What Nick Butter Learned Running A Marathon In Every Single Country

Completing a marathon is a noble accomplishment. How about completing a marathon on every continent? A feat of a lifetime. Now imagine completing a marathon in every single country in the world. Impossible? Meet Nick Butter — an enterprising young Brit who recently reframed human potential, becoming the first person in history to crush 196 marathons in all 196 countries. A world-record setting feat noteworthy for daunting financial and logistical challenges that often dwarfed those athletic, it took Nick and his team two years to plan and 674 days to complete — an astounding accomplishment that entailed running 3 marathons, in 3 new countries a week, every week, for 96 weeks, blowing through 10 passports and 455 flights along the way. More Jason Bourne than Forrest Gump, Nick ran through 15 war zones and endured several Argo-esque border crossings. He was mugged twice and repeatedly attacked by dogs, even going so far as to run 335 laps around a car park on the Marshall Islands to avoid that country’s overrun population of rabid canines. He had his luggage stolen. He ran in extreme cold and unbearable heat, oftentimes starting marathons at two or three in the morning to avoid 140-degree weather. He repeatedly succumbed to food poisoning and kidney infections. This list goes on. But ultimately, Nick prevailed -- and learned a few things about life along the way. What drives a man to attempt such a feat? In Nick’s case, it wasn’t fame. It wasn't notoriety. It was something far greater. In 2016, while enduring Marathon des Sables deep in the Moroccan desert, Nick struck up a friendship with fellow ultrarunner Kevin Webber — a man given just two years to live, courtesy of incurable advanced prostate cancer. Kevin’s courageous life embrace inspired Nick to rethink his career path in finance. Empowered him to tackle an impossible goal. And motivated him to raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer solutions along the way. This is a conversation about the physical, mental, and emotional strength it took to conquer a challenge of breathtaking magnitude. It’s about the obstacles faced and overcome. The lessons learned. And the importance of giving back. It’s about audacious dreams. Unbridled adventure. And the courage required to jump into the unknown without a safety net. But more than anything, this is a conversation about this fleeting, shared experience we call life — and what we can all learn from Nick's example about ourselves and our place in the world. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Note: This podcast was recorded pre-pandemic (on January 28, 2020). Reminder: I recently created a Facebook Group for fans of the show to to congregate. Click here to join. I think you're going to fall in love with Nick. I sure did. 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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• 1:05Speaker 01

  We are the lucky ones, and yet we don't do enough with it. You know, I want people to travel, I want people to see the world, I want people to have that view. And I often find that a lot of hate and negativity comes from misunderstanding. And if we see the world, and if we experience more cultures, or religions, or beliefs, then maybe that hate will be reduced. And I hope, and you say that, you know, what do people want to get out of my talks when I speak to them? And it's not having something in your life, or going to somebody's funeral, or seeing something bad happen on the news for you to wake up and realize that every moment that we have of every day is so privileged. We are, especially us in the Western world, in this privileged society, we have so much that we can give and we can do, even if it's just, you know, spending more time with your family, or saying to your loved ones that you love them more, or going and doing that

• 1:47Speaker 01

  pottery course, or that singing lesson, or whatever it is that you're putting off. You know, the tomorrow may not happen. Coming right back to the beginning message that Kev taught me, which is not waiting for something to happen in your life to kick you up the backside, to do something. You have an opportunity to do it now. And whether you're 10 years old or 80 years old, you probably have something that you want to do, and you have an opportunity to do it, even if you, like me, can't afford it, wasn't fit enough, really. Just go for it.

• 2:12Rich Roll?

  That's Nick Butter, and this is the Rich Roll Podcast.

• 2:27Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. Earth to listeners, how you guys doing? This is your host, Rich Roll. Welcome to the podcast. Okay. As has become my refrain, I hope this finds you well. I hope it finds you safe, hopefully home for those able to sequester and practicing responsible physical distancing while maintaining your important social connections. For those who are suffering, my thoughts are with you. And with all who are selflessly putting themselves in harm's way for our benefit, much love and respect to all our healthcare, emergency response, supply chain,

• 3:10Rich Roll?

  grocery and delivery workers, to the companies pivoting production lines to produce PPE, the scientists studying solutions and the philanthropists filling governmental gaps. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. One quick piece of housekeeping. I recently created a Facebook group for fans of the podcast. My intention being to basically help facilitate your ability to connect with each other. And I've been a bit remiss in announcing it. So you can find it and join at facebook.com/groups/richrollpodcast. And I'll link that up in the show notes. Second, I appreciate all the great feedback on my recent conversation with Charles Eisenstein.

• 3:54Rich Roll?

  And my intention as of this moment is to continue to host similarly themed, remotely recorded episodes over the coming weeks. But today, we resume our regular programming, a conversation recorded well in advance of this pandemic with Nick Butter.

• 4:14Rich Roll?

  Nick is an amazing guy. You guys are in for a treat. He is quite the enterprising young Brit who recently reframed human potential by setting a world record, becoming the first person in history to run a marathon in every single country. 196 marathons in all 196 nations. It's an astounding feat that entailed visiting roughly two countries a week for two years, blowing through 10 passports and 455 flights along the way. It was something that was also at times more Jason Bourne than Forrest Gump. Nick ended

• 4:53Rich Roll?

  up running through 15 war zones. He endured several Argo-esque border crossings. He was mugged twice, repeatedly attacked by dogs, even went so far as to run 335 laps around a car park on the Marshall Islands to avoid that country's overrun population of rabid canines. He had his luggage stolen. He ran in extreme cold and unbearable heat, oftentimes starting marathons at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning to avoid 140-degree weather. He repeatedly succumbed to food poisoning, a kidney infection. I mean, come on, you guys. Having heard the entire saga up close, I still have difficulty wrapping my brain around what this man has accomplished. And I've got a few more thoughts I'd like to share before we dive in. But

• 5:38Rich Roll?

  first.

• 5:46Rich Roll?

  Okay, back to Nick. So what drives a man to attempt such an insane feat? Well, in Nick's case, it wasn't fame, it wasn't notoriety, but it was actually something far greater. In 2016, in the Moroccan desert, while he was in the midst of enduring the marathon desable, Nick struck up a friendship with fellow ultra-runner Kevin Webber, who is this guy who had been diagnosed with incurable advanced prostate cancer two years prior, and given as little as two years to live at that point. And Kevin's courageousness, his refusal to give up. Inspired Nick and ultimately motivated him to walk away from his career in finance

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  and tackle this impossible goal and raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer solutions along the way. So, this is a conversation about all of that. It's about the physical, mental, and emotional strength it took to conquer this challenge. It's about the obstacles faced, the lessons learned, and the importance of giving back. It's about audacious dreams, unbridled adventure, and the courage required to jump into the unknown without a safety net. But more than anything, this is a conversation about this fleeting, shared experience we call life. One man's effort to dispense with comfort

• 7:15Rich Roll?

  zones and make the most of it, and what we can all learn from his example about ourselves and our place in the world. So, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the incredible Nick Butter.

• 7:33Rich Roll?

  Nice to finally meet you, man.

• 7:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, you too.

• 7:36Rich Roll?

  Thank you for making the trek out here.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  No, not at all. I mean, who wouldn't?

• 7:42Rich Roll?

  Well, here's the thing. I was thinking, I was thinking about you this morning, and part of the inspiration for this whole adventure is this encounter, this friendship that you struck up with this guy Kevin, and you know, this mantra that kind of repeats in your head, that loops in your head about the fact that life is short and life is precious, and you didn't want to look back in old age and have regrets about stones unturned. And here we are, two days from...

• 8:22Rich Roll?

  You know, Kobe crashing and, you know, nine people perishing in a helicopter accident, literally about

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Close by, right?

• 8:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very close by, like a mile and a half.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That close.

• 8:33Rich Roll?

  As the crow flies. Like, it's literally right over the hill over here. In the wake of that and the sadness and, you know, the reflection on a life very well-lived is a global conversation about the preciousness of life and how short it is and how fragile.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  It's just such a shame. And the same for Kev, really, that someone has to die or be told they're dying in order for the conversation to start, you know?

• 8:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  But hopefully through a bit of the running that I've done, maybe we'll keep talking about it, you know?

• 9:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, congratulations.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 9:06Rich Roll?

  You just completed this whole thing in November, right? So it's still very fresh, this

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:12Rich Roll?

  Two years of being out there and the many years leading up to it of preparation and logistics. Like, it's just, I can't even wrap my head around what you've accomplished. And it's a feat that has come up a couple of times on this podcast because I know it's something that Dean Karnazes has always wanted to do. And the last time he was on the show, I was like, come on, man, what are you doing? And then it was like, Nick's out there doing it. I think you were just about to complete it at that point. And so

• 9:40Speaker 01

  I've literally just spoken to him

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, did you?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Two days ago in London, yeah.

• 9:44Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah? What did he say?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  And he said, he said, he said, "Tell Rich that I bow down to you." And I said, "I said, it really should be the other way," in which we swapped and I bowed. But he, um, yeah, he's, you know, he's a legend. And he will do it. I know he will.

• 10:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  And he'll smash it. It's just, I know how long it takes to plan a, you know, we did it, but it's a bodge job, you know? When Dean does it, it won't be quite how we do it.

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  I don't think that anybody could do something like that without there being just, you know, countless Things that come up, unforeseen obstacles and cataclysms that throw you off course. I mean, it's just too, you know, enormous of an undertaking for something like that not to happen.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just, I'm just pleased we got to the end. I cannot tell you how many times we genuinely believed it wasn't going to happen.

• 10:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 01

  It wasn't a case of, oh, no, we'll be all right. We'll just throw some money at it or we'll just throw some people at it. You know, every possible option you have, which gets you through most things.

• 10:42Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  We, we just, we just came so unstuck so quickly.

• 10:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Um, and then it was just this kind of snowball effect of things going wrong. And then the multiplying of not having enough money, not having enough time. And then, you know, six weeks from the end, my, we had the, the first of many phone calls from my dad, who is a legend and has managed to do everything for me on this journey in terms of flights. So he was responsible for, took the job, I think I pushed the job on to him really, um, for booking all of my flights and to getting me from A and B and C and D and then all the way through. Um, and he called me and said, we can't do it. You know, this was six weeks from the end of the trip. He said, we cannot do it. And I, we were angry, we were crying, we were, you know, we've come this far. And I was just thinking, oh my word, what are we going to do? And, um, and it went on for a few more weeks of saying, we can't do it.

• 11:32Rich Roll?

  Despite the many years leading up to the undertaking of all the logistical preparations, all the, you know, I can't imagine how many phone calls with bureaucratic agencies about getting visas and permissions and all the like, and you think you've got it all sorted.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:48Rich Roll?

  And stuff just happens, right?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I, I imagine that before we left, when we got to the start line, as you would with most races or events, you'd prep to the point that you're ready.

• 11:57Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  But it was so, so not that.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  We got to the start line and we thought, well, we're probably okay for a good few weeks, you know? Um, and we had as many flights as we could booked and we knew what we wanted to do, but we really had so much up in the air, you know, we didn't know how we were going to get into certain countries. We didn't, it was just hope.

• 12:13Rich Roll?

  You couldn't get that. Sorted out way in advance, like figuring out, you know, the visas and the permit. I mean, I know it's tricky. There are certain countries where, you know, they're just going to say no, or, you know, it's going to be close to impossible to get in there.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  And the problem is, it's really volatile. So, you know, even if, even if we could, which it isn't possible to do it all in one go at the beginning.

• 12:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Even if we could do that, what's to say it won't change? You know, and the amount of times we've had, oh yeah, no, that visa will be fine for years, you know, it was on the list of green. It was, it was, it was one of the places that we thought we wouldn't have a problem. And then we did. And that was basically.

• 12:48Rich Roll?

  Because of some political skirmish or something like that that happens.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Politics, violence, protests, flight cancellations, airlines going bust.

• 12:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  You name it.

• 12:59Rich Roll?

  And you don't have room for error. When you're trying to do, I mean, let's just break it down. You're trying to do essentially two to three marathons a week in two to three countries, basically to stay on pace.

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, we said, we're going to aim for three countries a week, every week, knowing that we were going to have slip ups. And so, you know, sometimes I was doing five a week because we were making up time.

• 13:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  And sometimes we were doing one because I couldn't get off of an island, for example.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  You know, it wasn't just, it wasn't just.

• 13:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:30Rich Roll?

  And, and you left the trickiest countries, it seemed like, until the very end, the Middle East, right?

• 13:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, I would love to say that was by design. And I actually had a bit of a view that I wanted to leave some of the dangerous ones towards the end because if I was going to get kidnapped or killed or locked up, at least I've seen a lot of the world beforehand.

• 13:48Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  And I, and I thought, well, you know, I don't want to go and do these ones and tick them off and have the relief to then, you know, something happen. But also, it wasn't a case that we, we just couldn't get access to those places at the right time. And, and had we got access and something gone wrong, then it would have screwed up the rest of the flights along the line. And, and that would have had huge financial implications. So it was tactical on one part and kind of just, just wanting to, wanting to see the world before anything happened.

• 14:15Rich Roll?

  So Syria, Afghanistan, Iran.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:20Rich Roll?

  Lebanon, Israel. I would imagine all of those were super tricky, especially, you, you kind of have to leave Israel. Until almost the end, right? Because if you go to Israel, then you can't go to Lebanon, right? They're not gonna let you in.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  You're on the money there. Exactly that. We left it till the penultimate. So final one was in Athens in Greece, obviously, home of Marathon. And I, we went, we went there on the November the 10th. And the one before that was Israel. And when I set foot on Greek soil, we still didn't know if they were gonna be okay with me going to Israel. You know, because, yeah, you think it's okay, but you don't know.

• 14:58Rich Roll?

  Until you're there.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  And it's that last.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  So lots of, lots of like Argo-esque experiences. You know, when you're trying to board a flight or get through customs. Where you're biting your nails, thinking, are they gonna let me in?

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yes, I would say very Argo-esque, but slightly less glamorous. And, and more kind of just being in dirty clothes, not knowing really what time of day it is. And I cannot tell you how many times I've got to a country and I don't know which one I'm in. That's how quickly they went. You know, I was standing at an immigration booth over and over again. And they'd say, so where have you flown in from? And I couldn't answer them, you know, just because I was so exhausted. And then you get either put in a cell or you get questioned for hours. Even in countries that are okay, because I've got visas in my passports that don't make me look particularly innocent.

• 15:42Rich Roll?

  I, you know, I certainly haven't undertaking any, undertaken anything, you know, as vast and incomprehensible as, as you. But I have had some experiences in the Middle East. One in particular, trying to get into Pakistan. That was, you know, it was, it was like, you feel like you're in a Jason Bourne movie. Like, it's very strange. Like, I remember being greeted before I got off the plane in Karachi. And before I even got to customs or baggage, I was greeted by two soldiers who didn't speak English, who demanded to see my passport, who just stopped me. I was the only Westerner on the plane coming in from Dubai. And they're like, basically saying, give me your passport.

• 16:25Rich Roll?

  And you're like, this is one of those, like, is this okay? Like, once they have my passport, I don't know what's gonna happen. They take me down to customs and there's a lot of, you know, sort of bickering in a language I don't understand. And it's, it's super nerve wracking. And you think, what is going on here? Like Argo.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, you feel guilty even though you're not.

• 16:43Rich Roll?

  You know, like, what did I do? I'm just here. And then they took me into a room, you know, and I'm like, well, this could be it. You know, you don't, you just don't know. I mean, it was all fine and all of that, but.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  I suppose the beauty of doing so many and so quickly is that you get that so often that you kind of become desensitized to it.

• 17:00Rich Roll?

  Right, you're like, oh, here we go again.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  And when you've got, you know, another AK-47 pointed at you and you haven't got your passport, you know, and you think, oh, it's just, it's just a Wednesday. But that, at the beginning, you know, it was terrifying. And then other times I've had people that, you know, these, they've got their weapons on, they have their uniform on, they have their badges, their helmets there. They're looking very intimidating and they then come over and like a huge smile lights up and they shake me on the hand and they know who I am. And you just think like all of my preconceived ideas of everything that's come through. You have no idea whether it's going to be brilliant or scary.

• 17:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, certainly I imagine it completely, you know, sort of changed your, your view of the world and humanity. How could you, you know, how could you not be completely transformed after, you know, this experience?

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And everybody warned me at the beginning, you know, this will change how you see things, this will change how you, you view the world. And, and I thought, yeah, I understand that, but I didn't understand that. It was only when I finished, do I now have this new worldview of, of everything that's going on. And even to be honest, it's just kind of compounded my belief already when I started and from, from Kevin's message about, we have this precious time that we shouldn't waste, but also there's so many people that don't have the opportunity. You know, whether it's in Britain, in the US, in other countries that aren't as wealthy or affluent. People are miss, you know, we are lucky, we are the lucky ones and yet we don't do enough with it.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  And so coming back, you know, 54 countries in Africa, more or less all of those countries I've, I saw situations which I, I just didn't realize existed, you know? And then on the other hand, which I'm a big advocate for as well, our planet is in a really great place compared to how it has been, you know? Poverty over, in the last 20 years, people living below the poverty line has halved, which is just outstanding. In my lifetime, the amount of people, but, but then you go and travel and you think, hmm, I'm a bit torn. And so this whole, this whole world of, this whole worldview has completely changed me. And I've just got a lot of things on my to-do list now that I want to do.

• 18:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like what?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Ah, I wanna, so I've started this, this, uh, this charity which we're, we're kicking off now, um, called the One Nine Six Foundation, which is off the back of the, the Running the World One Nine Six trip and I, I wanna, I wanna do some more. I wanna help in a small ways, not start a whole new charity and make it, you know, there's lots of charities out there, but just be able to fund and, and support some other people that are doing good stuff. And, um, there's that, there's that thing. And then there's also the thing that I want to inspire other people to do the same thing. You know, I want people to travel. I want people to see the world. I want people to have that, that view. And I often find that it's, it's a lot of hate and negativity comes from misunderstanding. And if we see the world and if we experience more cultures or religions or beliefs, then, then maybe that hate will be reduced.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  And so when I'm visiting schools now for the next year on my speaking tour and trying to share this journey, I want people to realize that, you know, don't just sit behind a computer and live your world through your tiny phone in your hand. Like, let's go and do something else.

• 19:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, it's very easy to just descend into pessimism and despair. If you're scrolling and looking at the news and thinking, you know, we're on the verge of an apocalypse and nobody's talking, talking to each other in a productive way. And we're seeing the breakdown of Western civilization unfolding right before our very eyes. And, and yet there is an indelible truth that, that, you know, that we are in so many ways, like this is the best time to be alive.

• 20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:23Rich Roll?

  You know, and there are so many great things to celebrate and, and beauty in the world. And, and, you know, to be able to develop a, a deeper reservoir of compassion for humanity by virtue of that tactile, you know, one-on-one experience that I'm sure you had a zillion times over over the course of the last couple of years. I mean, you can't put a price tag on that.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:45Rich Roll?

  So it's almost your responsibility to, to share that, I think.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  I, I feel the same. And, and, you know, I went into it knowing that people said, oh, what, what if, you know, what if you spend all your money and what if you spend all this time doing it and then you don't make it? And my view was that-

• 20:57Rich Roll?

  Your banker friends.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And my, and my family.

• 21:01Rich Roll?

  Basically from the pub, telling you.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, telling me, and you gotta risk it, you gotta risk everything. But the beauty is, is that, you know, when you do something- That you love and that it doesn't matter, you know, if nobody buys my book, if nobody wants to watch a documentary, if nobody cares about what I'm saying afterwards, I've still had a great time in the process. It's not like I've done something that I was earning money and didn't care about, you know, it's I'm using money and it's given me this incredible worldview that I can't properly articulate yet.

• 21:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Um, so I, I feel incredibly lucky, but I'm also kind of impatient to, to tell everybody else to do something similar.

• 21:31Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, let's take it back to the beginning. So grew up in the UK.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  Dorset?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Dorset.

• 21:38Rich Roll?

  Dorset, yes. Uh, active kid, skier, right? First?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I was doing, I think like most kids, I lived out in the country in the middle of nowhere. You have to do sport because there isn't anything else to do. Um, my, my friends lived all over the place and I was either cycling 10, 15 miles to get to school or to my friends. And then started running, but didn't really think anything of it. It was just a means of transport.

• 22:03Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And, and then I got into skiing. I was in the, in the under 19 snow sports, English team, did lots of bits of racing, did some instructing. Um, but then I had the voice of my, my dad on my shoulder saying, get a real job.

• 22:16Rich Roll?

  Time to get on with it.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, come on. You've got to earn some money one day. And, and he was right because, you know, ski careers are very short. They're, you know, you, you, you're kind of outdated very quickly, even if you're the best. And I wasn't. Um, and so I got a real job, finance, banking, selling my soul.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  In London?

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, in London. I, to be fair, they were based all over the places, you know, I had multiple jobs, but yeah, London jobs. Um, and, and I, yeah, I, I enjoyed it because it was earning money and I was living the, the life where you buy new shoes and jackets and you think that that's what you need to be doing. And then, you know, you look back and you think, oh my word, what was I doing?

• 22:53Rich Roll?

  How long did you do that for?

• 22:55Speaker 01

  It was, uh, seven years.

• 22:58Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. It's longer than I thought.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Too long.

• 23:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  Much too long. It was, it was a big chunk of, you know, my life and, uh, and, you know, I don't want to. As much as I I kind of damn it in my mind, it still earned me money and it allowed me to do things. But if I could tell my kids, my future kids, my unborn kids at the moment to to do something, it wouldn't be to do something that you don't enjoy for money. You know, go and do something that you enjoy. And if if you enjoy it enough, you do it well, then maybe the money will come.

• 23:27Rich Roll?

  Right. These pendulums tend to swing back and forth, though. Like, the kids, the kids of people like, like you and me, then they go, they go into investment banking. You know what I mean? They're like, enough of this, like hippie, you know, it's all love kind of stuff. Like, I need to make some cash.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's so, so true, so true.

• 23:44Rich Roll?

  So it'll be interesting to see how that plays out, you know? Our best intentions are often foiled.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  I, yeah, maybe, yeah, you're completely right. And that's gone through my mind. But all I can do is hope and guide a little bit. But maybe that will happen and it will happen. You know, I still had that. And I'm still in this point now. So.

• 24:02Rich Roll?

  You're young. So, so you're, you're, you're doing the banking thing and that whole lifestyle, you know, hammering checks and the whole, and the whole thing. Where does the, where does the itch, like, at some point, I would suspect, and I'm projecting, but I would imagine, like, you start to get a little sort of discontent, or, or, you know, a sense of not feeling settled in your path.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think, yeah, absolutely discontent, but also not, you know, you get, you get to the point where you're getting, you know, you're going to die one day. And is this what I want to be doing until that point? You know, I started to think that more and more. And also, when you're not sleeping well enough, you're not eating well enough, and you're commuting, and you're in smog and trains and traffic, and you realize that your whole life is based around this job that you don't particularly enjoy. You know, I didn't actively not enjoy it. But looking back, it was just, it's just not me. And if you, if you asked any of my other colleagues at the time, they will tell you, it wasn't for me.

• 25:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, well, I mean, sitting across from you, looking at you, it's hard to imagine you, you know.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I'm going to tell you that was a coincidence. Exactly. I don't.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  Listen, I was a lawyer for 20 years. Like, I get it.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  I, I, you know, I can't stand that, that life. But. I I realized that there was definitely more and I think I got into running more and more while I was in finance because I wanted to have an escape. I think so many people do. You know, you're getting into sports, some people getting into it for fitness or to escape or to to improve your mental health. And it did. And then I realized that I was ending up turning down opportunities to go to races because I had to go to work. And then the kind of balance, like you say, the pendulum pendulum shifted a little bit.

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  Right. So ultra running at that time or just 5Ks, 10Ks and that kind of thing?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  I think I quickly went from five, you know, from five to 10 to half to marathon to to ultras pretty quickly because I wasn't very fast. I wasn't a good enough marathon runner.

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're like 253 or something like that, right?

• 25:59Speaker 01

  Good memory.

• 26:00Rich Roll?

  Slouch.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  No, it's not, but I.

• 26:03Rich Roll?

  Not like 210 or anything.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Exactly. I need to take another 40 minutes off that if I want to be a good marathon. No, and I I did some did some early ultras, some just 100Ks, 120K things. And I thought, yeah, okay, I can do that. And, you know, I was finishing in the in the top three, top five regularly. And I wasn't really training, you know, I was just working and then driving to a race and getting out and getting your trains on and doing it. And you're finishing okay, and you're thinking, hmm, maybe I can do this. And I'm not, I'm really not a very good runner still, you know, I'm not, I've done what 600 and something marathons. I am not a good marathon runner. I just enjoy it.

• 26:36Rich Roll?

  All the ultra runners say that.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  It's true. It's true. It's because we're it's because we're too slow to run marathons quickly that we have to say that.

• 26:44Rich Roll?

  But it's a big leap from saying like, oh, I want to, you know, I want to do ultras to I'm gonna pursue a career or a way of making a living doing this, especially when you're in, you know, this white shoe industry where you're making quite a bit of money. It's not like, oh, you're a barista at Starbucks or something like that. You know what I mean?

• 27:04Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  Like, it's a there's risk involved and, you know, real world considerations. And it's not like, yeah, there are the Dean Karnazes out there and the people who've been able to kind of figure out how to do that. But it's not an easy thing.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. But then. But then having, yeah, you're right. So you say, how long were you doing that finance job for? The answer is too long, you know, because for a good chunk of that, eighty percent of that, I was wanting to escape. But I think what led me to that cliff, which I kind of called it the cliff of adventure and doing what I love, is that Kevin, who we talked about earlier, who was my big inspiration, he was just the final shove. You know, all the way through my life, I'd had little mini shoves towards that edge. And whether it was, you know, my headmaster when I was in school, whether it was a teacher, whether it was a family friend, I've had some really brilliant people around me that have loved the outdoors and adventure. And it just is kind of going in slowly and slowly. And then you start to do this and then you have this idea.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  You know, you meet somebody like Kevin and he says to you, he's dying, he was told he's lived for potentially only two years and

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  Prostate cancer.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, terminal prostate cancer. And you have this guy that was incredibly happy telling you he's dying. And you think, what? You know, you don't understand, I didn't really didn't understand how this guy was so happy and so genuinely

• 28:23Speaker 01

  positive in life when he was potentially going to live for only two years. And then it dawned on me that he realized that life is, you know, he's doing everything that he loves and life is so precious. And so that was the final shove. And, you know, it wasn't a case of, right, I'm going to go and run around the world. It was, what can I do to raise some money for them? And then I worked out that it had to be big enough to get the attention because I wasn't well known. And so it just kind of spiraled, you know, it was, what can I do? And then I realized after one short Google, has anybody done it? And obviously following Dean, he's been threatening to.

• 28:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And he hadn't yet. And so let's give it a go.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  It's kind of amazing that no one had ever done it before.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I know. I absolutely can't believe it. I feel very, really lucky and almost like a thief, like I've stolen it from Nobody's looking at me.

• 29:09Rich Roll?

  You feel like an undeserved, you know, wearer of the crown?

• 29:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Because there's so many great people out there. I mean, especially Dean, but others as well, that, you know.

• 29:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but you made it happen. That's the difference.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  I'm proud about that. I'm proud that I'm the first person to do it. And I'm proud that we did it in a, it really was a journey of horrendous lows and fantastic highs. And so it was exactly what it should have been.

• 29:38Rich Roll?

  So just so I understand the timeline, you're starting to get into ultras while you're still working at the bank, right?

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:45Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, you're banking ultras and you met Kevin at Marathon de Salle, right?

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:50Rich Roll?

  So you're able to like train and compete at Marathon de Salle while you're still working this job?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  I was working less then. Yeah, that was, I think that was probably-

• 30:00Rich Roll?

  So you already like got one foot out the door.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  One foot, yeah. My whole soul was out the door. It had been for years, but yeah, literally, I was a little bit out the door and I was ready to go for it.

• 30:10Rich Roll?

  So the real exit plan is lining up enough support for this new crazy harebrained adventure that would allow you to train and, you know, do this thing and feed yourself, basically?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know what? A lot of people have said that to me. The training didn't even go through my mind because I thought that the hardest thing in that whole, they had two years from meeting Kev to then thinking about it to then coming up with the idea. The idea was made and it was two years from idea to start line.

• 30:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  And that was mostly planning. You know, I turned up in Toronto, Canada, minus 25 degrees C, super, super cold on day one. It was January the 6th, 2018 and I got there and I realized I hadn't run a marathon for three and a half months because the training-

• 30:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you like broke your ankle like four months before you started, right?

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:59Rich Roll?

  But prior to that, I mean, I read that, I read that like you were putting in 150-mile weekends.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, big mileage.

• 31:06Rich Roll?

  So you were putting in some pretty epic, you know, blocks.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  I didn't realize that it was too epic at the time because I was just going for it and my body was right and I was in really good, I would actually think I was fitter then than I am now. Just because I was, I was escaping from work and, you know, I was constantly running every possible minute I had.

• 31:24Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  And then that two years was just like, oh my word, I've jumped into this world where I don't know what's gonna happen. I need to make this, I need to make this trip planned and logistically possible. I know I can run and then I just forgot to catch up the running bit and so-

• 31:38Rich Roll?

  So the planning, the two years of planning transpired while you were still working at the bank?

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Half of it, yeah.

• 31:45Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  Half of it. They were very good to me and they, they said- Have time and they let me have some unpaid leave and then I ultimately

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  Didn't go back.

• 31:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  And I was very honest with them. I had some fantastic, you know, you have good bosses, you have bad bosses at that time. I was very fortunate, a brilliant friend of mine now called Razzy, Razzy Ahmed, he, um, he, he supported me and he believed in what I was doing. And he understood that there is more to life than work, which isn't, isn't that common in that industry. Um, and so, um, he said, yeah, go and, uh, go and, go and do it.

• 32:17Rich Roll?

  So by the time you finally cut the cord and walked out the door for good, you had enough support lined up at that point. And you were well invested in the preparation phase of all of this to be able to make it work.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  I, I let, I definitely jumped before we had everything lined up. Um, because there had to be so much. I, I spent a lot of those two years planning it on my own. Um, and then another friend who I also met in the desert in the same tent as Kevin, a guy called Jeff, who's a really lovely guy. He's an Everest Summiter. And he said to me, you know, you need to really get some people in your team. You need to pay some people. And I said, I can't pay people because I'm going to spend a fortune on this trip. And he said, no, you need to invest in the support because you can't do it on your own. And that was my first time. I thought, hmm, okay, I, I probably should listen to that. And I did. And I spent some money and I employed an assistant to help me work things out. And then skip forward to the middle of the journey where we had 19 people that were working.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  Plus loads of volunteers that were making the trip happen, whether it was psychologists, nutritionists, performance manager, security, visas. And, and then we got to the point that we couldn't afford it anymore. And people started dropping off and people's lives continue, especially the volunteers, you know? Uh, and so we went through this whole big cycle of just me planning it, having a little person involved. And then it peaked at a really big team and then it petered out. Um, and I'm just fortunate that I have some really great, and as you know, anything that happens like this is, is, is not just me. There's so many people that make it possible.

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  I can't even imagine like trying to compile the right people to make these doors swing open. It's almost like you need to hire a specialist or like a diplomat with relationships that run deep internationally. So that you can kind of, um, you know, massage who you have to massage to get these visas to go through. Like, I know you had ended up having to pay a lot of bribes. I'm sure those were like. You know, feet on the ground, like, you know, when you're trying to go somewhere or something like that. But just the pure politics of the whole thing is unbelievable.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  The politics was difficult. I had a company. So I worked out that I could go with a visa company that would get me all of my visas. And we worked out the value and it was something like 25, 30,000 pounds of just, just on visas. And then we found this great company called Universal Visas and they said, you know what, we want to support you. We want to help you and we'll, we'll take all of our fees out of it. And it really helped.

• 34:38Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's great.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  But they were such a small unit. And, and when you get little wins like that, you take them and you hold on to them. And, and Faisal and Maz, who are the, the, the kind of the founders of this company, they are still great friends with me now, WhatsApp regularly. And they made everything happen, but it was only because they were working at two o'clock in the morning on a Sunday when on their day off, that it was possible. And that was the same for everything. Honestly, I owe everything to these people. So I, I was very fortunate. But in terms of bribes and like you say, massaging my way through all of these, you know, when you turn up a border, I remember in Chad. And I, I didn't have a page free in my passport and I was getting stamps on like the inside page and all sorts of stuff.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  And they said, you haven't got any room. We're going to have to charge you. And it was like $400 for a day's entry when it would usually be $20.

• 35:26Rich Roll?

  Just because you didn't have.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  I didn't have a page to stamp.

• 35:28Rich Roll?

  A blank page.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Which is rubbish, you know.

• 35:30Rich Roll?

  That's crazy. In 2019, it was a piece of paper.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  They, he put the money straight in his pocket, you know, it's, but you still have to pay it.

• 35:40Rich Roll?

  And, and you had to go through like 10 passports, right? Cause you're having to send passports to different locations to get them approved for visas. And we're waiting on the return of them while you're also trying to cross other borders. Like, how does that work?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So I now travel with two and I always traveled with one and the other one would be home. So there was always two in, in, in the pipeline.

• 36:01Rich Roll?

  And you can have two, like they allow you to have two passports?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:04Rich Roll?

  I didn't even know that.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I think it's, I think it's common amongst lots of countries, but you, you have to have a reason for it and you have to ask. And I had a very clear reason why I needed it. But then you have problems where you realize that, okay, so I've missed a country. Because I was ill or because I missed a flight or we had to redirect for some reason because of the protest. And so I've got a visa in the wrong passport. Now, what do we do? And that happened, I'd say, close to 100 times.

• 36:28Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  And it was, I had friends and family.

• 36:31Rich Roll?

  And that's when you have to make the 2:00 AM phone call to the visa people to expedite whatever.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:36Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna be landing in two hours.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And sometimes they say to me, well, we can't expedite it because your passport's in France, or, you know, or it's somewhere else, or, and they can't physically do anything because I don't have it. So, yeah. It was a logistical, absolutely logistical nightmare. Passports is one thing, but then you have the flights just linking up from, you think it's obvious to be able to just fly from one country to the next, even if you have to go around the houses a bit. But, but it really isn't easy. Linking up the 14 Pacific Islands in two, two and a half weeks, two weeks, is nigh on impossible. And when I was speaking to Dean the other day, you know, if he's gonna do this quicker, which I believe he will, it's, it's gonna take some seri-, I mean, you're gonna have to have private planes. There isn't a way to do it much quicker.

• 37:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. He should just hire you. You're the one person on the planet who actually-

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Well, I've talked about-

• 37:26Rich Roll?

  Has experience with this.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  I might be going for a run with him over the next couple of days, now I'm here. But I'd love, I really would love to see him do it because I quite like to be an outsider looking at the trip. So I don't have the stress.

• 37:38Rich Roll?

  Well, that's very spirited of you. Were there ever countries where you had to kind of skirt the law and just sneak in and get away with it? I mean, I know I had, I've had Charlie Engel on the show a couple of times and he's told stories about, you know, their epic, you know, Trans Sahara run that they did. And I think they got to one border, I can't remember what country it was, and they just weren't gonna let them in. And I can't remember how they solved that, but it was another kind of nail-biter visa situation.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, lots of those occasions. And so we had two or three visas that were refused multiple times. So that was Iran, Yemen, and Syria, off the top of my head. And they were places where you don't just sneak your way in easily, you know? If you say, oh, well, which border do you want to cross that's illegally? Yemen and Syria isn't the one you'd pick. And so we did manage to do it all lawfully. But there were occasions where, so for Iran, I went to Kish Island, which is part of Iran. But I felt so intimidated there because you were told you can't come. Your visa was refused multiple times and it was only approved through- The visa guys, I had no idea how we made it work.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And I don't know if I arrive and it's actually valid. But I had a moment going through Yemen from Oman, drove through the night from Oman to get to the Yemeni border. And this guy, my driver, he was lovely, but very dodgy. That's all I can describe him as. He just appeared and seemed very dodgy and I was a bit nervous. Got to the border at two in the morning and this was about five countries from the end. This was so close to finishing. And I realized as we were crossing the border with all of these military personnel, 20 plus armed people surrounding the car, that he was smuggling goods into the country and using me as a mule, basically. And he said to me, you know, just put these under your seat and just sit on these and don't tell them. And here's me spending four, five years to get to this point of planning and work and

• 39:35Speaker 01

  effort. And I thought, oh my lord, how has this happened? And we were there for a couple of hours. They quizzed us. We had everything out of the car. There was lots of raised voices and fortunately they let us through. I think, I have no idea what they were saying, but by the looks of things, he paid them off.

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  Paid them. That's terrifying.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  It is, yeah.

• 39:55Rich Roll?

  Because you could have just ended up in some

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:59Rich Roll?

  prison somewhere, the key thrown away.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  The government isn't required to come and get me there.

• 40:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, diplomatically, you would be in a world of hurt.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I had that feeling a few times. I was locked in an airport in Central African Republic for a while because I didn't have the right paperwork with me. And I didn't have any money to pay my way through. I'd used all of my bribe money up. You know, I'll travel with thousands of dollars just to use as bribes when I can, because you have to, especially going overland borders in Africa. It almost feels not like a bribe, it just feels like the dumb thing. It's almost just a tax.

• 40:32Rich Roll?

  It's like getting a tip or whatever.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly that. That's a very good word for it, yeah, actually. And I was tipping heavily and I ran out of money and I just had to wait until the following morning for them to let me out of this airport.

• 40:47Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  And I say airport, it was just a shed.

• 40:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So it must have been, I mean, I think people who don't know any better, look at what you did. And it's all about like, how did you run all these marathons? But like, that's like the easy part, you know? It's just like, oh, it's a relief. All I have to do today is like, run 26 miles. Like, I don't have to worry about all these.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I remember, you know, I remember having those, those days in my diary. You know, I look at my diary in the morning and it's either flight day or, or run day. More or less every now and then you get some more time off.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Flight day or run day, and when it's a run day, it's just great, you know? Yes, there's some times when you're, you're terrified to go out and run because you don't know whether you're getting attacked or, you know, it's mugged and all sorts of stuff happened.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  But you get to that point where your run day is the, is the best bit. And obviously we love running, I'm a runner. But then you know, you don't have to get on a plane or you don't, you know? I've had some connections which were eight different planes just to get to another country. And then you have to arrive and it's two o'clock in the morning and you have to run. And the running bit is just the, the reset. If without the running, I think I would have gone crazy, you know?

• 41:52Rich Roll?

  And with the, you know, logistical problems that were continually arising and flights getting canceled and all of that. I mean, every day lost to some unforeseen circumstance pushes you off your schedule. It makes it more difficult down the line to kind of, you know, complete this thing timely.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So.

• 42:10Rich Roll?

  There's not a lot of room for error.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  There was no room. I mean, at the beginning, we were a bit naive because we thought, yeah, okay, we've, we've built, we built in about four buffer periods, about 10 days throughout the trip. And we thought, okay, we've got a little bit of time if things go wrong. But then we, it dawned on us that we'd used that time far quicker than we, than we'd planned. That buffer time had gone before we'd got six months.

• 42:31Rich Roll?

  All your bonus points are done.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  All the bonus points are used.

• 42:33Rich Roll?

  And this is over, just so people understand, this is over like, what, 624 days or something like that?

• 42:39Speaker 01

  674, yeah.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  670, 674 days. So in, in that period of time, you only have 10 days of wiggle room.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:47Rich Roll?

  Right, or the whole thing capsizes.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 42:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  And, and, and you know that. And that's the, that's the scary thing. You have, you have so little wiggle room. And we had a moment where I was bitten by a dog in Tunisia, one of my first African countries. Tunisia is relatively affluent compared to the other African countries. Um, these five dogs on the beach, I was running with a friend of mine who came out to support. Um, Andy and I were running along this beach and these dogs just came and, and, and bit me. And I thought, it's okay, I've got my rabies jab. I'm only two and a half miles from the end and I just ran, lots of blood pouring down my leg. And I got to the finish and I thought, that's fine, carry on. But I didn't realize that I needed to have top ups for my rabies in subsequent weeks. And where I was going to be, they didn't have the rabies vaccine readily available. And so it meant rejigging everything.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Um, and that was just, you know, and I, since then, following that bite, I was terrified to get bitten again. Not because of injury, but because of ruining the trip.

• 43:39Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, dogs were a big problem.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were.

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 43:43Speaker 01

  They were.

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  In one particular island of note.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  The Marshall Islands, absolutely, yeah. So I did lots of, so I call them like the micro states. So you've got, um, most of the Pacific islands are tiny. Um, in terms of where the land is, there's lots of land, kind of semi in the water, semi, semi out of the water. And you've got Vatican, obviously smallest country in the world, eighty two laps I did of St Peter's Square in the Vatican.

• 44:03Rich Roll?

  Did you get like, was there some, with that, was there weird permissions? Like, okay, here's the, you just run the perimeter inside the wall?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah. So I tell you what, I, I could have, uh, that could have come unstuck really, really badly quite early on. So Europe was my second phase of the journey and third phase of the journey. And there was a, a security guard who came to me when I was eight miles in and said, you can't run here. And it was only by pure coincidence that this security guard was heavily into Kung Fu. And my friend who was filming for me at the time happened to be very heavily into Kung Fu. And they, once again, sport winning, they shared their sport, sporting moments. And he said, you know what, I'm not going to tell anybody, just get it done.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 44:44Speaker 01

  And.

• 44:44Rich Roll?

  How did Kung Fu even come up?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  I know, I know. And, and, and, uh, cause I, I, you know, in those situations, you say and you do whatever you need to, to, for, to convince them. And I said, yeah, I'm, I'm a runner, like this is fine. I've done it in all these countries, please help. And, and you, you asked the question, like, you're a runner, you're a sport. And he's like, oh, and we got chatting. I tried to be as friendly as I possibly could, cause you have to be. Um. And it turned out, and I've I've still got his email address. He was a brilliant bloke because he he could have said no.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  Um. And and we didn't have all the right permissions that we needed, which I thought we had, but we didn't. Um. And I couldn't. He said, go to the uh go to the office, go to the visa office, which is just around the corner, but I couldn't leave because I was eight miles in. And if I'd left, I would have gone out out of the country.

• 45:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Um. And so he just, he was brilliant. So coming back to those countries, um very, very small countries, did a hundred and forty laps in Jamaica because of some some gang violence in uh in Kingston. Um. And then, like you said, the dogs proved very, very difficult everywhere, but especially in the Pacific Islands. And I ended up doing three hundred and thirty five laps of a car park in one of the most beautiful places in the world, which turned out to be rather ugly.

• 45:50Rich Roll?

  There's just wild dogs everywhere. They just run after you.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:54Rich Roll?

  So all you need is one, you know, nip on the Achilles and you're toast.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Exactly that. Exactly that. It's the it's the Achilles I was most worried about. Um. You know, if you get bitten in the wrong place and you can kind of soldier on and patch it up, but if it's nipping something that physically stops you from moving at running pace, then you're screwed.

• 46:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 01

  And I had twenty dogs. I I actually think it was more than twenty, but call it twenty dogs, big dogs, very aggressive. They have a diabetes crisis in the whole of the island because people don't go outside and exercise. These dogs are

• 46:23Rich Roll?

  Because of the dogs.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Because of the dogs. And I arrived in my hotel and they gave me my room key and a stick. And they said, if you go around the corner to the shop, you need to take your stick. And they didn't know I was trying to run a marathon.

• 46:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Um. Yeah.

• 46:34Rich Roll?

  That's yeah, like, how would you have known that?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I know, right?

• 46:36Rich Roll?

  I mean.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Hopefully, everyone, I can tell Dean now, take your stick, Dean, or a taser.

• 46:42Rich Roll?

  Um. And then there was a country where you had to run on a on a like a a landing strip?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Yes, good research. Tuvalu, Tuvalu, um one of the most hard to reach countries in the world. Um. Because they have, I think there's a couple of flights a week. Um. And there isn't any space on the island other than the runway. And so everybody lives on the beach, um which is rocky and you can't you simply can't run there. Um. But what, to my amazement, not only was I allowed to run on the runway, a live runway, because they knew when the flights were coming and there wasn't going to be one when I was there. Um, but the whole community of this island used the runway as a hub of sport. You know, everybody comes out. It was the most unbelievable sight. Thousands of people on this, and it was the whole country, you know, literally everybody from the country uses this runway.

• 47:32Speaker 01

  And I've got great videos and photos of people playing volleyball and cricket and football. Hundreds of different games on this huge couple of miles stretch runway. And so I was very pleased to do my whole map. I don't think there's many people.

• 47:45Rich Roll?

  So did you get a bunch of people there who ran with you?

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so as they, I mean, you know, you start off, you do your first up and down, and they kind of look at you like you're a bit nuts. And then, once you've done your fifteenth or sixteenth time, they realize that something's going on. And, um, and like, yeah, everywhere, everywhere was like that. People came out and.

• 48:01Rich Roll?

  Which country surprised you the most?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Oh, um, I think it, I would say nearly all of the countries surprised me. My preconceived ideas of the countries were nearly all the time completely wrong. And that's because of the media. It's because of my, my brain reading stuff and taking it as, as read, taking it as that's what it is. Um, there were some, there were some really lovely countries which I didn't expect. So Sierra Leone was a really fond favorite of the whole journey. The people there are poor, um, their health and their, the healthcare system is incredibly poor. Um, and yet, everybody there was smiling and we'd had people, you know, women passing me water bottles saying, water is life, and they have nothing to give. And yet they give you their water, you know, and that just amplified.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  So I think it's very difficult to say which surprised me the most. You know, going to places like Turkmenistan and North Korea, which are incredibly controlled.

• 48:55Rich Roll?

  Um. But you got the whitewashed propaganda tour in North Korea, right?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:00Rich Roll?

  Like they, they're just with you the whole time and they're showing you what they want you to see in the whole thing.

• 49:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you have to be incredibly lucky to not get that propaganda tour. But what I did see was more or less what I was expecting. It was incredibly clean. You know, there's lots of little aspects to stuff that you think, oh, I wasn't expecting that. Or, you know, how they all queue in single file in silence in the, in the, in the underground. Um, and, and little things like that, but it was more on a bigger scale than the things that surprised me the most is how. The correlation between people that are so lovely and have nothing. You know, and then I end up spending time.

• 49:32Rich Roll?

  That's what you hear time and time again from anyone and everyone who's traveled to those types of places. They come back very, very struck by that, by that truth. And yet, and I've said this before on the podcast, we get home and we, you know, we, we forget or we reset.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  It's so easy to reset. And I really try hard not to. But I mean, I have, you know, you, you, you get up and you, you, you buy stuff, you go online, you get into your rhythm again. And it's really hard to buck that trend unless you, I believe, unless you move away or you immerse yourself in it. But there is, there is ways to do that. And I think it's just, it's just be, be more in touch with it. So see it more and read about it more and don't necessarily, you know, there's the amount of negativity on the news and sadness on the news from stuff going on. And yes, we need to know about that stuff. But there's also some brilliant things going on in the world that I wish people could pay attention to. There should be a positive news channel.

• 50:26Rich Roll?

  Right. I, I agree with that. But then conversely, I'm doing my part. Conversely, you know, there's certain areas of the world that don't get enough attention for, you know, what's happening there. I mean, Haiti stands out as one such place, right? Like, and I know you had an experience there.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, Haiti, Haiti, country number four for me on the trip. It was certainly my first experience of poverty. And it was obviously the earthquake there that, that killed and made a lot of people homeless and orphans. And the violence there really struck me. It was heavily armed people on the streets that were approaching me when I was running. And it was only because I had a guy that was driving behind me at a snail's pace when I was running in humidity to, to help me with the water that I realized that there isn't, there isn't enough shed, you know, you, you be in places and I'll, I'll see something on the news about some horrendous attack. And I'll call home and say, oh, don't worry, I'm safe. And they'll say, what? You know, we haven't, it hasn't made it to our news. And it's thousands of people that have been killed or something in, in either an natural disaster or, or by human hands. And I feel.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I you're right. There's just not enough of the right media.

• 51:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah. How many of the marathons were sort of sanctioned races versus you just creating your own course?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, difficult to say because a lot of the, most of them were my own course. But most of those own courses were turned into races by people that were supporting me there.

• 51:55Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow. That's cool.

• 51:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I would turn up and not have a race.

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  It was all, it was pre-planned enough that the people there knew what was going on.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  Had set something up for you.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my plan, my default uh plan is to get to the hotel, look at a map, roughly know where I'm gonna run, run the distance, get some witnesses along the way, job done. But more often than not, as the trip went on, as it, as the awareness grew, um, I was arriving and then met by people and they say, oh, we've got this route for you. These are the water stations. Do you need any other food? This is the media we're gonna do.

• 52:25Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  And it's amazing, you know, and it happened all over the place. I felt like, you know, I was having my own personal, and it was my own personal runs everywhere I went.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for purposes of legitimizing the world record aspect of this for Guinness, like, there's all kinds of rigmarole that get baked into that, right? Like, you gotta have multiple GPS trackers and witnesses and things like that. Like, I know it's a whole thing.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  It's a pain. It's a real pain. And I.

• 52:53Rich Roll?

  They're sticklers.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  They are sticklers.

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  And I guess they should be.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, on one hand, I agree with it. On the other hand, there is a certain, it's frustrating me because it's kind of trying to fit a, you know, a square box into a round hole kind of thing. There, there isn't the rules that apply for a big two-year multi-trip easily. But I suppose the base, I had 11 pages of rules, by the way. You know, that's how detailed they wanted my, and I agree. And luckily, we followed them and it's been a pain. And I've had lots of people helping me to make sure we've got those, everything they needed. But, you know, I wore two different brands of watch, so two different like kind of GPS systems. Um, I had a GPS tracker that was just on me that wasn't a running watch. Um, and then we had to get witnesses during the run. Um, and some of them were hotel staff, but it's difficult, you know, when you run in, I don't know, in a Portuguese-speaking African country. About twenty months before I finished the trip.

• 53:41Rich Roll?

  Sign this affidavit.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  And they have no idea what they're signing. And so we've had to get lots of backups, you know, of people I've met in airports or on the plane. I say, can I just get your email just in case, you know, just in case.

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  Have they signed off on it now? Or what does that vetting process look like?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's long, it's really long. So we need to, we need to log the logbook. We need to submit an official logbook with all of the data in. But my logbook is a little bit difficult because along with all of those witnesses and GPS data, we have all the photos and videos. Four hundred thousand photos and twenty thousand video clips to show because that's all metadata and it proves where I was and it helped my cause. And so we're, we're in the process of sending the hard drive, a physical hard drive with everything on that they can go through and, and decide whether I've done it.

• 54:26Rich Roll?

  So in addition to the visas and, you know, making these flights and all of the travel, you know, logistical nightmares that were continually plaguing you. On top of all of this, you know, you're traveling to most of these places alone, like more, more often than not, right? It's just you.

• 54:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:46Rich Roll?

  And you're taking responsibility for making sure that you have the witnesses and that you have, you know, your watches are all charged and all of that. And you're trying to film this thing for a documentary, right? You're documenting it for a project beyond that. Like, so just the mental headspace, like, okay, are the SD, SD cards wiped? And like, where's all the footage and how are you logging that? Like, I mean.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you've hit.

• 55:13Rich Roll?

  I can't imagine, you know, staying on top of all of that, on top of everything else.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you've hit, and it gives me goosebumps, actually, when you hear me say, and you, when you talk about that. Because I was, I'm incredibly proud that I've managed to do that, but I honestly don't know how it happened. You know, the amount of stuff, the watches, you mentioned watches being charged. When you're staying in.

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  You're in some crazy country and they're, you know, you have the right adapter and all of that kind of stuff, right?

• 55:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:35Rich Roll?

  Where's the plug?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also, even when I'm in places where there is perfect electricity, perfect adapters, you know, I'll get so shattered and I'll have a shower and I'll lie on the, lie on the bed to go to sleep. And I'll fall asleep and I'll wake up at three in the morning thinking, ah, I haven't charged my watches because if I don't charge them, I can't run. And if I can't run, then we're gonna have to replan it. And so even little things like that were a stress. Fortunately, I mean, I had my, uh, my brilliant assistant and a guy called Veton, who, who organized a hell of a lot for me and was constantly on my case. Um, but it was the, you know, when you go away with people and you decide whether you wanna go left or right, or whether you wanna do something or not do something, having that sense check with somebody else

• 56:17Speaker 01

  was difficult not to have it. Um, you know, should I be running down this street now? Is it safe? You know, should, I haven't got any security in the center of Caracas in Venezuela, where it's famous for kidnaps. Should I actually go out or should I wait? You know, and having that sense check is, is, is difficult. Um, yeah, like you say, the documentary filming everything as well. Um, a great friend of mine called Mark Beaumont, who's cycled around the world, um, has the world record for the, for cycling around the world. He's, he gave me some great advice before I left and he said, if you're, if you're filming it, you've got to film all of the stuff that you don't wanna film, you know, and as

• 56:51Rich Roll?

  And when you're tired and you're just like, I just wanna run. Like, I don't, I don't need the extra hassle of like having to document this and I don't feel like it right now.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even to the point that I was actively aware of how fatigued I was by the fact that my brain didn't wanna lift my arm to take a photo. You know, when you're at the end of a very, very long run and your whole body is to plan it and any slight movement is a waste of energy. Mentally, my body was okay, but mentally, being able to go, all right, okay, I'll finish and do a video and try and convey what you're really feeling, when actually I'm thinking about, right, okay, I need to go and get some food now. And, you know, all of this stuff that goes on. And food, food was this

• 57:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  whole big other aspect which, which went, I mean, I think it was more

• 57:31Rich Roll?

  Take what you can get.

• 57:32Speaker 01

  Take what you can get and eat it a lot. Um, always ask for seconds on the planes, even if you don't like it, you know, that kind of thing.

• 57:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:38Rich Roll?

  How many flights total?

• 57:40Speaker 01

  Four fifty-six.

• 57:41Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Um, including the flight home. Yeah. And to put it into perspective, we were, we thought we would do two hundred and twenty. So that gives you an idea of

• 57:49Rich Roll?

  Doubled.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:50Rich Roll?

  From the planning, the ideation to the actuality. Yeah.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, there's just so many things went wrong. And I believe we, we planned it as well as we could have with the time that we had and the budget and everything. But even if you had all the money in the world and all the time in the world to plan this, things go wrong.

• 58:07Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 58:07Speaker 01

  Um, and that was why we had so many flights. We had four hundred and fifty odd flights, hundred and twenty, twenty visas, um, nine passports on my tenth now. Um, yeah.

• 58:17Rich Roll?

  How was Lebanon?

• 58:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lebanon was, um, when I ran there in Beirut as the official Lebanon Marathon that I ran, that was fine. I ran along the coast and it was beautiful, but.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  I've done that Beirut Marathon. I've been to Beirut twice. So yeah, I'm familiar with it.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  Along the Cornish, it's gorgeous. Yeah, it's beautiful. Um, and I like that the food is great as well. And I, I then had to go back to Lebanon to get into Syria. And crossing, there was a load of protests quite recently, only a few months ago.

• 58:47Rich Roll?

  Crossing by ground into Syria.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course, exactly. Leaving Lebanon, uh, leaving Beirut to go over into Damascus. Um, and the, a couple of days before, no, the, the day before I was due to arrive, I had a call from my dad saying that the tour agency that's supposed to be taking you, tour agency, it's, you know, it's not this big tour company. It's just one man on the ground. Yeah. Said that their driver, the driver that he'd hired to take another group of people to the border the previous day had been shot and killed. There was, I don't know, there had been a real, all these protests going on. And the problem was the Lebanese plated cars traveling towards the Syrian border or the other way around. And so we had to be careful to, and I switched cars halfway through the journey in order to not have that danger.

• 59:32Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Um, and I remember, you know, I thought I was, when I did that journey, we made the decision that we're here. We don't have any other time. Let's just go for it. I'll get my head down. Let's hope for the best. Had another driver, obviously, because the driver was killed before. Um, and they'd advised me not to do it. And I said, let's just get it done. Um, and I remember asking the driver if I could stop. We didn't speak very good English at all. And I said, can I stop? Go for a wee. You know, I need to go for a wee. And he said, not here. We, we, and he was racing through. Um, and only by pure luck and that we made it. Um, and we switched into the Syrian plated vehicle and, and went through the border.

• 1:00:07Rich Roll?

  And then how was Syria?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Syria was a surprise. Um, the center of Damascus is beautiful and actually much less rundown than I was expecting. People are lovely and by pure fluke, again, this happened so many times where I would be in a position where things would happen. I was running around the stadium in Damascus because it was safe. It was very hot and there was lots of cars. And so it was a, it was a good, easy way to do the marathon. And I had witnesses as well. So it was a win-win. Um, and I ran in Damascus in the stadium and then a few miles into the run, I was joined by the under 19s national Syrian female football team.

• 1:00:43Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  And they were coming to train.

• 1:00:45Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:00:45Speaker 01

  And they saw me run and they were like, yeah, let's do a few miles with you.

• 1:00:48Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  What an amazing thing. And I had this 20, 25 odd people that were, that were all training in their pristine running kit. And it's not something that you think of as Syria, you know, and it's that goes back to those preconceived ideas of, you know, people expecting me to be running in a war zone with bombs going off all around me.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  But it wasn't at all.

• 1:01:05Rich Roll?

  Right, right. Do you think that the experience would have been different if you were American?

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  Uh, and I briefly said that to Dean as well.

• 1:01:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  The, the amount of, um, I'm very fortunate to be born British and not have those political blockers. Um, but that said, you know, we've colonized, colonized a lot of the world and we've had some, you know, we've had some lots of frowns and looks to me, but it's a little bit different. I think, I think it's more hostile.

• 1:01:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would imagine. Um, what about Pakistan? Were you able to run outdoors?

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  There?

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Um, I was a little.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  When I was there.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Rich Roll?

  I was in, you know, they were like, you can't go outside. And, and my host was training for a marathon and lived there, was a Pakistani national, and he didn't train outside. Or if he, he said he would occasionally run outdoors, but he could never go back to the same spot, like at the similar time of day, like he had to mix it up.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:58Rich Roll?

  Because of kidnapping concerns.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was told that advice, you know, if I'm doing it, don't, don't post my route, don't tell people where I'm going to be, just in case. Um, lots of, lots of countries are like that. But it goes back to this, people say, how can you sum up the whole journey in one word? And I say, people. And this network of people that I had that made it possible was exactly why I really enjoyed Pakistan. I mentioned my old boss, the good boss, Razi. He was Pakistani, uh, born in Pakistan, and he had a really great friend that he used to go to university with in Lahore, a guy called Kabir. And he got on the phone to his friend and said, Nick's coming to Islamabad. Will you help?

• 1:02:33Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  And he did. And I arrived at the airport, he picked me up, he gave me a tour, we went for some dinner. Um, and unfortunately, it was absolute, absolutely torrential rain. And so I was running in about a foot of water, which was that. And I was running down a central reservation of a, of a four lane highway in Islamabad because, uh, it was the only dry place to run, dryish place to run. Um, but in terms of danger. I had Kabeer tell me where to be, inside knowledge. And without all of these people, I tell you, it would not happen. You know, money cannot buy you those connections. Yes, you can get people to be there at the right time and to pick you up and to have a security guard with you. But actually, it's the inside knowledge that made all the difference.

• 1:03:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I would imagine there were probably options in certain, you know, dicey countries to do the marathon on like a British military base.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:29Rich Roll?

  Did you ever do that? Or did you opt to, no, I want to be in the communities?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  I didn't do any in British military bases. I did in Afghanistan. I ran in the UN compound in Kabul because we were due to have a five armored vehicle escort up into the mountains, which was unheard of, but they'd approved it and then it was retracted because there was a blast and a few people killed and there was a attack the day before I arrived again. And so incredibly sad, there was lots of gunfire in the evenings when I was there. But it was one of those places that I was in this UN compound and we ran, we ran around all over the place and there was a brilliant ultra runners as part of the UN staff.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  And they supported me and we ran with a helmet and a bulletproof vest for some of it. And I didn't want to leave, you know? You turn up to these places terrified and then you make so many great connections you don't want to leave. And so, yeah, there was a few, there was a few compound runs, like in Jamaica, I ran around the High Commissioners' compound because there was 67 people murdered the weekend I was there through gang violence in Kingston, right where I was. And, you know, they weren't going to kill me, but I might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so there's lots of things like that which you don't plan. You know, go to Jamaica, you think of beaches and rum and cocktails and but stuff like this happens all over the place and so you have to be a little bit wary.

• 1:05:04Rich Roll?

  What did the kit look like? Like, what was the bag, you know, that you were hauling around? Did that change as you figured things out?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:05:12Rich Roll?

  I suspect you started with more than you needed and then as you got your footing, that piece of luggage got a little bit smaller.

• 1:05:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It was a bit like a bell curve, actually. I started with a big-ish pack, a rucksack. I was traveling around the world, take a rucksack, that makes sense. But everything was just difficult to get into it. I had far too many things. Skip ahead to the end and I was traveling with a tiny, tiny bag with like one pair of pants, one pair of socks and just washing, like showering in my clothes and washing them as I went on.

• 1:05:44Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the good thing about running.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:46Rich Roll?

  One pair of shorts, you're wearing your shoes already, you know?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  I tell you that and I'm still, I still have them with me right now because I'm going for a run later today. The pair of shorts that I wore all the way through, my kit sponsor which I'm wearing, DoSport Live, they gave me some shorts and I wore them for every single run and it has a bite mark out of the back where I was bitten by the dog and I still wear them to this day. So you're absolutely right.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  You gotta frame those.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna frame them. We might auction them or something, I don't know.

• 1:06:12Rich Roll?

  Just a little Bronner soap and you're good, you know?

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  They're pretty disgusting, I think. I think the frame would, I think the frame would work. And they're really, they're sun, you know, the waistband, they're black. And as they go down, because it's been so sun bleached, they're basically close to white now.

• 1:06:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  So yeah, my kit went up and down, but I also had a bit of a problem with souvenirs. People used to give me brilliant stuff, like medals with my faces on, trophies made by brilliant sculptors and all sorts of stuff, but I didn't have anywhere to put it. And so I ended up having, actually traveling with a souvenir bag because I didn't want to have to say no to this opportunity to take something.

• 1:06:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and you want to have that stuff, it's cool. What about the camera equipment? I mean, was this iPhone or GoPro or like how were you documenting it?

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  Every bit of camera equipment that's ever been made, not quite. I've, I've traveled with a lot. I travel with some decent lenses for some, I love my photography and we're releasing this photography book. And it's just a hobby, but I believe I'm okay at it and I'm passionate about it. And so I traveled with a lot of photography lenses just for taking photos.

• 1:07:14Rich Roll?

  For like DSLRs, like full-blown?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Full-blown, like three kilo, yeah, big lenses.

• 1:07:19Rich Roll?

  So you're running with that stuff too?

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Sometimes. If I had a, so frequently I'd have a car or a motorbike or a cyclist that would support me. And so they would have it in the car behind me. And then if I see something I want to take a picture of this, a group of kids or something, you know, I'd take the picture. But sometimes I wore my backpack and I ran. Osprey gave me these really great running backpacks, which were quite a bit bigger than the other ones, the summon ones. And so they do fit the cameras. But then GoPros, I had three GoPros. I had my drone, which was confiscated many, many times.

• 1:07:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:53Speaker 01

  All my batteries. I had, I think I had.

• 1:07:56Rich Roll?

  Fly a drone in Syria?

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. I didn't take it to Syria. I don't think I'd have got close.

• 1:08:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:02Speaker 01

  But it was confiscated a few times. Cuba, most places in Africa don't like it. Haiti was another one. And yeah, I traveled with lots of it and it was, a lot of it was stolen actually in China. And I didn't realize it had been stolen, but my bag, when it went through the airport, they decided that I wasn't allowed the camera equipment. And so put a nice letter in my bag, all in Chinese, which I couldn't read, which I assume says, we've taken your stuff. And I never got that back. So we had to kind of.

• 1:08:32Rich Roll?

  Did you have footage in there that you lost then too, or just the equipment?

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Very careful with the footage. The footage was always backed up immediately.

• 1:08:40Rich Roll?

  Right. So yeah, you gotta, you gotta finish the marathon, get to the airport, back up the footage.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  Write my blogs, tell people what I'm doing, make sure that the onward.

• 1:08:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because you did a great job of chronicling the thing in real time on Instagram with beautiful photographs and.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks. I think so. My Instagram and I'll plug it. It's NickButterRun, NickButterRun. I posted it because there's no point. You can't do it after the fact. You know, I can't spend the following two years doing it. But it was difficult and people would often mail me or email me or message me and saying, are you alive? We haven't heard from you in a day. It's like, yeah, I know. I'm in Central Africa. I'm in the Congo. I haven't got easy wifi. And yeah, connectivity was another, another big thing, trying to check in with people and my sat phone being broken sometimes. And being able to actually write my blogs, write everything on Instagram and remember it. Because I was writing notes as well, hand notes for my book, because there's stuff that you want to remember that isn't, you know, can't fit in a, in a small, small space in an Instagram post.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  So it's overall, you know, you get an idea of the scale of the trip. It's, it was the most amazing feeling to finish, but I. I feel like I want to go back. It's almost like a big recce, you know? I want to go back and see more of each place.

• 1:09:54Rich Roll?

  There's a cool like sizzle reel film on your website that, you know, basically gives you an idea. It's kind of very, you know, quick cuts of all these different places. It reminds me a lot of Casey Neistat's Do More video. It's very, it's very much in that style of like, it's so hectic and chaotic and there's so, you're just being bombarded with the stimulus of so many different cultures. Very cool.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, we like those videos. I was very fortunate. Spark Media put that together. They came to me before the trip and said, you've got to do a documentary and we'll help. And I said, well, I can't put any money towards a documentary now because we're spending everything on and everything else. And they said, don't worry, you know, we'll just, we'll just help you put it together. And, and they are now producing the final documentary.

• 1:10:36Rich Roll?

  Right. How many hours of footage did you come home with?

• 1:10:39Speaker 01

  Twenty thousand, we have, I think it was 18 terabytes, 20,000 video clips. So.

• 1:10:44Rich Roll?

  It's a tough edit because, you know, it can't be 196 episodes, you know? Like, how do you craft a cohesive narrative out of such an epic journey without it being repetitive?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I think a lot of people would say, well, I ran here, then I got on a plane, then I ran here. You know, but for to me, it wasn't like that, you know? It was, it's basically going from one problem to the next and just, just, just articulating in a relatively linear narrative of this is what happened. But the way that we're doing it, it's a parallel narrative. We have lots of interviews with my family and friends and team. And that's interspersed throughout the, throughout the documentary. But it's the same when writing the book, you know, my book, I'm plug it as well because it's on, it's on Amazon.

• 1:11:27Rich Roll?

  Plug away.

• 1:11:27Speaker 01

  It's on Amazon. It's called Running the World.

• 1:11:30Rich Roll?

  It's coming out later this year, but there's no, it didn't seem to be a specific release date.

• 1:11:34Speaker 01

  No, because I need to finish it first.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  That's the problem. And it, it leads me into, I've written almost the word count for this book and I'm only in chapter two. You know, how can I cut stuff out? It's, it's, I want, I want people to see the whole journey. It's, it's really difficult.

• 1:11:49Rich Roll?

  Well, I think you, your first pass needs to be overwritten. You know, get it all down and then you have this big piece of clay that you can chip away at. You know, and, and it's so fresh. I mean, you just finished this thing to get it. I think it's important imperative for you to get it all down on paper as soon as possible. And then you have something to work with.

• 1:12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I'm spending the next few days running, writing, running, writing until I go home to more, more stuff. But it's, um, yeah, I love it. I'm a very, very privileged position to be in, to be able to, to moan about having to write. Difficult to write the book on a, on a trip of a lifetime.

• 1:12:23Rich Roll?

  Um, on a very practical level, like how, you know, how is the process of, of, you know, lining up all of this sponsor support and kind of, you know, making sure that you're serving them as well. I mean, this is a, these are relationships, right? Like, like they're not just giving you money. You have to be, you know, a, a good ambassador for these brands. And I mean, you have like 46 brands or something like that supporting you, right?

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Rich Roll?

  I would imagine it would have been, it seems to me, it would have been a lot easier. You just have like one huge company comes in Visa, Nike, whatever it is, writing you a huge check. And you just, you're, you know, you have one company, but you're having to work with tons to kind of cobble this whole thing together.

• 1:13:05Speaker 01

  If, if you can write to, to Branson for me, that would be great, Richard. No, we, we, we did.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  Come on, Richard.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Please.

• 1:13:12Rich Roll?

  Well, you've done it already now.

• 1:13:13Speaker 01

  You can just back pay me. No, it's, um, you're, you're right. Having that many sponsors is difficult, but fortunately there's very, very few of them that have any formal commitments. And they're people that have come out the woodwork and said, look, we want to help you. We don't expect much, but what you can give, we'll be grateful for. And I think on paper, you say 46 sponsors. We've got now, I think it's 50, just under 50.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  And I think a lot of the outside world would see, oh, it's just a load of money that people have been giving you. I spent ninety, I'd say, let's try and get this right, eighty-five, eighty-two percent of the trip, that kind of number was paid by me and my family.

• 1:13:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  The rest of it, you know, a lovely, lovely brand would give me some socks.

• 1:13:56Rich Roll?

  Right, that's great, but.

• 1:13:57Speaker 01

  Great, but it doesn't, doesn't do anything else. And I, yeah, I need socks, but.

• 1:14:00Rich Roll?

  I need, I need five hundred bucks because I don't have a page on my, you know, my passport to get stamped here.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  Exactly that. And when you're wasting, you know, getting into Bhutan cost us fourteen hundred dollars, just because it's a, it's a difficult trajectory. I need an invite. So you have to basically pay for it. And so actually funding the trip has to be in the top two or the top three of the hardest thing to do. And I sold virtually everything. My parents and my family gave up a lot of money, loaned me a lot of money. And.

• 1:14:31Rich Roll?

  Sold all those suits?

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually did.

• 1:14:34Rich Roll?

  Did you?

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  There's a lot of, a lot of shirts that went to charity shops as well, because I thought, I've got so many shirts. The irony being is I now need a shirt to, to wear when I do my theatre tours. No, I, you're absolutely right. I stripped my life back. I now live in a van. I live in a van and I travel around doing my speaking tour all over the world with, just trying to share the journey. And I wouldn't change it for the world. And had I had hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, the trip wouldn't have been the same. And I wouldn't have felt so invested and so pressured. And all of the feelings were amplified by having everything on the line, you know, being told I wasn't going to do this six weeks from the end after having everything in my basket. I hadn't not left anything out. It's that motivation. You know, people say, so what gets you out of bed in the morning

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  when it gets tough? That's one of them.

• 1:15:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Speaker 01

  You know?

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  I think I read that the total cost of the endeavour was in excess of like five hundred thousand pounds?

• 1:15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Rich Roll?

  Something like that?

• 1:15:31Speaker 01

  More than that.

• 1:15:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I would think it would be more than that.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  It was, it was, yeah. But, but, I mean, it's, we haven't actually done the final numbers yet, because there's a lot of stuff that we're still paying. It, I would say it was, it was close to, more close to a million.

• 1:15:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  But that kind of money, you know, just great friends of the family that I haven't seen for years, who just put their hand in their pocket and said, yeah, we'll give you, we'll give you a few grand. And that made all the difference at the right time.

• 1:15:57Rich Roll?

  Well, if it makes you feel better, you know, a decent documentary budget is about a million.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:01Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 1:16:03Rich Roll?

  That was the budget of the documentary that you're making.

• 1:16:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, exactly.

• 1:16:07Rich Roll?

  You just had to do a few other things along the way.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  That's a very good point. That's a very good way of looking at it. I was just investing in a documentary.

• 1:16:14Rich Roll?

  Exactly, right? Come on, Spark. It's all on Spark now, right?

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Now, we've got, we've got some good connections with the documentary. I'm, I'm very privileged and I, I feel like I just want to go and, and physically, I cannot, I cannot tell you how thankful I am of people. I almost get emotional thinking about it. The amount of people that have come out, just, you know, a lovely lady called Rowena. She was listening to the radio before I started and she lived in Spain, British, lived in Spain. And she said, come and stay with me. I stayed with her, put me up in a beautiful home in Barcelona. She then drove me to two other countries because she wanted to help. And it's that selflessness of people from all over the world that made the journey. And I, I just want to encourage everybody I speak to in this upcoming tour to, to help, to like, to realize that your people around you are everything that make the world good. Without people, the world would be beautiful, but it wouldn't be as fun.

• 1:17:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What are some of, I mean, you, you, you just kind of said it, but you know, the, the takeaways and the lessons.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the, the takeaways, A, never, um, try and remove those preconceived ideas from countries. Um, more, and I really mean it more like 95% of the time I was away, it wasn't exactly how it was portrayed in, in all of the, whether it was a, a guidebook or whether it was a travel magazine or, you know, you compile all of this stuff of how you believe a country is going to be. And unless you've visited it, it's, it's, it's not the same.

• 1:17:37Rich Roll?

  So now what is it like when you turn on international news and you see some report from someplace that you've been?

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  Well, first thing I do is text my mates there and say, are you okay? More often than not, that's the, the real reason. And then I get the response back of, yeah, it's fine. It's not actually as bad as they're saying, or it is bad, or, you know, and. There's, when I see CNN, for example, lots of big disasters from all over the world, or BBC World News as well, there's a lot of stuff that needs to be talked about. And I believe that by focusing on some of the negative stuff, it actually creates positive stuff because people then come and help. But I wish there could be the follow up stories of this is now what's happened in the, in the wake of a disaster or the wake of something happening. Because it, because people need to see that as well. So I guess the other big thing is coming right back to the beginning message that Kev taught me, which is not waiting for, not waiting for something to happen in your life

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  to kick you up the backside to do something. You have an opportunity to do it now. And whether you're 10 years old or 80 years old, you probably have something that you want to do and you have an opportunity to do it, even if you, like me, can't afford it, wasn't fit enough really. And so just, just go for it.

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  And Kevin, you know, who you met, what year was it that you did Marathon de Salle?

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Fifteen, sixteen.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Fifteen, fifteen. Was diagnosed with basically, I mean, basically a life sentence, right? And now it's five years later.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, five years and 40 days, something like that.

• 1:19:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Did he join you in Athens?

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was incredibly moving. We had a lot of tears during that run and had some laughs and some really lovely chats. So Kev, Kev was 49 when he was diagnosed, given terminal prostate cancer, given as little as two years to live. And he dry, he describes it at the moment as drug roulette. So he's basically taking his drugs and one day they'll stop working and maybe there'll be another drug that works and maybe there won't. And it's that day that comes that we don't want to happen, you know, when, when he'll drop off a cliff, but, and, and you know, and his meds will stop working. But five years on, he's still with us and he still will die from cancer. He was absolutely riddled with it. And I just wish that we could get the message out there. So I suppose this is a big, a big message of mine that I'm going to probably be preaching

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  around the rest of my life is that if you are a man and you're over 40 years old and you haven't gone and got your prostate checked, you have to do it because you could have prostate cancer with no symptoms and you could be literally dying any day. That's the reality. If you don't get checked and you catch it late, the chances of you dying are huge. If you catch it early, the chances of you living are huge. And so. And also, if you're not a man or you're not over forty, the chances are you know somebody who is. And so I

• 1:20:16Rich Roll?

  That's the most common form of cancer for men, right?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, biggest. It's actually, well, it's overtaken breast cancer now, so it's the biggest, biggest

• 1:20:22Rich Roll?

  Oh, is it really?

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So it's overtaken breast cancer and breast cancer's obviously had a lot of public awareness and funding. And I just feel like it's now time to turn our heads and look at this cancer that's now killing a lot of men. And twelve, just over twelve thousand men die from prostate cancer in the UK alone. That's every forty-five minutes.

• 1:20:40Rich Roll?

  So you, you use this adventure to also raise funds for Prostate Cancer UK, right?

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:20:47Rich Roll?

  How much did you guys, did you do, you raise some, how much money did you guys raise?

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  We, we, on the JustGiving page, I'll have to check it. I think we're up about a hundred and twenty-five. But I know we've got a substantial offline that's gone in, so I believe it's just over the two hundred thousand pound mark. We wanted to raise two hundred and fifty, and I think we will. Hopefully with, when the book and the documentary comes out and with my

• 1:21:10Rich Roll?

  So that's like ongoing.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Oh, it's ongoing. And I, I won't stop until I know that that target is in the bank, you know, because there's no reason why we can't do that. It's just, it just takes everybody that's listening to this and everybody that's listening to the things I'm going to say in the future, just a dollar, fifty cents a pound, whatever it is, just a small amount really makes a difference. And that money that we're raising is specifically going towards a national screening program. And so that means that men can get access to free and easy checks without having to go through this whole ordeal. And and I hope we'll then have enough money to combat the stigma attached to prostate cancer and the fact that people don't want to talk about it because it's embarrassing, which it shouldn't be.

• 1:21:50Rich Roll?

  Really? I didn't even know. Is it?

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because people, men especially, don't want to talk about it because it involves your bum. That's the reality. And it shouldn't, it shouldn't be the case because it's killing people. And so I'm convinced that if it was, if it involved a different part of your body, they wouldn't be killing as many people.

• 1:22:08Rich Roll?

  So you've got this speaking tour.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  Coming up. Has that already started or you're on the cusp of that?

• 1:22:13Speaker 01

  I saw Dean just the other day, speaking in the National Running Show in the UK. So it's kind of started, but it's ramping up properly, starting in March.

• 1:22:22Rich Roll?

  And it's like a full, like, I looked at the schedule, like, there's a lot of dates all over the UK.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  All over the UK, and we're now starting to do some in the US as well. And what I've got planned in the future will bring me to North America. And so I'm hoping that if people enjoy, hopefully people enjoy what I'm saying and we'll, we'll take something from it in the UK. And then I can, I can then do more in the US.

• 1:22:43Rich Roll?

  And what's the, what's the message when you get up in front of kids or schools or these groups at these theaters?

• 1:22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the message is to, A, there's, there's a big message of resilience in this whole journey, right? You know, overcoming the stuff that you think you can't do. And you, when you get out of bed in the morning and it's raining and you think, oh, I can't go for it, and it's cold. Yes, you can. Like, there's, there's, there's other stories behind it, but the overarching message is of, of time. So I preach about this number of 29,747, which is the average amount of days that a British person will live for. 29,747 is the magic number. And I want people to realize that that number is going down every single day. And we have an opportunity to live, to live our life right now. In, in the UK alone, we spend on average nine years of our life watching TV. And we spend 90% of our life indoors.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  And so I'm, I'm basically standing up and preaching about the fact that, like, yes, okay, you need to earn money to feed your kids and pay your mortgage. But you also have an opportunity and a responsibility to enjoy and to live your life as passionately as you can with the stuff that you love. Because otherwise it's going to be too late. You know, you're going to get to your deathbed and not have done what you wanted to do. So.

• 1:23:52Rich Roll?

  When I look at what you've done, one thing that strikes me is you just basically made this decision to do this. Like you. You became a runner later in life.

• 1:24:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Rich Roll?

  It wasn't like you were out winning races,

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:05Rich Roll?

  winning Badwater and Marathon de Salle. Like you were, you're, you're an enthusiast. And obviously you have a certain amount of talent and dedication because it's hard to run these, these ultras. But the thing is like, it's not like you were a name in running.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:24:22Rich Roll?

  And you just took it upon yourself to do this thing that nobody else had ever done and you figured it out.

• 1:24:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Rich Roll?

  And I think it's easy, like people, oh, he was a banker. And he was, you know, it was like, oh, maybe he had a million dollar bonus that he just paid for this thing. But that's not the case at all.

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  No, not the case at all, not the case at all. And you're right, I'm not a fantastic runner. I, like you said, ultra runners say that, but I'm really not. I'm not even that fit, not even that healthy. You know, I literally just wanted to go and live by what Kev said is to enjoy it and to travel and to run. And, and I'm going to continue to run because it helps with my mind, with my, everything that I have in my life. So it's, uh, running, I, I describe as just very much my mode of transport. Um, and it happens to be a cheap, was a cheap and easy way of, of getting around until you decide to run around the world, of course.

• 1:25:09Rich Roll?

  Right. And I think it was funny as I, I was reading some of the media on you. Um, and, and, and it seemed like journalists were, were shocked that you still like to run, like, oh, this is like, no. You're like, you're like, I want to get back to running now. But people are like, what?

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  It's bizarre, isn't it? I don't really understand what that question I get is. So what are you going to do next? Well, I'm obviously going, I'm going to run. Like I'm not just going to stop. But at the same time, I get the point of I've run so much. Now, do you want to stop? But I'll tell you what I am not missing, which is getting on and off planes.

• 1:25:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  Or having that long snaking queue in airports to get to immigration. Um, but no, running is like you, like yourself, it's, um, it's, it's great for, if you love it, you carry on doing it, obviously.

• 1:25:51Rich Roll?

  Is there a bit of a, a coming down from such a, you know, huge experience?

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  I haven't experienced it yet. I think things have been kind of niggling me in the background, like stuff that I, I've missed, that I didn't realize I was missing. Like meeting new people all the time.

• 1:26:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  You know, I was meeting new people and making friends every couple of days and then having this great relationship with them and then having a chat with them on WhatsApp for the following weeks. And now I I'm very much in the zone of, yeah, okay, I'm still meeting people in theaters and I'm, you know, talking to new people, but it's it's not as intense. And it was that was quite a special two year bubble of my life. But I think the lot of people did say, oh, you're gonna have to prepare yourself when you come back because it's gonna be this. But I've just filled it. I've just filled this gap with being busy and writing the books and getting the documentary documentary out and doing the tour. And I think once that stuff starts to die down and I've finished the book and I've compiled all the photos for the photo book and I've witnessed the documentary come and go and

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  it starts to fade a little bit, then maybe, but other stuff will take its place.

• 1:26:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that's healthy. You know, there's a I know a lot of people who they do some really super crazy thing and then they feel like they just have to keep upping the ante or doing something crazier. And, you know, it's that's an addict mentality because it's like chasing the dragon, right? Like you've did you've done this incredible thing. And much like I would imagine, you know, a soldier returning from a deployment, like there's an adjustment period because you've gone from a very extreme situation, not to compare, you know, running marathons to being in battle, but

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:27:33Rich Roll?

  the idea of being in in something that's that's not of the normal life that is very heightened and intense, to then being sort of sitting in the countryside and having to adjust to that, right? And there's this this wanderlust or this itch like, you know, I need that dopamine rush again. And I think people get into trouble with that. But to the extent that you can kind of leverage the experience that you've had and the kind of platform that you've created for yourself to then take that whatever that energy is and pour it into being of service to other people, I think you'll find great fulfillment in that.

• 1:28:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hope so. And what I've what I've got next is still running and it's I've just slowed everything down and we're gonna go. The the plan is to do something similar, um, but to enjoy it more, not focus on a record or time, um, and to basically write more, take more photos and uh and really, yeah, I suppose just immerse myself in what I'm doing. And what I hope to do is to run, go and run, set another record, just because it's not been done, by running a marathon in all of the national parks in North America.

• 1:28:40Rich Roll?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Because exactly, it's cool, it's beautiful. Um, and I've got, rather than doing three a week, the schedule that we've roughly planned, and I've been thinking about it for a while, even during the last trip, was uh, it's about 10 days. So every 10 days I'll do a run and I'll, I'm then breaking it down to do some school talks and to do some other corporate work, but also just travel around in the van, um, getting a puppy in three days' time, by the way.

• 1:29:05Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  And so the puppy will start to run with me. Um, and uh, and then get, go over to the US in, in January 2021, um, and start trekking across all the national parks, tick them off over 500 days, and then go up to Canada and do another 500 days to tick off all of the other national parks.

• 1:29:23Rich Roll?

  Only one border crossing. Easy.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  Easy. And I hope, I'm not gonna have to pay any bribes to get into Canada either. You never know.

• 1:29:32Rich Roll?

  I was, uh, kind of living in the headspace of Ricky Gates over the last couple of days because he's the most recent episode that I just put up and, and have spent quite a bit of time thinking about his cross-country, you know, unsupported run across America.

• 1:29:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:47Rich Roll?

  Which has parallels to what you've done, but, but which is also a very different animal because he, he's somebody who, you know, whether it's running every street in San Francisco or running across America, like, these are ultra-endurance events, but they were really about taking your time and, and connecting deeply with your community and. Your natural environment and yours is different in the sense that you're popping in, you're running these marathons, you're having, you know, a valuable experience with the people and the landscape when you're there, but then you're out, right? It's very rapid, rapid fire.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  Too rapid, too rapid. And certainly for anybody that does this kind of thing, or the same thing again in the future, whether it's Dean or otherwise, you, I wanted more time everywhere. And you add one, one day to every country, that's another nine months, you know? That's the, that's the kind of length of, you can't add another day. But slowing things down for the future.

• 1:30:44Rich Roll?

  196 extra days.

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's, it's, it's intense and I, what I'm doing in the future is, is just slower and I want to take time to look around and enjoy what I have. And I also, I'm looking to get into a bit of learning about the environment because of, you know, our big problem in the West is the environment, despite the fact of all the other problems going on in the world. I want to just learn a bit about it and, and start to use the trip over those 1,000 days to, to learn and to hopefully share what I then have, I can come back and see you in a few years' time and say, well, this is what I now know. Cause I know virtually, I don't know nothing about the environment because I had to do lots of offsetting projects for my trip to make our whole journey carbon neutral. And so this next thing I'm trying is, is to learn a bit, to share the journey of this

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  trip as well, and hopefully get other people into, into sport.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  Let's talk about the carbon offset thing. That's, that's interesting because there is this thing like, oh, it's very self indulgent. You took 445 flights and God knows how many, you know, car rides, et cetera. Like the, how do you offset? I mean, that's a massive carbon footprint to offset.

• 1:31:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, I was trying to find companies that were going to be able to help me offset. And I think the standard, standard one that everybody jumps to is when you're offsetting carbon emissions, you plant a tree, you know, that's the, that's the obvious go to. But there are many, many other ways to do that. And using the carbon credits model, which is through this company called Natural Capital Partners, they very kindly replied to my One of many, many emails and said, yeah, we'd love to help you. And they sponsored my offset by giving me four projects in which we would do various different environmental work. So to use an example, Guatemala, which was also one of my favorite countries, there's a company there.

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Called EcoFiltro and they do water filtration and they also create stoves which require less wood and therefore the people that are cooking on these stoves then have to use less wood and then the smoke is less and so they get ill less and it's also cutting down less trees.

• 1:32:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  And so what this company does and they, you know, they, they're a very, very big company for lots of multinationals all over the world. And they said, we've put all of your, they even asked me about my diet, you know, what kind of, what kind of diet I had and how many planes we'd be taking and how many. And they gave me the certificate with, which was offsetting forty five tonnes of carbon emissions. And we're currently in email discussion about upping that, just to make sure we're completely covered with everything. So forty five tonnes was offset, which was CO2 equivalent. And that means that all of these, so we had four projects around the world. This one in Guatemala was one of them. And not only does it help the environment, but it helps the communities of people in, in, in, in country. So it, I don't know if it's a perfect system, but I think it's a much better way than just planting trees, that's for sure.

• 1:33:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah. One of the places in the world that I, that I know so little about that it's embarrassing is Africa.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  I, I think it's the same for a lot of people.

• 1:33:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  I believe I know a bit now. But what I have seen, I liken, I suppose this is, it may, it may sound silly, I don't know, but I liken Africa similar to the US in the sense that we've got fifty states and fifty four countries in Africa. And they're very much governed differently, different laws, different rules, different attitudes, different races, different religions. It's just that Africa currently is less well off. But if you were to read books, like a great book called Factfulness about how the kind of environment and the, and the, the culture of wealth is, is, is shifting to Asia and to Africa, you'll start to see that Africa is booming, it will boom.

• 1:34:33Speaker 01

  It's not a case of, oh no, they can never be a civilized society. Africa is A, beautiful, but B, has so much potential. And so. In terms of the the the climate and everything that's going on there, I had, I think it was an average temperature of forty four degrees C in those fifty four countries, it was hot.

• 1:34:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, what is that like? That's over a hundred Fahrenheit.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely scorching. And some places, you know, deserts don't have don't have rain for for very long periods of time. And then you you learn about all of this. And then you go to somewhere like the Pacific Islands, which are actually directly under threat from rising sea levels, which I also learned, which, you know, is also about the the saltwater membrane in these islands and how the water is rising and ruining the so there's there's all sorts of elements. But I tell you what, if I could tell anybody to go and visit any continent and spend some time, it would be in places like Sierra Leone and Togo and the Congo, where where people live very, very differently.

• 1:35:30Rich Roll?

  What about the North Pole, Antarctica and the Arctic Circle?

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, good point. Good mention it. Well, I definitely didn't need to do any running in the North Pole because there isn't any land. It's just it's just a lot of frozen water. But in Antarctica, technically co-owned by seven different countries. And so it's not technically a country, didn't need to do it. But it's it's it's one of the seven it's one of the seven continents. Right. I've got to do it. And so I was talking with a few friends recently about what I could do. And I'd love to run in in both the poles, some something substantial. But then I have the conflicting interest of the climate, you know, and the environment. And should I be should I be traipsing through these places that are delicate and maybe should be more protected? I don't know.

• 1:36:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's an interesting thought experiment, because in terms of offset, like if you can create, you know, an adequate amount of awareness that creates some kind of action in the wake of it, does it become, you know, a rational thing to do?

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And your guess is as good as mine. And how will you know until you've done it? And is it worth taking the risk? And I mean, as a as a tourist, as a human of the planet, I'd love to see both the poles and to properly witness them and do a brilliant expedition. And yes, I would love to plan them. But I don't want to we're in quite a delicate balance with with the with the climate. So I don't know what how I'll feel about that after learning, you know, I've talked about this learning period over the next few years when I do this next trip, I might completely change my mind and. Go completely green in a different way. I don't know.

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  How's the diet? We can start there.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  We can start there.

• 1:37:12Rich Roll?

  We can have a conversation about that right now.

• 1:37:13Speaker 01

  My diet and your diet are probably the opposite.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  No, I'd love, and I will, to get closer and closer to the likes of your diet. I have.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  I'll leave you with a couple of books.

• 1:37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, please do. Please do. I, no, I'm, I'd love to. Throughout this whole trip, these two, two years, I actually thought about being vegan through it, through the trip. And I'm so glad I didn't because I think I would have starved. Because, yes, there's obviously that. You're not going to starve.

• 1:37:43Rich Roll?

  It would have been, it would, it would have added, you know, a lot more complexity to it. Although I think, you know, in a lot of, you know, less developed parts of the world, you know, they, you know, a lot of vegan food is pauper food. It's, you know, it's rice and beans and grains and things like that. Like, you know, especially, you know, I've traveled all over the Middle East. Like, that's like the best vegan food.

• 1:38:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:04Rich Roll?

  Anywhere, like places where you think, oh, it's going to be so hard and it's not hard at all.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  No, and I don't know enough, I don't know enough as I should to make kind of informed decisions. And there's also the occasion, I mean, many, many times when you arrive in a country at two in the morning, and the only thing next door to you is a chicken house or, you know, a fast, fast food place. And if I go anywhere else, then I'm at risk of either getting into trouble or getting lost or getting attacked or whatever. And so I think I've made a lot of excuses why I shouldn't do that. But maybe by the time I see you next.

• 1:38:37Rich Roll?

  You're my, you're my new project.

• 1:38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, please, Rich, do it.

• 1:38:40Rich Roll?

  Well, here I was like, looking at some of the stats on your run. So on 22 of the marathons, you had food poisoning. On four of them, you had kidney infections.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Rich Roll?

  You did 101 marathons on an empty stomach. I mean.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:55Rich Roll?

  22 marathons with food poisoning.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  Horrible. Oh, my word. The amount of days I woke up and literally would just crawl out of bed to the bathroom to then vomit and then get my gear on.

• 1:39:08Rich Roll?

  Because of the water to something you ate in a strange land?

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 01

  A combination of everything. I think it was a knock on effect of not having enough water. So, for example, in Iran, I didn't have water for 24 miles. It was 40 plus degrees. And I was urinating blood by the end. I was peeing blood. And I'd had that several times. But in Bangladesh, the humidity was huge and. Had I, so I had a kidney infection and food poisoning in Bangladesh, forty odd degrees, and I was literally throwing up every single mile.

• 1:39:41Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  And you just, you know, you think, I'm gonna just give this.

• 1:39:44Rich Roll?

  Was that the hardest marathon?

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  That one and Kuwait or Djibouti, Djibouti in Africa was scorchingly hot.

• 1:39:52Rich Roll?

  Because of the heat.

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, and you know, I was, I was trying to cover up as well to kind of be respectful in these places and you just end up absolutely roasting. I remember sheltering in a place in Djibouti, which was this tiny, tiny shed of a restaurant. And the air con unit they had there, which was a huge air con unit, was cooling the room to thirty-two degrees C. It was, it was, it was so, so hot, even indoors. And so those temperatures were bad. Yeah, lots and lots of food poisoning. And it got very much okay, so I was used to it. I took lots of supplements to try and help, like probiotics to help my gut and stuff. But, you know, when you're out on a run and you need to drink from a tap in somebody's garden because you're thirsty, it's.

• 1:40:33Rich Roll?

  I would imagine you got a lot of shots too before you.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, every, every, literally everything you can have. And that took, I think it was three months to get everything. And then I was more or less done. And I had to have a couple of backups the following year, into year two of the trip. But that was fine. I got, I felt a little bit ill and I had, I think it was two hundred and something days on antimalarials, which made me feel rough anyway.

• 1:40:57Rich Roll?

  In, in certain Muslim countries, running in shorts, no bueno.

• 1:41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Speaker 01

  And there was lots of places where I would turn up and assume that that was the case. And then I would ask in reception whether it was fine. And they'd kind of give me the look as if to say, you idiot, like, of course, you, of course, you can wear whatever you want. And then in other places, it was the opposite, you know, where I assumed it would be okay. And it wasn't. But then.

• 1:41:22Rich Roll?

  Did that cause problems?

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  Uh, it, it, yeah, I'd had a, somebody threw a.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  A water bottle at me out of the window, um, which was full and it hit me and it hurt, but it wasn't damaging me, but they, they were honking.

• 1:41:36Rich Roll?

  What country was that?

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  I, it was Central Africa. I can't remember, I'm afraid. No, it was Central Africa. I also then, I was hit by a car and I broke my elbow in a, in, um, in Central Africa. And I believe that was semi on purpose. It was just their wing mirror, but it hit me so hard, um, that my, my elbow broke, but, um.

• 1:41:57Rich Roll?

  So did you have to put it in a cast? Like, how did that go down?

• 1:42:00Speaker 01

  No. Um, so I, I went to see a doctor, like that was in, in one of the embassies and they said, yeah, we, well, if you want me to X-ray it, then we'll have to take a few days out. And I said, well, we don't have the days, so we don't know. And then I went back on one of my passport pickups. So one of my many times where I've had to go back and exchange passports.

• 1:42:18Rich Roll?

  Back to the UK.

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  Back to the UK for like 12 hours. Um, and then I, I went and got my, yeah, exactly. And I got my, got my, my elbow looked at. So, yeah. Um, and so, yeah, there was those times when I did have to think about the, the religion was a really great eye opener. I tell you what, even if you do this whole drip just to learn about religion, um, but I was, I happened to be in Saudi Arabia, in Jeddah, um, the day of Eid, where everyone gathers at Mecca, um, uh, just the day, just the night before, and the families which were having these huge gatherings along the coast. It was just so beautiful to see. And I came very, um, very, very kind of, almost fell in love with the, with the different range of religions that we have in the world. Um, and so again, it's another classic example

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  of religions are seen as, as war makers and bad sometimes, when yes, they are, but there's also the other side of the coin.

• 1:43:09Rich Roll?

  I've been running in Jeddah.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Have you?

• 1:43:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I ran along the water.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  The Cornish?

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:43:14Speaker 01

  Yes. Over the bridge and along, and you've got the, the couple of mosques.

• 1:43:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a couple of mosques right on the coastline or along there. Yeah, it's quite something.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Were you running in day or night?

• 1:43:26Rich Roll?

  Day.

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  Day.

• 1:43:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I ran in shorts and that was a place where I got back and they said, you probably shouldn't have done that.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. I ran in long, I ran in long.

• 1:43:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And I ran in shorts in Riyadh also and was told afterwards that that was not a good.

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's slightly more frowned upon there.

• 1:43:42Rich Roll?

  And I, and it was just, it was ignorance, really. I just didn't, I just didn't know.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  But I, but that's the same, I've been in places where I thought it was absolutely fine, um, or where I've been running around places.

• 1:43:53Speaker 01

  During prayer time and anywhere else, it would have been fine. But at the moment, I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and I was disrespecting people by not giving them space. And, you know, you make those, you make those mistakes and you learn. So.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  So now that you're home and you flip on the news and it's Brexit and it's Trump and it's, you know, insanity and all of that, like, what is the lens through which you kind of process all of that, given the worldliness, you know, of your adventure?

• 1:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, worldliness. I definitely do feel worldly. I definitely also feel like I'm not as worldly as I want to be still, because in all of those places we've just discussed, there's so much more to be learned and.

• 1:44:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, be there for a day.

• 1:44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Be there for a day. I mean, you still run 26 miles. It's still a lot, lot to see, but actually to take into people's religions and what they do at mealtimes and all that sort of stuff. So when I, when I look at the news, my lens of this whole new worldview that I have, it's one of sadness on one part, because I want there to be more positivity and to show the great things that I've experienced. But then, on the other hand, complete elation and joy at how lucky I feel to have seen everything. And then, of course, you have Brexit and Trump and all of the, the squabbling, the squabbling over things that, ah, you know, I wish we could just spend a little bit of time, just give us 10 minutes of the news a day, talking about the problems that are happening in

• 1:45:15Speaker 01

  the Congo or in Sierra Leone or, you know, and, and, yeah, there's, there's, there's, there's lots of ways to look at it. It's frustration, to be honest. Most of what I see is frustration now because I want to do more. I want to be able to shake people and rattle them and go, why are you moaning about Brexit again? Or moaning about your commute, you know? The world has its own.

• 1:45:34Rich Roll?

  Well, it takes some crazy event to rejigger people's, you know, sense of priorities. And, and that's, you know, to bring it back to Kobe Bryant, I mean, that's kind of the, you know, everything kind of stopped on Sunday when that happened. It was so shocking and, and absolutely surreal. It was an incredibly foggy morning here. Like, you couldn't, the visibility was almost nothing. So there was, if, and that's sort of unusual. And it was just a bizarre, there was a weird heaviness where everything just stopped for a minute. And the whole world, like. For a witness to this thing that had happened and it allowed us to kind of connect with what's truly important.

• 1:46:16Speaker 01

  The preciousness of life.

• 1:46:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the question then arises is why can't we make that more, you know, top of mind in our daily decision making and how we navigate the world.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  And I hope, and you say that, you know, what do people want to get out of my talks when I speak to them and it's that, you know, it's, it's, it's not having something in your life or going to somebody's funeral or seeing something bad happen on the news for you to wake up and realize that every moment that we have of every day is, is, is so privileged. We are especially us in, in the Western world in this privileged society, we have so much that we can give and we can do, even if it's just, you know, spending more time with your family or saying to your loved ones that you love them more, or going and doing that pottery course or that singing lesson or whatever it is that you're putting off, you know, the tomorrow may not happen. And luckily for Kobe, he's, he's had this incredible life where he's done a lot, but I guarantee there's also things there that he hadn't done yet that he wanted to do.

• 1:47:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, no, I think that there were a lot of things that, you know, he had a lot of things that he was working on and wanted to, you know, express in his life. And then, you know, his daughter and the, you know, the, the other people that were on that. It's just, it's unbelievable. Um, yeah. Not to end on that note, I do want to know, uh, what your banker buddies think. Like now that you're back, are you still connected with the people that you used to work with?

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of them.

• 1:47:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Like how does that, how does that go?

• 1:47:38Speaker 01

  A lot of my friends, it's, I mean, I'm, well, I'm turning up to see them now when I'm living in a van. So that's, that's a difference.

• 1:47:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Because they're all living in a converted van.

• 1:47:46Rich Roll?

  You're like the weird guy down by the river now.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly that. It's, um, to be fair, I think some of them look at it in, in envy in a little way, not just the traveling bit, but just the change that I had the, I had the jump, but also, um, a lot of them still think I'm crazy, you know, turning or turning, turning your back on, on money and, and, I mean, it wasn't, it's, it's not extreme, but it's, it's. There's both sides of the coin. They definitely think, but my true friends, they know that it was always in me to do it. And so many of them, a great friend of mine, Andy, who I used to work with, he came and did nineteen with me, nineteen countries, nineteen marathons. And he was just coming out for the weekend and started in Brazil and we did.

• 1:48:27Rich Roll?

  That's cool.

• 1:48:28Speaker 01

  We ran in Chernobyl together, all sorts of stuff.

• 1:48:30Rich Roll?

  Family's good?

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, family's good. My parents, bless them. My dad shook my hand at the end when we had our little final closing thing in Athens and said, never again. Honestly, they have been so great. And my brother throughout, my brother is slightly younger than me and he's a nurse, and he took six months out of his job and life to convert this van that I'm now living in. So when I returned home, I didn't have to go back into that life. And so I could kind of seamlessly progress. So, yeah, the amount of people, and I said, I've said this a few times, I've had, I've got just over 2,000 new contacts in my phone from all over the world. And so when, when there's holidays all over the place, or when

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  there's religious occasions happening in the world, I get these messages wishing me, you know, from everywhere.

• 1:49:20Rich Roll?

  But it's gotta be like, wait, who's this guy? Like, what country did I meet him in?

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  But I've saved people's names with the country next to them. Just because it's

• 1:49:29Rich Roll?

  A photograph, like, you know, it would be hard to keep all that straight, I would imagine.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  But it's great for contacts because I've now been able to help other people that want to travel. And so on my website, I have this.

• 1:49:39Rich Roll?

  You could set up a whole consulting business around this.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm trying.

• 1:49:42Rich Roll?

  Like a fixer.

• 1:49:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. I'm a fixer that can't remember where I was. No, I've got a lot of great people that can help. So, I mean, along with that, this next focus for me is this year is the speaking tour. I'm also doing a few little mini runs. We're gonna circumnavigate Iceland. We're gonna run around.

• 1:50:00Rich Roll?

  That's a mini run?

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Mini run, thousand miles in a couple of weeks. We're trying to do that. That's gonna be beautiful. Difficult, more enduring, certainly on the body.

• 1:50:09Rich Roll?

  I know there's a cycling race that goes around, but yeah.

• 1:50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, there's a beautiful tarmac road all the way around the country. And then I'm gathering a few people with the brand that's been supporting me for years. Do Sport Live, they are giving me the reins to create a team to take out to Malawi. And we're going to run the length of Malawi.

• 1:50:28Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:50:29Speaker 01

  Um, just for fun, just to gather some team that have have this this whole ethos of of this brand is exactly what I breathe, which is be set free, similar to yourself, just being outdoors and live this world. So um, I'm putting that team together. Um, and other than that, it's it's speaking tour time. So um, if anybody wants me to speak anywhere, then let me know, because I want to share the journey. And I think, I mean, I it's all very well doing this over a conversation, but the amount of photos and videos that kind of illustrate the the dodgy moments kind of paint it.

• 1:50:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Better than I can.

• 1:50:59Rich Roll?

  Well, good, man. It's all good.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  No, thank you. I'm so grateful for you having me on.

• 1:51:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, fantastic. I mean, you know, I I can't congratulate you enough. I I just can't even wrap my head around what you've accomplished. It's it's really quite something, super inspiring, and I can't wait to see you get out in the world and and and share this message. I think it's super important. So my hat's off to you. And and I am here as a resource and of service. So if you ever need anything from me, yeah, I'd love to help you out.

• 1:51:29Speaker 01

  Thank you, man. No, I'm I'm very grateful. And you've, you know, what you're doing, I think many people underestimate the power of good you're doing. So I'm grateful. Thank you.

• 1:51:39Rich Roll?

  It's just me sitting in my house, talking to people like yourself.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. And it makes a whole lot of difference. It makes a whole lot of difference. And when when somebody else goes and does this record, or whenever something else happens, and we can we can share that moment, because I'm looking forward to that day.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  I like how how enthusiastic you are about somebody else, whether it's Dean or somebody else, going out and and and and breaking your record or.

• 1:52:02Speaker 01

  I want it to be Dean. I want it to be Dean. I've followed him. I'm a huge fan. I absolutely love the man. Um, and I I genuinely want to watch the trip unfold without having to be in the painful positions of.

• 1:52:12Rich Roll?

  You're like, oh, he's there. I remember that.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. No, I hope I could be a part of it as well. Thanks, Rich.

• 1:52:18Rich Roll?

  Nice, man. Thank you. So if you want to connect with Nick, nickbutter.com, at nickbutterrun on Instagram and Twitter. Book coming out at some point, documentary, all good stuff, man. So let me know when all that stuff is ready, and I'll I'll help push the word out.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

• 1:52:34Rich Roll?

  All right, man. Peace.

• 1:52:40Rich Roll?

  Amazing, right? How cool is that guy? I love you, Nick. Thank you for sharing your experience, strength, and hope. Huge inspiration for all of us when it comes to defining our own challenges and raising the ceiling on our own perception of what is possible and our innate potential. As a fun aside, I'm pretty sure our time together inspired Nick to go plant-based, so give him a high five on socials, @NickButterRun on Instagram and Twitter. Also, please check out the show notes for copious links to experience Nick's world beyond the earbuds. And again, I set up a Facebook group for fans of the show that

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  you can find at facebook.com/groups/richrollpodcast, and that's linked up in the show notes as well. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on the program on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube as well. The most important thing is to subscribe. Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. I love that. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com/donate. I appreciate everybody who worked very hard to put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis and Margot Lubin for videoing the show and creating all the clips that we share on social media. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting.

• 1:54:04Rich Roll?

  DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple days with another amazing episode. Until then, think more broadly about your potential while you social distance. Stay safe, eat the good foods, get lots of sleep, breathe, and try to move your body. I love more deeply, and lots of other good stuff. Until then, peace. Pies. Namaste.