Roll On: Meditations On The Moderation Wars

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 as always 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: Ag-gag laws, animal agriculture surveillance, and media weaponization; the documentary 'A Life On Our Planet' — the legacy of David Attenborough; The problem of moderating social media content veracity & the impending election impact; thoughts on climate consciousness and social entrepreneurship. In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do you set healthy boundaries with alcohol? How do you navigate your social life alcohol-free? How do you break into endurance sports and create a more adventurous lifestyle? Thank you to Cameron from Oahu, John from London, and Greg from Colorado 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?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:23Rich Roll?

  All right, let's do it. Another edition of Roll On. Adam Skolnick and myself, back in the house. Enjoy.

• 1:33Rich Roll?

  Greetings, Internet. It is I, Rich Roll, your friend, late podcast host, back for another edition of Roll On alongside my hype man, my co-host, Adam Skolnick, environmentalist, journalist-at-large, author, writer, David Goggins Can't Hurt Me co-author, all kinds of things. Good to see you, my friend.

• 1:53Adam Skolnick?

  Baby diaper changer.

• 1:54Rich Roll?

  That's right. Lot of that these days.

• 1:56Adam Skolnick?

  Diaper changing.

• 1:57Rich Roll?

  How are you doing?

• 1:58Adam Skolnick?

  I'm good. I'm good. You know, I've been hearing from the Rich Roll fanbase about my diaper choices.

• 2:05Rich Roll?

  There has been some chatter.

• 2:06Adam Skolnick?

  There's been some chatter about my piss-poor diaper choices. I want to say this: thank you for the messages. They're always very kind. And I just, I just wanted to address it straight off the bat. I live in an apartment, and we have a laundry room that is communal. And at the moment, I'm not prepared to put soiled cloth diapers in the communal wash. But I hear you. I want to be, I want to be that brazen, or at least move into a place with my own laundry.

• 2:33Rich Roll?

  If you were committed, you would figure out a workaround.

• 2:35Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, right. Well, no, I think we are going to look into a service.

• 2:40Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 2:40Adam Skolnick?

  Is the long.

• 2:41Rich Roll?

  All right, we'll just leave it there. For those that are new to this special edition format of the podcast, we typically canvass a couple news stories, things of interest. We call it the big story. We have a teachable moment. We do some show and tell. And after a break, we do some listener questions. If you'd like your question addressed and answered, you can leave it on our Facebook group, or preferably leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. And we thank you. What have you been up to lately?

• 3:16Adam Skolnick?

  Well, last week, I was working on a story for Outside Magazine, kind of about this moment, this political moment, and adventure athletes and how they're handling it. So it's kind of like how the NBA players, NFL players, Major League Baseball players were dealing with Black Lives Matter and voter suppression and police brutality in a very public way, which was kind of, for some athletes, it was a new setting, new forum for them. Others had been doing it. But adventure athletes have been kind of also doing that in their own way on social media. So this is about a group of adventure athletes who were kind of brought together to work on a voter campaign, get out the vote campaign in the name of public lands preservation and climate change policy. And what's unique about it, it's

• 4:00Adam Skolnick?

  not just a, hey, these are problems. It's a, an attempt to take back patriotism from the right. Because for a long time since Vietnam War and the protesters were burning the flag, the left has kind of left the flag alone. Even though some of the greatest advancements in America have been civil rights movement, where, you know, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, many others, kind of use the Constitution to embarrass and destroy Southern segregationists. And, you know, Barack Obama obviously mines American history and philosophy to great effect, and obviously to the presidency. But for the most part, you know, especially now, you don't see the kind of hug in the flag.

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 4:42Adam Skolnick?

  You know, that's just not happening.

• 4:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the flag has sort of been co-opted by the right as a symbol of... You know, a political point of view as opposed to this thing that should be uniting us all.

• 4:55Adam Skolnick?

  Right, and you, and you know, we're just talking to Blake here, who's operating the cameras and, and audio here, and he was talking about in Simi Valley, you know, these convoys with big Trump flags and big American flags in the back of the trucks, kind of rolling through town, and that has happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and in Portland, Oregon, and has caused skirmishes and problems, and those people are linked to far-right organizations, including some white supremacist organizations, people who are doing that. And so, you know, it is dangerous in 2020, can you embrace the flag? So Tommy Caldwell, legendary climber, you've seen him in Don Wall, you've seen him in Free Solo, he is, was one of those athletes wrestling with, is it all right to embrace the flag?

• 5:40Adam Skolnick?

  And so I spoke with him, I spoke with Claire Gallagher, who won Western States 100 last year, I spoke with a number of athletes, Connor Ryan, a Lakota skier, and talked about these issues, and, you know, because really at the crux of it is this tension that we all feel, especially people who get out in nature, run on trails, swim in the ocean, whatever, maybe surf, whatever your sport is, adventure athletes, people who are enthusiasts of adventure sports, we care about the land because we love it, you know, like it fuels us in a level beyond athletics, it fuels us in a soul way. So is it possible to love our country when we love the places that are our country?

• 6:17Rich Roll?

  Of course it is.

• 6:18Adam Skolnick?

  Right, right, right.

• 6:19Rich Roll?

  Of course it is, but there's this bizarre perversion, like if I was to hang an American flag, like, out in front of my house, people would make an assumption about what my political perspective is.

• 6:28Adam Skolnick?

  So that's what it starts with, so on September 8th, Tommy posted on Instagram, and you can see it, and I'm not sure when our story will drop, but in that post, he's like, I just bought a house, and I, and it had a big American flag, and I took it down. And I understand that, because I would also take it down, because of the assumption, but also because I'm just not that into the flags, you know, like, I'm not into the American flag, I'm just not that into the whole rah rah rah, you know, we're Gen X, man, coming up as Gen X.

• 6:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're supposed to be laissez-y and detached.

• 6:59Adam Skolnick?

  It was kooky to be rah rah. So there's also that. But but now, what I think is so interesting, Jeremy Jones, I spoke with him, he's the head of Protect Our Winters. He's a famous backcountry snowboarder, was a punk rock guy in his own right. And he is the one who started this organization, basically all about, we have to protect our winters if we want to protect our sport. And and obviously, to protect human life on earth, which we'll get into in a little bit.

• 7:24Rich Roll?

  And preserve the natural land and resources that provide the backdrop, the landscape for us to, you know, enjoy those sports.

• 7:32Adam Skolnick?

  So he he did some, he and Protect Our Winters did some market research and found out, there's 50 million Americans who do adventure sports. And they're all outside. And he calls it the outdoor state. And so he put together these athletes as an attempt to, let's take back, let's, we, we're the people that love our land. Let's show people that we love our country. So Jimmy Chin.

• 7:53Rich Roll?

  Happy birthday, Jimmy. It's his birthday today.

• 7:55Adam Skolnick?

  Happy birthday. He narrates this great video. And so that was kind of the departure point of the story. But it was also kind of inward looking of of this tension of, you know, you know, what does it feel like to love the land in this moment? What's it feel like to try to, is it, is it the right time to embrace the flag? Does it work? That kind of stuff. So I don't know. I hope the story works. You know, it's like, one of those things, you do your very best, you talk to a lot of people, and you hope it drops and it lands right. It never lands exactly as you'd imagine, but you hope it lands.

• 8:25Rich Roll?

  For outside, though.

• 8:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, for outside.

• 8:27Rich Roll?

  For outside. That's going to come out.

• 8:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:29Rich Roll?

  You're like insecure, are they going to publish this?

• 8:31Adam Skolnick?

  No, I mean, you know, we were talking earlier on the phone, it's like, you know, you get scarred as independent journalists coming up when you have stories killed and stuff like that. And so, part of me, until I've heard, and I've gotten my notes, and I know the plan, I always keep, I always like.

• 8:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, do you feel like you're jinxing it by talking about it now?

• 8:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Rich Roll?

  It's gonna be fine. It is a weird thing, though.

• 8:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Rich Roll?

  A very interesting thing. Like, I love America. I love our country. I love the freedom that I have and, you know, the liberty that I have to pursue the things that I love. I love being out in nature and, you know, exploring and everything that's great about this country. And how do you reconcile that with not being nationalistic in a jingoistic kind of way?

• 9:16Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 9:17Rich Roll?

  You know, they're two different relationships. But we have to find our way back to some place of unity where we can celebrate our collective humanity and this place that we all share as a home.

• 9:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And I don't say that explicitly, but that's the point, is unity is where we need to get to. It's hard in this climate for a lot of reasons, because mostly people are getting screamed at from the polls, not from the center. We don't have a uniter, we have a divider. Barack Obama was very much an attempt at a uniter. Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who just weren't going to listen to him. So this is an attempt for environmentalists, kind of this new era, this new wave of environmentalists who are trying to take back the flag and say, listen, if you love this country like you say you do, you better love the land, because that's what the country is. So it's like that aspect. And then, of course, from an indigenous perspective, it's Indigenous Peoples' Day.

• 10:11Adam Skolnick?

  Today, I spoke to a couple native athletes, and they had some really interesting takes on things and from their cultural perspective, and I really valued that, too.

• 10:20Rich Roll?

  What's also interesting is that environmental preservation was originally the purview of the Republican Party.

• 10:26Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Well, just like they were the abolitionists, too. You know, Lincoln was a Republican. So it all flipped somewhere along the line.

• 10:37Rich Roll?

  Somewhere along the line.

• 10:38Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 10:39Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 10:39Adam Skolnick?

  So it all flipped, but... You know, in environmentalism, it shouldn't be seen as a party issue. It really is. It's one of those issues like healthcare, like gun control, that the reason it's skewed the way it is along party lines tends to be around corporate contributions to the political process.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  Right, and that gets conflated with jobs.

• 11:00Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly. But those are arguments.

• 11:02Rich Roll?

  Cool. So we have that to look forward to.

• 11:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Rich Roll?

  Coming to outside, online at some point soon, man.

• 11:09Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly. Thanks.

• 11:10Rich Roll?

  Meanwhile, I'm getting ready. It's a heavy week this week. I've got three podcast interviews and I did two over the last couple of days. So I'm kind of ramping up my schedule.

• 11:20Adam Skolnick?

  The Shark Man.

• 11:21Rich Roll?

  Michael Muller just went up. That's great.

• 11:24Adam Skolnick?

  Can't wait to get into that.

• 11:25Rich Roll?

  Such a good one, man. Yeah, you gotta check it out. And he was kind enough to provide some footage of him swimming with sharks. Some of that footage, I think, is from his VR experience. And we were able to edit and weave that into the YouTube version of the podcast. So people should definitely check that out. And you can get a taste of like where he's coming from. Like, he's such an incredible character. It's a super fun one.

• 11:47Adam Skolnick?

  Incredible.

• 11:48Rich Roll?

  And you have his book, right?

• 11:48Adam Skolnick?

  I do.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  You've never met him, though, have you?

• 11:50Adam Skolnick?

  I haven't met him. I, you know, Tashin, who does these great art books and photography books. You remember they had a pop-up store like on Beverly or something like that for a while? And I used to go, whenever they put up a new exhibit, I'd go in there. They had a great Hockney exhibit once, and then I was in there for some exhibit. And then I looked in the back. I'd missed the Shark one. They might have done a book with him, but maybe not a big exhibit. I can't remember, but I saw that Shark book in the back and I bought it, you know? Yeah, it's so good.

• 12:19Rich Roll?

  It's an incredible book. I got Matthew McConaughey coming on the podcast tomorrow via Zoom.

• 12:27Adam Skolnick?

  All right, all right, all right.

• 12:29Rich Roll?

  Obviously, I would have preferred to do it in person, but we're in a pandemic. And I'm gonna take what I can get when it comes to Wooderson. So I'm looking forward to that. Trying to wrap my head around like what it is that I wanna talk to him about and ask him. Typically, I have people on the podcast who... You know, clearly are not as well known as someone like him.

• 12:48Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 12:48Rich Roll?

  And the trick is like, how do you approach an individual like that who's so well known? And try to get something unique and interesting out of them that, um, you know, is not Googleable.

• 12:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Well, it's interesting about him is, well, you're going to talk to him about his book, right?

• 13:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, that's the occasion for this. He's got this book, Green Lights, coming out. I got an early copy of it. It's an incredible book. He's an unbelievable writer. It's so well considered and thoughtful and interesting. And I mean, he's a very compelling figure.

• 13:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And I mean, how often do you see an A-list actor trying to give you life advice in a way? That's not kind of talking down to.

• 13:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:27Rich Roll?

  We talked about this on an earlier edition of this podcast, right? The advent of the actor become like lifestyle guru.

• 13:35Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you got it. You got Will Smith, Kevin Hart.

• 13:37Rich Roll?

  Right. But with him, it's different. Like there's, because of his kind of hangdog, laconic, laid back vibe. It doesn't feel, um, calculated in the way that it might with somebody else who's making like a bold move into social media. Like it's all very natural and organic, I think. And I think it's genuine. And I think it began when he started stepping out and doing, you know, keynotes and college graduation speeches. And people cottoned on to like the wisdom, you know?

• 14:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 14:08Rich Roll?

  He was able to impart.

• 14:09Adam Skolnick?

  He's kind of like a zen figure.

• 14:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyway, I'm looking forward to it.

• 14:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, it's amazing. I mean, you'll get into it with him, but the origins. But I read a little bit about like his journals were this wellspring for this book, right? It's a very, it's a very organic process.

• 14:23Rich Roll?

  He's been journaling for like 32 years.

• 14:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Rich Roll?

  And he decided during the, I think in the early phases of the pandemic, like now's the time to do something with this. And he went off to the desert for 52 days and huddled up somewhere without electricity and just banged this thing out.

• 14:39Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 14:40Rich Roll?

  So.

• 14:41Adam Skolnick?

  On what? A nap? Typewriter?

• 14:43Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 14:44Adam Skolnick?

  No electricity?

• 14:45Rich Roll?

  I know. Yeah. I don't know how that worked. Um, more will be revealed.

• 14:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 14:49Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 14:50Adam Skolnick?

  There's a, there's a, there's a whole section you can talk to him about.

• 14:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Uh, what are we talking about today? What's the first thing we want to get into?

• 14:57Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you, we were, you sent me this morning, this, um, Glenn Greenwald, animal agriculture story. Um, The Intercept did about, uh, new documents revealing how animal agriculture.

• 15:11Adam Skolnick?

  The industry is surveilling and punishing its critics?

• 15:14Rich Roll?

  Right, so Glenn Greenwald did some investigative journalism, came out with this article on The Intercept, as well as a video interview. It's called "New Documents Reveal How the Animal Agriculture Industry Surveils and Punishes Critics." Glenn Greenwald is a polarizing figure, I know that well, but one thing he's always been on top of is holding the animal agriculture industry to account for some of its sins, and that's essentially what he's doing here.

• 15:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 15:43Rich Roll?

  And basically, what he did was, he got all these documents by virtue of a Freedom of Information request, and it revealed the extent to which this industry really is surveilling and also retaliating against industry critics and animal rights activists. And in the crosshairs of this particular controversy is this veterinarian in the Bay Area, her name is Dr. Crystal Heath, who basically practices shelter medicine. She's affiliated with the Berkeley Humane Society and has been somewhat outspoken against certain practices that the industry has been engaged in over the course of the pandemic to reduce particularly pig populations.

• 16:28Rich Roll?

  Like, they're doing this horrible thing where, it's called, what is it called? It's called-

• 16:34Adam Skolnick?

  Ventilation shutdown?

• 16:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, ventilation shutdown. Ventilation shutdown, where essentially, they, I mean, for all intents and purposes, they kind of turn the air conditioner off and they let these animals die a slow, painful death.

• 16:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, shut the windows down.

• 16:47Rich Roll?

  In order to depopulate, you know, in the face of like, the pandemic and declining demand. And as a result of that, they're monitoring her social media, they're engaged in these retaliatory Facebook campaigns to make her look like a crazy person. And this is all very concerning, but I think a glimpse or a window into the extent to which this industry is willing to go to protect its market share and marginalize anybody who speaks out against it. It's sort of another layer of what we see with, you know, the laws that prevent any kind of investigative journalism to transpire whatsoever, the Ag gag laws.

• 17:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. I mean, it's nothing new, really. I mean, ag gag laws have been around for a while. I was harassed. I did this story on CAFOs for Sierra Magazine in East North Carolina, which we've talked about, and we were kind of, I was with Waterkeeper, and we were kind of driving around the perimeter of some of these CAFO operations and checking them out, looking at the, you know, the lagoons and their pig operations. And all of a sudden, we got, you know, harassed, like, farmers came out with two trucks and started tailing us and through the, these narrow roads in North Carolina. I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was like they were on our tailgate and harassing because, you know, Waterkeeper

• 18:12Adam Skolnick?

  comes around and monitors their stuff. And so this is nothing new, you know. To be fair, animal rights activists have been infiltrating farm operations for a long time and taking these pictures and publicizing this stuff. This is not new. At some point, ag gag laws came as a way to discourage that, and so they could criminally prosecute people who did that, which seems like a violation of free speech and is a violation of free speech, but that has happened. But now, on the other end, you have people like Crystal Heath who are being harassed, and she seems to be strong. He mentioned she's, she's strong, and she's got her career to a place where it's not going to impact her. But it could. Someone

• 18:54Adam Skolnick?

  had put images of the ventilation shutdown, and that's how the FOIA request, and they started prosecuting those people. So on the one hand, people are getting prosecuted, and the Department of Agriculture is involved in that. On the other hand, the, these farmers and industry types are able to, like, unleash holy hell on people like Dr. Heath, and it's fair play. So

• 19:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think the distinguishing factor here is the weaponization of social media to perpetrate what are essentially like ad hominem attacks on these individuals. It's one thing to prosecute them, and we could talk about that. It's another thing to do, you know, a character assassination funded by, you know, a lobbying group that is shrouding those social media campaigns behind anonymous accounts, et cetera, to try to create viral moments that make people look bad for basically speaking up against something that is wrong and should be addressed.

• 19:50Adam Skolnick?

  Right. You know, you're like, you're tagged as an elitist because you think torturing pigs is wrong.

• 19:58Adam Skolnick?

  You know what I mean?

• 19:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 19:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, like, that's basically what's happening, right? Like, people like her, you know, you're an elitist and you're... And worse, I think, they were... There was some misinformation about her that got into, kind of, fellow veterinarians were shouting her down, or something like that, saying...

• 20:13Rich Roll?

  Right, well, that's where the confusion comes in. Because if these attack campaigns, you know, are cast in a certain light, even a well-meaning or intelligent, you know, colleague isn't going to understand the context of what's actually going on.

• 20:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Rich Roll?

  Which is a broader issue, addressed in the social dilemma, about how social media is used for nefarious purposes.

• 20:34Adam Skolnick?

  It's true. I would just, not to criticize Intercept, I think Intercept does some really good stories, but they don't, they're not, they don't even pretend to be even-handed, and I'm not suggesting you should be even-handed, but there's like, words like torture and things in his story, which you wouldn't really write if you were writing it for, say, the New York Times.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  Right, but he's not, he makes no bones about his perspective on this.

• 20:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, he's, he's that guy that likes to kind of be the pot stirrer, which is fine. But sometimes I have a problem with left-wing journalists doing that, because you have a winning argument, and when you add that extra spice, you overplay a hand, and it doesn't help you. Like, listen, for us to solve some of these bigger problems, sometimes less is more, because you don't have to outrage and inflame, you can also just present a winning argument, and sometimes that's more effective. And when you, when you say things like torture, you're implying motive, like, these farmers love torturing their animals, they probably don't look at it that way.

• 21:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Adam Skolnick?

  And so, in that case, and I'm not making excuses for terrible practices, I'm against CAFOs and all of that, but, you know, as soon as you start using words like that, you are othering this whole group of people that you actually need to change this problem, to solve this problem.

• 21:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that was something that I spoke to Lea Garcis about, who runs Mercy for Animals, like, finding a way to communicate with the people that you perceive as your adversaries, so that you can work together for change. And there's, there's a very bold and strong argument for that, and she's made a lot of progress doing just that, but I think activism takes many forms.

• 22:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 22:11Rich Roll?

  And you need the Lea Garcises, but you also need the Glenn Greenwalds. Like, he's sounding a certain alarm. And he's going to write it up in a way that the New York Times is not going to. But maybe the New York Times picks up the story and does their version of it.

• 22:25Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe.

• 22:25Rich Roll?

  So I think everybody has their place. And I don't think anybody goes to The Intercept thinking that they're getting an objective perspective on anything. They're getting Glenn Greenwald's perspective or his staff's perspective.

• 22:37Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know, man. I think, I think you're, you know that. But I think when, when this stuff is distributed along Twitter and Facebook and it just is, it's flattened, that landscape is flattened. And now it's all just news stories. And it could be like, you know, you open yourself up to, if you're sensationalistic, you do open yourself up to arguments of fake news.

• 22:59Rich Roll?

  Right. You're also, you're, you're paving the ground for the counterattack.

• 23:02Adam Skolnick?

  That's right.

• 23:03Rich Roll?

  Basically.

• 23:03Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 23:03Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, everybody check that out in the meantime.

• 23:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 23:07Rich Roll?

  Listen, you know.

• 23:08Adam Skolnick?

  It's worth reading.

• 23:09Rich Roll?

  Ventilation shutdown, they call it VSD, to depopulate pigs. Just, it sounds horrific. I can't believe that this is legal.

• 23:18Adam Skolnick?

  And not only that.

• 23:19Rich Roll?

  This is the first that I've heard of it.

• 23:20Adam Skolnick?

  Well, CAFOs, all CAFOs have kill boxes. And on bad days, you can drive by, like, if there's a virus that comes through a CAFO, they'll kill all the piglets. And then they'll be stuffed in these kill boxes out front like it's a mailbox.

• 23:34Rich Roll?

  So horrible.

• 23:36Adam Skolnick?

  It's horrible.

• 23:37Rich Roll?

  What was the reporting that you were doing on CAFOs? What was that about specifically?

• 23:42Adam Skolnick?

  It was kind of a two-tiered. It was about how these CAFOs, how this one part of North Carol, eastern North Carolina turned into the CAFO hotspot where China is outsourcing its pork production through Smithfield, which is the big slaughterhouse. And how these CAFO operations don't really benefit the farmer. But not only that, they, there's no sewage treatment and they spray the fields with the poop and they put it in lagoons. And then when it's during rains, those lagoons flood and destroy rivers and basically the ocean. And even when there's not rain, when they're just spraying these fields, the people that live around there, largely black, largely low income, get their houses sprayed with shit.

• 24:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Adam Skolnick?

  And they can't even go outside, even on hot summer days.

• 24:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 24:29Adam Skolnick?

  And so I would talk to people in that, in that.

• 24:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it becomes aerosolized and you're breathing it wherever you go. And these farms tend to be in lower income areas where, you know, there's a minority populations and populations of color that are economically deprived and these people get sick.

• 24:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 24:49Rich Roll?

  And...

• 24:50Adam Skolnick?

  So mostly black residents that get sick and then the people working in the slaughterhouses are mostly immigrants, migrant workers from Central America. And then the farmers, the people that own the CAFO operations tend to be white and kind of the people that have been there for years running these farming operations. But they switch to CAFO and the difference is they don't own the pigs. They're just paid to raise them for the three to six months it takes to raise a pig. And if they lose a pig, that counts against them. And so they don't actually get the big payout of the slaughter of the pig. They get basically room and board payments.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 25:29Adam Skolnick?

  And it becomes very tight margins for them.

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I mean, they essentially become almost indentured servants.

• 25:36Adam Skolnick?

  Sharecroppers.

• 25:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, indentured servants that are servicing debt.

• 25:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Rich Roll?

  You know, and they're not really in control of their destiny and they're suffering as well.

• 25:44Adam Skolnick?

  And the state laws were basically hollowed out by a guy who was like the king of pig. You know, he was like the, he became industry muscle man and he passed these laws that basically made it legal to not treat this raw sewage. And there's a lot more pigs than people in this area. So it's like, you know, the humans have their sewage treated, but not the pigs.

• 26:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this was explored in the documentary, What the Health? And also in the upcoming documentary, They're Trying to Kill Us, that John Lewis is behind, he's been on the show. It's just, you know, if you think about it, like they're just, they're literally spraying refuse into the air and you're breathing it. And he has interviews with people and they're in their house and they're like, our whole house smells like all the time. You know, you can't get it out and it's, obviously it's in their lungs.

• 26:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yep. Can't have cookouts, can't have, can't go outside in hot summer days. It's horrible. These are happening, this stuff's happening, you know, every day.

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And when you're driving by on the road, you're none the wiser because it's all underneath these, you know, hooded, what essentially look like...

• 26:47Adam Skolnick?

  These kind of massive huts.

• 26:48Rich Roll?

  They look like greenhouses. They're just massive warehouses.

• 26:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, big warehouses and they, the food comes in one slot and the poop goes out the other and... And these animals live very short, you know, I think it's only like three months or something for a pig to get to weight.

• 27:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Rich Roll?

  All right, let's switch gears.

• 27:19Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 27:20Rich Roll?

  Because this-

• 27:20Adam Skolnick?

  It's kind of the same gear, though.

• 27:22Rich Roll?

  It is, it is. This podcast is sort of becoming a documentary review podcast.

• 27:27Adam Skolnick?

  Two thumbs up.

• 27:28Rich Roll?

  Every two weeks, we've got to find a new documentary to talk about, but we haven't had any problems because there's been so many amazing ones lately. And this week, it is David Attenborough's new documentary, A Life on Our Planet, which we both watched the other day. It's on Netflix. What a brilliant, beautiful man this guy is.

• 27:50Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  What a life that he has lived. At 94 years old, in many ways, the original naturalist who's been documenting the Earth's beauty and bounty and all these hidden natural environments for decades upon decades. And he creates this documentary that he calls his witness statement, which I think is so powerful. And the idea is that here he is at 94, nearing the end of his life, and it's almost like, here's what I want you to know about everything that I've learned about the planet from the beginning of my career to now, where we've gone awry and where we're headed if we don't course correct.

• 28:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yep. It's, uh, it's interesting how like our climate, uh, consciousness, our climate conscious, conscience has gone from like Al Gore to Greta and David Attenborough, you know, like-

• 28:43Rich Roll?

  From the youngest to the oldest.

• 28:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. It's, it's kind of cool in a way. It's sad in a way. Uh, I mean, you see him, I didn't, I didn't realize the kind of the breadth of his career because my interactions with David Attenborough is like through Blue Planet and Planet Earth and all that. And his, you know, silky tones tend to put me to sleep, to be quite honest with you. They're that good.

• 29:05Rich Roll?

  And like, how is he not, has he been knighted?

• 29:07Adam Skolnick?

  He has been knighted. Yeah. But he's been at this, what, since like the 50s, going to like, kind of going to, you know, New Guinea and Papua and places like that for, for, you know,

• 29:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, maybe the early 50s. I mean, one of the things that's so striking about the documentary is he says he begins his career when air travel was brand new. And so he's one of the first people who's able to travel to these places and show people what's actually going on in these hidden pockets of the world that were previously, you know, unexplored or never before seen by most people.

• 29:46Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, he's hanging out with gorillas, like arm in arm with gorillas.

• 29:49Rich Roll?

  It's very Jane Goodall.

• 29:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Rich Roll?

  Esque, you know, in that regard. And I love the parts where, you know, you see him as a young man doing all of this stuff. And it just, it makes your heart swell and

• 30:00Adam Skolnick?

  Great photographer.

• 30:01Rich Roll?

  Gives the, you know, the cinematography and the sweeping landscapes and everything that kind of unfurls as you watch the documentary is very profound and moving. But just the gravitas because of the life that he lived. He has this grandfatherly like energy and he's able to now, you know, in the place that he's at in his life, look down on all of this, like literally look down on the planet from 10,000 feet, this 10,000 foot view of the problem, the history behind it, with a sense of scale and proportionality that is rare and is informed only because of everything that he's done prior to that. And it reminded me a little bit of,

• 30:42Rich Roll?

  Yuval Noah Harari's books.

• 30:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 30:43Rich Roll?

  The way that Yuval is able to put distance between himself and these things that we're too close to, to provide what seems like common sense perspective, but is ultimately articulated in a way that, that allows it to land with the profundity that it deserves.

• 31:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, well, part of that is because he's studying at a distance, but you know, what's cool about this is that Attenborough lived it.

• 31:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:08Adam Skolnick?

  You know, it's very personal for him. Cause he's seen this and he's seen the bounty of biodiversity. And wild biodiversity, which we got into last time, but he kind of expresses that, like the big alarm bell he's ringing is that we're on the verge of the sixth extinction and biodiversity is kind of slipping through our fingers. And if we don't make some big changes, part of it's driven by climate and it's also driven by industrialization and the way that and more people on the planet and the way that we're developing the planet, the way we use it. And because of that, systems collapse that are happening in rainforests and in the ocean. And I think the witness statement comes from, I've lived this amazing, blessed life, which he says, but I realized that I didn't blow this whistle soon enough.

• 31:53Adam Skolnick?

  Like, I didn't see this coming. And now you're on the verge of seeing it happen. And it really is happening. And whether it's glacial melt, coral bleaching, you know, palm oil plantations.

• 32:04Rich Roll?

  Palm plantations. The bleaching of the coral was amazing to watch that, him explain that. And on some level, we're kind of acclimated to these, you know, alarmist, environmentalist documentaries at this point. But I felt like this one went to an even darker, more dire place at the bottom of the second act. And I think it was buffered only because he's such a, you know, kind of loving, beautiful, compassionate person. Anybody else who would have been hosting a movie like that, who took it to such a place like that, would have almost cast themselves as incredible or like some kind of crazy villain. Because I found

• 32:49Rich Roll?

  myself thinking, this is utterly hopeless. And then he kind of revives it and is able to stick the landing in a more hopeful place. But I don't know that I've seen another documentary, maybe Al Gore's, it's been so long since I've seen that. But, I mean, he doesn't mince words about how dire the situation is.

• 33:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Well, so I think, I don't have the percentages right in front of me. I have one of them, but not the other. But I think when he was born in the 30s, or I guess it would be in the late 20s when he's born. No. Yeah. Because he's 94 now. So like, when he's born, it's something like 65% of the wild is still intact. And now it's 35%.

• 33:29Rich Roll?

  The ticker that goes down, the graphic ticker.

• 33:32Adam Skolnick?

  So now it's 35%. So the UN has launched, it was supposed to launch this year, a big campaign to protect up biodiversity called 30 by 30. Protect 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean. As protected areas, no human activity, no extractive activity, no oil and gas, no palm plantations, no commercial fishing, all of that. Because there's been studies done, protected areas and specifically marine protected areas actually make an area more climate resilient. And so these are both an opportunity to draw down more carbon. Like you said, I think you're going to get into the drawdown aspect of this. But so it's an effort to do that. Also an effort to protect biodiversity because biodiversity is what makes these things resilient.

• 34:17Adam Skolnick?

  So you need to keep that biodiversity, otherwise the system collapses. And we don't want to get to systems collapse. That's what he's basically saying. So 30 by 30, if we can by 2030, create enough political will to protect more land, protect more areas of coastal areas, we have a chance to, to, you know, stave off the very worst of climate change.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  Right. And the solution that he articulates is really lifted right out of Drawdown, Paul Hawkins' book. He basically canvases the big things that we can do and that we're working to do to solve this problem. And what I liked is he was very plant-based diet favorable.

• 34:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Rich Roll?

  Much more so than kiss the ground. He's like, we need to, we need to adopt a plant-based diet, basically is what he says for the most part.

• 35:04Adam Skolnick?

  He's basically, he wants wild biodiversity, not like tame or cultivated biodiversity.

• 35:09Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 35:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, reforesting, rewilding.

• 35:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Rich Roll?

  These are of the utmost priority to enhance the biodiversity of these dying ecosystems all over the world.

• 35:19Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And rewilding is happening. That's what adding wolves to Yosemite was all about. That's what, you know, there's people trying to put bison back on the, in the Great Plains from Canada to Mexico. There's jaguar rewilding initiatives in South America and in, in Mexico. I mean, this stuff is happening. So that's, that's the. Rewilding is kind of really starting to hit right now. So that's a good thing.

• 35:44Rich Roll?

  Another thing that he talks about, and this is also from Drawdown, is that we need to raise the ceiling on the economic viability of impoverished nations and communities. Because when communities are doing economically better, they're less likely to have as many children, right?

• 36:06Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 36:06Rich Roll?

  So it's not really population control. It's just a fact that when nations are prosperous, they tend to not procreate as much.

• 36:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Because they want more leisure time, or they, or whatever it is.

• 36:17Rich Roll?

  And also, and also educating women and girls is a big, is a big part of it, too.

• 36:22Adam Skolnick?

  That's a big thing, keeping girls in school.

• 36:23Rich Roll?

  Which is also out of Drawdown. What I did not realize, until we talked earlier, is that, is that in certain pockets of the internet, this has caused controversy?

• 36:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. David Attenborough has been called an eco-fascist.

• 36:35Rich Roll?

  I have a hard time trying to understand that.

• 36:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I mean, who understands that?

• 36:39Rich Roll?

  What does that mean?

• 36:39Adam Skolnick?

  The accusation is that his take on overpopulation is the driver of climate change, which is what everything's reduced, you know, the internet being reductionist, that's the way, the argument they're making is that David Attenborough is saying it's, it's overpopulation that's driving climate change and driving systems collapse in nature, not industrialization or colonialism, which is, you know, so by, by saying it's overpopulation, then the burden and the guilt goes to poor people in developing nations that, that aren't consuming as many resources. Of course, that's not at all what he's saying.

• 37:14Rich Roll?

  That's a total mischaracterization of what he said.

• 37:17Adam Skolnick?

  And that's what I was saying with The Intercept. I've, I've seen this, because I, I am progressive and I write and report on these issues that are important to me as often as I can. It's not the only thing I do, but I, I try to do it as often as I can. And every time I do a story like this, I see activists, or other journalists, or whoever it is, making arguments that are overreaches. And when you overreach on an argument, you don't help. You actually cause an opening for people to doubt you, you know, and so to, to mischaracterize David Attenborough and suggest, and to try to trash him. When he's like, one of the more unifying figures you could ever come up with, right? Like, like, everyone loves David Attenborough.

• 37:59Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, he was, he, he like, created an Instagram page and in 48 hours, he had a million people. I'm sure it's way more than that now. Like, everybody loves this guy.

• 38:10Adam Skolnick?

  You ride that all the way. You know, you know what I mean? It's like, we need unifying. So, and, and I think that's a crackpot theory. I don't want to give it too much fuel, but it's out there. And it just shows you how you can be offended by anything, including a fact that if you raise the standard of living and you, and more people come out of poverty, they have less kids. It's a fact. You can examine any country that's ever had a growing middle class and you'll find it. In America, you'll find it. In Japan, which is what he used, you'll find it anywhere you look.

• 38:39Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. I mean, certainly, you know, for being intellectually honest, there's too many people on the planet and overpopulation is an issue. He never said that we need to mandate population control. He's just saying if people are more prosperous, they're not going to have as many kids. If every nuclear family has two kids, we stabilize the population.

• 39:01Adam Skolnick?

  And, and it's also the way that like, you know, he goes after CAFOs. He goes after the meat, you know, like, like you said, plant-based is the way to go. It's, it's a very, you know, so it's, it's not just too many people, but that is a problem, but it's also how we're feeding everybody, how we're getting our energy, you know, like, I thought one solution, the fact that Morocco is getting 40% of their energy from solar.

• 39:23Rich Roll?

  I didn't realize that. That was...

• 39:24Adam Skolnick?

  They have the biggest solar farm, right?

• 39:25Rich Roll?

  Right. Right.

• 39:26Adam Skolnick?

  That was cool.

• 39:27Rich Roll?

  Why can't we do that?

• 39:28Adam Skolnick?

  Well, part of the problem is, we actually subsidize oil and gas companies. And, you know, until Obama, we didn't do that for, you know, renewable energy companies. And we're starting to do that. We, you know, Obama did do that, took some heat because he had a project that didn't do well in his early, early part of his presidency. But now, then there was this incentive from states and localities and sometimes from the federal government to, to do that. So, we need to have the incentives in the right place, but we also have to disincentivize things like oil and gas. You know, we have to be prepared to pay a little bit more at the pump. You know, Europe pays a lot more for gas than we do. Typically, and because we're subsidizing petrol.

• 40:08Rich Roll?

  We need a Manhattan project around renewable energy. It seems preposterous to me that with the technology that's available to us, that we haven't scaled solar.

• 40:20Adam Skolnick?

  Solar scaling, it's some, I've been, because I know people involved in the solar industry. My understanding is it's a battery issue. You can't store it. So.

• 40:29Rich Roll?

  It's also janky. Like, we've tried to figure out how to do it at our house and have made multiple attempts with multiple companies and have continually run into issues and roadblocks that have made it not cost effective for us to do it.

• 40:43Adam Skolnick?

  I think the thing is to have, you know, there's a great project. My friend Jason Cottle kind of launched up in Lancaster where they basically saw, he's a city manager up there. And they were managing the energy up there and the Republican, he's a Republican, the mayor up there at the time. I think it was Rex Tillerson, Republican. And they said, what if we turned, you know, city properties into solar farms? And they started doing it and they started selling energy and were competing with these big energy companies up there. I think it was Southern California Edison, which didn't like that. But pretty soon people started buying their renewable energy from the city at a lower price. And now they're basically a renewable energy broker. And that's what they've become. They've become their own utility.

• 41:27Adam Skolnick?

  And so like, and that's a really smart solution, a very local solution.

• 41:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, more of that.

• 41:33Adam Skolnick?

  As opposed to just putting solar panels on your house or whatever and being kind of a, you know, when it's systemic, you have a bigger chance.

• 41:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it can't be reliant upon the consumer figuring this out. You need these solutions to be addressed at the top so that the origin of the energy is coming from a renewable source.

• 41:52Adam Skolnick?

  All upstream. You gotta go upstream as far as you can.

• 41:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Adam Skolnick?

  But you're going.

• 41:56Rich Roll?

  Oh, anyway, I was just gonna wrap it up by saying everybody should see this documentary on Netflix.

• 42:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, two things I want to flag. One is like, we talk about, they talk about commercial whaling. One thing I like to think of when we talk about can we fix it in the ocean especially, you can really regenerate very quickly with marine protected areas and with laws and whale numbers is a great example of what can happen when you stop doing a specific commercial activity. You know, humpback populations in many parts of the world have really rebounded. Sperm whale populations, the same, blue whales as well. We can fix it and the ocean is really powerful regenerative machine. And when you can enact these marine protected areas, they can really start to get the biodiversity back swirling in the ocean. And so that's very exciting. And so.

• 42:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but we really need some strident regulatory protection there and we need, you know, a global unified approach to it because right now fishing is by definition overfishing.

• 42:57Adam Skolnick?

  Well, not necessarily, but there's a lot of overfished areas. You know, the commercial fisheries, I think 35% are fish to their limit is the is the number. Because I've done a story on this as well, we can link to if you want to about overfishing. It was around poke and it was around tuna, basically. And I think the number was 35%. He quoted is fish to the maximum capacity. But when it comes to tuna, it's something like 80% or something like that. I mean, even Hawaii imports tuna in when it's not in season around the islands, never used to be that way. Tuna and salmon are kind of the big fin fish that are that are either overfished or they're farmed in ways that

• 43:38Adam Skolnick?

  are harmful. But there are people fixing those problems and there is fair trade. So like, I know we're we're plant-based, we don't want to get into that, but there is a way of doing that. But looking at this documentary, you know, plant-based people are not necessarily out of the woods because like if you look at butter alternatives, a lot of palm oil.

• 43:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, palm oil is a huge problem. And I think that that's, you know, it's an important point to make that just by eating plant-based, that's a huge step in the right direction.

• 44:08Adam Skolnick?

  Big deal, yes.

• 44:09Rich Roll?

  But we also need to be more mindful about what particular plant foods we're eating, how they're being harvested, where they're coming from. Because if we're doubling down on the palm oil, we're perpetuating, exacerbating a huge problem.

• 44:22Adam Skolnick?

  And not just here, you know, like Indonesia, I spent a lot of time there and way back in the day, it was all coconut oil. It was, you know, you can buy it locally. And now it's bimoli, this palm oil that everyone is eating and obesity rates have gone up. And, you know, it's because palm oil is being made cheap in Borneo. And Borneo is the case study that he uses in this film.

• 44:43Rich Roll?

  Right. And in order to cultivate these products, you have to basically shellac the rainforest and monocrop it. And that's the core of what Attenborough is getting at, which is the lack of biodiversity. When you do that, you just lose the ability to support, you know, thousands, if not millions of species.

• 45:03Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely.

• 45:03Rich Roll?

  And the downstream impact of that is catastrophic and leads us to this system collapse that he's speaking about.

• 45:09Adam Skolnick?

  How about a little shout out to these lions of conservation and fire? You know, David Attenborough, Jane Goodall and Sylvia Earle. Goodall and Earle are in their 80s. It's like, there's a longevity lesson in like having this purpose coupled with nature, right? Like something I think our friend Dan Buettner might speak to probably.

• 45:30Rich Roll?

  It's true. Like, how old is Jane Goodall now?

• 45:32Adam Skolnick?

  She's in her 80s, mid 80s, I think. Yeah. She has a documentary out.

• 45:35Rich Roll?

  I know. I haven't seen that one yet. Soon to be reviewed on a future.

• 45:40Adam Skolnick?

  We'll have to watch that again.

• 45:41Rich Roll?

  Depending upon the Netflix release schedule, I suppose.

• 45:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, we watch a lot of television, folks.

• 45:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it is interesting. I mean, it's striking how vibrant and present and with it Attenborough is at 94.

• 45:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Well, you mean, when you see our two presidential candidates going head to head? It's striking to see.

• 46:01Rich Roll?

  He looks younger than those guys do. I know.

• 46:03Adam Skolnick?

  Well, yeah, but you got, Joe does look good in Aviators. Come on.

• 46:06Rich Roll?

  He does. Did you see Jim Carrey impersonating him on Saturday?

• 46:10Adam Skolnick?

  I did. But he does rock Aviators. I've never seen a guy, like, ever since Tom Cruise.

• 46:14Rich Roll?

  Corvette, you know, the whole thing.

• 46:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, with that, I guess we can pivot to a little bit of election-related news. We're about 20 days away right now.

• 46:27Adam Skolnick?

  20 days out.

• 46:28Rich Roll?

  20 days out, man. Unbelievable.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  It's crazy, right?

• 46:34Adam Skolnick?

  I want it to be over.

• 46:36Rich Roll?

  It's not going to be over. Even when it's over, it's not going to be over.

• 46:39Adam Skolnick?

  No, this, no, go on. I don't want to even get into that guy's name.

• 46:45Rich Roll?

  But the specific thing that I think would be interesting to talk about here is the content moderation wars that are going on right now as we, as we enter this, you know, very last phase before everybody casts their ballot.

• 47:00Rich Roll?

  And it's relevant to the discourse that we had about the social dilemma and the weaponization of social media. And we're seeing these platforms that we all know now are extremely powerful in, you know, shifting the tide of public opinion, struggling with how to deal with everything from campaign ads to outright misinformation. Twitter sort of leading the cause, I think.

• 47:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 47:26Rich Roll?

  New York Times has, has an article that came out the other day, Twitter turning off some features. Maybe you could speak about that a little bit. I feel like Jack Dorsey of all of the, you know, kind of tech billionaires has been endeavoring to try to solve what I think is really an almost impossible problem to solve.

• 47:44Adam Skolnick?

  It seemed like he was the most laissez faire for a period of time. And now he's like, actually the most proactive and involved in, in trying to help. And, and I think if I remember correctly, the warning label, it's basically they're talking about warning labels. Basically before you retweet something, if it's not from a vetted news source and it's potentially kind of getting into the misinformation realm, you'll get a warning label and you'll have to click twice before you retweet it.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  Right. But how do you calibrate that?

• 48:11Adam Skolnick?

  So that's being calibrated.

• 48:12Rich Roll?

  If I wanted to retweet that Glenn Greenwald article.

• 48:15Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 48:17Rich Roll?

  That is very much, you know, of a certain mind. Would that be flagged as potentially misinformation because he has a strong point of view on that issue? Or is that kosher? Like, how do we distinguish between misinformation problematic and vetted? Like, it's an impossible rubric.

• 48:37Adam Skolnick?

  It's the algorithm, bro. That'll save us.

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right. Let's just, we've completely divested our critical thinking skills to the social media algorithms who are going to decide for us what's misinformation and what is not.

• 48:50Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's like, it's supposed to be a team effort. Like, the algorithm kind of flags what it flags, and then, and then, human monitors go in and look. But, obviously, there's so much information flooding these networks, how can they possibly have human monitors look at everything?

• 49:03Rich Roll?

  Millions of hours of content every single day.

• 49:05Adam Skolnick?

  It's impossible.

• 49:06Rich Roll?

  It is impossible.

• 49:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. So, but I think Twitter also banned political ads a year ago, and I think Facebook and Google are banning them, starting on Election Day, which seems late.

• 49:15Rich Roll?

  It's ridiculous.

• 49:18Rich Roll?

  Right. Unless you're Ken Bone, you have decided at this point who you're, who you're voting for.

• 49:24Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not that big a calendar guy, but it does seem late to ban them after the election.

• 49:32Rich Roll?

  I thought it was, at least with Facebook, I thought it was originally like 30 days before the election, or something like that.

• 49:38Adam Skolnick?

  October 20th, they're going to start deplatforming, or some, clamp down, and like, flag misinformation as well.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  On campaign, like, specific campaign advertising. Which is so ridiculous, because when you look at the balance sheet of Facebook, the amount of revenue that they're generating from paid campaign advertising is pretty de minimis in the grand scheme of things. And it would not have taken much for Zuckerberg to just say, "We're out of this business. We're not going to take money for campaign ads, period." It wouldn't really have affected their bottom line. So, it's baffling to me why they're taking such a hard stand on this.

• 50:12Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I think that they look at all content as the same. They don't, and they don't want to be arbiters of what's true content, you know, what's true and what's not, what's, what's fair game, what is not.

• 50:25Rich Roll?

  But that ship has sailed, and they've already been compelled to do that. They're doing it, they've, they've, they've deleted all of these QAnon Facebook groups. They're trying to address that, which gets back into, you know, the whack-a-mole issue that we're going to get into a little bit.

• 50:39Adam Skolnick?

  Right, well, what you had flagged with Twitter, it's the same thing. It's like, maybe Zuckerberg realizes it's whack-a-mole. I'm being generous, because I think they failed in a big way, you know, like, obviously, from 2016 with the whole... Cambridge Analytica, where they were really micro-targeting with fake news stories and misinformation. Those are the ads, by the way. We're thinking of ads like, you know, Trump saying, "Vote Trump. This is paid for, blah, blah, blah." No. And in Facebook, an ad can be a bullshit story targeted to you. And you click on it, thinking that it's a story, like an article, but really it's an ad. So that's the kind of stuff. They're attempting, basically, to not be a part of any sort of campaign to subvert the results

• 51:21Adam Skolnick?

  of the election. That's why they're banning it, starting on Election Day. Google's the same way.

• 51:26Rich Roll?

  But these campaigns have been going on for years at this point.

• 51:29Adam Skolnick?

  They're already saying, you know, Donald Trump Jr. on Facebook wrote saying, you know, "We need armies of people monitoring these elections," like self-appointed election monitors.

• 51:39Rich Roll?

  Well, and there was that thing with Charlie Kirk also, where he was behind like a bot farm that was of young people who were supposed to be, you know, behind, you know, pushing out all kinds of campaign-related stuff around Trump.

• 51:52Adam Skolnick?

  Even today, their story broke that like, the state Republican Party in California is putting bullshit ballot collecting places to collect, to deposit your ballot, stuff that's not sanctioned with the election board. That's happening right now in California.

• 52:08Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 52:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 52:10Rich Roll?

  So you think you're submitting your ballot, and it's like a fake...

• 52:13Adam Skolnick?

  Who knows? They're trying to say, "Hey, if you trust us to turn your ballot, fine, put it here." But yes, they could very easily, like, look at the ballot and throw out half of them, or whatever.

• 52:22Rich Roll?

  That's straight up weird, like, third-world coup-type stuff.

• 52:27Adam Skolnick?

  That is.

• 52:28Rich Roll?

  But, you know, in this article about Facebook in the New York Times, "Facebook Widens Ban on Political Ads As Alarm Rises Over Election." There's some interesting phraseology in here. I mean, it says, "For years, Facebook has been striving to avoid another 2016 election fiasco." Like, has it? Has it really?

• 52:45Adam Skolnick?

  I don't think it has.

• 52:46Rich Roll?

  No.

• 52:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 52:47Rich Roll?

  When it was used by Russian operatives to spread disinformation and to destabilize the American electorate. Zuckerberg has since spent billions of dollars to hire new employees for the company's quote unquote integrity and security. Like, they're spending more now in this, whatever this is, than the money they're probably raking in from the campaign ads themselves. So it's two different things.

• 53:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  It's the campaign ads, and then it's also all the other kind of shenanigans that go on on social media.

• 53:15Adam Skolnick?

  And it's not just campaign ads. They've taken down, what, 150,000 QAnon accounts or some crazy thing? Or posts or something like that?

• 53:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 53:22Adam Skolnick?

  They're trying to get a handle on QAnon, but that ship has sailed.

• 53:25Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, Wired just came out with an article also on this, "A Facebook ban won't stop QAnon." I mean, Kevin Roos was reporting on this, and he was seemingly striking a kind of optimistic tone, at least as of like a week ago or so, thinking this was actually progress because all those groups disappeared and the level of like chatter, which he pays attention to closely, around the kind of QAnon-type stuff had seemed to diminish somewhat.

• 53:50Adam Skolnick?

  So he's in favor of the Facebook taking them down?

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, he's heralding it as a step in the right direction. I don't know that it's ultimately going to solve.

• 53:59Adam Skolnick?

  The Wired story looks at like the fact that these people just go underground.

• 54:04Rich Roll?

  They metastasize. They just, they figure out different emojis and hashtags, and then they resurface.

• 54:09Adam Skolnick?

  They come up with different hand signals.

• 54:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 54:12Rich Roll?

  We'll see. But Matt Taibbi has an interesting take on all of this that he wrote about on his Substack. That's kind of a counterpoint, so let's talk about that.

• 54:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, so he's saying what you're saying, basically, that it's a game of whack-a-mole. Matt Taibbi, for those who don't know, is a great journalist with Rolling Stone, or he used to be with Rolling Stone. I don't know if he still writes for them, but he's now got his own thing through Substack. It's an email you can sign up for.

• 54:37Rich Roll?

  You should start a Substack.

• 54:39Adam Skolnick?

  Me?

• 54:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Adam Skolnick?

  I'm not sure I have the Taibbi following, but maybe after a few more of these episodes.

• 54:44Rich Roll?

  But it's a pretty cool platform, and you're seeing all these journalists now who are leaving traditional media and basically starting their own little fiefdoms.

• 54:51Adam Skolnick?

  They are. So they tend to have big followings. I think I'd need to, you know, flex out, maybe buy some followers.

• 54:57Rich Roll?

  Casey Newton just did it, who's like a tech reporter. More and more people are doing it. This could be your thing.

• 55:03Adam Skolnick?

  This could be my thing? I thought coming on the Rich Roll Podcast was my thing.

• 55:06Rich Roll?

  This is part of your thing. This is how you're building the tribe that's all going to migrate to your Substack.

• 55:10Adam Skolnick?

  You didn't hear that I was going to buy followers?

• 55:13Rich Roll?

  No. Who was I talking to the other day who was saying there were, oh, I had, I had, this is a tangent, but I had Ravi Patel on the podcast the other day. I haven't, obviously, I haven't published that conversation yet, but he's got a TV show on HBO Max called The Pursuit of Happiness.

• 55:29Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 55:30Rich Roll?

  And he's, he's super funny and interesting and he did that documentary, Meet the Patels, like back in 2014 or whatever. He's very charming.

• 55:39Adam Skolnick?

  Was he former Daily Show?

• 55:41Rich Roll?

  No, you're thinking of, he's worked with that guy. What's his name? I'm thinking Aziz, but it's not Aziz. It's, I'll think of it in a minute. But anyway, it's a pretty cool, you know, sort of travel show in the vein of Bourdain where he goes to kind of answer these questions and it's super interesting. But he's never been a social media person and his social media was always kind of private. But then with the show coming out, he was like, I should open these accounts up and make them public facing, but it doesn't have a huge following. So he told me he was gonna buy followers. I was like, that's a bad idea, man. Don't do that.

• 56:17Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe I can go in with him on followers.

• 56:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you guys can pool your resources.

• 56:21Adam Skolnick?

  By the way, I would never buy followers. Come on. Wouldn't do that. I can't afford that.

• 56:24Rich Roll?

  All right. But back to Taibbi here.

• 56:26Adam Skolnick?

  Um, yes, Taibbi doesn't need to buy followers. He's got a lot of them. And he has done some really important reporting. The best stuff, I think he got his biggest name was he reported on the financial crisis in 2007, 2008, linked it to Goldman Sachs and really came after Goldman.

• 56:40Rich Roll?

  Did he write a book about that or was that?

• 56:42Adam Skolnick?

  He did. It's great. It's like some, like the man eating squids, you know, whatever. It's, it's very gonzo. He's a gonzo kind of guy and he's very much pro First Amendment. So you can read this stuff and he's, and he.

• 56:54Rich Roll?

  He doesn't fall into any particular political.

• 56:57Adam Skolnick?

  No, he was, he was very much against the Russia Mueller investigation. He's, he thinks that's bullshit. But at the same time, and he's very much into free speech. He wrote a scathing review of white fragility. So he's, but he is progressive and, and he's done a lot of investigative, he did, he did an Eric Garner book that is supposed to be amazing on the death of Eric Garner. So he's been on the right side of a lot of this stuff, but he's, you can't pin him down. And so he is talking about exactly what you say. The sheer scale of logistical task involved with sorting through billions of pieces of content a day makes any hope at even-handed moderation a fantasy. And he's talking about like, do we really want? Private companies engaged in trying to tell us what's right and wrong,

• 57:40Rich Roll?

  No, we don't.

• 57:41Adam Skolnick?

  and not true.

• 57:42Rich Roll?

  We don't.

• 57:42Adam Skolnick?

  That's the whole point of having free speech. It's the best way to manage this bullshit.

• 57:47Rich Roll?

  It only works in the clearest of cases. But, you know, if there was ever a slippery slope, this is it. I mean, how do you even begin to approach managing this problem?

• 57:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 57:59Rich Roll?

  Like, it's, look, if there's a clear case of just sheer insanity, okay, you could label this as misinformation. But almost everything in between has shades of nuance to it. There might be aspects to certain reporting that's true, other aspects that aren't. You just can't possibly police this on an internet where million, as we said earlier, like millions of hours of content and thousands of journalistic pieces are getting uploaded every single day.

• 58:27Adam Skolnick?

  If you took it in how do we regulate big tech direction? What if one solution is if you're going to allow someone to post New York Times on Facebook, then Facebook has to pay the New York Times. Therefore, in the, in the financial transaction of paying the New York Times, they are incentivized to uplift the New York Times or any sort of like actual media company.

• 58:50Rich Roll?

  That's the way that it should be.

• 58:52Adam Skolnick?

  That's the way it should be. Because if someone posts a blog post and it doesn't cost anything for Facebook to, to use that piece of content, then maybe that's just, that's how you know.

• 59:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 59:02Adam Skolnick?

  You know, one is a professional media company and one is not. And if you have to pay for that blog post, then fine. But like, you know, maybe what we need to do is stop allowing Google and Facebook and Twitter to be these distribution systems of real stories.

• 59:18Rich Roll?

  Where the publishers are paying the platforms to amplify their stories and their content. So it's actually backwards right now.

• 59:27Adam Skolnick?

  It's backwards right now.

• 59:28Rich Roll?

  This is something that Scott Galloway talks about a lot. Scott Galloway is a professor of business at NYU. He does a podcast with Kara Swisher called Pivot. And he's got his own new podcast called Prof G. But he's out, way out ahead, you know, on a lot of these issues and has been talking about this, you know, quite a bit lately.

• 59:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he's saying, this is what Taibbi is saying. The current system is the worst of all worlds. It's invisible to the public, clearly invites government recommendations on speech, allows a gamable system of anonymous complaints to influence content, and gives power to an unelected, unaccountable body of private media regulators. And the problem isn't that those people right now might be, they might be on our side. When we're talking about our side, when we're talking about like Trump misinformation and stuff that benefits bad actors, that's what I mean by our side. Right now, the algorithm might be tuned in to be looking at, you know, calls for election, like bad faith election monitoring.

• 1:00:29Adam Skolnick?

  But like 20 years from now, it might not be the right thing that they're after. You know what I mean? So like, that's the problem when you start to pick and choose censorship. That's the problem with it.

• 1:00:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:41Adam Skolnick?

  It's, it creeps.

• 1:00:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I, you know, I don't purport to have a solution to it other than to know that this is a huge problem right now. And it's, it's not in service to our humanity or our unity as a population or as a country. And these things have huge, real-world ramifications on behavior.

• 1:01:03Adam Skolnick?

  Do you feel like we're living in a Petri dish right now?

• 1:01:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah. We've been foisted, you know, foisted upon us are these incredibly powerful social media platforms. And without any experimentation or research, we're just consuming them and using them in this grand experiment that we're already realizing is really not healthy for any of us.

• 1:01:27Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:01:27Rich Roll?

  And again, you know, back to the social dilemma. I mean, this is the, this is the dilemma that these tech creators are, you know, ruminating over right now. This idea that they set out to make the world better or to solve problems and have also, you know, created problems they couldn't have foreseen.

• 1:01:46Adam Skolnick?

  That's it. You know, it's like, you know, the unintended consequences of good intentions. That's the story of.

• 1:01:53Rich Roll?

  I think it's also important to remember that there's some ridiculously low percentage of the population on Twitter. We tend to think of Twitter as a proxy for kind of taking the pulse of where people are at on certain issues. But I think it's something like 2% of Americans are on Twitter.

• 1:02:13Adam Skolnick?

  But Facebook, it's like a billion people are on Facebook or more.

• 1:02:15Rich Roll?

  That's true.

• 1:02:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, Facebook is like a big one.

• 1:02:18Rich Roll?

  But how many people are the outspoken, you know, loud voices on issues? And how many people are just sharing photos of their family?

• 1:02:28Adam Skolnick?

  No, I think, I think what Kevin Roos's stuff is showing us is that the people that you think are just sharing photos of their family, they're, they're sharing QAnon posts. I'm not even kidding. I'm not even kidding. Like, can we just talk about QAnon just for one more second? There was a good story.

• 1:02:46Rich Roll?

  I'm always available to talk about QAnon.

• 1:02:49Adam Skolnick?

  Germany is becoming the next QAnon hotbed. I don't know if you saw this story.

• 1:02:52Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:02:53Adam Skolnick?

  And basically, that means that right wing Germans are having a fantasy right now that Donald Trump will send the American military, I'm not fucking with you, into Germany and depose Merkel and thereby elevating their interests, the average right wing Germans' interests. Because, you know, Merkel is bad for Germany. So that means people who like Hitler are rooting for the Allies to take over Germany 2020.

• 1:03:28Rich Roll?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:03:30Adam Skolnick?

  So as a G, I can make a Hitler joke.

• 1:03:32Rich Roll?

  So this is, this was, this was inferred from some Q drop, some cryptic Q drop?

• 1:03:37Adam Skolnick?

  You gotta read, it's a great story. They've been, the same reporter who's been kind of reporting on East German extremism and just German extremism, who, who broke the story about how special forces and, and police departments have been infiltrated by right wing neo-Nazi types in Germany. That same reporter does this story. And I'm sorry, I spaced on her name, but I'll get you for, for the show notes. We can make sure that's in there.

• 1:04:00Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:00Adam Skolnick?

  But, but it's great reporting. And one of the main guys.

• 1:04:05Rich Roll?

  What publication?

• 1:04:06Adam Skolnick?

  New York Times. And this one, this one of the big outspoken pro-Q.

• 1:04:13Adam Skolnick?

  Or he's, he said he doesn't fully believe in it, but he's a right wing, all right guy is German, but adopted. He's actually Turkish descent, adopted, and he's a huge celebrity vegan chef.

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

  Oh, I think he did send me something about this. Somebody did. I didn't, I didn't read it yet. So.

• 1:04:31Adam Skolnick?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 1:04:31Rich Roll?

  That is really crazy. How do you square that with the America first, make America great, non-interventionist, you know, ideology? That's kind of the premise of the administration.

• 1:04:42Adam Skolnick?

  The point is they're both, they're doing nationalism wrong. Don't they, don't these nationalists know what they're doing?

• 1:04:50Rich Roll?

  I don't even know, man. It's so crazy. I can't even.

• 1:04:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's, it's mental.

• 1:04:55Rich Roll?

  Begin to wrap my head around it.

• 1:04:56Adam Skolnick?

  I know. It's like, we are living, the point is, how do you wrap your head around it, but just to exist, right? Because all this stuff, if you, if you peek your head under the curtain or behind, you know, under the hood, and you see what's happening, which you have to do, because like, it's, it's, it's so critical these next three weeks, you know, especially certainly in this country. You have to stay in touch with it and know what's coming. But at the same time, it's like, how do you then pull back and just gut on with your own business and your own life? Like, you know, because it is crazy making.

• 1:05:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Where is the boundary between just minding your business, living your life, trying to take care of your family versus speaking up or participating in what has become just a very confusing morass of misinformation and emotions run wild.

• 1:05:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Rich Roll?

  It's very disorienting and it's hard to, it's hard to find your ballast in all of that.

• 1:05:51Adam Skolnick?

  It's very weird. I had.

• 1:05:52Rich Roll?

  But I have to believe that most Americans are level-headed, rational actors.

• 1:05:59Adam Skolnick?

  The majority are, but is it enough to get a bit, you know, like, we, you know, most Americans voted for Hillary Clinton.

• 1:06:07Rich Roll?

  Well, we will soon find out in 20 days from now.

• 1:06:10Adam Skolnick?

  And we'll be here to break it down for you.

• 1:06:11Rich Roll?

  If we can, you know, land this on a teachable moment, it's just a please vote and to make sure that you cast that ballot and make sure that it gets into the hands that it's supposed to get in.

• 1:06:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:06:21Rich Roll?

  So that it's properly counted.

• 1:06:23Adam Skolnick?

  You know, early voting or go, drop it, drop it in, in, you know, there are election sites, there are state and government-run election sites. That's where you want to look. Don't look at a Republican or Democratic Party site. Look at the actual election.gov sites. That's, that'll tell you where to vote.

• 1:06:39Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with a little show and tell and listener questions.

• 1:06:57Rich Roll?

  And we're back.

• 1:07:00Adam Skolnick?

  How was that? How was that break?

• 1:07:02Rich Roll?

  It was good.

• 1:07:03Adam Skolnick?

  Was it good for you?

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  So let's talk about social entrepreneurship.

• 1:07:07Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:07:07Rich Roll?

  A little, with a little light dusting of conscious capitalism.

• 1:07:11Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, I like my conscious capitalism lightly dusted.

• 1:07:14Rich Roll?

  This is the show and tell segment. There's actually nothing to show. We're just gonna tell.

• 1:07:20Adam Skolnick?

  You didn't bring in a roll of toilet paper?

• 1:07:21Rich Roll?

  I didn't. I didn't. Well, let's do that one first.

• 1:07:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:25Rich Roll?

  So that was the plan. I was gonna bring in this roll of toilet paper by a company called Who Gives a Crap?

• 1:07:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 1:07:31Rich Roll?

  We've been using this brand for a while and you have as well, right?

• 1:07:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, we use it. April brought it into my life and it's a great brand. Like when everyone was, was scouring the shelves for toilet paper, we had a big box of it in a closet and we are not even toilet paper hoarders, but we felt like it because we had so much of it.

• 1:07:47Rich Roll?

  Did you order it online?

• 1:07:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:49Adam Skolnick?

  We just had already gotten delivered.

• 1:07:50Rich Roll?

  I think this company blew up when nobody could find their toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic because that's how we started ordering it. And we get these massive boxes in the mail with like more toilet paper than we could possibly ever use.

• 1:08:02Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know if it started.

• 1:08:03Rich Roll?

  We got six people in our house, so we go through it quickly.

• 1:08:07Adam Skolnick?

  How many bidets do you have?

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  We have no bidets.

• 1:08:09Adam Skolnick?

  We have two bidets.

• 1:08:10Rich Roll?

  Do you?

• 1:08:10Adam Skolnick?

  Three people now, two bidets.

• 1:08:12Rich Roll?

  Did you install those or did the apartment come with bidets?

• 1:08:15Adam Skolnick?

  No, no, I, it's one of those tushy, it's called.

• 1:08:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:18Adam Skolnick?

  T U S H Y. And I self installed.

• 1:08:20Rich Roll?

  I think that company is sponsoring podcasts. I've heard, I've heard spots for them. Yeah.

• 1:08:24Adam Skolnick?

  Get your tushy now. It's like Regeneron.

• 1:08:29Rich Roll?

  Well, if you don't have a bidet, then you need toilet paper.

• 1:08:33Adam Skolnick?

  You need it anyway.

• 1:08:34Rich Roll?

  First of all, like this company does not sponsor the podcast, although I'd be happy if they did because I think it's really cool what they're doing. Basically, it's a direct to consumer toilet paper brand. It ships right to your house and they donate 50% of their profits to build toilets.

• 1:08:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Rich Roll?

  And I think that's really cool. And I think that that is significant. It's not 5%. It's not 1%.

• 1:08:57Rich Roll?

  It's 50%.

• 1:08:58Adam Skolnick?

  Right. It's the Tom Shoes model, but, but like 5X, right? Or 10X or something like that.

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, the Tom Shoes model, I think for every shoe, pair of shoes you bought, they would donate one pair of shoes.

• 1:09:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:09:09Rich Roll?

  But at their cost.

• 1:09:10Adam Skolnick?

  At their cost.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  So it's a little bit different. Like this, this is even more significant.

• 1:09:14Adam Skolnick?

  Much, much more, yeah.

• 1:09:16Rich Roll?

  But I think it brings up a broader conversation about social entrepreneurship in general and the effectiveness of conscious capitalism. You have some thoughts on this. Preface it by just saying that I think these are movements to be celebrated. Like when I have a choice of what toilet paper I'm going to buy, I can buy the one I've always bought at the store, or I can buy one that's donating 50% of its profits to do something good.

• 1:09:46Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:09:46Rich Roll?

  So that's inherently a good thing, right? And that's going to inform my consumer choices. But I think it's also important for the conscious consumer to be able to discern the difference between something that is real, and in the case of who gives a crap, I think it is real, versus this growing trend of kind of greenwashing, where all these brands feel like they need to be part of this conversation and this movement. So they step into it, but they do it in a very kind of tokenism kind of way.

• 1:10:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20Rich Roll?

  That's not meaningful way.

• 1:10:22Adam Skolnick?

  Like, like the investment banker who's taking a knee in favor of Black Lives Matter, but really, you know, is...

• 1:10:30Rich Roll?

  It's more like under social pressure.

• 1:10:33Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:10:33Rich Roll?

  Because you kind of have to do that now if you want to be, you know, in the marketplace.

• 1:10:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. I mean, I think my thoughts came in after this Thank You brand thing that is coming up, right? Like they're another Australian company that, that you sent me that information.

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  Right. So my friend Steve Barr forwarded me this thing about this company, Thank You, which I thought was really interesting. I sent it to you.

• 1:10:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Rich Roll?

  It's also, you know, of this ilk. I'm still not quite sure what it is that they, that they do.

• 1:11:01Adam Skolnick?

  They're like, they're like, they do like a more affordable Aesop kind of product, like, like beauty products or hygiene, healthy kind of health and beauty products, like lotions and things. And they, I think they made 10 million, according to this video I saw, they made like, they had a $10 million windfall from hand sanitizer during the pandemic. And then, but their whole thing is, thank you, like you give us money, we're gonna give, we're gonna pay it forward and we're gonna fund, you know, hunger projects in developing nations. And so if you watch the video, it's Africa, Southeast Asia, they're doing these, you know, it's, it, there's a, it, it, it reeks a little bit of white saviorism, which

• 1:11:43Adam Skolnick?

  is an issue. But my problem with the social entrepreneurship stuff is, does it work? Right? Is it, is conscious capitalism, it, does it work on its own? Is it just another sales pitch? You know, that's what I wonder. I always like, I always, I'm always skeptical of anyone who says they're gonna change the world. Because, I mean, I don't mean to be an asshole.

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  How dare you. That's the only way anybody does change the world.

• 1:12:06Adam Skolnick?

  No, no, if you tell me you're changing the world, it is not the same thing as showing me you changed the world. And the reason I came to that conclusion is, I've done some stories where I went into, I mean, I've, I've tried to report on, on issues a lot. And the biggest impact I've ever made, isn't from some issue story, like the CAFO story we talked about, or an overfishing story, or, you know, story about displaced people's camps in Burma. It's like, when I did a Lonely Planet book in Thailand, and reported on this small families pad Thai stand, that nobody really knew about, except for the Thai people in the area, and put it in Lonely Planet. And then when I came back three years

• 1:12:47Adam Skolnick?

  later, it's like a huge restaurant, and they're killing it. And there's something about, like, the most effective change, has to work. You know, it can't just be, we're doing this thing. The reason who gives a crap works, isn't because of the latrines at all. It's because they deliver the toilet paper to you, there's no plastic wrapped around it. It, it works on so many levels. One level is the consciousness level.

• 1:13:10Rich Roll?

  Well, that has to come first. The product has to be good, and it has to function.

• 1:13:12Adam Skolnick?

  And it can't be in plastic. It's gotta, it's gotta be better in a lot of ways. It's gotta solve multiple problems, not just one. And so it has to work. So, I don't have a problem with social entrepreneurship. I just don't think, because you tell me, you're doing XYZ, I believe you.

• 1:13:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But I do think that, in this age that we find ourselves in, that if you're starting a company, there has to be a social entrepreneurship aspect to it, in order to be competitive. Particularly, if you're trying to appeal to anyone who's millennial, or younger. And I think that's a good thing.

• 1:13:47Adam Skolnick?

  It is good, but then

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  I just think, you know, not all of it is going to be effective, but to the extent that companies are thinking about this and at least endeavoring in good faith to try to make some kind of impact, that isn't that something that we should be celebrating?

• 1:14:02Adam Skolnick?

  It is, but Google used to say, don't be evil was their motto. And look what happened. I mean, like, you know, like, like, like, when you do that, basically, you're absolving the government from putting into a social safety net that actually works. You're absolving, you're absolving the public institutions from doing

• 1:14:18Rich Roll?

  Can't we do both, though? We live in a capitalist society, so can we not, you know, marshal the levers of capitalism to do what capitalism does best, which is to move consumer habits and markets into a position where they can make a positive impact?

• 1:14:34Adam Skolnick?

  I would love that, but like, you know, what's Mrs. Jobs, Steve Jobs, uh, wife's?

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  Oh, I forget her first name.

• 1:14:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:43Rich Roll?

  I know who you mean.

• 1:14:44Adam Skolnick?

  She bought The Atlantic, she bought, you know, she, her foundation bought California Sunday, some other really good niche publications. And just this week, she, you know, they had to fire people because at some point, you know, the angel business, the angel, you know, wealthy entrepreneur or benefactor, that kind of stuff doesn't always work. And so then what happens when it, when it doesn't work or people lose interest?

• 1:15:11Rich Roll?

  You prevent the government from performing the function that it should be performing. I mean, a perfect example would be PPE, right? Like, at the beginning of the pandemic and we didn't have that.

• 1:15:21Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:15:21Rich Roll?

  It was the billionaires that came in and had to, like, fill in that gap.

• 1:15:25Adam Skolnick?

  Which is good, you know, in wartime, you, to marshal the, to have the government come in and say, look, we need this and this from you. I'm all for that. Like, I'm not saying business doesn't play a role, and I'm not saying it's bad to, you know, be keen on social entrepreneurship. I think it's great. I just think that you don't want to get to the point where we're relying on businesses to do that, because it's the same problem with relying on big tech to regulate itself. It's like you're, you're asking private companies to do these things, when in reality, there should be latrines where, and I, where we love Who Gives a Crap, but there should be latrines in these places because there are people there.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  Right, but there's, but the thing is, there aren't.

• 1:16:01Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 1:16:01Rich Roll?

  Right? So

• 1:16:04Adam Skolnick?

  You know, there is this argument that

• 1:16:05Rich Roll?

  Either an NGO is going to go in and solve that problem, or the government in that particular locale is going to take care of it. And in the event that that's not happening, let's buy a little who gives a crap.

• 1:16:17Adam Skolnick?

  I love who gives a crap. Believe me, I used you earlier.

• 1:16:21Rich Roll?

  So are you saying, do you, are you a believer in the idea of conscious capitalism at all? Or do you find that to be?

• 1:16:27Adam Skolnick?

  I am. I think what we need really to, I'm kind of just going off the cuff here. I have not looked into it. I'm sure there is some really good research into the benefits of social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism. I think there is because there definitely is a lot of academic studies on do, does foreign aid work, and it doesn't always come back positive on foreign aid. And so this is kind of a neighbor to foreign aid. It's like foreign aid adjacent. It's not, it's not big foundations or foreign governments bringing in boatloads of money, but it is a smaller scale version of that.

• 1:16:58Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 1:16:59Adam Skolnick?

  And, and what does that do to the places that you're helping long term?

• 1:17:03Rich Roll?

  And these are situations where we're not going to be able to audit, you know, where the money's going, how effectively it's being used. I mean, I could tell you, I'm no expert on conscious capitalism, but I've got a little bit of experience with it. And I was a speaker at John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism Conference. And John Mackey, the CEO, founder of Whole Foods, he wrote the book on this. He's a big believer in it. He's got some interesting, you know, political ideas as well. But I was able to spend a weekend at this conference and meet a lot of these business owners, CEOs, et cetera, who are involved in this movement. And I left that experience feeling better than when I arrived, that people are thinking

• 1:17:48Rich Roll?

  about this and trying to use capitalist forces to solve problems that are currently not being addressed or are underserved or not adequately being solved.

• 1:18:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And I'm all for like this idea, like I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we have a market. Capitalistic structure, which which incentivizes big companies that own lots of smaller companies to bleed every last dollar from of profit out of a product. So we're spending hundred fifty dollars on shoes that cost twenty, you know, twenty dollars to make and ship. You know, like, like, I would like a much kinder economy that makes it easier to live. Like, I would love that. We don't have that. And and it's nice when social entrepreneurship comes up. It would be great if every company thought about, you know, what's better for society? Like, should we maximize our profit here? Can we afford to not to here? I would love that. There's just no way to make it uniform.

• 1:18:45Adam Skolnick?

  But I am in favor of it.

• 1:18:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:48Rich Roll?

  Effective altruism is probably better. Like, if you're looking to be part of solving a problem that's not being solved right now.

• 1:18:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:56Rich Roll?

  Effective altruism is basically the study of how to best use resources to solve problems the most economically. I had a guy on the podcast a while back who's, you know, one of the big movers in this in this world. His name is William McCaskill. And basically, he's like, he's part of this community where they pledge a certain amount of their income every year. I think I think thirty percent of his annual income, something very significant, maybe even more. Like, he's capped his his salary at some, you know, quite low sum that allows him to live. And then everything else he gives away. And the the manner in which he decides where to donate his money

• 1:19:39Rich Roll?

  is dictated not by his emotional attachment to certain causes, but to what is most effective. And and that means that he ends up, like, buying a lot of malaria nets. Like, that's the cheapest thing that you can do to solve the most number of lives.

• 1:19:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, Bill Gates.

• 1:19:54Rich Roll?

  And it's not as sexy as like, I want to start a music school in, you know, downtown LA or something like that, where you have, like, you feel emotionally invested in it or, you know, some kind of connection to it. That isn't necessarily logical in the calculus of money versus lives saved.

• 1:20:11Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:20:12Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:20:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, well, who was that? There was that story years ago about the guy who runs his company and decided to cap his pay at like a hundred thousand, the CEO that capped his pay a hundred thousand dollars.

• 1:20:21Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, Dan. I met that guy at a conference.

• 1:20:25Adam Skolnick?

  And it's great. These are great stories and like, but I don't see them catching fire. I don't see. I don't see, you know what I mean? I don't see it. So like, it's great in the small scale. We can only affect our locality. I love it. That's good. And I'm in favor of it. I mean, I would like this all to work. And I think to save, to solve our really complex problems, we need it. We need so many different solutions. So I'm in favor of these small solutions. I just don't think you can depend on a hand sanitizer salesman to solve them. How dare you?

• 1:20:55Rich Roll?

  All right. One more thing I want to share before we move on from show and tell. I guess this is a show and tell. Back to, you know, reviewing content on Netflix, I suppose.

• 1:21:08Adam Skolnick?

  We are Netflix.

• 1:21:09Rich Roll?

  But

• 1:21:10Adam Skolnick?

  We are Netflix.

• 1:21:11Rich Roll?

  I watched Song Exploder on Netflix the other day. For people that don't know, Song Exploder is a podcast where the host basically takes a band or a song, and over the course of the podcast, like, deconstructs how that song was made with interviews from the musicians. It's super interesting if you are curious about the creative process in general, like, how do these things come together? And he does it in a very engaging and fascinating way. That podcast was developed into a limited television series on Netflix. And I think what's interesting about it and significant is that we're in this moment

• 1:21:51Rich Roll?

  right now where the entertainment industry is looking at podcasts as a means to develop them for television shows. And a lot of show, a lot of, a lot of big podcasts have been translated into television shows, but it's primarily been in the true crime kind of genre.

• 1:22:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:22:10Rich Roll?

  Dirty John and shows like that, that turn into like episodic television. And some of these shows translate well, others don't. But I think Song Exploder is probably the best example of a podcast turned into a TV show. It's wonderfully, beautifully, exquisitely executed with amazing cinematography and really compelling interviews. So I only watched two episodes. I watched the one with R E M. And I'm biased because R E M is my favorite band.

• 1:22:36Adam Skolnick?

  Ah.

• 1:22:37Rich Roll?

  But they deconstruct the song Losing My Religion with interviews with all the band members. I just thought it was really cool. And then Lin-Manuel Miranda, I watched that episode, deconstructing the Aaron Burr song from Hamilton.

• 1:22:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I watched those episodes too. I thought the coolest thing about that one is the fact that George Washington was meeting with his cabinet in Washington Heights.

• 1:22:59Rich Roll?

  Right, in Washington Heights, which is in Lin's neighborhood.

• 1:23:02Adam Skolnick?

  Right, I just never knew that.

• 1:23:03Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:23:04Adam Skolnick?

  And so that's kind of cool.

• 1:23:04Rich Roll?

  And it brings it all home.

• 1:23:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:06Rich Roll?

  And he used to sit in that house and write.

• 1:23:09Adam Skolnick?

  And rap to himself.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  I guess it was open, it's open as a museum and he would just sit in the corner in a chair and work all day and people would come in and wander around.

• 1:23:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17Rich Roll?

  While he was sitting there.

• 1:23:18Adam Skolnick?

  Who's that guy?

• 1:23:18Rich Roll?

  Trying to channel, you know, the energy of that era.

• 1:23:21Adam Skolnick?

  I didn't realize it took him five years and like, you know, when he first was speaking about this project, you know, at the White House, because Into Heights was out, so he had a little name and cachet and obviously from the group that he was in.

• 1:23:35Rich Roll?

  Right, Freestyle Love Supreme.

• 1:23:39Adam Skolnick?

  And, but people were laughing at his idea at first.

• 1:23:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Adam Skolnick?

  And, and look at what it became. I thought that was a really good episode. I think R E M, I mean, I didn't realize, to the extent, I guess, looking back, it makes perfect sense how losing my religion took them from like this kind of quirky alt band to like U2 level superstar.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it was, it was a huge, you know, lever in that gear that took them to, and how that song became like an anthem to different communities of people for different reasons.

• 1:24:10Adam Skolnick?

  Out of Athens, Georgia. Athens, Georgia at that time, remember they had R E M, B52s, Indigo Girls? Athens, Georgia was a, was a little hotbed. It's a great town. I love Athens, Georgia.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  I do too. I do too. I love it. I did a, I did a talk there a couple of years ago. I'd never been there before and I just basically, just put the earbuds in and had R E M on the whole time I was there trying to, I was like, I wonder where he grew, where, where's Michael Stipe's house?

• 1:24:36Adam Skolnick?

  Where's that church?

• 1:24:36Rich Roll?

  Like, where's that, where was their like headquarters, their little recording studio?

• 1:24:40Adam Skolnick?

  They lived in a like, a reclaimed church that had become like a, like Peter, Peter Buck and.

• 1:24:46Rich Roll?

  I should have asked somebody where that is. I, I would have liked to have visited that.

• 1:24:49Adam Skolnick?

  But what I like is, it's really creative how they use the tracks, like they get the demos, they get, they get the like.

• 1:24:55Rich Roll?

  They isolate out all the different parts and then they play them to the band members and then you're able to watch their facial expressions in real time, like listening to that.

• 1:25:04Adam Skolnick?

  And something about the fact that R E M, this happened so much longer ago and they're just older dudes makes like the gravitas hit me a little bit more than having just watched Hamilton and Lynn's been getting so much play lately, although I did like that one too. But like the R E M just kind of looking back at this song, you know?

• 1:25:20Rich Roll?

  And they have perspective.

• 1:25:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Rich Roll?

  Now, because they're in a different place in their lives.

• 1:25:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:24Rich Roll?

  All right. Win of the week.

• 1:25:26Adam Skolnick?

  Win of the week.

• 1:25:27Rich Roll?

  First up, we got to talk about Sarah Hall.

• 1:25:29Adam Skolnick?

  This, I think win of the week with respect to Rafa Nadal, who is amazing and

• 1:25:35Rich Roll?

  That's true.

• 1:25:36Adam Skolnick?

  My Lakers.

• 1:25:37Rich Roll?

  Are you gonna, he's putting on his Lakers face mask.

• 1:25:40Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:25:41Rich Roll?

  Big ups for the Lakers last night.

• 1:25:43Adam Skolnick?

  And LeBron James and fourth title and fourth finals MVP. I mean, amazing. And if you, there was a great story that Lindsey Kraus did for the Times on, on the Dow of Rafa and like LeBron is kind of somebody I actually, I think when he speaks, you can actually take pieces and apply them. That's what's so great about sports is you could take pieces of, you know, answers that they might give you to questions and use that as fodder for how you live your own life. Like I remember when I was writing One Breath, he had, he was talking about how, you know, you, you leave it all on the floor and live with the results. And I had never written a book before, a narrative book like that before. And, and I was like, felt like I was in over my head. And I knew the only thing

• 1:26:26Adam Skolnick?

  I could do is give it my very best and live with the results. If it got rejected, if it never made it anywhere, I would be able to live with that.

• 1:26:32Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:33Adam Skolnick?

  And, and this week, I think the theme is sometimes you don't have to win to win. You don't have to be first place to win the event. Like, and, and we can talk about these

• 1:26:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:26:44Adam Skolnick?

  Two people.

• 1:26:45Rich Roll?

  But just to put a, a pin on LeBron.

• 1:26:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Rich Roll?

  What, what is most, you know, amazing about that guy is like, here's a guy who from the time he was a young teenager, was given the imprimatur of like being the next hugest thing ever. Like he was going to inherit the reins of Michael Jordan and he fucking lived up to it.

• 1:27:04Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 1:27:06Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 1:27:06Rich Roll?

  He lived up to it.

• 1:27:07Adam Skolnick?

  He exceeded expectations, actually. Like, it's hard to actually be given that expectation and to exceed it.

• 1:27:13Rich Roll?

  Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that would have crushed that person.

• 1:27:17Adam Skolnick?

  People fail.

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And to do it at his level, and now he's like, helping to turn stadiums into voting areas.

• 1:27:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah, his activity off the court is equally impressive, if not maybe more impressive.

• 1:27:30Adam Skolnick?

  He's unbelievable.

• 1:27:31Rich Roll?

  In terms of the impact and the legacy that that guy's leaving.

• 1:27:33Adam Skolnick?

  And it's so weird to be so good and so dominant and to accumulate haters like he has. And a lot of that, I think, came from a racial place when he decided to take control of his own career and put people that he was close to, his friends, as kind of his agent and the person who was working on movies with, and those people are now like ballers. And he did it, and they're all huge successes. And you don't hear any negativity, like, there's just no scandal with LeRonde. It's amazing.

• 1:28:07Rich Roll?

  Right. All right, but on to Sarah Hall.

• 1:28:10Adam Skolnick?

  But yes.

• 1:28:10Rich Roll?

  So, yes, winning the race without winning the race.

• 1:28:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Rich Roll?

  I mean, she's definitely the story of the London Marathon.

• 1:28:15Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely.

• 1:28:15Rich Roll?

  Even though she got second. It's just such a magnificent performance on her part. So, in the midst of this stacked field in which she's competing against the current marathon world record holder and the 2019 marathon world champion, she runs her personal best, like, 222.

• 1:28:34Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 1:28:34Rich Roll?

  Sixth fastest of all time for US women. But what really captured everybody's amazement was how she was just passing people like crazy at the end with this unbelievable kick, including, in the last mile, passing Ruth Chep... I don't know how you say her last name, Chep Nigich.

• 1:28:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, Chep Nigich.

• 1:28:55Rich Roll?

  She's 26, she was the 2019 world champion, owner of the fourth fastest marathon time ever. And it was this redemptive moment because Sarah had to drop out of the Olympic trials. And, you know, she's in the later stages of her career.

• 1:29:10Adam Skolnick?

  She's 37, right?

• 1:29:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's like, she's 37 years old. Not only that, she adopted, her and Ryan, her husband Ryan Hall, legendary marathoner, adopted four girls, sisters from Ethiopia. So, she's like this mom to these four girls.

• 1:29:25Adam Skolnick?

  I know she was a mom of four.

• 1:29:25Rich Roll?

  Who are all running now, too. I think the older, one of them, at least, is like, doing really well in running. It's just a beautiful story and to have Ryan, you know, her husband as her coach, there's Ryan shared some footage of him like, like screaming at her like the last mile when she's running by, he's like losing his mind. It's really cool. And on a fitness tip, have you seen what Ryan Hall looks like these days?

• 1:29:49Adam Skolnick?

  No, no.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  So you probably have an image of your mind of him winning like the New York Marathon, typical marathoner build, like super skinny.

• 1:29:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Rich Roll?

  Tall guy. When he retired from running, he just went into the gym like a beast. And now he's just gargantuan.

• 1:30:07Adam Skolnick?

  Really?

• 1:30:07Rich Roll?

  It's crazy. Yeah. I mean, he put on, it took him two years, but he is an absolute monster now. It's unbelievable.

• 1:30:15Adam Skolnick?

  Rich roll in two years.

• 1:30:16Rich Roll?

  He like doesn't run really at all. I think he was gonna, I think I saw Sarah sharing something about how he was gonna run an ultra marathon, like a 50 miler on no training. I don't know whether he did that or not. I should look into that. But anyway, he's just built like a Mack truck now. It's, it's kind of amazing.

• 1:30:31Adam Skolnick?

  That is amazing. I didn't know that.

• 1:30:32Rich Roll?

  But hats off to Sarah. What an incredible performance to run that fast late in your career while juggling everything that you're doing in the midst of a pandemic, while being a mom, like all of that. It's just such a cool story.

• 1:30:45Adam Skolnick?

  Really hats off. And then my win of the week is David Goggins.

• 1:30:50Rich Roll?

  How could it not be?

• 1:30:51Adam Skolnick?

  How could it not be? He finished second at the Moab 240, running what he thinks is the race of his life so far. And this is a guy who's done very well and, and won some big ultra races. 197 entrance in this Moab 240. And for the backstory on this, there's a couple of things. One is he did, he ran this race last year and was in second place, I think, or in the top three and went off course. There was like a sign misplacement or something, or some sort of like controversy there. And he went off course like by 10 miles or something.

• 1:31:22Rich Roll?

  I think it was even more than that.

• 1:31:23Adam Skolnick?

  Was it more than that? So he had to run back. And then coming up to the biggest peak on it, he started having fluid in his lungs, like having some altitude problems.

• 1:31:33Rich Roll?

  Right. It was like a pulmonary edema.

• 1:31:35Adam Skolnick?

  And they basically. Forced him to go like, well, they didn't force him, but like the, I think the doctors were like, maybe you gotta get down to altitude. And so he left the race, went to his hotel room and started feeling better and then went back out on the course by himself. And they didn't let him finish at the finish line, but he finished like, cause right now there's still only five runners that have finished and you can finish like tomorrow, I think it's, it's some, I forget exactly. And so there's, most people are still not, not even in yet. And there's several DNFs already. But, uh, so that was one backstory. So he's coming back this year, but this year, at some point, he's going to reveal how fucked up his knees were. He's kind of hinted at it. He's shown

• 1:32:17Adam Skolnick?

  some therapy stuff. He's shown himself on, uh, in doctors offices. He just, this week before the race, showed himself having his knee drained where it said a half a baseball's worth of fluid was coming out of one of his knees. But when he finally reveals this story in its fullest and, and how, how fucked up his knees are, that's what makes this to me, one of the most amazing athletic accomplishments I've ever heard of. Like, like that, and you will agree with me? When you finally, when he finally tells the story.

• 1:32:45Rich Roll?

  I agree with you now.

• 1:32:47Adam Skolnick?

  Cause the guy he lost to and lost, I mean, he finished 10 miles. I think he finished a couple of hours behind this guy. I forget exactly, but let me tell you what, uh, this guy, this guy is like, set the record for running across the Atacama Desert. He'd set the record for this, um, Michelle Gralia, the Italian, uh, set the record for running across the Gobi. He wins, he's won bad water. He wins almost every ultra race he, he enters and David was gaining on him at the end.

• 1:33:16Rich Roll?

  The guy had like a pretty good gap on him though. I mean, like, it was like,

• 1:33:19Adam Skolnick?

  12 miles, 10 mile gap?

• 1:33:21Rich Roll?

  I checked maybe when they had like 40 miles to go and I thought it was, he had like 20 miles on him.

• 1:33:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but he only finished like eight miles ahead.

• 1:33:28Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:33:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Like, that's what I'm saying. He was gaining.

• 1:33:30Rich Roll?

  So, yeah, that guy had, he had a, a pretty solid lead that David was gaining on. And then there was David and then there was a huge gap.

• 1:33:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:39Rich Roll?

  And then it was a cluster. So it was like, basically those two guys were way out ahead of everybody else.

• 1:33:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 1:33:45Rich Roll?

  And then there was kind of a pack.

• 1:33:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:33:47Rich Roll?

  Behind those guys that were pretty closely packed together.

• 1:33:50Adam Skolnick?

  Three guys together. Yeah.

• 1:33:51Rich Roll?

  But let's count the ways that this guy is a savage. Cause like, I don't know if we even have time. I mean, it's, it's crazy because. What happened to him last year was like the most epic story ever. And I remember when he rejoined the course and he's running along and he did a little Instagram video. I was like, you know, quit. If I sign up for something, I don't stop, you know, just because the race is over, doesn't mean that I finish and I finished what I started or, you know, whatever he said.

• 1:34:15Adam Skolnick?

  But he was saying like he had so much respect for the slower runners that were still out there suffering and he wanted to be out there with them. That's what his point was, you know, like

• 1:34:23Rich Roll?

  But they'd all finish by the time he went back to the course.

• 1:34:26Adam Skolnick?

  There were still people out there. That's why he went back out there.

• 1:34:28Rich Roll?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:34:29Adam Skolnick?

  He's like, there are some people out there still grinding.

• 1:34:30Rich Roll?

  He was in the hospital for how long?

• 1:34:32Adam Skolnick?

  Just for like a few hours.

• 1:34:33Rich Roll?

  Oh, I thought he was like overnight.

• 1:34:34Adam Skolnick?

  No, no, no. Then he went to the hotel room. Yeah.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  All right. So this year, when did he have knee surgery?

• 1:34:41Adam Skolnick?

  I don't think he had knee surgery.

• 1:34:43Rich Roll?

  I just remember a video, maybe a couple of months ago where his knee was like the size of a watermelon.

• 1:34:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, never had knee surgery. He dealt with therapy and he kind of did, did, did some stuff and he put some of that on Instagram. But I'm not going to get into what I, what I've seen in terms of like the medical on him, the report on him.

• 1:34:59Rich Roll?

  You got the inside track.

• 1:35:00Adam Skolnick?

  But I'm not going to get into it. It's not me to say, but it's, um, but trust me, when you hear the whole story, uh, even Gralio will be like the guy that beat him will be like, what the fuck, Goggins? What the fuck?

• 1:35:13Rich Roll?

  The other thing that's so prototypically Goggins about it is that any other athlete who has like a profile on social media would have been sharing the lead up to this race. Like I'm getting ready to do this race. Here's my strategy. This is what my training looks like. None of that, not a peep. Nobody even knew that he was doing this race, at least publicly facing, right? So suddenly it was like, oh, Goggins is in Moab and he's in second place. Like, wait, what? Like, he didn't announce that he was doing, because he doesn't do that. Cause his thing is, that's for me. Like, I'll do these little videos once in a while because, you know, I have to, even though I hate social media and I'll like, put you on blast with some

• 1:35:56Rich Roll?

  crazy inspirational message. But it's not incumbent upon me to share anything else I don't feel like sharing. And I do this racing and this training for myself.

• 1:36:04Adam Skolnick?

  That's right. It's the same thing with his fire training. He doesn't put that on his social media either. He does that for himself. But then there's always a message. There's always something that he can use to inspire people out of it, whether it's through a talk or an Instagram post or, uh, you know, the book. And another thing that was prototypical Goggins is when he crossed the finish line, he banged out like, I don't know how many, like 20 pushups or more and just banged them out, right? When he crossed the finish line, like most people, 240 miles.

• 1:36:34Rich Roll?

  Is there video of that?

• 1:36:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, there's video. It's on his, it's on his Instagram.

• 1:36:37Rich Roll?

  I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to check that out. Well, good for you, David.

• 1:36:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:41Rich Roll?

  That's impressive.

• 1:36:42Adam Skolnick?

  It's unbelievable.

• 1:36:43Rich Roll?

  And the world, you know, the world needs that story.

• 1:36:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:36:48Rich Roll?

  So, thank you for that.

• 1:36:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And then that's the kind of stuff like, you know, that's why he's, people connect to him and his legend. It's like, because he's the proof that we can push through our own smaller problems. Yeah.

• 1:37:01Rich Roll?

  It's intense, man.

• 1:37:02Adam Skolnick?

  I love it.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  All right, let's do some listener questions.

• 1:37:06Adam Skolnick?

  Do it. Okay. Ready?

• 1:37:09Speaker 02

  Hi, Rich. Hi, Adam. My name is Cameron. I live in the beautiful Oahu, Hawaii, and I'm probably one of your younger listeners. I'm 22 years old and I have become immersed in the world of health and wellness. I've come a long way on my betterment journey, but one habit I can't seem to shake is overdoing it with alcohol. I've tried cutting it out completely, but then I end up feeling isolated from my peers. I've tried having a limit on how many drinks I will have, but often end up disrespecting that boundary and then feeling anxious and shameful for it. I haven't given up alcohol completely because I enjoy having one or two drinks and I use drinking as a means to network and socialize. Do you

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  think it's possible to set healthy boundaries of alcohol and stick to them? Or do you think it's safer to just stop drinking altogether, considering this relationship I have with it? Seeing of being a sober 22-year-old is quite daunting to me, and the more habits I change, the further I feel from relating to the people around me. As someone I look to for health and personal growth wisdom, as well as being a recovered alcoholic, I would love to hear your advice on possible ways I can resolve this. Thanks, guys. I hope I hear this on the air.

• 1:38:28Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Cameron. How cool would it be to be 22 and living in Oahu? First of all.

• 1:38:35Adam Skolnick?

  I want to be 48 and living in Oahu.

• 1:38:37Rich Roll?

  I know. It sounds good, and it sounds like you've got a cool life. And thank you for the question. I mean, the first thing I would say to you is, to your specific question, is it possible to set healthy boundaries around alcohol and stick to them? Only you can answer that question. Baked into what I just heard, it sounds like you've tried to do that and have failed. So I would encourage you to kind of think about that. Alcoholism is a self-diagnosed disease, and I can't say whether you're an alcoholic or not. Only you can make that judgment call for yourself. But to the extent that your alcohol use is starting to interfere with your well-being,

• 1:39:21Rich Roll?

  which it sounds like it is, I think it's worth spending a little time looking into that, particularly as somebody who's immersed and interested in the world of health and wellness. If you're interested in those things, I'm not sure what role alcohol plays in furthering whatever goals that you set for yourself. In my opinion, it's only going to be an impediment. And I think these experiments, like, hey, let me go out and cap my drinks. Maybe, you know, I'm going to go out and see if I can be with my friends and only have two drinks, or maybe I'll only drink beer, or I'll only go out on these nights. These are all, you know, experiments that I've played around with myself, only to

• 1:40:05Rich Roll?

  find out that they never work. Maybe they'll work for you, I don't know. But it sounds like your relationship with alcohol is making you unhappy and it's moving you further away from what it is that you most aspire to. So my suggestion to you is to, why not try to go sober for 30 days? It sounds like you've done that in the past, you've had stints where you've given it up completely, but that's impaired your ability to network and socialize with your friends. So what is that about? Why is it that you feel like you can't go out and network or socialize unless you're drinking? Is it because it makes you uncomfortable? Is it because it's no longer fun? And I think that's where the work is.

• 1:40:48Rich Roll?

  Invest in what it is that is leading you to be uncomfortable around that specific dynamic. And I think that will be a means of connecting with what exactly alcohol is doing for you and is not doing for you. On top of that, like, how can you be in health and wellness if you can't control your drinking? That's like the hard truth here. And I think it's, you know, this might come across as daunting and scary, the idea of giving up alcohol, but in truth, you won't know unless you try. And I think if you just try to do it one day at a time, like they say in 12-step, and not worry about whether you're ever going to drink again, you might find yourself enjoying

• 1:41:33Rich Roll?

  it in a way that you haven't previously. But I think, you know, when you give up alcohol completely and then you find yourself isolating, that's because alcohol is yourself, that alcohol is the grease that allows you to interact socially. And when you remove that, you're lacking in the tools to be able to do that sober. And the kind of idea behind recovery is developing your emotional aptitude and your social skills so that you're not reliant upon a substance in order to kind of gracefully, you know, navigate your friends and these social situations. So, again, it's not for me to tell you what you should or shouldn't do, it's not for

• 1:42:15Rich Roll?

  me to diagnose you, but it sounds like if you're thinking about this, that perhaps it's a problem. Because people who have a healthy relationship with alcohol are not the people that... That leave voicemails like this, right? So clearly, there's something about this that is unhealthy or dysfunctional for you. And I can only speak for from my own experience, which is when I stopped playing these games about, well, maybe I'll have two drinks, or maybe I'll do it at this, you know, these nights, but not these other nights. When I just let go of all of that and accepted help and started to, you know, live sober, that's when my life improved and got better in unimaginable ways.

• 1:42:57Rich Roll?

  And I just want everybody to have their version of the experience that I had. So I would encourage you to explore 12-step in your area. I don't know what it's like in Hawaii, but I think if you're in Hawaii, they're kind of functioning normally because they've kept the island pretty protected from COVID. So I suspect there are probably Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that are in person. And perhaps you can go on the internet, find out where those are and attend. Set aside your preconceived ideas about what it might or might not be, and just show up with an open mind. Listen, try to find somebody that you can talk to. Try to look for the similarities rather than differences.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  And if you can find that person to talk to, sit down with that person. Tell them the truth of what you're really going through. And I think that will be revealing in what you want to do going forward.

• 1:43:52Adam Skolnick?

  Beautiful. Well said. Thanks, Cameron.

• 1:43:55Rich Roll?

  Did I miss anything?

• 1:43:57Adam Skolnick?

  DK is here.

• 1:43:58Rich Roll?

  DK could have dropped a better sober bomb than that.

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  No, I think it was perfect. I think it's normal for a 22-year-old to feel that.

• 1:44:04Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  Because you're probably used to running with a bunch of people that drink.

• 1:44:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right, because most 22-year-olds drink.

• 1:44:11Rich Roll?

  Exactly.

• 1:44:12Adam Skolnick?

  But I would say that, you know, be careful. Sometimes like... Uh, it's, it's every, the people who we're closest to are mirrors, right? That's what the yogis like to say. And so you might getting, think you're getting a reflection, you might be thinking you're getting some, like, you want, you need to connect with this person. And the only way to do that is to be on their level. But that might just be a story you're telling yourself. You might be able to go out and hang out and be completely welcome and connected with people without drinking.

• 1:44:40Rich Roll?

  Well, you can.

• 1:44:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Rich Roll?

  You can.

• 1:44:43Adam Skolnick?

  But with your group of friends, I mean, it might not isolate you from your friends like you think.

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:47Adam Skolnick?

  It might not be as isolating as you think. Probably won't be, but you know, you have to experiment with that. Like 30 day experiment seems like a good way to go.

• 1:44:55Rich Roll?

  Why not?

• 1:44:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. All right. Let's go to the next one. This is a related question and you'll see.

• 1:45:04Speaker 04

  Hi, Rich. Hi, Adam. Um, my name's John. I'm from London, England. I am, um, seven years sober. Um, I'm also five years plant-based and Rich has been a real inspiration for me. As somebody who I guess is a type A male, it's, it's rare to find role models in sobriety and in plant-based eating. So, thank you so much. Um, my question is around sobriety. Um, Rich, I've listened to your story and I've read your book, Bye. Um, and one thing that I'm not sure you go into is, is how, uh, your social relationships suffered when you became sober. Um, that's a challenge I've had ever since I became sober and I'm still wrestling with it now.

• 1:45:49Speaker 04

  I'll often go, I'll often find myself not invited to gatherings with, with really close friends. Um, some of my friends see me suitable maybe for a country walk, but not a bachelor party or, um, any other gathering really. And, you know, it, it can be quite hurtful. Um, it does knock me back a bit and, you know, I see it time and time again. I get judged as a non-drinker and, and not included. And I'm, I'm just wondering, Rich, if you've had any experience in your story, uh, of that? And, and how have you dealt with it? And I'd be really, um, grateful for any response you have. Thanks both for a wonderful show. Um, take care. Bye.

• 1:46:35Rich Roll?

  Thanks, John. It's a great question. I definitely have had similar experiences, although I think there is a little bit of a difference with you being from London because culturally, it's distinct in that, you know, London tends to be a very drinking-centric culture in general. So I suspect that the challenges might be a little bit more intense where you live than where I live. The first thing I would say is that that dis inclusion, the idea that you have these, you know, quote-unquote, "really close friends", first of all, I would wonder, how close are they really if they're dis-inviting you or not inviting you to do fun stuff? Are they really your close friends? Maybe they are.

• 1:47:18Rich Roll?

  And maybe they feel like they're sparing you from putting you in an uncomfortable situation. But either way, that lack of invitation or dis inclusion says more about them than it does about you. And often, and I've experienced this, it's worth considering that you act as a mirror to their own behavior. So if you're sober and you're at a bachelor party, and you've got these friends and they're letting loose and they're going crazy, you being sober in their orbit is perhaps an indication that they might have a problem that they don't want to look at. So when they see you, they're reminded of their relationship with alcohol

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  and the extent to which it might be unhealthy for them. So that's one thing to consider. And it helps with, you know, empathizing from where they're coming from, I think, on some level. In my own personal case, I just made a ton of new friends. Like, I needed to develop a brand-new community of people who were living more in alignment with this new value system that I was developing. And so I would encourage you to do just that. It sounds like you've been sober for a while, but that, you know, you feel cut off or lonely from your friends, so... Perhaps try to find a way to tap into a different community, whether it's through 12 Step or even Andy Ramage's One Year No Beer

• 1:48:46Rich Roll?

  community, which is London centric. I would encourage you to reach out to Andy or to figure out how you can participate in that movement, because that is just packed with people who are experiencing life alcohol-free. And then to find new activities and new things to do. I mean, personally, for me, when I got sober initially, I didn't want to go to a bachelor party because that was scary and I thought I might drink. Today, I have no interest in going to a bachelor party because it's just not something, you know, like that kind of behavior and activity is just not something I want to be around.

• 1:49:21Adam Skolnick?

  They're very douchey, these bachelor parties. High on the douche meter.

• 1:49:25Rich Roll?

  I don't go to bars, not because I'm scared if I go to a bar, I'm going to drink, but going to a bar when you're sober just isn't that fun. And what you learn over time, and I suspect you already know this, is that what is meaningful is having meaningful interactions with those friends that you care about. And when there's a lot of booze around, those interactions are very surface level at best and not meaningful. So maybe shoulder the responsibility of inviting your friends to do things with you that interest you that don't involve alcohol, rather than waiting for them to invite you to do other stuff, or developing a resentment around not being invited to do something. And doing an inventory around that resentment, I think,

• 1:50:10Rich Roll?

  would be super helpful. You know, work, work a program around these emotions that you're having around the relationships with these friends.

• 1:50:21Adam Skolnick?

  I like it. I think, you know, having spent quite a lot of time in London and seeing how alcohol is really like ingrained in the culture there. I think there's an element, like we talked about Goggins earlier, of the only. You're kind of, it's a little different than being sober here in Southern California. You do feel like-

• 1:50:38Rich Roll?

  Everybody goes to bed at 10.

• 1:50:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  They're up for their mountain bike ride.

• 1:50:41Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly, like you're, you really are kind of the only. And Goggins has embraced that, being the only. He talked about being in this, in his book. Talks about being in the SEALs and the SEALs are like train hard and then party hard and like when they were based in Thailand and he would go to the, he didn't want to go to party. He wanted to study and then get up and, and beat their ass and whatever training they were doing the next day. And it rubbed some people wrong and he was disinvited or was suspe- and it impacted his, he suspects impacted his, which he writes about impacted his, um, his advancement to some of the team. So, uh, you know, but he embraced being the

• 1:51:22Adam Skolnick?

  only and that's what he had to do, uh, for his own, uh, kind of wellbeing, but also it's how he kind of excelled. He, he embraced it.

• 1:51:33Rich Roll?

  Right. But, but he's a very unique individual and, and you know, he had to accept some level of loneliness that he's comfortable with. And what I'm gathering from John is that he doesn't want to, he wants to be connected to his friends. You know, this is different, this is qualitatively different in that regard. I just think there's a way to do it that can be accomplished without the kind of stigma of alcohol kind of hovering over the dynamic itself.

• 1:52:01Adam Skolnick?

  No, no question.

• 1:52:02Rich Roll?

  So if these friends are really good friends of yours, they're going to be more than happy to connect with you in a meaningful way in an environment that doesn't involve alcohol, whether that's a dinner party at your house or some athletic activity or some other thing that you can mutually enjoy with this person. And if they're not interested in that, then I think it's, you know, worth considering just how good a friend this person really is. And again, it all goes back to working your inventory around this. Why are you resentful? What is your part in this? How are you contributing to this? And how can you change the dynamic with certain things that you can do in terms of your perspective of these friends and the activities that you can, or the actions that you can undertake to, you know, mend

• 1:52:47Rich Roll?

  what appears to be, you know, fractures in these relationships?

• 1:52:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And like any tough thing could end up being a benefit to you, however it plays out. You know, going through the hard thing can become what helps you become. Get you to even better place.

• 1:53:05Rich Roll?

  And also, why don't you call them up and tell them how you feel?

• 1:53:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:09Rich Roll?

  And have that conversation because maybe they're not even aware of how this is impacting you. And if they are good friends, they'll be able to hear that.

• 1:53:18Adam Skolnick?

  Beautiful.

• 1:53:19Rich Roll?

  Thank you, John.

• 1:53:20Adam Skolnick?

  Thanks, John. Let's go to Colorado.

• 1:53:23Speaker 05

  Hi, Adam and Rich. My name's Greg Johnston. I'm from Colorado. I've already adopted a plant-based nutrition plan. I eat all plants all the time, as much whole food as I can. I'm losing a ton of weight. Got my blood work back. Everything's good. My blood pressure is down and the great numbers. Not on any meds, just taking my B12 supplement. My question is, I'm 52. I've read Finding Ultra. I've become a great fan of the Rich Roll Podcast. I watched The World's Toughest Race with Bear Grylls. And I live in Colorado.

• 1:54:07Speaker 05

  This is the perfect place to start doing some adventure sports, some endurance sports. What do you see as the way to break into this for somebody who's 50 plus, you know, former college athlete, but really let himself get out of shape and is now getting back into shape? I would just love to hear some ideas of how you would take it if you were there. Have a great day, guys, and thanks for all you do on the podcast. It's really been helping me a lot.

• 1:54:36Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Greg. Great question. The first thing I would say is, I can't shake this sense that you're waiting for somebody to give you permission to do this thing. And the truth is, you don't need permission. You already have everything that you require in order to go outside and begin this process of moving towards this goal or this dream you have of doing adventure sports or endurance sports. So maybe look at what's behind that. Like, why do you feel like you can't start until somebody says it's okay or provides a roadmap for you to do so? The truth is, it's in the doing that the path is revealed. So you have to just begin.

• 1:55:20Rich Roll?

  So whatever pair of shoes you happen to have in your closet, pull those out, go outside. And go for a jog. And if you can't jog, start with a walk and then show up the next day and try to walk a little bit longer. And one day you'll find yourself jogging a little bit and just slowly over time, expand that. And if you're patient and you're consistent, I think the answers that you seek will start to unfurl before you. You don't have to have this whole plan completely conceptualized before you start. And in truth, that's the wrong way to think about it and to go about it to begin with. I think it's great to set

• 1:56:01Rich Roll?

  a goal for yourself. If you're like, I want to one day do this crazy race. So I'm going to start with a 10K or whatever it is to put something on the calendar that holds you accountable. Maybe you can find a friend to do this with. So you have an accountability partner to make sure that you get up out of bed in the morning and get after it. But ultimately, this is about falling in love with a lifestyle shift. That's going to lead you over time into a very different place. What that looks like for you is going to be different than what it might look like for me or for Adam or for somebody else. But find something that you really enjoy, fall in love with the process and the lifestyle.

• 1:56:42Rich Roll?

  And everything else ends up taking care of itself, whether it's gear, whether it's which race to do, whether it's, you know, what GPS watch to buy or what race to sign up for. All of those questions get answered. But if you're stuck in the starting gate, trying to figure it out in your head, you're never going to get to first base.

• 1:57:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, just go for a run. Just go for a hike.

• 1:57:05Rich Roll?

  This is not rocket science.

• 1:57:07Adam Skolnick?

  No, just hit the trails.

• 1:57:09Rich Roll?

  And there is no secret.

• 1:57:11Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I like the idea of being in Colorado. You can just like, look where, where's the beautiful place you haven't walked yet or run yet and go check it out.

• 1:57:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, turn it into a fun adventure.

• 1:57:20Adam Skolnick?

  Congratulations on a lifestyle change. Those are some really important big markers.

• 1:57:25Rich Roll?

  I think the other thing that might be worth commenting on is, it's interesting that you opened the question saying you're 52. And from that, I infer that there's some sense that maybe the ship has sailed, or it's too late, or you're too old to do that. And let me disabuse you of that notion. As somebody who's turning 54 in a week, 52 is not a barrier to this. In fact, I'm jealous of you being at the beginning of what Could quite possibly be the most enriching experience of your life if you lean into it. So get out of your comfort zone, put the fear aside, put one foot in front of the other,

• 1:58:07Rich Roll?

  and start with tiny steps. Make it about the atomic habits that you build over time. That way, it's not daunting. You're eating little bites every single day, and with that, you build momentum. And these things then develop their own momentum, and they become a lot. It has a life of its own that will put wind in your sails and guide you where you're supposed to go.

• 1:58:33Adam Skolnick?

  Absolutely. And I do understand, though, being in Colorado, seeing those incredible I mean, I get it. Like, if being 52 seems like a problem when you're in Colorado surrounded by endurance athletes that are just whizzing by.

• 1:58:46Rich Roll?

  That's true. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, because everybody's crazy fit.

• 1:58:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and they all look like they're lighting up for the Kona World Championships, like, every single day at the coffee shop.

• 1:58:55Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:58:56Rich Roll?

  I get it. I get it. Forget about that. It has nothing to do with that.

• 1:59:00Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:59:00Rich Roll?

  This is about your relationship with yourself and the person that you want to become.

• 1:59:06Adam Skolnick?

  Boom.

• 1:59:08Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:59:08Adam Skolnick?

  Rich, that's some good shit right there. Dropping wisdom.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  How do you feel?

• 1:59:13Adam Skolnick?

  Me? I feel great. I feel like this is a good place to vent my concerns of the well-being of humanity in a safe space.

• 1:59:21Rich Roll?

  I'm glad to provide that venue for you, so you can go home.

• 1:59:26Adam Skolnick?

  I can go home.

• 1:59:27Rich Roll?

  And be the best husband and dad and swim run aficionado that you can.

• 1:59:31Adam Skolnick?

  You know what? I appreciate that about you.

• 1:59:34Rich Roll?

  Right on, right on, right on. Just getting in the McConaughey headspace for tomorrow.

• 1:59:39Adam Skolnick?

  I can't wait to hear about it.

• 1:59:40Rich Roll?

  Cool. We'll be back in two weeks. In the meantime, follow Adam at Adam Skolnick on all the socials. If you'd like your message considered, leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. You can find me at Rich Roll pretty much everywhere. Please take a moment to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify. Check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. We'll put links up to everything that we discussed today, as always. And that's it. I think we did it today. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers and Davey

• 2:00:23Rich Roll?

  Greenberg for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK, my man David Kahn for advertiser relationships.

• 2:00:29Adam Skolnick?

  DK.

• 2:00:29Rich Roll?

  The music, as always, by Tyler Trapper and Harry. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for the love. See you back in a couple of days with another amazing episode. TBD. Who knows what it's gonna be? Who knows? Who knows what the world is gonna look like?

• 2:00:45Adam Skolnick?

  We'll still be here.

• 2:00:46Rich Roll?

  In a couple of days.

• 2:00:47Adam Skolnick?

  It'll still be.

• 2:00:48Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the funny thing with this show. We always think we're gonna talk about something and then the world spins off its axis and it seems no longer relevant.

• 2:00:55Adam Skolnick?

  It's gonna, you know what? It's gonna cycle back to normal. It is going to at some stage.

• 2:01:00Rich Roll?

  All right, Nostradamus.

• 2:01:01Adam Skolnick?

  We're gonna get there.

• 2:01:02Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 2:01:03Adam Skolnick?

  Together.

• 2:01:03Rich Roll?

  Peace.