Roll On: True Endurance

How does one best prepare for a fitness challenge? What is the real value of testing one’s outer limits? And what constitutes true endurance? These are but a few of the questions explored in today’s edition of Roll On, wherein Adam Skolnick and I blather on matters both pertinent and possibly irrelevant. We share good news and bad. We perform some show and tell. And as always, we answer listener questions. For those new to the podcast, Adam Skolnick is an activist and veteran journalist 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: David Goggins’ 4 x 4 x 48 challenge; proper endurance training; what endurance teaches us about ourselves; Rich’s Instagram mask controversy; the rise of Clubhouse and the future of audio talk shows; and World Surf League’s ‘We Are One Ocean’ campaign In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do you release anger and resentment? How do you find a partner with a similar lifestyle and goals (within a pandemic)? What is your leadership philosophy? How do you show up for your team? Thank you to Adam from Santa Monica, Madeleine from Redondo Beach, and Elizabeth from Nanaimo British Columbia 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. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll581 YouTube: bit.ly/rollon581 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. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. We're back today with another edition of Roll On. My home slice and trusty hype man, Adam Skolnick, riding sidecar as usual. Minds will be expanded, souls will be soothed. But first, let's take care of business.

• 1:41Rich Roll?

  Adam Skolnick, are you ready? It doesn't matter if I'm ready, I'm here. You are, and it's happening. We are back with a hotly awaited new edition of Roll On, wherein Mr. Skolnick and I blather... And pontificate on matters.

• 1:58Adam Skolnick?

  That sounds.

• 1:58Rich Roll?

  Both pertinent and possibly irrelevant, depending upon.

• 2:02Adam Skolnick?

  Depending on the level of blather you get to.

• 2:04Rich Roll?

  Good news and bad, a little show and tell. We answer some listener questions from our voicemail.

• 2:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:10Rich Roll?

  If you're interested in having your question fielded by us, ring us up at 424-235-4626. Quick reminder before we get into it, if you enjoy all the free content that we diligently toil here to create, it would be very meaningful if you could take a second to hit that subscribe button on YouTube or wherever you enjoy the audio incarnation of the show, leave us a comment, share the show with your friends or on social media. Also, another reminder that we recently created a clips channel on YouTube. So if you're into sampling the show or want to indulge in just the nuggets, including we put up discreet short videos of all the questions that we get and answer. So you can find those there.

• 2:56Rich Roll?

  We drop those videos pretty much every day. So check it out. Link in the show notes and in the description below on YouTube. Or you can just search Rich Roll Podcast Clips on YouTube. Also, voicing change update. This is the podcast Coffee Table book that we created. Some of you might know that we ran out of stock just before Christmas, right in the midst of the gifting season.

• 3:21Adam Skolnick?

  That's great timing.

• 3:22Rich Roll?

  Didn't have enough to ship, much to the chagrin of people who were looking to gift this. It is a great gift. That is one of the lessons learned when you're self-publishing. How many books do you order? But we have re-upped and the new stockpile is en route and should be here in the next couple of days. So we'll be shipping in the next week.

• 3:46Adam Skolnick?

  Second printing.

• 3:47Rich Roll?

  Second printing, that's right.

• 3:48Adam Skolnick?

  You were just signing a bunch of other books this weekend, right? I saw on your Instagram.

• 3:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the cookbooks.

• 3:53Adam Skolnick?

  The cookbooks.

• 3:54Rich Roll?

  So if you want some.

• 3:55Adam Skolnick?

  How many printing's have you done of that?

• 3:57Rich Roll?

  I mean, well, those are with major publishers, so it's different. They always seem to have stock on hand.

• 4:03Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we were signing those. We offer signed copies of all our books, Plant Power Way, Plant Power Way Italia, This Cheese is Nuts, Finding Ultra. You can get signed version of those through my website, richroll.com. And Voicing Change, you can learn more about and grab your signed or unsigned version of that book at richroll.com/VC.

• 4:25Adam Skolnick?

  I owe my wife a subscription to Julie's Cheese.

• 4:29Rich Roll?

  Shremu?

• 4:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  You owe it to her?

• 4:32Adam Skolnick?

  I've told her I was gonna buy. I promised her and I haven't signed up yet.

• 4:35Rich Roll?

  Have you guys tried it yet?

• 4:37Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 4:37Rich Roll?

  Oh, you haven't?

• 4:38Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 4:38Rich Roll?

  Oh, remind me to bring a couple of wheels next time.

• 4:41Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  You should at least try it.

• 4:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 4:42Rich Roll?

  It's fantastic.

• 4:43Adam Skolnick?

  No, I know, she wants it.

• 4:44Rich Roll?

  She's killing it right now.

• 4:45Adam Skolnick?

  That's the one thing she misses the most.

• 4:46Rich Roll?

  Growing this company, she's got a lot of excitement around what she's doing, a lot of momentum. So it's pretty cool.

• 4:52Adam Skolnick?

  It is cool.

• 4:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Adam Skolnick?

  Is she gonna be in retailers at some stage soon?

• 4:55Rich Roll?

  Well, you can get it at Arowan right now. That's the only retailer. She just did a kind of collaboration with a monthly wine subscription service where they kind of combined a package, but it's mostly a direct-to-consumer subscription box model. There'll be some retail outlets at some point to be determined, but the focus of what she's trying to build is that direct-to-consumer model.

• 5:21Adam Skolnick?

  It's a great model.

• 5:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Adam Skolnick?

  Cool.

• 5:23Rich Roll?

  So, good to see you.

• 5:24Adam Skolnick?

  Good to see you, brother.

• 5:25Rich Roll?

  Been two weeks since we did this. How's it going?

• 5:27Adam Skolnick?

  It's going good, yeah. Life is good. Just been busy and we're deep, we're doing SoBrewery at my house.

• 5:35Rich Roll?

  Oh, you are?

• 5:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Rich Roll?

  It's always SoBrewery at my house.

• 5:38Adam Skolnick?

  I know, I know. But I'm not sober, but...

• 5:42Rich Roll?

  You picked the shortest month of the year to do it?

• 5:44Adam Skolnick?

  That shows how not sober I am.

• 5:46Rich Roll?

  Okay. How's it going? We're on day fifteen.

• 5:51Adam Skolnick?

  It's going good. Yeah, no, it's fine. I mean, I'm not, I don't, we don't indulge too much, although the, you know, just a cocktail or a glass of wine here or there. So it's not like, it's a big lifestyle change for me.

• 6:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 6:02Adam Skolnick?

  But it is like empty calories change, which is nice. So I do feel like I've gotten a little bit lighter.

• 6:08Rich Roll?

  Well, this fits nicely into this fitness challenge

• 6:12Adam Skolnick?

  It does.

• 6:13Rich Roll?

  that you've brought upon yourself. So let's talk about that.

• 6:15Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do that. How do you wanna talk about it?

• 6:17Rich Roll?

  Well, tell me what you're working towards right here and we'll dive into it.

• 6:20Adam Skolnick?

  Well, it's funny. I mean, I don't feel like I'm necessarily, was necessarily working towards it, but we know David Goggins is doing his four by four by forty-eight. I don't know if you, if you listeners have not seen, go on his Instagram. It's a challenge he does once a year. It's from March 5th to March 7th, starts at 8:00 PM on a Friday. Ends the last run, I believe is 4pm Sunday or 8pm Sunday, I forget how it works. But every four hours from 8pm Friday till it ends on Sunday for 48 hours, you run four miles. And so at the end of that two day period, you've run 48 miles. And so I saw it happen last year. I was not gonna get involved in that. I think we had just done Otillo and I just, I wasn't gonna do it.

• 7:04Adam Skolnick?

  This year, I've done a lot more running and I decided I thought I would do it and then I kinda casually mentioned to David and he basically locked it down. And so I'm doing it and, and you know, the way I talk about it is I'm not, I don't say I'm trying to do it. I say I'm doing it. So.

• 7:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can't just casually mention it to David like I'm thinking about doing it.

• 7:24Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 7:24Rich Roll?

  You know, if you do that, like he's gonna hold you to account.

• 7:28Adam Skolnick?

  I wanna do this. So, so I so far haven't been training in any specific way. The last month I ran 110 miles. So this month, you know, it's been about 25 mile weeks, basically, for me, just in general. And I feel like I'm capable of doing it. I don't know. I mean, my weeks, the way they work is there's typically a longer run on a Sunday and you know, four to five mile runs, some of them with intervals, some of them just zone two during the week. So I think I plan on adding a little mileage, going, leading up, maybe doing a 10, a couple of 10 mile runs and stuff like that. But we had talked about something. So I want, I want Rich's training plan.

• 8:10Rich Roll?

  Well, first of all, you are working with a coach, right?

• 8:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Rich Roll?

  This Envol guy.

• 8:14Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, yes. I'm working with Nicola.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Swim run champion.

• 8:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, the swim run champion who owns Envol. And let me make sure I have his name correct before I screw up.

• 8:26Rich Roll?

  You don't know the full name of your coach?

• 8:29Adam Skolnick?

  I call him Nicola.

• 8:30Rich Roll?

  This shows me, this is telling me a lot. That's called a character reveal.

• 8:34Adam Skolnick?

  Is it really?

• 8:34Rich Roll?

  I just know, now I know how deeply emotionally invested you are in this.

• 8:39Adam Skolnick?

  Wait, I wasn't ready. Nicolas Ramirez.

• 8:42Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 8:43Adam Skolnick?

  Um, and he's French, actually, and lives in Sweden. And he's, he's been talking to me about, he has not come back with a training plan yet for this. He's just been giving me like runs to do and showed up in my garment and I do them. And he so far has not been like personally coaching me hardcore on anything. Cause I don't have anything on the calendar. I told him about this. He has not given me anything specific other than to say, the main thing is, and most people want to lay on the couch after you do the four miles because you think you need a lot of rest. But he's saying, don't do that. Don't let your legs get heavy. Make sure you're not doing that. And so, um, he's told me that David gave me some advice on nutrition, like he, you know, what he does anyway.

• 9:23Adam Skolnick?

  Smoothie, you know, before you run, um, you know, then meals after you run kind of thing to make sure, and making sure you get ahead of your nutrition. You have stuff prepared ahead of time. Um, the second day, he says, is very exhausting. So, uh, you know, that's when people like take more naps on the second day of it.

• 9:42Rich Roll?

  Right, right.

• 9:43Adam Skolnick?

  Um, meaning I guess Saturday to the Sunday. So I don't know. I mean, I'm just, I am kind of winging it like I do, like I did Attila. I kind of wing.

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  You're kind of like, well, I'm kind of doing this, but you, clearly there's no, there's no succinct plan in place right now. So I have lots of thoughts about this.

• 10:00Adam Skolnick?

  I've winged my whole career and it's working out okay.

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  Right, but what, Adam, what are you capable of if you actually formulated a plan?

• 10:08Adam Skolnick?

  Like had a like a five year plan?

• 10:10Rich Roll?

  That's, that's the growth opportunity here.

• 10:12Adam Skolnick?

  It is.

• 10:12Rich Roll?

  Well, there's lots of growth opportunities here. I mean, a few thoughts. I got plenty to say about this. And I think what's great about talking about this is that we can talk in a more meta global way about the power of endurance and endurance challenges and, and talk a little bit more at length about how you plan for approach and participate in challenges like this, which I think is something that a lot of the people who are watching or listening, you know, spend a lot of time thinking about as well.

• 10:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  So I think it's a good opportunity to do that. I love this challenge for lots of reasons. Not the least of which is, you know, it's led by, you know, by Commandant David Goggins, right? So he's, he, he, he will hold you to account. And, you know, I love how in the little sign up area, it's like cost zero dollars.

• 11:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yes.

• 11:04Rich Roll?

  Like, this is all about you and you, but, but also this sense that like David is, is peering at you from on high and is not going to let you get away with anything, which I think, you know, engenders a lot of excitement and.

• 11:18Adam Skolnick?

  And he checks in before each run.

• 11:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:20Adam Skolnick?

  With a motivational.

• 11:21Rich Roll?

  It's a social media driven thing.

• 11:23Adam Skolnick?

  It is.

• 11:23Rich Roll?

  A lot of engagement on his behalf.

• 11:25Adam Skolnick?

  And, but he also, you can sign up on his website to specifically get involved in it. You can raise money for a charity through it, but you don't have to sign up. He's like, it doesn't matter if you sign up. That's the whole point. Like you could do it your way.

• 11:36Rich Roll?

  Right. It's not about that.

• 11:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Rich Roll?

  The second thing is, uh, that I love about this is that it's hard, but it's also accessible. Like it's very hard, but also it's extremely doable. It's similar to the 29029 thing. Like,

• 11:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 11:52Rich Roll?

  Oh, what do you just, you just hike up this mountain and you take the chairlift down? Like, it doesn't seem that hard, but because you're trying to achieve the elevation of Everest, like you're going through the night and, and, you know,

• 12:03Adam Skolnick?

  Like a thousand foot mountain.

• 12:04Rich Roll?

  It's not until you're like two thirds of the way into it that people realize like, oh, this is harder than I imagined. And I think this is similar in that regard. You're essentially running an ultra with brakes.

• 12:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  It's a 48 mile run that is like an interval workout.

• 12:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 12:18Rich Roll?

  On some level. But because it's only four miles at a time, it just feels doable. Like, how hard is that? I go, I've run four miles. Like I can wrap my head around that.

• 12:28Adam Skolnick?

  That's exactly how I got suckered into this.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Right. But I also think that it's worth taking seriously and looking at it as an opportunity to more deeply connect with yourself as an athlete.

• 12:40Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Rich Roll?

  And to figure out like how you approach these things. And I think, so when is this, in early March?

• 12:48Adam Skolnick?

  It's March 5th.

• 12:49Rich Roll?

  March 5th, so.

• 12:50Adam Skolnick?

  So my overall plan, by the way, the reason I'm doing any of this is because I am an older dad, right? And my plan is just to, is to, you know, train for that, like to stay around and stay, and stay active and be able to chase him down and not like have my late game fatherhood impact him in any way that's like, he's gonna even notice.

• 13:13Rich Roll?

  It's a highly laudable goal.

• 13:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:15Rich Roll?

  Like, that should be the goal.

• 13:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Rich Roll?

  For you.

• 13:17Adam Skolnick?

  That's my goal.

• 13:17Rich Roll?

  It's a great goal. There's only so much that we can do at this point, given that this challenge is only three weeks away. So it's not like you've got six months to prepare for this thing. You've done what you've done leading up to it. You've put in some miles, so you're comfortable running distances, but you've never done anything that involves sleep deprivation or anything that involves this number of miles in such a compressed period of time. And so when I think about how you can best prepare yourself for this, there's a couple of things. First of all, nothing about this involves speed or power. This is all about resilience and persistent motion. You don't need to go out and do intervals.

• 14:00Rich Roll?

  You don't need to run any faster than a conversational pace. And I would go so far as to suggest that a great method to start to rehearse is a walk-run method going into this. And, you know, for people that are runners, talking about walking feels like a weakness. But when you do it properly, implementing a strategic walk-run strategy into your training and your participation in the event will actually provide dividends beyond what you can imagine. Because if you're training your walk, you can actually walk faster than a jog, like over time. And it provides your heart and your lungs the ability to get these mini recoveries within the runs.

• 14:44Rich Roll?

  So I would suggest to you that the overarching kind of philosophy right now should be, how do I get my body ready to be in a state of persistent motion when it's very fatigued? So that means... That you don't need to go out and do 12 or 15 mile runs. You're better off going out for maybe an eight mile run where every, every mile or half mile, you walk for five minutes. And the idea is getting through all of these workouts feeling fresh. And then perhaps having days where you're doing short runs. And I use the term run, you know, very broadly, like these can be very easy runs, light jogs,

• 15:28Rich Roll?

  but you're doing two or three throughout the day. So you're getting, you're acclimating your body to kind of always being moving.

• 15:34Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  And it has nothing to do with being fast or being winded or anything like that. It's really about can you keep moving forward when you're tired?

• 15:42Adam Skolnick?

  So how many, how many days a week? Should I do that this weekend, next week?

• 15:47Rich Roll?

  Well, I think, you know, in a broader context, I would approach this from a perspective of, of creating a periodized training program where you're building your base, then you're building strength, then you're, you know, getting a little bit of power. You're having easy weeks and then you're having harder weeks. And then you enter into the phase where you're really getting race specific and you're doing periodic simulation days, which I think you can still do and we can talk about, which is where you kind of mimic the actual event in some truncated way. Yeah, like, like when I was training for Ultraman, like two months out, I picked three days or my coach, Chris, and I picked, you know, okay, this week on Friday, Saturday,

• 16:31Rich Roll?

  Sunday, you're going to do 70% of the Ultraman event. And then we're going to have kind of a rest week and then we're going to build up towards over the next couple of weeks to a second race simulation weekend where we're going to do 80% of the distance. We're going to repeat that, have a rest week and then build up again and then do 90% of it. And that serves many masters. First of all, it's, it's, it's giving your body a sense of what this endeavor is going to look like and feel like. And also from a mental perspective, once you complete those simulation weekends, you're like, oh, I can, I, now I can wrap my head around this crazy thing that I never thought I could do before.

• 17:13Rich Roll?

  In your case, I would say we're three weeks out, so maybe you can do, pick two or three. SIM days between now and the event where you do, you know, 60% of the four by four by 48 where you're running like two miles every four hours for, you know, 24 hours or something like that. And you're like, okay, I did that. And then maybe probably just you were only three weeks out. So I would suggest maybe two SIM days and then a second one where you do three miles, but maybe you do it every three hours for 24 hours. Like, I don't think there's a lot of benefit beyond

• 17:58Rich Roll?

  the mental component of this to beating yourself up too much between now and then. You've kind of done the work like the work that you've done to date is pretty much going to dictate. You can't cram for an endurance race is the point. So there's only so much you can do now. And the worst thing that you want is to be tired on the day that the event starts. You want to be as fresh as possible. So making sure that you're, you know, for seven to 10 days before this, you're, you're really keeping it light. I think it's going to be super important. And I don't know that there is any real benefit to subjecting yourself to sleep deprivation, which you're already experiencing because you have a baby.

• 18:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, I have a baby that now has just popped his second tooth and has learned to corkscrew in his crib.

• 18:43Rich Roll?

  You're already not sleeping. So, but those, you know, when you wake up in the middle of the night and you got to put the baby back down, you might as well go out the door and run three miles before you go back to bed. Like, that would be a cool experience just for mental resiliency to like, be like, oh, it's three in the morning and I went out for a run.

• 19:01Adam Skolnick?

  Well, let me like, I actually think Zuma is going to help me with this because I have been going on, on fumes for a while sleep wise. And when I was reporting on the K2 thing, I had two or three days in a row where I was up at four in the morning to like talk to Pakistan. And it was so easy because I've been getting up at that hour. Like that's one of his hours that he gets up. And so I've been getting up at that hour and I was able to do it. And so I think, I do think that's gonna help me.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think that that's a mental hump in the sense that you, you go through a training regimen to prepare your body. So your body, you know, is prepared for the physical endeavor that you're doing. But interjecting sleep deprivation into your training program doesn't create the same benefit, at least in my experience. It's not like, like, oh, I did all this sleep deprivation training. So now, sleep deprivation is not a problem for me. There's something about sleep deprivation that it's gonna, it's gonna, no matter how much you, you've experienced that, it's still very hard. And for me, like, in my own experience, that's, that's the hardest thing. Like, I, you know, when I did the Epic Five, like, the sleep deprivation component of it was

• 20:11Rich Roll?

  really the most challenging for me personally. So I don't know how much benefit you get from subjecting yourself to that unnecessarily, other than, like I said, like, the, the mental strength that you garner from having weathered that. So this is gonna be, like, three weeks is a tricky time because you want to get some interesting training in that's gonna get your head and your body right, but you can't do too much because you don't want to be tired. And I think that you could wake up tomorrow and do this. Like, I don't know that you need to, because I do think this is, this is mostly a mental thing. For somebody to put in, you ran 100 miles last month. So, you know, you have some fitness with running. And I don't think that you need to

• 20:55Rich Roll?

  be that fit to do this because you could literally walk all of these four miles for this whole thing and still get it done. It's really a mental thing. And I think it's interesting that the first run starts at like, what, like 4pm or something like that? Oh, 8pm. Okay, so. What's cool about that is that you're gonna go through the evening and sleep deprivation aspect of this on the front end of the experience. Like if it, if the first run was at eight o'clock in the morning, then you're dealing with the nighttime and all of that when you're much more fatigued.

• 21:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Rich Roll?

  So I think that was smart that he set it up that way.

• 21:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Rich Roll?

  And that caters to, you know, new people who haven't done.

• 21:33Adam Skolnick?

  And it caters to the nine to fivers mostly.

• 21:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. So that they can do it and still, you know, be in their job or whatever.

• 21:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Rich Roll?

  So I think that's cool. I think, uh, you know, in a broader sense, talking about endurance, true endurance, you know, everybody knows who's listened to this show that I'm a giant proponent of zone two training. Um, and I think what you get with that, it's, it's really, to, to really be effective with this zone two philosophy, you have to play the long game. It's not something that you can develop in a short period of time. Literally to, to reach your kind of potential and capacity with that philosophy, it takes, it takes a couple of years. Like you can't even do it in a season.

• 22:15Adam Skolnick?

  Cause I'm like at 11:20 a mile now with my zone two and it started at like 12, 15 and I'm like.

• 22:20Rich Roll?

  This is why people burn out on it. Cause they get frustrated.

• 22:23Adam Skolnick?

  When am I gonna get fast?

• 22:24Rich Roll?

  They just wanna feel, yeah, they just wanna feel fast so they abandon it, you know, before they get the benefit of it, which is why it's a very particular type of discipline, the kind of discipline that requires you to hold back.

• 22:35Adam Skolnick?

  So you think like, excuse me, you think like in another year, that 11:15 could be 10:30 or something like that?

• 22:41Rich Roll?

  I can guarantee you that, that it would be at least that, but it requires very strict adherence and it demands consistency. Like you can't, you can't train three days a week in zone two and expect to get a great return. It's only when you're doing it day in, day out, day in, day out. Cause the whole idea is you're not really wearing yourself out so that you can get up and do it again the next day.

• 23:04Adam Skolnick?

  So is it five, five days a week?

• 23:06Rich Roll?

  Okay. Yeah, and you know that what that program would look like wouldn't mean that you're running every single day, but there would be some multi-sport activity that would contribute to you developing that endurance capacity, which then in turn creates greater mitochondrial density and your ability for your cells to produce energy at a lower like burn rate. And it helps enhance your body's ability to like utilize and metabolize oxygen for fuel and fat for fuel, all of these things that contribute to true endurance. So that this is something that Chris would always say to me, when you're truly, truly fit in

• 23:46Rich Roll?

  an endurance context, and I look at your Garmin data, and I look at your heart rate graph, it should be flat all the way across. Like if you're doing a 10 mile run, like how, how, how straight can you make that heart rate graph line such that it's wavering as little as possible? And he would say to me, I shouldn't be able to tell whether you're running uphill, flat, or downhill, because that heart rate should always be the same. And when you have that zone two fitness, let's say you're running on a flat and your heart rate's 142, you should be able to start climbing that grade, maintain that 142 heart rate. You're going to slow down a little bit, but the idea is keeping

• 24:29Rich Roll?

  that heart rate as flat as possible, like right on point. For me, it would be like 142, for somebody else, it's going to be somebody else. Okay. And to maintain that on a descent as well. And when you have this, then when you get into some speed work and some tempo work, you can dial it up like, okay, I'm going to do, I'm going to run 20 minutes at zone two, and then I'm going to do a round of intervals where I run, you know, two minutes at a, you know, 160 heart rate, and then bring it back down for a minute, and then go back up again. When you're really fit in an endurance context, you can ramp up for that tempo effort. And then your heart rate will quickly settle back down into that zone two range. When you don't have that true endurance fitness,

• 25:14Rich Roll?

  it's going to take a long time for that heart rate to come back down. And that's how I can like just internally, just being connected to my body when I know I'm not fit or yeah, I'm in a, I'm in a really good fitness place right now.

• 25:26Adam Skolnick?

  Interesting.

• 25:26Rich Roll?

  But it is playing the long game, you know, and it does require a certain kind of discipline and an unbelievable amount of consistency to get there and adherence to a well thought out, periodized schedule. Like ideally, when you're going to tackle a big challenge, something that intimidates you, that scares you, something that is outside of your comfort zone that you've never done before, you do want to pick a date on the calendar that is, you know, six to eight months out. And then you can really create and craft a program that will maximize your physical potential and what you can achieve in that, in that specific period of time.

• 26:08Adam Skolnick?

  Like a, like a longer swim run or something like that?

• 26:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. If you were going to, if you were going to do a full Otilo.

• 26:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 26:14Rich Roll?

  You know, the 70 kilometer or something like that. Like, do you have a year to plan? Well, if we have a year, like we can really, you know, get, get into the details of it. And if you take it seriously and prioritize it, then I think, you know, people are always amazed at what they can accomplish.

• 26:32Adam Skolnick?

  I think, so my strategy, I do, I do have a course kind of in mind and there's a little gradual, I mean, you would, you would call it flat, but there's a gradual uphill and a gradual downhill just in the streets all around me.

• 26:44Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 26:44Adam Skolnick?

  So I thought like when I get tired, I could walk the uphill and then jog the downhill and walk the uphill and jog the downhill as my kind of safe.

• 26:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you you told me about this the other day.

• 26:56Adam Skolnick?

  And you hate that idea.

• 26:56Rich Roll?

  That was, you know, ill advised. I I think that you you do have access to some pretty flat terrain.

• 27:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 27:02Rich Roll?

  Around your house. We talked about specifically what that that course would be.

• 27:06Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 27:06Rich Roll?

  But I would just keep it as flat and as simple as possible.

• 27:09Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 27:09Rich Roll?

  There's no need to add a complexifier into this with all kinds of different grades and try to figure that out. Um, I would just, I would keep it on the flats.

• 27:19Adam Skolnick?

  Well, these are like I said, you'd call it flat, but like those streets have like a little bit uptick. Like you you gain like 50 feet one way and you lose 50 feet the other way.

• 27:28Rich Roll?

  But what is your thinking in in terms of why that would be advantageous?

• 27:32Adam Skolnick?

  Well, just running them regularly because it's become like the pandemic run. Because when it, when you couldn't go on on the bike path and everyone was like clogging all these streets.

• 27:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:41Adam Skolnick?

  These are very wide streets that you can get away from people. So it became like close by.

• 27:46Rich Roll?

  And would that be the course that you would use for the event itself?

• 27:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  I don't think that's smart. Because the downhills, you think you're resting, but those can be like especially late in the game. Those are treacherous. Like it's the downhills that can beat you up just as much as the ascents.

• 28:06Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 28:07Rich Roll?

  And I think you would just be better off keeping it really simple and on the flats. And when and and you build in these like walk periods and you pace yourself out and understand that, you know, whatever four mile leg that you're on, it's not about that four mile leg. It's about the four mile leg that you're going to be tackling six hours later.

• 28:27Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 28:28Rich Roll?

  So you're in a state of constant motion, but also constant um conservation, right? You're always thinking about what's coming several hours later. You're mindful of what you're doing in the moment, but it's all about like, how can I? There's a, there's an equation that you have to run. Like, what is the minimal amount of output in this moment? So that I'm not spending too much time on this four mile leg. Because the more time it takes you to do that, the less rest you're getting, right?

• 28:58Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 28:59Rich Roll?

  But you don't want to overextend yourself because you're gonna, you know, meet the reaper six hours later and crash and burn. So. Constant conservation, trying to be as efficient as possible.

• 29:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Rich Roll?

  And that's why I think the walk-run method can be super beneficial.

• 29:17Adam Skolnick?

  So every mile.

• 29:17Rich Roll?

  Because if you start building, like, I would say, like, you know, like, this doesn't have to be for all your runs leading up to this, but if you start practicing doing these intervals where, yeah, I'm gonna run for a mile, and then I'm gonna walk for 30 seconds or something like that, and then run. And when you're walking, be mindful of how you're walking. Like, you can train your walk such that the walk can be almost as fast as your jog, and you're not using nearly as much energy. And your lungs and your heart get a chance to rest. But it's something that you train like anything else. So I think paying attention to that will be huge for you, getting into this.

• 29:57Adam Skolnick?

  I've been doing those, like, like I said, these intervals where it's 30, 60, 90 seconds, two minutes, up to five minutes at a tempo. And then either a back to zone two or a walk. And this is stuff that Nicola has sent me. And I do like those. And there's always a 15 to 20 minute zone two warm-up and a 10 minute zone two cool-down on the end.

• 30:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 30:21Adam Skolnick?

  Do you think that that is helpful with the zone two's development?

• 30:25Rich Roll?

  I think it's fine in the broader context of developing you as an athlete and as a runner, but with respect to this event, I don't know that doing tempo runs at this point, three weeks out, is gonna benefit you in any meaningful way. And in fact, it could just wear you out and make you tired. And I don't want you tired going into this.

• 30:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 30:45Rich Roll?

  So there's that aspect to it. Let's spend a few minutes talking about food and fueling strategies. I think David's advice is solid and very good in that before you run, you wanna be intaking calories that are easily metabolized and are not gonna cause stomach upset or require all your blood to go to your gut. When you have to go out and run, that would be bad. You get that food coma, and you get lethargic, and it's very difficult to move. So smoothies in the period leading up to a run, and then getting, you know, more bulk calories, you know, maybe 30 minutes after you finish your run, I think is a good strategy. And I also like what he said, and I believe this wholeheartedly, that

• 31:27Rich Roll?

  When you're fueling, you're not fueling for that next four miles. You're fueling for the four mile interval that's coming six hours later. You're always thinking about getting ahead on your nutrition. When you're gonna be, you're looking at 48 miles of running. So chances are you're gonna be running a caloric deficit no matter what. No matter how many calories you put in, you're probably gonna end up burning more than you eat. Maybe not, depending upon the athlete. But given that, you wanna be ahead on your calories. So it's not about that four mile, like I just said, I'm repeating myself. But this is the point that I wanna make. The instinct will occur like, I'm not hungry. I feel good, like I feel light. I don't wanna feel heavy when I go on and do this four mile run.

• 32:11Rich Roll?

  So I'll just eat later or I'll just, I'll bag that smoothie or that like rice bowl or whatever it is and I'll just do it, you know, after the next one. That happens to me because I do, I don't like to feel weighed down. The problem is then, you know, for two more intervals down the line, you're gonna, you're gonna bonk out because you didn't fuel properly all along. So you wanna test this in your training and figure out, everybody's different. Like how, you know, what is the, the right caloric intake for me? That won't upset my stomach, that will fuel me and allow me to feel good and won't weigh me down that I can metabolize? Cause everybody's a little bit different with this. And then also paying attention to your electrolyte balance. Like what products are you gonna be using?

• 32:53Rich Roll?

  Are you gonna be using like a, like a performance calorie drink? Like you can, something that's like a carbohydrate based drink that you can take calories in while you're running? Are you gonna be taking in electrolytes? What does that look like? Is there a product in mind that you have for that? Like all of these things you should test because some people, they drink Gatorade and they're throwing up or other people have no problem with that. I think coconut water is good, like I like coconut water. I've started using this product, Element. They've sponsored the podcast, so they sent me a bunch of this stuff and that seems to work really well as an electrolyte. It's a powder that you put in your, in your water. It doesn't, it's, a lot of those electrolyte products are super sweet. There's too much sugar in them. They cause a stomach upset. This doesn't have that.

• 33:38Rich Roll?

  It works really well for me. I can give you some of those samples, but you might wanna check that out. Okay. And I just know for myself. You know, when you're cycling, like doing ultra training or racing, you can, it's easier to, it's easier to taking calories. You're sitting down, it's a different posture. Running very hard, right? But there are products that are very calorically dense in, in liquid form that you could start to experiment with. Like I mentioned, Ucan is one, Carbure Pro. Like, these products are, are pretty good for that. It's a multi-dextran product.

• 34:12Adam Skolnick?

  Sorry. When I was doing the 10 or 11 mile runs more regularly, like in the hills, I would bring like a lemon, water, maple syrup based kind of thing that I'd make myself.

• 34:26Rich Roll?

  I think this is good.

• 34:29Adam Skolnick?

  So, I'm not gonna do that, I guess. You're saying, don't do that.

• 34:32Rich Roll?

  No, I would, I would start, I would get a couple of different products and try them out and see what suits you.

• 34:37Adam Skolnick?

  Element.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  And I can help you with that. You have an element and you can would be two that I would suggest.

• 34:41Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 34:41Rich Roll?

  For that.

• 34:42Adam Skolnick?

  What about smoothies, like, before, or?

• 34:46Rich Roll?

  I think that's good. You know, I think you should, you know, if you had, and again, it goes back to what's gonna upset your stomach. Like, if you have a green smoothie that's too green, your body might revolt. You know, chances are you're gonna get some diarrhea. That just kinda happens with this sort of thing.

• 35:01Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 35:02Rich Roll?

  But you gotta figure out what works for you. But I would, you know, I would, I would suggest foods that are nourishing and easy on the stomach and calorically dense. Like, I would have baked sweet potatoes, which are kind of like nature's gels. Like, you can chew on them, they go down really easy. Bananas are great. I mean, just your average, you know, Yukon potato is pretty good as well. Cooking some of those things. Some almond, almond butter, you know, almond butter.

• 35:32Adam Skolnick?

  Love almond butter.

• 35:34Rich Roll?

  You know, stuff like that. Avocados work well, too.

• 35:36Adam Skolnick?

  These are my favorite foods.

• 35:38Rich Roll?

  So.

• 35:39Adam Skolnick?

  You asked me the question, what I'm looking to learn about myself.

• 35:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like, why are you doing this?

• 35:45Adam Skolnick?

  I feel like a couple of things come to mind. One is, my feet are not great. Like, I have orthotics. I still have a mild plantar fasciitis in my left foot. I, I had an ankle sprain, a high ankle sprain. I took a week off and then got back to running. I took, I've taken this year, and especially since Zim was born, and looking at How injuries affect me in a very different way than I had for a long time.

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 36:10Adam Skolnick?

  Um, when I first had a, a, a foot pro, like I hadn't run. I had a bad case of plantar fasciitis in 2012. Yeah, 2012. And I could barely walk, like I was walking like an 80 year old man after a six mile hike. You know, it was like, it was really kind of scared me. I'm like, how, how bad is this? Um, and gradually, so I stopped running completely. And then I found, you know, my swimming became my main thing, but it never really had the, it was zone zero, like you said.

• 36:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 36:43Adam Skolnick?

  The way I was doing it. So I got back into running. Actually, my wife, when we first started hanging out, she got me back into running. And I was surprised I was able to do it because I was worried about my feet. And then I ended up having a tendonitis and broke, broke a bone in my left foot after a run and didn't realize it and walked on it and like had to go to Argentina for work and was walking on it for like a month. And by the time I got back, it was so bad that like it required PT and it required these orthotics and, but gradually from a treadmill, from, from a treadmill to a trail, I was able to start running again. And it was Otilo that got me running on the street again off a treadmill. And so that's kind of recent history. Had me always really worried about my foot.

• 37:26Adam Skolnick?

  If it, if it hurt at all, I'd take two days off, you know, like I was very much babying it. And then just like, you know, knowing what David goes through with his body and it doesn't stop him talking to you, you know, you don't, you don't get stopped by much. Um, so I just have taken a different view on it. And so I, yeah, when I sprained my ankle, it was a bad sprain. Like I knew it right when it happened. It was a terrible sprain. I've had a million times because I played basketball my whole life. And, uh, and I was like, fuck. You know, I'm right when I'm getting back in shape after the baby came, like, no way, no way am I gonna stop running because of this ankle. And I gave myself, like, I didn't even take a day off. I was in the water swimming the next day and I took a week off of running and I went

• 38:09Adam Skolnick?

  back to it, taped it up, just, just started doing it. And so I'm kind of, I'm kind of interested to see if I can pull this off with two wheels that aren't tip-top, you know, at my age and, and, and so I'm interested.

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  So here's, here's what's interesting about what you just said.

• 38:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Rich Roll?

  I asked you, what is it, why are you doing this and what is it that you want to learn? And then you just recounted your history of injuries and, and your tenuous relationship with endurance sports. But what you didn't do is tell me what it is that you're seeking to learn about yourself. Like, you, you made a general statement, like, I want to see if I can do it, of course, but that's on the surface level. What I'm saying is, you have an opportunity here, you're gonna go deep into the hole at some point, you're gonna have moments where you're gonna want to quit, it's gonna be dark, you're gonna be tired. So what is it about this that you're drawn to?

• 39:04Rich Roll?

  And how can you look at this as a lever for growth in some area of your life? Because I want you going into this challenge, thinking about some blind spot in your life or some aspect of how you're living that perhaps isn't working in the way that you would like it to. Because you can problem solve here. You're gonna, you're gonna go through something very difficult, you're gonna come out the other side of it, I have full confidence that you're gonna be able to do it. But what's most critical is how you evolve and grow as a result of this. And what is it that you can learn about yourself? And I'm not saying that you should have an answer to that, but I think that you should be asking yourself those questions, because this is the gift.

• 39:51Rich Roll?

  That keeps giving with endurance challenges. They are this lever for personal growth. And I think to just do it and say, well, that was fun and cool. That's fine, but you're missing the broader opportunity to, to do a little bit of personal inventory here. And all of that solitary time in the training and in the participation of the event itself, gives you that space that you just don't get as a young dad with a baby, when life is kind of coming at you really quickly. So, understand that alone is a gift. And then what you make of that experience, how it sets in motion some level of momentum,

• 40:33Rich Roll?

  or creates some type of foundation upon which you can build, I think is really, you know, the blessing of these types of adventures.

• 40:45Adam Skolnick?

  Interesting. Yeah.

• 40:50Adam Skolnick?

  I guess I don't have the deeper meaning answer just yet, you know? I guess I don't. I mean, I was looking at it as just, you know, I'd like to do it. I'd like to, I feel like I'll get some power out of accomplishing something like this. You know, a 50 mile run, basically. I was thinking of actually adding 0.18 or whatever to every run to make it an even 50.

• 41:10Rich Roll?

  Let's just do this and get through it. Like, you're gonna, you're gonna make it more difficult early on, and then you jeopardize like capsizing the whole shit.

• 41:19Adam Skolnick?

  So just do four.

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  Just do it, yeah. And if, if at the end of 48 miles, you're still like, I feel awesome, then go do another four miles. But don't make it unnecessarily difficult early on.

• 41:31Adam Skolnick?

  Okay, I'll stick with this. Look, I feel pretty good. Like, I keep things pretty simple in my life from a, from an emotional standpoint. Like, I don't try to, I don't try to overanalyze my life. I really don't. I don't try to be optimal in any way. Like, I'm not trying to optimize things. Like, that's not how I live.

• 41:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I get that. I'm not, I'm not encouraging you to do that.

• 41:51Adam Skolnick?

  No, no, no. But I guess what I'm trying to say is, I don't really, because of that, maybe I, I'm not as introspective in some areas, where maybe other people might be more introspective. Because I just don't feel like it helps me in my life. Like, I like keeping it pretty simple. Like, kind of in a Taoist way. Like, keeping it balanced, keeping it simple, trying to enjoy the beauty of the world, and, and take one step at a time. And that's how I approach basically everything I try to do. And, um, but that does come as a cost of introspection. Like, when you're taking it from a Taoist perspective of, like, you know, chop wood, carry water. There's not, like, chop wood, carry water, and then tell us what you think about that.

• 42:34Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and from that perspective, that is the more enlightened path.

• 42:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Rich Roll?

  Right? Like, I'm doing it for the sake of doing it, and I'm so immersed and present in the doing of it, that it doesn't have to mean anything more than that. I'm only, and, and I get that, and I think there's, there's tremendous beauty in that. I'm, I'm merely suggesting that, that accomplishing these sorts of things will undoubtedly leave you with an elevated sense of self-efficacy and a sense of personal possibility in your life.

• 43:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Rich Roll?

  And then, the question becomes, well, how do you channel that newly energized Adam Skolnick? Like, in what direction should you talk, you know, should, should you aim this, like, newfound, um, sense of what you're personally capable of?

• 43:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. That's a good question. And my wife's answer will be, he'll buy us a house. He won't be afraid to buy the house.

• 43:32Rich Roll?

  He won't be afraid.

• 43:34Adam Skolnick?

  He won't be afraid to pull the trigger on an offer.

• 43:36Rich Roll?

  Well, we could unpack that a little bit. I mean, so basically, she's saying, you could buy a house, but you're afraid.

• 43:42Adam Skolnick?

  Well, there was a couple of-

• 43:43Rich Roll?

  So what is that fear, what is that fear about?

• 43:44Adam Skolnick?

  There were a couple of opportunities. Um, I guess, I mean, I've been, I've been slugging away at this, at this job for a long time as a reporter, freelance journalist, and a writer. Um, and, and more recently, because of Can't Hurt Me, did, did-

• 44:01Adam Skolnick?

  Better than I ever thought I would financially. And I mean, at forty, I was wondering, what was like, like this whole career, like it could evaporate in ten years or less, and I could end up being really wondering what I'm gonna do. Obviously, I got through that before, can't hurt me, but then, you know, this has come with a windfall. And with that came, you know, some tax bills and all that. And so you end up looking at this account, and you have already put out all this money that you didn't get anything for, because it's taxes, because that's the way it goes. And then also put out a down payment. It just like was a lot to go out the door. And so I was like, can I just enjoy like a year where I'm not, where I never have to think about anything I buy?

• 44:46Adam Skolnick?

  And I think it's like a little bit of just having lived through hand to mouth for, you know, doing this job for twenty years.

• 44:53Rich Roll?

  So there's a little bit of trauma. There's a little bit of trauma because of your history.

• 44:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Rich Roll?

  And perhaps it might be worth examining whether or not you have some fear of largess, like a discomfort with-

• 45:08Adam Skolnick?

  Well, there's no doubt, there's no question about that.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like, oh, this windfall, it was a one-time thing, it's never gonna happen again, so I better hold on to this very tightly and not let it go, because I'm not deserving of it happening again, or this isn't, you know what I mean?

• 45:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I was thinking more like-

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  This is great, because this, I think these are the questions that you should be ruminating on when, you know, it's three in the morning and you're, you know, out in the dark.

• 45:33Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I wasn't even thinking about like, do I feel like I'm worthy? It's more like, although that's the deeper underlying meaning, when you're afraid, like, knowing, I could, I could come up with all the logical reasons, like, you know, Mark Twain had declared bankruptcy when he was basically after he wrote these great books. I mean, you know, like, I could, Herman Melville ended up working at the customs office after he wrote Moby Dick. You know, like, I could come, I could give you a hundred reasons why it's a bad career decision to become- Long term, and a lot of them are financial. I wasn't thinking of it as, am I worthy? Although that's probably the underlying thing. But what I was thinking about is I've never been comfortable, like I've never, I've never thought like living in the best house on the block was cool.

• 46:18Adam Skolnick?

  Like I've never thought, like I've never wanted to live in the best building. Like I, for some reason, I've just never wanted that for myself. And I think it's because there is something there about wealth and the way I see myself. And I think there's definitely some, some cobwebs there.

• 46:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not about like having the best thing. And I, I know you well enough to know that, you know, your perspective on, on, on the material world is rooted in, you know, a very heartfelt desire to see everybody flourish. Like you, you have a sensitivity to the underprivileged that I think is, is a beautiful thing. And that's where your, that's where your kind of focus lies. But it's also okay to, you know, live your life and enjoy it.

• 47:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 47:03Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 47:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Rich Roll?

  And to the extent that you're like, you don't want, I'm not saying you're martyring yourself or anything like that, but is there some guilt attached to the fact that suddenly you had some success that you didn't expect? And does that create some weird new emotions for you? I mean, clearly, you know, if April's like, you know, like she, she might be seeing a version of you that you can't see, right? And so I, you know, I don't have the answers to any of that, but I just think those are interesting questions to ask yourself and think about.

• 47:36Adam Skolnick?

  I like that.

• 47:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Adam Skolnick?

  This is great.

• 47:39Rich Roll?

  So I'm excited for you. You'll report back.

• 47:41Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 47:42Rich Roll?

  And we'll see how this goes.

• 47:43Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I'll report on my, on some of my, next time it'll be a sim before we even do the event.

• 47:48Rich Roll?

  Right, right. And we'll sort that out.

• 47:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Sort out the sim.

• 47:51Rich Roll?

  All right, well, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with lots of cool stuff to talk about, including listener questions and more.

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back. Before we get into a new segment we're calling The Buzz, is that what we're calling it?

• 48:13Adam Skolnick?

  The Buzz.

• 48:13Rich Roll?

  It was the big story.

• 48:14Adam Skolnick?

  Well, the big story, we didn't, we're not doing a big story this week. We're doing a shorter thing we'll call The Buzz.

• 48:20Rich Roll?

  Right. I like that.

• 48:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 48:22Rich Roll?

  I'm tired of the big story.

• 48:23Adam Skolnick?

  The big story's draining.

• 48:25Rich Roll?

  It really is. As you might have imagined, we pivoted away from politics today. There's a good reason for that. I think we're all fatigued of that, and we want to get back into the heart of the kind of stuff that I love to talk about. So, this is fun. Before we get into The Buzz, though, I did want to mention, for people that are watching on YouTube, they can see this, I'm wearing my Legion, Legion of Los Angeles t-shirt today.

• 48:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yep.

• 48:47Rich Roll?

  That's Justin Williams', Justin Williams's cycling team. He was a great guest on the podcast. And I ran into him yesterday. I was headed over to the studio here, Sunday, late afternoon, to put a couple of final touches on the Adam Grant podcast, which is up now. And I spotted him riding in his red, white, and blue Legion kit, pulled over, chatted with him. He was all fired up. He's got all kinds of good things going on with the team. He's very grateful for the podcast and all the people that reached out to him as a result of his appearance here. And it was a reminder that I had gotten this t-shirt, and I wanted to rock it.

• 49:26Adam Skolnick?

  It's a great t-shirt.

• 49:28Rich Roll?

  I think what he's doing is really cool. So, if you go to his Instagram, if you dig the t-shirt, and you want to support his team and what he's doing in the community of cycling, probably the best place is to go to his Instagram.

• 49:42Adam Skolnick?

  And you can buy, you can contribute.

• 49:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's got some schwag and gear and stuff like that.

• 49:46Adam Skolnick?

  I'm gonna buy one of those t-shirts. I love it.

• 49:48Rich Roll?

  That was kind of show and tell. We have more show and tell to do.

• 49:50Adam Skolnick?

  We do.

• 49:51Rich Roll?

  Anyway, get into it. The Buzz.

• 49:52Adam Skolnick?

  The Buzz.

• 49:53Rich Roll?

  What are we buzzing about?

• 49:54Adam Skolnick?

  We're buzzing about Clubhouse, the future of audio. This is a...

• 49:59Rich Roll?

  Is it, though?

• 50:00Adam Skolnick?

  Well, that's what we're wondering about.

• 50:02Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:02Adam Skolnick?

  The pros and cons of using it. So, Clubhouse is this new social media platform. It was, it's kind of like this thing where you go into different, you know, you, you become a member, you get an invitation, you enter this house and all in this house are an infinite number of rooms and each room has its own kind of topic or moderator going on and you can wander into the rooms and hear these interesting discussions. It is, to me, it's kind of part user-generated talk show platform, part like salons of the digital age, you know, those salons from like Gertrude Stein's Paris Salon is probably the best known version of it with Hemingway and Fitzgerald and all those great writers. This is for everyone to have a salon.

• 50:45Adam Skolnick?

  So, um, the, it was a tiny San Francisco startup with about a dozen employees founded by two entrepreneurs, Paul Davidson and Rohan Seth. And basically, I think, one of them is, I think, what is it? They both went to Stanford. Davidson created some social networking acts and apps, including Highlight, which allowed users to see and message people nearby. Seth was a Google engineer and co-founded a company called Memory Labs, which built apps. So they had this experience in the app space and they were kind of pinballing around trying to find something and this is the one that has taken off and they've raised a hundred million dollars in the last month and it's now-

• 51:28Rich Roll?

  I believe Andreessen Horowitz led that funding round. I know they're, they're pretty heavily invested in this platform.

• 51:34Adam Skolnick?

  And it's, it's now valued at a billion dollars and this thing just came out of nowhere. Like, I heard about it for the first time a couple of months ago. When did you, you were one of the first people on it, right?

• 51:41Rich Roll?

  I was very early in. Yeah, I got invited into Clubhouse at the very, maybe not at the very inception, but very early on. I think there were only like a thousand people on the platform at the time that, that I got invited on.

• 51:53Adam Skolnick?

  When was that?

• 51:54Rich Roll?

  It was, it was a while ago. Like, I don't, I can't remember.

• 51:57Adam Skolnick?

  A year ago?

• 51:58Rich Roll?

  No, maybe not that long ago. Can't, I can't, maybe a year ago. I'm not quite sure. Maybe nine, nine, 10 months ago? I'm not sure.

• 52:05Adam Skolnick?

  So 10 months ago, there were a thousand people on it and now it's-

• 52:07Rich Roll?

  There was barely anybody on it.

• 52:08Adam Skolnick?

  That's crazy.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  And I've dropped in and listened to conversations from time to time. I can't say I'm like a power user. It's interesting, like, now everybody's talking about Clubhouse. I think a big part of that is because Elon Musk- Was in a room the other day with the CEO of Robinhood and that was a big kind of like pivotal moment in the evolution of this platform that introduced it to a lot of people.

• 52:33Adam Skolnick?

  Because that was around the whole.

• 52:35Rich Roll?

  Like I've never, but I've never done a conversation there. I've got like a bunch of followers there, but I've not, I've never used it really, but I, I kind of check in on it from time to time and I've, I've been thinking about what this platform means and what it presents. And I do think there's something interesting about that salon aspect.

• 52:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  And having conversations that aren't just two people, but there's a variety of people that can chime in because you can quietly sit in the back and listen, or you can participate. And sometimes there's like 12 or 15 people that are all kind of like jockeying to have their point heard in these, in these rooms, in these specific rooms. It's sort of like eavesdropping on a party line or something like that.

• 53:21Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 53:21Rich Roll?

  Because it's happening in real time. These conversations are not recorded.

• 53:25Adam Skolnick?

  It's a party line. It's a great call.

• 53:25Rich Roll?

  They're not recorded unless somebody is, you know, recording them using something else, but they're not intended to be recorded. So it's an ephemeral kind of thing. And I think.

• 53:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Like an event, like a festival.

• 53:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So that spontaneity, I think, you know, contributes to a different kind of conversation than maybe you would have on a podcast where there's cameras and lights and.

• 53:45Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 53:45Rich Roll?

  A little bit of fanfare around it. Historically, my sense of Clubhouse is that there's been two camps that have grown there. One is, is very much a Silicon Valley, perhaps, you know, bro slash philosopher kind of ecosystem where there's a lot of conversations about the future of tech and it perhaps has a little bit of a libertarian bent to it and there's some controversy surrounding. Particular aspects of those conversations.

• 54:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 54:17Rich Roll?

  And at the same time, there's also a very robust community comprised of people of color, having interesting conversations about diversity and the future of the workplace. And now I think it's mainstreaming a little bit as more and more people are finding out about it and more and more people are onboarding onto it. And I've thought a lot about like my own personal relationship to this platform and whether or not I want to make use of it. And I think there's something interesting to be explored there. Like, I'm not averse to having a conversation with an interesting person on Clubhouse or participating in one of these broader talks. And I think it could be an opportunity to expose this podcast to an audience of people who perhaps are not familiar with it.

• 55:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Rich Roll?

  So there is a growth potential there, I think. But at the same time,

• 55:08Rich Roll?

  you know, I already do that here.

• 55:10Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 55:10Rich Roll?

  This is where I want the focus of my, you know, my audio content to live. And I think to jump onto Clubhouse and participate in conversations there is really contributing to the growth of that platform. And I'm more interested in growing my own audience and perhaps even, not perhaps, but definitely my own platform outside of these social media apps.

• 55:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Rich Roll?

  We're going to be launching, and I've mentioned this in the past, a portal, a membership portal for people that are like super fans, where we're going to have exclusive content and a lot more connectivity and interaction with myself and other people. We're working on that. We're going to be launching a pilot, sort of beta

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  version of that pretty soon. And I've got a lot more to share about that on future episodes. So I guess. I think it's super interesting and it will be fascinating to see how this develops and grows over time.

• 56:12Adam Skolnick?

  Well, especially since like Facebook's already got a rooms thing on Instagram and they're building.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  They can easily copy this thing and, and, and launch their own version.

• 56:19Adam Skolnick?

  Go the way of Snapchat.

• 56:20Rich Roll?

  You're going to see that pretty soon. I think that's inevitable.

• 56:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 56:23Rich Roll?

  You're seeing on Clubhouse, people who are doing these daily talk shows or weekly shows. I think that's cool. That is a version of podcasting that's unique in its own thing. But I think like podcasting, people are going to find out that it's going to be a grind, right? So who's going to, who's going to really develop an audience and stick to it? And be willing to do the kind of heavy lifting that's required to build an audience and remain consistent. Because the elons are going to pop in from time to time, but they're not going to be coming in weekly on Clubhouse. So what is it that people are going to be tuning in for? And I've just noticed when I open it up, I'll see a couple of conversations going on or a schedule of conversations that are going to be going on later in the day.

• 57:07Rich Roll?

  And I kind of go, that could be interesting, but like, I'd rather listen to this podcast where I kind of already know what's going to happen there and, and there'll be some, a forethought that goes into how that conversation is going to play out. So I've, I've listened in the background on some of these conversations and, and some of them have been cool, but I don't know. I don't think I'm going to be a power user on Clubhouse.

• 57:31Adam Skolnick?

  No, and then there's also the aspect of at some point, this kind of haze, COVID haze will all be lifted and we'll get back to normal life and everyone's going to want to go to a real salon, you know?

• 57:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 57:44Adam Skolnick?

  We're going to be hungry for that.

• 57:45Rich Roll?

  But, but the opportunity to kind of eavesdrop on like, well, what is Elon Musk going to ask the CEO of Robinhood? It's a pretty cool thing, right?

• 57:52Adam Skolnick?

  It is cool.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  And I think we're also going to see this platform pivot to a subscription-based model or a premium event platform where it's like, oh, you know, so-and-so is going to talk to so-and-so. So reserve your spot for seven bucks or whatever it is. And I think, I think that should be the case. Like if somebody's going to have like a really cool thing happening there, the creators of that or the participants in that should be remunerated.

• 58:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Well, that, I mean, you're, you're pointing to the thing that we talked about when we were talking about the social dilemma.

• 58:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 58:28Adam Skolnick?

  In that, um, what's the purpose of this platform? The purpose of the platform is not to get you into the room with.

• 58:37Rich Roll?

  The purpose of the platform is to create a unicorn and like have a billion dollar valuation.

• 58:42Adam Skolnick?

  And so everyone who's going there, um, they might think they're getting an experience, but really they're giving, they're giving power to this company.

• 58:50Rich Roll?

  They're the product, of course. And that doesn't mean that, that, that there isn't value in what's going on here.

• 58:55Adam Skolnick?

  It doesn't, it doesn't. And I'm not, and I'm not even, you know, that's entrepreneurship. It's fine. But, um, I do think like that has colored the way I look at all these platforms. And how do you want to make your, how do you want to spend your time?

• 59:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Adam Skolnick?

  And, um, I feel like I spend enough time on my phone, probably more than enough.

• 59:10Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:11Adam Skolnick?

  So personally, I am, I was invited. I'm, I am, I have it on my phone. I opened it once, like at eight in the morning, just to browse, like, well, like I was lying on the couch, like, or maybe even in bed or something like that. And two people wanted to talk to me. I'm like, wait a second. I got, I got out of there quick, man.

• 59:28Rich Roll?

  That happened to me too. I opened it up and there was some conversation going on around plant-based nutrition. So I thought, oh, this will be cool. But it was immediately noticed that I had like, that I was in the background or whatever. And, and I got a ping like, oh, join the conversation. And it was the same thing. I was like, I could have been in the bathroom, like, I don't know what I was doing, but I was certainly not prepared to like, you know, join in.

• 59:51Adam Skolnick?

  Hey, Rich, wait, wait, what?

• 59:52Rich Roll?

  And I, so I had like a little panic moment and I like logged out. I was like, am I live on this thing? I don't even know what's going on.

• 59:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, yes, yes. So beware when you first try to enter what might happen. So.

• 1:00:03Rich Roll?

  At the same time, another reason why Clubhouse is very much in the news and on the, on everybody's, uh, tongues and lips at the moment is because there's, they're trying to figure out what content moderation looks like here in this broader conversation around content moderation on Twitter and Facebook, et cetera. There doesn't seem to be any, um, effort or, or infrastructure around that with respect to Clubhouse at the time. And I think this is really interesting, like, like, how does that work? Like, what is the? You know, what is the, what is the, you know, value proposition around content moderation on a platform where conversations are happening live and in real time and are not being archived

• 1:00:48Rich Roll?

  or recorded? Like, are you, you know, certainly, um, if we've learned anything over the past year, that, you know, we do need to be thinking about this problem, but I just don't know how you implement any kind of solution, uh, on a platform like Clubhouse, not that, not to say that you, that you can't. Um, and I think even more broadly, there's conversations happening right now about content moderation in the podcast ecosystem as well.

• 1:01:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:01:22Rich Roll?

  Which, you know, I, I just, I can't imagine how you even approach that issue.

• 1:01:28Adam Skolnick?

  Why? Cause I don't think people really get like, like if I look at my Apple podcast feed and I see the way people frame their shows and not everyone frames them up. We've talked about this before. Not everyone comes correct with how, what their show really is. Um, why is it hard for these big, uh, platforms like Apple and Spotify and others to moderate?

• 1:01:50Rich Roll?

  Well, first of all, there's 2 million podcasts. There's something like 17,000 new podcasts that are being created every week, I think. And the number of hours that's getting on boarded every minute is insane. And in order to do any kind of content moderation, you can't just look at a Facebook post. You have to actually listen to what people are saying. And then you have to place, you can't even just transcribe it and really fully understand because it all has to be placed in the greater context of whatever conversation is happening.

• 1:02:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:24Rich Roll?

  There's going to be, you know, margin cases on the outskirts where maybe that's easy. Like if somebody's basically saying, we, you know, like fomenting insurrection and saying, we have to kill, you know, these people or something like that where you could easily, you know, immediately identify that there's a problem here. But other than that, like, podcasting is all about, like a nuanced conversation. And it's often about controversial or difficult topics. And I'm a believer in exploring.

• 1:02:58Rich Roll?

  Difficult ideas in long form as a way of stress testing my own views on things, but also as a service to humanity to get them to think about how strongly they hold their own beliefs. And so I think you need some some flexibility or kind of a broadness in that regard. So there's the logistical, technical aspect of how you would, you know, police, for lack of a better term, content moderate so much content. I don't know that AI is capable of that.

• 1:03:34Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:03:35Rich Roll?

  And

• 1:03:36Adam Skolnick?

  They'd have to build software.

• 1:03:37Rich Roll?

  You'd have to have millions of human beings. And also some things live, like, how long is it going to take you to? I just don't, I don't see how it's possible.

• 1:03:44Adam Skolnick?

  You couldn't do it within a show, but could you do it within like what the show is about, like, kind of the like?

• 1:03:49Rich Roll?

  Also, is it, is this something we should be doing?

• 1:03:52Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  At all?

• 1:03:53Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:03:54Rich Roll?

  I think that's a question we need to ask, you know?

• 1:03:56Adam Skolnick?

  Should we err on the side of free speech or not?

• 1:03:59Rich Roll?

  And, and, and on the logistical aspect of it as well, it's not like Facebook or Twitter where there's one platform. There's a whole stack of providers in the way that, you know, the AWS is the cloud support to these social media platforms with podcasting. It's not just Apple and Spotify. It's, it's all the hosting platforms. Like we host on Acast, there's Libsyn, there's Podbean, there's Blueberry, there's a million of these little companies. So

• 1:04:25Adam Skolnick?

  Which are like

• 1:04:25Rich Roll?

  Where are we doing the content moderation? Are we, are we doing it at the level of Apple and Spotify? Or are we doing it at the level of these hosting companies?

• 1:04:33Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:04:34Rich Roll?

  And what incentive do they have? Like, a lot of them are small companies. They have teams of 10 or 20 people or something like that.

• 1:04:40Adam Skolnick?

  These hosting companies you're talking

• 1:04:41Rich Roll?

  Set up to be able to do this.

• 1:04:42Adam Skolnick?

  They're like the version of web hosting for podcasts.

• 1:04:46Rich Roll?

  Essentially, yeah. Like, that's where the actual, like, audio file rests. And then you have this thing called an RSS feed, which is basically a way of syndicating your content across the internet. So by definition, it's an open structure, which makes it different and infinitely more complicated than these social media sites.

• 1:05:05Adam Skolnick?

  You know what's funny is that when the internet was born, its openness, the idea of open source and open everything and you can, you know, and it's a free for all was kind of seen as it will, it will end up being, it's like evolution. It will be a good. The end product will just automatically be good. And now we have We're in this kind of dark middle phase where it's turning out.

• 1:05:29Rich Roll?

  We're in our early adolescence.

• 1:05:31Adam Skolnick?

  Right, we're not sure that that will turn out that way.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  We're stumbling around in the dark, trying to solve problems that humanities never had to face before, which makes it really difficult.

• 1:05:40Adam Skolnick?

  But moderation and censorship, it's like they're, it's kind of a fine line, right? Between, between the two things like, um, and then you can't like, we didn't talk about this before, but this is a good time to talk about it like, the, everyone is so prone to outrage right now that like, anything said now might be construed in a way that five years from now, we'd look back and laugh at, or five years ago, we would think, what? Like, why are people outraged about that? You had, you posted, you, you went on a hike with Alexi Papas? And you posted yourself at the top, having fun with masks on, and what happened?

• 1:06:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so that was interesting. Um, Alexi Papas and I hooked up for a hike the other day. Um, we had a great time, super fun. And we're like, oh, let's take a picture, you know, when we're at the top of this little climb. And, uh, and we had masks, so we took the picture, posted it. And a lot of, look, to be fair, a lot of people were like, oh, that's so cool. You guys talked about like, you know, getting out for a run together and you actually did it. But there were a lot of people who were very angry that we were wearing masks in the great outdoors. And people, you know, hurling epithets at me and saying that I thought you were about wellness and you should be, you know, drinking in the biosphere and you don't need to be wearing masks outside.

• 1:07:06Rich Roll?

  And you've bought into the great hype and.

• 1:07:09Adam Skolnick?

  You were wearing a face diaper.

• 1:07:11Rich Roll?

  But it was, it was less like, all right, fine, there's, there's anti-mask people and there's people who have strongly held beliefs about the efficacy of wearing masks. But it was more the tone, like the vitriol of the whole thing, that really bummed me out. It was, it was disappointing that so many people felt so strongly about that when I was like, just trying to share a fun picture of Alexi and I out on a hike. Um, and I guarantee you that had we taken the photo with masks off. It would have been the same thing, just a mirror image of that.

• 1:07:40Adam Skolnick?

  Reverse, yes.

• 1:07:41Rich Roll?

  You know, and, and I think it speaks to that level of, um, you know, outrage that we're seeing in general at the moment.

• 1:07:50Adam Skolnick?

  And where people are more focused on stuff outside themselves on this little screen than what's, than their own self. And even better, um, like now it's more important to, it's more important what you say or how you said it than what you do and how you live your life in a way. It's like the perception has shifted, you know, like, like you can be misconstrued so easily. Um, and, and then there's also the thing is a lot of those people who are making comments on what to do with a mask or not, they're not necessarily qualified to make those comments either.

• 1:08:29Rich Roll?

  And it's like, listen, you know, I'm not virtue signaling because I'm afraid of losing followers or anything like that. But I think like it's better to like put a picture up where we're being safe than on the other side of it. But that's really all the thought that went into it, you know?

• 1:08:44Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I agree with you. It's okay to be safe.

• 1:08:46Rich Roll?

  You know, and then at the same time, people, I was wearing my ons, my on running shoes. So then there were people who were like, well, I guess, you know, Tony Riddle and the minimalist thing didn't, didn't stick with you. You abandoned it already, like the Vivo barefoot. I was like, I wear Vivos, I wear ons, I wear all different kinds of stuff. Like I'm trying different things all the time. On this day, I happen to be wearing my on running shoes. Like it's really nothing more than that.

• 1:09:10Adam Skolnick?

  You can't, well, listen, you can't.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  And it just makes me think, why am I even posting on these social sites? It's like, I don't, it, it, it makes me really disinterested in engaging on those platforms at all.

• 1:09:23Adam Skolnick?

  Is that right?

• 1:09:23Rich Roll?

  And, and, and it's more reason to create my own platform where the people are interested in what I'm doing, wanna, you know, participate and, you know, be connected to the work that I'm doing.

• 1:09:34Adam Skolnick?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:34Rich Roll?

  Like why, you know, what's the, what's the benefit?

• 1:09:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, there is a benefit for you to build the podcast through that platform since you've put so much effort into building your, your kind of following.

• 1:09:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, they're, they have a utility in that regard.

• 1:09:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:52Rich Roll?

  But at some point, it's like, if I can't post a picture of me and a friend out on a hike without it being controversial, then...

• 1:09:58Adam Skolnick?

  It's this weird time we're in, dude. People are so like, they're like, they're like, hair triggered to fucking launch because of, we've...

• 1:10:05Rich Roll?

  And listen, you know, to, to take a cue from, from Adam Grant and all of the amazing work that, that he's doing and how he speaks about...

• 1:10:15Adam Skolnick?

  That book is killing it, by the way.

• 1:10:15Rich Roll?

  Oh, it's unbelievable.

• 1:10:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:17Rich Roll?

  How he, how he thinks about, you know, engaging with people. It's like, people, you know, I, how can I, how can I look at that particular instance from a perspective of curiosity and empathy? And like, people are having a hard time. We're all stuck at home.

• 1:10:32Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Rich Roll?

  Maybe, you know, there, there's snowstorms everywhere at the moment and it looks like a nice day in Los Angeles and I'm out with a friend and that made somebody angry and they lash out because they're having a hard time or they got laid off or, has nothing to do with me.

• 1:10:46Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:10:46Rich Roll?

  So, the more that I can inhabit that space, it doesn't, it doesn't bother me.

• 1:10:51Adam Skolnick?

  I think they just wanted to see your pretty face, Rich, and they were really pissed off. They had to look...

• 1:10:54Rich Roll?

  I don't know what it was.

• 1:10:54Adam Skolnick?

  Someone called it a face diaper on your, on your, on your...

• 1:10:57Rich Roll?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:58Adam Skolnick?

  Face diaper. I haven't heard that one.

• 1:11:00Rich Roll?

  Uh huh. Anyway, moving on.

• 1:11:03Adam Skolnick?

  Moving on. Show and tell.

• 1:11:05Rich Roll?

  Let's do it.

• 1:11:06Adam Skolnick?

  All right. I've got something. I'll be right back.

• 1:11:09Rich Roll?

  Um, oh, you're gonna go get something? Well, you do that, I'll share one thing that I have right now, which is, uh, this mug. If you're watching on YouTube, you can, you've probably been looking at this red mug, thinking like, that's cool, what is that? So, I had the wonderful Steven Pressfield on the podcast the other day. People will know him as the author of The War of Art and Turning Pro. Um, he's had a huge influence on me as a creative person, perhaps the most influence of anybody that I had never previously met, and it was a super honor to have him on the show. We had a great conversation. I'll be sharing that soon. But he came bearing gifts and he brought me this mug,

• 1:11:49Rich Roll?

  which was made by this artisan potter called Joel Cherico. And essentially what it is, it's called a kothon, and it's inspired by the ancient Spartan warriors who fought in the Battle of Thermopylae like 2,500 years ago, which is a subject matter that Stephen writes about in some of his military novels. And he kind of discharged this potter to craft this kothon, this drinking cup, which was valued for its use on military campaigns with the Spartans. Nobody knows exactly what they look like specifically,

• 1:12:32Rich Roll?

  but Stephen challenged this potter to come up with the design based upon historical records. And this is what he came up with, and I absolutely love it.

• 1:12:41Adam Skolnick?

  So you're drinking your coffee out of a Spartan chalice?

• 1:12:44Rich Roll?

  I am, yes.

• 1:12:45Adam Skolnick?

  But the Spartans were the 100, like that great movie 100, right?

• 1:12:49Rich Roll?

  Well, the Battle of Thermopylae was 300.

• 1:12:52Adam Skolnick?

  300.

• 1:12:52Rich Roll?

  Right? It's basically the same thing.

• 1:12:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Rich Roll?

  And this cup was... So the way it goes, the way it's written here, visibly off-putting elements in stream or river water, which had to be drunk, were concealed by its color, while the dirt in the liquid was trapped in the lip, so that it reached the mouth. So whatever reached the mouth was cleaner? I guess that's the design aesthetic of the whole thing?

• 1:13:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Rich Roll?

  Essentially 2,500 years ago. And it has this cool seal on it, which is like the Spartan seal.

• 1:13:23Adam Skolnick?

  It's cool. I was wondering about that.

• 1:13:25Rich Roll?

  I just thought it was great. They're beautifully rendered, and I wanted to shout out Joel Cherico for his work. So if you guys want to learn more about his pottery, go to Cherico Pottery, it's C-H-E-R-R-I-C-O pottery.com. And get your own mug, I suppose. So thank you, Stephen, and thank you, Joel, for the gift.

• 1:13:45Adam Skolnick?

  And you have some shoes on as well.

• 1:13:47Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah, I do. So back to Alexi. So when Alexi came on the podcast, she was wearing these shoes called Atrea that I didn't know about. She's now sponsored by this running company. And I thought, those are really cool. They're unique. I hadn't ever seen shoes like that before. So I looked them up on the internet, and I bought a pair to check them out. And what I learned was pretty cool. So I'm wearing them right now. They're kind of dope looking, right?

• 1:14:13Adam Skolnick?

  They are.

• 1:14:14Rich Roll?

  They're pretty minimal. They have like on the inside, it says fear, fear only regret. Each one of their models has like a different little saying on the inside of them.

• 1:14:23Adam Skolnick?

  I like that.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  But what's unique about this particular brand is this subscription model that they have. And the shoes are incredibly affordable. Like you can buy a one-off shoe for 75 bucks. But if you go on a subscription, they're $55 and they come to you. You can set how often they send you new pairs, like two months, I think is the suggested interval. Because these are very kind of like lightweight. If you're running a lot, they're going to wear out more quickly.

• 1:14:50Adam Skolnick?

  And 75 bucks a year, you're saying?

• 1:14:52Rich Roll?

  75 bucks for one pair if you buy a single pair. And a typical pair of running shoes is like 95 to 110 dollars or something like that. 55 dollars for a shoe, like that's super affordable.

• 1:15:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:03Rich Roll?

  And they come with a return shipping label. So when you get your new pair, you send the old one back and they upcycle them and donate them to people who need shoes, which I think is really cool. On top of the fact that the company was founded by this guy, Michael Krychek, who is a sober dude, who has his roots in the music and restaurant industry. And they're in, I think they're in Austin. Yeah, I think he's in Austin. Anyway, I thought it was cool. They're not, they don't sponsor the podcast or anything like that, but I saw it was a cool brand. And, and I wouldn't have found out about it except for Alexi because she was wearing them. She's rocking them now. So anyway, that's what I'm wearing today.

• 1:15:41Adam Skolnick?

  Go Alexi.

• 1:15:41Rich Roll?

  That's my big show and tell.

• 1:15:42Adam Skolnick?

  I like Alexi's good pain analogy.

• 1:15:46Rich Roll?

  She's full of, of little nuggets of wisdom, isn't she?

• 1:15:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Rich Roll?

  So I shared the, the, the clip of her talking about the rule of thirds and people just love that.

• 1:15:56Adam Skolnick?

  That's amazing.

• 1:15:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:57Adam Skolnick?

  Um, I just downloaded her book, actually.

• 1:15:59Rich Roll?

  So we haven't, we haven't commented on the fact that you're wearing a moon suit right now.

• 1:16:03Adam Skolnick?

  Sorry.

• 1:16:03Rich Roll?

  You disappeared when I was talking about, I was so into the mug and then the shoe and then you returned and you're wearing like a parka.

• 1:16:09Adam Skolnick?

  Get yours on.

• 1:16:10Rich Roll?

  So, all right, talk and I'll go get it.

• 1:16:12Adam Skolnick?

  All right. So we are wearing. Shackleton Expedition Grade, uh, parkas, I guess. Um, so Shackleton is this, uh, expedition grade gear company, but they also have like, I guess, performance attire that also looks good and is super high end. I think Italian made. Um, this one is a performance jacket that is-

• 1:16:35Rich Roll?

  I'm already hot.

• 1:16:36Adam Skolnick?

  Is graded to minus 25 degrees Celsius. It's basically Antarctic grade, like summer in Antarctica, we could wear this and, you know, a Legion t-shirt and those shoes and be just fine, I think. Um, and it was made out of plastic recycled, uh, plastic bottles. So, um, they developed it in partnership with, uh, with an organization called the Blue Marine Foundation. And, you know, Shackleton made his name on an expedition to Antarctica that kind of was a failed fraud expedition, but his leadership basically saved everyone's life in this crazy period of time. They lived for, for like almost a year on ice, you know, in, in, in, in sheet ice in

• 1:17:19Adam Skolnick?

  the middle of the ocean and it kept everyone's, you know, sane and alive. Um, anyway, so this has been, let's see, it's, it's, it's made from recyc- 100% recycled fabrics, made, and post-consumer plastic bottles have been recycled repurposed to create this waterproof shell. So the, all the fabrics are recycled and the shell is made out of the bottles and then it's filled with goose down, so, you know, sorry, it's not vegan.

• 1:17:43Rich Roll?

  That's not so good.

• 1:17:43Adam Skolnick?

  No, but it, they're not a sponsor.

• 1:17:46Rich Roll?

  I appreciate, they're not a sponsor, no. And this was a gift, I appreciate that, yeah. It would be cool if there was no down in it.

• 1:17:52Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Rich Roll?

  But I appreciate the recycled plastic aspect of this.

• 1:17:56Adam Skolnick?

  It is, it is good. So it's a, it's, it is a beautiful jacket. If you're, if you're going to Yellowstone in the middle of winter, this will help. I was in Yellowstone, it was like minus 20 and I had like a Patagonia jacket that was graded to like 30 degrees.

• 1:18:10Rich Roll?

  Hmm, so essentially there's nowhere on planet Earth that you can go in this coat and, and be cold.

• 1:18:16Adam Skolnick?

  No, I mean, except-

• 1:18:17Rich Roll?

  Maybe at the bottom of the ocean.

• 1:18:19Adam Skolnick?

  Or the top of K2.

• 1:18:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, right, okay, cool. Well, thank you for the gift, I appreciate it.

• 1:18:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:18:35Rich Roll?

  So, talk to me about this on the subject of the bottom of the ocean.

• 1:18:40Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:18:41Rich Roll?

  This WSL, We Are One Ocean Campaign that we wanted to talk about.

• 1:18:46Adam Skolnick?

  The teachable moment today is WSL and WSL Pure, which is the nonprofit arm of the World Surf League, have launched a campaign to get ground swell support to encourage the UN to help declare 30% of the ocean off limits to development, oil exploration, gas development, fishing, commercial fishing, not all fishing, commercial fishing, by 2030. And the reason being is, well, there's a few reasons for it, but we are in the middle of a, you know, possible mass extinction event where species are going extinct at

• 1:19:31Adam Skolnick?

  a high level. The ocean is being acidified. The highest acidification of the ocean in terms of rate there's ever been. That matters because our every second breath comes from the ocean. 90% of the carbon dioxide that we've ever emitted winds up in the ocean, and that's the reason for the acidification. We have coral reefs that are dying. We have, you know, kelp forests that are going away. The water temperature is higher than it's ever been. So because of all of this, we are now worried about species collapse and total systems collapse, which matters to us, you know, from an oxygen standpoint, from

• 1:20:16Adam Skolnick?

  a life standpoint, from food standpoint. And so, one solution to our problems that the scientists have decided is that if you can declare 30% of the ocean off limits to development in any way and protect it. That has proven to be a driver for climate resiliency, increased biodiversity. It protects coastal areas from erosion. And it just is protecting, you know, vulnerable species. It also ends up being helpful for commercial fisheries because it gives, it provides sanctuary.

• 1:20:56Rich Roll?

  Right, the populations are more robust.

• 1:20:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right, for nurseries.

• 1:21:00Rich Roll?

  Bounce back.

• 1:21:01Adam Skolnick?

  Someone's calling our line. Nurseries for fish populations to bounce back so that, like you just said. So, the WSL has set up a website called weareoneocean.org. And they want you to sign a petition that will go to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, which is being held in China in May 2021. And the petition is basically asking the UN to set this 30 by 30 standard. And then let the countries decide amongst themselves. You know, each country will take that standard and then decide how much of the coastal waters

• 1:21:43Adam Skolnick?

  will be preserved, how much of it will be in national waters, and then how much in international waters can be preserved. Because some of the problem is there's overfishing in international waters where there's nobody regulating, right? The US is very good at regulating our fisheries. We actually have great fishery regulation. I would argue, I've looked into this for some stories, and it's the best in the world from what I can tell. And fishery management is going up in all sorts of countries around the world. But at the same time, we have fishing boats on the very edge of the Galapagos National Park, commercial fishing boats, and sharks are getting taken and everything's getting taken, right at the very edge of that. So what does that tell us? Tells us two things. One is, MPAs work.

• 1:22:26Adam Skolnick?

  Because there's a reason those fishing boats are right at the other end of an MPA, right? And some people are worried they're coming into the national park. That's a question that people are looking at. But they tell us that these kinds of things work. But eventually, you know, if you have a nursery of fish, they will go out. They need to go into the open ocean. And that's when you should be able to fish for them. And so, the other thing it tells us is that we do need patrol, this kind of thing. We need, we need higher patrols in the areas that are marine protected areas. Now, there is organized opposition that has popped up against the WSL. Some recreational fishermen are not happy that are also surfers that pay attention to what the WSL does. And they've been pushing back

• 1:23:08Adam Skolnick?

  on this idea of 30 by 30, partly because in California, there's an effort to get 30% of the ocean and 30% of land preserved by 30, 30, by 2030. There was a ballot measure that failed, and now there's a movement in the assembly to try to get that done. And so, commercial fishermen have put out talking points and are very much against that. This is not that. This is not the WSL saying California needs to do X, Y, or Z, or even the United States. This is the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, let's set this standard, and then let's let the countries work together to try to figure out the best way to do it.

• 1:23:43Rich Roll?

  Right, in kind of a Paris Agreement type of context.

• 1:23:46Adam Skolnick?

  It's exactly the perfect analogy.

• 1:23:48Rich Roll?

  Well, a couple of things. First of all, like, leave it to the surfers. Surfers are always at the vanguard with respect to ocean preservation. So, thank you for your service. And it's certainly laudable. And when you look at it broadly, it's like, how hard can it be to, you know, our oceans are so vast, can't we set aside 30%? That should be a no brainer and very easily accomplished. But I'm envisioning all of these countries getting together to try to hash out which parts are protected and which aren't. And I can just see that being a shit show in terms of...

• 1:24:23Adam Skolnick?

  Well, it's already happened, right? So, like, in Antarctica, Lewis Pugh, the great swimmer that has swum in Antarctica before...

• 1:24:29Rich Roll?

  Amazing, amazing guy.

• 1:24:31Adam Skolnick?

  He swims in Greenland, Antarctica, wherever he can to raise awareness of climate change. And the reason he wants MPAs, there's one, I think, West Antarctica and East Antarctica, one of them has already been declared an MPA.

• 1:24:45Rich Roll?

  What does the MPA stand for?

• 1:24:46Adam Skolnick?

  Marine Protected Area.

• 1:24:47Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:24:48Adam Skolnick?

  And so in the Marine Protected Area, you cannot, some of them you can, you can recreationally fish, but you can't commercially fish. You can't deep sea mine, which is a threat now. You can't drill for oil and gas, that kind of stuff. And so he was trying to get East Antarctica to become an MPA. And it would be, it would create the biggest Marine Protected Area in the history of humanity all around Antarctica, which is always supposed to be about the betterment of the United, of the, of the human family, right? The world governments came together and they never fought over Antarctica. It was always seen as this place where it shouldn't be about commercial enterprise. It should be about science and well-being. And he went down and swam in, in a glacier melt and he did this great thing.

• 1:25:33Adam Skolnick?

  And he was trying to get the UN to sign on to make this MPA happen. And China and Russia held out. And so it just took one no vote, basically of the Treaty of Antarctica. We weren't a member of that. It's, it's basically whoever signed on to the Treaty of Antarctica in the early days, they were the votes on it. And those two, China and Russia, held out. So this isn't a slam dunk, but we do need to recognize that we have a problem in our ocean. It's so vast, like you said, it seems like nothing can harm it, but it, you know, it is suffering.

• 1:26:07Rich Roll?

  So We Are One Ocean, what's the website?

• 1:26:12Adam Skolnick?

  WeAreOneOcean.org.

• 1:26:13Rich Roll?

  Dot org, right. And you can sign the petition there. There's a, there's a video, there's also another link, the WDRV.it link.

• 1:26:20Adam Skolnick?

  No, that was, that was kind of a-

• 1:26:22Rich Roll?

  That was one of the video, kind of like a video.

• 1:26:23Adam Skolnick?

  That was kind of presentation to journalists. So it was kind of like, it's not really wide. The WeAreOneOcean.org is the one you want. And, you know, Italo Ferreira, the world champion surfer is, is on board with this. A lot of major surfers are on board with this. My friend Reese Pacico is the kind of brain behind it at WSL Pure. And, you know, on this, he gets into the CO2, why, why it matters that the ocean is warmer than ever. What can we do besides CO2 emissions to significantly reduce other major stressors like overfishing and offshore oil development, blah, blah, blah. And that is setting aside. You know, big chunks of the ocean.

• 1:27:03Rich Roll?

  Cool, man. Well, keep us posted. Everybody check out that petition. Give it your signature.

• 1:27:08Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  And let's move on to listener questions.

• 1:27:11Adam Skolnick?

  Listener questions. So this one came in from Adam from Santa Monica. Oh, wait. That's me. I am, I was gonna say this.

• 1:27:22Rich Roll?

  You should have actually called in and left a voicemail and then we could play it.

• 1:27:26Adam Skolnick?

  I should have. Adam from Santa Monica is beyond outrage. This, we talked about this. We wanted to pivot away from talking about anything political. That last bit aside. Because I'm just like-

• 1:27:39Rich Roll?

  Although the sort of content moderation is highly political as well.

• 1:27:43Adam Skolnick?

  It is, but we're not really talking about like party politics and that kind of stuff. We're talking about issues that concern us all. But I'm kind of so beyond outrage, I couldn't watch the impeachment. I didn't want anything. I didn't have any more energy for it. And I was just thinking like, how do we move beyond outrage as a people? Because I've always found anger to be very powerful. It's a powerful tool. It can drive you in productive ways. But if it stagnates, it can become bitterness, which I think we saw on your feed. Some of that. And bitterness is so counterproductive. I think it fuels almost everything bad that we see that kind of bubbles to the surface here lately. So I guess the question is, you know, how do you move beyond outrage and anger?

• 1:28:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, isn't that the $64 question? I mean, yeah, your, mine as well. My outrage stores have been depleted. I feel incapable of it at the moment. But, you know, I have to also recognize that that depletion of my outrage is perhaps, you know, on some level, a function of privilege, you know, because I'm not in need at the moment. And I think we have to deconstruct this question from two perspectives. From the kind of greater social, uh, community, um, aspects of outrage and what's fueling that and what the antidote is. And then our own individual behavior that we can take responsibility for.

• 1:29:12Rich Roll?

  Because I think- Broadly, culturally, nationally, we're not going to be able to move beyond outrage until we solve some very large problems that we face, most particularly the wage gap. You know, we're in a situation where the middle class has disappeared. The division between the haves and the have-nots have never been greater. In the midst of the pandemic, the richest people have enriched themselves beyond measure, when they could have used that wealth to, you know, basically confront the coronavirus pandemic for the benefit of the less well-off. Like, there's plenty of things that the most landed gentry class in our country could

• 1:29:55Rich Roll?

  have been of service to us in a way that we didn't see. Yes. Meanwhile, people are losing their jobs, they're losing their health insurance. We're not seeing any real effort regarding like how to resolve any of this. And that wealth gap is only going to exacerbate. And I think, you know, over the course of history, if you study history, when that gap becomes too large, the foundations upon which that culture are embedded begin to fracture. And either revolution or some other force intervenes, and that's how changes in government occur. When we have so many people who are suffering at the moment, we can't begrudge them for their outrage.

• 1:30:40Rich Roll?

  Now, that outrage gets stoked by the news cycle and social media apps that provoke that outrage and exacerbate it to some extent. And I think we all need to be aware of the extent to which our anger gets triggered. But I'm sympathetic to people who are outraged right now because their lives are not what they should be or what they could be in this moment. On an individual basis, when I look at my own...

• 1:31:14Rich Roll?

  How I comport myself and how I behave and how I deal with people who are outraged or I'm in a context in which somebody's angry at me, I have to think about the conversation that I had with Adam Grant, you know, and how he talks about and how the science, what the science reveals about how to have more productive conversations and how to ameliorate tensions. And again, and it's not like I haven't talked about this before. It all goes back to leading with empathy, you know, entering these conversations with humility and with curiosity as opposed to a need or a desire to change somebody else's mind. If you ask somebody, that's interesting that that's how you feel, or that's the way

• 1:31:58Rich Roll?

  you see things. Tell me more about that. Or walk me through the process of how you arrived at that conclusion. I think that's always the way in. But when you come at it aggressively, then you're in a position where you're butting heads. Nobody's mind is getting changed and you're just basically doubling down on the difference and the acrimony that lives and breathes between two different people. Yeah. Further to that, what is the solution? If you enter those conversations with that spirit of empathy, humility and curiosity, well, you have to be willing to sit down for a while, right? And that's where I think long form conversations come in. That's why

• 1:32:39Rich Roll?

  I believe in podcasting so much as an antidote to all of this. You know, podcasting, because of the open nature source of it, the fact that it's an RSS feed and that it's not about clickbait titles and, and, you know, trying to, you know, game the system, not that the system doesn't get gamed in other ways, but there's something unique about it. There is no, like, podcasting suffers from a discoverability problem. Like, unlike YouTube or other things, like, you, it's difficult to find new stuff and it's difficult to kind of game, you can't do it with a clickbait title, right? Right. So I believe that the best stuff eventually rises to the top and my hope and my belief

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  is that, you know, these types of long form conversations are what people need right now and we crave it. Nobody wants to live in a place of Fear, anger and acrimony.

• 1:33:35Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:33:36Rich Roll?

  As familiar as it might feel right now. And I think that's a reason why people are cottoning on to these long form podcasts. Because there is, it is a salve to that in some regard.

• 1:33:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And I think, you know, there's also, individually, we have to kind of salve our own wounds as well. At the same time, because outrage, you can't run on outrage, no matter what.

• 1:33:59Rich Roll?

  It's not a sustainable fuel source.

• 1:34:01Adam Skolnick?

  It's just not. No matter where you are in the world and, and, you know, you know, how, how rightfully outraged you may be. You gotta, you gotta figure out a way to feel yourself some other way, you know, to some, from some other inspiration. Because really, the only solutions, like you said, are some structural changes, some, some changes for us to like, figure out a way to live, to live better together. It's unity really is the only answer.

• 1:34:32Rich Roll?

  Right, and recognizing that not everybody, you know, is on the same starting line.

• 1:34:36Adam Skolnick?

  That's right.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  That so many of us, myself included, you know, had tremendous advantages. And we have to, we have to reckon with that. And we've got to, you know, create social systems that provide greater opportunity for people that, you know, aren't, didn't, you know, weren't blessed with what I was blessed with.

• 1:34:54Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:34:54Rich Roll?

  You know, growing up. And we need to address that. We need to address the, you know, the, the wealth inequality. There's so many problems, right? So I guess what I'm saying is, is, you know, how do we, it's not a simple matter of like, just comport yourself better. Like, we have systemic problems that we have to solve. And, and so to be outraged at the outrage is not the solution either.

• 1:35:18Adam Skolnick?

  No, but you know, the, I guess the biggest problem with the outrage level that we have, to me, is it's not, that's, outrage is not a path towards solving those problems.

• 1:35:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:30Adam Skolnick?

  Ultimately. You know, it's a path.

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  It's an understandable reaction, but ultimately, it's not a path to solution.

• 1:35:37Adam Skolnick?

  It might be a path to garnering some sort of political power that can put you into, onto the path of actually making the change though. So, you know.

• 1:35:48Adam Skolnick?

  We're done with outrage for a little while.

• 1:35:50Rich Roll?

  You think? Well, I don't know. You just, you speak too soon, my friend. I would not.

• 1:35:57Adam Skolnick?

  I'm fueled by rage, okay? It's okay. But I'm just tired of the familiar, the familiar tune. All right, let's move over to Redondo Beach. This is an out of the box, out of the box question for you.

• 1:36:09Rich Roll?

  It is a little bit.

• 1:36:10Adam Skolnick?

  I know. How do you, how do you feel about it?

• 1:36:12Rich Roll?

  Well, we're gonna play it first, right?

• 1:36:14Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, that's right. It's pretty, pretty exciting, folks.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Hi, Rich and Adam. This is Madeline. I live in Redondo Beach and this is okay to play on your podcast. I just have a question about romance. I recently went through a big breakup. I was living with my boyfriend and I had to make kind of a life shift and so now I'm dating again. I've been going on the apps and it's kind of hard to find someone with a similar mindset. I've been a vegan for 11 years. I'm a longtime listener of Rich's podcast and my ex was an Ironman athlete and so because of that relationship, I got really into endurance,

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  running, and I ran my first marathon last year. Anyway, going through the apps, wiping through, I try to look for pictures of runners, but they're just not coming up. I don't know if it's because it's LA and I'm getting a lot of actors or so on. And I was just wondering if you guys had some advice of where to find these guys. It's also kind of hard with COVID because I can't really like join a running club right now. But anyways, thought this could be a fun question to answer on your podcast. Love the show. Thanks so much. Bye.

• 1:37:33Rich Roll?

  Wow. Well, thanks, Madeline.

• 1:37:35Adam Skolnick?

  It is a fun question.

• 1:37:36Rich Roll?

  It is a very fun question and it, it brings up all kinds of emotions in me because on the one hand, Let's face it, I am a de facto relationship expert, Adam. By pure dint of being in a relationship for 22 years, all I had to do is be in a relationship for a long time, and now I'm a relationship expert.

• 1:37:55Adam Skolnick?

  You're an expert, but the thing is, you're an expert of your relationship.

• 1:37:59Rich Roll?

  Yes, this is true. On the other hand, I have no idea how to give advice on dating. I haven't dated in decades, particularly dating advice in a pandemic, or anything having to do with dating apps, because I've never been on a dating app in my entire life.

• 1:38:16Adam Skolnick?

  Were you a serial dater?

• 1:38:18Rich Roll?

  No, I'm the guy who goes from relationship to relationship. I've never been able to date like multiple people at the same time. I don't know how people do that. So essentially, I'm very ill-equipped to help you out here. And one of my kind of core things is that I always root any advice that I give on, based, you know, I base it on my personal experience. I have no personal experience with dating apps, trying to date in a pandemic.

• 1:38:45Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:38:45Rich Roll?

  Or having to date, you know, in any recent decade.

• 1:38:49Adam Skolnick?

  No. You haven't dated since the 80s.

• 1:38:52Rich Roll?

  With that, I feel like DK or Davy should sit here, because they know well, much more about this than I do.

• 1:39:00Rich Roll?

  But I will say this, you know, obviously, the instinct to connect with like-minded people is a good instinct, and that's certainly compromised in a situation in which personal interaction is so compromised. And I can say generally that I think there's a lot of good in dating apps and helping people figure out how to connect with people that are like-minded to them. But they're not an effective stand-in for what is or is not real.

• 1:39:31Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:39:32Rich Roll?

  I have friends that are on Raya. Have you ever seen Raya?

• 1:39:35Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:39:36Rich Roll?

  And people put like, they spend like tens of thousands of dollars on like, like, like basically these showreels to, you know, basically, you know, like, it's, it's crazy what goes into like creating profiles on this, on this app so that people can look.

• 1:39:52Adam Skolnick?

  Is Raya like the high-end one?

• 1:39:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a crazy high, you have to get invited on and all that kind of stuff. Um, I have a friend who's been digitally dating somebody for weeks that he had never met. They spent like countless hours on FaceTime and texting and stuff like that. And then they finally met in person the other, the other day. And, uh, he was like, he knew immediately that he didn't want to date her. But even though he was like enamored with this person on FaceTime for umpteen hours, the minute that he met her, he was like, yeah, this is not going to work.

• 1:40:26Adam Skolnick?

  Wow.

• 1:40:27Rich Roll?

  Which I thought was a really interesting, um, testament to the, you know, the fallibility of, of, of trying to interact with somebody digitally.

• 1:40:39Adam Skolnick?

  That or he needs to run the four by four forty-eight.

• 1:40:42Rich Roll?

  Maybe he does. Yeah. I don't know. I don't, I don't know. I mean, you know, I think there are no running clubs right now because of the pandemic. But what you can do is you can still go running and you can go running where people go running, even though the clubs have canceled their, their get-togethers.

• 1:40:57Adam Skolnick?

  And you can do like digital networking in those clubs, like Facebook group.

• 1:41:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can do all of that. And you can trust in chance encounters and double down on your, you know, analog experiences. But I also think because we're being restricted from interacting with people in this moment, that it's a unique opportunity to do the work on yourself that maybe you have been reluctant to today, in the sense that, um, you reconfigure your focus rather than chasing a mate or trying to find that person that you think is going to make your life better, that'll make you feel better or fill some hole. Instead,

• 1:41:42Rich Roll?

  Try to work on becoming the person that your ideal mate would want to be with. And I think when you shift that focus in that manner, you in turn, over time, become like this magnet who then attracts the right person to you as opposed to being the person who's out there fishing or chasing all of the time. So it's like a power differential and it's kind of a spiritual equation. But I think it's, I think it's, it works and it's effective. Like, I just know so many people, they're unhappy in their lives. They're like, if I just could date this person, if I could just find this person, like, my life would be better. But they don't have what that person they aspire to be with.

• 1:42:25Rich Roll?

  They don't have the qualities that that person would find attractive, right? And they think that that person is going to complete them, when in truth, you have to become complete yourself.

• 1:42:35Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:42:36Rich Roll?

  Right? And when you can focus on that, on that personal growth trajectory that you're on, you become this more attractive person to the mate that you seek or the world more broadly.

• 1:42:49Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. It's great advice. You know, going on the apps is overfishing. And tuning into yourself is sustainable fishing.

• 1:43:03Rich Roll?

  Is that, let me think about that.

• 1:43:05Adam Skolnick?

  That's my, that's my, that's my over-

• 1:43:07Rich Roll?

  Tuning into yourself is sustainable fishing?

• 1:43:10Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, you tune into yourself-

• 1:43:11Rich Roll?

  Is that the title of this podcast episode?

• 1:43:13Adam Skolnick?

  You become-

• 1:43:14Rich Roll?

  Tune into yourself.

• 1:43:14Adam Skolnick?

  You become the elusive-

• 1:43:15Rich Roll?

  Sustainably fish your soul.

• 1:43:17Adam Skolnick?

  You become the fish they all chase.

• 1:43:20Rich Roll?

  All right, I can live with that.

• 1:43:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:21Rich Roll?

  I got it.

• 1:43:22Adam Skolnick?

  I like that one.

• 1:43:22Rich Roll?

  I don't know if, that was very helpful to Madeline, but-

• 1:43:25Adam Skolnick?

  Well, it's disappointing because no one wants to be told, just tune into yourself and forget about dating. Because when you, you're out of a relationship-

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  But I don't have the answer like, oh, you should call this number or go to this website and here's where all the people are hanging out secretly.

• 1:43:38Adam Skolnick?

  No, well, there are those secret parties.

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  I know there are. There was an article in the LA Times about the secret gyms.

• 1:43:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:44Rich Roll?

  Did you see that?

• 1:43:45Adam Skolnick?

  No, I saw the secret parties one.

• 1:43:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I saw that too. There was one about like people who've set up gyms in their garages. And there's like a whole underground network of where, because all the hardcore fanatic gym rats needed a place to go when all the gyms closed. And so they're like speakeasies.

• 1:44:01Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:44:01Rich Roll?

  Like you gotta know somebody and a password and then you can get into this.

• 1:44:04Adam Skolnick?

  That's what these parties are.

• 1:44:06Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:06Adam Skolnick?

  And like, and like the parties are getting shut down. Then Garcetti shut down like the power to some of these houses.

• 1:44:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, he did?

• 1:44:12Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They had it all done.

• 1:44:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So maybe, I don't know, Madeline, I don't have the, I don't have the pass, password for any of these eyes wide shut, you know, running, speakeasy situations. They probably exist somewhere.

• 1:44:25Adam Skolnick?

  They probably do. You don't want to go.

• 1:44:27Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:44:28Adam Skolnick?

  But, you know, you're gonna be all right. That's a fun question. You're obviously a fun person. It's gonna be.

• 1:44:33Rich Roll?

  And you live in Redondo Beach.

• 1:44:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:35Rich Roll?

  Go run on the strand. Go run up to Manhattan Beach and back. There's so many people out there.

• 1:44:40Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:44:40Rich Roll?

  I'm sure that you can find somebody.

• 1:44:42Adam Skolnick?

  And I'm not saying avoid actors, but avoid actors.

• 1:44:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that, that's definitely, I love that. I'm getting a lot of actors on the apps.

• 1:44:50Adam Skolnick?

  I think if I had to go on, if I ever was single and I had to go on the apps again, I would like, my bio would be like, says the wrong thing and mixed company or.

• 1:45:00Rich Roll?

  Well, there's a lot of tongue in cheek with that too. Again, I'm speaking out of school because I don't know. It's all anecdotal.

• 1:45:05Adam Skolnick?

  I was, I was on the apps for like about five minutes. And it was so bad. Like I met one person and they, they didn't look anything like their picture. And I got traumatized and I couldn't go. I was like, you know what? I'm gonna go analog.

• 1:45:17Rich Roll?

  You know what I say to that? Okay, boomer.

• 1:45:23Rich Roll?

  You know what's funny?

• 1:45:23Adam Skolnick?

  That's a good one.

• 1:45:24Rich Roll?

  And then we'll pivot to the last question.

• 1:45:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Rich Roll?

  And I think there was an article in the Atlantic about this, but we were talking about it at dinner the other night. In this whole conversation around Gen Y and Gen, and, and Gen Z and millennials and how like Gen Z doesn't like the millennials and like all the kind of like.

• 1:45:41Adam Skolnick?

  Zoomers and the boomers.

• 1:45:42Rich Roll?

  Right. The zoomers and the boomers and all of that.

• 1:45:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Rich Roll?

  No mention of Gen X.

• 1:45:47Adam Skolnick?

  That's how we like it.

• 1:45:47Rich Roll?

  Which is my generation.

• 1:45:48Adam Skolnick?

  We're stealth.

• 1:45:48Rich Roll?

  I know. Fully stealth, slacker.

• 1:45:51Adam Skolnick?

  We will never have a president.

• 1:45:52Rich Roll?

  We're too slacker to even participate in that cultural discussion.

• 1:45:56Adam Skolnick?

  Well, listen. The Gen Xers, we don't want cancel culture because it's just like, we wanted to be like the iconoclastic culture, like the iconoclastic generation. Like, we liked people that said the wrong thing. We kind of like, we liked punk rock and things like that. And now, that's turning out that our tastes in like, pop culture and didn't save the world. So now, we're gonna have to cede the stage to people who have better ideas.

• 1:46:22Rich Roll?

  Right, but why does Gen X get lost in this conversation? I feel like we just get lumped in as boomers.

• 1:46:28Adam Skolnick?

  Now, we're getting lumped in.

• 1:46:29Rich Roll?

  Because everybody who's not, if you're Gen Z, anybody who's not Gen Z and maybe slightly millennial is a boomer.

• 1:46:35Adam Skolnick?

  There's that great overheard LA thing on Instagram where it was like, overheard in a coffee shop, "Okay, boomer." And then the parent, the daughter said, "Okay, boomer." And the parents said something like, "I'm not a boomer, honey. I'm Gen X. Okay, boomer."

• 1:46:50Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It doesn't matter. We're lumped in.

• 1:46:53Adam Skolnick?

  It doesn't matter.

• 1:46:54Rich Roll?

  We're just, we're boomers.

• 1:46:55Adam Skolnick?

  Which is too bad, because I share my, the skepticism of boomers is well documented.

• 1:47:01Rich Roll?

  Right. And boomers are nothing like Gen X.

• 1:47:03Adam Skolnick?

  No. They had, they had the Summer of Love. We had the AIDS epidemic.

• 1:47:08Rich Roll?

  It's basically just a way of saying you're clueless.

• 1:47:11Adam Skolnick?

  Being a boomer?

• 1:47:12Rich Roll?

  Well, "okay, boomer" just means like, you're, you've tapped out. Like, time to cede the stage, old man.

• 1:47:19Adam Skolnick?

  We don't have to cede the stage yet.

• 1:47:21Rich Roll?

  This is what I'm saying.

• 1:47:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. So you want Gen X to be factored into these discussions? I like Gen X being ignored.

• 1:47:27Rich Roll?

  You like it being ignored.

• 1:47:28Adam Skolnick?

  I like being ignored.

• 1:47:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, surprise them from the side.

• 1:47:31Rich Roll?

  It probably is better that way. But I don't like being accused of being a boomer.

• 1:47:35Adam Skolnick?

  You know, who does? That's like, that's like being a Karen.

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  Is it that bad?

• 1:47:40Adam Skolnick?

  It's just that bad.

• 1:47:41Rich Roll?

  All right.

• 1:47:42Adam Skolnick?

  All right, here we go.

• 1:47:43Rich Roll?

  We digress. Final question.

• 1:47:45Adam Skolnick?

  Elizabeth from Nanaimo, British Columbia. My friend Justin Chatwin's from there.

• 1:47:53Speaker 03

  Hi Rich, hi Adam. My name is Elizabeth and I am in Nanimal, British Columbia. Firstly, I want to say how much I enjoy your role on conversations. Rich, I also want to thank you for providing a platform to educate and challenge listeners to expand their perspectives and their awareness. I cut at you with encouraging me to consider a plant-based lifestyle for myself and also through your guests and your own perspective. I've made that change in my own life to great benefit. I'm really interested in getting your perspective on leadership. Something I value and treasure about your podcast and perspective is your self-awareness and your willingness to examine yourself in your life. I'm curious what your perspective is on leadership?

• 1:48:36Speaker 03

  How do you show up to lead your team? Do you have any advice for spiritual self-aware individuals that value doing the work on themselves? On how to show up in a professional setting? And/or perhaps ideas on how to blend self-awareness and personal growth with leadership and encourage your team to do the same? Please feel free to play this. Thank you both for listening and wishing you all the very best.

• 1:49:00Rich Roll?

  What a cool question, Elizabeth. Thank you for that. I don't know if anybody's ever really asked me about leadership before. It is, it's fascinating. I will admit that I haven't spent a lot of time pondering leadership and probably less time studying it over the years. But I have started thinking about it a little bit more and shouldering this mantle more recently because I now employ people, which is something I never thought would happen. So I guess I would, I would launch into this response by saying I'm a reluctant leader.

• 1:49:42Rich Roll?

  I don't consider myself a thought leader or a leader of teams. I think of myself as a solopreneur, somebody who relishes quiet alone time. I'm fundamentally a writer in disposition and I always kind of consider myself suited to doing my own thing and wanting to be left alone. I mean, that's still my greatest desire is just to be left alone, right? Yes. But I recognize that I've created this situation.

• 1:50:11Rich Roll?

  That places me now in the context of having to lead much more than I would have ever wanted or realized. And with the growth of the podcast, like I said, I have people that I employ now. I am a boss.

• 1:50:23Adam Skolnick?

  I'm a subcontractor. You don't employ me.

• 1:50:25Rich Roll?

  You are. You're not. Yes. You don't report to me.

• 1:50:29Rich Roll?

  I'll W nine you. I am a boss, though, which is weird. And I admit, it's a little bit uncomfortable for me, but it's forced me to kind of wrestle with some growth stuff. Because what I say, how I say it, and more importantly, like what I do, how I comport myself, how I handle myself, matters to other people in my immediate orbit. And so I have started kind of thinking about these issues in a more meaningful way recently. I won't say that I have any kind of specific philosophy of leadership, but I do have a few touchstones. And many of

• 1:51:07Rich Roll?

  those, I have to say, I credit to my business partner, Greg Anzalone. Like, I've learned so much from this guy. I just think he's an exemplary human being and leader. Greg is the CEO of Sideshow, Sideshow Collectibles. That's really, you know, what he, like, he's my business partner, but really, his business is Sideshow, which makes limited edition collectible figures from pop culture, like all the Star Wars stuff and Marvel stuff, like these limited runs of like beautiful, you know, the Baby Yoda is their product, stuff like that. And Greg is somebody I've come to really deeply admire and respect as

• 1:51:48Rich Roll?

  one of the most effective and compassionate leaders that I've ever met. And somebody who in so many ways mimics the findings and the research of Adam Grant, who's the guy in the podcast this week, a guy who studied leadership deeply for many, many years. And so some of those touchstones are. And this is coming from Greg. It's about the people, not the product, that the employees come before the widget, right? Like, the organization is set up not to make widgets, but to empower people's lives with meaning and purpose. I've learned that it's wise to approach every situation with a giving mindset.

• 1:52:33Rich Roll?

  It's not about what you can get out of a situation, but how you can better support the people beneath you. I've learned that it's about action and behavior. What you say is important, but that must be aligned with your actions, which obviously speak louder than words. And if your actions are misaligned with your words, then you faltered. So I think that's been super helpful to me. I'm a perfectionist, so learning that progress is better than perfection is a lesson hard wrought for myself, something that I'm getting used to, because your perfectionism might help you create something that will get you to a certain level, but if you want to create

• 1:53:16Rich Roll?

  largesse in a sustainable way, you have to empower the people around you. And those people have their own ways of doing things, and that's not always going to meet up with how you would do things. So, holding on too tightly to your ideas, I think, becomes an inhibitor to growth. So, learning how to let go and empower other people, I think, is super important. I think anticipating the needs of the people that you work with is really powerful, like creating solutions to problems before they arise, because you can see where things are headed before they even get there. One of the things I've seen Greg do is just surprise and delight the people that work underneath him and alongside him by showing up in ways that others in a position of leadership

• 1:54:00Rich Roll?

  don't, because they're thinking about themselves. And Greg's always thinking about other people. And he'll just show up and do the thing that nobody would have ever expected. And sometimes they're big gestures, and sometimes they're little gestures, but... They're always very meaningful, like Greg will, will, you know, find housing for an employee or do something that like a CEO or a person in a position of leadership just wouldn't, you know, you wouldn't think that they would be thinking about the people who work beneath them in such a meaningful way. And that's been, you know, really kind of amazing to see him do that time and time again and has impacted me. I think in terms of leadership, thinking about how to play the long game is super

• 1:54:43Rich Roll?

  important, not over indexing for short-term profitability or productivity, but rather thinking broadly about creating and establishing sustainable systems that allow people to flourish and do their best work, not in a highly pressurized environment, but giving them a little bit of bandwidth so that they can feel secure in their expression, I think is huge. Adam has this great quote, Adam Grant, which is, "The most meaningful way to succeed is to help others succeed." And it seems simple, but I think it's powerful to not perceive the world as some kind of zero-sum equation, but to look at things from a broader, more spiritual perspective,

• 1:55:27Rich Roll?

  that the universe is infinitely abundant. So with that, give freely of yourself in service to others. And not only does that come back in your direction tenfold, it engenders amazing trust and loyalty in the people that you work with.

• 1:55:43Adam Skolnick?

  See, we're back to the Taoist philosophy. I mean, that's really the whole, like, the middle way is the Taoist philosophy is if the few have much and the many have little, that's totally, completely anti the way, like, the nature of the Tao. And the idea is to, is to have everyone sharing the abundance. And so, like, the fact that you're citing that as a driving philosophy for your business bodes well for your business of countries. Worked out that way, like, you know, in Scandinavia, countries who have a expanded social safety net and are able to, you know, yes, the taxes might be higher to have healthcare

• 1:56:28Adam Skolnick?

  and public education at a high level and X, Y, and Z, but if you actually look at everyone's bank account, everyone has more money, the rich and the lower, lower working class and the middle class. There is no lower class. And so if you look at it that way, everyone does better when there's enough for everyone. And the way we have it in our mind is, well, if I have to pay this, it's less for me, you know, that person should get, should get more themselves, you know?

• 1:56:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:56:54Adam Skolnick?

  But that's just not how it works, you know? If everyone did better, everyone would do better. It's very simple. Unfortunately, you know, we do have a leadership vac- I love this question because we have a leadership vacuum in this world right now. There's not a lot of effective leaders you can point to that are getting the job done on a, on a global or national level. There's a few that we, we sometimes identify, but it's hard. And I think the great leadership, everything's like the best leaders, it's all happening local, in people's homes and people's businesses.

• 1:57:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:24Adam Skolnick?

  And, and, and I think Greg's amazing. It's been so cool to meet him and learn from him. So, well said.

• 1:57:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And just, and, and having a moral compass.

• 1:57:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Rich Roll?

  And having your actions aligned with that perspective, right? Like, isn't that what leadership is? It's not, it's not just, you know, bending to whatever is in your self-interest in the moment, which seems to be the hallmark of current times.

• 1:57:49Adam Skolnick?

  That's right.

• 1:57:49Rich Roll?

  But rather, you know, heeding a greater call and being willing to sacrifice yourself first in the interest of that. And I think when you demonstrate that as a leader, that's very powerful for the people that are following you.

• 1:58:07Adam Skolnick?

  Agreed. Well said.

• 1:58:09Rich Roll?

  We did it, dude.

• 1:58:09Adam Skolnick?

  We got to the end.

• 1:58:10Rich Roll?

  Right on. How do you feel?

• 1:58:12Adam Skolnick?

  I feel good, man. I feel lighter and also like that I have to be a little more introspective as I approach this. Weekend of hell awaiting me.

• 1:58:23Rich Roll?

  You do. You've got some work to do for yourself.

• 1:58:25Adam Skolnick?

  I do.

• 1:58:26Rich Roll?

  On the subject of feeling good, we should say that our buddies, Georgie O and Arthur, and their Feels Good Man documentary did not make the Oscar shortlist. I'm sad to say.

• 1:58:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Rich Roll?

  But if you have yet to check out that movie, please go to Apple Plus and make a point of watching it and let's support those guys. We need more cool indie filmmakers out there.

• 1:58:49Adam Skolnick?

  We do.

• 1:58:49Rich Roll?

  Their work should be celebrated.

• 1:58:51Adam Skolnick?

  How do you feel, Rich?

• 1:58:52Rich Roll?

  I feel good, man. I feel good. I love talking to you, man. This was super fun. And it was nice to kind of pivot back to more of my sweet spot in terms of things I like to talk about. Yeah.

• 1:59:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:05Rich Roll?

  There was no, you know, giant social, political explosion this week that forced us to focus on something that is a little bit outside of, you know, one of the things that I enjoy most talking about.

• 1:59:20Adam Skolnick?

  Hopefully, this is the new normal where we don't have to pay attention.

• 1:59:23Rich Roll?

  Like I said, just stop it right there. You know, we'll see. We're taking it day by day, my friend.

• 1:59:28Adam Skolnick?

  It is 2021.

• 1:59:29Rich Roll?

  Cool. All right, let's wrap it up. Thank you, Adam. Always a delight.

• 1:59:34Adam Skolnick?

  Thank you.

• 1:59:35Rich Roll?

  To share space with you. You can follow Adam at Adam Skolnick on Twitter and Instagram. You can leave us a message at 424-235-4626. As always, check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com where you can dive deeper into all the things we talked about today. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the good places. Again, we created a clips channel on YouTube, so if you like short chunks, you can check that out. Links in the show notes and in the description below if you're watching this on YouTube, or you can just search Rich Roll Podcast Clips on YouTube. What else? I think that's it, man. I appreciate everybody.

• 2:00:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, thanks for the-

• 2:00:18Rich Roll?

  Who worked hard to put on today's show.

• 2:00:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, and thanks for all the calls, guys, all the questions.

• 2:00:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, appreciate that.

• 2:00:23Adam Skolnick?

  We really appreciate it.

• 2:00:24Rich Roll?

  I want to thank Greg Anzalone for his leadership.

• 2:00:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, Greg.

• 2:00:28Rich Roll?

  As always. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for handling video duties. Jessica Miranda for graphics. David Greenberg for his beautiful portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK, who is in the house right now-

• 2:00:44Adam Skolnick?

  DK.

• 2:00:44Rich Roll?

  For advertiser relationships. And theme music, as always, by my boys Tyler Trapper and Harry. Appreciate the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple of days with another amazing episode. Until then, peace. Plants.

• 2:00:57Adam Skolnick?

  Namaste.