Play Is The Miracle Drug: Dr. Kelly Starrett On Movement, Recovery, & The Wellness Trap

Dr. Kelly Starrett is a physical therapist, New York Times bestselling author, and co-founder of The Ready State. This conversation explores human performance and a wellness culture that's become a kind of secularized religion, fixated on optimization while the fundamentals get ignored. We discuss the carbohydrate revolution, why the brain chooses safety over performance, the Enhanced Games, the power of play, and much more. Before the pod, Kelly put me through the paces with a Frisbee, a tennis ball, and a rope – and it reframed how I think about starting over. Kelly is a grounded source of trust and a force for good. Enjoy! Show notes + MOREWatch on YouTubeNewsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% off your first month of DS-01®👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRollWHOOP: Join now and get one month free👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/RollRivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.comFreaks of Nature: Save 20% with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.freaksofnature.comGo Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Rich Roll?

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• 0:46Rich Roll?

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• 1:20Kelly Starrett?

  Everyone learns better through play. Play is the miracle drug. Dr. Kelly Starrett.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  He's worked with professional athletes, Olympians, elite military personnel, corporations as well.

• 1:30Kelly Starrett?

  He teaches people how to move better for sake of sport and for everyday living.

• 1:35Rich Roll?

  What are the principles that are actionable and applicable to the average everyday athlete?

• 1:41Kelly Starrett?

  People are treating their training like a Super Bowl weekend every weekend. PR, PR, PR, PR, PR. And if there is no offseason or downtime and you're on this belief that you have to make constant progression, that is a misunderstanding of how this works. If it's gonna be a sustainable experience, we better go and have fun. That's how I want this to leave us. I want it to leave us so that we go out into the world and we're better people.

• 2:07Rich Roll?

  The last time I saw you was, I think, probably eight months ago. We were both at a wellness conference out of town. I was in the early days of recovering from the surgery. I don't think I was still wearing a brace, but I was probably like 50 pounds heavier than I was.

• 2:26Kelly Starrett?

  You were amongst it, you were in it.

• 2:28Rich Roll?

  Probably in a semi-deflated state, realizing how much patience this was gonna require and how long this road was going to be. Here we were at this event in which a lot of like quote-unquote wellness influencers were speaking. And you and I are both kind of OGs in this world, whether it's fitness or wellness, where we've seen a lot of changes. You know, there's been a lot of...

• 2:56Kelly Starrett?

  Is that a euphemism?

• 2:57Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, one thing about this conference is it was undeniable like how huge wellness is. Like it was just like a giant convention where people had spent a lot of money and, you know, a lot of well-known people were speaking. But there was also a like a convention hall filled with vendors of every imaginable product. And, you know, I was just reflecting on kind of the current state of wellness, what it was like when you and I were kind of both coming up in this world, how much it's changed and how in certain ways it's really become deranged.

• 3:35Kelly Starrett?

  That's a kind word.

• 3:36Rich Roll?

  In the ways in which it's impacting and influencing the average well-intentioned person out in the world who's just trying to make good choices for themselves and their families.

• 3:48Kelly Starrett?

  We walked around and ran into a woman that we knew. And she was like, "Hey, can I ask your opinion? Should I buy this, this $1,000 vibration plate?" And I was like, "Well, tell me what you're doing currently." And I was like, "No." And then we walked over here and she's like, "Do I need this?" And I was like, "No." And she walked over here and...

• 4:05Rich Roll?

  You need a tennis ball and a rope and a frisbee.

• 4:08Kelly Starrett?

  You need a friend, right? You need some hot scotch, you need some like, you need to play tag. We have these belts that we use, they're flag football belts. And the fastest way I know to get people fired up is to try to play capture the flag. And you and I, the five of us, six of us, started doing this with no tech. Very instantly we would be activated, fun, play, moving weird, crazy places. What's that Amazon flag football belt cost? So I think what we saw there was that we had confused like which core pillar is this thing improving? Is it nutrition? Is it really making a difference in my nutrition? Is it making a difference in my sleep? Is it making a difference in my pain?

• 4:52Kelly Starrett?

  I think what we see is that we can purchase a thing and then that will take care of the thing.

• 4:56Rich Roll?

  Right. It's a way of offloading responsibility on some level. I spent a lot of money on this thing. It's going to take care of it for me in the same way. Maybe I go to my doctor and they say, take this medication. As opposed to looking inward and, and saying, well, what is causing this? What's the root cause? The solution generally isn't something that necessarily costs money. But it might require work and a little.

• 5:23Kelly Starrett?

  And some investigation.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like.

• 5:24Kelly Starrett?

  Yeah. And, um, you know, let's, let's be generous that, you know, people have always been looking for ways to sell things to people. We, I sell a mobility app where you can come in and learn how to take care of your body. Okay. No, everyone's a little bit guilty of some of this, but the, I think, what we're starting to see there is the maturation of this marketplace that's, that really misses the idea of what, what it is, what's important. Like, do you cook food? Do you eat dinner with your friends? Stu Stevenson wrote a really good book about creating kitchen culture for his family.

• 6:08Kelly Starrett?

  And if you want to transform your family, sit down, no tech. Everyone contributes in the kitchen and you eat food together and then do dishes together. That will. 180, any biohack you can, you possibly do. And I think, I think to feature, not a bug, all of that stuff. And it's our job to help people sort of see through theirs, see through and see what's essential. And let's be generous about all that stuff. Let's say that some of those things could be totemic. And they're like, I did this thing and it changed, started to get me to think differently about my sleep. And because I got interested in my sleep, I started thinking about drinking more water. And then I started thinking about walking. So it can be that way leads to way leads to way.

• 6:53Kelly Starrett?

  But that's a little bit like trickle down economics and I'm a little bit skeptical, you know?

• 6:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Kelly Starrett?

  What I see is that when you're, you used it, it was novel and went into your closet. And it didn't change anything that we're talking about here.

• 7:04Rich Roll?

  On the one hand, it's fantastic that people are thinking about their own well being uh, in a way that, you know, generations prior didn't. Uh, and that's good. Anything that gets people moving or making better food choices, et cetera, is a, is a, is a net positive. I just think that the focus is so firmly placed on the marginalia, like these, these, these hacks or these devices or these things that there's nothing wrong with them and they have their, you know, some are more evidence based than others, but you know, probably do some good for you in some certain way. But it's one tree in a massive forest. It's like losing the forest for the trees, uh, overlooking like the things that we know,

• 7:49Rich Roll?

  the major pillars that are driving us towards being happier and healthier because they're sexy. I don't think that you can talk about this without talking about the epidemic of loneliness and this crisis of meaning that, uh, I think is a kind of a cultural phenomenon right now. People are looking for more meaning in their lives. And wellness in some respects, to my mind, is now showing up almost as secularized religion. Like it is a identity bearing caisson into the ground that people can associate with, where they're going to find like-minded people. Uh, and so in the absence of, you know, any other kind of like faith institutions,

• 8:30Rich Roll?

  as those things declined, more and more people are gravitating towards this as a kind of religion and as a way of defining themselves, like creating an identity around it. And within this world, we have A whole spectrum of influential people from very solid to just patent grifterism, within which there is an incentive structure for people to behave badly for the cause of, you know, selling some product. And so we see a lot of confusing messaging around everything they, you know, like, we've all seen the reels where like, everything they told you was a lie, and here's the secret they don't want you to know about because of Big Pharma or whatever,

• 9:15Rich Roll?

  and you should get this. And then the next reel says the exact opposite. And it just creates a lot of paralysis and confusion. And it's obfuscating the message that someone like you is trying to put out, which is very grounded and principle-based around like, what we know, deep down in our DNA, we don't even need you to tell us. Like, you need friends, you need to move your body, you need to experience joy, you need to make your life about something bigger than you. And I think there's something very navel-gazing and, um, and kind of narcissistic about wellness, because it's so focused upon the self. Like, this optimization culture is

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  really like an egoic pursuit that I think is fundamentally unhealthy, if not checked.

• 10:04Kelly Starrett?

  Yes. Um, one of the ways that helps me filter this out, because I, I'm a consumer on the internet too.

• 10:13Rich Roll?

  And I love all this stuff, and I'm in it, you know, and I probably, you know, like, I'm, not only am I a participant, I'm a purveyor, you know, so like, what is my responsibility in this?

• 10:22Kelly Starrett?

  I, I am part of the problem. I recognize that. One of the ways that I try to make sense of it is, if I drop a performance lens, how does this hold up? Does this get me to the Olympics? Does this, you know, at high speeds, high loads, does this matter? And that could be high psychological loads and demands. And that really gets me through, like, okay, this is sort of entertainment, fitness and wellness is entertainment, it's the bourgeoisie dying of their ennui, and this is another cake party. That's what this is. Like, I have some money, and I wanna, it feels good, and I'm, I'm a dilettante, and a sort of, you know, um, a tourist, like, touristing is super fun, and didn't meaningfully change anything. But

• 11:07Kelly Starrett?

  as soon as I drop this filter, this performance filter, You know, did you go faster? Did it improve your wattage and your recovery? Did like, that's a really easy way for me to see. And the other thing I can look around and I'm like, well, who's using this thing? I mean, I think that's really, it's interesting. A lot of that, we haven't, and it's getting complicated with GLP ones, which I'm a huge fan of. But it's always been about aesthetics. And in service of being skinny and having this ideal. So there is very much an egoic narcissist thing underneath this. And look, I think it's reasonable not want to be gross for your wife. Like, that's my, again, my goal. And, and to have a body that I have, feel proud of and is capable. I think that's a really reasonable goal for people.

• 11:52Kelly Starrett?

  But if it's only about being skinny and restriction, and again, this, this, my brain doesn't think I'm safe. And I have to do these things in order for me to have this. It's, we know what's gonna happen. We've run this experiment, how many times? How many generations are we gonna run this experiment on? We've been selling fat shakers to women about, you know, like the German, you know, belt drive from, you know? We've been, we've been talking about these things for as long as there've been humans. So I think it is, it is a feature of being human. When I, again, try to understand this, I'm like, well, is it, does it fit in? And if, could this get me to the Olympics? Do I bring, how does this scale?

• 12:35Kelly Starrett?

  Let me ask you this, if you're, anyone is doing these things, a simple way of understanding, is this even worth my time? Is, would you let your kids do it? You know what I mean? And you're like, oh, your kids aren't getting infusions and ozone treatments? And like, why not? Because it's 17, it's dangerous, or it's, you know what I mean? But you'll take, I just saw The Guardian, this is a really good example. The Guardian just did a test of some peptides that had, they'd gotten from a reputable site. I'm just gonna put, you know? And they, they had it tested and it contained no peptides. But it contains lead and, but because the solution is, this is easier than, than I'm, I'm more willing to put that aside.

• 13:20Kelly Starrett?

  And again, if we just look at the dichotomy between, hey, I'll take this untested peptide that doesn't have any rigorous trials. But I won't take this vaccine. Like, there's a real sort of divergence of logic there.

• 13:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:35Kelly Starrett?

  And, and I want-

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  You have to do some real mental gymnastics-

• 13:39Kelly Starrett?

  Yeah.

• 13:39Rich Roll?

  -to justify that, uh, you know, that conflict.

• 13:44Kelly Starrett?

  And, without, you know, I know I just hear the rake's gonna hit me in the face here, but, um, you know, again, the performance piece really helps me, you know, you know, hey, I, I discovered that I'm vitamin D deficient, right? So, just saying metaphorically, right? We had a woman who, uh, we knew was a strength coach in New York. She got pushed into a railing. She's a woman of color, broke her ribs. And she was like, I couldn't believe it. And I was like, oh, you found out you're vitamin D deficient. She's like, how'd you know? I'm like, you're a woman of color, you work out in a gym and you live in New York. And I was like, you're never in the sun, ever in the sun. When our second daughter was born, Caroline, she was born a preemie. She was born six weeks early and we spent three weeks in the NICU with Caroline.

• 14:26Kelly Starrett?

  This is our, our division one water bowl player. And we had a placenta mama problem. And when they sent us out, and I think this says it all, they were like, okay, you gotta give your kid these vitamins. We're getting out of the NICU and I was like, I have to give my kid vitamins? And they're like, yeah, they, she has to take these vitamins. And I was like, look me in the eye and tell me that this mother's milk is incomplete nutrition for my child. Go ahead, go ahead. I'm waiting for it. And I just crossed my arms and they were like, um, well, and I was like, what's the problem? And they were like, the problem is that the white women in San Francisco don't go in the sun. There's no vitamin D in their bodies. The child doesn't get any vitamin D. And I was like, okay, so what

• 15:09Kelly Starrett?

  you're saying is here's a solution to a behavior problem. What I need to do is make sure that my kid gets a little bit of sun exposure every day. And they're like, yes. And I was like, great. And I think that is sort of what we're doing. This, this wellness thing is surrogacy for the real work. It's hard work to have relationships and to schedule dinners and to go on adventures. It's hard work to be a human engaging in a human society. But as long as we're, can be on my phone, not doing those things, then I'm, I'm looking for this exogenous solution. And we'll continue to do that until we wrap our heads around what does it mean to be a person in a community.

• 15:49Rich Roll?

  The other interesting thing that I think a lot about, uh, is-

• 15:55Rich Roll?

  Using that like conference as an example, and it's not to denigrate the conference. Like I had a great time.

• 16:00Kelly Starrett?

  Oh, there were some rad people there.

• 16:01Rich Roll?

  But when you're in that environment where there's lots of doodads and gadgets and here's the latest biohack, et cetera, and all of these things are being kind of positioned and sold as this is what's missing in your life. And if you want to be a peak performer, you need this.

• 16:16Kelly Starrett?

  Performing what again, exactly?

• 16:18Rich Roll?

  So as somebody who has competed in sport at a, at a high level and has a long history of being in athletics and yourself being somebody who has worked with so many athletes in so many different sports at the highest level, like do any of the Olympic athletes that you know, do any of those things?

• 16:42Kelly Starrett?

  No.

• 16:43Rich Roll?

  Not at all?

• 16:44Kelly Starrett?

  This doesn't exist.

• 16:44Rich Roll?

  This is not how you do it. No Olympic athlete is doing any, I mean, they're, maybe they're dipping their toe here and there into certain things, but it's not like a major aspect of how they're training and recovering on a day in, day out basis.

• 16:59Kelly Starrett?

  It, it can't be. There's no room.

• 17:01Rich Roll?

  And these are the highest performers in the world. And so the conversation around high performance has, you know, the elephant in the room is the fact that the highest performers in the world actually aren't doing any of those things.

• 17:12Kelly Starrett?

  And your high performance is what? Looking good naked in the mirror on a Tuesday for Instagram? You know, your high performance is having less brain fog because you drank one less bottle of wine? You know what I mean? Like, I'm, I, I agree with you a hundred percent. And I think that's what is suspicious. You know, when you are in these places, then you see that, you're like, where is this disconnect? That's why I say that filter of performance, real performance, athletic performance, mental performance, you start to see. Let me give you an example, and I hope I don't get in trouble with this. Delta Force spends a lot of time thinking about sleep and the army is starting to think differently about sleep. Maybe we should do training differently. If we keep our young captains awake for 36 hours, they make bad decisions.

• 17:56Kelly Starrett?

  So they, right, they they're changing the core DNA of some training exercises because they were having too many injuries and all these things. One of the things that one of these tier military groups do, they're always looking for how do we improve performance? Well, you know what made the biggest, the only thing that changed? Heart rate variability and recovery? One of the squadrons went dry. They didn't drink for a month. They just didn't drink for a month. Everyone slept better, everyone performed better, they won the the monthly Olympics, their heart rate variability changed. What did we pull out? We just pulled out this coping strategy, this elite, they didn't change, they didn't add some tech thing, down regulate, vasal, vagal, like, none of that.

• 18:37Kelly Starrett?

  It wasn't injections of super serum, it was maybe when we're stressed, we shouldn't drink. And when we come back to these fundamentals, you and I are the same person, we were 10,000 years ago. I'm fatter, your femur's longer, it's the same. So there hasn't really been, and you're telling me in 10,000 years, we haven't really been obsessed with, I mean, the the first sports science in the world is military science. The Prussians figured out that at this temperature, we can march these dudes with this load this far. And at this temperature, we can march these dudes this low, this far. People have been obsessed with this forever. Go to Scotland, what are all those stones just laying around?

• 19:20Kelly Starrett?

  People are just like, I bet I can lift that stone, you know? Hapthor, right, the mountain, did this famous thing where he walked this mast, and he, it's like a 3,000 pound mast, some insane mast on a ship, and he lifts it up, and he walks four steps, and it is, everyone loses their mind, because the old Viking history of 1,000 years ago is the guy walked three steps. So we have all of the technology, all of the drugs, all the recovery, and he gets one more step. With the 3,000 pound mask, that's how long people have been savages. That's what I mean. I mean savage athlete, performance machines. Let's not pretend we're the first generation to give a shit about going fast. Come on. That's so, that's just not even true.

• 20:03Rich Roll?

  So how is the average person meant to get their head around all of, all of the messaging that's out there on social media, et cetera, around like, I just want to be healthier. I want to eat a little bit better. I want to feel good. I want to be robust. The other piece that's missing here is the fact that all of these things should make us more resilient and more robust. And it seems as if there's a little bit of, of the opposite going on. Like there was that whole kerfuffle when Stephen Bartlett said, oh, I drank and then I couldn't like focus for three days and it ruined my, like, like, oh, you, if you're thrown off your wellness routine by a micrometer, then like your whole life caves in and you're, you're, you can't get out of bed.

• 20:45Kelly Starrett?

  You've, then you've never, ever been at the pointy end of the spear.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  Like, the whole idea is to be robust and resilient so that when you are in a position where you're not in control of your environment in the way that you would like, you can like roll with the punches and be fine.

• 21:00Kelly Starrett?

  I'll give you two examples. I love that position. Our friend Laird Hamilton, he's like, hey, if we go out for a long time and you bonk, you're a liability. What do you mean? You have to eat every like, you know, you're, oh, you watch one off glucose, like, you can't just go out long. When Jimmy Chin climbed and did Meru, right? This is, you've probably seen Meru. The first failed attempt, they're what, like 300 meters from the top, 30 feet from the, like they have to turn around. It's a failure, right? They're out of food and you can watch this in documentary. What you don't know, and he told me, is that they had a third of a cliff bar a day for four days. They had to down climb that whole thing and they each got a third of a cliff bar.

• 21:45Kelly Starrett?

  So what I'm going to say to you is you get a third of a cliff bar a day for the next three days. Go about your life. Let me know how it goes. If they don't get down, they die. So this is the reality. They get to the bottom, all their food's buried. They have another 12 mile walk, something, some ridiculous, right? And that says a lot about the capacities that, you know, it's not these micrometer, little micro, that's not, it's not reality. Laird also says that if the only food we have available to us is a hamburger and you can't eat it because your knuckles are going to swell up, you're a liability. Like you can't go out and have amazing glass of wine or amazing beer or be a human being and partake. And no one can say that that's,

• 22:28Kelly Starrett?

  you do whatever you want with the alcohol piece. The point is, you know, that if you're so fragile and you're off, you're not going to be able to take that, that show dog, that show pony and go race it Hidalgo style across the desert. You're not going to last. I'm on a training camp in Greece with a team. There's no gels. There's no bar. Like, you know what I did? I went down to a local bodega thing and bought these one euro chocolate crispy wafer bars. And they're one euro and they had 30 grams of carbs in there and they're super palatable. And we crush the shit out of those week after, like day after day after day. Local, what's available? How do we solve this problem? These are elite athletes. Let's make sure it's fueling and not worrying about it. And then we'll, you know, we'll solve it on the back end. So,

• 23:14Kelly Starrett?

  you know, if we get so special and specialized and so precious, that we can't go out into the world and, and make mistakes. When's the last time you bonked? Like really bonked?

• 23:25Rich Roll?

  Well, it's been years because I haven't been able to like move my body adequately enough to get to the place where I could bonk.

• 23:32Kelly Starrett?

  You know, but I bonked. Yeah, you bonked and you're like, I don't want to do that again. But I'm just saying that like, as we talked earlier, when is the last time you risked something? Like, you know, I'm not saying we needed some misogi that we're, you know, like, but we oftentimes are like, I have to do this. If you're going for a bike ride with your friends for an hour, you don't need a water bottle. You, you'll feel better if you have some water, you know, if we're racing and if you want to reduce the session cost, yeah, drink some water. But like we, it doesn't have to be perfect. Stop it. Stop being so, dressing your up and yourself up in the cloak and the mantle of professionalism when that's not the real world because you're not elite.

• 24:14Rich Roll?

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• 27:49Rich Roll?

  One of the things that's so compelling and unique about you is that you've worked with so many different types of athletes and sport teams, like all kinds of athletes from every imaginable discipline, plus special forces, people and first responders. Like, in your career of having worked with such a diversity of people, like, what are the consistent or like parallel principles that you extract from all of them that are, you know, like actionable and applicable to the average, everyday athlete?

• 28:27Kelly Starrett?

  One of the most important ones is the ability to start again. I don't think people realize, like, the internet leads us to believe, especially if you're watching the gym stuff, the fitness thing. Is that you just make infinite progress. PR, PR, PR, PR, PR. I mean, you're a beginner, yeah, it's true. You take an untrained person, you put them on the bike, they squat more, right? One of the most important principles that comes out of this is the ability to start again. The consistency is really amazing. We, we think that sometimes people should just continue to see linear progression, which is just not the way it works. For example, in the weight room, like if I miss this workout, X will happen. You know, I'm like, really? Like you didn't do pull ups for a week and went on vacation, you thought you lost your gains?

• 29:10Kelly Starrett?

  Like, let me introduce you to what actually happens in sport. We traveled to a different country, we got to compete, we had multiple games, no one was in the gym. So the next time we went back to the gym, we started over again. And when we start to see that it can't just be about naked, raw progression and strength, like athletes started over and over and over again. You didn't just continue to build off of a season at Stanford, you had an off season. And then you hopefully took some time off and then rebuilt your body. And initially in that season, you were slow, you couldn't handle the volume, you started again and again. So there is natural periodizations that happens for professional athletes,

• 29:52Kelly Starrett?

  where they have an off season or a downtime, or they, and we see that in our pro. I mean, this is it. I mean, basically go to the Super Bowl and then you need to chill. But people are treating their training like a Super Bowl weekend every weekend. And if there is no off season or downtime and you're on this belief that you have to make constant progression and you can't start again, otherwise you've failed. That is a misunderstanding of how this works. We're just gonna come back in and begin again and begin again. And as soon as you, ever been injured? Yeah, we're gonna start again. Ever had a hotspot and couldn't compete in a thing? Yes, and we're gonna begin again. That is one of the biggest through lines. This, as we look at this concept of, you know, sort of like what's, what's important and essential

• 30:37Kelly Starrett?

  across all domains. This raw naked consistency and ability to start again wherever I am, but based on what, it gives us curiosity and it's not a failure. You know, I, you, it's, you know, I just was talking, I was at a friend's wedding and I was talking to a two-time Olympic swimmer. He's pretty good. He's a mutant. 6'6" Matt Target. And I was telling him about, um, he's Australian, you can look him up. Um, I was telling him about my, I'm a beginner now and, and basically you pointed out something. I am the worst, fattest, skinniest, weakest, slowest person in every room I am. So I gotta, I gotta.

• 31:12Rich Roll?

  I didn't say that. You made it sound like I said that to you. I did not say that.

• 31:16Kelly Starrett?

  You said, Kelly, you work with a lot of diverse sports. Like I am the worst person in the room. So it's nice to be really curious. When you come in and you have nothing at stake, cause I'm not in my domains, I really get to be curious and like, what's that all around? I talked to all the coaches and how, when, when are your off days? And, you know, how do you feel your women? And I'm always gathering, cause someone has solved this problem for me. So Matt said, he's like, I was like, hey, I'm, I'm working on these timed 100s. I want to do 10 timed 100s so that when we do a conditioning piece, like our test set, I want to get in with some of our athletes and just be able to be like, I see you, I know what you're suffering. I'm going to do a timed 50 to their 100. That's maybe I'll do a 25, like they're so fast. But I was like, no one told me about swimming with fins. Like this is amazing.

• 32:00Kelly Starrett?

  And he was like, bro, you cannot believe that every single time I got in the pool, I put fins on first because swimmers get in the water and they're like, I feel slow today. I feel sluggish, my body, right? It takes a second to kind of come to yourself. One of the reasons we love movement preparation as game is to just remind yourself, who am I? How does it work? What's, what's feeling today? And he's like, I put fins on and I did my first few hundreds of fins. Cause every time I put fins on, I'm fast. And my brain was like, look how fast we are. And then I took the fins off and he's like, I'm gonna have a great day cause I'm fast versus getting in the pool and being like, whoa. I'm so slow. This is so hard. And here is this idea that

• 32:43Kelly Starrett?

  he recognized that he couldn't say sustain these hu- and two-time Olympic swimmer, he's a monster. But he was gonna have down days. And here was a coping strategy he had where instead of getting in his own head about, wow, it's hard to put out. He put fins on, felt fast, and then the rest of it was.

• 33:01Rich Roll?

  Right. That's so interesting, just a psychological reframe. Yeah, it's very different from waking up, like the average person example of that is like waking up and then looking at your phone that is tethered to your wearable. That's telling you like you're, you're not awesome.

• 33:18Kelly Starrett?

  You're not awesome.

• 33:20Rich Roll?

  And then you have to go do whatever you have to do that day anyway, you know, despite that. Which is starting your day off with that kind of messaging versus like, how do I start my day off with something that feels good, that gives, gets me in a positive frame of mind?

• 33:35Kelly Starrett?

  I think as sports become more sophisticated and training for sports become more sophisticated. The thing that continues to lag is the psychology. We don't have the language, we don't have the tools. I'm talking about NARPs, non-athletic regular people. Like I'm just a rec athlete. Everyone is like.

• 33:52Rich Roll?

  Non-athletic.

• 33:53Kelly Starrett?

  Regular person.

• 33:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:54Kelly Starrett?

  That's a collegiate term that there's kids who do college sports and then everyone else. They may be the best athlete in the world, but they're not doing a college sport. They're a NARP. And it's not a denigration term, but just, you know, you don't have to do all this silliness. You're probably what we would call a SARP, a super athletic now, regular person. Let's say if we took the average NARP. And like me, I just, I wanna be less gross for my wife. That's one of my physical goals. I don't want my wife to leave me. I wanna be less gross. I know I'm gross.

• 34:21Rich Roll?

  I think you're, you're doing alright.

• 34:22Kelly Starrett?

  Less gross is the game. So I'm interested in training and I love training and I love to exercise and play. And what's my self-talk? When it gets hard, what do I say? So even the mental framework of how do I approach this hard thing that I'm going to do? And then how do I actually approach that and say, okay, what's my framework for having this difficult conversation with my wife or my child or addressing something at work or grief? We're not sort of consummating the, you know, the experience and we're certainly not empowering people to have a template for even how to frame some of these, the mental piece. We just were like, let me just throw as much at the wall and I hope it sticks and I hope I'm become mentally tough and I just David Goggins the crap out of this and, you know,

• 35:07Kelly Starrett?

  weakness, strength is never a weakness and like, that just doesn't work. It didn't really work for me. I was much more need to understand and be, be party to the process. But the self-talk is a, is a great example of, of Matt swimming, figuring out a mechanical self-talk that he got in the water. He's like, look how fast I am. And already he was going to have a better workout than me because I got in the water and was like, oh my God, I suck today. Right? And we need formal training in this and there are plenty of great places and, and resources for this, but it's the least sexy and it's the one that we feel like is the least hack.

• 35:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We did a workout earlier today. Uh, for people that are watching on YouTube, you can see this is my home gym behind me right now. Kelly was kind enough, uh, to arrive very early this morning and put me through a few paces. We're going to make a video of that, uh, that we're going to be sharing. Um, but you gave me that gift because you kind of contextualize this as, as like you, you're wiping the slate clean. Like you're recovering from this back surgery. You're reassembling yourself. And so every time you do something, it's a PR. You're like, you just PR'd, you just PR'd like.

• 36:23Kelly Starrett?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  That mental reframe instead of like, oh my God, I could barely do this or whatever. You're like, no, that you just, you just set a new PR because we're starting from a new place. We've wiped the slate clean. It's tabula rasa. You've rebooted the operating system. Everything that came before that burned down in the Library of Alexandria a long time ago or whatever. And like, we're. We're thinking about this as a fresh start. And that just little like reframe, that little mental tweak made it a lot more fun.

• 36:55Kelly Starrett?

  Can you imagine if we had that same phrase towards we, if we took that and applied it to the curiosity, the joy, I mean, that's really what we're supposed to do. Like, and there are people in your life who are like that. You're like, they're always stoked. One of the common threads for Juliette and I and all the friends, the most successful people and the people we want to be around are the most stoked. And they're like curious and they're fired up and they're not, it's not Pollyanna, but they're just like, oh, I can't wait to see. You know, they're just so curious about the process. And if we could, if we could use training as a way of, of practicing that, then this all becomes physical practice. And theoretically, no one's going to look at your Strava someday and no one's going to be like, well,

• 37:40Kelly Starrett?

  Tuesday.

• 37:41Rich Roll?

  After you pass at your funeral, everyone's like, well, I don't know. You have a good day that day. Like you think these things matter and that people care and nobody cares.

• 37:49Kelly Starrett?

  And it is reasonable as a human, especially when we, you can track it and see it. And one of the things that you haven't had a chance to do in a long time is experience beginner gains. And if you do something or pick up a new skill, for the first time, you're like, whoa, put a hundred pounds on my bench. I'm like, well, how long have you been benching? Two days, right? You can make massive progress with skills or physiology when you're beginning, but going from nine to 10, ooh, nine point nine to 10, like that, how much longer does that take you to shave a second off your best time?

• 38:20Rich Roll?

  One of the things that, that happens progressively as you get older and you become more and more set in your ways is that you just want to do the things that you are good at, you know, like, oh, I'm good at this. And I just want to get fit enough to be able to continue to do that thing. And you. Lose a little bit of that curiosity and that willingness to like learn a new thing and be bad at it and allow yourself that joyous experience of vulnerability. And when you showed up today, in my mind, I was thinking, okay, Kelly's going to take me through a workout. I can't wait to learn. I thought like, he's gonna, he's gonna pick up these kettlebells and show me these

• 39:00Rich Roll?

  compound movements. You know, Kelly's the mobility guy. He's the, you know, kind of strength and conditioning guy. Yes, but really it's about all of these more holistic, complex movements that are creating a stable infrastructure for adventure and performance, et cetera. And instead, what you did is you showed up with a frisbee, a tennis ball, and an orange rope. And you had me like swinging a rope around in a way that was confusing my brain and like making me catch tennis balls. And I was like, what are we doing here? You know, and I was bad at it. I have terrible eye-hand coordination. My balance isn't great right now in this post-surgery, you know, kind of reparations

• 39:41Rich Roll?

  period that I'm in. And even in on my best day, I'm not strong in these areas. But it was fun. Like, it was goofy and like silly. And it reminded me like, this is supposed to be fun. It's not about like fronting with a puffed up chest and, you know, whatever ends up on Strava. It's about like falling in love with physical movement and doing certain things that are, yes, like setting you up for a stable, you know, future of movement with longevity. But let's not forget like why we're really doing this, you know? And that is something that is a mountain that

• 40:21Rich Roll?

  has been difficult for me to climb because I hold these athletic pursuits so preciously with a certain hardness. And for me, training has always been equated with suffering, almost like self punishment, or like a tariff that I have to pay to feel worthy in the world.

• 40:39Kelly Starrett?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Rich Roll?

  And my goal is to do it from a place of joy and, and kind of transcend that hardness that has always accompanied my relationship with endurance sports for sure and swimming.

• 40:53Kelly Starrett?

  What you just said? Is so beautiful and so important and so difficult. And we have really sucked the joy out of the gym. It's become this austere place where I measure like Russian Drago doing his like, you know, and then, you know, Rockies in the woods throwing logs and playing around and inventing and being creative. And as allegory, we need to figure out a place where we still were doing preparation for your back. Like, I, I needed to see how you were moving. Were you able to move quick? Were you able to breathe and rotate? We did a lot of very complex things under the guise of play. And as I get to work with other teams and, and other cultures, one of the things that

• 41:38Kelly Starrett?

  we see is this has got to be a joyful, i- if it's going to be a sustainable experience, we better go and have fun.

• 41:46Kelly Starrett?

  You know, I mentioned that, um, you know, I, I get to go and travel. I'm the performance director, performance lead for this water polo team in college. I, I travel with them, but I'm also in charge of their warmups. And, um, our games, warmups are gnarly. We'll wrestle on an exhale breath hold. Like I have women, like before the national championship, we're locked up. We exhale, girls are fighting and we're, and the laughing, the entrainment, the listening, we're dialed in together. I created a, I really love the Hakka. Every time I see a Hakka, you know, this, it, it hits me someplace. The all blacks. I wish that I had that.

• 42:28Kelly Starrett?

  I will tell everyone that if you want to cry, there's a, a wedding video where in New Zealand, the, the men perform a Hakka for the bride and groom. And every single time, it just makes me weep because of just this intensity and what's going on. Having a chance to work with the All Blacks, um, spend some time with them, you know, they would do the Hakka and then they'd actually have to go in and chill out because they were too revved up and they would play terribly. So they would be like, ah, then, okay, too much. Let's go. But I recognize

• 43:02Rich Roll?

  I thought that was the point to get

• 43:04Kelly Starrett?

  Too much, two rounds, ah, like make mistakes. But I recognize that like, our team needed that thing. And we're not Maori, we're not traditional indigenous New Zealand people. And so we're not going to do a Hakka because that would be inappropriate. But I was like, what could we do? And we, we circle everyone up. And we try to do it in a place where we own the place. So we've done our official warmup and then we're on the pool deck and we're about to do our swim warmup. And one of our seniors goes in the middle and she yells the word hell. As loud as she can and everyone just goes, yeah. And it's just back and forth. Hell, yeah, hell, yeah, yeah. And what we have is

• 43:45Kelly Starrett?

  this moment where all of these women are locked in, prepped, and the affirmation where you say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you're looking at your friends in the eye. We're unbeatable. We might lose, but we are unbeatable. And the metaphor here, the story here, the moral is that's how I want this to leave us. I want it to leave us so that we go out into the world and we're better people that where we've gotten out our demons and we sweat hard and there's still time to do intervals. I'm not like if my training is difficult, if you do my programming, which I hope you'll, you'll jump into, you're going to be like, Kelly is a terrible person. He doesn't care for my well-being and simultaneously I want us to feel like we can go out and

• 44:29Kelly Starrett?

  we just have to remove some of this stigma, one or zero, I'm a failure. And that begins with a, a self-practice.

• 44:42Rich Roll?

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• 45:26Rich Roll?

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• 46:11Rich Roll?

  Speaking of dressing yourself up in the cloak of professionalism, did you watch the enhanced games?

• 46:21Kelly Starrett?

  So I have friends who were asked to be on the advisory board. I may have been approached about being part of that. Professionally, I couldn't touch it and wouldn't touch it. I had two friends who are Olympic lifters. One of them was an Olympian, one of them was real good, who went in and partook. And I loved it for them because they got to make a living Olympic lifting after their retirement, right? And what I would say is, did you watch the documentary about the cyclist who discovers the crazy doping thing in Russia?

• 46:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Icarus.

• 46:58Kelly Starrett?

  So.

• 46:59Rich Roll?

  So I had him on the show.

• 47:00Kelly Starrett?

  He's amazing, and that story is amazing. But when that movie came out, I was working with a cyclist, a professional Tour de France cyclist, and I told him, I was like, Hey, have you heard about this? And he's like, let me guess, he did all the drugs and he went slower. And I was like, yeah. And he's like, it's because it's never just that. And he was an elite. And so sometimes we can tell our stories that I could have been great if this thing didn't happen to me, and that was because someone else had something. And the point of this is drugs and performance enhancing drugs have always let the best athletes in the world work harder and recover fresher so they can work harder. They were never shortcuts, never have been shortcuts.

• 47:44Kelly Starrett?

  And now we're recognizing that there are places and methodologies and systems that doesn't even require us to do that.

• 47:53Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:54Kelly Starrett?

  I think there's an opening when someone has a really bad injury. Should we be able to avail ourselves of modern pharmaceuticals to repair this person? That's a different conversation, you know, like, you know, there was a famous football player who got popped for taking HGH, a quarterback, right? And because his neck was destroyed. And I'm like, wow, if he's the marquee of my team and he's on human growth hormones that he can repair this thing on his neck, I'm like, so that he can stop that and then go back into his job, is there a morality? And already, the NFL is entertainment anyway, right?

• 48:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that is a serious gray area. I think it speaks to many things. I mean, first of all, let me just say that I agree with you that. The Enhanced Games provided well-deserving athletes with the opportunity to actually be fairly compensated for their gifts. And I appreciate that. And I think that athletes who signed up to participate in it and were able to be remunerated in that way, like, good for them. You know what I mean? Like, they've been taken advantage of for way too long. There's been gigantic organizations that have leveraged athletes for their own gain.

• 49:08Kelly Starrett?

  Yes.

• 49:09Rich Roll?

  And athletes are always at the bottom of the food chain. And this was an opportunity for them to actually make decent money. So

• 49:16Kelly Starrett?

  And I will say

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  That's fantastic.

• 49:17Kelly Starrett?

  They did the wrong thing for the right reason. That's what I would say.

• 49:23Rich Roll?

  So I guess I can also understand an athlete in the twilight of their career who's being thrown a lifeline to get up on a stage and, you know, do their thing in front of a lot of people and make that bargain for themselves. I think that's a personal decision. And I have no judgment on that. But I think the broader point that I want to make or explore with you has nothing to do with like, good or bad or judgment. It's more a reflection of where our culture is at right now. It's a very different relationship with what we would traditionally call PEDs because of things like peptides. And even to your point, human growth hormone, like a somebody who just wants to repair their neck, like, is

• 50:06Rich Roll?

  that a perform, like, should they be barred for life because in the offseason when they were injured, they needed something to like, help them improve their recovery? That's a conversation that, you know, has valid points on both sides of it. But I think we're entering an era in which we're developing a different cultural relationship with these things.

• 50:28Kelly Starrett?

  Does it normalize?

• 50:29Rich Roll?

  It's normal. Yeah, like, the Enhanced Games normalizes this use, which was the entire reason for doing it. Because this corporation that put it's a private, you know, entity, it's unregulated, like, they want to sell their enhancements. Like, that's the entire value. That was why they they're doing this. But When you reflect upon the self-optimization culture and kind of obsession and fascination that we have right now, and then you look at these biochemical developments with peptides, and normal people are using these things.

• 51:04Kelly Starrett?

  Unregulated, unmanaged, unsupported, like garage gym, let me just work this out, like holy shit.

• 51:13Rich Roll?

  But now it's sort of out in the open, you know, it's not the guy in the locker room at Gold's Gym who's secretly handing the bodybuilder a bag when no one's looking, like it's out in the open, it's commerce on the internet and it's being broadcast and livestreamed through the ENHANCE Games, and that is, you know, to again use the word trickle down, like how does that trickle down into the 40-year-old guy who is still remembering how he could throw a touchdown pass and wishes he could do it again, you know what I mean? And is that, is that a bad thing, is it a good thing? How should we be thinking about these things?

• 51:50Kelly Starrett?

  Let me go a step further.

• 51:50Rich Roll?

  How should the 14-year-old aspirant athlete be thinking about his relationship to sport and, you know, his future as an athlete in the context of what that person is seeing online right now?

• 52:04Kelly Starrett?

  Let me make two points. One is, when I met my wife Juliette, we were at the World Championships for whitewater paddling, sponsored by Camel Cigarette South Africa.

• 52:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because Camel used to sponsor like all these like raid and like I think even like some of these adventure races and stuff like that, which is hilarious.

• 52:26Kelly Starrett?

  So I obviously was so evolved that I was like, I'm not gonna take a free trip to Chile as a broke slalom athlete in a sport no one cares about and promote the cigarette brand, like that didn't even occur to me. And I will say that we're on the same slope here, right? And there were stacks of cigarettes on the table every dinner, and we would take them and then bribe our way through South America with cigarettes. So on one level, I want to say that, you know, That athlete position is really untenable. I'm broke. How do I have health insurance? How do I, you know, the system hasn't set me up to retire. So that that's a thing.

• 53:07Kelly Starrett?

  The real question here, and I think what's interesting is, well, let's apply that logic. So the enhanced games, everyone's over 18, everyone's consenting, duh. But if we take that to nicotine, we are seeing an epidemic of young people, young athletes, take buying zins, using zins, using these pouch nicotines, massive amounts of these huge energy drinks with huge amounts of. And what we're seeing is sort of the greenwashing of it, but it's called sport washing. And I think that's what the the enhanced games did. It sport washed a lot of these sort of gray areas, untested, unregulated

• 53:49Kelly Starrett?

  things. And I'm not saying that everything they did was, I know they were under the care of physician and testosterone is a great, safe supplement for the right person. However, you're right, when you have a generation of kids, what's our morality and what are our ethics towards this generation? What are we normalizing in terms of, again, you think that you're elite, but you're not elite because you just didn't do the thing. And we, in the case of when we see influencers talking about the no tropics, the effects of brain focus, and then kids at college, and again, this is firsthand witnessing, this isn't second. We're seeing the use of these zins among college athletes is astounding.

• 54:30Kelly Starrett?

  And where kids are packing multiple 15 milligrams, which is like pack of cigarettes in your mouth. And they do that multiple times a day and highly addictive. But so and so influencer told me it was safe and good for my brain and I'm optimized. And so the really, we don't have this filter. Meanwhile, the gum disease. The, the heart problems of this huge amounts of nicotine. This is the same conversation. And one, it's worth, worth having. Um, do I think we will learn anything from the, what did we learn from the, we were entertained. We saw old gladiators.

• 55:06Rich Roll?

  It was the Colosseum.

• 55:07Kelly Starrett?

  It was the Colosseum.

• 55:08Rich Roll?

  It's the new Colosseum. It seems to be of two minds. Either the lackluster performances are a commentary on the fact that everybody at an elite level is on these things. And that's why the performances at the enhanced games were not so impressive. Uh, or it's that they don't really work in the way that we thought they did, but.

• 55:31Kelly Starrett?

  And maybe those athletes needed them when they were at the peak of their game.

• 55:34Rich Roll?

  I believe these athletes were only on like a two and a half month protocol or something like that. So, you know, listen, you need to train on these things for a longer period of time. I think to reap the benefits. I don't know, but.

• 55:46Kelly Starrett?

  In Canada, I have heard firsthand from people's families that elderly people going to do a big adventure. The doctor would be like, let's put you on HGH for six weeks and they prescribe it. And this person was able to go be an adventurer, have less pain, come out. Because the doctor prescribed a course of HGH for six weeks. I'm like, that is the best use of a pet I've ever had. Grandma went hiking in the mountains. Like that's, that's awesome. That is not the same thing of what we're talking about here. And when particularly first principles are displaced. And the message is, I don't have to do this work and I don't have to put in this time and I don't have to do all these things.

• 56:31Kelly Starrett?

  And I'm, don't have to be genetically gifted, then it cheapens this experience. It cheap, it definitely cheapens. And I'll tell you, it's real hard to use performance enhancing drugs these days. It's hard. The biological passport is real good. And you're seeing, there are countries we won't name, but you can imagine that these countries go dark. They train up, then their athletes become mutants and then they come back to the Olympics. And we see that happen for sure. So drugs in sport, if there's an incentive, um, Castor Semenya is a great example. She is the biological woman who had a high, she's, you know, high natural testosterone.

• 57:09Kelly Starrett?

  The track and field was like, no, you can't run the 800, right? You're, you can run a long distance, but you can't run the 800. So I was like, this is crazy, you know? And I went and watched her run at the Prefontaine. And she was tiny. She was a tiny woman. I was like disappointed. I was like, oh, I thought I was gonna see some hooked up person. She doesn't even have any of the top eight hundred meter times in the world. Those are all done by East German women in the peak, you know, phase. So it is not a level playing field. If you chose the wrong parents and have the wrong genetics and the wrong motivation and the wrong coaching and you get injured, like, it's not the, we're never, it's never been a level playing field.

• 57:51Rich Roll?

  If you're a swimmer and you have size 15 feet.

• 57:53Kelly Starrett?

  That's probably gonna inure to your benefit, right? That there are some people and bodies that just are freakish. And simultaneously, I guess we have to ask the question, what is it we value as a culture? You know, how do we protect those innocents? So they can come through and make good decisions for themselves? And there's Alan Lim, again, we're coming back to him. He has a great saying is you cannot cheat your biology, full stop. You cannot cheat your biology. Your physiology cannot be cheated. You don't get something for nothing.

• 58:27Rich Roll?

  As somebody who's parented young athletes through this confusing world, what is the message that you have for the parents out there? Who are trying to make good decisions for their kids? Who they know are seeing all kinds of strange stuff on social media? There's so many fitness influencers out there and such a push around aesthetics. And that doesn't even consider like this whole new world of enhancements and all this sort of stuff that is like filtering into the awareness of the mind that is not even fully formed. So how do you help your kids make good decisions?

• 59:09Rich Roll?

  When they're being impulso and influenced in, in, in those ways on these addictive supercomputers that we all have?

• 59:16Kelly Starrett?

  Someone can probably control some things in their household, not every household. And that's not even.

• 59:23Kelly Starrett?

  Do your kids eat breakfast? Do you eat dinners together? Are you feeling with Whole Foods? Did your kids even eat a vegetable or a fruit today? Chances are not. Um, you know, where's their caffeine consumption? Can you help say, hey, we go to bed at 11 because we wake up at 7? That means lights are off at 7, 11. We all agree. You start to set standards with this and you just can't ghost write it and hope that it works out anymore. You have to be much more aware and intentional because if you're not the voice and your family isn't the model, well, the kids will solve that problem somewhere else. Why are kids needing three energy drinks? I just heard of an 11 year old or 12 year old drinking two or three Monsters a day. He's a skater. You know, like, where do you go from there?

• 1:00:08Kelly Starrett?

  That's kind of like skate culture too. Where do you go from there? You know, so how are we going to? Keep in mind that the probably the most important thing you can do is say, I love you. I'm so proud of you. That was so fun. And I'm going to swear on this podcast, you can bleep me out. Shut the fuck up in the stands and do not talk in the car on the way home. Create a safe environment where you're like, it is so enjoyable. I want to ride home with my dad because we put on the music and we vibe and he doesn't ask me about it. And we have such a good time and we make it this enjoyable process. That's sort of agnostic to performance and we stop carrying our, our expectations of high level performance and eliteness on our children. We fuel them.

• 1:00:53Kelly Starrett?

  We hang out with them. We talk, we're not their coaches. We are their cheerleaders. And this is most important. This came from Carmen Bott, who is a specialist in Canada on return to play after ACLs. And she said, your job is chief reminder. Your kid is not an elite pro athlete. So I think that, so for example, with Caroline, I would make her breakfast every day. Why? Because it gives me enjoyment. But I know that she's gonna leave the house with a fruit, a vegetable, maybe there's a probiotic food and a protein and I'm covered, right? One meal as I've controlled. And I discovered that sleep is so important and she went to a hard school and she's a badass,

• 1:01:36Kelly Starrett?

  that I would let her sleep to the very end. And guess what she didn't want to do first thing in the morning? Sit down and eat a big breakfast. Do you want to sit down and eat a big breakfast first in the morning? But she wanted to eat first period, so I would make her breakfast to go and we discovered that I had better adherence. She ate breakfast, she got the micronutrients she got in, right? And I got to help control that and shape that. And then we took it with her so she could do that. So that's the kind of thinking where I got to protect her sleep. Instead of waking up her half hour earlier and forcing her to eat some breakfast she didn't want to eat at that moment, where we could sleep a little bit longer, she could take this meal with her. You know, I think one of them, you want to talk about a performance enhancing drug? This is, everyone get ready, there's this thing called Grooms. Have you seen this?

• 1:02:19Kelly Starrett?

  The Grooms, the gummy bears, the green gummy bears? Okay, I'm not sponsored by Grooms, but I want to be sponsored by Grooms. So Grooms is just a green powder gummy bear. That is highly palatable and just like all Athletic Greens, all Greens, it's just a vitamin. Let's just treat it like a vitamin. But your kids don't get any fiber. Your kids don't get any vitamin C, your kids don't get any micronutrients and minerals. And this highly palatable gummy bear, green powder candy snack gummy, is the adherence goes through the roof. You send your kids with one of those, at least, it's not a food, but at least we're putting something into the system to water the plants. It's like putting Miracle Grow on the thing. You still need sunlight.

• 1:03:04Kelly Starrett?

  But that, they just sold to Unilever for 1.2 billion dollars. But of all the stuff I've seen in the last decade, that is the most cutting edge, behavior changing thing that's come out because I can make sure that my kid eats something that is good for them in a packaged way that they can. Be highly reproducible for years and years and years.

• 1:03:24Rich Roll?

  It's the 2026 version of the Flintstones multivitamin.

• 1:03:28Kelly Starrett?

  Well, those kids are never gonna be elite because they didn't eat the Flintstone vitamin. Maybe that's why we're elite. Well, why you are elite.

• 1:03:36Rich Roll?

  So in the workout this morning, you walked me through all of these warm-up exercises that were very joyful and about play. So I think a good way to kind of bring this conversation to a close is to leave the audience with some version of that that they can begin to practice and incorporate into their lives.

• 1:03:58Kelly Starrett?

  We have ruined the gym experience. It's, there's some person in the middle with their camera filming themselves. It's lonely. There's so many good examples of physical culture on the internet. Of people dancing, of people playing with tennis balls, of rhythmic drills. If you took the first 15 minutes of your gym time, and you need to get hot and sweaty and prepped and awake anyway, and we could do breath work and we could do, we could do eye training and tracking. If you played spike ball, right? If you just engaged with having to move in a funny way, played frisbee like we talked about, you would see that you would

• 1:04:41Kelly Starrett?

  have a better workout. It would be fun and you'd get to create a community around that. There's so much cool stuff on the internet. I'm so inspired. I get so many good ideas. I will point at a friend named Rhett Larson who is a incredible coach. He used to be at EXO's. He's the German national volleyball team women's coach, and he has a thing called No Zombies. And what he saw was that for years, kids would just zombie through the warm-ups. And adults zombie, I have to touch my toes, you know. And he was like, this isn't getting what we want. So he created an entire ecosystem of play, of games, where he got invested as a coach again. He wasn't phoning it in, and his athletes performed better. And I think you could go on the internet and be inspired by something you see and be

• 1:05:24Kelly Starrett?

  like, I'm gonna learn that. I'm gonna play that. I'm gonna throw a tennis ball against the wall and play Butts Up. Do you remember that game? Right? That was just like, you would throw a ball and if you didn't catch it, you had to like, go up against, this is not a politically correct game and this is again the 70s. You would bend over and then whoever threw the ball got to peg you in the butt with the ball. But what it did was shorten the distance between you making errors because you didn't want to get pegged and it incentivized you to catch the ball. That idea of play, of engagement, of like, we have lost that section as adults. And we know that everyone learns better through play. Like, play is the miracle drug. And let's put a little bit of play.

• 1:06:06Kelly Starrett?

  What I'd say is if you're on a bike, I mean, do you remember these little rides where you'd sprint to the town sign? You sprint to the town line sign? Those are games within games. So we play a game on the rowing machine. This is the worst game ever. Rowing is terrible. It's suffering. It's awful. And we see who can get closest to the 500 meter, who can get closest to the 1,000. And we play it like golf. Whoever's closest gets a point. So there's so many ways where you can start to gamify. Don't lose the narrative. But in that first 15 minutes, I think there's a lot of ways to explore, move. Um, there's a gentleman named The Fitness Marshall. And he has a YouTube channel full of dances. He's a local kid here. I have used The Fitness Marshall to warm up my athletes more times than you can shake a stick at.

• 1:06:52Kelly Starrett?

  Because dancing's fun and moves you in funny ways and you gotta load and rhythm and four minutes or five minutes later, you're sweating and grinning. So let's do more of that.

• 1:07:00Rich Roll?

  All right. Awesome. More dan- more dancing.

• 1:07:03Kelly Starrett?

  Dance Marshall. Fitness Marshall.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  The Fitness Marshall on YouTube?

• 1:07:06Kelly Starrett?

  Yep.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:07:07Kelly Starrett?

  Have your mind blown. He has 14 million followers.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:07:10Kelly Starrett?

  Yeah, you're gonna have your mind blown. Caleb is a genius.

• 1:07:13Rich Roll?

  It's wild how there are people that can have that many, uh, people following them and then you've never heard of them. And you're like, you know, sort of in this same space.

• 1:07:21Kelly Starrett?

  But I am. I am. Kelly's all right. Well, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Tens of followers.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  I love you, man. You're such a force for good. And I just appreciate you being such a grounded, uh, source of trust in a very confusing world. Um, you haven't lost your mind in this crazy insanity that we're all trying to survive right now. Um, and you're my go-to guy on all things.

• 1:07:47Kelly Starrett?

  No.

• 1:07:48Rich Roll?

  Fitness, movement, mobility, stability, strength. And I do want to say publicly that you have been behind the scenes and unbelievable support system for me. Like, when I came out of surgery, you were just. On it like you need to do this and you've sent me that electro stim thing and here's how you use it like you've just really taken care of me in a in a way that like you didn't have to do that man and it just speaks to your character and who you are as a person.

• 1:08:15Kelly Starrett?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:08:15Rich Roll?

  And I just adore you and and your wife and really appreciate you basically spending almost an entire day with me today. So, thank you.

• 1:08:24Kelly Starrett?

  Thank you. This is all I think about. It's so fun. You're really important to us and to the world and so we need you back. So, very selfishly, I was like the faster I can get Rich back to being rich, then I do better, right? And I just want to say, Rich is dead. Long live Rich.

• 1:08:40Rich Roll?

  Thank you, brother.

• 1:08:41Kelly Starrett?

  Thank you, man.

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  Peace.