ROLL ON: The State of Podcasting In 2025

Roll On resurfaces from the chrysalis! Adam Skolnick and I unpack 90 days post-surgery, why the caterpillar needs a tortoise mind to become a butterfly, and the death of authentic podcasting. On tap: The state of Podcastistan, why I'm breaking up with viral culture, and the unexpected joy of moving at glacier pace. We explore Phil Stutz's three truths, Alaska's last frontier vibes, and why Deadwood still hits different. Plus: Movies are officially back, friends of the pod crushing impossible distances—because regular suffering is passé—and why community beats audience every damn time. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: LMNT: Get a free LMNT Sample Pack with any purchase 👉 https://www.drinklmnt.com/richroll Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order 👉https://www.seed.com/RichRoll25 Pique: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first subscription 👉https://www.piquelife.com/richroll Momentous: Save 35% OFF your first subscription order 👉https://www.livemomentous.com/richroll Calm: Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription 👉 https://www.calm.com/richroll Prolon: Get 15% OFF plus a FREE bonus gift 👉 https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll Mint Mobile: Get your 3-month Unlimited plan for just $15/month 👉 https://www.mintmobile.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us@voicingchange 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.

• 0:01Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody, Roll On is back and it's coming right up, but first.

• 0:07Rich Roll?

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• 0:51Rich Roll?

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• 1:12Adam Skolnick?

  Bro.

• 1:13Rich Roll?

  I'm just happy to have you here.

• 1:14Adam Skolnick?

  I'm happy to be here.

• 1:15Rich Roll?

  Are you doing okay?

• 1:17Adam Skolnick?

  I'm doing great.

• 1:18Rich Roll?

  And what's happening?

• 1:19Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, we've started.

• 1:20Rich Roll?

  We are, we're rolling.

• 1:24Adam Skolnick?

  You know what? A big moment happened a couple of weeks ago I wanted to tell you about. I was out with Zuma, you know, we do our Breakfast Bros. It's usually a Saturday or a Sunday. It's gonna be tomorrow for this week.

• 1:37Rich Roll?

  And he is how old now?

• 1:38Adam Skolnick?

  He's gonna be five on the 29th of August. And so, we went and, you know, he had to pee, and so, we went to a public restroom, and this one had urinals, one little guy urinal and one big guy urinal right next to each other. And so, our first time ever peeing in the urinals next to each other. And it felt like a moment. It felt like a bit of a moment.

• 2:02Rich Roll?

  This concludes Skolnik's Corner on dating. Rites of passage for healthy masculinity.

• 2:10Adam Skolnick?

  Locked.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:13Rich Roll?

  This is a portal into the manosphere for you. I can see it all unfolding.

• 2:19Adam Skolnick?

  This is gonna be where it goes.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  This is gonna be your new thing.

• 2:24Adam Skolnick?

  There I was, looking over, and we were having a conver- we were breaking the rules, you know, talking. He was laughing. He thought it was so funny. I mean, come on. I'm still in like, the very fun moments of parenthood. It's cool, man.

• 2:39Rich Roll?

  Awesome, dude. Well, it's good to be back with you.

• 2:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:43Rich Roll?

  It's been a minute since we've done a roll-on, and we are appropriately showing up to serve the passionate roll-on audience out there. The small, but very loyal roll-on audience.

• 2:57Adam Skolnick?

  Size doesn't matter, Rich.

• 2:58Rich Roll?

  No, it doesn't.

• 2:59Adam Skolnick?

  It's potency.

• 3:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Did you notice the t-shirt that I'm wearing? Do you see what that says?

• 3:05Adam Skolnick?

  Stutz.

• 3:05Rich Roll?

  Says Stutz.

• 3:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 3:06Rich Roll?

  Yes. Shout out to my friend Jamie Rose, who gave me this as a gift recently. She was wearing it at this book release party that I went to for Phil Stutz, for his latest book. And it's sort of, like, has this Marvel overtones to it.

• 3:25Adam Skolnick?

  It does.

• 3:26Rich Roll?

  Sort of like a Batman kind of logo for this guy, so I wanted to rock it today.

• 3:33Adam Skolnick?

  It's almost Superman.

• 3:34Rich Roll?

  In honor of the great Phil Stutz. I'm still wearing the band that he gave me around my wrist that reminds me of the three truths.

• 3:42Adam Skolnick?

  Ah.

• 3:43Rich Roll?

  Do you remember what the three truths are?

• 3:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. Three truths. I do.

• 3:48Rich Roll?

  You're on the spot.

• 3:49Adam Skolnick?

  I'm on the spot.

• 3:50Rich Roll?

  Can you read this far? Because you could probably see it.

• 3:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, hard work. You can never get away from hard work.

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  There are three unavoidable truths of life.

• 3:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 3:58Rich Roll?

  Suffering. Starts with pain.

• 4:00Adam Skolnick?

  A pain.

• 4:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Pain is unavoidable.

• 4:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  There will always be a need for constant work.

• 4:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, constant work.

• 4:07Rich Roll?

  And what's the third? Life is uncertain.

• 4:10Adam Skolnick?

  Uncertainty.

• 4:11Rich Roll?

  But there's one thing for sure, which is that roll on must continue. And here we are.

• 4:18Adam Skolnick?

  Here we are. I can't believe, this is the problem with, this is another problem of parenthood, is that you can't remember these kinds of things. They don't come to the front, they don't come to the front of mind as quickly. But yes, I know Phil Stutz's three truths.

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  Yes. You just got back from Alaska.

• 4:34Adam Skolnick?

  I did.

• 4:35Rich Roll?

  We can talk a little bit about that. I'm now past the initial 90 days since my spinal fusion surgery.

• 4:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 4:46Rich Roll?

  So we can bring you up to speed on what that's been like. Celebrated 22 years of being married, as well as my wife's birthday the other week. So yeah, three anniversaries, my wife's birthday, our wedding, and the anniversary, the three-month anniversary of my surgery.

• 5:05Adam Skolnick?

  Holy shit.

• 5:06Rich Roll?

  So.

• 5:07Adam Skolnick?

  Do you celebrate anniversary, is surgery anniversary a thing?

• 5:11Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I'm making it a thing.

• 5:13Adam Skolnick?

  You're making it a thing.

• 5:13Rich Roll?

  We gotta ritualize these, these like, you know, goalposts.

• 5:17Adam Skolnick?

  But they're 90 days, so you're at 90 days. Let's go there first. Then the 90 days, is that like a signpost on the road to recovery usually with this kind of surgery?

• 5:25Rich Roll?

  It's, it's the first kind of major signpost in that you're emerging out of the very acute phase of the healing and into a more rehabilitative phase. So to date, I haven't even started PT. That 90-day mark was my permission to no longer have to wear a back brace every single day. So I've liberated myself from that. I had a, I had an appointment the other week where they took x-rays and the surgeon looked at it and he said, everything is looking good and it's moving along and healing nicely. But still, I'm in the very early stages of, of the fusion aspect of it. Like, these bones are only starting to, you know, kind of grow together. And there's a long way to go before that is completely

• 6:09Rich Roll?

  locked in. So at least I have the green light to begin PT. He told me he was gonna refer me, but I haven't gotten that referral yet. So I haven't really been doing anything except what I have been doing, which is walking and. Taking things very gently and lightly and and still like feeling a little bit better, not as tired in the afternoons like I can handle a little, a little bit more on the work front, but still fragile, still feeling, you know, weirdly uncomfortable, still not supposed to bend or twist or lean or all those sorts of things. So yeah, it's been a massive test of patience. I know there's a lot of people out there who were enjoying the walks that I was doing.

• 6:54Rich Roll?

  Yes, I'm one of them. It's like weirdly, that was like a very popular thing, much to my surprise. And then I just completely stopped doing it. Did you stop doing the walks? I wasn't doing the, I haven't been doing the walks as rigorously and as regularly as I was, at least in the morning in that way, because I've been using this time to advance the book project that that I'm that I'm pretty immersed in right now. And my special creative time is in the morning, so I want to capture that. And so those walks and the other kind of nominal, the nominal amount of exercise that I'm doing is a little bit later. But also, the whole point of those is to be present to, you know, I keep talking

• 7:37Rich Roll?

  about like, okay, well, this is the opportunity where you're forced to like be still with yourself and to pay attention and to be present and to, you know, lean into the the lessons and the opportunity that this unique moment that I find myself in is making available to me. Yeah. And when I'm thinking about like, how am I capturing this to share it? I'm completely out of that experience altogether. Yeah. I'm thinking about like, okay, should I film this? And where's a good photo? And that's all that's occupying my mind, which is fun in terms of like sharing the experience with other people, but it comes at the cost of of what the whole endeavor is supposed to be about. So I kind of stopped doing that, although maybe I'll start doing

• 8:20Rich Roll?

  it once in a while because people seem to enjoy it. But I am still making sure that I'm getting my steps in and.

• 8:28Rich Roll?

  Doing my meditation and really honoring the uniqueness of this experience that has forced me to basically stop everything. And it's very uncomfortable, you know, and it requires a tremendous amount of patience that I that I don't always have, but it's forcing me to practice all of these principles that I talk about all the time, like, you know, you can't train where you think you should be, or you feel like you used to be, you have to train where you're at. And where I'm at right now is basically like ground zero. And as much as I talk about the present moment being the place where all answers seem to reside, I nonetheless am, you know,

• 9:12Rich Roll?

  always looking for the escape hatch to distract myself. And just noticing that in and of itself has been interesting and trying to bring my back, myself back into the present moment, to sit with the discomfort of not being able to do the things that make me feel like who I am. And knowing that, you know, it's our resistance to being present, to declining distractions, that always reveals the teachable moments that are lying in wait, if we're, you know, courageous enough to sit with that discomfort and lean into, you know, what those lessons might be. You gotta just do what you can with what you have. And when, you know, I don't have

• 9:56Rich Roll?

  much in terms of my physical capacity, you know, it's, it's definitely a sense of being limited, but also this understanding that I'm being prepared for something better. Like, you can't, I can't get back to doing what I love doing unless I really am patient with the moment that I'm in right now. And I've sort of been thinking about this in the context of The caterpillar becoming the butterfly and how Alexi Pappas says you have to, you know, it's not like a transition from one to the other. You have to, the caterpillar has to be completely dissolved into a goo. She calls it the glop, right? Like you have to go into your glop state before you can emerge into something else and be transformed by the experience.

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  Or Chip Conley calls it the chrysalis, right? I mean, that's what it is. It's this chrysalis. And really paying attention and honoring like these transitions in life. But also my spin on it, this is, this is my big like insight, which is that the caterpillar cannot become the butterfly unless it inhabits the mind of the tortoise first.

• 11:06Adam Skolnick?

  Okay, that's a, that's a mixed metaphor, but I like it.

• 11:08Rich Roll?

  I'm, I'm using many animals here, but the caterpillar can't hair its way to the butterfly. It has to, you know, adopt the mindset of the tortoise and take these things slow. I guess is what I'm saying, like slow and steady, patience, things I've always promoted. I try to live by, but now I'm kind of being forced to live

• 11:27Rich Roll?

  at a whole entirely like new level.

• 11:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:30Rich Roll?

  And that conjures all these questions around identity, like who am I? Like, am I an athlete? Like, not right now, I'm not, you know, a different kind of athlete, I suppose. Am I a podcaster? Am I a writer? Are you a father? Are you a husband, Adam? Like, yeah, we're all of these things, but we're also none of these things and so much more. And, and what happens when you kind of release your grip on this idea you have of yourself and who you think you, you are and how you hold yourself out to the world and how you would prefer to be perceived and relinquish like all of your energy around that, you know, what happens then? Like you're in this state of deeper surrender that makes space for

• 12:15Rich Roll?

  something new, something more capacious, I suppose. So that's a little bit about this exploration that I've, that I've been on, which is cool, you know? And it's like, you were talking to me earlier about this clip that I posted or that my team posted from a podcast that I did with, with Mike Gervais a while back where I was talking about these phases of life in which we find ourselves dismantled and how it's like, congratulations. Like this is your opportunity, right? Like this is where all the juice is to, you know? Take the experience, learn from it and, and, and build upon it to, you know, emerge transformed as, as, as a consequence of that. And taking that idea and layering it on top of like where

• 13:00Rich Roll?

  I'm at, where I'm at right now, instead of like resenting the situation or trying to emerge from it as quickly as possible, instead to just like allow myself to completely be in it, you know, without resisting it. And, and it's different, you know, it's, it's been a different experience. And I've got the expanded waistline to prove it. It's like my pants aren't fitting so well these days, you know, it's like, oh, that's interesting.

• 13:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 13:29Rich Roll?

  You know, how long is it going to take me at 58 to, to get rid of that, you know, probably a little bit longer than it did 15 years ago. But this is the reality that I'm in right now. But I'm excited to start the PT and have something to, you know, sink my teeth into that will distract me.

• 13:46Adam Skolnick?

  Well, yes.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  From the experience that I'm in right now.

• 13:48Adam Skolnick?

  Two, two questions. One is just, I know you've, some of the walks you've been doing, pool walks too. Is that easier? Is that, do you find that you can go longer on the, in the pool?

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  I can go as long as, I can go long. Like I, you know, like, like, that's not the limiter. The limiter is, is, is like, what's hard is doing less than what you feel like you're capable of doing. You know, it's like, okay, you've done enough. The idea isn't to walk a mile longer than you did the day before, every single day until you're walking 30 miles. It's like, this is not, this is not what we're doing right now. I could do that. I want to do that. But that's missing the point. So yeah, I can walk in, in the pool, do the pool walking and it's cool because you get a little bit more resistance without any kind of, you know, strain on the lower back or any of that. And I would admit to

• 14:39Rich Roll?

  doing a little bit of swimming and kicking in the pool, just to see how it feels.

• 14:44Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 14:44Rich Roll?

  Which is nice. So anyway, enough on that.

• 14:47Adam Skolnick?

  Enough on that. What's your, when you feel the urge to escape from your, and try to distract yourself, where do you go?

• 14:54Rich Roll?

  I go immediately to Netflix. No, no, I mean, it's kind of true. Yeah, I've watched a lot of stuff.

• 15:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Just to, just to, just to get your mind.

• 15:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, I have plenty of work to do, you know, so I can, I can be a workaholic in the midst of all of this, and I would plead guilty to indulging that, you know, when you have a, when you have a book deadline looming.

• 15:15Adam Skolnick?

  It's interesting what you said about the relinquishing, because I was listening to, you know, my favorite mindfulness guy, Jack Kornfield, from like some 1992 talk. And he was referencing one of his teachers, and the, the subject was Nirvana. I'm wearing.

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you were in the Kurt shirt.

• 15:34Adam Skolnick?

  And the description of Nirvana, you know, we think of Nirvana as the goal, like this, this enlightenment, boom, you're a realized, you're a fully realized being, you have ultimate equanimity, you have reached, you have reached the, you know, the, the spiritual, you know, Jedi phase. But in reality, there's moments of Nirvana every day, and it's in the relinquishing of the grip. It's in the letting go and that feeling you have. It's, it's after running hard, and then you stop running and the running high hits you. It's in that moment. It's like, it's like we all have these moments of Nirvana, we just don't label it that way. And this is what these guys were saying, you know, Buddhist scholars and people who've,

• 16:19Adam Skolnick?

  who've been pursuing this for, for years by that point. And I just thought, that's an interesting way of putting it, and, and like the, the little moments of Nirvana we have in our day. Because there's like, there's multiple things happening all the time. There's the big tragic comedy that we're all immersed in, and it feels very tragic a lot of times. There's the stuff we're dealing with on our own plate, which can be at times stressful or fun or whatever. And then there's these, there's the, the real subtext, which is, which is what you were saying, where all of these things, and to let go.

• 16:56Adam Skolnick?

  In the course of your day, maybe 10, 12 times, you have these moments of nirvana. And just to kind of focus on those and give them a little attention. I found that that's a pretty cool experience. So it just made me think what you're saying.

• 17:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, those experiences happen before we have the mental acuity to label them, you know, as good or bad. You know, we do that in retrospect. And I think to the extent that we can recede into the background and inhabit a more present state of awareness, we make ourselves available for those experiences. Because it's our compulsion to rush in and slap a sticker on it and say it's this or that. That takes us out of the experience itself and robs us of the opportunity that's available

• 17:51Rich Roll?

  to inhabit our lives from a more, I'm not saying like a perpetual state of nirvana, but to make ourselves available for those experiences when they arise.

• 18:04Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely. The analysis paralysis.

• 18:07Rich Roll?

  Did you have these experiences or an experience like that while inhabiting the vastness of Alaska, watching grizzly bears chomp down on salmon swimming upstream?

• 18:18Adam Skolnick?

  Alaska, man. Well, you know, Julie's homeland, where she emerged, the legend that she is. Our first time in Alaska, it was, I know I'll be back. I knew I was gonna love it. I knew we were all gonna love it. It just felt, you know, it recalls the same feelings you have in Hawaii and the Pacific Islands. There's something about it, like a frontier aspect. There's a cultural kind of kinship with those places. And there's actually a lot of travel between those places. You know, it's just, it's the last frontier. And we were only there for like a week. We have our, a good friend of mine, Leah Barrett, who's the underwater photographer

• 18:59Adam Skolnick?

  that got me into covering freediving, lives there now with her husband, Rob, and their kids, Mako and Tiger. And so we had never, I'd never met her kids, she'd never met Zuma. And so we, we'd been talking about how to get the families together and finally they just moved back there. And for a job Rob got, and so we just said, hey, we're coming. And so we stayed with them in Anchorage for a few days. Uh, we did the float plane trip to, um, Cat My National Park where the grizzlies, that waterfall, Brooks Falls, where that, where that famous picture of the grizzly, uh, just about to.

• 19:32Rich Roll?

  I know, you sent me that video and I was like, oh, that's exactly like that image that I've seen. Like that actually is happening in real time in real life.

• 19:40Adam Skolnick?

  Dude, it was amazing. It was like, but it's funny, when you do the day trip from Anchorage, you're like, wow, you can just do a day trip and go see these animals? Cause it was too late, by the time we decided to do this trip, it was only a couple of months ago. So it was too late to like stay the night there or get any sort of lodging in the national park. That stuff's like lottery two years in advance. And so we, um, just did the day trip, but then you get there, like there was fog in the morning. So we got a little bit delayed, then we got there and you have to go to something called bear school. So like a 30 minute primer from the national park to teach you what to do. And then you have to, then you wait, then you have to immediately eat because otherwise you won't eat. And then you finally get on the trails and we had about five hours while in the park itself.

• 20:21Adam Skolnick?

  And, um, immediately you walk out, your, your whole concern is, are we going to go there? Do this money, spend all this money, take all this time and then see no bears? Like that's what you're worried about. Immediately you hit the trails, there's bears, you know? There's bears everywhere, grizzly bears. And so from the first lookout, we watched some grizzly bears play and I let, you know, April's the photographer. I mean, she's got the gear, she's got the eye, she's got it all. She's very skilled. And so the whole thing was you go and, and Zuma and I had our own little experience. And so it was fun, just cruising the trails with Zuma. And then finally caught up to her cause she's, she's shooting, uh, a lot of photos. And then we hit the falls and we, we saw everything. We saw about eight bears.

• 21:03Adam Skolnick?

  One crossed the path like 60 feet from us or 50 feet from us, just like the trail in front of us. And so that was pretty fun. Our bear school kind of kicked in and, and I picked up Zuma and we just kind of. Stayed quiet and let it pass.

• 21:18Rich Roll?

  Are they just unperturbed by human observation?

• 21:23Adam Skolnick?

  They seem it. They seem it. You know, if you probably ask them, they'd be like, man, get these, they're like mosquitoes. Get these people out of here, you know? But, um, but they seem fine. Like there, there didn't seem to be anything and like, nobody's got weapons around. They've got, the Rangers have bear spray.

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  Yes, bro.

• 21:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And maybe some of them have sidearms, but, um, for the most part it was, it's a very low stress, low concern thing. If the biggest, the big concern is if you don't do what they advise and you just stay in the trail and the bear is right there, the bear will just lay down and won't move for two hours and then nobody gets their plane and nobody leaves the park. It's a big problem.

• 22:00Rich Roll?

  It's a standoff.

• 22:01Adam Skolnick?

  That's the big, that's the big concern. It wasn't like attack. Attack was never a concern. And also make sure the food's out of the cabins and things like the normal stuff so that they don't just break in and associate food with people. Um, and so that's the main thing. But with, with this much salmon, I mean, the river was red. I mean, with this much salmon, uh, right now, there's no, there's no concern. There's food everywhere. And so that was fun. Um, and then we did, we went down to a place called Between Beaches, which is on a spit about four hours south of Anchorage. Then you catch a boat to some, a place called McDonald's Spit in the Seldovia region. And it's like this little spit of sand and rock and both sides, there's a beach on the lagoon side and there's a beach, there's a beach

• 22:42Adam Skolnick?

  on the ocean side. And it's just magnificent. Like, you know, snowy peaks and, and bald eagles everywhere. And it just was like magnificent.

• 22:51Rich Roll?

  Did you get your cold water immersion?

• 22:53Adam Skolnick?

  I did. There is freediving in Alaska and I brought my fin and mask and my fin bag with me the whole time. Like I'm carrying, like we do not travel light. I mean, we don't travel light. We had a guitar. We had my fin bag. We had everything. And, um, and so we got in, I got in, the vis was terrible, but I'm used to bad vis. It was, it was warmer than I thought. It was warmer than like the Oregon coast that summer I dove there. Um, so it was like 49 degrees at depth, uh, Fahrenheit, but it was a blast. Hung out with Alaska. Free diver, there's a new shop in Saldovia, shout out Chris and Amelia. Chris took me out and had a great time. And so, you know, it was just, it was epic.

• 23:36Adam Skolnick?

  We're going to be back. And Between Beaches is a great spot, highly recommend for people who are looking like for a remote kind of cabin in, on a beach in Alaska.

• 23:47Rich Roll?

  I'm looking for this new goggle that Speedo recently came out with. I saw an image of it on the internet and I'm trying to find it right now. I was going to send it to you and I forgot and I can't find it now, but maybe we can insert it. Yeah, later.

• 24:03Adam Skolnick?

  I need to see that.

• 24:04Rich Roll?

  The reason is that it's, it's sort of a hybrid in between a, you know, a scuba diving mask and actual goggles. It's like goggles, but it has these flanges that kind of go over your thing. And I was like, oh, this is, this is the compromise that Skolnik and I have been looking for.

• 24:22Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you need the nose though, or you can't dive.

• 24:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't have the nose thing.

• 24:26Adam Skolnick?

  Right. So then you can't dive.

• 24:27Rich Roll?

  So you won't even consider this, even for swimming, even though you don't need your nose to be covered.

• 24:32Adam Skolnick?

  No, for swimming, I have goggles, I have goggles.

• 24:35Rich Roll?

  Okay. I thought the whole thing was you insist on these masks when, you know, you should be wearing goggles because this is the etiquette of Adam.

• 24:43Adam Skolnick?

  My problem.

• 24:44Rich Roll?

  These are the rules.

• 24:44Adam Skolnick?

  My problem is I can't swim without trying to dive. That's my problem. But yeah, no, it was, it was, it was a blast. It was a good time. And Leah like fished a halibut off a paddleboard, which was pretty, pretty incredible.

• 25:01Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 25:02Adam Skolnick?

  So yeah, she, she's become a full on Alaskan. You know, you're picking berries, salmon berries and blueberries fresh off the bush. So, you know, I'm boring people who've been to Alaska who know how great it is, but love it there and we'll be back for sure.

• 25:17Rich Roll?

  Been a while since I've been there. Yes, Julie's, Julie grew up there. She's got crazy stories of, of living there, being a kid.

• 25:26Adam Skolnick?

  In the seventies.

• 25:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 25:27Rich Roll?

  Latch key situation, you know, and her and her friends are, you know, on a glacier with like no phone and, you know, like,

• 25:34Adam Skolnick?

  Nothing.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  And just, you know, a can with a rattle in it. And, you know, that's basically it. And there's crevasses everywhere. And it is just like amazing.

• 25:42Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 25:43Rich Roll?

  That like. They survived and people would die all the time.

• 25:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, people did die.

• 25:47Rich Roll?

  So and so die, you know, like this is just like a hap- you know, the thing that happened like all the time because nature is so uncompromising and so, you know, gigantic.

• 25:58Adam Skolnick?

  And apparently like the beaches off Anchorage, it's like they look like sand, but it's mud flats. And so if you go down to the mud flats and try to like get in, you could get stuck there and the tide could come in and just suck you like you could be like the slow death of your of your nightmares. And so like you have, you see this water, it's flat and and it looks amazing and inviting and it's like, do not go there. And there's no signs or anything like any tourist could end up getting stuck. But apparently there are stories in the newspaper, so and so stuck in the mud flats.

• 26:27Rich Roll?

  Are you old enough to remember when we were kids and it was just all about quicksand? We would talk about quicksand all the time. There was an obsession with quicksand and people dying in quicksand.

• 26:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 26:40Rich Roll?

  And then that just went away at some point and people don't talk about that anymore. But when I was 12, I can tell you.

• 26:47Adam Skolnick?

  That was your phobia?

• 26:47Rich Roll?

  Nationwide, there was a conversation happening amongst my peers, my age group, around quicksand.

• 26:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. The different ways to die. As you grow older, you you learn more and more ways it could happen, you know?

• 27:07Rich Roll?

  All right. What do we want to talk about?

• 27:08Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about, well, first of all, this week, we put up a podcast with Dr. Jessica Nurek. I mean, it's Monday morning when we're recording this, this podcast that you're listening to or watching will go up on Thursday. But it's been cool to see this guest be embraced by the audience, somewhat somewhat of a, you know, controversial conversation that we have around the state of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which, you know, I felt compelled to have with her and I'm glad that I that I did. And it's been nice to

• 27:50Rich Roll?

  see her message embraced right now. I wrote a Substack article that I published right before we started recording with some thoughts on that conversation and kind of what's going on generally with the Make America Healthy Again movement and what is actually going on behind the scenes with.

• 28:13Rich Roll?

  Those who hold power and the impact and implications of how that power is being used and leveraged, mostly in the context of deregulation in ways that are actually undermining any good faith attempt to actually make America healthy, setting aside the again part, which is debatable. But anyway, I think it feels good to kind of take a stand on that, understanding that it might be divisive or controversial. And it also feels good to begin to share thoughts on Substack because we're in the process of really looking at how we can use and leverage

• 28:57Rich Roll?

  Substack for the benefit of the community. I think it's a really powerful and super cool and also very intuitive platform that we really haven't been taking advantage of. And I recently participated in this thing that Elizabeth Gilbert has on Substack. She was a guest a while back on the podcast. We still haven't published that episode, but she has a thing called Letters from Love. Yes. And she's developed this community of over 200,000 people. And what she's doing is encouraging her community to practice this thing that she's been practicing for a long time, which is to write a daily letter to herself from this perspective of love,

• 29:41Rich Roll?

  like, you know, dear love, what would you have me learn today as a prompt, right? Yes. And it's an exercise in self-love and in kind of honoring yourself and showing yourself gratitude. And she, every week invites somebody to perform this exercise, write a letter, share that letter with her community and kind of make a video where they read it. And she asked me to do it and I did it the other week. And it's a confronting exercise for somebody who is challenged with the idea of self-love, which was kind of the subject of the letter that I wrote to myself and shared. But it was cool. But I think even more cool than that was to see the engagement of her community around this one idea. And

• 30:24Rich Roll?

  it led us to thinking about what our version of that might look like, because I think the real benefit.

• 30:35Rich Roll?

  Of Substack is the way in which you can cultivate community, which is something I've been thinking a lot about in the broader kind of context of podcasting itself and what I want to do with it as somebody who's been doing it for a long time because it's changed quite a bit since I began the humble beginnings, where it was the, you know, kind of purview of the hobbyist, where there was no business plan and it wasn't a income generating adventure, let alone like a vocation. But now things are very different. And so I thought it would be cool to kind of talk about that a little bit, like the state of the union of podcasting. Like I said, you know, it had a humble history.

• 31:19Rich Roll?

  I had a sense when I started it that, that it would grow into something bigger and more meaningful than it was at the inception, like back in 2012, when I began, which was early, not that I wasn't one of the first, but I was pretty early. And what it's like now, which is it's essentially become almost mainstream media, like all these people. It's going that way. Basically, all running their own public access television show. Right. And, and working very diligently to garner people's attention. From my own experience, what's happened is that in many ways, podcasting has become almost an adjunct

• 32:00Rich Roll?

  of the publishing industry. Publishers realized pretty early that the way to sell books is to book their authors on prominent podcasts. And I've participated in that economy for our mutual benefit, I would say. And it's been great because it gives me access to interesting people because they're making themselves available to promote their, their, their wares, their goods, their latest book, their latest offering. But it's kind of gotten to the point now where it's harder and harder to create something that stands out and that's unique. And individuals who are good guests learn quickly that they are good guests and start making themselves available for lots of podcasts. You know what I mean? So, so

• 32:45Rich Roll?

  when the prominent They become professional guests. When a prominent individual, be it an author, whoever, is like, okay, I need to get out in the world and promote something, they are going to, you know, book themselves on all of the podcasts that are similar to mine. So you enter into this.

• 33:02Rich Roll?

  Equation, or this agreement where you know that you're going to get access to this person, but you also know they're going to go across the street and do the other guys, and the other guys, and the other guys. And by the time you publish this, this person is going to appear essentially simultaneously on all these shows. And what happens over time is that all of these shows start to look similar and bleed together. Right. And when you layer on top of that, the incentives that are now in place in podcasting, it creates a very interesting situation where in order to stand out in a very, in what is now a very crowded marketplace, you need to, you need to learn about things like algorithms,

• 33:45Rich Roll?

  and analytics, and what, you know, gets people to not only pay attention, but to sustain that attention. And that has costs and benefits. Like, if you do it right, you can benefit by growing an audience and maintaining a large audience. The cost, of course, comes at kind of the whole raison d'etre of the entire affair. Like, when you start to book guests based upon what you think is going to grow your audience, or what's going to, you know, constitute rage bait, or, you know, incite people, or is going to lend itself

• 34:24Rich Roll?

  to creating a bunch of clips that have the potential to go viral. To me, on some level, you're sort of losing the plot of the whole affair. And I've been thinking a lot about this, and the ways in which it's impacted me and this show, and how I want to kind of move forward in the context of this environment that's now very different from the one in which I started. And I think while everyone's out kind of chasing trends, "Oh, this works", or "We need this kind of intro, and that hooks people, and here's your title, and your thumbnail, and all that kind of stuff", in this world that is increasingly video-first

• 35:04Rich Roll?

  as opposed to audio-first, which is the way that we started, rather than chasing trends, where is the white space? What are people not doing, or underappreciating in this whole thing? And for me, much of it goes back to the very beginning, which is, the whole appeal of this is that you're crafting, curating, and cultivating something real, something honest, and something authentic, that...

• 35:30Rich Roll?

  That is appealing because it's not in a rush and it's not trying to manipulate you or game your attention. And so that is why I've been doing these longer intros in the audio version of the podcast where I can share my thoughts and take my time. I'm not interested in whether you're gonna click away five seconds later. Like that's up to you because I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. And I also think in the context of this, when everybody is so focused on growth and audience capture and attention farming, that the real differentiator isn't the size of your audience, but more the depth

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  of your audience. Like, how real is that audience? How loyal are they? And how well do they feel like you're nourishing them? And the differentiator, in my opinion, is going to be that community piece. Do they feel like they're being nourished? And how can you, rather than being focused on growth, like, how can you really serve the people that are already there, who are, you know, taking time out of their day to pay attention to what you're doing? And I think the answer to that is by emphasizing and investing in ways to bring them in even more, which is why, you know, we have this new studio and we have this theater, we're gonna be doing live events and live podcasts and creating

• 36:52Rich Roll?

  more immersive experiences. And it's why this Substack idea, leveraging it to bring the community in and try to create some kind of community-based enterprise around it, I think is so vital and important and exciting.

• 37:09Adam Skolnick?

  Cool, man. There's a lot there to kind of unpack and tease out. I love the Letter from Love that you did. And I, you know, Liz is an old friend and she's asked me to do one. And, and I, at first, I thought, when I first got the instructions, I was kind of hastily read them. And I thought it was like a letter to your younger self. And then, so I thought, okay, I have an angle on that. And then I, when I realized what it was, and I read yours, and I'm like, oh, this is much more challenging, actually, than I thought. And when she first approached me with it, she goes, she thinks it's such an important practice for men to do, because we are less likely to be so sweet with ourselves, or to even tap into that angle. Not to that we're less likely to be sweet with ourselves, but we're just less likely to even consider that lens to which to kind of filter our

• 37:54Adam Skolnick?

  perspective. And so,

• 37:57Adam Skolnick?

  I thought I was gonna do it in Alaska, like five, my five or 10 minutes to go sit there and do it, but I haven't done it yet because I'm afraid of it.

• 38:05Rich Roll?

  Well, the whole thing is like, don't spend more than five minutes on it.

• 38:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 38:09Rich Roll?

  Nobody only spends five minutes on this. I probably spent like two hours on it.

• 38:13Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 38:13Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 38:14Adam Skolnick?

  But you might have done the original thing and then played with it. But um, in terms of the Maha stuff, I thought in your post, you mentioned Trojan horse. And I think that's like a perfect analogy because Maha was kind of brought into the fold during the campaign as a way to lock down the election, right? So it was, it was kind of a strategic, it was never about we believed in these things. It was about we believe that this thing could help us get what we want. And so, um, and it worked, right? It totally worked. And then, uh, as, as to your point, I don't want to belabor it, but like in, in your, in your essay, which I thought was brilliant, you, you lay out how, yes, red dye, number 50 is being cast.

• 38:59Rich Roll?

  Forty.

• 39:00Adam Skolnick?

  Forty, getting cast aside, seed oils, and you mentioned all the things, but then you're like, yeah, but the Clean Water Act's being repealed, uh, the Drinking Water Act's being repealed in, in, in certain ways. And that is going to impact us in a much greater way. And so, um, I thought that was really well said, so I just want to reinforce that.

• 39:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that what Jessica did such a brilliant job at elucidating was providing a sympathetic understanding around, uh, this groundswell of support because it is good that we get these dyes out of our food.

• 39:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 39:36Rich Roll?

  It is important to say out loud that Big Pharma and Big Food and all these companies are, you know, have incentives that are at cross purposes with our individual health and our collective wellbeing. It's just that the solutions to those problems are not actually what's happening.

• 39:55Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 39:56Rich Roll?

  You know, what's happening is massive deregulation, uh, that's giving all of these, these, you know, kind of quote unquote like corrupt, uh, behemoths more and more bandwidth to do as they please. And it's easier.

• 40:13Rich Roll?

  To continue for them to do as they please, if every once in a while, they voluntarily say, "We're going to swap this for this in our ingredients," not because the government is making us, like, they're volunteering it. It's not like, you know, anybody's telling them they have to. And they get, like, a little more latitude to play behind the scenes in ways that people are not paying attention to as much as perhaps they should.

• 40:39Adam Skolnick?

  Right. I mean, all the information we're getting on how things are unhealthy is because there's a regulatory framework and because universities and institutions have had federal money to do certain kind of research. Now, the federal money is going away from universities, so the research is going to be much more privatized. And so that means it's going to be in the hands of industry more and more. It is already in some respects, but it's going to be more so. And so the science, you're going to have less science to kind of be able to gauge what's healthy and what's not. So it's, there's so many, at least that's my limited understanding of it, but that seems to be at risk, right? The ability to research what is unhealthy and what is healthy is getting, is being compromised.

• 41:21Adam Skolnick?

  And then, of course, the EPA is no longer going to be able to regulate pollution. You wonder, when power switches back, because it always does, cycles end, cycles kind of fold in on each other, how much of this becomes the new norm? Because it's so hard to get things passed now. Like, does this, is it become the new norm? You know, does it? You know, it's a good question. So it's troubling.

• 41:47Rich Roll?

  Well, one thing that history teaches us is that the more that you grant, in our case, the executive branch power, like, it's hard to, it's hard to then, you know, take that power back from them. So this, you know, tripartite system where we have the three branches of government that are supposed to, you know, operate in parity with each other is very much out of balance. Like, more and more of that power has obviously been transferred over to the executive branch. And once it's there, it stays there, regardless of who's in office.

• 42:26Adam Skolnick?

  Right, so there you go. But anyway, that's one piece of it, like the Maha piece of it. And I've been following Jessica before. I didn't, you know, when I found out she was on the pod, I was like, wow, because I've been following her on the same kind of track over the last few months. And, you know, she's explaining it very well. Like, you can get, you can understand why people are attracted to that movement. But then, like you say very well, but that's not the whole story. And sometimes, these days where it's almost impossible to tell what's real and what's not, you can easily get, get, you know, roped into supporting something you're not, you're not supporting. The great example of that is the hunters that had to rise up and scream and yell about the big, beautiful bill because the public

• 43:11Adam Skolnick?

  lands that they rely on for recreation were getting sold if it went through. And to their credit, credit Cameron Haynes.

• 43:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Cam Haynes made a big, made a big push.

• 43:22Adam Skolnick?

  Huge push.

• 43:22Rich Roll?

  Raising awareness around that. And they were successful. They got that dealt with. But it took quite a bit.

• 43:29Adam Skolnick?

  It did.

• 43:29Rich Roll?

  And, you know, short of the, the sort of Teddy Roosevelt Republicans standing up and letting their voices be heard around this, it would have, it would have sort of surreptitiously just like passed through.

• 43:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but part of it was the, the podcast realm came in as well. So Cam Haynes kind of tapped into that. And it just rippled, like the Teddy Roosevelt aspect, like you said. But the, the, the thing that I thought was amazing, the reason I wanted to bring that up, I know it's a little bit older news, and shout out Kyle Tierman, who also was public on this, is that Kyle, the environmentalist, also likes to hunt occasionally. And Cam, who voted Republican, you know, Kyle did not. Kyle's a Democrat. It's one of the few times you actually see hunters and environmentalists coming together. You don't see it too much. When it comes to marine protected areas in the ocean, the commercial fishermen kind

• 44:24Adam Skolnick?

  of have their take, and those political takes usually get absorbed by the recreational fishermen. No regulation, please no more regulation. We have to, our waters are too overregulated. And the same Anything happens often in ranching and hunting communities regards to open space and public lands. This was the first time I can remember, and I've been involved in some ways in the environmental movement since the 90s, that these two groups came together to actually get something done like this. It's almost always there at odds. And so I feel like that matters. I don't know if it's something we can build on or not, but I think it matters. And part of it is the intentionality behind a guy like Cameron Haynes, who cares deeply, he's deeply

• 45:07Adam Skolnick?

  passionate for the earth. Now, how can we communicate with these, that side of the aisle and come together on other issues? Because I feel like-

• 45:18Rich Roll?

  To build from that.

• 45:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:19Rich Roll?

  I mean, it is, it is such an interesting thing, because, you know, truly, at least in America, you know, environmentalism was born out of, you know, the Republican perspective, courtesy of Teddy Roosevelt-

• 45:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  Who said, "We need to protect these lands, and we need to kind of, you know, exercise our federal power to make sure that they stay the way that they are and that they are preserved." Like, he's the original American environmentalist.

• 45:48Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 45:48Rich Roll?

  You know, and so, and so then, you know, but then, you know, these parties shift and morph in the tectonic plates of, of policy, you know, move them in different directions, such that, you know, environmentalism became the purview of the Democratic Party, and deregulation of the environment, that of the Republican Party.

• 46:07Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 46:07Rich Roll?

  But, as in all cases, when there's overreach in either of these, be it with the Republicans, you know, allowing corporations to pollute these lands, or trying to pass a bill that's going to allow, you know, the privatization, like, you know, the, the sort of, you know, building of developments, etc., you know, on these lands, there's going to be a backlash. Similarly, on the left, when they get, you know, they get too crazy about the regulation, then there's going to be pushback. So, in the middle, you have, you know, Kyle and Cam, who are kind of like avatars. At the center who are coming together to resolve an issue that I think we all, you

• 46:49Rich Roll?

  know, it was pretty, pretty, pretty much, you know, at least, you know, amongst the citizenry, you know, unanimous that like, we can't do that.

• 46:58Adam Skolnick?

  Right, exactly. And you look at a, so not to, I don't want to bring up names and have people get all scream and yell, but like, um, it's not that, it's not like our health secretary doesn't understand the link between the environment and all this stuff. He helped found, he founded Waterkeeper. Waterkeeper is one of the great environmental organizations out there.

• 47:20Rich Roll?

  And he did a lot to clean up the Hudson and other rivers and that organization still exists.

• 47:25Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and they're amazing.

• 47:26Rich Roll?

  And it's done a lot of good.

• 47:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 47:28Rich Roll?

  Which makes it, you know, all the more curious and bizarre, like, you know, like the whole, the whole thing.

• 47:33Adam Skolnick?

  The whole thing. Um, which brings us back to the podcast realm you're talking about. It's so interesting because while this deregulation is happening on, on the national level and in relation to the environment and food systems, where there's increased regulation on one hand in a narrow way, but more broad deregulation, um, the broadcast universe is like, that's the tectonic plates that are shifting the most. And we feel it here in Los Angeles where, um, there's less work for long time crew and, and up and comers who want to, who want to start as PAs and get into production. There's just so much less work in Los Angeles, um, partly because of that, production work. But then also it's just that the nature of the economy that is broadcasting and, and

• 48:17Adam Skolnick?

  filmmaking in general is shifting. And, you know, you, we come out here to this amazing studio that you guys built and you're one of, you know, I didn't realize it at the time, like when you were putting this together. I've only learned it over the last year or so, but there are, you know, you are one of several now that have popped up, kind of indie podcasters that have grown and grown and you have a, a footprint here that is a real part of the broadcast future. And, and, you know, we think of you, I think of Mel Robbins, Steve Rinella, that you can, you can, you know, obviously Joe Rogan was the first with his studio in Woodland Hills and now in Austin.

• 48:57Adam Skolnick?

  Uh, but you have kind of a small footprint in, in relation to the others, but, but actually a growing one. Uh, it's really interesting to see how the, how that system is, is changing. Yeah.

• 49:09Rich Roll?

  We're definitely in this flux state of transition in terms of the media landscape, you know, writ large and small. We have the Colbert Show getting canceled, you know, and that's a whole, you know, sticky wicket, like, you know, why that's happening. At the same time that YouTube creators like Rhett and Link from Mythical Mornings, those guys are coming in later this week to do the show, I'm excited about that, and a handful of others are being submitted on behalf of YouTube for Emmy consideration. So the lines are getting blurred between what is traditional or mainstream media and

• 49:52Rich Roll?

  what is alternative or online digital media. Essentially, everything's on a screen and we're in this position now where it doesn't really matter if you call it television or you call it YouTube. Like, these things are all just buttons on a screen that we choose. And whether it's being broadcast by a, you know, one of the big four three-lettered networks through an antenna and satellites, or it's coming through an ethernet or, you know, your wifi into, you know, into your office on a smaller screen, really doesn't matter anymore. All of these things are being put in the Vitamix and they're being blended

• 50:37Rich Roll?

  together. And it's, and we haven't really emerged yet from that with any clarity. Like, right now, it's all confusing. But it is true. Like, here we are in Los Angeles, the global capital of, of, you know, content creation for as long as any of us have been alive. And people who have had long careers in this industry can't find work, or at least can't find work that pays a, you know, habitable living wage.

• 51:05Adam Skolnick?

  Oscar nominees are driving Uber.

• 51:07Rich Roll?

  And we're seeing these people move from working on television shows or movies into the digital space, looking for jobs at places like this, which I think is...

• 51:19Rich Roll?

  Incredibly fascinating.

• 51:21Adam Skolnick?

  It's so fascinating.

• 51:22Rich Roll?

  And I feel so lucky to even have a foothold in all of this. I mean, you know, we're, we're a small operation in comparison to, you know, what many others are doing out there right now. And it's really special and, and I'm so grateful to be able to do this thing and to, and to kind of grow it and now to start to work with other creators and kind of expand what we're capable of doing, which I think is really exciting. But I think it's important to hold on to like why it is that you're doing it in the first place. Because with all of the incentives, like I was mentioning earlier that are out there, it's very easy to lose sight of the why. And I, I've borne witness to people who, who are doing that.

• 52:06Rich Roll?

  And when you get to a certain size and scale and you're staffed up with all kinds of people who know how the internet works, I've seen, I've seen people kind of, you know, move into this place where their perspective on what they're creating and sharing is really entirely through the lens of like, what's going to go viral? What's going to be, you know, the thing that is, that is going to travel across the internet the most fluidly? And as a consequence of that, the programming starts to get reverse engineered. Rather than it being what perhaps it was at the outset, like this more authentic, original

• 52:49Rich Roll?

  kind of organic exchange between people has now become kind of completely predetermined in advance. And I think that comes at a certain cost. It certainly works. People are, there are people out there who are, who are, who have become very successful doing this and I don't begrudge them. They're doing what they're doing. But I just, I just think for me.

• 53:15Rich Roll?

  And also, as somebody who's been doing it for a very long time and wants to continue to be able to keep doing it and be in love with it in the same way that I always have been, like, I always want to come back to the why. Like, and the why is, like, I want to serve the audience in a meaningful way. I want to, I want to create something that will have the potential to be impactful, not on a surface level, but, but really on as profound a level as I'm capable of, of doing. And in order to do that, I have to step outside all of the gamesmanship that I think is going on right now and, and just, you know, lean into my strengths and, and try to double down on them and allow it to

• 54:00Rich Roll?

  be what it wants to be, rather than trying to force it to be something else, because this is what's, what other people are doing that's working really well.

• 54:07Adam Skolnick?

  It's interesting. It's like, what we were talking about before you went into that was this, the shift in the, in the flux. And like you said, people from, from professional broadcasting careers coming over to YouTube, well, what you just described as gamesmanship or as like planning on the questions and having, you know what you're going to get back from the, from the guest. I mean, that's late night talk show, that's talk show stuff.

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  Right. It's all, it's basically going back to, yeah, it's like, you know, all of these things are moving in bidirectional, you know what I mean? Like, like, the talk shows have to become more like podcasts and the podcasts are becoming more and more like the late night talk shows and the morning shows where it's like, here's my card with the question on it. And this question has been vetted, you know, based upon A B testing to solicit the answer that is going to be the most popular with our audience, you know? And it's like, okay, well, right, now we're doing television.

• 55:03Adam Skolnick?

  Now you're doing television. And what you're talking about is, I gotta stay true to my rudder and just keep going and, and stay indie, and stay indie, but also stay indie in your own mind and, and how, and.

• 55:15Rich Roll?

  It's probably like a Gen X thing, you know, it's like the Gen X, like, don't sell out while you're selling out or like, you know, like, or you have, you're guilty about it or something like that, you know? Yeah. I mean, it's, you're wearing a Kurt Cobain t-shirt, right? This is like, you know, this is like very Gen X.

• 55:31Adam Skolnick?

  I, I am wearing the shirt, but I did find out, I read somewhere that like, when the money started rolling in, Kurt somehow negotiated 75% of the royalties for himself.

• 55:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, of course. Yeah.

• 55:43Adam Skolnick?

  And he probably deserved them. He probably deserved them.

• 55:45Rich Roll?

  But it doesn't mean there wasn't a part of him that was like, you know, yeah, you know, like the guilt of selling out, you know, it's like there's this sensibility for people of our age, like the way that we were raised in this sort of, you know, fuck you punk rock, like it's not cool to care and you know, everything is is sort of, you know, it's sort of like this veneer of nihilism over everything.

• 56:06Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 56:08Rich Roll?

  Where the worst thing you could do was sell out. And now we're in a culture where, where like selling out is the point, you know, like this is the thing that everyone is celebrating. And like, look, this is a, this is a commercial enterprise. Like I want it to be successful and I'm glad that it is and I'm very proud of it. And I get to employ all these people and do all this cool stuff. So I'm not necessarily hung up on that. Only when it comes at the erosion of the value system that gave birth to it.

• 56:36Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I think your intentionality comes through also. And like I was telling you before we, we got on here that like, I called you a tastemaker. You called yourself a, a, was a curator, more of a, a mindful curator and like someone people depend on for not just, like we call tastemaker, usually it means what you, what you eat or what you consume media wise, but you're, but you're bringing, you're introducing concepts and, and experts as well as when we talk about like things to watch and books to read and things like that. So you're bringing that and that intentionality kind of comes through, I think, because you're, you're, the way you started, which was you're, you're kind

• 57:17Adam Skolnick?

  of three niche, your three niches, the, the plant based, the, the sober living and the endurance sports. So those three niches crossed over and you were able to, to kind of introduce them to each other. And now you're continuing to do that. That's growing. So that intentionality comes through. And the other thing I think of in that regard is You know, even though guests rotate between shows and from a host perspective, it's got to like make you a little nuts. But from a user perspective, like how many websites do we actually visit on a daily? Like if you really monitored, some people really range across the web. I would venture to guess, most people don't. Most people have their favorite

• 57:58Adam Skolnick?

  sites and they have their favorite shows. And yes, though, you've had this person on and they and so and so's had the same guest on and you can name 10 people that have had that guest on. Probably a good chunk of your audience has only consumed that guest on your show. So there's something about that, too. Because you know, in the silo- siloization of media, which is what we're talking about, and this is one silo, you've become instead of you've actually become a silo. So you're you're kind of the filter through which some of this stuff gets in to one channel.

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there's some truth in that. I think what I was getting at was more that, and this is a little inside baseball or like, you know, how the how the sausage is made. But essentially, when you get to the point that, you know, that where we're at, it becomes very easy to program the show reactively.

• 58:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 58:54Rich Roll?

  Because you get so many pitches, like every day, like 20 to 30 incoming emails with so and so and their book or whatever. There's, you know, I'm on publicist lists and I get the galleys for all the self improvement books and, and all of that. So it's, it's really like, you know, I can just pick and choose what appeals to me and just say yes to this and no to this. And, and, and booking the show, because I'm the only one who books. I know other people have like bookers. People might not realize that, but they hire bookers to like, get people to come on the show. Like, I'm the only one who books. I'm the only one who is, you know, reaching out to guests and, and. You know, making lists of people that I want to have, et cetera.

• 59:35Rich Roll?

  But I will admit to having gone through periods where it's just like you just, it just becomes easy to do that and you don't really think about it. And I've sort of woken up from that phase to realize in this space where, yes, there are these respective silos and maybe there's some, you know, kind of cross pollinization there, but, but maybe not also because people have their favorite hosts and they want to hear their host talk to this person, et cetera. At the same time, I think there's a lot to be said for, for, for really being proactive rather than reactive and thinking hard and long about the people you really want to have and, and going after them intentionally.

• 1:00:15Rich Roll?

  And so I'm trying to do more and more of that to step outside the ecosystem where there, you're just picking and choosing among the people that are doing the rounds to find the hidden gems and the amazing people who maybe have never done a podcast or maybe only did that tiny one, but it was amazing and you saw it or heard it and thought like, oh, wouldn't it be cool to, you know, broaden their reach and amplify their voice by having them on? And so that's kind of like where my head is at in terms of that. And I think the only way to distinguish yourself, if, if your audience is cross pollinated with a bunch of other people, is to, you know, venture outside the lines a little bit and,

• 1:00:58Rich Roll?

  and, you know, make your stamp by doing something a little bit different rather than going along to get along and, and, and just following, you know, whatever happens to be the trend at the moment.

• 1:01:09Adam Skolnick?

  I like it, man. I'm not in demand by the other podcasts, so that's why, that's why I'm a good guest for you right now. I'm very much not in demand.

• 1:01:18Rich Roll?

  I've tried, I've tried my best, Adam, to like, position you as in... In-demand guests for other podcasts, but I, there's only so much I can do.

• 1:01:27Adam Skolnick?

  There's only one podcast that needs me.

• 1:01:28Rich Roll?

  You know, it's, it's up to you at some point.

• 1:01:31Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:32Rich Roll?

  You know, you gotta, like, let's, maybe I should have, uh, A/B tested a bunch of questions for you and then thrown them at you and we could rehearse before the podcast so that by the time you're behind the mic, you could just lay down some truth or some monologue and we'll clip that, we'll put it up there, it'll go crazy.

• 1:01:49Adam Skolnick?

  Get a minute.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  And then all those podcasters are gonna be calling you.

• 1:01:52Adam Skolnick?

  I get, I get invited, I say no, it's like, I'm, I say no a lot. I get invited to smaller podcasts sometimes. Um, there's a time and place, there's a time and place. Maybe, maybe that day's coming.

• 1:02:04Rich Roll?

  I am encouraged, though, by the fact that I think the most popular podcast that we've done in the last, in the last handful of months was with Craig Maude.

• 1:02:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, love that one.

• 1:02:16Rich Roll?

  And that's also, like, the longest and the, the kind of conversation that lends itself the least to the viral clip.

• 1:02:27Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? It's like, you gotta be in for the entire experience with this guy. And if you're, if you go all in, you will be nourished and rewarded and you will emerge, like, better than you were before.

• 1:02:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  And feeling better, like, it's, you know, it's, it was, that was an incredible one. And I love the fact that it was also popular because sometimes, you know, those really deep and heartfelt explorations don't necessarily translate into, you know, views and listens on the internet.

• 1:02:56Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:02:56Rich Roll?

  Because people are busy or because, whatever, for a million different reasons. But to see that is like, oh, yeah, that's right. This is what we do here. You know what I mean? More of that, please.

• 1:03:07Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. I love that one. Go for a long walk with Craig Maude.

• 1:03:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:03:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's, yeah, I love, I mean, it's so funny, because when you, when, when that one starts, it's like, it's like, here's this really cool, nice guy who has these great insights, but then as, as the podcast goes on, you realize he's like this incredible polymath that's great at a million things.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Adam Skolnick?

  Like, great musician.

• 1:03:30Rich Roll?

  Oh, I can create my own social media platform that is exactly like Twitter, because I can code, but I can also write better than everyone else and create these art books and I can walk for days and do, yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:42Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly. Like, by the end, I was like, man, this guy's not an underdog, this guy's one of the greats.

• 1:03:47Rich Roll?

  I never said he was an underdog.

• 1:03:48Adam Skolnick?

  No, no.

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  I think he's sort of quietly under the radar.

• 1:03:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Rich Roll?

  You know, uh, soup, like superhero type figure.

• 1:03:55Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Big fan.

• 1:03:58Adam Skolnick?

  Cool.

• 1:03:58Rich Roll?

  Is there anything else I want to say about that? I think, I think, uh, I think we said what we needed to say.

• 1:04:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  I feel good about the place that we're in right now. I'm excited for the future. I'm excited to be able to expand our offerings and, and reach our tentacles deeper into you guys, the community to, uh, reward you for your, uh, for your attention and to hopefully, uh, strengthen, uh, our ability to not only feel connected to you and you to us, but to serve you better in a more immersive way. So there's a lot in development right now as far as that goes.

• 1:04:36Adam Skolnick?

  And I'm, I'm psyched to be a part of it, partly because in this new, like in a way, you didn't even mean to be doing this when you asked me to come on and start doing Roll On kind of in the, and as the pandemic hit, but like, you know, when the New York Times shut down their sports section, like a lot of stuff's been shutting down, outside fired. And, you know, they're coming back and they're doing well, but they, they, they did fire everybody I worked for.

• 1:05:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Everybody got fired. Everyone at Outside Magazine got fired. Like this is happening, you know, all across the board in publishing.

• 1:05:11Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  In television, you know, only movies that are getting made are these gigantic movies.

• 1:05:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:05:16Rich Roll?

  You know, the exception of a few, we're going to talk about in a sec, but, um, yeah, like we're, we're in a weird state right now in terms of the business model for media.

• 1:05:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right, but then.

• 1:05:29Rich Roll?

  But, but what we're doing, I really believe is the future and it holds promise. Whereas legacy media, um, is, is, is dying right now.

• 1:05:41Adam Skolnick?

  No doubt.

• 1:05:41Rich Roll?

  Like, you know, sort of network television programming, like all of that, like the business model is just eroding underfoot, you know, as we speak there. And, and what is that going to look like in a couple of years? You know, CBS is going to cut its slate, like all these, all these networks, like they can't. afford to continue to underwrite the programming that they always have been underwriting because the advertiser dollars are not there because the eyeballs aren't there and the eyeballs that are there are you know basically geriatric.

• 1:06:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, there's no doubt about it. And that's what I was getting at is that it's for me, someone a professional in this space that has like always, you know, while looking back, it's easier to see, but every story I've almost every story I've done has been about expanding our awareness of of what this world really is and what our life is really about. Like if you look at it like everything from the Goggins books to some of my sports reporting to my own projects. It's like, it's all about like expanding, expanding that sphere of awareness, piercing the bubble and see

• 1:06:51Adam Skolnick?

  that there's so much more. And so for me to land here, it's like, um, that's, I think that's where we kind of link up in that same idea. And, uh, and so to be a part of this and to have, you know, my small, my small foothold here as part of what I'm doing, it just means a lot to me. And especially because of this, this audience, you know, this audience has been incredibly affirming for me and just a great place to, to kind of, to, to, to share what I'm doing and receptive in that way. And so it's like, it's been such a pleasure. And I've said it before on social media, but to be able to say it now on the podcast, how grateful I am for the audience, for the listeners here and to, and to be part of what you're doing. It's, it's awesome.

• 1:07:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, it's, it's been great doing this with you, man. I love doing it. It's been fun.

• 1:07:41Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks.

• 1:07:42Rich Roll?

  But you know what, you know what, you know what the most fun is?

• 1:07:44Adam Skolnick?

  What's that?

• 1:07:45Rich Roll?

  What I really want to do?

• 1:07:46Adam Skolnick?

  Watch Netflix?

• 1:07:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I want to have like a, I want to have like a movies podcast.

• 1:07:50Adam Skolnick?

  Hey, man.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  This is like, that's all I really want to talk about, Adam.

• 1:07:54Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it.

• 1:07:55Rich Roll?

  All this stuff about change and transformation. It's great, you know?

• 1:07:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. But let's, let's talk about movies.

• 1:08:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, like, uh, let's, let's dismiss audience receptivity and just, you know, talk about, uh, talk about like, uh, you know, stuff that I think is fun to talk about.

• 1:08:11Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it, man. We should.

• 1:08:14Rich Roll?

  But I think the role on audience now is, is relatively attuned to the fact that Media Diet has become a cornerstone.

• 1:08:21Adam Skolnick?

  It is a cornerstone.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  This edition of the show.

• 1:08:28Adam Skolnick?

  All right, so are we getting into?

• 1:08:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what have you seen?

• 1:08:31Adam Skolnick?

  I've been watching the first season of Deadwood. Have you heard of that show?

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  I have heard of it. One of the greatest of all time.

• 1:08:37Adam Skolnick?

  I'm a rewatchable.

• 1:08:38Rich Roll?

  By, you know, the great David Milch.

• 1:08:40Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:41Rich Roll?

  Who, uh, who, ask anybody who is a screenwriter and they'll all pretty much agree that he's like the GOAT.

• 1:08:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  In terms of television writing.

• 1:08:50Adam Skolnick?

  Well, he was Hill Street Blues, right? Hill Street Blues, and then, um, what did he do after that?

• 1:08:57Rich Roll?

  He did Deadwood.

• 1:08:58Adam Skolnick?

  Deadwood.

• 1:08:58Rich Roll?

  He had that show, didn't he do the show about, um, horse racing for HBO?

• 1:09:03Adam Skolnick?

  He did. I don't know how that did.

• 1:09:05Rich Roll?

  That got cancelled.

• 1:09:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:06Rich Roll?

  Uh, I'm sure he's done a lot of other stuff.

• 1:09:08Adam Skolnick?

  But Deadwood is, especially the first two seasons, I'm only watching the first because that's to me the pinnacle of it, and then I'll go back to trying to be a current person and not an old bastard. But like, that show, that came on HBO, um, right when Entourage was hitting, and so like, their big, it was a big Sunday night, one, two, was Entourage, then Deadwood. And maybe, um, Six Feet Under was in that lineup? I forget, but it was like this great Murders Row lineup, and, um...

• 1:09:39Rich Roll?

  NYPD Blue, Deadwood, Hill Street Blues.

• 1:09:42Adam Skolnick?

  That's it, yeah, NYPD Blue. Um, which, by the way, NYPD Blue-

• 1:09:45Rich Roll?

  True Detective, also.

• 1:09:47Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, really?

• 1:09:48Rich Roll?

  The first season, I think.

• 1:09:50Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:09:50Rich Roll?

  I'm looking on IMDb right now. Sorry, go ahead, though.

• 1:09:52Adam Skolnick?

  But NYPD Blue is considered very much groundbreaking television, and Deadwood is so Shakespearean, and it's not just the writing, but the acting is just incredible. And to watch, just to watch it, it's like artistry, so for, so, and I, you know, I do like a Western, I do like a West, and Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane and all that, and, um, so if you haven't seen it, you probably have seen it, but if you haven't seen it, that's what I've been watching, and then-

• 1:10:21Rich Roll?

  And if you love Deadwood, then maybe check out the podcast I did with Titus Welliver.

• 1:10:25Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Who's in that show, who talks about Milch in that conversation.

• 1:10:28Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, does he? Okay, yeah, definitely.

• 1:10:32Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, he's isn't he? He comes in at the end of the first season.

• 1:10:35Rich Roll?

  I think so. It's been a while since I watched it. My boys love it. I think they recently rewatched the whole thing themselves and they talk about it all the time.

• 1:10:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, it's unbelievable. Swearingen is one of the great.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  All right, so you're staking your, you're planting your flag.

• 1:10:48Adam Skolnick?

  At Deadwood?

• 1:10:49Rich Roll?

  In the, yeah, in.

• 1:10:50Adam Skolnick?

  I watched Deadwood. I've been watching Deadwood, The Dodgers, and then I read a book. I mean, it's Media Diet, so books, do books count?

• 1:10:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Adam Skolnick?

  I read.

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  For now.

• 1:10:59Adam Skolnick?

  James Reban, exactly. James Reban's new book, who shares an agent with, with you and I, a bird is his agent, called The Place of Tides. He is, I think, the best naturalist writing today. It's one of the best nonfiction books I've read since iTunes. I would put it on the list of, you know, you know, five or six top books. It's, it's very quiet,

• 1:11:28Adam Skolnick?

  beautiful, kind of earth-based and earth and water-based book. And it's about, he spends, he wrote Shepherd's Life and Pastoral Song, which is, you know, his, his day job is, is running a farm in the north, north of England, where he was born. His family's been farming there, ranching there for 600 years. And he basically did regenerative agriculture, brought that to, to bring his family farm back. And so the first two books are kind of about that. And the, this one, he embeds himself with the Iderdown duck ladies of, of, of the Norwegian Islands. And so he spends a season with a 70-year-old woman who has brought back an

• 1:12:11Adam Skolnick?

  age-old custom, which is, goes all the way back to the Vikings, which is to protect and provide shelter for Iderdown ducks, Ider ducks, to come, to come on land, protect them from predators, and then let them hatch their eggs. And then when they go back with their young to the ocean, they leave the, the down behind. And so all this idea of like down is, is kind of cruel. This is not that. Iderdown is not that. Iderdown is like they just leave it behind in their nests. And so he spends, it's this way of life that has gone obviously vastly out of fashion. Everyone's leaving the islands, the kids go to Oslo. And she has brought back, she went to islands that that were all built around this economy.

• 1:12:55Adam Skolnick?

  Since the Vikings and since she was a kid, there was, the islands were still functioning this way in a vast way and thousands of ducks were coming to the point when she was having a kind of her own midlife crisis, the ducks weren't there, no one was, no one was doing it and she brought the custom back to several islands, she and some others. And so he met her and he spent a season doing that. And so that's, that's the book. And it's, it's remarkable.

• 1:13:21Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm sure the writing is beautiful.

• 1:13:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's poetic.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  And obviously it's like, you know, like.

• 1:13:25Adam Skolnick?

  And easy to read and just like you go on and he has these incredible insights about kind of our humanity and what it means and the nature of the modern world. Because, you know, we're all kind of stuck, you know, what it is, is we're all like kind of cogs in this modern world and we have to detach and look around every once in a while to kind of realize that we're not that because it's going to become all consuming. And I think that's really like heart of the book is like that he is this high functioning guy doing, running this, he's written bestselling books, he's in demand and he wants to be in demand because, because you know, it gives him.

• 1:14:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:01Adam Skolnick?

  Some, some, somehow makes him feel validated. And being with her, he realizes actually being part of the land and sea and the wind and she's part of everything when she's doing her thing. It makes him realize that that is actually the, the point.

• 1:14:19Rich Roll?

  Right, that's, that's the whole thing.

• 1:14:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Rich Roll?

  I love it, that's beautiful, man.

• 1:14:25Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks, man.

• 1:14:26Rich Roll?

  You've gone very highbrow.

• 1:14:27Adam Skolnick?

  Gone highbrow?

• 1:14:28Rich Roll?

  This week.

• 1:14:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, and one last thing, Eddie Palmieri, the great Salsero, the great musician, Latin jazz and salsa innovator, Latin music innovator. He died at 88, he's one of the great, if you haven't, this is a media diet thing, if you haven't ever listened to Eddie Palmieri, he is an absolute maestro. He kind of was one of the first to put out like six, eight minute. Songs on record, like the record companies weren't doing it and he did it because of the band he put together. Started playing piano at eight years old in Washington Heights. He's a Washington Heights kid. He's a New Yorker from Puerto Rican descent and just

• 1:15:11Adam Skolnick?

  a master musician. And I'm not gonna drone on too much, but there's an incredible obituary in the New York Times that I can give you the link if you want to add to the show notes and just Spotify him and I'll throw a few songs on there if you want for people who are interested in that kind of thing. I love all kinds of music. And if you're not a big salsa or person, give it a listen because it's funky and deep and really cool.

• 1:15:38Rich Roll?

  Nice, man. That's a good one.

• 1:15:41Adam Skolnick?

  Hey, thanks.

• 1:15:42Rich Roll?

  It made me think about a documentary that I'm excited to see that I haven't seen yet. This documentary on Jeff Buckley. It's coming out soon. I love Jeff Buckley and I'm fascinated by his life and his music and this life that was cut short far too early. I'm not sure when that date of that is coming out. I'm starting to see previews around that.

• 1:16:04Adam Skolnick?

  It's a biopic or a documentary?

• 1:16:06Rich Roll?

  It's a documentary. Yeah, it's a documentary. But speaking of movies, I mean, I'm gonna pick the low hanging fruit here. I mean, I saw Weapons this week and it's just like amazing. This movie is fantastic.

• 1:16:20Adam Skolnick?

  The marketing's amazing. Looking at the posters, they freaked me out the minute I saw them.

• 1:16:24Rich Roll?

  I'm not like a huge horror guy. So I'm not necessarily like the, you know, the prime audience for this kind of thing. Like, I like horror fine, but I'm not the guy who's like running out to see the latest, you know, scary movie or, you know, Friday the 13th or whatever, Blumhouse or whatever. Yeah, it's like, it's fine, but it's not like, that's not my sweet spot at all. But I do admit to really enjoying this new trend of kind of auteur-driven.

• 1:16:57Rich Roll?

  Horror is high art, like the Midsommar's, you know, those types of movies that are, yeah, Get Out, things like that, like these directors who are pushing the envelope and kind of redefining horror. And that's what obviously made me interested in weapons because it was, it was clearly, if you watch the trailer, like this is in conversation with those filmmakers and those movies. But I steered away from reading anything about it, or wanting to know too much about it, or even the director who created it, and who has his own like really interesting story in and of itself, like he comes from improv comedy and is like a very interesting origin story. So I suppose I went into it

• 1:17:42Rich Roll?

  with a projection or an assumption about what I thought it was gonna be, and it just wasn't that at all. You know, it's sort of a movie that keeps you on its toes, because every time you feel like you have your footing and you feel like you understand the movie that you're in, it becomes a different movie. And it's almost as if he's playing with these tropes, or these, these, these things that he's dropping into the frame that you're used to seeing, and you're like, oh, when I see this, it means this, or this is what's gonna happen, or, or I can, I can foresee how this story is gonna play out. And he's constantly subverting those expectations. And it's really fun. Like, it's uproariously

• 1:18:23Rich Roll?

  fun, and it's funny also. It, it wasn't necessarily, I mean, it has a, you know, the construct of it is like a scary idea, but I wouldn't say, like, it scared me, you know, it has disturbing moments for sure, but it's wildly entertaining and, and super fun. And I think, I mean, I checked like a day ago, it was scoring like 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, like, people love this. And when I went to the movie theater, it was packed. And I think movies are really back in, in-

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  In no small reason, due to sinners, 28 years later, which is also amazing.

• 1:19:01Adam Skolnick?

  I heard that's great.

• 1:19:02Rich Roll?

  And now this movie, like, these are, these are really well-done, very crowd-pleasing movies that have brought audiences back into the theater in a moment where it's like, oh, theaters are dead and the movie-going experience is defunct. But if you make great stuff, people will come, they're coming out for this, it's great. My kids went to go see Naked Gun, which is like, not that interested in seeing it, but apparently that is like, really well-done and they loved it and it was super fun and it's been a long time since like, a broad comedy was in theaters.

• 1:19:36Adam Skolnick?

  Is it the Zucker's again?

• 1:19:38Rich Roll?

  I don't even know, no, no, are they still making it? I don't know, I should know. If I'm gonna host a movie podcast, I should know things like this.

• 1:19:45Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I'll watch these.

• 1:19:46Rich Roll?

  But, the point being, like, when was the last time there was a really broad comedy that did really well at the box office, in theaters, like, like, really, you know, like, like, on the broadest level, like a movie like this?

• 1:19:58Adam Skolnick?

  Step Brothers, probably?

• 1:19:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's, that was a long time ago, right? Like, they're not making these kind of movies.

• 1:20:03Adam Skolnick?

  Wedding Crashers did well?

• 1:20:04Rich Roll?

  Probably because these movies don't do well overseas, so they don't have the global return.

• 1:20:09Adam Skolnick?

  Comedy doesn't transfer.

• 1:20:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so they're not making them because they, these things cost money and more money than they used to.

• 1:20:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  But anyway, Weapons, that's my choice. I still wanna see Eddington, I haven't seen it yet.

• 1:20:20Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:20:21Rich Roll?

  But, uh, I'm busy.

• 1:20:22Adam Skolnick?

  Right, we're busy.

• 1:20:23Rich Roll?

  Even though I can't move my body.

• 1:20:25Adam Skolnick?

  You can't move your body and I can't get out at night, so it's, it's, it's kind of like, we're a little bit mixed, but I think Weapons is on Netflix, right?

• 1:20:31Rich Roll?

  Weapons is in the theaters right now.

• 1:20:33Adam Skolnick?

  It's in theaters only?

• 1:20:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's in the theaters.

• 1:20:35Adam Skolnick?

  Okay, so I need to see it.

• 1:20:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Adam Skolnick?

  I need to see Weapons. How about F, how about F1? Did you see F1?

• 1:20:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I saw F1.

• 1:20:42Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  I loved F1. Um, I mean, it's, the cinematography is fantastic in that movie.

• 1:20:50Rich Roll?

  It's it's something you really should see on the big screen. I don't think it's in theaters anymore, is it?

• 1:20:55Adam Skolnick?

  No, maybe not.

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  I didn't see it in IMAX. I wish I had. The story is incredibly basic, but I think it needs to be because there's so much else going on, like the sport is so complex. And I think they did a really deft job of trying to explain it without too much exposition or leaning too much into the insane complexity of the whole thing by focusing on like tire choice and, you know, some kind of basic strategy stuff that a broad audience can understand. And it's wildly enjoyable.

• 1:21:28Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:21:29Rich Roll?

  I was at the Formula One race in Austin a couple of years ago.

• 1:21:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:21:36Rich Roll?

  With the boys and and had the opportunity to be in the paddock and and visit the Mercedes garage. And like meet, I got to very briefly meet Lewis Hamilton and Toto and like, you know, it was a wild experience.

• 1:21:54Adam Skolnick?

  That was his last year being the best too, I think, right? Or was up there?

• 1:21:58Rich Roll?

  That was the year that he was still that he was starting to struggle a little bit.

• 1:22:04Rich Roll?

  But while in the in the Mercedes garage, where you get the you have the headphones on and you kind of hear what everyone's saying, like it was this was like the day before the race when they were, I think, no, actually, this was during testing, maybe, where the drivers are out and they're reporting back like how the car feels and what they feel needs adjusting and all that kind of stuff, which is super interesting to hear. But literally, like, standing next to me was Brad Pitt.

• 1:22:32Rich Roll?

  He was like, you know.

• 1:22:33Adam Skolnick?

  He was already researching.

• 1:22:34Rich Roll?

  And then we went into like each of the each of the teams, you know, they have their own garage. And then like across the little roadway paddock, you know, in this paddock area, they have these hospitality suites where they have like, it's a little cafe kind of situation. And like Brad and Joseph Kaczynski, you know, are sitting with Lewis Hamilton and they're like, you know, this is like two years before the movie comes out, like they're figuring it out, which was wild.

• 1:22:59Adam Skolnick?

  That is wild because Brad Pitt's character is basically Lewis Hamilton now, right? Like he's like on the, on the, he's at the end, towards the end of his career and

• 1:23:07Rich Roll?

  Brad Pitt is 60 years old.

• 1:23:08Adam Skolnick?

  Well, right, but that's the idea, right? No, he's not playing a 60 year old though in the movie.

• 1:23:12Rich Roll?

  No, but he's playing in a much more, have you seen the movie?

• 1:23:16Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  Okay, so you're talking out your ass right now. I am too, even though I saw it, but anyway, I wouldn't, I wouldn't draw that, that much of a parallel. Yeah, I think they were really, really careful to not over identify the characters with any, you know, existing drivers in an unfair way. And, and they also did a really great job of, obviously it's immersive because they're filming this like in the midst of these races going on. And so the real drivers and the real cars are part of the story, but not in a way that,

• 1:23:56Rich Roll?

  that intrudes upon the narrative such that the real life drivers become characters necessarily, which I think was a smart choice. But you know, Joseph Kaczynski, who's an engineer by trade, like he was a mechanical engineer along before he was a filmmaker, like he is engineering these movies in really fantastic and unique and creative ways. Like they had to basically come up with all of these new cameras that separated the lenses from the bodies so that they could place them all over the cars and hide the bodies underneath the chassis. So the cars wouldn't, would still function properly and their weight balance and aerodynamics. I mean, like you can go down the rabbit hole on YouTube and like on, on sort of behind the scenes and how they actually did this. And it was, it's quite a master stroke.

• 1:24:41Adam Skolnick?

  Interesting. It's like the way George Lucas had to create new cameras, he's creating these booms and new, like new ways of, of holding cameras, I would imagine, right?

• 1:24:49Rich Roll?

  And, you know. I would buy stock in Joseph Kaczynski because he's sort of emerged as, you know, one of the most prominent filmmakers when it comes to super high budget, action thrillers.

• 1:25:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  Because he's able to do things no one's ever done before and it's thrilling to watch them.

• 1:25:08Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I would agree that movies are back and TV is kind of like slumped. You can't think, that's one of the reasons I'm watching the first season of Deadwood is that like, uh, we just, although we did watch The Bear, but like, we did watch The Bear recently. We watched The Bear.

• 1:25:21Rich Roll?

  You know what I started rewatching, like in my, in my convalescence? Because I just wanted, I wanted something that made me feel good, that was earnest.

• 1:25:33Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:25:34Rich Roll?

  And so I went back to the beginning and started watching Friday Night Lights.

• 1:25:38Adam Skolnick?

  Ah, yes.

• 1:25:40Rich Roll?

  And that show holds up.

• 1:25:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:42Rich Roll?

  It's pretty good. It's kind of awesome.

• 1:25:44Adam Skolnick?

  Right. The show, not the movie, the show.

• 1:25:46Rich Roll?

  It's so earnest in a way that you don't kind of see right now in culture and I found that to be heartwarming.

• 1:25:53Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:25:53Rich Roll?

  So, that's it. I think that concludes media diet for this week.

• 1:25:58Adam Skolnick?

  It does.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  Any, any parting thoughts?

• 1:26:01Adam Skolnick?

  Well, we should shout out some of the, uh, the, shout out to friends of the pod.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Friends of the pod update.

• 1:26:09Adam Skolnick?

  Friends of the pod update.

• 1:26:10Rich Roll?

  Who's, who's out there doing stuff?

• 1:26:12Adam Skolnick?

  Well, to, while we were all sleeping, uh, David Goggins and Harvey Lewis were finishing Bigfoot 200. A 200 mile race that I think is like 47,000 elevation gain and loss or something incredible.

• 1:26:25Rich Roll?

  Where does it take place?

• 1:26:26Adam Skolnick?

  It's in the Cascades in Washington State. And, uh,

• 1:26:29Rich Roll?

  David hasn't competed in quite a while.

• 1:26:31Adam Skolnick?

  No, he keeps it super under the radar. Um, and, um, you know, I didn't know he was competing until, uh, Ben Pryor.

• 1:26:41Rich Roll?

  Shout out Ben.

• 1:26:41Adam Skolnick?

  Shout out Ben, sent me a link to the tracking and I was tracking him and I haven't talked to him about the race or anything yet, um, but it was such a pleasure to watch him do it. And I just, and I like, I knew he, uh, towards the end, he was like picking up pace and just like, like he always does and tracking people down. And, um, I think it was like a top 20 finish and, and Harvey was right there. I think Harvey finished, uh, around the same time. And so it was, uh, it was cool to watch, to watch both those names and go and go and go. But it was a long one. It was like, uh, it's like, it must be harder than Leadville. It's like a three, well, it's 200 miles, but it's

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  Twice the distance.

• 1:27:18Adam Skolnick?

  Twice the distance. But even Moab. I feel like was incredible too, and that's 240 miles. This seemed to be the same amount of time for less miles. So I think it's the terrain.

• 1:27:30Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:27:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, Kate Courtney

• 1:27:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:33Rich Roll?

  Uh, won the Leadville 100 mountain bike race in record breaking time.

• 1:27:38Adam Skolnick?

  Incredible.

• 1:27:39Rich Roll?

  So shout out to her, which is cool.

• 1:27:41Adam Skolnick?

  Under seven hours.

• 1:27:42Rich Roll?

  Uh, she's a machine, man. Do not get in her way. That woman is so capable. Whatever she chooses to focus on in her life, I have no doubt she will, you know, set, set whatever you would consider to be a course record in whatever pursuit it is that, you know, she decides to laser in on.

• 1:28:01Adam Skolnick?

  One of those.

• 1:28:02Rich Roll?

  She's, she's, she's an extraordinary person. And, uh, and Tom Holland back in the Spider-Man suit, back on set. People seem very excited about this.

• 1:28:12Adam Skolnick?

  Well, good.

• 1:28:12Rich Roll?

  For all the Marvel heads out there. Um, I'm sure there's other people who have been on the show who are out doing interesting things right now.

• 1:28:19Adam Skolnick?

  We haven't, we haven't checked. Was there one other person that you had on the, on mine? No, Tom Holland. Oh, Christian Blumenfeld.

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, Blumenfeld.

• 1:28:25Adam Skolnick?

  Blumenfeld.

• 1:28:26Rich Roll?

  What's he up to?

• 1:28:27Adam Skolnick?

  He's been dominating. He's out, he's, he's out there winning. He's winning all the races he enters and he's just like crushing the comp because I think he had one down season where it was hard for him to get, um, on the podium. And, and people wondered, is that, is that the end?

• 1:28:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I did a podcast with him in New York right after Kona.

• 1:28:43Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:28:43Rich Roll?

  So five years ago, Christian wins gold at the Olympics. He moves into half Iron Man and Iron Man, becomes a dominant force, uh, in that world. Um, and then decides that he wants to return to the Olympics in Paris to win gold again, this unprecedented thing. Well, all did not go as planned. He did not have a great performance in Paris. He went from Paris to Kona to step right back into Iron Man where he was just throwing up and blew up. So that didn't do very well. We did a podcast in New York City right after that. He kind of shared his experience and, and how he was going to pick up the pieces and move forward. And it seems like he's done that because now he's back and he's crushing it once again.

• 1:29:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. He, he just won, uh, the Iron Man 70.3 championships. And then he won Iron Man Frankfurt, which was the European championships. Um, he's won his last three events, gold, gold, gold, and has dominated.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  Awesome.

• 1:29:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:43Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, I think we did it for today.

• 1:29:45Adam Skolnick?

  I'm gonna close this so I can get a better view of you.

• 1:29:47Rich Roll?

  How do you feel? I'll close mine too.

• 1:29:49Adam Skolnick?

  I feel good.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna look you right in the eye, Adam. Tell you I love you.

• 1:29:53Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, thanks, man.

• 1:29:54Rich Roll?

  So grateful for our time together.

• 1:29:56Adam Skolnick?

  I love you too.

• 1:29:56Rich Roll?

  This friendship that we have.

• 1:29:57Adam Skolnick?

  Me too, man. It's great, it's a great time. You know what? I appreciate your taking a stand in the health and wellbeing of our, of our world and having me along for the ride.

• 1:30:10Rich Roll?

  Awesome, man. Thank you.

• 1:30:11Adam Skolnick?

  You got it.

• 1:30:12Rich Roll?

  Well, let's do this again soon.

• 1:30:13Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it.

• 1:30:13Rich Roll?

  All right, buddy. Peace.

• 1:30:23Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep

• 1:31:07Rich Roll?

  this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis.

• 1:31:50Rich Roll?

  Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Platz. Namaste.