Roll On: Guns, Liberty & Responsibility (+ Sen. Cory Booker)

Welcome to another edition of ‘Roll On’, wherein Rich Roll and journalist & author Adam Skolnick riff on matters of interest across sports, culture, entertainment, and self-betterment. Given the heartbreaking number of mass and school shootings this year—punctuated by the horrific events in Uvalde—today’s discussion centers on gun violence in America, culminating with a conversation with Senator Cory Booker, who joins via Zoom to help us understand why this problem is so intractable, and what we can do about it. Specific topics discussed in today’s episode include: Kristian Blummenfelt’s stunning Sub7 Project performance; the downfall of legendary UC Berkeley swimming coach Teri McKeever; the release of Robbie Balenger’s movie The Colorado Crush: 63 Days of Endurance; American gun culture, alarming statistics behind mass shootings, and the political barriers that make it difficult to enact stricter gun laws; and Senator Cory Booker’s take on what’s needed to change firearm legislation. Today’s episode is also viewable on YouTube: https://bit.ly/rollon685 Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:05Cory Booker?

  This is not a partisan issue. It really is not. And the problem often with our country is we try to reduce things into the binary world as Democrat-Republican. I've listened to your show enough to know that you realize that's not the case. And we, as Americans, have so much more in common. The lines that divide us are nowhere near as strong as the ties that bind us. But this political-industrial complex that will try to parse us along these tribes and make us believe that we're different, that's a problem. We're at a perilous moment for our democracy where you're seeing larger and larger portions view an us versus them within this country, and not just us, where we're all one people with one destiny.

• 1:49Cory Booker?

  And the real challenge I see, again, is how do we make other people care? I don't need to change one person's mind who might believe that we shouldn't pass universal background checks or gun licensing, or... I don't have to change one person's mind. All we have to do is get the people who share our beliefs, which is the majority of us, to do a lot more. But we are gonna need a lot more committed Americans to, despite your whipped-up differences with somebody, that you can still find ways to create connection and see common dignity and see common destiny.

• 2:34Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Roll On, where two, I might add, very well-dressed, sartorially-conscious podcaster, one, an ocean-swimming journalist and author, that would be you, Adam, the other, an ultra-endurance athlete-turned-writer-and-podcaster, namely me, bring our perspective on culture, on world events, on art, sports, politics, and try to just make a little more sense of this crazy world that we live in while we're at it. What do you think?

• 3:10Adam Skolnick?

  I think that's the perfect encapsulation to what we do here, Rich.

• 3:15Rich Roll?

  Concise.

• 3:16Adam Skolnick?

  It was concise. I think it's the most well-descriptive piece on the Roll On yet.

• 3:23Rich Roll?

  Well, we continue to iterate on this format and play around with bringing new things to you guys, so we've got a very exciting show today. First, we're gonna talk about a few interesting headlines from the world of endurance, which has kind of become our habit here. We're gonna share a few things we've been enjoying, respectively, but really, the thrust of today's discussion is focused on a more sobering subject, to say the least. Specifically, America's perplexing problem and obsession with guns, why rational gun control continues to elude us, and what we can and perhaps should expect to be done

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  about it. It's a discussion that will be bookended by a call with Senator Cory Booker, which is very exciting. He was kind enough to join us with his thoughts on this heated and important matter. So, let's kick it off. I'm gonna begin with my standard opener. How go you, Mr. Skolnick?

• 4:23Adam Skolnick?

  Rich, did I ever tell you about the time I realized I was dead broke in the middle of Mongolia?

• 4:28Rich Roll?

  You've somehow forgot to share that story with me.

• 4:31Adam Skolnick?

  I was in a supermarket in Mongolia when I realized I was running low on cash. I had weeks to go on this research trip. It was early on, and I was, I attempted to, what do they say, push, was it push? I guess, take a month off paying for my car. Delay my car payment?

• 4:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's a very, uh, I don't know.

• 4:56Adam Skolnick?

  I was attempting to, you know, I built up a little bit of wiggle room and so I was attempting to basically decline to pay. And in actuality, accidentally paid three times the normal car payment.

• 5:10Rich Roll?

  How did you happen to?

• 5:12Adam Skolnick?

  I don't want to get into the technical difficulties.

• 5:14Rich Roll?

  No financial wizard you.

• 5:18Rich Roll?

  That's what I take from this story that you're only halfway into.

• 5:21Adam Skolnick?

  Dead broke.

• 5:22Rich Roll?

  So you spent all your money overpaying for your car and stranded yourself in Mongolia?

• 5:27Adam Skolnick?

  In the middle of Mongolia. Luckily.

• 5:29Rich Roll?

  No Ubers.

• 5:30Adam Skolnick?

  No, there was no Ubers there. There was a camel. I called for an Uber and a camel came over.

• 5:35Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Five stars.

• 5:37Adam Skolnick?

  But, uh, but luckily, my future wife, April Wong, happened to be with me.

• 5:43Rich Roll?

  Very forgiving of your financial oversight.

• 5:46Adam Skolnick?

  And she was in much better financial condition than I at the time. So the lonely planeting continued and on we went into the Gobi Desert.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  The planet became a little less lonely.

• 5:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. And I thought about that because I was having this weird scent memory. You know how memory and scent are kind of like connected?

• 6:04Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:05Adam Skolnick?

  And today, April played this morning, uh, while I was making breakfast, she played an Indian song that she remembered from her travels. And I swear to God, I would, this ended up getting us into this Mongolia discussion, but while she was playing this song that I hadn't heard before, I swear I smelled nagchampa.

• 6:24Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:25Adam Skolnick?

  Does that ever happen to you? You hear something, a memory's triggered and you smell something that's not there?

• 6:30Rich Roll?

  Usually it's the other way around. I smell something and it triggers the extreme vividness of a memory that I didn't even remember that I had.

• 6:41Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Like I was, I swear to God, I smelled like, like the incense wafting in Varanasi, you know, like when I was there. And I was, I was like. Anyway.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  Hence the mala beads that you're wearing today.

• 6:52Adam Skolnick?

  I'm in a, maybe it's all related. You know, I got into the beads during my deadline. That was just like all encompassing when I had that poofy beard. And I, the, all of a sudden I started wearing beads.

• 7:04Rich Roll?

  Is there a story behind where you procured said beads?

• 7:09Adam Skolnick?

  No, I'm not sure. I have like a whole rack of beads of different kinds. I was, I was deeply into beads at one time. I'm not, unless so now.

• 7:18Rich Roll?

  Unless so now. So they weren't, they're not the providence of some, you know, holy guru figure.

• 7:24Adam Skolnick?

  No, but I used to actually use them because I'd use them to do meditations, whatever. And so now I don't meditate quite that way where I'm, where I'm doing mantra meditations. And so I haven't used them in a while, but I used to actually use them. So I'd pick them up wherever. But yeah, there you go. Otherwise the deadline beard is dead.

• 7:44Rich Roll?

  I know. The, the beads would have gone well with the, with the beard though. Sorry to see it better.

• 7:49Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I wore them last time.

• 7:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But did you wear them on top of your shirt? I think they were tucked in.

• 7:54Adam Skolnick?

  This time they're on top because if, I don't want to get into the whole biological issue of a hairy chest and beads, but it's not always comfortable.

• 8:02Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, there's something to the idea that you're wearing mala beads. And my feet are adorned in vegan Birkenstocks right now. And we're going to talk about gun control. A couple progressive libtards.

• 8:15Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 8:15Rich Roll?

  We're gonna pontificate upon.

• 8:17Adam Skolnick?

  We are.

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  This, this, you know, very heightened issue.

• 8:21Adam Skolnick?

  Two strikes against us right off the bat.

• 8:25Adam Skolnick?

  Hopefully you're not, hopefully you're not watching this. You're just listening to it and you think, those guys make a lot of sense.

• 8:31Rich Roll?

  I had to ditch my flip flops for the Birks though.

• 8:34Adam Skolnick?

  Right. But what's going on with you, man? How, what's happening with?

• 8:36Rich Roll?

  There you go. That was the prompt I was, see, I have to like spoon feed you.

• 8:40Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I didn't know if we were done talking about me. I always assume we're still talking about me.

• 8:44Rich Roll?

  Well, we can do that. We know the audience a lot. We could just do it. We could do a whole show. Tell me more, Adam. What other tales from the lonely planet can you share?

• 8:54Adam Skolnick?

  Should I ever tell you about the time I was in Jordan and I went up to a shawarma stand? I was pre vegan and I had no idea if I could afford a shawarma.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  Hmm. You did not, but you know what? We're going to put a pin in that and you can tell that story some other time.

• 9:12Rich Roll?

  Back to my vegan Birkenstocks.

• 9:13Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 9:14Rich Roll?

  So, and this relates to like my fitness and my back problems that I've shared about. I'm working with a PT right now, who basically said, you gotta get rid of the flip flops.

• 9:25Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  Very painful counsel, I might add, because essentially, I just, if I'm not wearing Solomon running shoes, I'm wearing flip flops.

• 9:34Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 9:35Rich Roll?

  That's my preferred footwear.

• 9:36Adam Skolnick?

  And you can forget about Chuck Taylors. If he's, if the flip flops are out the window.

• 9:40Rich Roll?

  I own a couple pairs of Chuck Taylors, but.

• 9:42Adam Skolnick?

  Not gonna work.

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for the back, I was told no bueno, and told that the vegan Birkenstocks would, would, would, would be a better option. So that's why I'm wearing those today. But yeah, so.

• 9:54Adam Skolnick?

  So wait, so you're saying dad shoes, it took you a long time to get to dad shoes, but you should consider that a victory.

• 9:59Rich Roll?

  I have some dad shoes, and I had to, I'll get to it, but I had to kind of do a thing in San Diego the other day, and I had to go buy a pair of dad shoes, because I don't have any, any sort of respectable shoes that I can wear in a, in a more formal setting. But anyway, I'll get to that.

• 10:15Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  But yeah, so as I've shared, like, I've had these back problems, and it's really got me benched from doing the things that I love, swimming, biking, and running. I've sort of been told, like, not now, we gotta work on these other things. And so I've been focused on all of these annoying little physiotherapy exercises that are all about activating my glutes and my hamstrings, because they're so weak in comparison to these other muscle groups. And it's not even strength exercises, it's really just getting these muscles to fire, because when I tell my brain, like, move my leg in a certain way, like, it doesn't move, or I use the wrong muscles to move it. So it's been really educational and interesting playing around with that. But, you know, I hate it. It's annoying.

• 11:00Adam Skolnick?

  You hate, you hate the PT?

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  I wanna go, I wanna go, I wanna go run.

• 11:03Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  I wanna go, I wanna go swim, I wanna do these other things. But I'm committed, I'm all in. I'm trying to do these pelvic mobility exercises and this whole like routine. Straps, straps and things? I'm not even at the straps yet. I'm more, I'm at the more elementary phase of this whole thing. Which has required kind of a new level of humility in patients. Right. Because I want to just burst out the door, but here's where I'm at. I'm accepting of it and committed to this journey and we'll see where it heads, but haven't had any huge back flare ups. It's not like my back pain has gone away, but you know, hopefully I'm on a good trajectory with all of this, so. That's great. That's good. And you look fantastic. Hey, man.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  And that's what counts. You got...

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  The hair and makeup person just left. You can thank them. Okay.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  But it's been a cool week. My eldest daughter Mathis graduated from high school. That was exciting. Can't believe that she already graduated from high school. It's just crazy. Congratulate you? You having a newborn. No, don't graduate me. Graduate or congratulate Mathis. I know, but do people congratulate the parent in that regard? If they do, it's a little weird. Especially because it's high school. It's like, you should be able to graduate at high school. I think so. I think so. It's worthy of celebration though. Yes. And then I had to jet from that to go down to San Diego, where I attended this conference called Life Itself, which is this event that Sanjay Gupta, personal friend, friend of the podcast, created in partnership with this other guy called Mark Hodush,

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  who was the owner and co-founder of TED MED. Okay. And they created this new conference called Life Itself. Sanjay had just sort of invited me to attend and... I didn't know you guys were buddies. Super buddies. Yeah, we met like, I think back in like 2013 when he did a story on me and we've just stayed in touch. And I just went with no expectations. I didn't really spend a lot of time researching what it was all about. I just thought it would be cool and nice to support Sanjay. And he was kind enough to invite me to attend. And then a couple of days before the event, he texted me and he's like, hey, I think it would be really cool if you did like a fireside chat with Lance Armstrong. What do you think about that?

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  So it went from being like, oh, I'm just gonna chill out to, oh, now I have to like, do a thing. And of course, I'm gonna say yes to that. But then it was like, okay, what do I ask Lance? How is this gonna go? It's just a 20 minute thing. But it ended up being great, really fun. The speakers at this conference were off the chain, like next level thinkers, geniuses at the cutting edge of health and biotech and longevity. I saw more than a few people who I just love to get on the podcast and also presentations by people who have been on the podcast, like David Sinclair and Arianna Huffington, Dean Ornish, Sanjay, of course. And what's cool is the presentations are slowly being dripped

• 14:06Rich Roll?

  out on CNN.com. The one I did with Lance, I'll let you guys judge how that went, should be up there soon. It's not up there yet. But if you go to CNN.com/lifeitself, you can see some of the presentations, again, with more being dripped out. So it was really fun. It was incredibly inspiring, uplifting event. And I go to a lot of conferences and this was like a cut above basically anything else I've ever attended.

• 14:33Adam Skolnick?

  How forthcoming was Lance? Were you getting into the nitty gritty? Or had you done that kind of, you hadn't done?

• 14:38Rich Roll?

  We did a podcast several years ago. And, you know, I guess I would just say, watch the video. You guys make up your own mind, you know? I'll leave it there.

• 14:47Adam Skolnick?

  Sounds like, sounds like you were hard hitting.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  No. What are you gonna do in 20 minutes? They're like, 20 minutes? I'm like, that's one question.

• 14:54Adam Skolnick?

  So did you do it?

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  I can do, I can do two to three hours. 20 minutes is much more stressful.

• 15:00Adam Skolnick?

  Right, that's much harder.

• 15:00Rich Roll?

  Like, how do you even get your head around that? Like, it's not in my skill setter toolbox.

• 15:05Adam Skolnick?

  I actually think it is. You know, like, I always thought after our first interview and then like, kind of listening to your show, I always thought like, you're one of the best interviewers there is. So you could do any format. I always thought like, your destiny was like NBC was gonna come calling, or 60 Minutes was gonna come calling. That's what I always thought. This could be the beginning of it.

• 15:26Rich Roll?

  Very, very kind of you to say.

• 15:28Adam Skolnick?

  I always thought that.

• 15:28Rich Roll?

  Very kind of you to say.

• 15:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 15:31Rich Roll?

  We'll see. I like doing what I'm doing now.

• 15:33Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 15:33Rich Roll?

  I'm not doing this so that I can get another thing.

• 15:35Adam Skolnick?

  I know. No, I'm not implying that that was your idea. I'm just saying, I could see it.

• 15:39Rich Roll?

  I will say it went well. People seem to really enjoy it. So you guys can decide and when it goes up, I'll share it out on social media.

• 15:48Adam Skolnick?

  Beautiful.

• 15:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Final thing before we get into the next little segment is I just want to thank everybody who joined the giveaway for the 50 copies of Finding Ultra that we're handing out to kind of celebrate the 10th anniversary. We got a big response out of that. That opportunity closes on June 9th, which is the day this podcast is going up. We're recording this on, what is it, the 6th today, which is Monday. But in any case, we're going to announce the winner soon and just appreciate everybody who kind of signed up for the mailing list. And we also got a lot of cool ideas about how to leverage that mailing list

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  to create something that people would actually enjoy seeing in their inbox as opposed to feeling irritated and quickly unsubscribing.

• 16:37Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, right. Or you could be like me and just never unsubscribe and just watch these emails come into your inbox. And start taking up residence in your inbox.

• 16:46Rich Roll?

  I subscribe to some Substacks and some newsletters and I would say that more often than not, like I just don't have time to even read them.

• 16:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 16:54Rich Roll?

  And no matter how many times I unsubscribe from mailing lists that I never signed up for, every day I would say like 60 to 70% of the incoming emails are just from lists that I never signed up for and I'm just constantly deleting emails. Is that your inbox experience?

• 17:11Adam Skolnick?

  My inbox experience is I never delete them and then I have like 30,000 emails and then Gmail says you have 90, you have 1% left and then I go on a mad like slash and burn.

• 17:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 17:25Adam Skolnick?

  Clear cutting.

• 17:26Rich Roll?

  I delete them as I go. Well, I delete them as I go and then when I'm busy, I just leave unread the ones that I need to go back to.

• 17:33Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 17:34Rich Roll?

  And then it's a crap shoot as to whether I ever go back to them.

• 17:37Adam Skolnick?

  I'm going to start deleting as I go.

• 17:38Rich Roll?

  Causes irritation with people that, you know, I'm trying to do stuff with.

• 17:42Adam Skolnick?

  Really? Do you ever, have you ever had, I've had that once where I was just sick of getting this one newsletter?

• 17:50Adam Skolnick?

  Unsubscribed? And then I thought like at the time, this was way back. At the time, I thought that there's some bot, like that person is never going to see me do that.

• 18:00Rich Roll?

  They look at their unsubscribe so they know that you.

• 18:03Adam Skolnick?

  Then I found out, I got like unfollowed.

• 18:06Rich Roll?

  Blocking somebody on, on social media? They took it personally?

• 18:10Adam Skolnick?

  They did and they, they dropped me like a, like a bad habit.

• 18:13Rich Roll?

  Hey, you invited that, Drew.

• 18:14Adam Skolnick?

  I did, I did. I wasn't upset.

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  All right. Well, let's start with the light before we go into the dark. We need to report back on the sub seven hour Ironman project. I think it's fair to say that this podcast is now officially a Christian Blumentfeld stan account, particularly in light of his accomplishment this past weekend. It seems like we're checking in on Christian every single week here because he's constantly, you know, breaking records and eclipsing ceilings on what he's capable of.

• 18:45Adam Skolnick?

  Oh yeah. I mean, every time he races, it seems like he's doing something special. So.

• 18:50Rich Roll?

  Right. So our favorite Norseman did it again. Just to recap in the last 12 months, this guy was not only crowned Olympic champion, he claimed the WTC series championship. He set the fastest recorded Ironman ever in Cozumel. I guess that's not a world record though. There were some, something about that.

• 19:11Adam Skolnick?

  It wasn't, it's not considered a world record because of the down current swim in Cozumel. Like something about the bike distance. But then when he won in St. George, it was the fastest time ever at a world championship. But it was not the same course as, as in previous years.

• 19:28Rich Roll?

  So he was most recently crowned world champion in, in St. George. And now he's become the first ever athlete to go under seven hours in an iron distance triathlon as part of this sub seven project, which much like the sub two marathon project where Kipchoge was trying to go under two hours in the marathon. This allowed for drafting. They created a course that was very conducive to going fast. And not only did Christian go under seven hours, he absolutely demolished it. He went six hours and 44 minutes, which included a 225 marathon, which is unbelievable. There's some. Graphics that I found on social media that I wanted to share.

• 20:13Adam Skolnick?

  And it was supposed to go up, he was supposed to go, this was actually a race. He was supposed to go up against Alastair Brownlee.

• 20:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 20:20Adam Skolnick?

  But he got ruled out. He had a stress response to his hip. And so they brought in Joe Skipper, who happened to be the guy that had been trash talking.

• 20:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's the smack talker, which makes for better television.

• 20:30Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, it was great. And he, and he fucking threw down.

• 20:33Rich Roll?

  He, he was not messing around.

• 20:35Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 20:35Rich Roll?

  He was not messing around.

• 20:36Adam Skolnick?

  He was ahead as, you know, off the bike.

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah. So Christian got out of the swim at 45. Joe was 49 and then Joe just threw down an unbelievable bike leg. Going three hours and 20 minutes.

• 20:51Adam Skolnick?

  316.

• 20:52Rich Roll?

  Or is it 316?

• 20:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. 316. Sorry. Oh, yeah. The project. Sorry. I was looking at the projections. Yeah. Three. Oh, so yeah, Christian swam 48, Joe swam 53. And then Joe threw down a 316 on the bike. That's riding 112 miles in three hours and 16 minutes.

• 21:11Adam Skolnick?

  That's unbelievable.

• 21:12Rich Roll?

  It's unbelievable.

• 21:13Adam Skolnick?

  That's crazy. How is that even possible?

• 21:15Rich Roll?

  Like eight minutes faster than Christian, but Christian, you know, he knows how to stay within himself and not race anybody other than himself, stick to his plan and.

• 21:26Adam Skolnick?

  So is that a 30 mile an hour or greater than 30 mile an hour average speed?

• 21:30Rich Roll?

  I can't do math. It's fast.

• 21:32Adam Skolnick?

  Geez.

• 21:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable. But then Christian, so Christian threw down, oh, his, I'm sorry. I misspoke about his marathon. I said he ran 225, but he, he ran 230.

• 21:43Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  And Joe ran 236. I mean, these are crazy fast. So Christian went 644 and Joe went 647.

• 21:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 21:53Rich Roll?

  Unbelievable. And then on the women's side, they called that the sub eight project. Nicola Spring. And Cat Matthews both readily eclipsed the eight hour mark. Nicola went 734 and Cat went 731. These times are just so crazy fast.

• 22:12Adam Skolnick?

  Marathons on those two.

• 22:13Rich Roll?

  I know, 245 and 246, marathons.

• 22:16Adam Skolnick?

  And apparently, so when Joe went by Christian on the bike, he talked shit. This is supposedly what happened. I didn't get to see the, I saw a little bit, I read about it, but I didn't get to see or hear the, I guess, whatever that he said. And then on the run, Christian gave him a little, little something on the way.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  Did he?

• 22:37Adam Skolnick?

  When he passed him at like the 17K mark. I don't know. I couldn't find anybody that had the transcript of what they said.

• 22:43Rich Roll?

  Unbelievable. I know there was a live cast. I didn't catch it. I know you didn't catch it either. But I heard that it was really well done. And I think that's interesting because in contrast, the WTC that oversees Ironman, they always live cast the Ironman races and they're pretty notorious for being substandard. People are always complaining about them showing the wrong thing or being in the wrong place at the wrong time and all this kind of glitchy and all that kind of stuff. But apparently with this sub seven, sub eight broadcast, like they crushed it.

• 23:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  So hopefully, you know, Ironman needs to get its shit together when it comes to these live casts.

• 23:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, no doubt. I mean, it worked and people loved it and it, and it sounds like everyone was really thrilled to be a part of it. And it seemed like Christian loved being part, even though he is part of Team Norway and they do work together as a team, as a lot of triathletes do. It can be, you're out there racing alone. So it seemed like he enjoyed the, like, the big team, you know? They had like, obviously world-class marathoners pacing them. They had professional cyclists pacing them. So, you know, he might, it must've been fun to be in a, in a pack and to be able to work that way.

• 23:56Rich Roll?

  Sure. I mean, two observations before we move on. One, obviously the course was fast, but it really just goes to show you how significant drafting is.

• 24:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Rich Roll?

  You know, if you can go that much faster. I mean, basically when you're tucked in on the bike behind a group that's breaking the wind for you. There is an effortlessness to the whole thing that makes a huge difference. So not only does that count towards the incredible bike splits, but also allows them to be super fresh for the run.

• 24:25Adam Skolnick?

  Fair.

• 24:25Rich Roll?

  And the second observation being that, let's not forget, we pointed this out in the last roll on, Christian was not prioritizing this. This was just kind of like a one-off thing for fun that they weren't even really focused on.

• 24:40Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 24:41Rich Roll?

  So the fact that he goes, you know, he went as fast as he did without overthinking it too much is kind of amazing.

• 24:48Adam Skolnick?

  It's definitely amazing. I mean, I wouldn't say he was fresh as a daisy on the run. He said he had cramps at the 10K mark. And I'm thinking, I had cramps last night, in the middle of the night, as I was sleeping. So.

• 25:01Rich Roll?

  Oh, Adam.

• 25:02Adam Skolnick?

  And I almost cried, but he finished his marathon.

• 25:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, you can call Larry David about it.

• 25:09Rich Roll?

  Good for you, Krishnan. We look forward to getting you on the podcast after Kona. If that's when we're doing it.

• 25:16Adam Skolnick?

  After Kona?

• 25:17Rich Roll?

  We did it before or after?

• 25:18Adam Skolnick?

  Are we doing Kona?

• 25:19Rich Roll?

  I don't know. Probably not.

• 25:21Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, all right.

• 25:22Rich Roll?

  We'll see.

• 25:24Rich Roll?

  Maybe. I said I would look into it, and I've done nothing to look into it since we last talked about it, so.

• 25:29Adam Skolnick?

  That's what I've done.

• 25:30Rich Roll?

  I don't know. All right, well, then we're just in the same place we were last time.

• 25:34Adam Skolnick?

  Let's check back in on that.

• 25:35Rich Roll?

  More will be revealed. The other thing that caught my eye in terms of, you know, news from the world of sports and endurance.

• 25:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 25:44Rich Roll?

  Is this Terry McKeever story. So Terry McKeever is a legendary coach in swimming. She's been the head coach of the UC Berkeley women's team for many, many years. I think it's fair to say she's the most prominent, most victorious female coach in swimming history. I mean, she's about my age. She's been around forever. I don't know her personally, but I, you know, even like way back in the day, like she was around, like everybody in swimming knows her. She was suspended and has been put on administrative leave in the wake of this scandal,

• 26:23Rich Roll?

  where more than 20 current or former athletes of her have come out to report bullying and verbal abuse on her behalf. So this is a kind of, you know, set off a bit of an earthquake in the swimming world. Right. You know, basically, she's, you know, being one of swimming's leading coaches and the architect of one of college sports premier programs. I mean, she's produced Olympians and NCAA champions and all kinds of standouts, both in the pool and in the classroom for decades. She's the first and only woman head coach of the US Olympic team. She led a squad that included six future, current, or former Cal swimmers who earned a combined

• 27:04Rich Roll?

  13 medals at the 2012 Games in London. She's won four NCAA team titles. She's produced 26 Olympians who have combined for 36 Olympic medals in 29 seasons in Berkeley. So you can't argue with her track record, and yet this story breaks. And not for nothing, it was broke by the Orange County Register, which is kind of an interesting outlet to kind of break a big story. They have a paywall. I know, have a paywall. But in any event, like, what's interesting is the Orange County Register, it's like a little local paper. Yeah. But they consistently break big stories in the swimming world for some reason. So whoever is on the swimming beat here is like on top of their game. Yeah, no doubt.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  In any event, in this expose, we learn that at least six Cal women swimmers since 2018 have made plans to kill themselves or are obsessed about suicide due to McKeever's bullying. 24 current and former Cal swimmers, eight parents, a former member of the Golden Bears men's team, and two former Cal athletic department employees have told the kind of safety and sport organization that McKeever was a bully who, for decades, has allegedly, verbally and emotionally abused, swore at, and threatened swimmers on an almost daily basis, pressuring them to compete or train while injured or dealing with chronic illnesses or eating disorders. It just goes on and on and on. It's like, it does not paint a

• 28:30Rich Roll?

  very good picture. And... No.

• 28:35Adam Skolnick?

  Sounds like the Bobby Knight of the swim game.

• 28:39Rich Roll?

  So the broader kind of conversation around this is around this philosophy of coaching, that Bobby Knight school of coaching, that win at all costs kind of philosophy.

• 28:49Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 28:50Rich Roll?

  We're kind of seeing the end of that for good reason. Like, there was a period of time, I mean, back when I swam, my coach exhibited a lot of these, some similar tendencies.

• 29:00Adam Skolnick?

  Who was your coach?

• 29:01Rich Roll?

  Skip Kenny at Stanford.

• 29:03Adam Skolnick?

  Right, yeah.

• 29:03Rich Roll?

  You know.

• 29:04Adam Skolnick?

  I thought he got deposed on a similar situation.

• 29:08Rich Roll?

  Well, ultimately, his downfall was the result of, he had a personal grudge against one particular swimmer named Jason Plummer, who recently passed away this past year. I think we talked about it on Roll On. And he hated Jason so much that he doctored the record board, like the all-time performance list, and removed Jason's name from the record boards, even though Jason had swum times that would have allowed him to be on those lists. Jason called him out on it, there was a big scandal, and ultimately, Skip had to step down.

• 29:40Adam Skolnick?

  So he cooked the books, that's it?

• 29:43Rich Roll?

  He cooked the books, but then there was, there's a lot of other stuff, and we don't need to get into it now, but the point being that, you know, he was pretty hardcore, and this was the 80s, and that was a time where you could get away with that stuff, and maybe even get praised for it, like, it was sort of a mark of pride.

• 30:00Adam Skolnick?

  Bobby Knight was revered by these basketball journalists.

• 30:02Rich Roll?

  So culturally, we've moved forward, and thankfully, this is no longer acceptable. I had no idea, I mean, I'd heard stories that Terry was a hard-charging coach, but I had no idea the extent to which, you know, this was going on, so.

• 30:18Adam Skolnick?

  I read one of these stories that you had up there, the more recent one, apparently, like... Because the athletic director is saying all the right things now, but apparently was sitting on this information for ages.

• 30:30Rich Roll?

  Well, apparently it's been going on forever, right?

• 30:32Adam Skolnick?

  And he's been fielding these same complaints that the OC registered journalist has now documented. This is like prize winning stuff because he's shaking the core of this incredible swim program. But apparently like they were contacted then by someone who was supposed to be like an assistant coach there that maybe they thought was taking over and the swimmers came to what they thought was a meeting and she was there.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 30:58Adam Skolnick?

  And she's like, and basically said, are you guys ready to swim? And they all bailed.

• 31:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:03Adam Skolnick?

  And then, you know, like he had to chase them out or she had to, I don't, Jesse so and so, I don't know if it's a male or a female. But so like even as this was ongoing, Terry was still there basically trying to hold court.

• 31:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:17Adam Skolnick?

  And then finally that's what was the last straw and they made the announcement. So, you know, Berkeley trying to cover their ass, like saying they care about the swimmers. It's like, you know, a person like Terry McKeever, they, it's not just journalists that revere her or whoever, it's the ADs that revere her. Like she's produced so much for the school.

• 31:38Rich Roll?

  Right, we can't shake this up. Like look at the track record.

• 31:41Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And then that's how these people continue generation after, you know, year after year. I mean, she's been up there for a whole generation, basically, right?

• 31:51Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I think she's, she's 56 or something like that. And has been, you know, been in coaching, you know, shortly after she graduated college, if memory serves me.

• 32:04Adam Skolnick?

  So there you go.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  And it's just interesting, you know, this, this philosophy of being so intense to drive performances. I mean, your, her track record demonstrates that on some level, I guess you can make the argument that it was effective, but it's a short-term solution.

• 32:20Adam Skolnick?

  That's what she would make the argument. But in college, you only need short-term. In Olympics, you only need short-term. You only have the same roster once.

• 32:27Rich Roll?

  I just never responded to that.

• 32:29Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 32:29Rich Roll?

  I just don't think, like now with everything that we know, it's unacceptable. Like you want to bring out the best in your athletes, like empower them, give them agency, make that coach athlete relationship a collaboration where there's open communication and a sense of empowerment. But this idea like you're a piece of shit, like these girls were all reporting like they were so driven for her approval that it drove them to the edge of like mental health insanity.

• 32:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 32:59Rich Roll?

  So, anyway.

• 33:01Adam Skolnick?

  Well, another one down.

• 33:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, right? Like, how many coaches are still out there who are behaving badly like this? Probably a lot.

• 33:09Adam Skolnick?

  I would guess a lot. Guess a lot.

• 33:13Rich Roll?

  Anyway, uh, let's move on. This is also a Robbie Ballinger Stan account podcast.

• 33:19Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, Robbie Ballinger.

• 33:20Rich Roll?

  And we've all talked at length about his Colorado crush where he went out and spent a whole summer doing all this crazy stuff. He ran up all the 14ers in Colorado. He ran the Leadville and the Colorado Trail and all that kind of stuff. In any event, they have made a documentary about this that was directed by friend and friend of the podcast, Reese Robinson. Reese used to work with us and take pictures and make videos with us.

• 33:47Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 33:47Rich Roll?

  And Reese, you know, followed Robbie around for the better part of that experience and they've created something special. It's going to debut on, on June 8th on Robbie's new endurance platform on YouTube, which is called, what is it called?

• 34:01Adam Skolnick?

  The Audacious Report. I think it's Robbie and Reese together are behind that one.

• 34:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. And, oh, they, they launched that channel together, The Audacious Report.

• 34:09Adam Skolnick?

  It's not just a channel, it's a platform. So they have a website and the website is going to be a place to go to, to, you know, check out films, podcasts and articles featuring endurance athletes.

• 34:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's cool. I didn't know that. Where did you read about that?

• 34:24Adam Skolnick?

  Robbie told me about it.

• 34:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, he did? That's very cool. So, go to the Audacious Report YouTube channel. You can watch the, the trailer for the Colorado crush. It's already up. If you're watching this on YouTube, you can see it here. And then June 8th, which actually that's the

• 34:38Adam Skolnick?

  Good day before.

• 34:39Rich Roll?

  So it'll be up by the time this podcast goes up, which is cool.

• 34:42Adam Skolnick?

  And you'll find it on that YouTube channel. And, and, uh, yeah, the idea is to, is also for athletes to consider the foundation report a place to announce big adventures and goals and things like that.

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  Right on.

• 34:54Adam Skolnick?

  So cool. Congrats, guys.

• 34:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, awesome.

• 34:57Adam Skolnick?

  And the film is great. I saw it.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, you did?

• 34:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I got a sneak peek and it's, uh, it's fabulous. The cinematography is wonderful. It's really intimate. You really feel like you're part of the crew, watching Robbie do this stuff. And, and then also seeing the, uh, how spectacular the scenery is and where he's doing it. It's really cool. It's got that big feel, but also the intimate, uh, kind of fly on the wall feel as well. So congrats, guys.

• 35:23Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Well, I look forward to talking about it.

• 35:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 35:26Rich Roll?

  Uh, before we take a quick break, you wanna talk about our, our next favorite person? The other person, the other person we stand for?

• 35:32Adam Skolnick?

  Bo Burnham, the, the funniest man alive today.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  So good.

• 35:36Adam Skolnick?

  He is the funniest man alive, right?

• 35:38Rich Roll?

  He's pretty damn funny.

• 35:40Adam Skolnick?

  I think he's the funniest guy alive today.

• 35:41Rich Roll?

  Geniously talented, creative person. Um, he released, uh, outtakes from his special that we talked about at length on the podcast.

• 35:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 35:50Rich Roll?

  Inside, where he just strings together on YouTube for free, uh, all this stuff that didn't make it into the final cut. And it's an epic watch.

• 35:59Adam Skolnick?

  It's amazing.

• 35:59Rich Roll?

  Highly suggest to everybody.

• 36:01Adam Skolnick?

  I, I, I think I have 10 minutes to go. I've been just, this has been nibbling on it. It's got outtakes of stuff that you'll recognize. It's got completely new numbers that he never put into the podcast, including, I mean, into the film, including a podcast.

• 36:16Rich Roll?

  Right. That's the one that's, that seems to be resonating on social media and getting shared the most. So it's, it's pretty transparent who he's poking fun at in that. Uh, and I'll just leave it at that. You guys can check it out, but it's pretty incisive.

• 36:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And, and, and there's some more, uh, Jeff Bezos trolling, which I'm always here for.

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  I know. There's a couple of things in there, but he just can't get off the Bezos obsession.

• 36:40Adam Skolnick?

  I, I think like now he would do an Elon. So like if he was making the next one, don't you think Elon would be someone that he'd go after?

• 36:49Rich Roll?

  I love the fact that he's such a prolific creator and really a product of social media and YouTube.

• 36:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 36:56Rich Roll?

  But he's mature enough now to really not participate in the social media ecosystem. Other than to tweet like once every eight months that he has some new thing out to share with everybody.

• 37:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Rich Roll?

  And everyone goes wild.

• 37:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 37:10Rich Roll?

  You know, good for him.

• 37:11Adam Skolnick?

  He's a, I feel like somehow this was more depressing though than the actual film.

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm. I still, I've only watched a couple of clips, so I haven't had time to sit through and go through the whole thing.

• 37:22Adam Skolnick?

  Pretty fun.

• 37:22Rich Roll?

  Um, but Bo, if you're listening, I'm going to remove Adam from his seat and place you there. If you're ever so inclined.

• 37:30Adam Skolnick?

  Oh.

• 37:31Rich Roll?

  It would be an incredible podcast, not, not on the role.

• 37:34Adam Skolnick?

  So I can't be here.

• 37:35Rich Roll?

  I can't, I can't. You could be here, you just can't sit, you can't sit in that, you can't sit in that chair. He would sit in that chair, Adam. Um, all right, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with our main topic.

• 37:54Rich Roll?

  Should we talk about guns, Adam?

• 37:56Adam Skolnick?

  I think we have to.

• 37:58Rich Roll?

  We do have to.

• 37:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  How do we do this though? It's so difficult to figure out how to approach this subject matter. It's so devastating and unwieldy. And uncomfortable, you know? I think we can all agree that what we've borne witness to just over the last couple of weeks is heartbreaking to say the least. And I've struggled with how to think about this, how to approach it. I do feel compelled, I feel a responsibility to discuss it, even though it's not fun on the podcast.

• 38:35Rich Roll?

  But how do we structure this? You have a thought?

• 38:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, I think if we frame it like this is, this is the deal. So we're 23 years since the Columbine massacre, which was shook everybody up. That was in a high school outside of Denver. A decade since Sandy Hook, which I thought at the time would have been the event that spurred action because there's nothing you could, you couldn't imagine a worse thing than, what was it? Kindergarteners being targeted by a madman with an AR-15. And then we're only 10 days since Buffalo, since that racist massacre in a, in a supermarket where 10 died. And then, you know, we had just talked about the murder in Austin of an athlete.

• 39:23Rich Roll?

  Right. Mo Wilson.

• 39:24Adam Skolnick?

  Mo Wilson.

• 39:25Rich Roll?

  We recorded that.

• 39:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  Literally the day before Uvalde.

• 39:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Rich Roll?

  And you had pointed out this issue around guns, which was sort of prophetic. And then I had to kind of append the blog post and the social media posts around that episode to remind people that we had recorded it in advance of Uvalde. And that's why, you know, it was not discussed.

• 39:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but I mean, I guess the real question I think people want to know from you is kind of how did this land for you? Where were you? How did you like, what, what were your feelings when you heard this was going on? And like, what were you doing? Were you paying close attention to it? Were you trying to avoid it because it's so heavy? Like, what, what were you doing?

• 40:04Rich Roll?

  I mean, in between, you know, I wasn't glued to the 24 hour news cycle. But of course I was, you know, paying attention to what was going on. I mean, it's devastating. You know, as a parent of, you know, such a young person, when you become a parent, it becomes all that more heightened. I mean, it's unbelievable in elementary school. Like, how could this possibly happen? And when you think about the 23 years since Columbine and the decades since Sandy Hook, and then you consider the fact that in The short period of time between Uvalde and today, there's actually been 23 more mass shootings in the United States. Like, look at this article. Like, it's unbelievable.

• 40:47Rich Roll?

  I don't know how they're defining mass shootings. I guess that's-

• 40:50Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's three or more.

• 40:51Rich Roll?

  Three or more.

• 40:52Adam Skolnick?

  Three or more.

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  So, obviously, these aren't all school shootings, but-

• 40:54Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 40:55Rich Roll?

  It's really devastating. And it's so strange that no matter what happens, we can't seem to move forward in any kind of meaningful way to address this problem. So, I want to talk about that, of course. I don't know that I can offer anything that hasn't already been said, particularly with respect to, like, the emotional experience of what we've all collectively experienced.

• 41:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, because it unfolded, it was like, I mean, I was busy day after day during this whole thing. And at some point, I plugged into it, right around the time when we started to realize that the police line on this thing was some bullshit, and that there were complications, to say the least, in how they addressed this problem, and how there was somebody alive.

• 41:42Rich Roll?

  That's a whole other thing that went down.

• 41:45Adam Skolnick?

  Right. But, like, yeah. And so, then, when that was going on, is when I kind of plugged into it. And it was just, you know, when you have Parkland and Columbine, then you have Sandy Hook and Uvalde, you just-

• 41:58Rich Roll?

  It's hard not to be super angry about the whole thing. I mean, it's so outrageous.

• 42:02Adam Skolnick?

  You're angry, you're despairing, you're like, you know, in my house, we are friends with a lot of families with young kids, obviously, and, and the moms are just like, you know, looking for other places to live, you know, like, that don't have this problem. Let me give you some statistics I found to show you why people are kind of leaning in that direction. Gun deaths so far in 2022, just so far, the first six months, not even full six months, five months and change, 18,697 gun deaths. Of those, 8,335 are murders, 10,362 are suicides.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  Hold on, let me just interrupt you. These statistics are coming from this site called gunviolencearchive.org.

• 42:45Rich Roll?

  And in the time between you jotted those stats down in this outline.

• 42:51Adam Skolnick?

  On Sunday.

• 42:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, then, you know, earlier today, that gun death total was at 18,700 and I just refreshed it just now and it went up to 18,713.

• 43:05Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 43:05Rich Roll?

  Like it just, it notches up minute by minute.

• 43:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and they have, you know, they have 7,500 sources, they're getting law enforcement reports, they're getting government sources and media sources, that's how they're, it's kind of like, I guess, farming the internet to come up with this database. And 284 murder suicides, that's a plus four since Sunday. 246 mass shootings in 2022 already. 12 mass murders, 153 children under 11 were killed, 320 are injured. I know this is hard to hear, I'm not trying to make it worse, but I think it's important for us to understand this as a baseline for the rest of this conversation.

• 43:47Adam Skolnick?

  554 teens killed, 1,451 injured, 25 police officers killed, 162 injured or killed, 485 gun events used in a defensive situation. So that's 485 in a defensive situation. 634 unintentional shootings and 512 school shootings in the United States in primary and sec- or secondary school since 2014.

• 44:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so amongst all of those statistics, the ones that jump out to me as most egregious and heart-wrenching are 153 children under 11 killed and 512 school shootings in the US since 2014. This is not a problem that other countries have.

• 44:35Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 44:36Rich Roll?

  This is completely unique to the United States.

• 44:39Adam Skolnick?

  It's not even close. I mean, listen, you have, you have, um, the best examples are in, in the nineties. There was a mass shooting at a, at a workplace, I believe, in Australia. And immediately.

• 44:50Rich Roll?

  They changed all the guns.

• 44:51Adam Skolnick?

  And people voluntarily gave up their guns. New Zealand, after the Christchurch massacres at the mosques overnight.

• 44:58Rich Roll?

  Took care of it.

• 44:59Adam Skolnick?

  They took care of business. There's something going on here and you can point to the constitution if you want. That's what a lot of people are going to go to, but there's something going on here. It's, to me, it's a little bit deeper than that. Obviously that's part of it, but we are not willing to change in the face of these kinds of outcomes. Not only are we not willing to change completely on a dime, like some of those other countries have, but we're also not willing to even do incremental changes. And it's not that we're not willing. It's that somehow the political apparatus isn't set up to be able to get that done. So, cause the majority of people are willing for, to do that.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And we're going to get into that.

• 45:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Rich Roll?

  But really all, well, we're, we're offering, listen, Adam, we're offering up lots of prayers and lots of thoughts. That's not nothing, right?

• 45:44Adam Skolnick?

  Right, right.

• 45:45Rich Roll?

  You know, look, I will preface my take on this by saying that I'm not against gun ownership. Uh, there's lots of people that responsibly own guns. That's fine. Most gun owners are responsible. I'm not a gun person, but I have friends that are. And, you know, I think that the statistics bear out that most gun owners support rational and reasonable gun control. And we'll get into those statistics and I support that as well. And I, you know, I just think that there is zero reason why it shouldn't be incredibly difficult to purchase a gun.

• 46:25Rich Roll?

  The bar to accessing a weapon, particularly a semi-automatic or an automatic weapon, should be incredibly difficult. Every other thing in the United States that is dangerous or poses a safety threat to others is heavily regulated. And we accept that, except when it comes to guns. And we'll get into the reasons, the culture, how it roots into the second amendment and all this sort of stuff. But as you pointed out, other countries with responsible gun control just do not have this issue. So, yeah, I'm fed up. I'm despondent. I'm sick of the thoughts and the prayers.

• 47:06Rich Roll?

  But I also feel this sense of despair or powerlessness that anything will ever get done here, given our social and political climate.

• 47:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with you on everything you just said. It's difficult to believe it's going to happen. I will say, for the first time, I feel like even just some fear about like, it could happen. I mean, listen, there was a situation at Zuma Beach, I don't know if you ever heard about this, but there was someone that was arrested here, that deputies got to him, and he had several loaded automatic weapons in his van, or in like, he had a trench coat on in the middle of a summer day, and it was right where we swim a lot, like, just like at Zuma, right where westward.

• 47:51Rich Roll?

  How long ago? When was this?

• 47:52Adam Skolnick?

  It was like, a year or two ago, and someone saw him and reported him, saw someone acting squirrely and reported him, and the cops got to him. But like, he could have just gone down the beach. I mean, like, it could happen anywhere. It's still, I'm not, I don't want to overstate the problem, it is still, the odds are obviously miniscule that it will happen to you, but it could happen to you anytime, anywhere you live. And for the first time, that fear is kind of dripping in, probably because I have a young kid, probably because my wife is Australian, and she thinks it's kind of batshit crazy that nothing gets done when you have this kind of a problem. Like, what does it take? How many more children is it gonna take?

• 48:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:30Adam Skolnick?

  And so I think that, I mean, I also think like, when it comes to weapons like AR-15s, you know, to me, it's like, I always think of the joke of like, there should be no president who wants to be president, like, we should only have reluctant presidents, like, people who want to be president should immediately be disqualified from the job.

• 48:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:50Adam Skolnick?

  Just on basis of they want it too much.

• 48:52Rich Roll?

  If you want it too much, you're immediately disqualified.

• 48:54Adam Skolnick?

  Right, if you apply to own an AR-15, you should immediately be turned down, just because you want it.

• 49:01Rich Roll?

  Only those that do not want AR-15s get AR-15s.

• 49:04Adam Skolnick?

  That's in my fantasy land, so, but yeah, for the most part, I'm with you on all of this, so, you know, but how do we, you want to feel hopeful? It's hard to feel hopeful in this moment, like, it was a very tough week, to be thinking about everything that went down, the way it went down, the fact that this guy waited till he was 18, and then bought it, even though he had-

• 49:28Rich Roll?

  No problemo.

• 49:29Adam Skolnick?

  Even though he had social media posts out there.

• 49:31Rich Roll?

  Did he buy them online? I can't remember.

• 49:34Adam Skolnick?

  No, I think he went to a gun shop.

• 49:36Rich Roll?

  A shop or a show?

• 49:38Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know, but I think he bought him in person. He waited till he was 18. He had social media posts that were alarming out there. Nobody reported him. The guy at Sandy Hook was given a gun by his mom. So like, listen, age limits will only help so much because the mom gave him the gun in the Sandy Hook situation. So we're not trying to say any solutions are perfect solutions, but it would be nice to try something.

• 50:07Rich Roll?

  Right, try something. Like, let's get into the solution rather than throw up our hands and say, well, we can't solve this problem. There's nothing that can be done. We're just going to have to learn to live with mass shootings. Like, it's insanity.

• 50:18Adam Skolnick?

  It is insanity.

• 50:19Rich Roll?

  Because for every proposed solution that you offer, there's a rebuttal as to why it won't work. Trevor Noah did a pretty interesting monologue on this the other day, and I'll link that up in the show notes. But he basically goes on this rant where, you know, kind of taking on that argument of why all these things won't work. And just basically saying, we have to do something. Like, okay, it's not perfect. And maybe it won't work as well as we hope it might, but we have to be in the process of trying these things and iterating it. Because that's how you make progress. But to sit on your hands and just say, well, I guess there's nothing we can do, is complete insanity.

• 50:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right, it's insanity. I mean, right when it happened, I did tweet out that this is not a mental health issue. It's an access to deadly weapons issue. I do believe that. I don't think it is a mental health issue. I've looked at the statistics. Anyone who says that it is, is kidding themselves. That's not to say people who do these things are not mentally ill. It's to say that there's other countries with mentally ill people where it doesn't happen. And the reason is, is they can't get the weapon. So it's the same thing we talked about with Mo's killer. If she was just upset and distraught and like having a breakdown, but couldn't fire a weapon. You know, there'd be three lives that would be radically different right now.

• 51:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, sure.

• 51:38Adam Skolnick?

  Not to mention all the family members.

• 51:38Rich Roll?

  That doesn't mean there isn't a mental health problem. Clearly, there's a mental health problem and anybody who goes into an elementary school and shoots it up is mentally unhinged.

• 51:46Adam Skolnick?

  Of course, but the fact that we have mental health issues in this country is not the reason it happened.

• 51:51Rich Roll?

  No, it's the free unfettered access to guns.

• 51:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 51:54Rich Roll?

  That allows the mentally unstable person to perpetrate the harm.

• 51:58Adam Skolnick?

  That's it.

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  And that's what needs to be addressed.

• 51:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 52:00Rich Roll?

  So, why don't we go through all of these things?

• 52:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 52:02Rich Roll?

  And just as a caveat before getting into that, on the subject of AR-15s and mass shootings and school shootings, in order to be kind of intellectually rigorous about this, I do think it's important to point out that, of course, the mass shootings and particularly the school shootings are going to capture the headlines because it is so devastating. But when you go to this gun violence website and you look at the statistics, you realize that those are, you know, but a very small portion of the total incidence of gun violence, injuries, and deaths every year. Like, you can even go to all these charts and maps.

• 52:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, more than half are suicide.

• 52:40Rich Roll?

  And so, you know, the AR-15 is like the low-hanging fruit.

• 52:43Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 52:43Rich Roll?

  Because that's the gun of choice for these sorts of incidents. But most of these gun violence incidents are by dint of, you know, a handgun, generally, you know, and often a semi-automatic handgun. We'll get to some reporting around this, but David Frum has been pretty good on this subject matter as a traditional conservative voice writing in The Atlantic about this topic. And he has some pretty insightful things to say about how we think about the school shootings versus the bigger problem that goes less addressed because it's so persistent and endemic to our culture, which is just gun violence and, you know, private gun owners in their home and how, when you have a gun in the home, even for self-defense reasons,

• 53:28Rich Roll?

  it becomes a catalyst for a lot of this harm.

• 53:31Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 53:31Rich Roll?

  That we're seeing. But in any case, you know, to kind of go through these opposition points. You said the first one, which is this is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.

• 53:42Adam Skolnick?

  Which is like the first thing all the Republican leaders.

• 53:45Rich Roll?

  I think it's both, you know, it annoys me that we have to pick one or the other. Of course, it's both like, can we not talk about this in a nuanced way? We have a gun issue and we have a mental health issue. There are mental health concerns. Like I said, nobody shoots up a school if they're not mentally unhinged. And we also can't extricate these individuals and the harm that they're perpetrating from the impact that social media is having on radicalizing these individuals. There's a New York Times article about this.

• 54:15Adam Skolnick?

  That certainly happened.

• 54:15Rich Roll?

  That you shared with me.

• 54:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that certainly happened in Buffalo.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  About the Buffalo guy and they kind of go through his entire social media diet and they can pinpoint like where he, you know, gets activated and how he becomes more inclined to violence by tracing the videos he was watching, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, that's the larger issue also that comes into play. And I guess my point being that this is not a, something that we can look at in a binary context. Like all these complicated things are coming into play, not the least of which is gun culture. Right?

• 54:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 54:49Rich Roll?

  When you're seeing on social media, these families where they're all holding their AR-15s and things like that, like what is the message that we're sending? And how is that being interpreted by young people? So, in my opinion, we do need better mental health programs. But the truth of the matter is for all the decrying about how this is a mental health issue and not a guns issue, you know, the Republicans or the right have really done very little on either front. It's, you know, it's sort of a talking point to say it's a mental health issue, but it's not like they're hard at work in addressing that.

• 55:22Adam Skolnick?

  No, the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, in April slashed over $200 million from the Texas Department budget that oversees mental health services. And as soon as it all day happened, he said it was a mental health issue. Mental health has never been an issue that Republicans have championed in any, in any budgetary kind of way. It's always been kind of a scapegoated thing. And so this is what's happening. So, but when you say it's a mental health issue, not a guns issue, and then you do neither, you know, why are you in power? That's the one thing I want to, like when there's something like this happens, right? You're in power. You wanted power. You're there. How can you possibly want to be a power player and have see something like this happen and do fucking nothing?

• 56:07Rich Roll?

  Because you're inferring that the reason they're in power is to represent the people's best interest, when in truth, power is there to basically extend power, right? And in order to extend power, you have to play to your base and you have to appease the people who are funding your campaigns.

• 56:33Adam Skolnick?

  So you get to power and your service is power itself. It's not the children that you are supposed to care for?

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  It's just insanity. I mean, that leads to the next opposition point, which is my favorite. We need to arm the schools with militias and we need to, you know, restrict ingress with having just one door, you know, in and out of these schools.

• 56:53Adam Skolnick?

  How would fire departments feel about that?

• 56:55Rich Roll?

  Let's create a fire hazard out of it. I mean, this idea, you know, and sort of Ted Cruz is the face of this one. Like, let's just make sure that there are armed militias outside of every school and there should just be one door. Like, does he actually believe this?

• 57:12Adam Skolnick?

  You know?

• 57:12Rich Roll?

  Because to me, I'm like, you're either stupid or you're a liar, because this is just more insanity. Let's not look at the real issue here, which is how a young person has such unfettered access to a powerful weapon that can destroy so many people. Instead, let's skirt around that and come up with this other absurd rationale for addressing this situation so we can sidestep gun control altogether.

• 57:41Adam Skolnick?

  I don't think he's stupid, but didn't he?

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  He can't believe in his heart of hearts that this is a real, that that is a viable solution.

• 57:49Adam Skolnick?

  I have no idea. Didn't he go to the NRA? Didn't he? Isn't he one of the few people that turned up there and spoke at the NRA convention?

• 57:55Rich Roll?

  At the NRA conference?

• 57:56Adam Skolnick?

  I believe he was.

• 57:57Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I think he did. Well, one thing I know for sure is that when the Uvalde funerals began, he was playing poker and he shared a video of himself playing poker.

• 58:09Rich Roll?

  Which it's a very, to give him the most charitable interpretation of that is in unbelievably poor taste. So I don't understand the mentality of somebody who thinks that that would be a good idea to share that video of him playing poker on social media in the midst of this crisis and to literally look at camera and talk about patrolling schools with militia, basically saying that the solution to this gun problem is more guns, which is all the more absurd by virtue of the fact that the police completely bungled their ability to manage the Uvalde

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  situation and allowed this kid to go into the school and sat on their hands and did nothing and even prevented parents from jumping into action. Now, when you have a kid who's wearing a bulletproof vest and he's completely armed to the gills and he's got all of these jacket, you know, like the ammunition.

• 59:07Adam Skolnick?

  Grenades? Oh, the, yeah, the cartridges.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  The cartridges, exactly.

• 59:13Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 59:14Rich Roll?

  And this automatic rifle, and then you have cops who are, they're not on an equal footing with that and they're afraid of their lives, so.

• 59:19Adam Skolnick?

  But you're supposed to put your life on the line for children if you're a cop. I mean, you're supposed to.

• 59:24Rich Roll?

  But basically, it's exposing the fruitlessness of that option.

• 59:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right. I mean, you know, it didn't work. I have family members that have guns. I have no problem with people who are gun owners responsibly. I will say, it takes a special kind of asshole to go to an NRA conference days after the Uvalde massacre. That's my feeling about it. Like, if you go there, whether you're a spectator, a purchaser, you have a gun show, you're speaking there, that says a lot about your priorities, man.

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  What's interesting about the NRA and the power that it wields as a lobbying organization is that it's completely out of step with its membership, because if you look at the polling and the statistics, you realize that people overwhelmingly support rational gun control. Like, you pulled together some polling on this.

• 1:00:15Adam Skolnick?

  I did. You want to go through it?

• 1:00:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, maybe let's just go through that right now.

• 1:00:18Adam Skolnick?

  Okay. So the majority of Americans support the right to own a gun. That's just the facts. Forty percent of households have at least one firearm. A lot of this is from this Pew Research study that came out in September 2021. So they did a lot of polling on it, on this issue and from a variety of vantage points, and came up with this. So the majority of Americans do support gun ownership. Forty percent of households have at least one firearm. But three quarters of Americans believe gun violence is a big or moderately big problem. And 53% favor stricter gun laws. That's as of April 2021. We know that the number has risen since Uvalde. There's been some polling since then that has shown that that number has gone up,

• 1:01:02Adam Skolnick?

  possibly approaching 60%. That might seem low, but remember, there's an urban-rural divide going on here, and people in rural areas will have more guns and will favor having them a lot more than the urban resident. There is, let's see, 87% of Americans, that includes 85% of GOP voters, want legislation that prevents mentally ill people from buying guns.

• 1:01:26Rich Roll?

  Eighty-five percent.

• 1:01:27Adam Skolnick?

  Eighty-seven and eighty-five of the GOP.

• 1:01:29Rich Roll?

  Okay, right, 85% of GOP voters. Like, that's a really powerful statistic.

• 1:01:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, and 81% favor strict background checks. That's an overall 81. 64% want to ban high-capacity magazines. That's over 10 rounds. That's what you were talking about.

• 1:01:44Rich Roll?

  Right, magazine, that was the word I was searching for.

• 1:01:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yep, and 63% want an outright assault weapons ban like we had for, what, 20 years or so? That just expired not too long ago. The most alarming statistics I could find, though, is this recent CBS News poll. I think it was, it came out today, maybe the last couple of days. Forty-four percent of Republicans now say that mass shootings are something we have to accept.

• 1:02:09Rich Roll?

  It's so strange to hear that, in contrast to this polling, that 85% of GOP voters...

• 1:02:17Rich Roll?

  Want to prevent mentally ill people from buying guns?

• 1:02:21Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:02:21Rich Roll?

  Like, how did those two things square with each other?

• 1:02:24Adam Skolnick?

  I think it just squared, there's a percentage of that that want it to change, but don't think it will. So therefore, they are kind of more like, it's not going to change. Therefore, we need to accept it as it is. And there is some reporting, like, if you look at the more conservative judicial branch, it's gotten more conservative, it's gotten, it's hewn more towards constitutional conservatism, which means Second Amendment, kind of taking it literally to a point where it really never was intended. Remember when the Second Amendment was written, people were shooting guns with muskets? And it was like, one little ball?

• 1:02:54Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:54Adam Skolnick?

  And it took like, a couple of minutes to load that thing. And now, it's a different story.

• 1:02:59Rich Roll?

  Of course, which is why it's problematic to be a strict constructionist, or to try to intuit, you know, the hearts and minds and the manner in which the founders, you know, meant these words to be put into use.

• 1:03:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, why don't you get into the Second Amendment? I know you had some stuff on the Second Amendment.

• 1:03:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think, you know, as we kind of go through all of the, you know, opposition points, it's like, well, we have a Second Amendment right to bear arms. You know, the Second Amendment specifically, to quote it, says, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." And when you kind of parse that and try to understand what it's saying, you can't help but think, well, what does "well-regulated" mean? What does "militia" mean? And all of these words and phrases, over the years, have been interpreted by the judiciary, to the point where we've broadened how we define those things,

• 1:04:02Rich Roll?

  to the extent that we allow people to bear arms in the way that they do today. There was a case, a Supreme Court case, I think it was 13 years ago? I'm not sure, District of Columbia versus Heller, where the court, for the first time, recognized people's constitutional right to own firearms as individuals, not just as members of a well-regulated militia. Because prior to that, you could say, well, are you a well-regulated militia when you walk into an elementary school and gun everyone down? Well, Heller allows individuals to fall within that definition.

• 1:04:40Adam Skolnick?

  Which just doesn't make sense.

• 1:04:41Rich Roll?

  Right, but when you think about what the Second Amendment really means and how it was intended... Basically, James Madison was thinking of it as a way for states to repel the danger of the federal government, right?

• 1:04:54Adam Skolnick?

  Right. At the time, state militias were basically people that lived at home and they got the call and they came out with their guns.

• 1:05:01Rich Roll?

  The union being formed out of this tension between states' rights and federal rights, right? And at a time where states really wanted to be kind of independent nation-states within the republic. We think about our country as a democracy, but it's really a democratic republic. What are the states' rights vis-à-vis the federal government? And what should happen if the federal government extends the boundaries in the exercise of its power? We need to reserve the right for people to rise up against that power, which makes sense, but nobody, like to your point of muskets, nobody could have imagined guns progressing to the point that they are today. And I don't think any founding father, if they had been, you know, given a looking glass

• 1:05:44Rich Roll?

  to see what's occurring today, would interpret what they meant by the Second Amendment to allow what is unfolding before our very eyes in real time, day in and day out.

• 1:05:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And so that one case, basically, is what expanded the aperture from well-regulated militia to individuals.

• 1:06:06Rich Roll?

  Right. So it allowed people to bear arms in their homes.

• 1:06:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:06:10Rich Roll?

  But it was not unlimited in scope. It did not permit the right to keep and carry any weapon in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. So there were sort of, you know, restrictions on that. And what I mean by that is it is totally constitutional to impose conditions and qualifications on the sale of arms, like universal background checks. Nine out of 10 support this. We went through the polls. What's interesting is, is that half of the people who were polled already believe that universal background checks are a thing, meaning federally mandated background checks. They don't realize that actually many states don't require this.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  And one out of four guns are sold without a background check.

• 1:06:56Adam Skolnick?

  And background checks are criminal background checks. They're not like the kid in Uvalde didn't have a criminal record, so he would have gotten cleared anyway.

• 1:07:07Adam Skolnick?

  Some people are saying, you have to be 25 to rent a car without special dispensation. Maybe we should do something 21, you have to be 21 to buy a six pack of beer. Maybe you should have to be 21 to purchase a gun. But there's a columnist of the New York Times, Ross Duttot, I don't forget how to.

• 1:07:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:07:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Rich Roll?

  I have that in piece here.

• 1:07:28Adam Skolnick?

  He is saying, look, instead of doing that, why don't you make it really hard for troubled young men to get these guns? And one way of doing that isn't an outright ban or an age limit. But if you are a young man and you want this gun, well, then you have to go through a lot more hoops than a 50 year old.

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:07:48Adam Skolnick?

  You know, so and the hoops would include.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  Reasonable.

• 1:07:52Adam Skolnick?

  Like a social media audit, two letters from people who can vouch for you in writing, that you're not, you know, a strict background check, some counseling perhaps, something real, something like, how about if you just required a class to be able to be licensed and then to buy a weapon? If you just had to take a class like driver's ed.

• 1:08:15Rich Roll?

  Driver's ed, yeah.

• 1:08:16Adam Skolnick?

  And you had an instructor in front of you, you would weed out a lot of these people. If you just had to take a class, like just that.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  But there's nothing we can do, Adam.

• 1:08:24Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:08:25Rich Roll?

  We can't do anything about this problem.

• 1:08:27Adam Skolnick?

  I can't wait to talk to Senator Booker about this because I know there's a group of senators, a bipartisan group, trying to hash out something to get something moving. We'll see if that prevails or not in the next weeks, but.

• 1:08:38Rich Roll?

  It's so frustrating and infuriating that we can't get off the dime on this. I was listening to Scott Galloway the other day. It's sort of like, okay, we understand where the right sits on this. We understand the left's perspective on this as well. Why can't we move the needle at all? And he called it a war between the wrong and the ineffectual, right?

• 1:09:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Rich Roll?

  The left not being able to basically accomplish anything and the other side being wrong headed in how they're thinking about this problem and their reluctance or failure to address it at all.

• 1:09:14Adam Skolnick?

  You know, I was looking, I was thinking about it, like, why are guns so uniquely American? And you think, from a storytelling perspective, where I always default to, we're a country born of revolution and bondage, where guns played the key role of liberator and oppressor. We had the Wild West expansion, the manhood that came along with the guns, the high plains drifter, the John Wayne shit that happened in real life in 19th century, and then, obviously, on the big screens. Then you had, in the 80s, kind of this hip-hop culture where guns became a way of life in the inner cities, and kind of manhood as well as dominance. But, other countries love westerns and hip-hop, and they don't have our problems. So then you come back around to this bigger problem, and it's not just

• 1:09:55Adam Skolnick?

  access to firearms, but, like, what is it about us, like, why do we lack empathy and responsibility for one another, in a way that other countries don't? And I really do believe that we do have that problem. Like, we don't care about another's welfare as much as our own here, and that's different than the way it is in a lot of countries. I'm not saying that other countries are, you know, perfect and angelic or anything, but there is an acknowledgement that our fates are tied up with one another.

• 1:10:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great insight, and I think it's very true, and I think it tracks back to the genesis of the country where liberty became the priority. Like, all these people who came to America so that they could do what the fuck they wanted to.

• 1:10:40Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:10:40Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's bred into the DNA of how this country was born, right? And I think over time, that empathy has constricted and extends perhaps only to one's very small circle. And as we become more and more isolated and less, sort of, communitarian in how we live our lives, ensconced in our, you know, homes, on cul-de-sacs, et cetera, we're more and more separated from our fellow individuals, I think that sphere of empathy, you know, continues to dwindle. And what gets eclipsed in all of this is the other side of liberty, which is responsibility. Like, you can't have liberty without responsibility. And in

• 1:11:23Rich Roll?

  the United States, people are gung ho for liberty, but when it comes to talking about responsibility, no one really wants to rise to that occasion. And this is something I talked at length about with Ryan Holiday, when he was on the podcast recently.

• 1:11:40Rich Roll?

  We didn't talk about it in the context of guns specifically, but it's certainly applicable to that. Like, we want what we want, and we want to be able to do whatever we want to do. And when it comes to our responsibility to the collective, we don't want to hear about that. And that is a very weird American thing.

• 1:11:59Adam Skolnick?

  It's a self-destructive seed that seems to be like replicating, you know, like, if that's how we feel, there's a self-destructive kind of code that's gonna just, could destroy it all. Because if you don't care, and that's the biggest problem, why we can't, and we're getting more and more polarized, and we demonize one another, to the point, I realize I called anyone who went to an NRA convention, an asshole, which is demonizing. But at the same time-

• 1:12:29Rich Roll?

  You're, yeah, like, at least you're calling yourself out with some level of self-awareness around that.

• 1:12:34Adam Skolnick?

  I'm not saying I'm not part of the problem. What I am saying is, both things can be true. And we do have this empathy gap. And until we start to respect one another and care about each other's fates. The problem is, it does feel like, when you're on the left, it does feel like, we care about people's fates more than the people who are the strict individualists, which are, tend to be on the right. And so, that's kind of, comes with its own thorny inability to then, talk to each other. Because no one likes being talked down to, and no one likes someone who's a selfish person. So, we have to figure out a way, to look past that. Hopefully, that's going to happen. That's what senators and

• 1:13:16Adam Skolnick?

  congressmen are supposed to be able to do, right? That's what politics is about.

• 1:13:20Rich Roll?

  Which is why, you know, I'm so interested to talk to Senator Booker. Like, why is this such an intractable problem? Like, what is the lived experience of being in the Senate, being passionate about this issue, and not being able to kind of get any traction, to get things voted on, at the very least? Like, how are those obstacles, created, faced, met, and hopefully, you know, at some point, overcome?

• 1:13:48Adam Skolnick?

  Well, and how do you live with yourself, if you're on the other side of it, and your, your, your whole goal is to scuttle votes like this? Like, how do you, like, do people live in an absence of guilt? And, like, I live with guilt-

• 1:14:00Rich Roll?

  It's hard for me to wrap my head around.

• 1:14:03Rich Roll?

  Like the mentality of somebody who is trying to prevent all of these measures from going into effect. I mean, it is Occam's razor. Like, you can say whatever you want and throw all those oppositional arguments out there. We need to arm the schools with militia. You know, the ad hominem attacks. You're just a libtard. Second Amendment, you know, whatever. But ultimately, like, what is the most obvious thing that we could do right now? We can restrict access to deadly weapons from people who are not suitable or mature enough to handle them. Can we not at least accomplish that? We all agree on this.

• 1:14:42Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:14:43Rich Roll?

  People that are trying to block this from getting passed or being put into into motion, I have a really hard time trying to understand it. And you know what? Maybe I'm missing something. The other argument being like, they're gonna take all your guns away. Like, nobody's saying that.

• 1:14:59Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:15:00Rich Roll?

  We're just saying, let's be reasonable here.

• 1:15:03Adam Skolnick?

  It did happen in Australia, right? So that's what happened in Australia. But they passed a huge, kind of all encompassing gun control measure, and people did give up their-

• 1:15:13Rich Roll?

  They don't have a Second Amendment.

• 1:15:14Adam Skolnick?

  They don't have a Second Amendment. I also think it's funny, these people running for office, how often they're disparaging government. Like, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene does it all the time. By the way, she works for the government. She is part of the government. Hates the government. She's part of- she hates her- that's self-hating. She hates herself. Dr. Oz has that funny video about like, where he's like, firing weapons.

• 1:15:40Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's- this video is bananas.

• 1:15:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Wasn't he like, didn't he get famous because of Oprah?

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  Well, I don't know what the beginning of him being famous was, but anyway.

• 1:15:51Adam Skolnick?

  Overly intrusive government.

• 1:15:52Rich Roll?

  It's so bizarre to see that video. Like, because I think of him as the guy with the daily talk show, talking about like, health and alternative medicine and stuff like that. And like, suddenly, he's like, out shooting guns and, you know, talking about all this stuff that like, is this real? Like, are you just creating this character because you're running for office?

• 1:16:13Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:13Rich Roll?

  Railing against the government, to your point, you know, in an attempt to become part of the government.

• 1:16:19Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. They rail against the government to try to become part of the government so they can do nothing when children are murdered in their classroom. It's a strange obsession.

• 1:16:28Rich Roll?

  It really is.

• 1:16:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  It's also interesting, there's a weird, like ironic twist to all of this because those that rail the hardest against mask mandates in schools, like kind of decrying the mental health implications of kids having to wear masks in the classroom, are the same people who are not interested in gun control measures that would reduce the likelihood of a school shooting.

• 1:16:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. It's, uh, and so, and want, and want it to be more militarized, want the classroom to be more militarized, not less militarized.

• 1:16:59Rich Roll?

  Right, so what is the, what are the mental health implications on kids of schools being hyper militarized?

• 1:17:04Adam Skolnick?

  Well, that, that same Times column is basically saying, he thinks like, the more militarized you make it, the more you bring up school shootings, the more you have these kind of active shooter drills, the more likely some kid, some disturbed kid is gonna, yeah, so it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You know, that kind of stuff happens, like, we've talked about the hippo, I think last time, we talked, when we talked about abortion, we talked about those same hypocrisies, like, I want liberty, but you can't have an abortion, you know, like, and vice versa, I'm pro-choice, but you have to wear the mask, and we, we talked about that, it's not necessarily an equal thing, but, you know, there is, there is that irony, that we're always trying to, that often, it's the side of convenience.

• 1:17:49Adam Skolnick?

  It's just, it's more grotesque in this instance.

• 1:17:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:54Rich Roll?

  Before we move on, I did wanna circle back on David Frum, because I think he has done some compelling writing on this. Again, he's a, he's a conservative, a traditional conservative with a pretty rational take.

• 1:18:06Adam Skolnick?

  When you say traditional conservative, you mean?

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  Like, just, you know, he was a, he was a Republican, I can't remember what administration he worked in, but, you know, he has a long history of, you know, being a conservative thinker, but also a really smart guy, who is outraged by what he's seeing right now in terms of gun violence, and has written a bunch of pieces for The Atlantic, which I'll, I'll hyperlink in the show notes, because I think they're worth your time. And, uh, anything else we wanna point out on this, before we pivot to Corey?

• 1:18:38Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I mean, the, when you think about... What David Frum is saying is basically some of the same stuff that we've been talking about, right? Like, he wants rational measures that make it harder for kids and innocent people to be killed en masse. Like, this is all we're asking for. So, we can only hope that we're heading in that direction.

• 1:19:03Rich Roll?

  We need a little bit more than hope.

• 1:19:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Rich Roll?

  And it goes back to that despairing when you see Columbine and Sandy Hook and nothing happens, and here we are again. It did feel different with Uvalde.

• 1:19:16Adam Skolnick?

  It did.

• 1:19:17Rich Roll?

  Because the nation, and really the world, was so outraged and activated by that, that there was a sense like, okay, maybe this is the point where the tide turns. Our greatest fear, of course, being that we just move on. And the way that our news cycle happens so quickly these days, you know, that's my fear.

• 1:19:39Adam Skolnick?

  That we're just gonna move on and forget about it?

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. Until it happens again, and then we'll have the same conversation and the same conversation. So...

• 1:19:47Adam Skolnick?

  That's what we hope doesn't happen, because we thought Sandy Hook was gonna be the end of the line, right? Where something would finally happen, and it didn't work out.

• 1:19:54Rich Roll?

  Right. And we should also point out that in terms of SCOTUS, we're anticipating a decision, it could be in the next few weeks, I think it's meant for the fall, but the Supreme Court is on the precipice of delivering an opinion in the case of New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin, which is a decision that could strike down concealed carry bans, even in the few states that still have them. So, basically, that would mean more guns, more places, fewer checks, fewer protections. It's basically, you know, this punctuation mark on how we're moving backwards and downwards, and to use

• 1:20:37Rich Roll?

  David Frum's words, you know, kind of plunging towards barbarism.

• 1:20:42Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and so-

• 1:20:43Rich Roll?

  Because SCOTUS is obviously unshackled from public opinion and the legislature, and it's packed to the right right now. So they're positioned to make a decision that could very well make that possible.

• 1:20:57Adam Skolnick?

  There's a couple of things that are also popping up, though, that can be looked at as positive. I believe that the police, the national kind of police union consortium that represents all the police unions in different localities has come out in favor of, you know, some gun control in the wake of Ivaldi. That's happened. Governor Newsom, they just passed a law here in California that you can sue somebody who's involved in a mass shooting, you can sue them, and you can sue anybody involved in helping them carry out their mass shootings. It's basically using that same abortion law that's been passed in some states in Republican states, and using that same lawsuit idea that you can, as a private citizen can sue someone who gets an abortion, can sue the doctor.

• 1:21:42Adam Skolnick?

  Same idea in this sense. You can sue the gun shop that sells the weapon. You can sue the person who's involved and the family that's involved. So there are people trying different new tactics, new things. This police union is not typically someone that, an organization that gets on to progressive causes. So the fact is, this should not be a progressive, should not be a right or left cause. It's the welfare of our children.

• 1:22:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and as the polling demonstrates, it isn't a left or right thing. It's an everybody thing.

• 1:22:15Adam Skolnick?

  It is.

• 1:22:16Rich Roll?

  All right, so we're gonna take a quick break, and then we'll reconvene with the good senator, and hopefully he has some thoughts for us.

• 1:22:31Cory Booker?

  Hey, Rich, how are you?

• 1:22:32Rich Roll?

  How's it going, man?

• 1:22:33Cory Booker?

  It's been an emotionally raw stretch, but, uh-

• 1:22:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38Cory Booker?

  I wouldn't want people to think wrongly of me when I say I go to bed with you often. I promise not to say that publicly, although this is being recorded now, so that could be held against me. But I just finished, uh, just finished your talk with a guy I've loved, uh, even though he, back then he was a think tank on the other side of the aisle, but I've always loved, uh, Arthur Brooks. He's just such a

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Arthur Brooks.

• 1:23:00Cory Booker?

  Yeah, that was a great conversation.

• 1:23:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you. I mean, I'm so, I'm touched and honored that you make the time to listen to the show. I can't believe that's possible, but you know, Arthur makes my job easy. He's such a, you know, a beautiful font of wisdom. And it is interesting as, you know, him being somebody who was head of a conservative think tank. Um, my sense is that he, he really doesn't want to talk about politics. That's not his interest level right now.

• 1:23:27Cory Booker?

  No, I mean, you covered it well, which, you know, all of us being in our 50s, he definitely has made a shift away from this crazy think tank world, but he was moving that way. He wrote this amazing book about love, um, which I think was one before this one that I, I, my stack of books right now is just trying to figure out how do we talk to each other in a country that's spiraling, uh, in, in kind of a, into a culture of contempt.

• 1:23:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:53Cory Booker?

  And he's thought, been really thoughtful about that. And I think highly influenced by the Dalai Lama.

• 1:23:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's accurate. And, uh, you know, I think that's a, a good place to just jump right into it. I mean, I know your time's tight and I really appreciate you carving out.

• 1:24:06Cory Booker?

  The staff, they said 15 minutes. I, I've been looking to talk to Rich Roll for like, since I started listening to his podcast, I fell in love with your podcast. It was one of your best of years, you know, like with the end of the year, you do the, you sample from all the ones. So I, I've been looking to, to have a conversation with you for a very long time. So I told my staff to give me at least an extra 15 minutes because I knew I was going to fanboy all over you for the first 15 and we wouldn't get to the subject matter.

• 1:24:32Rich Roll?

  Well, you got me all buttered up and I'm going to hold you to that because I'm definitely, you know, somebody who wants to get you in the studio and we'll do the full kit and kaboodle podcast at, at some point when your schedule permits.

• 1:24:44Cory Booker?

  Your journey, I, I read Finding Ultra and I think that you can see in my opinion, the universe sort of using you. I think that not only athletics, but also your struggles with, with addiction have made your power of empathy and your ability to connect, you know, I always say that broken people. We're all broken more than we maybe want to. Not only is it let good stuff in, but it also creates more points of contact, which you can connect with other broken people. And I think that you have this wonderful ability to connect with the people you interview that in a real way, in a substantive way, to go a little deeper than some of the general interviews we often see. I think that's a gift.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I appreciate that. It's an honor to be able to do it and it's certainly nourishing for me. And to be able to kind of give it back to the audience is just, you know, something that just gives my life purpose and meaning. So I'm very grateful to be on this journey and to be talking to you today, my friend.

• 1:25:43Cory Booker?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:44Rich Roll?

  Let's get into it.

• 1:25:45Cory Booker?

  Yeah, please. Go ahead.

• 1:25:48Rich Roll?

  You know, obviously the country is under a lot of strain right now. We're enduring some challenges, not the least of which is all of the mass shootings, what transpired in Uvalde and subsequent incidents that we've all borne witness to, these tragic events. And so I really wanted to kind of focus the limited time that we have with you today on the subject of gun violence and gun control. And I thought it might be beneficial to just hear your perspective. Like, what is your bird's eye view on kind of where we're at as a nation? How are you thinking about this issue right now? And perhaps like some thoughts on why this is so intractable in terms of finding solutions?

• 1:26:30Cory Booker?

  So I'm a kid that grew up in the suburbs and New Jersey and not part of a hunting culture, and my granddad did take me out once. But, you know, it was a suburban town outside of New York and gun violence didn't affect my life. But I've lived the last, God, since the late 90s in New York, New Jersey, in the Central Ward. And gun violence immediately impacted my life on my first nights sleeping in an apartment. I got across the street from the projects. I eventually moved into them. I started hearing gunshots and at night, I still remember coming out one day and there being a sort of the tail end of a shooting. And since then, I've lost young kids I've known to gun violence and, and seen the horrific

• 1:27:14Cory Booker?

  everyday realities of gun violence in America. And it's often the violence we don't talk about. It's stunning to me how we as a nation.

• 1:27:24Cory Booker?

  Doesn't even pop into our consciousness unless we have these horrific mass shootings. But every single day, on average, more than 300 Americans are shot, over 100 Americans die. And the violence is everything from domestic violence, which we don't talk about, to suicides, which we don't talk about enough. And now we have this stunning rise of hate in our country where since 9/11, we've lost more Americans due to Americans killing Americans, right wing groups from synagogues to churches to supermarkets. And then obviously, school shootings like we just had.

• 1:28:02Cory Booker?

  So it's a very personal issue for me, some of my own personal trauma being in and around shootings. And so I came here as the only United States senator that lives in a low income, black and brown neighborhood, who's had shootings on their block. And most recently, 2018, a young man, Shahad, who I used to live in the same building with, the police officer who was giving me the account, it was like his head blew up. It was an assault rifle that...

• 1:28:32Cory Booker?

  And so it's been frustrating to me to live in a country where, you know, since the time that you and I have been alive, as guys in their 50s, we've had more people die to gun violence than in every single war in America combined.

• 1:28:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:45Cory Booker?

  And so when you start asking me why something hasn't changed, I think it's too easy and convenient to say it's just Washington.

• 1:28:54Cory Booker?

  Because we've seen change happen against impossible odds before. When four little girls died in the bombing in Birmingham,

• 1:29:04Cory Booker?

  you saw a nation mobilize to demand change. And as I remind people all the time about this place, you know, there's an old trope saying here that they say often that change doesn't come from Washington, it comes to Washington. You know, it wasn't a bunch of guys on the Senate floor in the 1920s that said, "Hey, fellas, let's give these women a right to vote." It happened because people demanded it. As Frederick Douglass says, "If there's no struggle, there's no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand." And so we have tolerated for a very long time in this country, a level of carnage and violence and death. That we've almost normalized because days and days go by without us doing enough.

• 1:29:47Cory Booker?

  And so I can give you stuff that you know, and I've heard, listened to you enough of your podcasts, and I've heard you express understandable skepticism, if not cynicism, about Washington and politics. There are very powerful lobbies, there's money, there's, you know, people's ambition. You know, there is a real consequence to congresspeople running in red districts where districts have been drawn, where they're always worried about being primaried by somebody on their right. I was on Meet the Press recently with a guy who just lost a senate race, who lowered violence in his North Carolina city 50%, but he was running against somebody that had a gun in their belt, he said, for most of their commercials.

• 1:30:29Cory Booker?

  And he lost in a primary because the guy casted him soft on guns. But I think that's a convenient and easy excuse just to blame it on Washington. It's almost like surrendering responsibility and not understanding that we all have a role to change this nightmare. And it's more than just those real things that I just, I just mentioned.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think, you know, that, that makes me, you know, want to know more about, and my colleague Adam Skolnick is, is on the line too, and I know he wants to chime in on this. The kind of lived experience of you being a legislator, a senator, and, and what that experience is like that perhaps we're not aware of. Like, to the extent that there's frustration, like, why can't we just get a law passed? Or what is actually going on? Like, when you, as somebody who cares deeply about this issue and is working so diligently to change the law and move our country forward in a new direction on this subject matter, like, what are the obstacles that you encounter on a daily basis?

• 1:31:31Rich Roll?

  Or what do we, as the public, not see about what that is like for you?

• 1:31:38Cory Booker?

  So, look, I've seen the best of this place and I've seen the worst of it, you know, where we've been able to hammer out really great bills, you know, our criminal justice system is an outrage. We're a nation that takes our addicted, our mentally ill, our poor, our black and brown, we stick them in jails when they often need help, or healthcare, or counseling, or trauma and treatment, and we put them in our jails. And, you know, we've passed some good bills to try to start changing this nation from being the country where we still are, with the one out of every three incarcerated women on the planet Earth are in the United States. And so we've passed some bills that have liberated thousands of people, that that's the best of us. We have a long way to go, though. And I've seen

• 1:32:21Cory Booker?

  the worst of us, you know, we just passed an anti-lynching bill, more than a century after it was first introduced, when thousands of blacks were being killed, and we couldn't even make lynching a federal crime until 2022. And so, I, you know, I've seen the corporate gun lobby and how powerful they are. I've seen them change. I think after Columbine, Wayne LaPierre said, you know, we need to make universal background checks. He was for a lot of things. But the culture has slipped on, on the sort of, within the NRA world, where they are resisting and fighting any change whatsoever. And they are a very

• 1:33:00Cory Booker?

  powerful lobby for people who are concerned about reelection. And so, like, right now, we're, I've watched now, I've been here eight, nine years, and I have seen those Americans who are really willing to do something different, dig in, organize, put, show more pressure on politics, change laws on states, you know, since Parkland, there's been a whole lot of state laws that have changed for the better. But here, it's been more difficult. I think we're actually going to get something done. You know, I was talking with Senator Murphy and a, and a group of House members, that there's hope here that something can get

• 1:33:41Cory Booker?

  done, but I'm, I'm going to be candid, it's going to be very incremental, necessary things, but nowhere near sufficient to end the kind of carnage what we're seeing on a regular basis.

• 1:33:53Adam Skolnick?

  Senator Booker, you're talking about the election cycle and the pressure to get reelected. You know, when we see these stats of the NRA and how much they're contributing to people like Mitt Romney, or you know Mitch McConnell, people who you could argue are bigger than the NRA in some ways. They have their own kind of brand, but they're still under the sway of an organization like that. Does that speak to how hard it is to raise money and compete in politics? Like, what is the draw there? Or like, is it more that they're afraid of the primary? Like, what do you think is the draw for some of these bigger names that you think would be able to win without them?

• 1:34:33Cory Booker?

  So again, getting into the psychology of your colleagues is often a dangerous odyssey. You can lose your own mind trying to figure out people's different motivations. The NRA is not the biggest donor down here. And money, I mean, it's really one of the toxins of our of our government, I think, when Susan's United passed and corporations now can pour tons and tons of money, strengthens the corporate gun lobby. Because remember, these are corporations who are having a field day. They're selling guns in our country at a level that we could have never imagined. Every man, woman, and child in America, from babies to 99-year-olds, could have one gun, and then we'd still have 70 million more

• 1:35:12Cory Booker?

  guns out in our streets. But I don't know if it's just the money they're contributing. And, you know, again, like, for example, I gave up all corporate money. It was fourth senator to do so. I just didn't want to give anybody reason to question my motives. But I know that there are, as you said, there are people that can raise money if they didn't get the whatever $30,000 from the corporate gun lobby. But they, I think their power, a lot of it lies in their ability to mobilize people and get them out to vote singularly on this issue. And that's a pretty powerful, if you know you're in a

• 1:35:50Cory Booker?

  Election where if you don't have that A rating and you're going to be, you're going to be beat up by it by somebody else who really has whipped up this idea that this person is going to be a part of the group in Washington is going to try to take away your guns. You know, when gun sales spike when Democrats get elected because they have, again, and you could listen to the, to the rhetoric because they're told, people are told that you're going to lose your, people who believe, the very narrow version, believe that they're going to lose your gun rights. So that's a base, not in my world, but that's a base, I think, for, that people are concerned about in primaries.

• 1:36:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What's interesting is that, that being said, it does seem like the NRA is out of step with its constituency because the polling demonstrates clearly that most people are in favor of rational gun control. And yet the NRA still wields so much power to, you know, rebut the public sentiment on this issue. And so I guess I'm curious about, you mentioned Senator Murphy, Chris Murphy from Connecticut. He's put together this bipartisan consortium of legislators to really work on rational gun control. Like, are you like sanguine about the possibilities here? Because that does seem like something

• 1:37:10Rich Roll?

  that's new and different from what we've seen in the past.

• 1:37:13Cory Booker?

  Yeah. I just want to dwell on that point you made first, which is such an important point, and I should have mentioned it already. This is not a partisan issue. It really is not. And the problem often with our country is we try to reduce things into the binary world as demo Republican. I've listened to your show enough to know that you realize that's not the case. I mean, the stranglehold that big ag has down here is not a partisan issue. Chemicals are being sprayed on our foods that are in our bloodstream, breast milk and the like. It's not a partisan issue. Tech issues are not partisan issues. And we as Americans have so much more in common. The lines that divide us are nowhere near as strong as the ties that bind us. But this political industrial complex that will try

• 1:37:56Cory Booker?

  to parse us along these tribes and make us believe that we're different. That's a problem. There's a whole raft of common sense gun safety things that I've seen comedians go to NRA conventions and ask people about universal background checks. And you just see these NRA members saying all this about, I'm worried about my. Guns being taken, oh, but, you know, universal background checks, heck, yeah, we need to have them to stop criminals from getting guns. So this is not a partisan issue amongst Americans, it's a partisan issue down here. And that's a lot of the disconnect. Folks have got to, on the Republican side, Democratic side, whatever you identify, begin to make this a central issue in your political behavior. As far as me being optimistic, look,

• 1:38:40Cory Booker?

  I'm a prisoner of hope, but I always differentiate hope from optimism. Hope stares the wretched truth of the world in the face, doesn't deny it, but still believes ultimately that something can be done. And so I've seen this come around, and I can't, if I lost hope that we could do something, I don't think I could continue doing this job. I will tell you again, that Washington watchers do think that there are the makings right now because of, you know, Chris Murphy said this to me today, said this to a group of us today, that his sense was that a lot of folks went home and heard from people within their, that identify as their tribe, the Republicans, and were so dismayed about this. Because at the end of

• 1:39:24Cory Booker?

  the day, we are all hugging our children, if you have them, before they go to school. There's a lot of that worry, I think, that they're feeling, which is opening the door to do a little bit. But I do not have a belief that in this bill, we're going to see the kind of comprehensive things that most Americans, Republican, Democrat, independent, would want to see.

• 1:39:45Rich Roll?

  But we got to start, just like Trevor Noah's monologue the other day, like, we have to start somewhere, and we got to iterate on that. And just to get anything moving forward.

• 1:39:56Cory Booker?

  I love history. People look at the civil rights movement, think so was in the 60s. People started in the, you know, A. Philip Randolph and others were working on a march on Washington far before the one we know about in the 60s. They were doing activism and protests and working and making small changes. Thurgood Marshall was out there, changing laws and more. So I agree with you. First of all, we have started, the Parkland Kids, the Moms Demand Action, Gabby Gifford's organization, there's a After in every single state of Moms Demand Action, for example, that are making a difference in local elections, city, county, state elections. So this is a movement. The question is, is are you a part of it or not?

• 1:40:39Cory Booker?

  Because I think what Martin Luther King said at very frustrating points in the civil rights movement. Remember, his letters from the Birmingham jail were not to the racists. He was talking to good people. And what he said is what we have to repent in this day and age. And these words echo in this moment. What we have to repent for is not simply the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. And so that's the question is, to me, it's very binary. Don't tell me what your beliefs are. Show me who you are through your actions. Are you part of the movement to change these laws? Are you doing more than you did before Uvalde? Are you doing more than you did before Buffalo? Or are you doing the same things you were doing before those two mass shootings?

• 1:41:23Cory Booker?

  And expecting other people to make the change that you want to see in your country?

• 1:41:26Adam Skolnick?

  Hmm, yeah. You spoke about this kind of increased contempt in terms of the volume. I guess that's speaking to polarization, but also speaking to kind of, I guess, information silos and how that can turn up the volume and the heat on some issues like this one. It seems like a tragedy like this, the breaking of all of us. Like if the United States is our common body and we're broken, it seems like that should be the place to latch on and to do some good, right? I mean, that's what we were talking about, but maybe before we started to record this interview, how a time of brokenness can be a time, can be the perfect time to come together. Are you seeing anything like that?

• 1:42:09Adam Skolnick?

  I know that you're kind of trying to make us not expect too much from this coming law. But are you seeing any of that? Are you hearing any of that in the hallways? A little bit more coming together at all?

• 1:42:23Cory Booker?

  So I do think that they're hurt and shattered more than broken, how much we, a lot of us have been, is creating a climate for change. And the rhythms of Washington DC are often in those moments where of where we share a common pain, sometimes we can find common purpose. And that's, again, one of the reasons why I think we're going to get something incremental done, or at least I'm hoping and praying that we will. But I have to be candid with you. We had a hearing today all about replacement theory. And for those who don't know what that is, it's been around for generations. It was around about the Catholics and the Southern Europeans

• 1:43:02Cory Booker?

  that were coming here to replace Protestant Americans. It's this idea that there is a quote unquote, "true American." I'm a black guy who can, who Skip Gates traced my history back to the 1640s in this country, but there's this idea that, and you hear it, you remember the marching with tiki torches in Virginia, "Jews will not replace us." So the professors that were there and the experts that were there at this hearing, it was stunning to hear and to look at the data about the mainstreaming of these views. He, he really called it just like this resurgence of the Klan in the 1920s, which then it was a lot of Catholics hate and the like, and how we're at a perilous moment

• 1:43:46Cory Booker?

  for our democracy, where you're seeing larger and larger portions view on us versus them within this country and not just us, where we're all one people with one destiny. And so I would be, I don't want to candy coat the truth of our country right now. There is a rise in hate. There is a rise in resentment. There is a culture of contempt. There are these devices that are in our lives now that have algorithms that are profiting off of making us more emotional and more involved. I tell the story even about, I'm pointing to my TV where, you know, a friend of mine had a show on CNN, his name's Van Jones,

• 1:44:29Cory Booker?

  called Crossfire. And I love what Brene Brown says. She says, "It's hard to hate up close, so pull people in." And they decided when him and Newt Gingrich realized they they were proximate to each other and had lots in common, they wanted to do the last segment as ceasefire. And then after a few episodes of that, the producers stopped them because they said ratings were going down. So we have got people who are realizing the incentive, their corporate incentive, their political incentive. As I said in the hearing, if I yelled at Donald Trump during the State of the Union address, if I heckled him and screamed, "You lie, you liar," I may have had a really great fundraising quarter the next quarter.

• 1:45:11Cory Booker?

  I know that because when somebody yelled that to Barack Obama, they had an incredibly great fundraising quarter. And so we're building this powder keg right now where we've literally seen people whipped up to storm the Capitol of the United States. And remember, they had symbols of antisemitism and racism there, where peoples are being preyed upon, their vulnerabilities, their hurt, their trauma, their fears are being preyed upon by leaders. And that's my biggest worry for my country right now, for our country. I really worry that if we can't figure this out, if our tribalism becomes deeper and it's no longer an objective analysis, say, this person believes in these values, these

• 1:45:52Cory Booker?

  ideas and this ideas, but it's more tribalism, we demonize each other, we so hate each other that we can't even talk to each other. I worry about the future of our country. We have got to figure out a way. And is this tied to the violence that we are seeing? Absolutely it is. And so I just will finish this point by saying to you that I'm not despondent because I believe in the radical redemptive power of love. And I've seen the data, the scientific data, that love goes viral too. In fact, if you're as a Stanford researchers, Richard Almata, that have shown that just

• 1:46:33Cory Booker?

  witnessing a kind act changes your biochemistry and makes you more likely to make change. And you can follow it two or three degrees of separation. But we are going to need a lot more committed Americans to, despite your whipped up differences with somebody, that you can still find ways to create. Connection and see common dignity and see common destiny. And when you ask me about how things get done down here, how they really get done. One of the best examples of getting through the crap and the obstacles is a story of my implicating myself on my own bias. We all have implicit biases. And there's a guy who's retiring named Inhofe, an Oklahoma senator, who, you know, we vilify

• 1:47:18Cory Booker?

  on our side sometimes. He carried a snow wall down to the Senate floor to show that there was no climate change. But when I got down here, my mentor, a guy named Bill Bradley, told me, go to dinner with your colleagues. Find ways to have one on ones with them. And I went to Bible study in Inhofe's office. And I'll never forget walking in and I saw on his shelf, a picture of him. And this challenged my implicit bias because I never thought I'd see this kind of picture. I saw a picture of him and a little black girl. And I said, sir, who's that? And he says, it's my daughter. And he tells me this powerful story about him adopting her at a tough circumstances. Fast forward, months later, many months later, there's a big education bill going through, and I want to get an amendment on this bill about homeless and foster kids.

• 1:48:03Cory Booker?

  And I'm told there's no amendments being allowed. Lamar Alexander was blocking the bill. But I remembered this point of human connection. And I went to Inhofe, summoning the spirit of his daughter and the connection I felt with his humanity, that we often don't see when we're on different sides of the political aisle. And I'll never forget, he told me, I will co-sponsor your amendment on a bill that no amendments were being allowed. I had this powerful chairman, then I got Chuck Grassley, then we got other Republicans, and it's now the law of the land. And that's just one small story. But I think we need millions of those stories in all of our lives to begin to start to heal the fabric and break through the bias and the venom and all those who profit off of our hate or our contempt for each other.

• 1:48:49Rich Roll?

  Very powerfully put and beautifully stated. I mean, thank you for that. I mean, certainly, love, connection, these are the antidotes to the rift that is increasingly dividing us and the misalignment of incentives, whether technological or economic, that are driving this. I mean, we're close enough in age, Senator, that we remember a time when a crisis befell our country, it brought us together, it didn't drive us apart into our silos and make us argue with each other. And it really is an existential crisis. And if we can't see our way forward from that, none of the other issues are ever going to get addressed. So I appreciate you pointing that out. And I know your time is running

• 1:49:34Rich Roll?

  out with us, but it was amazing to have a few minutes to talk to you. And I appreciate you sharing with us and our audience. And I really do hope that at some point in the not too distant future, I can sit down with you in person and do a full blown podcast.

• 1:49:48Cory Booker?

  Hey, Rich, can I make one more, perhaps emotional plea to your audience?

• 1:49:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:49:52Cory Booker?

  I love your podcast. I love listening to the two of you go at it during the new kind of evolution of your podcast where you have this you two interstitially. And I just trust and believe that not only is your podcast strong, but it appeals to people across the political spectrum and from all different backgrounds. And the appeal I want to make to you is that I was doing a New York Times editorial and they asked me, they were doing fun questions at the end, they were asking, interviewing all the Democratic presidential candidates. And they would ask me funny questions and they asked me a question, what was the biggest mistake you've ever made? And I thought they think they thought they were going to get a light answer. And I said, look, the biggest mistake I made was when I was living in these high rise projects in the lobby of the building, I

• 1:50:37Cory Booker?

  lived there for eight years, this place called Brick Towers. And I watched these little amazing boys grow up, all black boys. The leader of the crew was my dad incarnate, and they were so similar. They were both whip smart, charismatic, born leaders, both born at or below the poverty line, both weren't raised by their mothers, raised by their grandmothers. There was just so many similarities, it was eerie to me. One day I came home smelling something I hadn't smelled since the days of the enchanted broccoli forest. Rich, I smelled it often at Stanford, but I smelled it in my lobby, which was pot. And, you know, Stanford students have a lot more wider margins to experiment with drugs than black kids in inner city communities. And I immediately thought to myself, I gotta lean in more.

• 1:51:20Cory Booker?

  And I took them to the movies and I took them, you know, out to diners. I asked them what their dreams were, and they were really humble dreams. I still remember when one of them told me they wanted to learn how to repair cars and maybe one day have a shop. And I, boom, I thought, okay, I'm gonna fix you guys up with mentors that can help you with all of your dreams and made commitments to them that I didn't immediately follow through on because I was too busy. I was running to become mayor of the city of Newark. And even though I was busy and didn't follow through, they would still greet me in the lobby on the end of long campaigning days and cheer me on, lift me up. And then I get elected and I have death threats against me. So they surround me with police officers, station cops in the lobby of the building

• 1:52:04Cory Booker?

  and the projects, safest projects I think I'd been in a long time. But the kids, I don't care who you are, high school kids don't wanna hang out where the police are. So I just didn't see these young people. But in the back of my mind, I'm like, I'm on a mission to help all the children of the city. I'm not, I know I'll reconnect with them soon. And then a month into my time in office, I called to Court Street in Newark. And I get there after a shooting and there's a body covered up. And I barely affirmed the death on the sidewalk. And I'm too busy ministering to the lead, to the living and telling them what we're gonna do to drive crime down. And I get home that night and I'm going through my BlackBerry, reading reports.

• 1:52:44Cory Booker?

  And the name of the murder was Hassan, the young man from my lobby.

• 1:52:54Cory Booker?

  And I will never tell you, talk about shattered. God literally put my dad in front of me. My dad used to talk about the conspiracy of love, all the small acts of kindness that helped him get from a rural, poor, black boy in the 1930s and 40s to become an IBM executive. All the acts of kindness, people going out of their way. And here I had a chance to pay it forward. And I'll never forget going to his funeral, which was like in the bottom, the Perry's Funeral Home in Newark.

• 1:53:24Cory Booker?

  And it was like descending into the hull of a ship. We were all tied together in grief, wailing and moaning chained to this horrific daily occurrence in America, which is another young boy in a box. And it haunts me to this day, and I regret it to this day, that I didn't do more. And so I don't know what it will take for all of us to understand that we are so connected that what you do matters, that no matter how busy you are, there's something more you can do to end this death, the pain, the hurt, the devastation that happens when a young

• 1:54:03Cory Booker?

  man commits suicide, or a woman gets killed by her boyfriend, or a gun, illegal weapon, because it was not a background check, gets into the streets of communities like mine and is used for a horrific murder. And so my appeal to the folks here is that democracy is not a spectator sport. It really isn't. You get the government you deserve. And people before us sacrificed, sweat, bled, were willing to die to try to bend the arc of this nation's moral truth. And if there's not, if there's ever a time to lean in more, to change something that's not partisan, it's right now. Because you and I, I worry, even though I think we're going to pass some legislation,

• 1:54:46Cory Booker?

  I worry that, that you may call me up and say, hey, can we have another 15 minutes to have a conversation about why do we have another mass shooting? And this time, God forbid, if you're a listener here, God forbid, it's your neighborhood, your school, your mosque, your supermarket, your neighborhood, and you're wondering why I didn't do more to stop that pain and that horror from visiting upon your life.

• 1:55:11Cory Booker?

  Wow.

• 1:55:13Adam Skolnick?

  That's amazing words, Senator. Thank you so much for telling us that and sharing that. It's like, it must weigh heavy every day, these kinds of things that you've witnessed and then also hear about. You must get every day, and another tragic story like that. How do you deal with that on a daily basis? Like, the responsibility you carry and the weight of all of that?

• 1:55:36Cory Booker?

  Um, look, I am who I am because a community that I'm not from embraced me, a young law student from Yale, who thought I was some kind of savior, and knocked me on my ass. People like Frank Hutchins and Ms. Virginia Jones, Ms. Yancey, you know, Ms. Wright. I can tell you the women who taught me. I say I got my BA from Stanford, but my PhD on the streets of Newark. And I have too many stories about gun violence. But, you know, on the worst moment for me, because it was just so traumatizing, we hear these stories about the shootings where we're not seeing the bodies. Well, I was on the scene of a shooting where a teenager got

• 1:56:18Cory Booker?

  shot multiple times, and I was the person trying to stop them from bleeding to death. And it was the most gruesome thing I had ever experienced. It's foamy blood was coming from his mouth, blood pouring from his chest. And I just, I just was doing, I think about it now, I had no training, so I'm sticking my hand in his mouth, thinking if I just can clear away the passage for him to breathe because he's choking on his blood. And I remember that night, trying to scrub this boy's blood off of my hands. And I remember, I have never felt more anger at my country than I did then. And I never felt more of wanting to quit and just be done with this. Why was I even trying? The problem seemed so much bigger than me. And I came down into that lobby where the boys hang out the next morning,

• 1:57:03Cory Booker?

  and walked through the lobby. It was early in the morning, so nobody was there. And I walk into the courtyard. And, you know, this is why I believe in a larger power, because I was drowning. I was done. It was over. And then I see the tenant president, this elderly woman, Ms. Virginia Jones. Who had her son murdered in the lobby in which I lived years before I moved in. A woman had every reason to move out of those projects. In fact, I know the money she made, I know where she worked. She didn't have to live in this dangerous neighborhood, especially after her son was killed. And I remember walking out and being frozen because I saw her back to me. And then she turns around, almost like she could hear my hurt.

• 1:57:43Cory Booker?

  And then she sees me and she does the only thing that I needed at that moment. Not to say a word, she just opened her arms and I ran across that courtyard like a little boy, running to his mom. And I'm much bigger than she is, but I felt like I disappeared in her arms and she held me. And this is the gift she gave me as I started sobbing.

• 1:58:07Cory Booker?

  She just said two words over and over that were, I hold on to now when I hurt. And when I get angry and when I don't understand my country and where I want to give up.

• 1:58:20Cory Booker?

  And I think about women like that who never give up. I think about kids from Parkland who turn their pain into purpose. I think of moms, demand action, people who've lost and turn their hurt into action. And this woman just rubs my back and she says two words that I held on to during my times mayor. And in my toughest days here, and she just says to me, she's rubbing my back. She says, stay faithful, stay faithful, stay faithful. And so I believe that what real hope is about is like Ms. Jones. It's like, hope is the act of conviction that despair will never have the last word. That no matter how much it visits upon you, you still have agency, you still have power,

• 1:59:04Cory Booker?

  even if it's just the defiance of keeping going and not giving up. And so, yeah, I see shrines on my streets, teddy bears and candles, too many damn times. And it's unfortunately black children or Latino children who don't seem to count as much sometimes to the media. They don't seem to get the same coverage. And I get angry about systems that date back to. You know, when we had overt redlining, they've created a lot of the pain and hurt. But I will tell you this, we've come this far by faith and I have no right to give up, especially when others didn't. And the real challenge I see again is how do we make other people care?

• 1:59:46Cory Booker?

  I don't need to change one person's mind who might believe that we shouldn't pass universal background checks or gun licensing, or I don't have to change one person's mind. All we have to do is get the people who share our beliefs, which is the majority of us, to do a lot more, to show their faith. Because as my religious tradition says, and it's a terrible, foreboding thing to say, but it says, faith without works is dead.

• 2:00:14Rich Roll?

  Very true.

• 2:00:17Rich Roll?

  Wow, I'm just trying to process everything that you just shared. It's such a powerful story. And I think if you can carry that resonance of hope and channel that into action, it's inspiring for the rest of us who might feel paralyzed or powerless, or as if, you know, our actions don't really matter, because they do. And in this democratic republic that we're privileged to live in, it's incumbent upon all of us to shoulder that responsibility and do what we can to put in motion the better world that we want for ourselves and future generations.

• 2:00:52Cory Booker?

  And a lot of, you know, you have a lot of athletes that listen to this. And this is very obvious, like, nothing worthwhile is easy. Nothing that I watched you do, you don't just get up in the morning and win a national championship or win a heavyweight boxing match. It is hard. It takes endurance and resilience and pushing through pain and pushing through a setback. But that's what it takes to be great. And I do believe in the greatness of this country. I think American history is a perpetual testimony to the achievement of the impossible. But we who are the inheritors of this impossible dream that is America, have got to, as I failed to do in that one instance with my dad, we've got to. Prove worthy of it by paying it forward through our sacrifice and our struggle.

• 2:01:33Adam Skolnick?

  You mentioned, if I could trouble you with just one last recommendation, because you've been so generous with your time. But you mentioned that you're asking us to give more and do more. And I see like a lot of the the volume on the political discussion has gone up. The frequency that the average person is talking about politics has gone way up. And a lot of that you poignantly pointed out is related to our phones and obviously that addiction. But often what we're doing is just shouting into the void. There's not really much getting accomplished, other than a bunch of information soup, which doesn't help us. Actually, it hurts us. What would you say would be, you've mentioned some great organizations. What kind of, if there's a couple of concrete steps that you could recommend for listeners to kind of get involved

• 2:02:17Adam Skolnick?

  or a first step to getting more active?

• 2:02:19Cory Booker?

  Yeah, I would find others and connect with others that are that are doing that. I mean, this is the great thing about America now and these devices, I have to say, because I don't want to say there's only negative to them, is that fingertips away are the ability to connect with people that are probably two or three steps ahead of you, sometimes 10 or a mile ahead of you, and understanding what makes a difference makes a change. And so do some research, find these organizations, find these people who are committed to this kind of change, and never underestimate that you can make a difference. I've seen incredibly imaginative young people find ways to bring pressure to bear amongst people in power. It's really extraordinary. And and this will be it, because my staff always stands up when I, you gotta go.

• 2:03:01Cory Booker?

  But I am the living evidence that you doing a little bit of something can change the world. And I always say this because there was this white guy sitting on a couch in Jersey in 1965, watching TV, just chilling out, I think it was a Sunday. And this was back when we only had three channels. And they break away, the movie most Americans were watching that night was a movie called Judgment at Nuremberg. And suddenly he sees these black, these not, these, these people on a bridge called the Edmund Pettus Bridge, being viciously beaten. And he's so disturbed by it. He's like, I gotta go to Alabama. And then he laughs at himself because he just started a business. He can't afford a ticket even to Alabama. So this guy does what is a great American tradition.

• 2:03:46Cory Booker?

  He just thinks to himself, okay, I'm just gonna do the best I can with what I have where I am. And he does a calculus in his mind. And he thinks to himself, okay, I could spare one hour a week of pro bono work. And he does what I just advised you to do. Calls around, back then he didn't have an internet. Calls around to figure out who might need a one hour pro bono civil rights legal work. And he finds this young woman, she's now ninety three years old, but this young, and she's still head of the same organization. Finds this woman who's head of the Fair Housing Council in northern New Jersey. And she's like, hallelujah, Jesus, I need help because we don't know how to stop. They won't let black people live in these neighborhoods. They keep showing up and they get steered away. And he goes, well, let's figure something out. And they designed this sting operation where they get volunteer white couples to volunteer to follow black couples around.

• 2:04:29Cory Booker?

  And so what happens is he goes, four years later, I get this case file of this black family moving up from the South. Getting turned away from house after house. He goes, we set up the sting, they fall in love with this house, they're told it's already sold, they leave, the white couple comes, the house is for sale. They put a bid on the house. Papers are drawn up on the day of the closing, the white couple doesn't show up. The lawyer does. And the black guy. And they confront the real estate agent. Real estate agent doesn't give up. He gets up and punches the lawyer in the face. Saves a Doberman Pinscher on the black guy. All this kind of rigmarole. And next thing you know, that black family moves into this affluent, all white town, as the father would say. That we are the four raisins in a tub of sweet vanilla ice cream. That family is my family. That's my story. Wow.

• 2:05:14Cory Booker?

  That's how I got to where I grew up. And by eighteen years old, I was a two position high school All American. On my way to Stanford University on a full scholarship. And I would not be in this senate office right now. If it wasn't for some white guy, years before I was born. Deciding to give one hour a week of pro bono work. So don't tell me that your actions right now, if you're listening to this. Can't make a difference. What you do, if it's righteous and for cause of justice and peace and security, or the highest of human virtues. Love. It resonates, it reverberates, it goes out across space and time and makes a difference. You may not live to see it, or even have the gift of knowing it, but it makes a difference.

• 2:05:58Cory Booker?

  And now more than ever, we need that kind of radical love and consistency to say, I'm going to give a little bit every day, or every week, or whatever you can do for the cause of my country.

• 2:06:10Rich Roll?

  Fantastic. Wow, I'm inspired. Adam, what are we going to do? We've got to do more than that.

• 2:06:16Adam Skolnick?

  I've got to do at least one hour a week. I mean, this is crazy.

• 2:06:21Adam Skolnick?

  That's an unbelievable story. Thank you so much, you guys. Thank you so much.

• 2:06:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, thank you, Senator Booker. Really appreciate it. Have a great evening and look forward to crossing paths again.

• 2:06:32Cory Booker?

  I hope to see you in LA.

• 2:06:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for sure. I'm holding you to it.

• 2:06:35Cory Booker?

  I'm, trust me, man, we've got a lot of, we need to talk about America's broken food system and how Washington DC has created a system where only 2% of our ag subsidies go to the thing we tell people to eat the most of. So I'm looking forward to that.

• 2:06:49Rich Roll?

  100%.

• 2:06:50Cory Booker?

  And my staff is all here, they're all waving.

• 2:06:53Rich Roll?

  There we go.

• 2:06:56Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody.

• 2:06:57Cory Booker?

  You've got a lot of fans.

• 2:06:58Rich Roll?

  Thanks for letting the senator run long. I thought we were just getting 15 minutes. We got almost 50 minutes, so.

• 2:07:04Adam Skolnick?

  Phenomenal.

• 2:07:04Rich Roll?

  You've been very generous. Thank you.

• 2:07:06Cory Booker?

  Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

• 2:07:07Adam Skolnick?

  All right. Thanks, you guys.

• 2:07:08Rich Roll?

  Cheers.

• 2:07:08Cory Booker?

  Bye bye now.