion between the three of you, I loved it, and, you know, this, but this particular race, I was watching it, and Christian had that late downhill push, leaving American Ben Canute. For the win. On the women's side, I mean, the women were almost as fast. Like, the men finished their bike ride with an average speed of 28 miles per hour. I think the women were like in the 26s. I mean, they are fast. And Taylor Nib, another American, rising back up and winning. You know, the Americans are rising back up in this sport now. We saw it at Kona, right, with the second place. We see it here with the second place on the men's side. And then two first-place finishes with women that were just not even thought of as real contenders.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I mean, no one even, they were off the radar, not that they weren't contenders, but they just weren't talked about.

• 46:36Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  And so now the Americans are kind of rising back up in the sport. So that's got to be exciting. I mean, I know people that you're friends with must be really excited about that in this triathlon world.

• 46:45Rich Roll?

  It is cool. Yeah, it is cool. There is a shift. I think it's a new, like, just this new generation of really interesting athletes who are going to be competing at the highest level for many years to come.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 46:59Rich Roll?

  But from that, let's switch gears. I do want to touch briefly on the 3100 self-transcendence run.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 47:05Rich Roll?

  My favorite race.

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:06Rich Roll?

  Where they run around a block in Queens like 800 billion times.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:10Rich Roll?

  To accumulate 3,100 miles, basically in 52 days or less. It's essentially running 60 miles a day until you've run ostensibly the distance of going from one side of the United States to the other. I had Sanjay Rawal on the podcast a couple of years ago. He made a documentary about this race called Run and Become, 3100 Run and Become. You can find that on Prime Video, or you can listen to our podcast. In that, it follows some athletes and their kind of life stories and why they do this thing, one of which is this guy Ashbran Alto, who's won it a couple of times. And he came in second this year.

• 47:55Rich Roll?

  The interesting thing about this, though, that I wanted to draw attention to is that there was a Ukrainian and a Russian who were running it. And Outside Magazine wrote this article about these two guys who are friends.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Ben Prior.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  You know this guy?

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Ben Prior is a Rich Roll listener. And he reached out to me, a Rich Roll listener. And he reached out to me, and we've worked together. He's done some research for me in the past. And he wrote this beautiful piece on this.

• 48:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved it.

• 48:23Rich Roll?

  It's pretty cool.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  You're gonna link to it, yeah?

• 48:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'll link to it. And, you know, the power of running to, you know, reach across boundaries and

• 48:33Speaker 01

  But also-

• 48:33Rich Roll?

  create some level of unity and a bond for peace.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  And also within yourself, finding more, you know, like-

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Well, that's what the whole 3100 thing is all about.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:42Rich Roll?

  It's this Sri Shin Moi, uh, search for self-transcendence.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:47Rich Roll?

  And you can't solve the world's problems if you can't, you know, transcend your own problems.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  And that same kind of thread runs through your podcast, it runs through the Goggins book, in both books. You know, like, that's what, that's what makes it unique. That's why people want kind of this nectar, I think, because it is something you have to continually look for. Cause it does, otherwise you just get distant from it.

• 49:09Rich Roll?

  You don't, well, you, you never, you never like transcend it completely.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  No.

• 49:14Rich Roll?

  It tends to, it tends to snap back.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  And I can tell you for a fact that that is, you know, my experience of life.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, life snaps back in your face.

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  The minute you think like, oh, you've mastered something, uh, you will be rudely reminded that the work, uh, is never done.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:33Rich Roll?

  Um, but beautiful, man. Yeah, so we'll link up that in the show notes. Uh, we should touch base on this guy Ned Brockman, who ran across Australia. Did you follow this story?

• 49:43Speaker 01

  A 23-year-old electrician?

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this guy's off the rails.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  He ran from Perth to Bondi, uh, 50 miles per day in 47 days, covering nearly 2,500 miles.

• 49:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  And he was raising money for a homeless charity. And, um, he overcame like

• 50:01Speaker 01

  so many injuries. And like, he at one point was sleeping two hours a day. I mean, it was,

• 50:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  it was amazing. And he got this huge following, like Forrest Gump style, didn't he?

• 50:10Rich Roll?

  It's crazy because people run across America all the time.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:13Rich Roll?

  And like, I've had lots of those people on the podcast and, and, you know, it's like small groups of people are there, kind of, you know, good job. And, you know, maybe they have friends and family and 100 people meet them at the beach when they finish.

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Or in New York City. I mean, Hella had a nice crowd.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:30Rich Roll?

  To greet him when he completed his run. This guy, though, I mean, throngs of thousands. Like, if you go to his Instagram, like, he finishes in Bondi Beach. Like, look at all these people, if you're watching on YouTube, I have his Instagram up right now. It's, uh, Ned Brockman, two D's and two N's.

• 50:49Rich Roll?

  Brock Man. Unbelievable crowds of people to cheer this guy on. And this dude is like the most Aussie Aussie in the history of Aussies. Like, he's got a mullet and like, the way he talks and the vernacular and the use of like, Australian slang, like, I don't even know what this guy's talking about 90% of the time. Fast talker. I'm planning on being in Australia in January. I wonder if I can track this guy down. You gotta. See if I can convince him to come on the podcast, because I would love to, you know, hear more about this dude. And he's 23. He has like, positive energy. People love him. Yeah. There's something really cool about it. He's not 56. Mad respect. He's not 56. I'm literally twice his age, Adam.

• 51:34Rich Roll?

  No, you're more than that. Should I be bummed about that? You're not literally twice his age. Oh, my God. That's undershooting it, like, dramatically. Yes, thank you. I appreciate that. On the subject of being excited about somebody who did his own crazy thing, this guy, I wanted to shout out this guy, Paul Minter, who is a dude in the UK, who, a military guy who lost 14 comrades to suicide, more than he lost to combat. He was a soldier and he founded this mental health charity called Head Up for the military and developed this range of positive mindset techniques. And to kind of raise awareness for that, he ran 5,000 miles of the United Kingdom, like, around

• 52:19Rich Roll?

  the periphery, I believe, the periphery of the United Kingdom, to raise awareness and money for military mental health, for this retreat center that he's trying to build, which is really cool. Very cool. Anyway, yeah. I went to Andrew Huberman's live show. He sold out the Wiltern Theater. It was great. Did his thing. It was unbelievable. Got to co-mingle with all of his fans. It was super fun. That's another weird thing about this era. Now it's Podcasters going on tour. Professors are playing the Wiltern. A neuroscience professor could sell out the Wiltern Theater and perform a neuroscience two-hour lecture to a group of people who are taking notes and completely engaged with

• 53:01Rich Roll?

  what he's doing. Like, when you feel pessimistic about the future, like, that is something that gives me hope. I think it's cool. Everything everywhere all at once. What's the connection?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Isn't that, didn't that movie just come out or something?

• 53:15Rich Roll?

  Uh, it came out like a year ago.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  Right, all this, all this good stuff and bad stuff is all happening all at once.

• 53:19Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, I feel you, I feel you. All right, I don't want to dip too deep into the culture wars, but there is a certain issue that I think demands our discussion and our redress. You want to launch into this, Adam?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  It's a strange time to be a Jew.

• 53:35Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  That's a quote from this book, one of several books I will be.

• 53:40Rich Roll?

  Uh, Michael Chabon's?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Michael Chabon, the Yiddish Policeman's Union, a great murder mystery.

• 53:46Rich Roll?

  I haven't read that one.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, and it's always a strange time to be a Jew in that world, which it is. And it has been lately, you know, I, we don't have to get too deep into it. We all know what happened, uh, with Kanye or Ye, Yi, is it Yay? Yay or Yi?

• 54:01Rich Roll?

  Yay? Yi.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  He, he wanted to go DEFCON 3 on the Jews, even though DEFCON 3 is kind of like in the between, DEFCON 5's bad, so DEFCON 3 is just a scolding.

• 54:13Rich Roll?

  Right, it was weird that he chose DEFCON 3, like either go all the way in or like de-escalate.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Right, right, DEFCON 3, just moving up a little bit.

• 54:20Rich Roll?

  We're gonna, we're gonna incrementally increase.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  Incremental.

• 54:24Rich Roll?

  Increase the threat.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  You know, it worked because there were banners over the 405, kind of saying Kanye was right and people honking, you know, Kanye's right about the Jews and people, a lot of people honking. There were mailbox incidents in Brentwood and Pacific Palisades where, uh, kind of antisemitic literature was distributed, cars were vandalized with swastikas in Calabasas. I know somebody who had that happen, um, or I know a friend of a friend, excuse me.

• 54:49Rich Roll?

  There was in Calabasas who had a swastika painted on their car?

• 54:52Speaker 01

  Not painted, keyed.

• 54:53Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  And that same message that was on those banners over the 405 was projected on a football stadium a week ago at the Florida Georgia game, in Jacksonville, a hundred thousand or so people there, and the universities of both Florida and Georgia, um, had to issue statements, kind of obviously saying, it wasn't us, it wasn't an organized thing and, and we condemn this. And then, right after that, you know, not too long after, Kyrie made his post where he was promoting a, a movie that's on Amazon. And you can find the movie. I'm not going to go spend that time on this platform to talk about it, but I will just say that it was a very anti-Semitic and it basically is a Holocaust denying movie, among other things. And it talks more in like the overall

• 55:40Speaker 01

  global conspiracy kind of jargon, just like Kanye was getting at. And that is, you know, that Jews run the world and they're pulling a fast one, or whatever it is. And those same kind of ideas have been around for a long, long time in neo-Nazi circles.

• 55:54Rich Roll?

  All of these tropes that are resurfacing are age-old and timeless. Like, they're the same arguments that get resurfaced whenever antisemitism flares up.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, hundred percent. So then there was like, after Kyrie's thing, there wasn't like, some people spoke up, but it took a long time, like, days passed. And yes, the owner of the Nets, who's Kyrie's team that he plays on, the Brooklyn Nets, said something right away. And then there was this kind of lull. And nobody said anything. The NBA didn't condemn him, didn't suspend him, nothing happened. Until, I give full credit to Charles Barkley and Shaquille O'Neal and Reggie Miller, Malibu Zone, who on Inside the NBA, and while they were doing their games last week, they just spoke out very strongly against Kyrie and in support of Jewish people. And so that was cool. I mean, even after the Kanye stuff, there was support on Instagram of people speaking out. So there

• 56:48Speaker 01

  was, it was a mix.

• 56:49Rich Roll?

  Pretty universal denouncement.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there was a universal denouncement of Kanye, then the Kyrie thing happened, there was almost nothing. And then that happened. And so this, it is a strange time. You're seeing the kind of the antisemitism, you're seeing the support. At the same time, strange times to be a Jew. But through all of that, in the defense of and in the denunciation of, I noticed that people don't really fully understand what antisemitism is, or what these tropes are about. And, you know, I don't actually think, I mean, I could be wrong. I don't think Kyrie is, I don't think Kyrie probably even watched the movie, to be honest with you. And I don't think Kyrie hates Jewish people. I think he's gullible. He's a flat-earther guy, maybe years ago. And I think even people who defended Jewish people don't fully understand it. And so I just wanted to take just a couple minutes

• 57:36Speaker 01

  to talk about. How I view it, and that is that Judaism is not just a religion. That's why people like to frame it. You know, I didn't mean to insult your religion. It's not really just a religion. It's a tribe of people that have existed without a country for almost their entire existence. Right? You know, kicked out of Israel, in Egypt as slaves, trying to get back to Israel, kicked out of there again, end up in Eastern Europe mostly, but all over the world. My family came from my, from, on my father's side, from Russia, my mother's side, Latvia and Poland, and they lived their life here. They came over at the, in the end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, depending on which side, mostly beginning of the 20th century. And when they were here, Jews weren't considered white people.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, it was the influx of Jews that actually ramped down immigration laws. So all of a sudden, the wide open immigration wasn't wide open anymore because of so many Jews and Italian people, but mostly Jews that were coming in. And so this idea that it's just a religion is where I just want to point that out. That's just not correct, in my opinion. It's an ethnic minority group with a shared history. And it's been under attack, not just on the right wing. We all know the Charlottesville chanting, Jews will not replace us, but on the left. Like, I consider what Kanye and Kyrie are doing is more on the left side of things. Kanye is probably on the right, but Kyrie more on the left side of things, where there

• 59:02Speaker 01

  has been an increase in antisemitism, quite frankly, straight up. And a lot of that is conflated with legitimate criticism of Israeli policy in Palestine, but some of it is not. And you'll see, you'll hear the same New World Order, kind of like, you know, George Soros is evil shit, which is the same thing that they used to say back in the early 20th century about the Rothschilds, the same shit is being reproduced now, that you'll, you'll hear that in yoga studios. I mean, you will. And so you'll hear that on the left a lot. And so what we need to do is, we need to combat this ignorance. Obviously, it's always ignorance. Any sort of prejudice is just ignorance. It's just displaying your own ignorance. We know that. And so I would just encourage people who are not familiar with Jews, and there's not

• 59:47Speaker 01

  that many of us, you know, a lot of people are not friendly with us. So not just, not, not for any reason, just they haven't met us. There's a great documentary out right now. It's a series by Ken Burns. We all know how great Ken Burns is. It's the US and the Holocaust. It dates back to how American Jim Crow policies actually influenced the Nazi regime. And then it doubles back and talks about how, you know, early industrialists like Henry Ford were actually in line with the Nazi regime and all of that. But then it gets into real heroism and people who supported and spoke out against what was happening. You'd be surprised to know that like when the finally during early days of World War

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  II, when it came out that a million or so Jews had been exterminated in Europe, that wasn't front page news. It was like on page eight. I don't know why. You'll see in this documentary, it wasn't front page news. The only paper in the country that had it as front page news was a Pittsburgh newspaper. I think it was the Pittsburgh Courier. It's a black community newspaper and they were the only ones to put it on the cover. And so, and that's because they had their own intimate experience with like oppression and a genocidal kind of background. And so I just, I think that it's important that people watch that. It's a great primer. And I think, you know, the only way to kind of eradicate this ignorance is by shining a light on it and trying to get to know a bit more about the subject.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  I think if you haven't read it, obviously Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank's family stories in that series. Man's Search for Meaning is like right up the alley of this podcast.

• 1:01:23Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  Viktor Frankl was in Auschwitz and it's, this is a story of survival, but also of trying to find, you know, humanity in that situation. And then there's Eli Wiesel, who is, this is a very dark story about his experience in the Holocaust. So those are great books. I highly recommend, but if your thing is watching video and watching movies, Ken Burns is the gold standard. Obviously we know that. It's riveting stuff and I highly recommend it.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. Thank you for that. It is, it is so strange and disconcerting that there is this, you know, this weird groundswell right now of this sentiment percolating up. Like why now? What is going on? And what's so strange about antisemitism is the weird and disturbing ways in which it kind of prods both left-leaning and right-leaning people. Like on the one hand, It's the ethnic minority who's, you know, who's penetrating our border and like taking our jobs and, you know, the non-white people, right?

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  But on the other hand, it's also the people who have like sort of ingratiated themselves into culture and ascended to positions of power and are secretly controlling everything.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:41Rich Roll?

  So it's like both of those things at the same time, you know?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Right, right. And that's what fascism is, right? When the right and the left meet, that's why it's scary. But I'm not here to say that I feel like we're on that trip down that memory lane to that dark place. I don't think we are. I don't believe that at all. But, you know, like, listen, I've experienced antisemitism my whole life. It just happens. You know, like, my great uncles and my grandparents, they endured it on the streets. I've had so many just more like comments at me or around me my whole life. It's fine. We are not really geared to vocally fight it. We're more geared to ignore it and just get on with it. Like, if you look at Goldman Sachs, I'm not telling you that I think Goldman Sachs is a great institution, but Goldman Sachs was started by Jews who couldn't get jobs on

• 1:03:27Speaker 01

  Wall Street because they were Jewish. And so then they started Goldman Sachs. And like, look what happened. You know, Hollywood started by Jewish. So the, these kinds of businesses, I think that's where these myths and these conspiracies come through. You know, they didn't need Wall Street to build Goldman Sachs and then dominate Wall Street. So that's going to engender a certain jealousy. I just think that, you know, obviously Kyrie made a mistake. I think Kanye is having mental health issues personally. Not an excuse for that behavior, and I'm not here to excuse it, but it just shows that we all have work to do, I guess.

• 1:04:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I am encouraged by the essentially, you know, broadly unanimous denouncement of all of this, but there are pockets of people for whom, you know, that Kanye, you know, Kanye's messaging like resonates with them, which is disturbing, right? And you can't separate that from the impact of social media and the internet on how it's shaping and warping brains alike, right?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:29Rich Roll?

  In terms of like... You know, what we're seeing spill over into real world ramifications and culture, which brings us, of course, to Elon Musk buying Twitter. It's very controversial.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  He's sort of this, you know, incredibly successful serial entrepreneur, richest man on the planet, who is kind of turning into an edgelord, like, interested in like, you know, basically being extremely online on Twitter.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  And has purchased this platform where he reigns supreme. And it would appear, as of today's taping, is kind of making the rules, you know, as he goes. Now, listen, I think Twitter has a lot of problems. I think there is room for tremendous improvement. I would like to see it turn into a healthy ecosystem for global discussion. Elon Musk seems intent on making lots of changes. As of right now, I'm not exactly sanguine about those changes, you know, being as positive as I think we would all like. And this is, seems to be evolving moment to moment.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  Right. Today was something like-

• 1:05:33Rich Roll?

  He's like, he's like this, this hard line policy on like, you can't impersonate anybody unless you declare that it's sarcasm.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:40Rich Roll?

  But all of these accounts were turning their names into Elon Musk, and then he's like banning them, and it's like, it's weird right now.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  Everything that's going on there.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Because sarcasm is always funnier when you say it up front.

• 1:05:51Rich Roll?

  Right. But if Kathy Griffin is changing her profile name to Elon Musk, we all know that it's sarcasm.

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:05:57Rich Roll?

  Does she need to declare that? And then her account is suspended? Like, what is, maybe there's something good about having a hard line policy of like, nobody can impersonate anybody? We'll see what happens here. This seems to be changing literally hour to hour. The latest I heard was that of all the people that were fired, now they're trying to bring a bunch of those people back.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Did you, did you see Kevin Ruze's kind of analysis?

• 1:06:20Rich Roll?

  Well, he's got this new podcast now called Hard Fork with Casey Newton.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  And they did a whole deep dive last week on it, and actually interviewed some Twitter employees about what it's like, you know, their lived experience of being there and kind of living through all of this.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Are you gonna fork over your eight bucks a month?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Is that even happening?

• 1:06:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I guess that's already a thing. There's an update where people are doing that.

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Are you doing it?

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  I have a hard time imagining doing that. Like, I have problems with this in that it seems like really what you're getting out of it is amplification of your tweets. If you don't pay the eight bucks, they've basically said they're suppressing your tweets and nobody's going to see them. So is this a free speech thing?

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem free speech.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, I think there is a bot problem, and I think verification is important, and it would be nice if everybody was vetted and you had to actually prove and establish that you are who you are. I think that would solve a lot of problems. And I think there is friction when you say you have to pay. Suddenly, a lot of these bots and bot farms are, you know, going to get weeded out. But I'm not sure this is the best way of doing that. But I'm not a computer scientist nor a social media engineer.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:35Rich Roll?

  I just know that this is a very unhealthy situation right now, and it feels very tempestuous at the moment.

• 1:07:40Speaker 01

  My friend Reese Pacico sent me a couple of, uh, he's, he's, he's in, um, in finance, and he's working on a great project, I should say, about, uh, kind of trying to find climate solutions, but in, you know, investing in, in climate solutions for profit. And he sent me a couple of, like, diatribes on this. And one of them was like this new social network that they're talking about. I know Jack Dorsey has a, is in beta.

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:08:08Speaker 01

  On a new thing. And so like-

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  I signed up for that beta, just to see.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Did you? It's a good idea. I mean, but what would, what will happen? Like, all these people who are on Twitter who had, like, hundreds of thousands of followers, they're not going to give up on, like, if they go to Mushroom or whatever it is, they're going to start at zero.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  Mastodon?

• 1:08:24Speaker 01

  Or Mastodon?

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  Mastodon?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  Mastodon's one of them. Is that Dorsey's one?

• 1:08:28Rich Roll?

  No, no, no. I don't know who owns Mastodon. The Dorsey one, I forget what it's called, but it's still, you know, it's still in beta. Like, you just give your email or whatever. It's been interesting to see, um, Jack Dorsey clap back on Elon a little bit also because-

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  He's gone both.

• 1:08:44Rich Roll?

  Because, well, Jack, you know, wanted, like, Elon was the-

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  A person that that Jack really wanted to inherit this.

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:08:53Rich Roll?

  And he felt very strongly that Elon could solve these problems. Now it seems to be that there's a little bit of friction between them. It's hard to tell.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  The genius myth.

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, yeah, here we are again.

• 1:09:05Speaker 01

  The genius myth.

• 1:09:05Rich Roll?

  Here we are again, like, yes. So what is actually happening? To me, it looks like a dumpster fire right now. But maybe he can do this? I don't know.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  Do what, though? What is the, what problems he's solving?

• 1:09:19Rich Roll?

  Good question.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Right. There's no problem to solve here. Like, the problem is.

• 1:09:23Rich Roll?

  Well, also, we're going into the midterms right now. And like, he's just fired staffs and teams of people who are involved in content moderation to avoid a lot of the misinformation that leads to all of these problems that we're seeing with, you know, alleged voter fraud, et cetera.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  I would like it if Elon could figure out a way to get the Democratic Party to stop emailing me.

• 1:09:46Rich Roll?

  That would be good.

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  How many emails?

• 1:09:47Rich Roll?

  I can tell you, in the last two weeks, I literally get dozens of text messages, phone calls, and like, I spend hours every day reporting junk and like, unsubscribing from emails. But literally in the last five days, yeah, I mean, like, how many text messages are you getting?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Text message, email, I'm getting like.

• 1:10:07Rich Roll?

  Phone calls.

• 1:10:08Speaker 01

  And they're all desperate and thirsty. It's like, it's not in, like, who's, who's in charge of email strategy? None of it seems like it's going well.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  It's not good.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, we're gonna lose. Yeah, with this attitude, you're definitely going to lose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One campaign.

• 1:10:24Rich Roll?

  So come Tuesday, tomorrow, at least all of that will stop, hopefully?

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Hopefully. One campaign emailed me 14 times within a 24-hour period. I told April, I said, this campaign 14 times, and she looked at me, she goes, "You're gonna lose, bro." That was her message for that campaign. "You are not winning."

• 1:10:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, man. All right. I mean, all right, let's crawl out of this.

• 1:10:44Speaker 01

  Let's crawl out of it.

• 1:10:45Rich Roll?

  Desperate black hole.

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:47Rich Roll?

  All right, let's take one more break, and we're back with more.

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back. I do wanna note, because we haven't done a roll-on in a while.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:05Rich Roll?

  And this might be the last roll-on of the year, because we go into December. I've got some travel coming up, I'm not gonna be around. And then in December, we do our best-of episodes.

• 1:11:14Speaker 01

  Unless you wanna do like a Zoom roll-on.

• 1:11:16Rich Roll?

  Me, we can't do a Zoom roll-on. Are you kidding me?

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Trying to get it. I'm trying to get another.

• 1:11:20Rich Roll?

  We might have to pre-record a roll-on that we could really, we'll see.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:11:24Rich Roll?

  But.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  I'm trying to get one in, listeners.

• 1:11:25Rich Roll?

  There is a chance this might be the last roll-on of the year.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  Trying to get one more in.

• 1:11:28Rich Roll?

  In which case, let's like, bring it back to, you know, something helpful to people.

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  Let's do it. But, can I start? Can I start?

• 1:11:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  Happy 10-year anniversary.

• 1:11:35Rich Roll?

  Thank you, sir.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  10 years.

• 1:11:37Rich Roll?

  10 years.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  To this week.

• 1:11:38Rich Roll?

  Of this podcast.

• 1:11:38Speaker 01

  To this, this date?

• 1:11:39Rich Roll?

  Uh, no, it's, I think it's kind of around Thanksgiving. Like, I think it's near, near the end of, around the 23rd or something like that of November, I believe.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Can we turn this on, guys?

• 1:11:49Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  Do we, do we?

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, so.

• 1:11:51Speaker 01

  I want, I want everyone to see this.

• 1:11:53Rich Roll?

  So we are celebrating 10 years. We did, the last roll-on we did, though, I did do those 10, 10 or 12 things that I've learned from doing this for 10 years. So I don't wanna completely reprise that, cuz that was a little bit of a, you know, we were kind of celebrating then. But there was, so when we first started, I'm gonna show this video, we were early on the video, because Julie and I would record these little teasers about the podcast. So this was like, for like, episode four.

• 1:12:18Speaker 01

  Look at these guys!

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Or something like that. This is on YouTube.

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  Looking good.

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  Look at that. All right, I can't, I can't even, I can't watch myself anymore.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  We're talking about the, my crashing journey from today, earlier.

• 1:12:30Rich Roll?

  I actually feel a little bit better, like, oh, I think I've, maybe I've gotten better at this podcasting thing.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  You have, you have.

• 1:12:37Rich Roll?

  But, early on in video.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Look how great you look!

• 1:12:39Rich Roll?

  Doing like, I looked, I was fit then. Now, I feel like motivated to get fit again, cuz I am looking pretty fit there. Anyway.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  You both do. It's great.

• 1:12:48Rich Roll?

  The point being, it's been 10 years.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  Looking at her, looking at you lovingly.

• 1:12:50Rich Roll?

  We're in this warehouse where the acoustics you could hear are terrible.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  I'm liking the, um, that, the fact that if there's a fire that breaks out, you're gonna handle it.

• 1:12:59Rich Roll?

  You think so? Well, yeah, because the fire extinguisher. There's the fire extinguisher there. Anyway, yeah, it's crazy to look at that 10 years. And of those kind of lessons that I shared last time, I felt like I rifled through them really quickly. There were three that I kind of wanted to spend a little bit more time on. Okay. The first of which, and the reason being that I think that these lessons are applicable and informative to anybody who's trying to achieve or accomplish anything meaningful in their lives. And the first one, and perhaps the most important of all of them, is consistency, right? Like, the reason this podcast is successful is that over that 10-year period, we never missed a week. We always uploaded. We never succumbed to perfection paralysis.

• 1:13:44Rich Roll?

  Not every episode was amazing, but we just had this mission of like, every Monday we upload, no matter what. And now we do, you know, a couple midweek kind of things, but that whole like, Monday morning, there's a new podcast up every time, no matter what, we've never missed. Professionalism. So, yeah, and so you learn as you go. And, you know, as you can see from this video and my cringe-worthy disposition, they're not all going to be perfect. You're not going to be great when you start, and that's not the point. The point is to marshal the courage to weather through that and continue to keep iterating and doing in the face of understanding that it's not going to be amazing all the time. Yeah. And this is the case for you as a writer.

• 1:14:29Rich Roll?

  It's the case for me as an athlete or anything that I've accomplished in my life as a result of doing small things with extreme regularity and consistency. That's how you move the needle. So you look at these big goals and they're giant mountains that you have to climb. And there's something sexy about, you know, planting your flag and declaring that as your goal. But in truth, whether or not you accomplish that goal has everything to do with all the tiny little things you do every single day when nobody's paying attention and nobody cares. And it's very easy to flake out and the stakes are low.

• 1:15:02Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. You know, that's, that's the case of being a writer. You need to work the muscle. It's a craft. It's not a talent. You can have some talent and affinity for it and some natural talent, but that's not going to get you anywhere in a professional way, in my opinion. It could if you also just happen to have like built in attention, like you can focus and get something amazing out. And then maybe, yes, you can be a wunderkind, but for people like me who did have some skill, but you know, just couldn't, you know, it took me a long time to actually be good and as a storyteller. I could turn a phrase, but to actually get good at this took me years and years and years of frustration

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  and, and, and just make an appointment with yourself to go do it. And even now I'm doing it.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  Be willing to be bad. Like even if you like reduce the stakes even further in your daily journaling practice, or whatever it is that you're, you know, trying to kind of master, doing it privately for yourself and allowing yourself to be bad so that you get out of that mindset of being stuck or thinking that everything you do has to be great. And I'm just thinking about like this next book that you did with, with David Goggins.

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:16Rich Roll?

  After like this just unprecedented success of the first book.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:16:19Rich Roll?

  It would be very easy to be paralyzed and say, well, maybe we'll do a second book or maybe not. Like it'll never be as successful. So why do another book? Let's go do a podcast or let's do something else.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:31Rich Roll?

  Like, let's not even try.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:33Rich Roll?

  Or to go into that second book saying, well, there's no way it could be, that was a flash in the pan, one time thing. So, okay, well, we'll do this book, but like, you know, it doesn't have to be that good because it'll never be as good as the other thing.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. But at least then we have like, I, I, I can be of service to him and then we can, and obviously Jennifer Kish is involved deeply in this. And then it's like a team that.

• 1:16:58Rich Roll?

  Right. I'm saying the courage to do, to show up anyway, in light of like all of that, and then get to the other side of it and actually create something that everybody feels like rivals, if, if not altogether, exceeds the original book itself, is a result of having the courage to like not pay attention to, not be paralyzed by that early success.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  And that's, that's, I think, his secret to success in general is he's always focused on.

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  The next thing.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  The next thing. And he's keeping him, he's keeping himself oriented forward. And then when you have it, when it's a team thing, it's a little even easier as a writer too. When it's, when it's a crew of us working together, it actually, it doesn't make it easy. It's still hard and he is, and he's, and, and he has his process and I have my process. And it's, it's all writing. It's all one thing. And, but when you have each other and it's a team, it's, it's like even easier. When you're by yourself and you're hitting your head against the screen, it's a lot, it's, it's, it's, it's harder to, to keep going sometimes.

• 1:17:59Rich Roll?

  And you don't have an accountability partner.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:18:01Rich Roll?

  Cause it's just you and whatever fabricated deadline you've come up with.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  And nobody cares. Like at least in, in that sense, people were dead, really wanted it, you know? He's been asked about it. He's been like, you know, and people really want it. You know, there's a market for it. So just like you said, yes, the easy thing for him would have been like, hey, I've made my impact. I'll go do something else because I, I can do a million things and the world's open. Um, and he chose this because he loves the process.

• 1:18:26Rich Roll?

  Right. Which brings me to the next thing, which is process over results.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Rich Roll?

  Falling in love with the process.

• 1:18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Rich Roll?

  It's okay to have a dream or a goal that is oriented around a certain kind of result. But if the result is all you care about and the process is nothing but drudgery that you, that you dread, you're unlikely of being successful. You have to find a way to engage with the process and fall in love with it over time. To really allow it to energize you rather than it be, you know, sort of an impediment, you know? Or, or something that you, you feel like is an annoyance on the journey towards a certain result. And the more you're rooted in the process, the less the results matter.

• 1:19:15Rich Roll?

  Because to, you know, sort of go back to the Goggins thing, like whatever the result is, you're on to the next thing anyway, because you're all about the process.

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  And, well, when you're talking specifically about writing. That is the process is rewriting and rewriting and reanalyzing and reanalyzing and rereading and rewriting. And so to get to be good at it, the process includes that. So that liberates you from worrying about is the first draft any good? Now, it doesn't necessarily always work that way in everything that you're doing when you're when you're on a tight deadline. But for me, almost anything I write the first time through needs a lot of work. I mean, that's just the way it is. It's not your best work. It's the it's the first work and it's a way to to kind of get it out. Occasionally, like the O story, it came out real smooth the first time. It's very rare that that happens for me. Usually I chunk it out.

• 1:20:07Rich Roll?

  But the point is you're writing all the time and and we're using writing as a metaphor for anything. That could be your race result or your, you know, your grade in your college class or whatever it is. But the point is, you're doing it because this is what you do and this is who you are, not because you want to see a book on a bookshelf in a bookstore, but because you are a writer and writers write. Like, I think one of the great examples of this is Ryan Holiday. Like, how many books has that guy written in the last 10 years? Like, he's written like

• 1:20:39Speaker 01

  How old is he?

• 1:20:39Rich Roll?

  12 books and he's like 18 years old. And the reason is, is that he is a writer and he's in love with the process. And as soon as he turns a manuscript in, he's literally on to the next book like the next day. Like, he does not allow any, any, any kind of like interference with the process of being a writer. Like, he's researching, he's making these cards and he goes through his whole process. He has this box that he puts all his index cards in and how he maps out.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  The Nabokov system.

• 1:21:06Rich Roll?

  Like, all of the, yeah, and it's sort of, you know, when you're done with the writing and then you're on to this other phase of it, which is more reading oriented and and it's all detached from whether the book ends up on some list or how many copies it sold.

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  It's the process itself.

• 1:21:21Rich Roll?

  It doesn't impact like what he wakes up and does every single day.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Well, I, I respect that. I mean, personally, I will say, I think that sometimes the process does feel like drudgery. Sometimes it does, for me.

• 1:21:33Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  And that, that could be anything. And I'm sure there's athletes that feel that way about

• 1:21:37Rich Roll?

  But you do it anyway.

• 1:21:38Speaker 01

  But you do it anyway.

• 1:21:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Speaker 01

  You do it anyway, because eventually there'll be a time in every session. Where you'll find the reason you're doing it. So like even if it feels like shit, you feel like you're running in mud for, you know, three, like for the most of your run, for eight of 10K. There might be a point where you feel like, okay, that's why I did it. It might be right at the end, might be at the end.

• 1:21:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  With the, with the endorphin rush.

• 1:22:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  But if, you know, for me, that's an amazing story of Ryan.

• 1:22:06Rich Roll?

  Seth Godin is the same way. I did a podcast with him and hasn't gone up yet, but you know, that guy's written a blog post every single day for like, how many years?

• 1:22:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:14Rich Roll?

  Back to 2005 or six or something like that, every single day.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  That's.

• 1:22:19Rich Roll?

  And he's a master of creative expression and, and you know, how you think about and pursue a life as a creative person who literally, you know, ships their work, like isn't paralyzed under the weight of their own, you know, the pressures that they impose upon themselves.

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  Yep. I mean, you know, you, you, you want to give your best effort and sometimes it doesn't feel that way when you look back at it that day. But that doesn't matter because over time, the process and the consistency is the effort.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and that's what matters.

• 1:22:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Really, at the end of the day, all the other stuff is nonsense because you do the thing because that's who you are and this is what you do.

• 1:23:07Speaker 01

  It's a great thing to remember.

• 1:23:08Rich Roll?

  And it's back to.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  That mindset.

• 1:23:10Rich Roll?

  The final like point that I want to make is around patience. And you mentioned like, yeah, you show up for it, you show up for it, it's drudgery, you hate it, it sucks, it's terrible. And then you have that moment of, of, of breakthrough where it's just flowing, right? And you're this channel and it's all working out. And you live for those moments as a writer.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:23:29Rich Roll?

  As an athlete where you feel in the flow, as a musician who's writing a song, whatever it is, those don't come easy and they're not predictable and you can't manufacture them, but the only way that you can experience them is if you're showing up consistently and make yourself available for that, right? And that requires patience and beyond that.

• 1:23:50Rich Roll?

  It's important to understand that becoming good at anything takes much longer than people are really willing to reckon with or accept. Everybody in this instant gratification culture, they want the result. They don't want to endure the hard work that it takes to get there, and they completely overestimate what they can do in short periods of time. Like, oh, in a year, I'll be here, or whatever. This goal, and if things aren't going well initially right out of the gate, or it's not headed in the direction immediately that they want it to head, people abandon their path. And the truth is, and I beat this drum consistently because I think it's so important, and I'm not sure that people really appreciate it

• 1:24:31Rich Roll?

  or believe it, but it really does take at least 10 years to get good at anything. Whether you're an athlete, a writer, podcaster, musician, you show up for something every single day, it's going to take 10 years minimum before you have any kind of solid aptitude at that that is worth sharing with other people.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  I found it interesting, and again, going back to your interview with the Bergen Boys, that even when they were 14, like-

• 1:24:58Rich Roll?

  They were training like professionals!

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Gustav said he trained for 10 years, and even at 14, they had a 10-year plan. At 14-

• 1:25:06Rich Roll?

  And now they're 10 years later, and everyone's like, oh my God, nobody can do this well at their first Kona, and they're crushing it. But Gustav was like, yeah, I've been doing this since I was 14. I've been training like a professional. This is a 10-year plan finally manifesting.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  So let me ask you, have you ever had a five or 10-year plan?

• 1:25:23Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Like a formal one?

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  Not really.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  No?

• 1:25:26Rich Roll?

  I fall in love with certain things, and I get invested in them, and I pursue them, and I've experienced that I actually don't get good at them until the decade lapses. And I'm just feeling that now with podcasting. As a swimmer, as an athlete, it took 10 years. I mean, obviously, I was a kid, growing into it and all of that. I've heard this, when I was a lawyer, it takes 10 years to build a client list and be successful. You as a writer, like, I don't know. I mean, certainly, there's outlier examples-

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  Took me 20 years.

• 1:25:58Rich Roll?

  Took you 20 years, yeah. But all of these experiences that you have inform the craft.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Well, like Ryan Holiday, those guys sound very structured. I've lived kind of unstructured. April always calls it, I live the improv life, or that's how she always perceived it. And now I'm getting to the point where I've already know my ideas or have fielding ideas for next books right away, like I'm into something already. And, and so I'm now getting to that point, but I've never had the, I remember an ex-girlfriend's aunt once asked me my five-year plan and I was like offended. I was like, I'm offended by that remark.

• 1:26:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  I was offended. So like-

• 1:26:38Rich Roll?

  No, no, no true free spirit artist would have a five-year plan. That is offensive.

• 1:26:44Speaker 01

  A five-year plan is like a mask to the anti-masker.

• 1:26:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  That's what it was like to me. I was offended by, I like, I didn't want anything to do with that stuff. Yes, I was more free spirited and all that. And, you know, I still have that within me. So it's interesting to like ponder that. Like I was wondering if you'd had it, like even now, now that you have a whole operation, do you guys have, how far out do you guys plan?

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  It's interesting. Like I don't have a five-year plan. I don't have a 10-year plan, but I do have, I, the way I think about it is what gets me excited and what am I curious about? And I have the, the privilege and the freedom to indulge in those things now because this is successful and because I'm surrounded by talented people who, who are very capable and can handle a lot of the things that, you know, I used to do on my own. And Tyler, who's here back working with us, used to handle for me when it was just the two of us. Now I have some added free time to think about and execute on other projects. And that's, that is a privilege and I don't take it lightly. So I don't think

• 1:27:54Rich Roll?

  about it in terms of, of five or 10-year plans. I think about it in terms of like, what would be cool? What, what, what would feel meaningful, you know, to invest some extra time in? Where do I feel under expressed? And how can I express myself better in a way that would be helpful to other people outside of the podcast? All of those things are things I think about.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  You have your goals though, right? You have like, like, like towards, like during the year, you start to think about next year towards the end, right? And think about, is there something I want to add to the list next year? I mean, do you do that at all? In any, even in informal way?

• 1:28:29Rich Roll?

  Maybe in a very informal way.

• 1:28:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:28:31Rich Roll?

  Like I said at the outset, like I want to have a stable body and I want to be fit enough so that I could like pop into all of these fun experiences. Like that's a, that's a sort of vague goal, I suppose, but, but important to me and meaningful.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:43Rich Roll?

  That isn't wed to any kind of like timeline or anything like that. So I, I think setting goals is important. You want to have a North Star, something that you're working towards. But I think you also have to hold on to those a little bit loosely. And, and I've said this before, like be available and open to, you know, other intervening miracles that can reconfigure your trajectory. Cause if you're so like, this is what I'm doing and you're so rigid about it, then perhaps you're also blind to other things that could be beneficial.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Really interesting. I was looking at your early episodes and you had Julie on episode one and three had Chris, Jabe, is that who you were, that you were collaborating with over there?

• 1:29:30Rich Roll?

  He was the, yeah, he was the owner of Common Ground. He was like our host or whatever.

• 1:29:33Speaker 01

  And then you had Gabby Reese, episode eight, and kind of you're off and running now on that, on that train. I mean, I loved going through, like looking at that, I'm like, it's really inspiring to look back and see like that trajectory for me anyway. It was cool to see. Is there any early moments you remember that where you, where it clicked for you? Like any early stuff where you're like, am I doing this? Am I not doing this? Am I playing? Am I real? Is there, was there a moment early?

• 1:29:58Rich Roll?

  Well, there was never a sense that this was a vocation or a business. Like it was literally like me having a creative impulse and feeling a little bit stymied on this island where I felt disconnected and uncertain about what my next move would be. And also as a fan of podcasting, interested in this medium and had for a long time, wanted to explore the possibilities there. So. I did the homework to figure out how you do it because it's not self-evident. How you do it, it still isn't like you do have to like, oh, how do you get this thing up on? Apple, it wasn't Apple Podcasts, then it was iTunes. How does that work? Blah, blah, blah. Figuring all of that out and then just sitting down and having a conversation with Julie

• 1:30:41Rich Roll?

  at the end of which thinking that was fun. Let's do that again. It wasn't like, oh, this is my new life.

• 1:30:46Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right.

• 1:30:47Rich Roll?

  It was just now people launch podcasts and they have strategies and they hire publicists and they're pre-selling the advertising and they have a whole thing about like, how many should we record ahead of time? And what it was like, it wasn't like that at all. Like we were just freewheeling it and having fun and did it for a long time before we monetized it in any meaningful way. I mean, years before it was self-sustaining in any, in, in, in any material way. But doing it for the love of it, doing it because I enjoyed the process of it because it, it scratched, you know, a creative itch and it allowed me to, you know, continue to grow and explore,

• 1:31:28Rich Roll?

  you know, new ideas by allowing me to have conversation with, conversation with interesting people. At a time when people were not clamoring to start, start podcasts, like it just wasn't a thing back then. Like it was very unusual and not cool to have a podcast, but I loved it. And, you know, now the fact that it's like this, this huge kind of medium where there's so much energy and interest in is like an added bonus.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  It's very cool to have a podcast now.

• 1:31:54Rich Roll?

  It's crazy.

• 1:31:55Speaker 01

  Now you're all at the red carpet.

• 1:31:56Rich Roll?

  It was literally the dorkiest thing ever. Like it was sort of like, do you work at Radio Shack? Like you're some kind of weird hobbyist, you know? Embarrassing to admit, you know, in mixed company that you were a podcast host and obviously that, that has changed and.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Well, you used to have to explain what a podcast is, I'm sure.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  Sure, of course.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  How many years before you monetized it?

• 1:32:16Rich Roll?

  I don't think, I mean, I think we did some ads here and there for like Audible that were like, we were barely getting paid anything. So technically maybe we ran some ads. You know, maybe in the second or third year, but it had to be. I mean, it four or five years into it.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  But it was it was helping the sale of the book. So you were you were getting seeing some revenue like right?

• 1:32:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but like the audience, it also it also was just very gradual growth.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:32:43Rich Roll?

  There was never any big viral moment.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  There was no moment you can point to and like, that's the moment where this plane really took off.

• 1:32:49Rich Roll?

  No, no, no, it's just very, very gradual.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Consistency.

• 1:32:53Rich Roll?

  Consistency, dude.

• 1:32:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Rich Roll?

  You know, everybody wants those big spikes, but you know, truly, if you just keep showing up and keep showing up and refuse to quit and continue to get better and devote yourself to the thing that excites you and that you care about like you. You know, then you're you're available for the miracle. And that doesn't mean that you're entitled to anything or that anything will is guaranteed to occur, but it certainly can occur if you bail on it or you are unable to be consistent or show up for it or give it the respect that, you know, it deserves.

• 1:33:29Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  There you go.

• 1:33:30Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for inviting me into it in the in the recent years.

• 1:33:35Rich Roll?

  Here's to 10 more years.

• 1:33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Rich Roll?

  I still love it. I really do.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  It's.

• 1:33:40Rich Roll?

  And I'm excited for that for what's going to happen next year, too. We got lots of cool plans.

• 1:33:45Speaker 01

  It's really exciting. It feels like more you're you're actually mainstreaming in a way. There's people who I know that listen to this that that that have come to you in recent years that aren't I would never have put in one of your kind of like, you know, you had one thing I always when I when I think about the success of the Rich Roll Podcast, you think of, well, you have these these niche markets that were always kind of you were organic, kind of you're you're you're you belong to the sober living.

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  The plant based athlete.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  And the athlete and the endurance athlete. So we've talked about that before, but now you're getting people who aren't necessarily involved in any of those. And you know, you're getting almost a million on YouTube now.

• 1:34:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  I mean, it's pretty amazing.

• 1:34:27Rich Roll?

  Almost a million subscribers on YouTube.

• 1:34:29Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  That's nuts.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  It is nuts.

• 1:34:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  I'm one of them.

• 1:34:34Rich Roll?

  You, do you subscribe?

• 1:34:35Speaker 01

  I'm a subscriber.

• 1:34:36Rich Roll?

  I'm glad.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  I'm a subscriber to both.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  So do you get notifications and alerts when you're, when you show up on the, on YouTube?

• 1:34:41Speaker 01

  No, because I have an alert when my name is on the internet. I don't want to see it. So I have the opposite.

• 1:34:46Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:34:48Speaker 01

  Can I, can I just point out one thing?

• 1:34:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Before we get into listener questions?

• 1:34:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  Remember we talked about the murder of Eliza Fletcher in Memphis?

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 1:34:57Speaker 01

  And we talked about kind of the danger that women face going out running. And, um, I mean, at night especially. And people asked, I think I got a couple of messages. Are there any solutions? You know, I think we maybe got a phone call about that.

• 1:35:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:10Speaker 01

  And we didn't have, we, we tried our best, but we didn't really have anything. Well, this company called Nathan, I never heard of them before in my life.

• 1:35:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. They make lots of hydration vests and camping gear and endurance running gear.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  They have put together this, it's a night running hydration vest that includes a siren, like a, a, a high volume, high decibel siren that you can pull a ripcord on and it will just explode with light and, and siren.

• 1:35:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:35:40Speaker 01

  If you're in any trouble whatsoever, that'll wake up the neighborhood. So, um, it would be very hard to, uh, to visualize someone hearing that and not running far, far, far, far, far away.

• 1:35:52Rich Roll?

  That is a, an amazing solution.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a solution. So, um, Nathan, you're saying they're reputable. You know them. Um, I'm sure they are. It's a great piece of equipment. Um, it's certain, you know, if you added like a little pepper spray canister in one of these pockets and you'd be fully loaded, I think to feel better.

• 1:36:09Rich Roll?

  And it's, and it has hydration.

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:11Rich Roll?

  And it's reflective gear for running at night.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:36:14Rich Roll?

  So it's firing on all cylinders.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  All cylinders. So congrats. And Nathan, thanks for putting this together. I think, uh, women can really benefit from it. Don't you think?

• 1:36:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a good idea.

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Rich Roll?

  Cool. Okay. All right. Let's go to some listener questions.

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Listener questions. Okay. Here we go. Antonia in Petaluma.

• 1:36:33Speaker 04

  Hey, Rich and Adam. I'm Antonia calling from Petaluma in Sonoma wine country. And over the past two or three years, I've been experiencing this increasingly persistent call to write a book. You know, it's not fiction, not a memoir, but a book about a specific recurring theme in my life. So my question to you is, how does a laywoman like me, I have a business degree, I'm a winemaker and a yoga instructor, with zero English lit or creative writing background, go about writing a book? Where do I even start? I would like to write it myself and find a good editor, but have no idea how to go about that.

• 1:37:16Speaker 04

  I realize this is a rather broad question, but since you both have written successful books with varying degrees of previous experience, I'd really appreciate just a couple of nuggets of your wisdom. Thank you guys for creating such a great show. It's impacted my life in more ways than you can imagine. Thank you so much, and I can't wait to hear for your nuggets of wisdom. Thanks.

• 1:37:44Rich Roll?

  I love this question. Thank you, Antonia, in Petaluma.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, Petaluma, great town.

• 1:37:50Rich Roll?

  It is. Thank you, Antonia. Listen, the answer to your question, like, how do you begin? Where do I even start? You start by starting. You have to get out of your head and outside of like all the baggage that's holding you back, all this storytelling, this narrative about how I don't know how to do it, and I don't have a background in English and all of that, just get out of your own way with all of these BS reasons, and get out a pen and a piece of paper, or open up your laptop and start typing. It feels like you want to know where it's going to lead you, or you want to have all of your questions resolved and answered before you begin, and that's just not how it works.

• 1:38:35Rich Roll?

  The way it works is, the universe conspires to support you when you put in the work and you show up for it. So, begin by doing that, and something inside of you will come to life, because you have this thing inside of you that's yearning to be expressed, and it's actually, here's a way to kind of reframe it. I think it's actually an act of violence against yourself to not express it. By repressing it, you are not in loving kindness to who you are. Clearly, you have something inside of you that's nagging you to be brought to life. And every day that goes by where you ignore it, or you repress it,

• 1:39:18Rich Roll?

  or you look for an excuse to not actualize it, is not in service to who you are. It is not in service to your authentic self that is telling you that you need to get this outside of yourself. And all the stuff you're worried about will get answered and resolved. There are people out there who can edit books, who can help you with structure, who can fact check.

• 1:39:46Rich Roll?

  And you know, there's a lot of amazing books out there that are not by people who have some background in English literature. They're from people who have something to say. That's the most important thing when you're writing a book. I never took a creative writing class. Yeah, do you have something to say? The English part is easy. Like, that has almost nothing to do with it. There are other people you can bring in to fix all of that kind of nonsense. But the having something to say, like really having something to say, that is the rare part and that is the hard part. So remember that and just get into action. Begin, make it a practice and make that practice non-negotiable. Create structure around that practice and then protect that structure above everything else.

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  Get it done, ship the work, as Seth Godin would say. Ship the work. Ship the work. None of it is meaningful until you ship it, which is when you let go and you allow it to be in the world. Yes. Which is scary in its own right. We want to protect it. It's not perfect yet. Got to hold on to it. Once I let go of it, I can't control it anymore. I can't iterate on it. There's a sense of vulnerability. That comes with shipping it. And you don't have to experience that fear or that vulnerability as long as you are continuing to tinker, right?

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  I've been tinkering with a novel a long time. I'm getting ready, I'm getting closer to shipping, but I'm still tinkering. It's hard, it's scary, because I've never, I haven't had success in the novels, in the fiction space. So it's like terrifying.

• 1:41:14Rich Roll?

  Right, but you have written books. So how does all of this square with you? Like, what would you say to Antonia?

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Well, I would say, I'm going to give some practical feedback. I mean, you have some interesting books that you recommend for her to kind of take a look at. Steven Pressfield, you talk about Rick Rubin's new one, The Creative Act.

• 1:41:33Rich Roll?

  Right, well, let me just do that and then I'll turn it over to you. I mean, you know, I've done many podcast episodes on the subject of kind of getting out of your own way and getting into the creative flow. Brian Koppelman is fantastic on this, so search the archive for that one. We talk a lot about the practice of journaling and the importance that Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way, has played in his writing career. That book has been instrumental in my life. It's a book that I continue to return to to this day. I've been doing The Artist's Way on and off since 1996, yeah, since 1996. Steven Pressfield, his book, The War of Art, and he has a couple of other books

• 1:42:13Rich Roll?

  in that vein, Turning Pro, et cetera. I did a podcast with Steven, but his book, The War of Art, perhaps the best book to read on getting out of your head and getting things onto the page. Seth Godin, again, I did a podcast with him, it's not out yet, but he has a book called The Practice, which you should check out, similar to The War of Art. Rick Rubin's book, The Creative Act, is coming out in January. That book is fucking awesome. I'm going to buy hundreds of copies of that book and give it to everybody I know. It's really a beautiful book. It's a book that anybody who is interested in creative expression, whether you're a writer, or whatever it is that you're trying to manifest in the world, I think, would benefit from reading.

• 1:42:57Rich Roll?

  And I would add to that list Chase Jarvis's book, Creative Calling. Chase is also a friend of the podcast, has been on the show before. So in terms of resources- I would suggest, Antonia, that you check out all of those and then

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  I would add Big Magic.

• 1:43:13Rich Roll?

  Put those aside and start, oh, Big Magic also, great.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  By Elizabeth Gilbert.

• 1:43:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a, there's a little bit of Big Magic energy in The Creative Act and Rick Rubin's book and the podcast that I did with him that's going to come out in the new year. We, we talk about that a little bit. Um, but yeah, great, great addition to that list.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would add Big Magic.

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  The problem is, and then I'll turn it over to you.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Yes, no, no, no, not at all.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  Sorry to keep speaking over you.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:43:33Rich Roll?

  It's easy to then get immersed in all of these books and podcasts and say, well, I'm learning about being creative. When actually you're just using that as a, uh, like a, um, like a smoke shield to prevent you from actually doing the thing.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  I think that's a great point. I mean, um, personally, I am not one of those writers that really meditates on the practice of the creative or on the creative process at all. I've never have been. I've been much more, you know, just do it kind of like the consistency. Just put in the hours and, and, and do it. But from the practical aspect of this, I think you're right, uh, in terms of doing some preparation and reading on it would be helpful to her because it would decode it. And then I also think that, you know, getting into some sort of journaling practice or just a practice would be helpful because you don't have the muscle built up yet and you need to get it. You need to, you need to get it working. So having said that, when you're talking about actual practicalities

• 1:44:34Speaker 01

  of how does a book come to this world, in, in nonfiction, you have the ability to write a book proposal. You don't have to write the whole book. You can write a sample chapter or two, figure out the marketing plan, figure out where this book fits in the mark, in the marketplace and all of it. You can easily Google book proposals and find some examples. And that's how, I don't know what the full percentage is, but a vast majority of nonfiction books are sold today. Is they're sold via agents, to publishers in book proposal format. And so you don't actually have to write the whole book to get, to create a book. And eventually you do, but you don't have to get it.

• 1:45:12Rich Roll?

  Those are two, like the, yeah, it's a, it's a good distinction to bring up. I guess the question is, what is the purpose of this book? Is it to just write a book and be expressed in that?

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:23Rich Roll?

  In that, in that thing that you're trying to, you know, wrap your head around? Or is it to be a published author? Like, that's a whole different thing, because you're bringing commerce into this.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. And so, I guess I was just putting that in because it's the only thing I could add that's more, a little when you're thinking about this. And obviously, she is visualizing a book.

• 1:45:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:45:43Speaker 01

  And a product.

• 1:45:44Rich Roll?

  And there's many ways of, like, you can self-publish.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:47Rich Roll?

  You can do the book proposal thing.

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  You can.

• 1:45:49Rich Roll?

  You know, the book proposal thing is now, it's sort of like, you know how studios are only making superhero movies?

• 1:45:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:45:54Rich Roll?

  Like, now, publishers are only making books from, you know, people with giant Instagram accounts.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:46:00Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like, a lot of that kind of stuff gets played into it. But none of that should be an impediment to you creating the book that you want to create. Because we're in an era in which those gatekeepers no longer are playing the role that they once did. And there is no impediment to distribution. You can create a self-published book and get it on Amazon and get it out in the world. And perhaps that's the best first way for you to become an author.

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I love it. We're moving right on to Rich. Not Rich Roll, but Rich in Rockfield.

• 1:46:36Rich Roll?

  Rockford.

• 1:46:37Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:46:37Rich Roll?

  Rockford.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  Rock, Rockford.

• 1:46:40Rich Roll?

  Rich in Rockford.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  Hello, Rich and Adam. This is Rich Toppey from Rockford, Illinois. I'm 71 years old, so I suspect I skew toward the older range of your listeners. I discovered your podcast about five years ago and enjoy the great interviews and information. Roll on is especially a treat when you share your banter. It's like hanging out with a couple of good friends. I've learned a lot, too. I can now say, hey, it's not age slowing me down. I'm just doing a lot of Zone 2 training. My question comes from listening to both of you so effectively share your reading experiences. Clearly, you both read volumes of information to be your best as an interviewer and a writer.

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  How do you retain and then retrieve as much as you do? Certainly, you prepare for specific topics and guests, but you often pull thoughts from books you've read long ago and then apply the ideas to a subject that has randomly popped up. I love to read, but wish I could retain much more than I do. Are you just lucky enough to have superlative memories? Or are there some skills that you could share to help us all get more from our reading? It's sure okay to use this on the air if you wish. I really appreciate all I've been getting from your program. So, all the best from the Midwest. Thanks a lot.

• 1:48:10Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:48:11Rich Roll?

  What do you think, Adam?

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  I just think that he sounds like a swell fella.

• 1:48:16Rich Roll?

  Sounds like a nice gentleman.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  I know. It's like the Midwest. His Midwest, you know what I mean? Like, his manners and his laid-back.

• 1:48:24Rich Roll?

  Genial and covivial.

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  Yes. That's what I think. I don't think I have a great memory.

• 1:48:30Rich Roll?

  I definitely, I assure you, my memory is anything but superlative.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. But you are good, and he's right, you are good at pulling tidbits of knowledge and things that you remember from either from your past or things that you've read, especially, I think, in your one-on-one guest stuff.

• 1:48:49Rich Roll?

  It's nice that he has pointed that out. I would not have thought that I was somebody who would stand out in any way for that. I mean, I think, to the extent that that is true, and I would challenge just how true it is, it's because this job requires homework. You're always doing homework. And a lot of the guests that I've had on the show are published authors, and I do my very best to read their books in their entirety, or at least as much as I possibly can before they're on the show. And if they have multiple books to familiarize myself with the canon of their work. And I spend probably eight to 10 hours of prep per guest irrespective of whether they're

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  an author or not. And I create an outline for each guest. So that forces me to take what I've read and distill it down into interesting kind of bullet points. I don't write out questions, but I write topic headings. And if it's somebody, if, you know, if somebody's written like a nonfiction book, I'll kind of go through the structure of that book and extract from that themes and principles that I want to explore with the guest. And I think the process of not just writing, but then creating the outline, you know, every little extra step cements the information and the knowledge contained in the book a little bit more deeply. And then I'll review the outline and I'll refine the outline and then I'll make extra notes.

• 1:50:18Rich Roll?

  So all of those little things, I think, really help, you know, anchor whatever I've learned in the memory bank. And I don't know how long it stays. Like, you know, sometimes I don't remember anything about what we talked about or what that book said. For books that are super meaningful to me, it seems easy for them to remain in my conscious awareness. Other books, not so much. And I think it goes to understanding how you learn. Everybody learns differently. Like, I know that often I'll consume a book as an audiobook. I'll go out on a Saturday morning for a long bike ride and I'll listen to half of an audiobook. But hearing it, I don't retain it nearly as well as I do when I read it.

• 1:51:02Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm a visual learner.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:51:05Rich Roll?

  So then I have to go to the printed book and kind of go through it and make notes. And in the typing and in the looking at my computer or in, you know, the pieces of paper, like something about my visual cortex or whatever gets activated that...

• 1:51:22Rich Roll?

  That helps me learn better than hearing. And I'm sure other people are the other way around. So I think it's a piece of self-understanding and then developing practices to kind of cement what's important for you to learn. And now there are all of these resources. You could read a book. I know what it's like to read a book kind of casually and then be like, I have no idea. I can't remember anything from that book. But you can go to Blinkist or you can find summaries online. And just doing little refreshers brings a lot of that stuff back. And it's helpful because it's easy to read like a really long book. And you've read so much that you lose the forest for the trees, right? And you kind of need a synopsis or a summary to like, remind you, oh, here's what's important.

• 1:52:05Rich Roll?

  Here are the primary tiers and here's the kind of scaffolding upon which to hang all of these interesting ideas. And revisiting that, I think with some regularity, helps kind of, again, with that long-term memory piece of really anchoring it. And then thinking about it, like, how does it apply to your life also in terms of problem solving? At least in the kind of nonfiction space.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I don't think I have great memory or can pull pieces of writing. Or like, I'm not the guy that toasts, you know, and recites Chaucer.

• 1:52:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, you have friends, they remember quotes from movies and they can like, they remember everything about what a movie was about that they saw 15 years ago. I'm definitely not that guy.

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  And I do it even, I have a better memory for movies sometimes than books. But there are, and there's times when I'm writing a story and I'm like deep diving into material and I'm reading a lot about it. And then I write this piece and then as soon as it's done and it's published, if you ask me about it like three weeks later, I would, I would sound like it wasn't me that wrote it. You know, like I also have that where it just kind of goes away.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  I have that with the podcast. People like, remember when, you know, you and so-and-so said that thing? And you talked about that thing? I was like, no, I have no, I have no memory of that.

• 1:53:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I write, I read, I read as much as I ever did, maybe more so. I'm putting books away a lot quicker. I've got. I'm reading fiction and nonfiction simultaneously now. I used to kind of stick with a book and I'd finish it no matter what. And so that would block me from reading more books because sometimes I'd be in a book that's dry or that I'm not connecting to.

• 1:53:34Rich Roll?

  Just because you start a book, doesn't mean you have to finish it.

• 1:53:37Speaker 01

  Right. So now I, I, I give myself permission to not finish it. And so because of that, I'm reading more and I'm kind of, I'm, I'm going back between fiction and nonfiction. I used to think when I'm writing nonfiction, I'm going to read fiction. When I'm writing fiction, I'm going to read nonfiction and I just don't have those kinds of guardrails at all anymore. They're just excuses. And, um, and to be quite honest, there's so much content out there, TV content and, and like audio content, there's so much of it. I'm, I find myself like taking up shelter in books. You know, like I can't take that.

• 1:54:08Rich Roll?

  How can you read a book though, when White Lotus is back, Adam?

• 1:54:11Speaker 01

  Well, I'm on White Lotus. I'm on that. But you know what I mean? It's like, and so I'm reading more than ever. And so, uh, and some books do stay with you, right? For long ways. And so often I think if you're saying that I brought it up, it's probably because I brought, I bring up the same like five books. But I do, I will, one recommendation is Dwight Garner, who is a literary critic at New York Times. We've talked about him on this podcast, I think before. And he has something called Garner's Quotations that just came out not too long ago, maybe a year ago. And he is one of those that can pull a quote for anything. Like he can, he can pull a quote out of left field for any occasion.

• 1:54:47Rich Roll?

  His own quotes or just quotes of things that other people?

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  Stellar quotes from, from like luminaries. Um, and then another person, Kelton Reed, who has The Writer's Files, a podcast host, good, good friend of mine. He does the same thing. He's able to put quotes out there and you'll see it on his Instagram or The Writer's Files. Um, and so they're really good at that. Um, I think I'm just, I just read as much as I can and hope to retain it, but I don't have any strategies for you.

• 1:55:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So you didn't answer his question at all.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  I have no strategies.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  Keep reading, read more.

• 1:55:21Speaker 01

  All right. Uh, but I appreciate the question.

• 1:55:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  It's nice. I think he's talking to you. You're good at that. You are good at that.

• 1:55:27Rich Roll?

  It's nice that you appreciate the question.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Listen, man, you're good at that. You happen to be good at.

• 1:55:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but it's, it's sort of like, uh, there's a little bit of cr- you know, like you cram for a test.

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:39Rich Roll?

  You know, so you know it all. So I, I'm like fully.

• 1:55:42Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:55:43Rich Roll?

  Fully dialed when I'm doing the podcast. Like, how long does that remain? Also, when you get older, like the hard drive's full, dude, you know, like everything that comes in, something else has, like, I'll notice, like, I, I can't quite, like, I, we couldn't remember Brendan Gleeson's name.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:55:59Rich Roll?

  Right? Like, that's a name that, like, maybe 10 years ago, I would have had no problem.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:56:03Rich Roll?

  recalling because the hard drive is kind of, it's crammed, right?

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  It's dusty.

• 1:56:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You gotta like, if I'm taking in some bullshit, I gotta get rid of something else.

• 1:56:13Speaker 01

  Right. That's why take in less, read more. I have one for you, the one last thing that we could offer. Cause you know, I know you talk about David Epstein's book Range.

• 1:56:23Rich Roll?

  I do talk, that's one that.

• 1:56:24Speaker 01

  And so that, that kind of fits here because like, I think that we both have wide interests. And because of that, we're going to read from wide, you know, range of material. And so it might seem like we're like, we know more, you know, that, that idea of having a range of interests might feed into this in a way. Like you have memories from different parts of your kind of personality or, or, or, um, you're the dashboard that you're seeing the world through. And, um, and so that might help actually kind of being, sounding like you, you have a little bit more handle on things than you really do.

• 1:57:00Rich Roll?

  It's all about like the illusion of, of making it seem like I'm better at stuff than I actually am.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  Great. This is good. I hope this is revealing.

• 1:57:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Uh, let's, let's, let's get to this last question.

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  Let's land this plane.

• 1:57:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  We're going to Zach up in, uh, Is he in Spokane? He's in Eastern Washington.

• 1:57:21Speaker 05

  Hey, Rich and Adam. My name is Zach Smith. I'm from Eastern Washington. I'm around 27 years old and I'm a plant-based runner, starting to become a diadition. Both things inspired by your podcast. Currently, I am training for the Mesa Marathon and the good news is with that zone two approach, I am getting faster. But I'm actually becoming scared of achieving my goal of qualifying for Boston. I feel like I'm getting hooked on getting faster as a runner and losing touch with the broader joy of the sport at only three years into my running journey. So I was hoping to hear you and Adam speak to why we pull ourselves away from family and friends to pursue these efforts and how motivations for these efforts change across time. And if you have any

• 1:58:03Speaker 05

  past podcast guests who speak to this that you recommend returning to, I'd love to hear them. Thank you for your time.

• 1:58:10Rich Roll?

  It's cool. Yeah, thank you for the question, Zach. To the point or to the question of speaking to why we pull ourselves away from family and friends to pursue these efforts and how motivations for these efforts change across time.

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  I don't know what you're talking about, Zach. That doesn't happen. I never do that.

• 1:58:30Rich Roll?

  Right. But I don't know what what is animating Zach. Like, I don't know what his motivation is. It sounds like it's germinating from some kind of performance goal that he has, qualifying for Boston, etc. I think it's interesting that he has enough self-awareness to realize he's getting hooked on the performance aspect of it, and this is draining some of the joy out of the sport at only three years into this journey. And that self-awareness is powerful to the extent that you channel it into some kind of behavior modification. So I think in your case, there's some easy fixes, understanding that you have this goal, you want to qualify for Boston, but

• 1:59:13Rich Roll?

  you're also afraid because you're getting so into the performance piece that it's not as fun as it used to be, or it's not it's not as joyous as when you began. So let's cure that by Incorporating into your training routine, some fun runs where you don't have the garment on, you take off the heart rate monitor, you forget about the log or whatever, you know, sort of purpose of the training is that day, and you just go get lost in the woods, or you go out with friends and you have a good time. The joy is the sustainable energy that will keep you in the sport, you know, for many years to come. But if you lose touch with that, you will burn out. And you may achieve your goal and all of that, but

• 1:59:58Rich Roll?

  that goal won't be as joyous or as meaningful as it could be if you're able to find a way to maintain connection with whatever it is about running that provided that sense of joy to begin with.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  That's a great answer, because I know Davy talked about it before going to New York, that he wants to take a break from running after New York in April, said the same thing. She had this goal of sub 145 for the half marathon, and she is like the same thing. It's like, I'm ready to stop running for a while. And so interesting, and I'm sure they both were on these training programs and they were on performance kind of base.

• 2:00:35Rich Roll?

  Your life gets very regimented.

• 2:00:37Speaker 01

  Right. So that's, I love that idea, because you know, the other day, I went for, I hadn't been able to get out because I've been working and just can't run, and I went out for a swim, and I forgot my garment at home. And it was my most fun swim I've had in so long.

• 2:00:52Rich Roll?

  Right. At first, you're like, you're feel naked, you're like, does this even count? Do I even do it? You know, which is weird.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  And it's my furthest swim I've done in the ocean since, you know, I did the 5K swim a couple of years ago. So it's like, maybe three years ago. So it was, it was great. And so that's a great piece of advice. I think in terms of pulling yourself away from family and friends, I wouldn't put like, I mean, you're 27, I wouldn't put that guilt on you, or maybe you're feeling a little FOMO because you got a lot of young people and friends that are like having a lot of fun at night, and you have to get some sleep because you're running early in the morning. Maybe that's where that's coming from. I personally think that we are called to escape, like, and it's okay. Like, I think the beauty of escape is a wonderful thing. I've lived, I've lived as a Jew, it's in our nature. But no, but all seriousness, like,

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  The idea of dropping out and going for a long travel or getting out in the ocean and forgetting everything for two hours or going for a long run, I think there's a lot to be said for that. So I wouldn't feel bad about that, pulling yourself away. What I do now is kind of take bite sized moments like that if I can. It's the only time I'm not either working or spending time kind of with the family and all that. We need that, especially Americans in the individualist society that we are in. I find myself needing that time and it's the best way for me to take time. That's also fueling my wellbeing, which only helps me work harder and be better with my family. So all that kind of stuff, I don't look at it as pulling myself away.

• 2:02:28Speaker 01

  I look at it as needed time to recharge. And so that's the only thing I would say to the question that I disagree with, but I think your point to like bringing the joy back is really.

• 2:02:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think rather than framing it as an escape versus being plugged in, think of it as nourishment versus depletion. Like, are you being nourished by these training sessions or are they depleting you? If you're training for a hardcore goal, you're going to get depleted. Like you're going to be pushed and challenged and that's okay. That's part of the whole deal, right? And there's something to be gleaned and learned about yourself from that experience. And this is part of why we sign up to do hard things. But ultimately, in the long run, it has to be more nourishing than depleting. And whether that means you take breaks or you find ways to build into whatever it is

• 2:03:19Rich Roll?

  that you're pursuing, that nourishment piece, be it through community or through a relaxation of the pressure that you're putting on yourself, et cetera, getting immersed in nature or just finding a way to make it fun, gamifying it somehow, that's critical, even if you might in the micro feel like it's moving you away from the goal that you're seeking because it's not part of the training program, right? Ultimately, it's going to build longevity by creating that deeper kind of.

• 2:03:53Rich Roll?

  Emotional connection with this thing.

• 2:03:56Speaker 01

  And your motivations for these efforts change, it's gonna change. You're gonna evolve, you're gonna grow, you're gonna have different responsibilities and desires as they come through. It's like, like we said earlier, the seasonal aspect of living, that's just the way it is. And so that, we embrace that. We embrace that these motivations are going to change, that we're gonna try to find a new way to approach the same thing that's been good for us. And that's the goal. But then if you have to kind of press pause, there's nothing wrong with that either, right? Like, if you need to take, look at it as a season, maybe look at how, you know, tennis players take six weeks off at the end of the year, or runners take four weeks off. Maybe you need to take a break so that you can come back fresh. There's nothing wrong with that.

• 2:04:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And finally, to kind of round this out, the part of the question was whether there's a past podcast guest who speaks to this. I would suggest my conversation with Brad Stolberg and his book, The Practice of Groundedness. Brad's pretty great on this very subject matter. He's also a great follow on Twitter where he writes, he sort of microblogs on Twitter, and talks a lot about this kind of thing.

• 2:05:05Speaker 01

  He's great. I've got him on Instagram now, I believe.

• 2:05:08Rich Roll?

  There you go. Right. But did you see Kipchoge recommended two books? He recommended, he recommended Atomic Habits by James Clear, friend of the pod. And he recommended Brad Stolberg's Practice of Groundedness.

• 2:05:24Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 2:05:25Rich Roll?

  How about that? What a cool, like, it's one thing, like, James Clear sold, I don't know, 10 million books. I mean, that book is crazy, right? But for Brad, like, very cool for him.

• 2:05:34Speaker 01

  It's very cool.

• 2:05:35Rich Roll?

  That the goat is like, read this book.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  Did he run, did Kipchoge run, or is he just on the outskirts of the race? Did he run the race?

• 2:05:41Rich Roll?

  You mean, ever? Does he just float above the road?

• 2:05:44Speaker 01

  Did he run in New York?

• 2:05:45Rich Roll?

  In New York? No.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:05:46Rich Roll?

  No. He did a shakeout run, though. I know Davey did.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Right, because I knew he was there, so I didn't know if he was running the race or not.

• 2:05:52Rich Roll?

  No, I don't think he ran the race. Yeah, cool. All right, let's get out of here. Are we done?

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, we're done. I feel, I feel still 50. Do you still feel 56?

• 2:06:03Rich Roll?

  56. What does that mean? How am I supposed to feel at 56?

• 2:06:07Speaker 01

  I don't know, man. All I know is I had a PRP injection. Have you had one of those?

• 2:06:11Rich Roll?

  I had that, I had that for my back.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I mean, that is, that hurts like a motherfucker.

• 2:06:16Rich Roll?

  It's no joke. It's no joke.

• 2:06:18Speaker 01

  My eyes were watering for like three hours. I thought I was gonna go back and get some work done. I was literally on the couch trying to read with like, like, eyes watering. Yeah, pretty funny.

• 2:06:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Tales from, tales from the fifth decade. All right. Um, listen, if you have a question you want us to talk about, and who knows when we're gonna do a roll-on again, but anyway, leave us a message.

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  Wait, are you firing me?

• 2:06:43Rich Roll?

  No, I don't know when we're doing.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  What is this, is this Twitter?

• 2:06:46Rich Roll?

  You're not, no. Yes. All hands on deck.

• 2:06:52Speaker 01

  You might get fired, but you could get called back into work next week.

• 2:06:54Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna fire you, but I'm gonna call you, yeah, plead with you to come back.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Rich Roll?

  Uh, leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. Um, and that's it. Any parting thoughts?

• 2:07:07Speaker 01

  No, that was, uh, thank you. Thank you for the time today.

• 2:07:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you. Super fun. Let's do it. Should we do it again?

• 2:07:14Speaker 01

  Let's do it one more time before the end of the year. What do you think, people?

• 2:07:17Rich Roll?

  Maybe. We'll see. All right. Peace.