Roll On: A Planet Based Lifestyle

Welcome to another edition of Roll On—my bi-monthly deep dive into (semi) current events, topics of audience interest, and of course answers to your questions. Commanding co-host duties is my hype man Adam Skolnick, an activist and veteran journalist perhaps best known as David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me co-author. Adam has written about adventure sports, environmental issues and civil rights for outlets such as The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, BBC, and Men’s Health. He is the author of One Breath and is currently hard at work on a novel. Some of the many topics explored in today's conversation include: the documentary 'Kiss The Ground' -- underground econsystems; regenerative agriculture v. demand for meat; the documentary 'My Octopus Teacher' -- underwater ecosystems; New studies on the exponential growth of plastic waste; and thoughts on rugged individualism and commonwealth harm In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do we grapple with the contradicting values of the American culture? How do you balance training needs and social responsibility in a pandemic? How do you help loved one's transition to a plant-based lifestyle? Thank you to Heidi from Northern California, Adam from Toronto, and Tristan from British Colombia for your questions. If you want your query discussed, drop it on our Facebook Page, or better yet leave a voicemail at (424) 235-4626. The visually inclined can watch our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

  Eating well rarely falls apart because of one big failure. It's the daily question that wears you down. Like, what am I actually going to make tonight? What's in the fridge? And it's exactly why we built the Plant Power Meal Planner. It's a personalized, plant-based meal planning program that matches you with recipes based on your taste, your allergies, your cooking skills, and how much time you actually have. You build, through this program, a balanced, nutrient-dense plan for your entire household in a few minutes. Then it generates a grocery list for you with one click that plugs right into our delivery partners. All the recipes in the program are built by dietitians with culinary training. Plus, you get your own food coach to help you problem-solve along the way.

• 0:44Rich Roll?

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

• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:22Rich Roll?

  Okay, so today, Adam and I get into a few documentaries. Kiss the Ground and My Octopus Teacher. We discuss the quickly metastasizing problem of plastic ending up in our oceans and waterways. And of course, we answer a bunch of listener questions. We answer a question on group training in the era of COVID, how to be an effective advocate for healthy lifestyle change, and also a question on the problematic aspects of American exceptionalism, as well as several other topics. So with that, I give you me, Adam, and Roll On. Enjoy.

• 2:06Rich Roll?

  All right, everybody, we're back. Welcome or welcome back to another hotly anticipated edition of Roll On.

• 2:15Adam Skolnick?

  Roll On.

• 2:16Rich Roll?

  Roll On. Give me your BBC One introduction again.

• 2:20Adam Skolnick?

  This is BBC Radio One.

• 2:22Rich Roll?

  There we go. I like that. Can you do the whole podcast in that accent?

• 2:26Adam Skolnick?

  I cannot. I'm good at that, just that. Otherwise, it gets really weird.

• 2:30Rich Roll?

  Really quick, if you're joining us on YouTube today, make sure you hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I'm told that that's effective in building our subscriber base.

• 2:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:41Rich Roll?

  Also, apparently, there's a little bell, a little notification bell, and if you click that, you will be alerted every time we post a new video, so.

• 2:50Adam Skolnick?

  And you can trick YouTube into sending you good stuff.

• 2:52Rich Roll?

  Exactly, right?

• 2:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Rich Roll?

  We're all here to take control of the algorithm, are we not?

• 2:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 3:00Rich Roll?

  And I'm joined today, of course, by my hype man bestie, journeyman journalist, adventurer, environmentalist, author, David Goggins, can't hurt me co-author, Adam Skolnick. How you doing, man?

• 3:12Adam Skolnick?

  Good, man. How are you?

• 3:13Rich Roll?

  Swim-run enthusiast.

• 3:15Adam Skolnick?

  Swim-run devotee.

• 3:16Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 3:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Rich Roll?

  Backburner a little bit with a new baby at home.

• 3:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, new baby, the new baby, new baby life is real, man.

• 3:24Rich Roll?

  How's the sleep?

• 3:26Adam Skolnick?

  Intermittent.

• 3:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Adam Skolnick?

  If I get three straight hours, that's amazing.

• 3:31Rich Roll?

  Too bad the health benefits of intermittent sleeping don't match the health benefits of intermittent fasting.

• 3:39Adam Skolnick?

  Right, which I'm not doing either.

• 3:41Rich Roll?

  More people would have babies.

• 3:42Adam Skolnick?

  If, if, what do you mean? If intermittent sleeping?

• 3:45Rich Roll?

  Well, you know how intermittent fasting is now like a big thing? Everyone's like, you gotta intermittent fast. But if it was intermittent sleeping, that was the craze.

• 3:55Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, they'd have babies.

• 3:55Rich Roll?

  This would be a way to have more intermittent sleeping.

• 3:59Adam Skolnick?

  I thought you meant it would be like you'd, you wouldn't, you'd wake up to have the sex, opposed to, I kinda want to, but I'm not gonna go to the trouble. I thought that's what you meant.

• 4:07Rich Roll?

  Maybe that would happen, too. I don't know. What we do here on the Roll On is we invest a little bit of time in what we call the big story. We try to throw a teachable moment or two at you. We do a little show and tell. We take questions from listeners on our Facebook group. If you would like your question considered for us to contemplate and talk about, you can leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. Quickly becoming a new addition to the format is our fitness check-in.

• 4:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Rich Roll?

  How's your fitness check-in? You went, you swam around the reef the other day.

• 4:45Adam Skolnick?

  I did. I'll say two parts. One is, that was great. I mean, to be able to get back to the reef and to see the, and it was, it was 40-foot vis, at least. It was really one of the more beautiful days of the year. Rays, tons of fish that, like, new fish had hatched. So there was like baby fish everywhere, like explosions of baby fish. It was beautiful. But, you know, to be honest, like this zone two stuff, I feel like it's making me less fit. Like, I feel I'm slower and more breath, out of breath, but maybe it's the sleep deprivation. I don't know.

• 5:15Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a couple of things with zone two. First is, and I've said this before, it's a, it's a long game, right? So patience is key. But the other aspect of that is consistency. It only works when you're plying it consistently, day in and day out. So if you're, if you're doing intermittent zone two, you're probably not reaping the benefits and perhaps your fitness has slipped.

• 5:36Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 5:37Rich Roll?

  Because that's really how you make the gains, is when you're just like showing up day in, day out, day in, day out, and being patient.

• 5:43Adam Skolnick?

  Like an hour a day in zone two on a run?

• 5:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's gonna be different for, for everybody. But if you're doing zone two twice a week and not doing anything else, yeah, your fitness is gonna slip.

• 5:53Adam Skolnick?

  Dude, twice a week is good for me right now.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  Look, you've got a baby, and, you know, everything has a season.

• 6:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? That's cool that you got out on the reef. What, what I think a lot of people don't realize is the best, I think the best time of year in Los Angeles is September and October.

• 6:11Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  The weather's incredible. The water's warm.

• 6:14Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:15Rich Roll?

  It's really great.

• 6:15Adam Skolnick?

  It was like 68-degree water and, and clear. And then October and November is the best visibility on, on the California coast, anyway. I think October is the best month in almost every country like October and May are the like if you have when we can ever travel again, October and May, that's when you should travel.

• 6:32Rich Roll?

  Well, it depends on where you're going.

• 6:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 6:33Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:34Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you.

• 6:34Rich Roll?

  But October in Los Angeles is very much a an extended summer. I mean, the days are shorter, but the climate is super nice.

• 6:42Adam Skolnick?

  It's so nice.

• 6:42Rich Roll?

  And temperate.

• 6:43Adam Skolnick?

  You're right.

• 6:44Rich Roll?

  I haven't swam around the reef in quite some time, but I did go on a bike ride with my buddy Mark Hancock the other day. Mark is the guy that I did the Catalina swim run with.

• 6:54Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:55Rich Roll?

  You met him, remember?

• 6:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  He's Greg Renfrew's husband. Greg's a past podcast guest. She's the founder and CEO of Beauty Counter. And Mark is super fit, like an incredible athlete, and I love doing some training with him. And when we were preparing for the Catalina race, I took him down to do that swim and then we were running all over the bluffs because that's the one place in our kind of general region where you can approximate some kind of authentic swim run experience because it's hilly. Like, most of the beaches around here, everything's too flat.

• 7:28Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 7:29Rich Roll?

  But that's one place where you can climb those trails and get some elevation and stuff like that. But he like was sort of freaking out when we went around the reef at is that, what do you call that? It's it's on the way to Little Doom, but what is that point called?

• 7:44Adam Skolnick?

  It's Point Doom.

• 7:44Rich Roll?

  That is the Point Doom.

• 7:45Adam Skolnick?

  So you could call it Big Doom. Like, a lot of people call it Big Doom, and then that cove, that beach there is Big Doom, and Little Doom is on the other side of the smaller point.

• 7:52Rich Roll?

  It's very exposed. There's a lot of seals, there's a lot of marine life.

• 7:56Adam Skolnick?

  Sea lions.

• 7:57Rich Roll?

  And sea lions. And there's, there's a, the general consensus is this is a shark feeding ground.

• 8:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 8:04Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 8:05Adam Skolnick?

  And it's true, it is.

• 8:06Rich Roll?

  I've done that swim a ton of times. I've done it with you. It is a little bit freaky and treacherous when you're out there because you definitely have a sense that you are exposed and in the wild.

• 8:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  Although I've never seen anything that scared me. You're on high alert, for sure.

• 8:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:23Rich Roll?

  And Mark, since that experience, has told some friends that he swam around the Big Doom Point.

• 8:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Rich Roll?

  And he told me that like all his friends are like, I can't believe you did that. Like, you're like risking your life. Like, that's super sketchy to do that.

• 8:38Adam Skolnick?

  And we do it.

• 8:39Rich Roll?

  How many times have you done it?

• 8:40Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, I moved out there to do it like five times a week. I did, you know, like, I've got a buddy who's still out there like four or five times a week. And when he's not working, he's in production.

• 8:48Rich Roll?

  Do you see sharks ever?

• 8:50Adam Skolnick?

  We've never seen, uh, we've seen a blue shark. We've seen mola mola. There was a turtle sighting not too long ago. You know, I think that, so that in terms of shark attacks, we see seals, uh, sea lions that have been washed up with big bites out of them. I have a friend who surfs a big doom sometimes and he said he's, he literally was surfing when he saw a great white eating a whale calf.

• 9:10Rich Roll?

  Oh my god.

• 9:11Adam Skolnick?

  Um, and he just kept surfing and he's like, well, he's got food, so it's all good.

• 9:16Rich Roll?

  Luckily.

• 9:17Adam Skolnick?

  One time we, we finished our swim and we came out on the staircase and overlooking the blast. It was a beautiful day and we were just basking in, you know, in raw nature and thinking, wow, what a wonderful day. Isn't it beautiful out there? It was clear and the blue waters glittering with sunlight. And all of a sudden we see a white shark just breach and flop down right where we'd been. And we just looked at each other and said nothing and just moved along.

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 9:43Adam Skolnick?

  Um, but no, we've never seen a white shark. I think we will at some point. I mean, you know, the odds are eventually you might, um, but, uh, I'm not, you know, I used to be scared about it. I used to, sometimes when I'm out there alone, you might still feel it, um, like, like the darkness approaching. It's in your brain.

• 10:01Rich Roll?

  The water's quite clear out there, but on murky days, that's where it gets scary because you can't see, you know? And there's a sense of powerlessness.

• 10:08Adam Skolnick?

  The murky days are when you get scared, but, um, and there's powerlessness. You are in the food chain, but most of the, the attacks, I mean, I, I look at anytime there's an attack. First of all, we don't really have them to, I mean, I, I can't remember last time it was publicized in our area. And the ones that were, were kayak fishermen and they got, and nobody died. Uh, there was a guy who got bit in Manhattan Beach by a juvenile white shark, not too long ago, an open water swimmer. And that was because he'd been, uh, going after the bait of the pier fishermen. So it's, it tends to be, you know, the, the freedivers that get hit or the open water swimmers that get hit. It can be bad, like around here anyway, it can be bad luck, but often it's, it's related to fishing. And we're not doing that. And yeah, we're around their, their food. It's true.

• 10:53Adam Skolnick?

  Um, they are ping, pinging off those buoys. Some of those buoys have like a radio kind of receptor and, and any white sharks that have been tagged do ping those buoys.

• 11:03Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 11:03Adam Skolnick?

  And so there, there are, they do hear if, if it comes within a quarter mile or a half mile of the buoy, they, they ping. So yes, it happens.

• 11:11Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 11:12Adam Skolnick?

  Um, but you know, it's funny, Sunset Point, like in the bay. Is like within a mile of Sunset Point, there is a shark nursery, a white shark nursery that's known. So that's actually swimming to Meskell, where I've been swimming lately for swim run training is I think is much more in terms of white sharks. We've seen one breach there, too.

• 11:32Rich Roll?

  Wow, there's a lot more people in the water.

• 11:34Adam Skolnick?

  And there's more people in the water.

• 11:36Rich Roll?

  For sure.

• 11:36Adam Skolnick?

  I think, you know, we're all scared because of, nobody wants to die that way. But, uh, and because of jaws and all that. But in reality, I think it's, you know, you have better chance of getting struck by lightning.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  Well, we, we kill a hundred million sharks a year.

• 11:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:53Rich Roll?

  A hundred million.

• 11:54Adam Skolnick?

  It's crazy.

• 11:55Rich Roll?

  We kill. And there are five people who die by shark attacks every year.

• 12:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Rich Roll?

  Which is crazy. Do you know, uh, Michael Muller?

• 12:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  So I had him on the podcast.

• 12:06Adam Skolnick?

  I have his book. I have his amazing shark book.

• 12:08Rich Roll?

  His big shark book. Yeah, it's incredible. He gave me a copy of that book. He did the podcast recently. That's going to go up in a couple of weeks. But we spent the gravement of that conversation talking about his adventures photographing sharks and, and swimming out of the cage with sharks.

• 12:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Rich Roll?

  That has really reframed how I think about these creatures.

• 12:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  Um, it's an amazing podcast. I can't wait to share it.

• 12:31Adam Skolnick?

  I can't, I can't wait to listen. I think he posted on his Instagram not too long ago, maybe it was like a year ago, about like if people knew how close sharks really came to them in the water, even just around here, like nobody would be swimming in the ocean.

• 12:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Adam Skolnick?

  Uh, some, some sort of like hint like that, but he's not afraid of them. I, I feel the same way. I feel like we might see one. The thing to do, if you're out in deeper water and you see one is to group up like in a knot and everyone face outward and to kind of make you like, you know, make yourself bigger and, um, not splash around or, or, you know, as hard as that might be.

• 13:04Rich Roll?

  The other thing he said was that you, you should swim towards them.

• 13:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 13:08Adam Skolnick?

  All the stuff.

• 13:09Rich Roll?

  Which goes against every instinct that you're going to have.

• 13:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  But because they are the apex predator or the top of the food chain, they're not used to that. So in their brain, they're thinking, oh, this is a predator and they will turn off.

• 13:24Adam Skolnick?

  Now, that's all this said, there are parts of the world where shark attacks are more common. North Carolina, Florida, Australia, even Hawaii. I'm not minimizing the fear of sharks.

• 13:34Rich Roll?

  Martha's Vineyard?

• 13:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Rich Roll?

  From Jaws?

• 13:36Adam Skolnick?

  I'm like, exactly. I'm not like saying I'm this big brave guy, but where we are, it's just the history of it, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty far down what could go wrong.

• 13:48Rich Roll?

  Famous last words.

• 13:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. But hey, if it happens. No, I think that our plan, we do talk about it. If we see a shark out here, what to do. And we always say, calm, try to enjoy it and then swim in as soon as you can.

• 14:01Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. That's, that'll all go out the window. The moment that happens, I would suspect.

• 14:05Adam Skolnick?

  I would think so.

• 14:07Rich Roll?

  Um, all right. We're still on the fitness check in, are we not?

• 14:10Adam Skolnick?

  I think so. You're gonna get into your vegan gains.

• 14:12Rich Roll?

  I gotta, yeah, I gotta check in on the swole update.

• 14:15Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 14:15Rich Roll?

  So the strength training is ongoing. As I mentioned, the last time we got together, I've been going to this gym where they set stuff up outside and I wear a mask and you know, we social distance and there's only a couple of people there, but I've been really consistent with it. And it's been fun. Like my body has definitely changed. Like I'm back to, I was never like a gym rat and I've never been that strong in the gym. I've never been somebody who threw big weights around or anything like that. Even when I was swimming and we were doing heavy weights three times a week, I was like, okay, you know, but I was never like, yeah, like way back then, but my goal was to be able to lift the, the kind of weight that I could lift in college when I was swim training at Stanford.

• 14:59Rich Roll?

  And I thought it would take me at least until November to get there, but I'm already there, which is great. And I did it by just like literally like the first couple of weeks, I would only go for like 20 minutes and 30 minutes. And now I'm up to like an hour and a half. And I'm feeling like different in my body. Like I have more control and I definitely have bulked up a little bit. Not too much, but it's interesting and unfamiliar in contrast to when you're really focused on endurance and you're trying to get as lean as possible. And it's all about power to weight. Like letting go of that and trying something different has been cool. And like I said at the outset of the podcast, like everything has a season, right?

• 15:43Rich Roll?

  So right now, like this is the season that I'm focused on. And it's cool. You know, I'm somebody who was really fit in college and then I got fat and then I lost a bunch of weight and then I got fit and then I got crazy skinny. Like in 2011, when I did Ultraman that year, I was like down to 158. Like I was, I was like too lean. And now to be able to kind of bulk up a little bit and get strong has been a cool experience for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to say, as somebody who's been vegan for 13, coming on 14 years at this point, like I can still put on mass and I can still make gains in the gym without any animal products in my

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  diet. And I think it speaks to this counter argument that you hear a lot from the peanut gallery when an athlete goes plant-based and then performs well. The, the kind of retort that you hear is, well, he, he or she made all their gains when they were eating animal products and they're just riding on the coattails of that. But in truth, I've had so many permutations in my fitness journey and I've been vegan for so long, to go from like really skinny where my arms were like toothpicks and I could swim all day, but not with much power, to now having, you know, some heft on me and be able to kind of pack that back on has been cool. So part of the, you know, in terms of like the storytelling

• 17:09Rich Roll?

  aspect of it, like, hey, you know, at 54, I can get strong again after being vegan for this long and being at my age and that feels good. So more, more to be revealed. Not that like, I'm not holding myself out as some kind of, you know, like, you know, this is a process. Like, I'm not like insanely fit or anything like that. I'm just trying something different and new.

• 17:31Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's great. I mean, I think there's a lot to be said for weights, especially to water sports. I mean, I don't know about endurance sports as much. You would know more than me, but I would imagine like getting Having strength can only help you, right?

• 17:45Rich Roll?

  Right, but at some point it becomes diminishing returns depending upon what you're trying to do. Like when I got crazy skinny, like I said, I could open water swim for hours and not get tired. And you don't build up any lactic acid because your muscles are so reduced. Like now, if I was to go out and swim, I'm strong and I'm sure I'd be able to, you know, have more force in each pull, but I'm not going to be able to do a 10 kilometer swim the way that I could when I was training in a different way. So there's just trade offs with that.

• 18:17Adam Skolnick?

  It's always trade offs. I mean, I think, well, that's cool. It's a good journey. I, that's one thing I've been missing since COVID is I used to go to this high intensity interval training gym in Santa Monica Circuit Works. And really it was an integral part of what we were doing, my wife and I. It was like, I was doing that, I was swimming and I was running more and more off the treadmill. But like I'd had the foot problems and the treadmills where I was able to get back on it in these, in these intervals and haven't had that. So I started doing more distance running, which got my running a lot better and got my swim runs better. And now I'm coming back to this, I'm like, wow, I really missed the, the strength because I have lost weight and strength.

• 18:58Adam Skolnick?

  And so I might start to do some of that in a, in a park with one of those trainers and like socially distance away. He's like starting to meet people in a park. So I'd be one of those guys in a park.

• 19:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you see those guys.

• 19:11Adam Skolnick?

  You see them around the park. I'll be a yoga mat park guy.

• 19:14Rich Roll?

  They, you know, pop the hatch on the back of their car and it's just filled with fitness equipment.

• 19:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that's him. I'm, I'm the guy that comes in and please don't watch because I'm not, I'm not, I'm not an attractive runner.

• 19:26Rich Roll?

  Well, there used to be, I don't know what's going on now, but close to where you live, at the Santa Monica stairs, right? So at the top of the stairs, there's a little grassy area and there would always be those guys there like running fitness classes, but they closed the stairs because of COVID.

• 19:41Adam Skolnick?

  Stairs, right.

• 19:41Rich Roll?

  So you, the stairs are part of that workout.

• 19:44Adam Skolnick?

  The stairs were the main part of the workout. And then when the stairs got closed, people still came and started working. I don't understand the appeal. Like, the medians aren't, it's not a park. It's like a little median strip. People would like sunbathe in the median. They would like have picnics. I'm like.

• 20:00Rich Roll?

  So that's still going on?

• 20:02Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:02Rich Roll?

  I haven't been by there in a while.

• 20:03Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Every, every day.

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  Um, all right, shifting gears. So I don't know about you, but the Social Dilemma documentary hasn't left me. Like, it kind of lives in my unconscious mind, and it has changed, altered my relationship with, with social media. I've kind of really pulled back. And one of the things I've been thinking about, and this is all about me. Like, I've been thinking about turning off the comments on YouTube.

• 20:31Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 20:31Rich Roll?

  In part because of that documentary, but also because I found myself unable to stop checking them.

• 20:39Adam Skolnick?

  Really?

• 20:39Rich Roll?

  And I kind of scroll through them. And look, a lot of, there's a lot of people there who say nice things or offer constructive criticism or feedback, and I'm all about that. That's totally fine. But it's also like a complete shit show.

• 20:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  And I question, like, all right, what is the purpose of these comment sections? If it's to create a place for healthy debate and conversation, that's one thing. But if it becomes a breeding ground for bot manipulation and all kinds of half-baked, strange theories, or just ad hominem attacks on, on either the guest or myself, what, what are we doing here? You know what I mean?

• 21:23Adam Skolnick?

  Well, isn't it?

• 21:24Rich Roll?

  And I thought, well, if I turn these off, does that then create the argument like, oh, he doesn't want to hear feedback?

• 21:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 21:29Rich Roll?

  Or, you know, I don't, I don't know, but I thought as an experiment, I might try to turn them off and see what happens.

• 21:35Adam Skolnick?

  Why not?

• 21:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, is anything productive coming out of these?

• 21:38Adam Skolnick?

  I learned long ago, don't read the comments. I mean, when you, when you write stories for these publications that have the big, uh, you know, like, and you have, you have that. You have a huge subscriber base and listenership. And, and so you're going to get that same kind of blowback and. And often it becomes people, personal gripes, or, or, you know, a take on your story that, you know, they didn't jive with. It's, it's almost always negative because it's the same thing. It's not about social connection as you'd want it to be a place for a forum, for constructive criticism and connection and discussion. But really it's about engagement and engagement can cut negative more often than positive.

• 22:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:18Adam Skolnick?

  Because the way the internet works, it's like, you know, even, even when you text your friend, if you text them kind of something, it can be misperceived. So imagine that on a comment section when they're not your friends. And, you know, like, who knows?

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  You don't even know who these people are. You don't know if they're real people.

• 22:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 22:36Rich Roll?

  And, and really it's just about my relationship to it. Like, I just need to not look at that. Because I don't want to be influenced one way or the other. I want to be able to speak freely and share my heart and not be thinking, if I say that, somebody's going to comment this. Like, it lives in my, you know, it lives in my awareness and I don't like that. But I think what I'm going to do is just stop reading them and try that. But I, it's like that addictive thing. Like, I have to, like, I want to gauge the temperature of how this particular conversation lands with people.

• 23:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, right.

• 23:06Rich Roll?

  So then I find myself checking it and then I'm like, why did? Especially like at night, like, terrible idea.

• 23:12Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, my God. Right before bed.

• 23:13Rich Roll?

  And then I think, well, if I'm creating, like, by virtue of publishing a video and putting it on YouTube and allowing that comment section to be open, am I participating or contributing to some kind of manipulation that occurs there by, you know, forces that don't have people's best interests at heart?

• 23:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think the idea of YouTube is the force has only one interest at heart and that's continued engagement, right? So it's not like it's some, that's the thing about social dilemma. It's not like even, even the people that we might say, how dare they create these things and let them run rampant and have no, no responsibility over them and all, they're just cashing in. Really, they didn't mean to create this, this problem. They were looking at the positives, like you were saying, like, social discussion, social connection, that's what their goal was, you know, and make money, of course. And, and it just turns out engagement trumps everything. And so that's the deal. I mean, I think. You know, you don't have that problem with your Twitter mentions where where people are negative like that?

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  I mean, a little bit, but it's easy. It's not as much.

• 24:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, because I think you've, in a way, just who you are and the stuff you cover, and the guests you have on, and the people that listen, it's a nurturing place.

• 24:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Adam Skolnick?

  Like, you've created actually one of the more nurturing communities.

• 24:32Rich Roll?

  There's plenty of people who have problems.

• 24:35Adam Skolnick?

  But the YouTube, but the point is, is the YouTube videos that are posting are going to other people that aren't the listener base from the podcast.

• 24:41Rich Roll?

  Right, that's true.

• 24:41Adam Skolnick?

  They're finding you on YouTube.

• 24:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:43Adam Skolnick?

  And so I think, and they're getting served your stuff.

• 24:45Rich Roll?

  Right, it's a different thing because, yeah, they're getting served up and they don't have any background or familiarity with who I am and what I do.

• 24:51Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 24:52Rich Roll?

  So it's coming at them completely sideways and out of the blue. And so they're like, who's this idiot?

• 24:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Rich Roll?

  I mean, that's fine, whatever, all right. You know, I guess what I'm gonna do is just commit to not looking at it.

• 25:05Adam Skolnick?

  You commit to not reading the comments. I mean, it's one thing in the Facebook group, which you might want to check in on.

• 25:11Rich Roll?

  Well, that's different because that's a, that's a, you know.

• 25:13Adam Skolnick?

  It's curated.

• 25:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's curated. That community is coming there for a reason, so it's different.

• 25:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 25:30Rich Roll?

  The main thing that I want to talk about today, kind of the big story aspect of this podcast episode, is to talk about this new documentary called Kiss the Ground. It's on Netflix. I'm sure many of you have seen it at this point. It just premiered the other day. It's directed by Joshua Tickle and Rebecca Harrell Tickle, who are environmental filmmakers. It's narrated by Woody Harrelson.

• 25:55Adam Skolnick?

  Woody!

• 25:56Rich Roll?

  What's not to love about Woody? He's the best.

• 25:58Adam Skolnick?

  Woody, Tom Brady, Gisele. Come on.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a lot of celebrity cameos in this. Jason Mraz, and we got Gisele, and my boy Tom Brady. Love Tom Brady.

• 26:08Adam Skolnick?

  Wait, do you know him?

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  No. He follows me on Instagram, though.

• 26:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he's all about lifestyle.

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  No, I haven't met him.

• 26:15Adam Skolnick?

  Healthy lifestyle.

• 26:16Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 26:16Adam Skolnick?

  He's gotta be in this chair one day.

• 26:18Rich Roll?

  Gotta make that happen.

• 26:19Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, we gotta get him on there.

• 26:20Rich Roll?

  If anybody knows Tom Brady, let's make that happen. In any event.

• 26:22Adam Skolnick?

  He looks great on there, Tom.

• 26:24Rich Roll?

  There's a lot of good about this movie. And it essentially posits that

• 26:30Rich Roll?

  We can not only stave off climate change, but we can actually significantly draw down carbon by way of soil regeneration. And it's kind of a meditation on the existential crisis that we face, and it's very hopeful in the solution that it offers, which is this pivot from this sort of CAFO industrialized farming system that we've created and pivoting to a regenerative way of relating to the land.

• 27:07Adam Skolnick?

  Right, because they point out that we're having a huge soil erosion problem where everything-

• 27:13Rich Roll?

  Two thirds of the world is desertified and this is increasing.

• 27:16Adam Skolnick?

  And it all started with human-based agriculture, and they link it to all these failed civilizations, and they link desertification to that, and the idea being that you can be regenerative instead of extractive and still actually help farmers. It actually will be a boon to farmers.

• 27:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's a big piece of it. I mean, God bless that guy whose name I forget, who spends all his time traveling around meeting with farmers.

• 27:43Adam Skolnick?

  Ray.

• 27:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, explaining to them, yeah, exactly. Like, what an amazing human, that he's not only evangelizing how important this is, but connecting with these farmers one-on-one to actually show them that if they do this, they can be successful and more profitable.

• 28:00Adam Skolnick?

  And that farmer, the example of the farmer-

• 28:03Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:04Adam Skolnick?

  Who is, he's out in the Midwest, and he had his entire, he was doing tilling. The idea is, you know-

• 28:12Rich Roll?

  Well, no till is a big part of this.

• 28:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right, so tilling is what creates the erosion problem, and the idea is, this guy had, was doing that, going by the book, like 95% of the farmers do, because only 5% are regenerative. And so, he was doing that, and he had his crops, three years in a row, wiped out by hailstorm, hailstorm, and then drought. And he was on the brink of bankruptcy, and he used that suffering, that crucible, to completely reinvent how he was growing food, and he became kind of the poster child of regenerative agriculture in his area. And his- Anecdotal stuff, I mean, what he's showing on the, what you can see plainly on camera and everything he's saying, it is, it is cool.

• 28:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's super cool and I think the movie does a great job of explaining this idea of drawdown and how carbon works, this, this concept of carbon sequestration and how important soil and soil regeneration is in that equation.

• 29:13Adam Skolnick?

  Right, they take the soil regeneration and they link it to climate change and carbon sequestration, which is, real quick is like, plants basically are carbon stores and they can store it in their roots, which then puts it into the soil. So it takes the CO2 out of the atmosphere, produces oxygen. And so if you, if you cover your land, if you have cover crops all the time, you never till, you can retain water better, retain the soil better and sequester carbon. And so this, it's, they position it as not just a good thing for soil and farmers and food, but a good thing for climate change.

• 29:47Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So much of the climate change discussion revolves around reducing our emissions, but that's only a small fraction of the solution because we have all this carbon in our atmosphere and unless we figure out a way to draw it down, just reducing the amount that we're contributing to it actually isn't solving the problem at all, right?

• 30:08Adam Skolnick?

  It's like reducing how much you're putting on your credit card when you're a hundred thousand in credit card debt.

• 30:12Rich Roll?

  Right. Like, I'm gonna charge less, but I'm not paying any of it down.

• 30:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 30:16Rich Roll?

  You know, is, is the idea. And I think the movie also did a really good job of kind of casing the history of how we got to this point through the Dust Bowl and what happened after that. And then the introduction of chemical fertilizers and in particular glyphosate and the impact that that has had on the farming community and our food systems at large, which is a subject that I've gone into in-depth. Many times with Zach Bush, probably most in-depth in our first episode, which was episode 353, if you haven't listened to that, if you watched the movie and you haven't listened to that podcast, I think you'll find that quite illuminating and instructive. So lots

• 30:56Rich Roll?

  to love about this, the importance of no-till, the role of regenerating soil in this climate equation, and some really good education on this existential threat that we face, that we really are at a turning point and the stakes are very high. And what happens if we don't start living in the solution?

• 31:15Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 31:15Rich Roll?

  The impact of this increasingly dire climate change on not just the environment at large, but on human beings, like 1 billion refugees by 2050. It's already starting, and this is very real. And transitioning farms to regenerative principles is like this huge and great thing. And the idea that they're taking soil education mainstream and packaging it in a very entertaining documentary, I think, is something to be celebrated.

• 31:47Adam Skolnick?

  Totally. And there's even an amoeba sex scene where they play sensual music, and you see little amoebas getting together.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  Right. What was the song they used for that? Sexual healing?

• 32:00Adam Skolnick?

  It wasn't sexual healing.

• 32:01Rich Roll?

  I know, but it was like...

• 32:02Adam Skolnick?

  They couldn't get the rights.

• 32:05Rich Roll?

  I also liked the case study of the Loess Plateau in China and how they restored this once amazing part of China that had become desertified, and now it's thriving, which is really cool.

• 32:16Adam Skolnick?

  And that was the example of this huge empire that had fallen, because they cultivated that place, and then it's completely deserted.

• 32:23Rich Roll?

  Right. I also like that it's sort of a RRP roundup, pun intended. We got Ryland Inglehart, who's a producer on the film, who's been on the podcast, and he and his family are the ones behind. The Cafe Gratitude chain of restaurants.

• 32:39Adam Skolnick?

  Which is also in.

• 32:41Rich Roll?

  Which is in the movie as well. Yeah. Paul Hawken, of course, who we're going to get into in a little bit more in depth, is really kind of the anchor to this whole movie. His book Drawdown, which I have right here, which I want to talk about a little bit more. And, you know, longtime listeners will remember him from the live event that we did in Los Angeles, talking about all these issues. And then David Bronner also, who's just like.

• 33:03Adam Skolnick?

  I love David Bronner.

• 33:04Rich Roll?

  He's the best. He's amazing.

• 33:05Adam Skolnick?

  Talk about a good Twitter follow.

• 33:07Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God. I know. And, and a lot of the philosophy and the kind of backbone of what's discussed in this movie really does echo the work of Zach Bush. He's doing something similar with Farmer's Footprint, which is his nonprofit. And I should mention that Ryland, you know, in addition to being producer on the film, Kiss the Ground is, is his nonprofit that is behind the production of this movie.

• 33:31Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 33:31Rich Roll?

  As well. It also bears a fair resemblance to The Biggest Little Farm documentary. Did you see that?

• 33:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I remember that. No, I didn't see it. But they, they have a stand at the farmer's market on Wednesday in Santa Monica every day, like the people behind that farm. Yeah.

• 33:46Rich Roll?

  Molly and John, who were on the podcast as well. And, you know, having visited that farm, I can attest to what it's like to put your hands and your feet in soil that has been regenerated to such an extent. And the contrast that exists because their farm butts up against a similar conventionally farmed plot that, that is, you know, kind of what you see with that guy, you know, in, in the movie where he's like, this is my land and this is, this is the next door neighbor's farm. And you could see the desertification in the soil. The ability of this soil to like, hold the water and become more resilient in terms of drought. Like, there's, there's so much that's amazing about this process

• 34:30Rich Roll?

  of regenerating the soil and to celebrate. So overall, like, I love the movie for that. And I should say, I do, you know, I have a couple of issues with the movie that I want to get into in a second. But before I do that, you know, when I, when I did the podcast with the Chesters, the Biggest Little Farm people, like, I took some heat from the vegan community. Because this farm, like the farms portrayed in Kiss the Ground.

• 34:55Rich Roll?

  They're, they use animals. They're ranchers. Yeah, they're ranchers. There's animal husbandry going on and some of those animals are sold to slaughter. And as I said in that podcast and in kind of response to the criticism that I got, like my intention in hosting them on the podcast was to celebrate this beautiful movie that they made, but also to focus on soil, you know, and, and how important it is that we, you know, get into this idea of drawing down carbon by generating our soil, you know, as something that's set aside from the ethics of animal husbandry in general. And it was also an attempt at intellectual honesty.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  You know, I think as somebody who's vegan, plant-based, there's an idea in the vegan community that you're living a harm-free life. And I think that that's, it's a fallacy and it's not intellectually honest. It's an aspiration to live more gently on the planet. But if you're eating an avocado, as John Chester said in our podcast, like he has to go through extraordinary lengths to keep the gophers from eating Right. the avocados, right? And initially, before he reached some kind of balance with his ecosystem, he would have to kill gophers in order to protect the avocado tree. So there's harm that's the result of all of the choices that we make.

• 36:18Rich Roll?

  It's just a calibration of your relationship to that harm. So in the case of the gophers and the avocado trees, that harm is more indirect. Like you're not involved in the slaughter of an animal to eat that food, but the idea that it exists outside of any harm whatsoever, I think is something that Wishful thinking. is not true. And I think it's important to be like, it's not a credit to the plant-based or vegan movement to not be intellectually honest about these things. We are aspiring to live more gently and that's something that I believe in and try to do, but I'm not under any illusion that the choices that I make don't have Deuterius implications down the line. I'm just trying to be in a place where those

• 37:01Rich Roll?

  are as reduced as I possibly can to make them.

• 37:05Adam Skolnick?

  That's a great point. And also, I think we need to resist this idea of being in silos with like minds. And that if we if we are only with this live gently crowd, that our life can be better and, and you know, we're making an impact and, and, and all the rest. Because look, our problems are so deep and, and varied, that we do need to build the bridges to other people doing work that can be beneficial and positive.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  Right. And who are the people that we're slinging arrows at?

• 37:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 37:36Rich Roll?

  Now, let's, let's try to celebrate the wins. And I think the move from, you know, conventional farming to regenerative farming is of course, a step in the right direction. So I'm not in the business of trying to vilify any farmers who are trying to make that switch. I want to, I want to be somebody who can champion that move. Now, like, I would like to believe that if I was John Chester and running that farm, that I would not make the choice to sell my pigs to slaughter. But I'm also not him. And I don't understand the economics of what's required to, you know, maintain the financial well being of such an enterprise. So I don't want to stand in judgment of that. And these issues are complex and complicated. So I think we need to focus on the big problems that we're trying

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  to solve.

• 38:22Adam Skolnick?

  Well, also, if you're not tilling, then the pigs are, are actually performing a service on your land to, I think, I mean, that's part of it.

• 38:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And this is, this is kind of what we're going to get into in a little bit, which is really, you know, the role of these ruminants. I mean, pigs aren't ruminants, but the role, you know, the role of the ruminants on the land and the extent to which that's necessary in this regenerative process.

• 38:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Rich Roll?

  And I think My issue with the movie, and again, you know, everybody should see this movie, and I love Ryland, and I think what these guys are doing are fantastic, and I want to celebrate that, but I think there's a couple of things that are overlooked. And this idea that regenerative ag is this panacea, that it's a simple solution thesis for solving our climate crisis, is not exactly correct. This is much more nuanced and complex. And I don't know whether there's a disingenuity to this, or a desire to avoid audience division, but basically, the movie celebrates this guy, Alan Savery, in a kind of Pollyanna way.

• 39:28Rich Roll?

  And for those that don't know, Alan Savery did this, he's this African rancher, he did this TED Talk that has millions and millions of views, it's very compelling. And his basic thesis is that grazing reverses desertification and climate change. But what it fails to really tackle is that grazing is also the major driver of deforestation and topsoil loss globally. There really isn't any credible, peer-reviewed science to support Savery's thesis. And it's also not clear on the role or the advantages that these ruminants have on the regenerative process. And there's a school of thought that's supported by science that that idea, that ruminants

• 40:11Rich Roll?

  are absolutely necessary to this, is a little overblown. He's a, by the way- It certainly improves the soil. A white rancher from Zimbabwe. Right, correct. Yeah. Certainly, these regenerative farms are improving the soil, but actually, forests do it better than these farms. And none of this works unless global meat demand is significantly reduced, drastically reduced, some say up to 75%. Anybody who's wanting to shift to holistic grazing and keep producing meat at today's volume at current demands- Is kind of indirectly advocating for the tearing down of forests in order to make

• 40:52Rich Roll?

  room, because there just isn't enough room to do all of this. And this is a long way of saying that there's a bit of greenwashing in this documentary. And this is a subject that my buddy Simon Hill from the Plant Proof Podcast went into into detail with this guy Nicholas Carter, who's an environmental scientist, guy's amazing. I think I might reach out to him to get him on the podcast because he's great. They did a whole podcast on this subject matter that I would encourage everybody to check out. Carter's, like I said, an environmental researcher. He's focused on the scientific links between agriculture and planetary health. He's got a website that's got tons of resources on it called

• 41:34Rich Roll?

  plantbaseddata.org that you should check out. There's also another guy called Dr. Jonathan Foley. He goes by @globaleco guy on Twitter, who's a climate and environmental scientist who's been speaking about this issue specifically recently. And the problem is that there's this idea that's kind of interlineated throughout the movie, kind of inferred, not quite stated expressly, that cows are the solution to the problem.

• 42:02Adam Skolnick?

  Cows are the solution to the climate crisis.

• 42:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's just not, it's just not true.

• 42:06Adam Skolnick?

  It could be a positive carbon, it could be carbon positive to have more cows grazing, not in feedlots, not in CAFOs, but grazing open land.

• 42:15Rich Roll?

  And I think that that's a fallacy. Right now, 40 to 50% of all land is used for agriculture. Most of that is for animal agriculture, for livestock and for grazing. Only 5 to 10% of land is used for human crops. And land is only-

• 42:30Adam Skolnick?

  Human crops, meaning that a lot of that land is used for feed, right?

• 42:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like it's used for feed, right?

• 42:35Adam Skolnick?

  Corn, corn and soy.

• 42:37Rich Roll?

  And we're deforesting, we're clearing that land to grow that feed. So the forests are what we should really be focusing on. The forests and the wetlands, which are much more effective at sequestration than grasslands. It also should be pointed out that this whole thesis is about ruminants, but chickens and pigs are not ruminants. So like, what are we doing about the chickens and the pigs? Are they grazing wildly? Like, I'm not sure how that plays into this whole equation as well.

• 43:03Adam Skolnick?

  Well, yeah. So I think that my flyover on this is, like, one of the problems is is that there, yes, there's this need to preserve topsoil. Farming regeneratively is a good thing.

• 43:17Adam Skolnick?

  But it is sensationalistic, like, and, and it's high on kind of feel, on, on like emotion, but very low on specifics as to the problems being solved by anybody in their movie. And the greater problem, which is there's X number of cows that are contributing X amount of methane, and here's the desertification. Because if the argument is, all these areas around the world have been desertified. If we, if we use this philosophy, and instead of doing CAFOs, ship cows in all these different parts of the world and create regenerative ranches, then we can replace that meat that is produced, which clearly is not possible. That would be one thing, but they don't really get into any of that at all.

• 44:01Adam Skolnick?

  So the specifics are so low that you don't ever get a sense of the problem, let alone the solution. And so I think that's the problem. And I, I don't know if it's greenwashing, because it's, these aren't, you know, big companies trying to pretend they're environmental. Or just, sometimes you see this where you're trying to claim too much. And, and the claim is, is greater than the proof you've got. And I think that's probably what's happening. You never get a sense of the problem in any real way. You just get fed, kind of like, high-level, like, emotional strings that are getting plucked. But they, they don't prove the case.

• 44:39Rich Roll?

  And that's good to the extent that it's getting people excited and active about solutions. So, again, like, I want to be very careful. Like, I'm not, I'm not against this movie. I think, you know, regenerative, you know, regenerating the soil is something we should all be excited about it. But let's be intellectually honest about it. Regenerative-raised cows live longer than CAFO cows. So they're going to use more resources, they're going to consume more, they're going to require much more land. Like, when you see the, the, the Marka Grad Ranch in Half Moon Bay in the movie, it's massive, right? But... The cattle is nominal. Like, I don't know how many heads of cattle they have on

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  that ranch, but it didn't seem like that many for such a massive plot of land. So this is what we're talking about. Most of the grazed, grass-fed cattle, still, those farmers still feed them feed for the last 100 days to like fatten them up. Not all of them, but some of them do. Also, when they're eating grass, they're eating a more fibrous diet, and that means they're producing more methane, four times as much methane. And you just, the truth is, you can't feed the world this way with current meat demand. But meanwhile, we've cut down 45% of all the trees. Like, we should be talking also about reforestation. So what you eat and how much you eat is actually more impactful

• 46:07Rich Roll?

  than than where it comes from. Because the other argument is like, well, if you're a vegan or vegetarian, you're eating these monocropped foods, the soy and the grains and the things like that, or soy that's imported from somewhere else. But actually, there's studies that have run the math on this, this, and it basically indicates that imported soy is still less problematic than the grass-fed beef that's grown like down the road from you.

• 46:32Adam Skolnick?

  Less problematic?

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, environmentally, environmentally. So there isn't enough land, if we want to continue to eat animal products at the level that we do today, the livestock sector is going to continue to be very significant in terms of the greenhouse gas emissions that are emitted.

• 46:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I think my big alarm bell went off in terms of just like glossing over something in the film was the claim of biodiversity. Because the idea is that monocrop farms are not diverse, but but regenerative farms are very biodiverse. There's multiple crops, there's animals, there's insects and bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi and everything happening in the soil, which is positive, which is true. But that's not, when I think of biodiversity, that's, I don't think of human engineered biodiversity. I think of actual biodiversity like, like in a kelp forest underwater or in a rainforest and or a cloud forest or in even in a desert, because they kind of vilify deserts, and then they show Joshua

• 47:33Adam Skolnick?

  Tree, which is actually an intact ecosystem. So, you know, like, There, right now, the UN is calling for 30 by 30. It's a campaign called 30 by 30, which is 30% of all land in all oceans preserved, preserved completely from, from human activity by 2030. That's what it's going to take to help combat the effects of climate change. And they want to go to 50 by 50 by 2050. So it's this idea that the less we interact with a specific area, actually, the better off Earth is. And so it's getting to your point in that, you know, that there's, there's a very human-centric

• 48:15Adam Skolnick?

  element to this, as if we can solve a problem that we've already caused. And I rebel against that because, first of all, we're, when we stop hunting for a certain thing, or stop growing a certain thing, or stop monkeying with a certain forest, it pops back. That's just how nature is. That's the idea with no till. When you stop tilling, your farm becomes, just by nature, your soil becomes more biodiverse in the soil. But that's not, to me, what biodiversity really means. That's not what the UN is calling biodiversity. That's, that is more biodiverse than a monocrop desertifying farm, but it's not biodiversity writ large. And, and so that's, that, that, that's the kind of stuff-

• 48:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, savory would probably say that he's giving the land a head start by trying to, you know, create that biodiversity by planting the cover crops and all the different kinds of grasses. Like, he's trying to create an environment where that can be more like what it would be like if we were leaving it alone, yet also be a place that we could use to harvest food to feed humans.

• 49:19Adam Skolnick?

  Right. But you could also accomplish it. There's people trying to rewild buffalo, because like, instead of using cows, you could try to rewild wolves and buffalo. And there are people doing that. You know, wolves have been rewilded in Yellowstone and other places. And buffalo, there are people trying to get buffalo rewilded that, that can go from Canada to Mexico, again, through this area that used to be full of bison, and that the bison were wiped out as a part of a campaign to not only trap and get the fur, but also to destroy indigenous cultures and, and commit genocide.

• 49:50Adam Skolnick?

  Post-Civil War and the Western Expansion, pre and post, I would guess. And so you could also rewild. You know, there's other solutions that can still use some of the same thing that are talking about grazing big animals over large pieces of land, planting the right grasses. Because it also matters what you're planting. If you're managing a big farm, you're not necessarily planting native grasses. You're planting grasses that are going to be benefit for your, you know, animal or for your crop.

• 50:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:21Adam Skolnick?

  So not everything is created equal. Not every plant is the same. Like indigenous grass is what you need in a certain area, not if you're trying to create real biodiversity, not just a grass that can be eaten by your cow. Now, I'm picking. I'm being picky, but that's the problem I had, this claim of biodiversity, because it's not explained that well in the film.

• 50:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Back to Paul Hawken, who again is like an anchor in here. He's the guy who's been boots on the ground, studying this stuff for a very long time. His book Drawdown, which everybody should get, I have a copy here, which basically

• 50:55Adam Skolnick?

  Phenomenal.

• 50:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Chronicles the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming. Not reduce it, reverse it, right? And so it goes kind of subject by subject through all these different methodologies, modalities to draw down carbon. Number four out of all of them is a plant-rich diet. And the movie does do a section on this.

• 51:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 51:20Rich Roll?

  And that's where you see Ryland and you see David Branner, like, these guys are vegans.

• 51:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 51:25Rich Roll?

  But they don't really make the point, which I wish they would have made, which is that if we really want to be in the solution here, we have to move towards not just a plant-rich, like ultimately a plant-based diet or a mostly plant-based diet. We have to reduce our reliance on meat. That's a huge part of this.

• 51:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 51:45Rich Roll?

  Plant-rich diet and Drawdown, if we can make that pivot, that would be responsible for 66 gigatons of carbon, as pointed out in the book. Regenerative ag is number 11 at 23 gigatons. So this is more important by a factor of three. In terms of what's going to move the needle the most. Number five is tropical forests, which goes back to reforestation at 61 gigatons. So I think soil regeneration is key and crucial and beautiful and amazing. And if every conventional farmer made this pivot, we would live in a better world than we do today.

• 52:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 52:24Rich Roll?

  But it is a piece in a larger puzzle if we really want to solve this problem. Another good thing about the movie is they did spend time on reducing food waste.

• 52:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  Which is huge.

• 52:34Adam Skolnick?

  Which is amazing.

• 52:35Rich Roll?

  And that's something that eludes kind of us.

• 52:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 52:37Rich Roll?

  We don't talk very much about it.

• 52:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 52:39Rich Roll?

  Paul and I talked about it in our live event and it's number three in Drawdown. Food waste is like such a huge problem. And to the extent that we can create systems to alleviate this, because I think we're just relying on us like not throwing away our scraps. Like it's never going to work.

• 52:58Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 52:59Rich Roll?

  But that case study in San Francisco where there's businesses that incentivize people to make sure that that food ends up in a compostable bin. And that bin goes to a certain place where they can process this and create compost, I think is amazing.

• 53:13Adam Skolnick?

  It's not businesses, it's the government.

• 53:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:15Adam Skolnick?

  The government makes, my sister lives in the Bay Area and they have it in all, it's kind of grown from San Francisco across the Bay Area. And you get fined for putting.

• 53:24Rich Roll?

  Right. So Newsom makes that point.

• 53:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Rich Roll?

  Like you, you, you don't, you, you only pay, you pay when you screw up, right?

• 53:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, you pay. Is that how it works? Yes. So you pay a fine if your compostable food waste ends up in the trash or in the recycle bin.

• 53:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:39Adam Skolnick?

  And so, and you get, you get, you get money back. You pay less if you don't have that much in your black trash bin. And the trash bins are tiny. They're really slender things.

• 53:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:51Adam Skolnick?

  They're like you back in 2013.

• 53:52Rich Roll?

  You go to Europe, you go to Europe and the trash bins are all tiny.

• 53:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 53:56Rich Roll?

  You know that?

• 53:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  And you're like, how do you live this way?

• 53:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Rich Roll?

  And it just makes you realize how in America, we're such a refuse oriented culture.

• 54:04Adam Skolnick?

  We are just bloated.

• 54:05Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 54:06Adam Skolnick?

  Bloated, greedy assholes.

• 54:09Rich Roll?

  You're in like an apartment in, you know, some city in Europe and the trash can is literally like, you know, two feet tall.

• 54:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Rich Roll?

  By one foot or something like that.

• 54:18Adam Skolnick?

  You're like, I throw.

• 54:18Rich Roll?

  For a family of four.

• 54:19Adam Skolnick?

  I throw more away in one day.

• 54:21Rich Roll?

  I know. It's terrible, right?

• 54:23Adam Skolnick?

  I know. Hey, listen, I'm the guy putting diapers in a, in a, in a bin right now.

• 54:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 54:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  You're not recycling your diapers.

• 54:30Adam Skolnick?

  Uh, what that?

• 54:30Rich Roll?

  Regenerative.

• 54:31Adam Skolnick?

  Recycling?

• 54:31Rich Roll?

  Regenerative diapers.

• 54:32Adam Skolnick?

  Actually, when I leave here, I'm going to be, uh, doing a massive diaper clean and hang out. Like, I've got this clothesline that stretches across San Vicente. Just my child's diapers.

• 54:43Rich Roll?

  Right. Awesome. There's a bunch of studies, uh, on all the stuff we've been talking about. I'm going to link them up in the show notes.

• 54:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Rich Roll?

  Certainly don't take my word for it. And I'm not a climate scientist. I'm not a scientist. But I think, you know, it's important that we all kind of, uh, grapple with these issues and

• 55:01Adam Skolnick?

  I agree.

• 55:01Rich Roll?

  take responsibility for our own education. In the meantime, again, I'll just say, listen to that podcast with, um, Nicholas Carter and Simon Hill, Plant Proof Podcast. Check out Nicholas Carter. Check out Dr. Jonathan Foley and others. And again, I'll link up those studies.

• 55:17Adam Skolnick?

  And the tropical forests kind of, uh, and aquacultures and drawdown, I believe, aqua, expansion of aquaculture.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 55:23Adam Skolnick?

  Because there's this idea that you can, if you stop taking wild fish stocks and you, and you, and you stop, because there's aqua, you can do aquaculture, just like you can do farming in a regenerative way, you can do aquaculture in a way that's, uh, I know not every, you know, not to be, I, I am ninety, ninety-five percent plant-based as an eater, but I'm just saying that one of the solutions to, uh, instead of using large CAFOs and, and people feeding on, on red meat and chicken, which is really bad for the climate, is this idea that if you pump, if people ate more fish and you grew the fish in a way that's sustainable, then you can draw down carbon. That's why it's in, in drawdown. But the idea for tropical forests, sixty-one gigatons, part of that, again, goes back to

• 56:06Adam Skolnick?

  real biodiversity and what biodiversity does when you leave a place alone.

• 56:10Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 56:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 56:11Rich Roll?

  Cool. All right. We ready to move on?

• 56:14Adam Skolnick?

  Ready to move on.

• 56:15Rich Roll?

  What are we talking about?

• 56:16Adam Skolnick?

  You want to get into, you want to get into? You have a hot take on another Netflix doc?

• 56:21Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 56:22Adam Skolnick?

  My octopus teacher.

• 56:23Rich Roll?

  My octopus teacher.

• 56:26Adam Skolnick?

  You gotta see My Octopus Teacher.

• 56:27Rich Roll?

  It's great. I love My Octopus Teacher. This is turning into a documentary film review podcast.

• 56:32Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, the last two times. Next time, we're not gonna wa- I'm not watching any more documentaries for at least a month.

• 56:38Rich Roll?

  But this is good because we need, you know, these water cooler moments. Like, these are movies that we can all see that are accessible to all of us.

• 56:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 56:46Rich Roll?

  And it gives us, and I love these movies and I like talking about them. So if there's another good documentary that comes out next week, it's coming up on the podcast.

• 56:56Adam Skolnick?

  I'm gonna get a text.

• 56:58Adam Skolnick?

  Wait, My Octopus Teacher is basically what we, what my friends and I have been doing for eight years at Point Doom.

• 57:06Rich Roll?

  So you must have felt like, oh, this movie was made for me.

• 57:10Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I feel, first of all, my friends are still going out to the reef almost every day and they're sending me images and it's, it is a little bit depressing to not be able to go out. But obviously I have, I have bigger things on my plate. I'm holding, I'm holding a creature in my arms versus swimming with them.

• 57:26Rich Roll?

  And I should say, sorry to interrupt, but just to interject, when we talk about swimming around the reef, the first time I went and did this with you, I'm used to going out with a group of people and hammering. Like, you know, we're swimming. Like, this is a workout. And I go out with you and you've got a scuba mask on and I'm like, what is happening here? This is not the normal open water swim crew that I'm used to?

• 57:48Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 57:48Rich Roll?

  And then you're just diving to the bottom and this is like, we're taking our time. And I was like, the first time, I'm like, what? I gotta get my swim in.

• 57:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 57:59Rich Roll?

  And then I had, and then finally, after like 30 minutes of this, I was like, okay, I get it. Like, this is just something totally different. Like, you know, forget about your workout. We're here to like smell the roses, so to speak.

• 58:10Adam Skolnick?

  It's very smell the roses. We, and I didn't realize that actually at the time because until I started going to this hit gym and started doing swim run, I didn't realize how much I wasn't getting in shape with my swims. I used to think that that was getting me in shape, like five times a week, like getting fit. And it is, it absolutely-

• 58:28Rich Roll?

  Zone zero is what it is.

• 58:30Adam Skolnick?

  It is literally zone zero. You cannot get in shape swimming the way we do or the way Craig Foster does, who's this, you know, he's a wildlife photographer that is, that is from South Africa. And the idea is that he's, he's having a midlife crisis. Basically, he's having a emotional breakdown and he decides to go back to his family's beach house on the cliffs of the most amazing coastline in all of Africa. And, uh, and he swims every day and he meets an octopus who teaches him the ropes. But it's, it's very similar to what we do as we go down and we swim in the reef and we see the animals and, and it is. And so in that way it touched me and the angle, and he is a gifted photographer, like his own footage that is kind of woven in.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  It's beautiful.

• 59:13Adam Skolnick?

  It's unbelievable. Um, so that's the kind of basis, but let's hear the hot take.

• 59:17Rich Roll?

  Right. It's a beautiful movie and it does such an elegant job of creating this connectivity with the natural world and the mysteries of the natural world and how much there is for us to learn. Like it's humbling. It's like this beautiful mainline injection of humility. Like we think we know what's going on and in truth we don't. And there's so much beauty and majesty and mystery right in front of us if we would just slow down and take the time to pay attention, you know? And, and that's a big part of what I got out of it.

• 59:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 59:51Rich Roll?

  And I love it, you know? And I think, well, a couple of things. First of all.

• 59:55Adam Skolnick?

  Where's your hot take?

• 59:56Rich Roll?

  I'm getting to it. I'm working up to it. I want to make sure everybody understands that I love this movie first. What a badass Craig Foster is to go in this water without a wetsuit, first of all, because that wa- what is it like?

• 1:00:08Adam Skolnick?

  Nine degrees Celsius, so it's fifty.

• 1:00:10Rich Roll?

  So what is that? I mean, that's crazy cold.

• 1:00:12Adam Skolnick?

  Fifty, fifty-one.

• 1:00:13Rich Roll?

  And he's out there every day for like a really long time.

• 1:00:15Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the Southern Ocean.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  And nobody, the movie wouldn't be any worse for wear if he's like putting on a wetsuit every day.

• 1:00:21Adam Skolnick?

  But, but he won't, he, he won't even hear about it.

• 1:00:24Rich Roll?

  He's a purist.

• 1:00:24Adam Skolnick?

  He's a purist.

• 1:00:25Rich Roll?

  And he won't take a scuba tank.

• 1:00:27Adam Skolnick?

  No, but he has, he has his freediving fins and weights.

• 1:00:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:00:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 1:00:30Rich Roll?

  Right. But he's got to come up for air and he's diving down pretty deep. So.

• 1:00:34Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's like 25 feet, you know? I think that it doesn't look that much deeper.

• 1:00:38Rich Roll?

  Is that part of just? His trying to be as connected to that world as possible by not like kind of putting on any artifice?

• 1:00:47Adam Skolnick?

  You know, I don't know, he doesn't really describe it, but if you if you think about it, like he was emotionally like damaged, he was feeling emotionally fragile, and so he wanted to feel the ocean. I think he explained it as when he was tracking animals in Botswana, right? And he was with, what was it, Burundi or Botswana? I thought it was-

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  I can't remember, but he's with a tribe in Africa.

• 1:01:08Adam Skolnick?

  And they were barefoot and they were part of the, and they were the best trackers he'd ever seen, and he had been doing this long film with them, and he was so taken by them, and he wanted to be a part of the environment. So I think he was inspired by those guys, those hunters and trackers.

• 1:01:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:22Adam Skolnick?

  And that's why he went with no wet suit.

• 1:01:23Rich Roll?

  My hot take is that this movie is really a movie about mental illness. It is. This is a guy-

• 1:01:31Adam Skolnick?

  Not the octopus.

• 1:01:32Rich Roll?

  -who clearly was suffering.

• 1:01:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:35Rich Roll?

  Right? And we don't really know exactly the cause of his, the root of his suffering, and we don't know exactly what he was going through, because it's only very tangentially alluded to.

• 1:01:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Rich Roll?

  They don't spend a lot of time getting into like the backstory, other than to show him making that movie, you know, tracking in Africa. But clearly, there's something that he's struggling with. And he loses himself, and his, this movie is about his journey back to wholeness and the impact of this ecosystem, and in particular, this one octopus has on on healing him, really. But I couldn't help but think like, well, what is, is it depression? Maybe it's manic depression, because there is a mania with his obsession, once this clicks in with him.

• 1:02:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Rich Roll?

  Where everything else in his world gets pushed away, and it's just all about this octopus. And he's coming home, and he's putting pictures up on the wall.

• 1:02:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Rich Roll?

  And it's almost like, you know, the trope of the, you know, the cop who's hunting the serial killer. And you're like, what is going on with this guy?

• 1:02:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:02:38Rich Roll?

  And he's got a family, he's got a son, he's got a wife at the beginning, although we don't see the wife at the end, so I'm not sure what happens there.

• 1:02:47Adam Skolnick?

  You don't think she stuck through it?

• 1:02:48Rich Roll?

  I don't know. I don't know, I don't know if she did. I mean, you know, wouldn't, if she was still around- Wouldn't she have been part of that conclusion on some level?

• 1:02:57Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe she, I don't know. Maybe she didn't want to be a part of it. I don't know.

• 1:03:01Rich Roll?

  But I'm thinking about the son when he's putting up the pictures on the wall.

• 1:03:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Rich Roll?

  Thinking, what's going on with the son right now when his dad is like, you know,

• 1:03:09Adam Skolnick?

  Is dad having an affair with an octopus?

• 1:03:11Rich Roll?

  Octopus, you know? I mean, there's an absentee aspect to it, I'm sure.

• 1:03:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:03:16Rich Roll?

  And, and that couldn't have been easy for his family. So while he's being healed, I would suspect that, you know, the domestic life was very challenged by this, but it was probably even more challenged by him prior to that when he was suffering even more deeply.

• 1:03:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he probably got to the point where his wife's like, sure, go out, how many, five hours today? Good.

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  Go for six.

• 1:03:39Adam Skolnick?

  But you know what? I, I, see, I didn't take, I mean, I agree, it was a midlife crisis movie, but, um.

• 1:03:44Rich Roll?

  It's more, it's more of a, more than a midlife crisis.

• 1:03:46Adam Skolnick?

  A severe, a severe crisis movie.

• 1:03:48Rich Roll?

  And, and, you know, he's, he's a very interesting character, clearly very talented with a camera.

• 1:03:53Adam Skolnick?

  I'm unbelievable.

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  And, and obsessive.

• 1:03:55Adam Skolnick?

  But also like an art, a true artist.

• 1:03:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, an artist.

• 1:03:57Adam Skolnick?

  A true artist. Like, the pictures he's putting up on the wall are incredible.

• 1:04:01Rich Roll?

  Right, I know.

• 1:04:02Adam Skolnick?

  And the collections he makes, it's unbelievable.

• 1:04:04Rich Roll?

  And basically, he's trying to mimic the tracking that he witnessed in Africa and ply that underwater.

• 1:04:12Adam Skolnick?

  Which is incredible.

• 1:04:12Rich Roll?

  Like, how do you track an octopus underwater? What are the traces that you're looking for? And like, the forensics of that alone are insane, right? It is like a weird CSI South Africa kind of narrative, you know what I mean?

• 1:04:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. The, the other way to look at it from the octopus point of view is, this octopus was being stalked its entire life.

• 1:04:36Rich Roll?

  Do you think it was?

• 1:04:37Adam Skolnick?

  You shake hands with one human being and you're stalked for the rest of your life.

• 1:04:40Rich Roll?

  Do you think it was the same octopus?

• 1:04:44Adam Skolnick?

  That's, are you, are you a my octopus truther?

• 1:04:46Rich Roll?

  I'm just asking the question.

• 1:04:49Adam Skolnick?

  You just ask the tough questions. I think it was. I trust Craig Foster's obsessiveism.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  I hope so.

• 1:04:55Adam Skolnick?

  But at the end of the movie, at the end of the movie, he's not swimming alone. He's got a group of people. None of them are allowed to wear wetsuits.

• 1:05:01Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah. I'm really glad his son came back into the picture at the end and you see this bond between them and how this process has ultimately brought them together and they can now have this shared experience.

• 1:05:10Adam Skolnick?

  I hedge a little bit on the family. It's impossible to know through these movies or any books like what a person's family life is like. They might just keep it out just to keep it private.

• 1:05:20Rich Roll?

  But that's kind of part of the story, though.

• 1:05:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, you would want it to be. And it is part of this story, his relationship with his son. And it's not really delve, they don't really go into it too much. It's like almost the, a little bit the opposite problem with the last movie you talked about where they take on a bunch of issues to the point where they can't get in depth in some ways, whereas this is so deep into one place.

• 1:05:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very.

• 1:05:39Adam Skolnick?

  It doesn't, it doesn't kind of encompass everything.

• 1:05:41Rich Roll?

  The focus is very narrow. Yeah, it's like you're not cutting away to the son sharing his perspective on what his dad's doing.

• 1:05:48Adam Skolnick?

  I love that.

• 1:05:50Rich Roll?

  I know. I kind of wanted that, but I understand why, you know, they did it the way that they did it. And, and look, we didn't even talk about what it's really about, which is, he immerses himself in this environment. And by being very patient and showing up day after day, he develops this connection with this octopus. He's observing it relentlessly. And he ends up learning all about this incredible creature.

• 1:06:15Adam Skolnick?

  Which is one of the most intelligent creatures on earth.

• 1:06:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, in a way that, you know, even other scientists, you know, he's like making discoveries, like first time discoveries about behavior that people didn't even realize. And I think what you get from that is that it goes back to humility. Like, we think we're at the top of the food chain, we're the most intelligent animal. Well, intelligence comes in many different forms. We have a certain kind of intelligence that allows us to be very good at certain things. But when you see the intelligence of this creature, you realize like, this is unbelievably smart.

• 1:06:51Adam Skolnick?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:06:52Rich Roll?

  Animal that is so.

• 1:06:56Rich Roll?

  Adept in its environment and so good at survival. It's amazing. Like when it collects all those shells and rolls up into a ball to like disappear or changes colors.

• 1:07:06Adam Skolnick?

  Which you might have seen in like Blue Planet before.

• 1:07:09Rich Roll?

  Right, but when you actually see it played out and there's like a whole methodology to this whole thing. And then how it gets comfortable around him and swims up on him and attaches to his chest and all the way to, you know, I keep saying he, it's a she.

• 1:07:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, the octopus is a she.

• 1:07:24Rich Roll?

  And then the mating and then the giving birth and.

• 1:07:28Adam Skolnick?

  Very Charlotte's Web at the end.

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Adam Skolnick?

  It's beautiful. And, um, you know, one thing that Craig Foster makes a really good point is that like people always ask him, why do you go to the same place every day? And they've asked us that same thing. Why are you always going to the same place? Wouldn't it be cooler? Wouldn't you learn more if you went other play, other dive sites? And he said, to learn about the wild, you gotta go back to the same place every day. And I find that to be so profound. It's like, it's like.

• 1:07:55Rich Roll?

  It's very Zen Buddhist.

• 1:07:56Adam Skolnick?

  It's very Zen Buddhist. It's very localist. You know, there's like an argument of it's very Zen Buddhist in that wherever you go, there you are. You don't have to travel the world to know the world. Right?

• 1:08:06Rich Roll?

  Right. It would be like going into your backyard and just staring at the same anthill every day. You could all do that, you know?

• 1:08:16Adam Skolnick?

  Wait, you have a cool anthill in your backyard?

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  Probably. I wouldn't even know.

• 1:08:20Adam Skolnick?

  I don't have a backyard, bro.

• 1:08:22Rich Roll?

  But you might have like a spider web or something like that. The point being like there's nature everywhere. If you slow down and pay attention.

• 1:08:31Adam Skolnick?

  But there's a Wim Hof element of being in cold water and how that shocks you. And then just like, can we give some, just take a moment to pause at the breathtaking beauty and incredible majesty of Africa? Like Africa, you don't even, you think of Africa, like you could think of it in a million different ways. Kinetic cities, incredible music, like colorful and beautiful cultures and traditions, the big five animals, all the incredible animals in East Africa, all the way, the mountain gorillas, and then you see this coastline, that's like Big Sur times 10.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Right, it's so majestic.

• 1:09:09Adam Skolnick?

  Africa is unbelievable.

• 1:09:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, those waves crashing, you're like, I can't believe you're going swimming out there.

• 1:09:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he's a badass.

• 1:09:15Rich Roll?

  It's crazy, he didn't get just washed up on the rocks.

• 1:09:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he knows what he's doing. So, anyway, props to Africa, I want to get out there, I want to go, I want to go, I want to join the group for a swim.

• 1:09:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've never been to Africa. All right, My Octopus Teacher, it's on Netflix, right?

• 1:09:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's on Netflix.

• 1:09:32Rich Roll?

  All right, good, check it out. Let's take a break, and we'll be back with a little show and tell and some listener questions.

• 1:09:51Rich Roll?

  And we're back.

• 1:09:52Adam Skolnick?

  All right, show and tell. So this week, a new article came out in the journal Science, a new study, it was co-authored by my friend Marcus Ericson at Five Gyres, and Marcus led a study, the first global estimate of amount of plastic that is actually swirling in the oceans, and at the time, it was in 2015 when that came out, it was five trillion tons of plastic.

• 1:10:16Rich Roll?

  Is that when they were saying the patch was the size of Texas?

• 1:10:20Adam Skolnick?

  That's right, and the patch is the size of Texas, but doesn't mean there's like big sheets of plastic swirling around, most of it looks exactly like this, this was collected by Marcus in the North Pacific gyre.

• 1:10:31Rich Roll?

  So explain that for people that are just listening.

• 1:10:33Adam Skolnick?

  So we talked about microplastics before, the idea is the plastic ends up in the waterways and breaks down to plankton-sized particles, and it gets nibbled on by fish, and that's how it toxifies, the food chain toxifies nature. But these little plastic particles get into, plastic gets into the water, and there's five oceanic, main oceanic gyres, current systems.

• 1:10:55Rich Roll?

  What's a gyre?

• 1:10:56Adam Skolnick?

  A gyre is like this swirling current, and it brings-

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  Like a macro current, like a giant-

• 1:11:00Adam Skolnick?

  It's a macro, a giant current, influential current, and the North Pacific has one, the South Pacific has one. North Atlantic, South Atlantic, and there's one in the Indian Ocean. Those are the main gyres.

• 1:11:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:11:10Adam Skolnick?

  Um, I'm not sure about the Southern Ocean, but those are the main oceanic gyres that, that, uh, Five Gyres, uh, looks at. And so the, the plastic get into rivers, get into the ocean and it just travels. A lot of it travels. Sometimes it'll beach itself. Sometimes it'll just continue to travel into this gyre. It'll start swirling and it's kind of the toilet bowl.

• 1:11:29Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:11:30Adam Skolnick?

  Situation. And it breaks down. And so these are microplastics, these little jars. This was in the North Pacific gyre.

• 1:11:36Rich Roll?

  Let me see that.

• 1:11:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:40Adam Skolnick?

  This is-

• 1:11:40Rich Roll?

  So it just, it looks like, like large grain sand.

• 1:11:44Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:44Rich Roll?

  That's multicolored.

• 1:11:45Adam Skolnick?

  Or pebbles.

• 1:11:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Adam Skolnick?

  And some of it's really tiny. Here's a North Atlantic gyre. This was collected on the expedition I was on with Five Gyres and, uh, Jack Johnson.

• 1:11:55Rich Roll?

  It looks different based on where, you know, which part of the ocean you get it from, which ocean.

• 1:11:59Adam Skolnick?

  Well, it looks the same, but it's just like, there's less of it. And, you know, that, that's the Great Pacific Garbage Patch that was, but those were pulled out of water that was as blue as you could imagine. It didn't look like anything was in it. It looks like perfectly clear and yet you're pulling that because you can't see it. It just looks like little flakes. These are nurdles. Um, it came from a Hong Kong plastic plant. Nurdles are the base element of all plastic. It's just a, a base element that becomes any plastic item, a bottle.

• 1:12:25Rich Roll?

  So this is what all plastics start with, like these little tiny little kernels or nodules that it just looks like sea salt.

• 1:12:32Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Rich Roll?

  Like large grain sea salt.

• 1:12:34Adam Skolnick?

  And like grains of rice. And that's what my, our, when we talked about the Bereo guys on their podcast, the guys that turn the,

• 1:12:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:41Adam Skolnick?

  Uh, fishing nets back into nurdles. Uh, that's what they do. Anyway, so, uh, I brought that in because there's this new study that estimates there's nine, in 2016, they looked at it. 19 to 23 million metric tons or 11% of the plastic waste generated globally entered the aquatic system. So one out of every 10 items that you're throwing away that's plastic ends up in the water. And that if we do nothing, I talked to Marcus on the drive here, I spent a little time chatting with him, and he said that if we do nothing at all, that number by 2030 will go to be 80 million metric tons that we throw away.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  So literally four times what we're currently seeing.

• 1:13:22Adam Skolnick?

  Four times. He says that he's authoring another study now, an updated global estimate, and he says it's 10 times at least what they thought in 2015, which was 5 trillion metric tons. It's going to be at least 10x that in this new study. And basically, he said that this new study that came out in Science this week isn't really about the problem so much as how do you solve the problem? And so there's no magic bullet. There's no magic bullet situation. There's a few things that we can do, and we need to work on all of them simultaneously. One is moratorium on plastic production facilities. The industry is putting billions of dollars into building new plastic plants. You've seen reporting

• 1:14:05Adam Skolnick?

  on it, I'm sure. So that one is a moratorium. The other is bans on single-use plastics, things like bottle bans, bag bans, all packaging bans. The EU has all single-use plastic bans. That's in place. Kenya has really strong rules on that, is one thing that Marcus told me. And with the pandemic, even myself, who I was really good about no plastic, you know, I've been going to the farmer's market and using prepackaged plastic bags worth of tomatoes or whatever the fruit might be, or food, because I don't want a bunch of people, you know, feeling up my produce and COVIDing on it. But and he and I asked him about that,

• 1:14:48Adam Skolnick?

  and he said, you know, look, we got to, we got to take care of essential workers. We have to take care of ourselves. You have to take care of human beings. So for now, if we're taking a small step back and using plastic, he's not poo-pooing any of that. But long term, we need to start making this change. And the number one change that needs to be made is something called extended producer responsibility, which means if you are proctor and gamble. And you are packaging something in plastic. You then have to be responsible for disposal of that thing. As it is now, they just dump a bunch of plastic into the waste system. Cities, our tax money goes towards trying to get rid of it.

• 1:15:23Rich Roll?

  Right, they're absolved of any responsibility for what happens to it after that. So the proposal is that it's an end to end responsibility.

• 1:15:30Adam Skolnick?

  It's a closed loop.

• 1:15:31Rich Roll?

  If you produce it, then you have to be on the hook for how it gets recycled or where it ends up.

• 1:15:37Adam Skolnick?

  So then the money goes into, you have to start to R and D, figure out ways to create packaging that can be reused. And us as consumers shouldn't have to expect like, you know, a shiny thing necessarily.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  The problem is that even if it's designed to be reused, most people just throw the shit out anyway.

• 1:15:56Adam Skolnick?

  Right, so then that goes in where the money goes. You have to, you have to make inroads to these local plants. There has to be a plan in place for you to ship that back to your facility, wherever that might be, your distribution.

• 1:16:08Rich Roll?

  The machinations are so insane. I mean, the title of this science article is predicted growth in plastic waste exceeds efforts to mitigate plastic pollution. So it's, it's sort of like the doping situation. Like the dopers are always a step ahead of the detectors, right? So the plastic production is just ahead of our ability to mitigate it with these machinations. Like we have to go through all of these crazy, you know, processes to try to get a handle on this. Can't we just invent something that disintegrates after a certain amount of time or, you know what I mean? Like, there has to be some kind of technological solution that would render plastic obsolete. Like that, I feel like that's the only way we're gonna get a handle on this.

• 1:16:51Rich Roll?

  Because otherwise, it's just, it's, it's gonna continue to spiral out of control.

• 1:16:55Adam Skolnick?

  Because the companies will never want to invest money into fixing their own problem.

• 1:16:59Rich Roll?

  Right, and there is, you know, like, I don't know, did you watch in Kiss the Ground at the very end, like when the credits are rolling, did you watch that part?

• 1:17:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I watched some of it.

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  So, Rosario Dawson's like on Venice, on the boardwalk at Venice, and she's like interviewing random people and asking them like, you know, what are you doing about, about climate change? And like people either stare at her blankly, or they're like, well, I use, I use paper straws. You know, it's like, that's, for a lot of people, like, that's the one thing that they're doing, but.

• 1:17:26Adam Skolnick?

  Which is nice.

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  It's not necessarily a greenwashing thing, but it's this idea that when you do this little thing, that's good.

• 1:17:34Rich Roll?

  But not really having a major impact, it makes you feel like you're part of the solution and it prevents you from actually tackling the real issues here, right? And this issue is so out of control and so beyond, you know, the average consumer's ability to get a grasp on it, like, yeah, okay, I'm not going to use plastic bags. But we've been sharing about like how hard this is.

• 1:17:55Adam Skolnick?

  But it's not the average consumer's responsibility.

• 1:17:57Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:17:58Adam Skolnick?

  So the point is that it's gotta be put on, you gotta go upstream, you've got to stop this stuff from coming into the system. That's the only solution. So the only solution is stop manufacturing it, putting a moratorium, creating laws that eliminate it from coming into the system because you can't put it on the person on the boardwalk. You can't put it on us. It's gotta be put into the companies themselves.

• 1:18:24Rich Roll?

  How is it that so much of this stuff ends up in the water?

• 1:18:27Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, that just goes through the way.

• 1:18:29Rich Roll?

  What is the chain of custody here that?

• 1:18:31Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, it spills out every time, you know, have you ever watched a trash truck drive down the street?

• 1:18:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, but, but, all right, so we're, we're talking about, you know, 20 and then moving towards 80.

• 1:18:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, some of it is, some of it has been the way it's collected, it spills onto the street, it's, it's littered. Some of it has been we ship our plastic waste overseas and who knows what happens and it gets sorted. You know, I don't, I don't exactly know if they've, if they looked at exactly how that happens, they've just quantified how much does.

• 1:19:02Rich Roll?

  And what is the impact on marine life? Like when this stuff is in, obviously we know, like the fish eat it and it toxifies the fish.

• 1:19:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Rich Roll?

  But do you have a grip on kind of?

• 1:19:12Adam Skolnick?

  It feels like, well, I mean, Marcus was, was activated on this issue when he took students as a grad student, he took students to the, I think it was Midway Islands to study albatrosses and he found scores of dead albatross on the beach. And they, he cut open, he cut them open, they bisected them right then because Marcus is a mad scientist and he just had his kids do that. And their bellies were filled with this plastic. And so, you know, you can't overstate its impact on wildlife.

• 1:19:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:42Adam Skolnick?

  And.

• 1:19:43Rich Roll?

  And we've all seen the images of these once beautiful, pristine tropical beaches, like whether it's in Bali or, you know, and they're just littered with, you know, so much plastic refuse.

• 1:19:55Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Rich Roll?

  It's just horrific.

• 1:19:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, and whales that have turned up with bellies full of plastic or especially the lunge feeding whales, right? They're getting it, that's happened as well. So there is a huge impact on wildlife and in terms of the comp, like stuff that will disintegrate, you know, often we see here in LA, we might get a smoothie or a coffee and something with a plastic that says compostable. Those are only compostable in a very specific technology that heats it up to a various temperature and most recycling centers that will receive that container will not have that there.

• 1:20:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I've heard that from other sources as well.

• 1:20:35Adam Skolnick?

  It's kind of bullshit.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  So it makes you feel like you're doing the right thing, but so little of that actually gets properly composted.

• 1:20:42Adam Skolnick?

  That's right. So, you know, not to say don't recycle, but the point is we need to stop the manufacturing, you need to go upstream and we need to stop it and that's the way we gotta do it.

• 1:20:52Rich Roll?

  Hmm, yeah. Yeah, it kind of, there is an analogy to the regenerative soil thing and this idea of, you know, how we're addressing climate change, like are we just reducing like how bad we're making it or are we actually reversing it? You know what I mean?

• 1:21:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:21:08Rich Roll?

  So there's like, okay, we gotta slow down this plastic consumption thing, but that's not actually reversing it or removing it from our waterways.

• 1:21:17Adam Skolnick?

  You can't really remove it, you know, it's already out there.

• 1:21:19Rich Roll?

  There's that guy Boyan Slot though, right?

• 1:21:22Adam Skolnick?

  It's not going well.

• 1:21:23Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's not? What's going, what's the latest with that?

• 1:21:24Adam Skolnick?

  Well, they raised a hundred million dollars and they've deployed it and within a couple, within a handful of weeks, it broke down and then they moved it to the Hawaiian Islands and they tried to refix it and redeploy it. Now it's being transitioned into like a river cleanups thing, cause you know, you can't, it's very hard to put a piece of machinery out in the middle of the ocean and not have it break down. I mean, saltwater corrodes and erodes. I mean, that's what it does, so I don't think it's going very well from my, from what I've

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  That's a bummer.

• 1:21:52Adam Skolnick?

  Kids.

• 1:21:53Rich Roll?

  I like that kid.

• 1:21:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, magic bullet solutions just don't work really when it comes to this stuff. And. I think it is possible, you know, we never would have thought plastic bags would become illegal and they did. So, you know, like I think there is, there is a way you gotta put it, it's not consumer based, it's producer based. You have to ask people to be responsible for their shit, just like you do your kid. You know, like if you, if your kid takes something somewhere, don't just leave it on the ground.

• 1:22:22Rich Roll?

  In a broader context, I feel like as a culture, we've become less and less capable of unifying around solutions that are community oriented, you know? And, and part of this is government responsibility, but we're so fractured right now. Like, can we really come together to solve our biggest problems? Like COVID was this amazing opportunity for us to stop. We're being put in timeout. Let's really take a hard look at some of these systems and the impact that they're having on our planet. And I feel like we're missing that moment, that it's passing us by without really taking advantage of what it's being offered.

• 1:23:02Rich Roll?

  Like in the seventies, when they realized that aerosols were harming the ozone, we were able to like eradicate that and take care of that, right?

• 1:23:12Adam Skolnick?

  And now we're having these- We passed a law saying you can't make it.

• 1:23:14Rich Roll?

  Right. Stop making it, right?

• 1:23:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right, same deal.

• 1:23:17Rich Roll?

  Like, why can't we just, no more plastic bags?

• 1:23:19Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:23:19Rich Roll?

  No more of that, like-

• 1:23:20Adam Skolnick?

  We can. We just don't.

• 1:23:22Rich Roll?

  We don't do it.

• 1:23:23Adam Skolnick?

  Because of lobbying, because of influence on politics.

• 1:23:26Rich Roll?

  And then it becomes politicized and we argue about it. And that, that's deeply concerning to me. I think that's the bigger issue is like, can we come together to solve our problems?

• 1:23:34Adam Skolnick?

  Well, look, look, here's the deal, like we, especially in the podcast community, where like in, in, in the kind of area that, that you specialize in and even Joe Rogan, you have these people that come on, the David Goggins of the world, who say, who, who are paragons of, I took, I took care of my shit. I looked at myself in the mirror. I owned my shit. I changed my life and I became more.

• 1:23:58Adam Skolnick?

  And I've become empowered and we love that. Those are great stories and we consume those and we and they became they become our kind of mentors by proxy that we follow either on Instagram or just we read the books or we watch the films or whatever it is and they become who we we want ourselves to be a we want a piece of that for ourselves and we don't demand that of people in the public space of corporations. We don't demand it. Somehow those people are exempt. You know, you they're not they're not supposed to look after their own shit. Or you look at a guy like Trump. If I lose, I didn't lose. You know, like the absolute opposite of someone who owns their shit and is and it has integrity.

• 1:24:39Adam Skolnick?

  So all we're asking is, look, company, no one says don't make money. We're all I like making money. Make your money, but look at the at the earth, look at the greater culture, look at the, you know, have some responsibility to everybody else. That's all we're asking. So can we ask that of a corporation? It's certainly out of the box. I'm not saying it's easy, but I think we should be able to ask it and we could ask it once back in the day. We were asking those questions.

• 1:25:09Rich Roll?

  Back to the broader issues. I mean, part of the reason why we love those stories of transformation is that it speaks to our innate attraction to this idea of like rugged individualism. Like I can do it, right? It's up to me and like and there's something very American about that, like manifest destiny. And it's about self-interest and the self-made man. And when we see somebody who accomplishes something, we love to kind of celebrate that as an example of what is a very American ideal. I think it's very it's very US centric in that regard, at least the fervor that we have for that kind of story is very particular.

• 1:25:51Rich Roll?

  And that's at odds with the Commonwealth, right? Like when we have these existential crises, they require us to come together and we don't celebrate the community rising up to solve the problem in the way that we celebrate the individual who's able to like overcome obstacles himself. Like, can we apply that?

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  That enthusiasm that we have for those kind of individual stories to a common story, where we come together as a people to solve a problem and overcome an obstacle.

• 1:26:27Adam Skolnick?

  I like that. New way of storytelling.

• 1:26:30Rich Roll?

  All right, let's do some listener questions.

• 1:26:32Adam Skolnick?

  There's a question that kind of gets into some of this, I think. Ready?

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Hi, Rich. Hi, Adam. My name's Tristan. I'm calling you from the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Coast Salish people in Vancouver, B.C. I'm a dual citizen of the U.S. and Canada, and I've lived in both. So I've been comparing and contrasting the two countries for some time now. I've been wondering if there's some cultural root difference that could explain why our value systems are manifested in policy and behavior so differently, almost to the point that Americans appear to champion freedom but reject responsibility when Canadians generally accept freedom and responsibility

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  as two sides to the same point. I'm thinking, for example, how, as Americans, we want the right to bear arms but not the universal background checks or common sense restrictions. We want the freedom to run a business, but not so much the responsibility of dealing with the waste or byproducts of production. We want to move fast and break things in the tech world, but we don't want to take responsibility for how that affects society. We want the right to vote and are outraged at the thought of foreigners interfering in our elections, but we interfere with and overthrow other governments. We want to use the fast lane to pass slower drivers, but we won't move over for others. I'm wondering

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  if you think there's something cultural that is uniquely American to account for this.

• 1:28:10Speaker 02

  Love the show. Thank you very much.

• 1:28:12Rich Roll?

  Thanks Tristan. I feel like this could be a whole college course. Like you could spend a semester on this question.

• 1:28:20Adam Skolnick?

  Why Canadians are better than Americans?

• 1:28:21Rich Roll?

  No, not that. But certainly, you know, to answer his question, is there a cultural difference? A hundred percent there is. Like, America, you know, America. Like, that's what this is about, right?

• 1:28:31Adam Skolnick?

  Just what you were talking about.

• 1:28:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's what we were talking about. What is it, what is it about America and the American sensibility and, you know, our, our shared history that leads to, you know, those observations which I think are astute that Tristan made. And, you know, when you trace it back, to echo what we were just talking about, like, our culture is premised on this idea of liberty and baked into that is this sense of self-sufficiency and manifest destiny, this idea that your future rests on your shoulders, you know, literally, don't tread on me. You know, like, don't tread on me. Get out of my business. Get out of the way. We came here from England to escape a certain, you know, certain aspects of, of

• 1:29:17Rich Roll?

  religious repression and taxation. And we wanted to be left alone, to do what we wanted to do. And I think the genetic material of that has been passed on generation after generation after generation. It's so woven into the fabric of our culture. And part of that is what makes us great. You know, it's, it's what makes us different. It's what makes this experiment like so compelling and dynamic. But there's also a part of it that's incredibly dysfunctional. And we're seeing that dysfunction metastasize in certain ways right now. It's different right now. Like we were talking about, crises used to unite us, right? Like, what happened when we were heading into World War II and all

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  the women had to go into the factories and they converted the automotive factories into, you know, making airplanes and making munitions and all these sorts of things. Or, you know, the New Deal with FDR where, you know, we just marshaled incredible Reserves to create these programs to lift people up from the bottom. You know, like all these things, there's so many examples over the history, over the history of our country, where we were able to unite in times of strain to solve our shared problems for the common good. And now, the crises that used to unite us seem to divide us. They become partisan, they become acrimonious, they become feeding grounds for, you know,

• 1:30:44Rich Roll?

  political talking points and arrows slung. And social media plays a big part on this by really tapping into people's fears, by activating their subconscious in a, in a, in a way that weaponizes ideas and pits us against ourselves. And I think, you know, another aspect of it is this idea that, a very American idea of, of zero sum game, right? Like baked into don't tread on me is like, this is mine, yours is there, you can't have what's mine, and if you're winning, then I'm losing. And I think we have a leader at the moment who, you know, exemplifies this idea, like nobody else can win except him.

• 1:31:29Rich Roll?

  There are no, you know, there are, there, there are winners and there are losers. And we, you know, the idea that we can all win together is not part of that mentality, the zero sum sensibility. And that my responsibility only extends to myself, my needs, and that of my family alone. Meanwhile, as we modernize and we specialize, we've become more and more alienated from each other. We've lost, you know, our connection with our neighbors. We've experienced this denigration, this demise of community as we move towards this cul-de-sac culture where we lock ourselves in our cars and our homes. There's an isolationism.

• 1:32:10Rich Roll?

  That that is at play here that I think you can layer on top of this sense, this false sense of American sort of superiority.

• 1:32:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:20Rich Roll?

  And entitlement like, yeah, like, how dare anybody, you know, mess with our elections while we're doing who knows what in the third world. But that's fine because we're America.

• 1:32:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:32:30Rich Roll?

  Right. This idea of American exceptionalism. And that's starting to fracture. It's like, there is this unmistakable sense that like, we're like Rome in the final days before the collapse. Like, these systems don't last forever.

• 1:32:45Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:32:45Rich Roll?

  And our system is flawed, highly flawed. So.

• 1:32:51Adam Skolnick?

  And the, and, and the, the way that they were put, the systems were put in place also was, was kind of obviously flawed and problematic and evil in certain ways. And who was treated with fairly by the law and who still is.

• 1:33:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:33:06Adam Skolnick?

  But, you know, in terms of just going to the core of the question of Canada versus America, what makes it different? And I don't, I've never lived in Canada, so it would be hard for me to know. But a few things kind of stand out. Two of them are, are kind of policy and one is more media. But I, you know, first of all, we just had this big Supreme Court decision when Obama was still in office that made corporations individuals. So I don't think many countries in the world treat businesses as individuals. They don't give the same rights, the corporations that they're supposed to give to individuals. It's crazy. Corporations are not individuals. They're businesses and they should be held to a different standard. Canada, to my knowledge, does not treat businesses that way.

• 1:33:48Adam Skolnick?

  They, they, it's the same thing with Gavin Newsom and what happened with homeowners and trying to get them to throw their trash out. Canada gets corporations to throw their trash out a little bit better than we do. I mean, I think manifest destiny existed there, too. I think, you know, First Nations, as they're called in, in Canada, indigenous people were treated very poorly and were eradicated there, too. So that happened. But in terms of legal. Legally, what's been going on. Corporations have more to answer for than they do in this country. They also have a parliamentary government, which means that if you win a government, if you win, the prime minister is elected through their parties.

• 1:34:31Adam Skolnick?

  The parties are elected and the leader of the party becomes the prime minister, as far as I know. And if you win in a parliamentary process, if you win by a narrow margin, you are then tasked with creating a coalition government with people who are maybe your political opponents and getting enough people in place to actually support your government. That means that coalition building is baked into the process. That's the same process England has, the same process Australia has. We don't have that process. I'm not arguing that that's a better process, but there is a coalition building, a communal, you know, having to see each other eye to eye and meet in the middle. It's baked into the way they create their laws in Canada. We don't have that here.

• 1:35:14Adam Skolnick?

  It's winner take all here, you know, holding hostage by the power of the senate or whatever it might be. It's supposed to be, you're supposed to come correct and meet and compromise, but that's not been happening lately.

• 1:35:28Rich Roll?

  No, I mean, first of all, we're not a democracy. We're a democratic republic. There's a difference. I don't think we talk enough about that, like the republic aspect of how our government is structured. But what we've seen in the last several decades is this explosion in executive powers, like this expansion of the executive branch that I think exceeds the, you know, what the forefathers would have ever predicted. There's supposed to be a very finely tuned balance between the three, the three branches of government. And now it's just all about the executive and it's all about the president. So I think the president has too much power.

• 1:36:10Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, with the rights that have been vested in corporations matched by

• 1:36:17Rich Roll?

  The way that we structure campaign finance, we've created a situation in which lobbyists actually hold the most power. They're making all the money and they're the ones who are dictating policy at the highest level by getting politicians to do the bidding of these corporations, which are treated as individuals. And thus, we create a system in which the rights of these corporations are paramount to the rights of citizens. And that's led us to this place where we are unable to care for our commons because our priority is making sure that business is growing and that business is thriving.

• 1:36:53Adam Skolnick?

  And campaign finance laws are different in Canada and you can see that. And I think there was a Michael Moore documentary, was it Bowling for Columbine, where he like crosses the border and like starts opening Canadians' doors and their doors are always unlocked. And he looked at the media and there wasn't like, they didn't have cops and no one was afraid of getting robbed and they didn't have guns and their news media actually wasn't all about fear first. It wasn't headline grabby, it was kind of boring. And, and, and so all of those things, I think, was that Bowling for Columbine? I forget what that was.

• 1:37:25Rich Roll?

  I remember, it sounds right.

• 1:37:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Rich Roll?

  But, all right, we answered that question.

• 1:37:28Adam Skolnick?

  We did.

• 1:37:29Rich Roll?

  Let's move on. Thank you.

• 1:37:31Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks Tristan.

• 1:37:31Rich Roll?

  Thank you Tristan.

• 1:37:32Adam Skolnick?

  All right. Ready? Go.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Hey, Richard and Adam. My name is Heidi and I am in the Bay Area. My question or sort of conversation that I'd like to open up is about training and social responsibility. So I train with a large TRAFON team in the Bay Area. I've known the people now for nine years plus. And over the years, they've helped me go from 5Ks to multiple IRMAC initiatives. But more importantly, they're my second family. In the beginning of the pandemic, we did socially distant workouts and then we just quickly transitioned when everything was, you know, hell in a handbasket. So we would actually just post virtually. And in May, a lot of

• 1:38:16Speaker 03

  my team decided to train in person together, just keeping six feet apart. But that's really tricky, right? With the winds and everything and. I made the decision not to attend gatherings. Um, I noticed through Strava photos, people weren't wearing masks or hugging. My question is, I've known these people for many years, as I mentioned, deep relationships, and I struggle now with reconciling that and meeting that social network with disregard for other people. And it just doesn't seem respectful to me to be out there with no mask now and putting my athletic pursuits into the one. For me, it feels more selfish. So I know this seems like a judgmental question.

• 1:39:00Rich Roll?

  All right. Thank you, Heidi, for your question. This one's tricky, uh, and I think it's applicable more broadly than her specific question. Yeah, she's talking about her triathlon training group, but this could be...

• 1:39:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but we all deal with this.

• 1:39:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like, how are we interacting with our friends and our peer group?

• 1:39:19Adam Skolnick?

  Or is it cool to go out running? That kind of thing, yeah.

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And whether it's meeting at a restaurant or going out running or cycling or whatever it is, you know, I think there's, there's a relatable aspect of this question that extends beyond her specific circumstances. But, you know, I think it's, I think it's tough. And ultimately, all I can say is that you gotta do what's right for you and you gotta stay out of the business of what other people are doing. And I think you said in your question, this seems judgmental, but you're not being judgmental. But I would, I would, I would suggest that perhaps your judgment runs a little bit deeper than you might be aware, because I feel like you are judging everybody else, or at least this particular group. And I don't think that that judgment is, is serving you or them.

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  Ultimately, you only have control over your actions and your reactions, not what anyone else is doing. And I understand that that peer group, that social connection with that community is important to you, but if your personal safety and social distancing exceeds that need or that desire for your social outlet, then that has to dictate.

• 1:40:30Rich Roll?

  How you behave, right? It's tough when you're talking about training outdoors. And I think what makes this complicated is there's a lot of confusion and uncertainty about the disease, how it's transmitted. Is it safe to be outside? It's like, oh, we all wear masks. But then you're, you know, I'm walking down Main Street in Santa Monica and there's restaurants and everyone's sitting outside and they're not wearing masks and I'm walking right by them while I'm wearing masks. So it's like, it's, it's okay to not wear a mask when you're sitting down at a table, but not when you're walking?

• 1:41:00Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:41:01Rich Roll?

  It's weird. And so, you know, it's like, how do you make sense of any of this?

• 1:41:06Adam Skolnick?

  You don't.

• 1:41:07Rich Roll?

  You can't, and you don't, right? So that's why it all goes back to doing what feels right for you. And also not putting other people in harm's way as a result of your behavior, I think, is important as well.

• 1:41:19Adam Skolnick?

  So yeah, so do no, first do no harm.

• 1:41:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I would say, you know, look, I deal with this as well. Like, I like to train alone, so being with a peer group isn't as important as it feels like it is to you with respect to the training. But I do think when you're outside and the wind's blowing and you're somewhat distant from another individual, the chances that you're going to contract the disease are pretty limited. And that doesn't mean that you shouldn't, you know, maintain a safe distance and, you know, kind of watch your Ps and Qs. But that scenario is very different than going to a bar where the music's loud and people are yelling and they're standing right next to each other and, you know, the air is not well circulated. Like, those are night and day situations.

• 1:42:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:42:01Rich Roll?

  Although I have been out riding my bike by myself, but I'll ride up behind somebody and they're like, I don't know, 10 meters ahead of me. But when you're riding a bike, like, you generate a lot of phlegm, you know?

• 1:42:12Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:42:12Rich Roll?

  You're doing the snot rockets and like, and it's like, am I just, even though I'm 10 meters behind, if you're going 15, 20 miles an hour, is that just going right into my nose and my face?

• 1:42:23Adam Skolnick?

  I don't think snot rockets are cool right now.

• 1:42:25Rich Roll?

  But people are doing it like when you're riding your bike, like your nose starts to run, you gotta do something with that. You know what I mean? And a lot of that ends up in the air. Like that, is that not the aerosolized droplets that we're hearing about? So then I'm like, is this like worse than me being, you know?

• 1:42:43Adam Skolnick?

  It's a good question.

• 1:42:44Rich Roll?

  And I don't know the answer to that. You know what I mean? So all I can tell you is, is that, you know, you should continue to train, but maybe not do it with this group. If you want to, you know, find a way to do it with one other person and you can, that way you can kind of

• 1:42:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, bubble up.

• 1:42:59Rich Roll?

  Regulate the social distancing a little bit more practically. That might be good. But I think the broader thing that I want to express is, is not getting caught up in what other people are doing or not doing, because that's going to make you crazy.

• 1:43:14Adam Skolnick?

  But it is hard to do that when, when there is this

• 1:43:17Rich Roll?

  You've seen pictures of people hugging and it's like, well, yeah, on Facebook or whatever. You know, you know, your buddy, you, you work at a job and you can't see your colleagues anymore. And then you see they're going to a bar and you're at home trying to do the right thing or whatever.

• 1:43:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, some people are more committed to bubbling than others. And believe me, with, with a newborn and then before that pregnant wife, we were super careful. And, you know, I think all you can do is have a mask on you. So if you're biking or, or running, we even put them in our wet suits and put them on for walking back after swimming. Just have it with you. And if you're coming up close on someone, put it up. And if not, run free without the mask. I think that's fine. That's what I do.

• 1:43:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Adam Skolnick?

  But kudos Heidi for 5K to going from a 5K to multiple Ironman finishers.

• 1:44:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:04Adam Skolnick?

  That's pretty amazing.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:06Adam Skolnick?

  So.

• 1:44:06Rich Roll?

  All right, cool.

• 1:44:07Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks.

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  All right, we'll do one more.

• 1:44:09Adam Skolnick?

  All right, cool. Let's go to Toronto.

• 1:44:11Rich Roll?

  Two from Canada today.

• 1:44:12Adam Skolnick?

  I know. You're huge in Canada, bro.

• 1:44:15Speaker 04

  Hello, Adam and Rich. My name is Adam. I'm 29 years old and live in Toronto, Canada. I am a big fan of the podcast. Rich, you've been a huge inspiration in my life. I have been eating whole food plant based for three years now. Recently I started to train and I aspire to one day complete an Ironman competition as you did. I have also cleared my chronic migraines since I have changed my diet to whole food, plant-based. My question is, how do you inspire extended family members and friends to transition to a plant-based diet? This concerns me, especially when I see the health issues they are experiencing, in addition to the impact that food choices have on the environment and animals. Thank you.

• 1:44:58Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Adam. This question isn't that different from Heidi's question. Because an aspect of it has to do with trying to convince people to do what you're doing. You know what I mean?

• 1:45:13Adam Skolnick?

  Trying to control behavior, kind of?

• 1:45:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, trying to control the behavior of others, or being in judgment of others' behavior. And I get it. Like, I understand the predicament that you're in. You've made this lifestyle change. You had this amazing turnaround. You've cleared your migraines. And that's to be celebrated and amazing. And I think what happens when you're, when you, when you have an experience like that, you then want to be a cheerleader. You want to chant. You're like, why isn't everybody doing this? Like, I need to tell people about this, right? Yeah. And then you quickly run up into some brick walls because people don't want to hear it.

• 1:45:51Adam Skolnick?

  They don't want your flag.

• 1:45:53Rich Roll?

  They don't want your flag, man. Go on Reddit.

• 1:45:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Rich Roll?

  Go tell people on 4chan about it, right? And family members can be particularly tricky.

• 1:46:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:03Rich Roll?

  Right? And I could just tell you, yeah, I could just tell you from personal experience, like, I've been plant-based for 14 years at this point. We've got all these cookbooks. I've got this podcast. Like, my whole thing is about advocating this.

• 1:46:17Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely.

• 1:46:17Rich Roll?

  Do you think this has impacted my family in terms of their choices around food?

• 1:46:23Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:46:24Rich Roll?

  If you think so, you would be sorely mistaken about that.

• 1:46:28Adam Skolnick?

  You've influenced a lot of people, but not the ones that love you.

• 1:46:30Rich Roll?

  Right. And that's because sometimes the ones that love you are the hardest one, because they know you too well, right? So if you want to be an advocate, that's great, but your audience might have to extend beyond the people that you care most about. And that's just the way it goes. My whole way of carrying myself with this is to just be... A lighthouse. I'm not in the business of taking other people's inventory, and this is something I learned in recovery.

• 1:46:57Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:46:57Rich Roll?

  Like, clean your own house, man. Make sure your house is clean. Don't worry about what's going on in everybody else's house. Clean your own house. Don't take inventory of other people's behavior, which is another way of saying, don't be in judgment of other people. Three years ago, you weren't eating plant-based. If somebody had come up to you then and browbeat you about your dietary choices, how would you receive that?

• 1:47:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:21Rich Roll?

  Probably not so good, right?

• 1:47:22Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:47:23Rich Roll?

  So, be a lighthouse. And by that, I mean, stand in your power, be an example of this lifestyle, live well, be awesome. And in doing that, you become a center of gravity that puts out this tractor beam that attracts people who are vibrating on your wavelength to you. And those are the people who are going to be receptive to what you have to say, because they're going to petition you. They're going to come up to you and say, "Hey, you look great. You look different. What are you doing?

• 1:47:52Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:47:52Rich Roll?

  Will you tell me about that?" That's your audience. Those are the people who want a little piece of what you have to offer. But trying to roll up on people who haven't expressed that kind of sentiment, or aren't demonstrating to you that they're open about it, is generally a losing proposition. And it becomes off-putting. Basically, you're creating the opposite of what you're trying to so.

• 1:48:19Adam Skolnick?

  Also, I think that's so interesting. You said it. I was thinking that, is that what makes you so good at talking about these issues is that the recovery background has put you in the perfect position to be not ever caring what somebody else is eating. That's just not on your program.

• 1:48:37Rich Roll?

  It's not my job to be in judgment of what other people are doing.

• 1:48:42Adam Skolnick?

  That's a recovery thing, right?

• 1:48:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And that's something I learned early and often

• 1:48:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:47Rich Roll?

  in the rooms. And I try to carry that into the way that I speak about these other things.

• 1:48:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:52Rich Roll?

  What's funny is when you get sober, and I talk about this with my buddies, you get sober, and then you're like, you think everybody quit drinking and doing drugs just like you did? And then occasionally, you find yourself in a situation, like at a bar or a party, and you're like, people are partying, and you're like, people still do this? Like, what is going on? You know, I thought we all quit. Isn't that the deal we made?

• 1:49:15Adam Skolnick?

  This is over.

• 1:49:16Rich Roll?

  Right? So that's not dissimilar from when you've had a lifestyle change that has had such a positive impact on you. And then you're like, I can't believe people are still doing X, Y, or Z. Like, didn't we all get over that?

• 1:49:29Adam Skolnick?

  Especially people you know, because just the same way that they, that family knows who you were before you changed, you know all their dirty little secrets and know how their eating affect may affect their, their physical issues. It is, it is fraught. But yeah, just the fact that you have that background to fall on. God, that helps in so many ways. It's so interesting how the, the crosses that we bear and the things that we overcome, you can just call back on, in so many different fronts in your life. I just find that so cool.

• 1:50:01Rich Roll?

  I mean, one thing you can do, and I would say this to Adam, it's not like you just completely opt out of caring about your friends and your family. You can say, like, hey, you know, like, this is what's going on with me. But just lowball it. Just be like, you know, I started eating plants and like my migraines went away. It's, it's about your attachment to the impact of that. Like, it's about your relationship to the results. So you can be like, hey, if you're, if you're ever interested, like, I'm happy to talk to you about it. Or here's a book that I read. I thought it was pretty cool. Just as long as you're not walking around with an expectation that that book is going to get read or whatever you're saying is going to land with that person.

• 1:50:40Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Rich Roll?

  So you can make yourself available if and when that person shows, you know, some inclination or interest in what you have to say. Just don't be attached to it. Cause it's, you're, you're the one who's going to suffer.

• 1:50:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. If you bring a vegan lasagna to the family potluck and nobody eats it, don't throw it on the ground.

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  No. Maybe just make a better vegan lasagna.

• 1:51:03Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:51:04Rich Roll?

  Like, that's the thing Julie does. She'll just make something that's so good.

• 1:51:07Adam Skolnick?

  And people are like, whoa.

• 1:51:08Rich Roll?

  It's not even like-

• 1:51:09Adam Skolnick?

  This is vegan?

• 1:51:10Rich Roll?

  You don't even have to say it's vegan or it's not vegan. You just make it awesome and they eat it.

• 1:51:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:14Rich Roll?

  You know? That's the whole philosophy back to Ryland at the beginning. Like, they have a restaurant, in addition to Cafe Gratitude, they have a restaurant called Gracias Madre in West Hollywood.

• 1:51:23Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, that's them too?

• 1:51:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, man, I love that restaurant.

• 1:51:26Rich Roll?

  It's incred- it's a beautiful restaurant.

• 1:51:28Adam Skolnick?

  Phenomenal.

• 1:51:28Rich Roll?

  The food is insane.

• 1:51:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:51:31Rich Roll?

  Not once, nowhere on the menu, not on the signage, nowhere, does it say this is a plant-based restaurant or a vegan restaurant. And I would suspect a lot of people go and eat there and have no idea.

• 1:51:43Adam Skolnick?

  I would think, yeah.

• 1:51:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's just great. And you go there because the food's awesome. And that's the way that you win.

• 1:51:49Adam Skolnick?

  And the vibe is awesome. It's a great place.

• 1:51:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. Do we answer the question?

• 1:51:52Adam Skolnick?

  I'm hungry now.

• 1:51:53Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:51:54Adam Skolnick?

  We answered it.

• 1:51:55Rich Roll?

  Let's end it.

• 1:51:56Adam Skolnick?

  Let's wrap it.

• 1:51:57Rich Roll?

  Let's land this plane. Somebody sent me a comment and they said, you should make a T-shirt that says, let's land this plane. So I always say on the podcast.

• 1:52:05Adam Skolnick?

  Do you ever feel like we landed it, we're on fumes and it's just like coming in bumpy?

• 1:52:10Rich Roll?

  All the time. All the time.

• 1:52:12Adam Skolnick?

  Not this time, though.

• 1:52:13Rich Roll?

  Last week, we stuck the landing.

• 1:52:15Adam Skolnick?

  We stuck it.

• 1:52:15Rich Roll?

  That was like a gymnast on her floor routine.

• 1:52:19Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:20Rich Roll?

  It was perfectly executed.

• 1:52:21Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:52:22Rich Roll?

  That might have been our, our peak podcast.

• 1:52:24Adam Skolnick?

  That's it? It's all downhill from here?

• 1:52:28Adam Skolnick?

  Wait, is this, is this my last day here?

• 1:52:30Rich Roll?

  No, you're fired, America. Are we done?

• 1:52:34Adam Skolnick?

  I think we're done.

• 1:52:35Rich Roll?

  All right, cool.

• 1:52:36Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:52:37Rich Roll?

  This was good?

• 1:52:38Adam Skolnick?

  I always enjoy it. It's fun.

• 1:52:39Rich Roll?

  It was fun, man. I had a good time. I hope everyone else enjoyed it as well.

• 1:52:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:44Rich Roll?

  You can follow me on the socials, at Rich Roll. You can follow Adam on the socials, at Adam Skolnick. Leave us a message if you want your question read, 424-235-4626. You can also drop one in the Facebook group. It's just easier if you leave a message, though, then we can organize all this better.

• 1:53:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:02Rich Roll?

  Hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. We're going to have some copious show notes for this episode because we talked about all this research with respect to the movie and all of that. So please, check that out and you can dive deeper into the science.

• 1:53:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, and for all the listeners that sent, you know, messages on Instagram after the Maya Gobert story kind of finally came out this week.

• 1:53:25Rich Roll?

  Right, it came out late. Like, everyone's like, what happened?

• 1:53:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it came out late. It was held for a week because of the floods. And they didn't want to have like a big wave story.

• 1:53:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:35Adam Skolnick?

  While people were, you know, they felt it was insensitive. So they held it in a week, but the timing, this is, you never know how.

• 1:53:40Rich Roll?

  The story blew up.

• 1:53:41Adam Skolnick?

  It blew up.

• 1:53:41Rich Roll?

  It was huge.

• 1:53:42Adam Skolnick?

  Timing and, and thank you for listeners who read it and reached out.

• 1:53:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was a great article, man. And it traveled, it was, I think I sent a screen grab. It was like trending on Twitter.

• 1:53:51Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 1:53:51Rich Roll?

  A lot of people were reading it.

• 1:53:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:53Rich Roll?

  Well, everybody likes a video of a big wave surfer.

• 1:53:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And a badass woman.

• 1:53:57Rich Roll?

  That's right.

• 1:53:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:59Rich Roll?

  So we should get her on the podcast.

• 1:54:01Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely.

• 1:54:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:02Rich Roll?

  She'd be cool. Awesome. So we'll be back in two more weeks with another one of these.

• 1:54:07Adam Skolnick?

  I'll be here.

• 1:54:08Rich Roll?

  Until then, be well. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiello for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing the podcast. Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ally Rogers for portraits, Georgia Whaley for copywriting, DK David Kahn for advertiser relationships. And theme music as always by Tyler Trapper and Harry. Appreciate you guys. Love you. See you back here in a couple of days with another awesome episode. Peace. Platts.

• 1:54:40Adam Skolnick?

  This is BBC Radio One.