First Light: Cole Brauer's Life Lessons From Racing Her Sailboat Around The World

Cole Brauer is the first American woman to race solo, nonstop around the world, and the author of First Light: Sailing Solo but Not Alone. We discuss the Dragon Time mindset, breaking into the walled garden of alpha males, 130 days alone at sea, choosing her boat over the win at Cape Horn, and why coming home was harder than the ocean. Along the way, she teaches me what a ring around the sun means. Cole is a badass wise beyond her years. And our conversation is cinematic. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Eight Sleep: Get $350 off your Pod 5 Ultra with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.eightsleep.com/richroll Prolon: Get 15% OFF sitewide + a $40 bonus gift👉🏼https://www.prolonlife.com/richroll Noble Mobile: Try Noble for just $10 with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.noblemobile.com Freaks of Nature: Save 20% with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.freaksofnature.com TORRAS: Get 15% off the TORRAS Q3 Air Pro case with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://torraslife.com/products/iphone-17-pro-max-case-ostand-q3-air-pro Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:22Speaker 01

  I had to make the decision of, do I go into the storm that's blowing 85 knots? Or do I protect myself and lose the race?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  Cole Brouwer isn't just a champion sailboat racer. She was the youngest and only woman to compete in an event called the Global Solo Challenge, finishing second to become the first American woman to single-handedly race a sailboat across the world, solo and unassisted. Along the way, the world fell in love with her as she shared the highs, the lows, the doldrums, and the extreme difficulties of this endeavor on social media. Very candid videos that included chaos and injury, self-administering, medical procedures, emotional breakdowns, all of which connected us to just how grueling this challenge was to simply survive,

• 2:13Speaker 00

  as well as videos that were very warm and sometimes silly, like snuggling with stuffed animals in her pajamas, dance parties, and dinner parties for one that humanized her and upended the alpha male silverback stereotype associated with professional ocean racing.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  I almost sunk the boat twice. I had run aground a few times, almost caught the boat on fire twice. I had already made every other mistake that she could possibly make. And that's what made it a successful race.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  Cole's a badass, wise beyond her years, and today, this model of resilience, grit, and unapologetic girlishness shares all. The dragon time mindset that has propelled her to break structural barriers, subvert norms, defy expectations, and achieve greatness. We talk about why problem solving in high-stakes environments under extreme duress is all about mind-body connection, and how humility, surrender, and deep connection to nature are essential to her success.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  It's great to have you here. I'm such a fan. I think you're so inspiring, not just for the feats that you've accomplished, but the example that you set for the world, for young women. And I'm really interested in the story behind the story, because I think there's a lot more there than people realize. Of course, you communicate this in your new book, First Light. Congratulations. And I learned a lot about sailing and how much more complicated it is than I initially realized. I was reflecting on having Alex Honnold on the podcast a number of years ago, after he had free soloed El Capitan, but before the movie had come out.

• 4:06Speaker 00

  And I thought, in the aftermath of that conversation, that I understood what he had done. And then I saw the movie and realized, oh, I didn't really understand this at all. And having watched many of your Instagram videos and followed the story, I thought I understood what you were doing. And then I read the book, and I was like, oh, I didn't, I didn't really, I don't really, like, understand this world at all. What you have accomplished is remarkable. And I think we should just contextualize the audience around this. For people that are unfamiliar with you, you're most well-known for having come in second place in the Global Solo Challenge, where you raced a sailboat for how many days?

• 4:51Speaker 00

  I mean, you started at the end of October in 2023 and finished in early March.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yes, about 130 days.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  130 days, solo, unassisted, the youngest in the field of this competition, the only woman, and the first American woman to have completed this challenge. Did I get that right?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  How many nautical miles?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  It's just over 27,000 nautical miles.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And this is the equivalent of crossing the Atlantic five times?

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, five or six times. Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 00

  What is the difference between a nautical mile and a mile? I've never understood this. And why would you create a distinction?

• 5:35Speaker 01

  Nautical mile, so funny. That's not the question I thought you would start with. Quiz time.

• 5:41Speaker 00

  It's always bothered me. Also, like knots and miles per hour? Why do you have to have your own thing?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  It's super, it's only 1.1. And to be completely honest and candid here, I can't remember the 1.1, if it's nautical mile or if it's...

• 5:56Speaker 00

  So you don't even know? What is the reason for this?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Give me a second.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Okay, sorry, I'm interrupting you. I do that. I apologize.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  I believe, I believe, I think it's one nautical mile for every 1.1 mile, regular mile that we, we know as Americans. And so that means 27,000 nautical miles actually equates to something, you know, like 29,000 miles, I believe. Also, someone fact-check me.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  Is it because there's up and down motion? And so for every mile, you're actually traversing a little bit more than a mile?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  I think miles were, miles and nautical miles were developed by two different people. And I could also be making this up, but a nautical mile, it comes from knots on a rope. And so they would throw the rope overboard, and then like how fast they were going is knots. And then that's how you kind of equated that to nautical miles also, something like this. Someone fact-check me, somebody. We've got a cool studio here.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Either way, it's its own language, you know, and, and that is almost symbolic of like the insular world of sailing. And it is a very curious subculture that, in many ways, you have not only distinguished yourself in, but also subverted along the way. And I think that is where you kind of intersect with culture in the way that you're communicating your experiences and what these races are like in a really palpable way that has, that has impacted a lot of people. I mean, your social media presence is insane. And you really brought the world into the physical demands of, of this challenge,

• 7:40Speaker 00

  but also like the emotional journey and, and humanizing it in a way that made it relatable and created an emotional connection with a lot of people where, you know, the whole world was sort of like cheering for you.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  I wanted the book to be very much like an accessibility experiment. And when we look at sailing, we don't see accessibility. We don't see inclusion at all. Sailing is a super expensive sport, and it's been run in more of a legacy program where you have very, very wealthy people, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, who have kind of commandeered this world. And then people look up to the old style of, you know, sailing and say, that's what I want to be. I want to wear my epaulettes, and I want to go on my huge, very expensive multimillion-dollar yacht. And I want to sail against other people that also have multimillion-dollar yachts.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  And a lot of times, there really hasn't been a space for women to be involved in that conversation at all, even in the working side. And I, of course, when starting out, started out really in the working, the hired help side. And I think that with my book, I really wanted people to look at it almost like a pathway. My pathway was this like...

• 9:01Speaker 01

  Kind of crazy, you know, artistic way of being able to get to completing my dream of being the first American woman to race solo around the planet at 29 years old. And I had spent 10 years focusing on that and not focusing on just being, you know, that, that one statistic of like, okay, I wanted to be able to take it and say, there's other women that are out there that are just like me that could also do this. It doesn't just have to be me, Cole Brauer. It could be, you know, the woman that's walking down the street that just is, could maybe be better at meteorology than me and who, who probably

• 9:42Speaker 01

  is better at meteorology, but just hasn't been able to be allowed into that community because it's so expensive. And it's why in the book I actually talk about the prices of things because talking about prices of things in our world is, is not, is not kosher, right? You don't sit at the New York Yacht Club and talk about how expensive someone's $7 million boat is and what their annual costs are. You don't, you don't mention any of those things, but I wanted to kind of break that barrier in the book and say, no, I'm going to be transparent. This is how much it costs. It's difficult. It's expensive. And this is how much I was getting paid. And that's something that actually moves women

• 10:25Speaker 01

  forward in the sport because I have found out just by asking these questions to other men in the industry, how much are you getting paid? And they tell me three times the amount that I'm getting paid. Same age, if not younger and with less experience. And that's how I ended up even pushing to do this campaign. It wasn't about becoming this global, you know, phenomenon or icon on Instagram. It was about just promoting equal pay in my industry. And it just happened to turn out that I also liked creating videos and having fun offshore.

• 11:01Speaker 00

  And you're quite good at it. Well, let's take it back to the beginning. I'm interested in, in what captured you in the first place about the sea. When did you realize like, oh, this is, this is what I want to do?

• 11:15Speaker 01

  I, I think there was a few different ways or reasoning that brought me into wanting to be on, you know, on the water. I think one of the main things that happened was I, I grew up on Eastern Long Island in the dichotomy of having, you know, wealthy people living next door, but my dad worked construction and my mom had a small store in town in East Hampton.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Right. When people hear East Hampton, you know, it's like ding, ding, ding. Like this is the, you know, the wealthiest of the wealthy, but it's a stratified area, you know, like there's a whole sort of blue collar support class there that co, that, that coexists with the, with the, you know, coastal elites, I suppose, right?

• 12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 00

  And that is more the world that you grew up in. So you're in and around all of these people. And of course sailing is a part of that, but also on the outside of that.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  And sailing for me was really not available. I mean, the buy-in for a yacht club, um, you know, in the Hamptons is incredibly expensive. Nobody could ever be able to afford that also that working on a, on a construction salary or landscaping or teacher's salary. And so the thing that was available to me as a teenager, um, growing up on Eastern Long Island was fishing because it is a fishing community. And that's where everyone that needs to make money and wants to make quick tips goes. And so I started fishing. I started fishing because my boyfriend at the time was a fisherman. His dad was a fisherman. His

• 12:55Speaker 01

  grandfather was a fisherman out in Montauk. And I kind of just grabbed on to that. And what I found was that I would wake up in the most beautiful place on the planet, which was so far away from land, miles and miles, my, where you could just see the tip of Montauk. And it'd be super flat calm with these nice big rolling waves. And I express this in the book that it was like, that was a very clear moment to me. Like, wow, I could do this for the rest of my life. And not the fishing side, but just being out there in nature, period, the end. And I then transferred to the University of Hawaii, um, from an

• 13:40Speaker 01

  art school that I went to in Georgia and, which I know you said that your daughter goes to Chicago. Um, I went to SCAD, I went to Savannah College of Art and Design.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  And I studied photojournalism and advertising and I loved it because you have to learn all these different artist forms. And that's probably why the Instagram looks the way that it does.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  I'm seeing a clear pathway from that to, yeah.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Are you seeing the?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, everything, you know, yeah, contributes.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  It all, yeah, exactly. Where, and then I, I transferred to the University of Hawaii to get a little bit closer to nature. Uh, my mom had gotten diagnosed with cancer. And so I went into studying food science and human nutrition. And I loved Hawaii. I, I absolutely loved it. And so, but I had never been sailing before, but sailing in Hawaii, everything is very quite inclusive in Hawaii. Um, and so I was immediately pulled in by this community. I had no friends, no family. And the Hawaiian beautiful community was like, yeah, come in, let's show you our culture, which is Polynesian culture is, is rooted

• 14:51Speaker 01

  in this, you know, thousands and thousands of years of studying celestial navigation, studying how, you know, the, when you lay down on the bottom of the boat, you can feel where land is just by the way that the, like, the ripples of the water hit the hull. And even now I treat sailing much more as an art form than just muscling sails around and pulling on ropes and grinding, you know, the crap out of the ropes until they break. I'm much more, I can still take my artist background from Savannah College of Art and Design and transfer it into this athleticism, which is, I got that from Polynesian culture.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there's the fishing background, the appreciation of just being out in nature in its fullness. There's the inclusiveness and the warm-heartedness of the Hawaiian culture welcoming you into this world of sailing and this even deeper connection with nature, like an understanding of it. When does the racing part enter though? Cause then, then it enters into kind of a performance context.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  Well, I've always been a very competitive person. I think my parents met in a gym. They were triathletes and, um, and so they had raised me quite strong in, you're going to be an athlete. And they didn't ever think I would be a professional athlete. They just always kind of pushed me to be an athlete in general. Um, my dad was really harsh on me. He's, he's German, so he was very strict. I had to beat all the boys, no matter what.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  A German triathlete. I'm sorry.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  He's, he's, yeah, he's a strong, he's, he's got a very strong mind. And we had these tests in New York, the presidential tests. Um, I don't know if anyone's ever heard of them.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Presidential physical fitness test. Yeah. This is no longer, right? Like, I don't think that exists anymore.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  I don't know. I still have.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  I wouldn't have even thought it existed in your era.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  It was massive. My dad was insane about it. He was absolutely insane. He was so focused on me being the best of the best, no matter what. And it wasn't to create me into this thing that could make money or whatever. It was just, he wanted me to beat the boys. He raised me to be a boy. He was like, you're going to be the strongest out of everyone. You're going to do the most amount of pull-ups. You're going to do the most amount of push-ups, everything. You're going to be the fastest. And it's not like you're going to be the fastest girl. You're going to be the fastest person. And he had put it into my head that it was 100% possible. And it didn't matter that I was born with these physical features of a woman. I was going to be the best.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Also a lot of pressure.

• 17:36Speaker 01

  Which was fun. He put the same amount of pressure on my sister with books. And for me, I, I'm very dyslexic. Um, I, actually with the book, I, when writing the book and designing, I got to actually design how it's, um, when you open the book, like how it reads and the fonts and everything. I specifically picked a font. It was easy to read for dyslexics because I am one. And I wanted even people with disabilities to be able to pick up the book and read it quickly, read it without stumbling as much as I normally stumble over words in books. And I've even had a lot of feedback so far of people saying, oh, I'm

• 18:20Speaker 01

  so glad that you did an audiobook because they have a learning disability or maybe they've losing their sight or whatever it may be. And, um, and so I wanted the book to be able to be accessible across everyone. And you could take what I was being brought up with, with my parents is that very, very strong mentality. And now I still have that kind of stubborn, strong mentality.

• 18:45Speaker 00

  Yes, clearly.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Maybe not always a good thing.

• 18:49Speaker 00

  Right. All right. So, you know, faster than the boys.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  As, you know, stronger than the boys, faster than the boys. Growing up with that, um, I don't know if it was an expectation, but a burgeoning mentality around that, a competitive streak. You're in Hawaii, so you're getting introduced to sailing as a sport. This is in deep contrast to when you return to the East Coast and have to encounter a very different relationship with the sport and the kind of, uh, you know, walled garden of silverback alpha males and a series of, you know, uh, conflicts and run ins with that culture.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So different. It was, oh, I can't express to you how difficult it was. I came, I came back to the East Coast with an obscene amount of confidence, cockiness, and just pure like happiness. And like, I, I can do anything, no matter what. I mean, this had been transferred from my parents that I could do whatever I wanted. Then I moved out to Hawaii. It was very accessible and inclusive. They had told me, yes, you can do whatever you want. I moved back to the East Coast, like the blue blazer type of East Coast sailing and was hit immediately like in the face with this idea that, oh

• 20:19Speaker 01

  my gosh, like, you know, I've got these three strikes against me. I'm young, I'm small, and what was my?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  You're also a woman.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 20:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 01

  But it's true. Actually, I'm side note, my brain chemistry has changed massively being in Europe. Um, now I am competing at the highest level of my sport and, um, we're 50 50 on the race course and actually in the shed. So in like on base, we're 50 50 on the, on the short team.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  You mean gender wise?

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Gender wise.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And we're 50 50.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  What do you attribute that change to?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  It's been, so the organization of sailing at this higher level called the Ocean Race, they have been working on this gender equity for, since, I don't know, before 2017. So pre Me Too movement. And because they had been spending so much effort on this the last like 10 years, now we have equal, equal. The sailing below that, the private sector of sailing is nothing like that. It's still maybe 10% women of, in the pro sector. And so that's moving up into the ocean race. What I'm doing now actually is really amazing because I, I don't even look at myself like

• 21:42Speaker 01

  I'm a woman. I'm treated, the only thing that differs me from the people that I'm sailing with is that I'm American. And there's not really any Americans that have managed to move their way into that top sector because we don't have enough sailing programs and accessibility here in the United States. And most women and men usually get tired of dealing with the BS and then never really move forward all the way up. Like the amount of molasses that you're swimming through to get to the pinnacle of our sport is insane from both men and women. And it's because the private sector, the billionaires that

• 22:23Speaker 01

  own the boats who then hire you because you, you know, look nice or you're this or you know this person. I mean, a lot of people after like my whole journey had gotten viral were inviting me because they just wanted me to sit on their boat and look pretty. I was like, wait, I did all this work just to then go backwards in this world?

• 22:45Speaker 00

  I suppose there's some parallel to Lewis Hamilton in Formula One, you know, like this very moneyed sport that is impossible to penetrate unless you're the scion of some billionaire to become a driver and you have the funds to, you know, get your kid into a car when they're very young and all that kind of thing, right?

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  And Lewis being in it, you know, kind of an outlier in that regard, coming from a very different background and somehow, you know, through the support of his dad and the like, and being scrappy, like figured a third door in, you know, so how were you able to, you know, swim through the currents of this molasses to open that door and, and get on the inside of this?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you brought him up. Like, have you seen his fashion style? I mean, he is fabulous. I mean.

• 23:36Speaker 00

  He's a one of one.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  He's a one of one. Exactly. And that's the only thing that I would change. I would change that we, instead of just having one of ones, we start to have more people in these, you know, pinnacle sports that are like him where he's not afraid to dress they want, like the way that he wants to dress. And it's a fashion show for him. For me, I'm exactly the same way. I, the first race that I won and won so convincingly that people were hating on me, um, was this race called the Bermuda 12. I raced, uh, you go from Newport to Bermuda solo, and then you race back double handed. And I raced down, um, and I won the solo division. And I didn't just win it. I won by 90 miles, which is

• 24:21Speaker 01

  like insane because it's only a 600 nautical mile race. I mean, that's like totally insane. So people were like, this is a fluke. Like, what'd you do? Did you pay off the weather gods to like, allow you to get there faster? But I invited one of my really close girlfriends to do the race back with me and no women had ever won the solo or the double handed. And then we won them way back by 60 miles. And I wore a wedding dress to the awards ceremony as like the biggest F you to the establishment. And I was like, this is it. Like I have been, I've had my face shoved in the mud so much. If this is the last race I ever am allowed to do because, you know, I don't have the money or I don't have the

• 25:06Speaker 01

  time or whatever else I have to go back to work, then I'm going to do it in absolute style. I'm going to be here. And I think that's why he does it. He does, he, he lets his creativeness flourish because you never really know if it's going to go away. If you come from a background that doesn't tailor you to be in there forever, you, you come out swinging, you know?

• 25:34Speaker 00

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• 28:14Speaker 00

  How did you even get to a place where you could participate in that race? There's a whole story of just being able to like, get into the position where you, you know, were an entrant in a race like that to begin with.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  That is how I weaseled my way into that race. So my sponsors who allowed me to do the Around the World Race, pre Around the World Race, they had talked to me and they said, okay, well, we want you to be able to try to use this boat and figure out and train against us. And they had a different boat that I was racing against them. They were our training partners. And I was working so hard with this idea of like, I really want to do this race, the Bermuda 12. I'd always wanted to do it. I had been denied doing it years before. My previous sponsors had dropped out about two weeks before the start of that race.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And I felt like this is the pinnacle of me, if I can do this race. And so I talked to the sponsors and I, I don't want to say that I lied to them, but I just said to one of them, yeah, you're, you're, the other guys are really excited about me doing this race. And they were like, oh yeah, they, they know you want to do this. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then on the same dock, at the same time, I went over to the other sponsor and I said, yeah, you know, these guys, they're super excited about, you know, what do you think of me doing this? Oh yeah, if they're into it, I'll do it too.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Right. This is, this is what a film producer does, by the way. You have to be ahead of yourself a little.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  You gotta be a little. And, and my, my partner in crime at this time, my, my, my co-skipper Kat, she was like sitting and working on the boat, watching me just finagle this, this scene. And she was just like, I'm going to stay out of this one. She's more of an electronics girly. She, she works behind the scenes a lot more. And so for her, she, when she opens her mouth, she'll get us, she'll get us all fired. So she was like, you do the talking and just get us on that start line. And I was like, and it, it was a make or break because that was the end of April or like the beginning of May and the race started at the end of June. So I had no time to like, push. And when you have

• 30:35Speaker 01

  like no, no time, there's something inside us humans where we just make things happen no matter what.

• 30:43Speaker 00

  The sponsors you're referring to are the Day Brothers.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 00

  One of which, correct me if I'm wrong, is like Executive Vice President of World Bicycle Relief and also an Executive Vice President at SRAM, the bicycle components company.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  What was it about these guys? Like, how did you get them interested in what you're doing? Because this is an inflection point in your career. Like, they enter the picture and suddenly you go from somebody who's really struggling to be able to even do your thing to getting this boat, getting it retrofitted, First Lights, the name of your book, this beloved vessel that you anthropomorphize by calling it mother and teacher and girlfriend and boyfriend, et cetera. And that really paves the way for everything that follows.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So who you're talking about is FK Day. He became almost one of my guardian angels. I met FK and he was, I was racing on this boat and the boat originally was named Dragon. And he was on a, he was with a different boat at the time called Longbow. And he, very quiet, you would never know that he had money. You would never know. He's got a long ponytail. He's one of the founders of SRAM. And he was the one who actually stepped away from SRAM, a big business, to actually then create World Bicycle Relief.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And he created World Bicycle Relief because he, with his ex-wife, because they were, they went to Africa and they were super tired of seeing people struggling to have transport to be able to get, you know, from one place to the next to work, to school. And he said, you know, we have a bike component company, a super expensive, high-end luxury bike component company that specifically works with, you know, very wealthy athletes that make tons of money that are sponsored. And he couldn't handle that anymore. He was traveling all over the world and he said, you know, we really need to make this world easier for people to be able to get around. And a bicycle is super simple. I mean, he's the, he's the

• 32:56Speaker 01

  guy who invented the gear shifter. I mean, you know, the original gear shifters were like this on your, on your bike. He's the guy. He's the guy that did this. But everything, everything that's changed our whole brain chemistry about how to ride a bike safely was him. And I had no idea when I first met him. I just thought he was this super nice guy who had a boat down at the end of the dock. And I just like, he's super quiet, really nice guy. He likes to have a drink at the end of the day. And I just had no idea. And there was one day that there was the, the brothers and they were all hanging out, because there's three brothers actually. And they were like, oh, we've seen you working on

• 33:38Speaker 01

  the boat so much. We would love for you to come out to dinner with us. And so I went out to dinner with them in Fort Lauderdale, where the boat was based. And they pretty much drank me under the table. I'm 100 pounds, so it doesn't take that much. And they love tequila shots. And so we had like a private room in this, you know, steakhouse or whatnot. And I, it was their family, it was their friends, it was everyone. It was loud, it was fun. We were having a good time. I went outside and I puked and I was like, okay, I'm not, I'm not a wuss. I'm going to go back. I'm going to do this. And so I went back and I hung out with them and then like pushed alcohol away from me. And, and not

• 34:17Speaker 01

  very many people know that story actually, which is funny. And I got a phone call like maybe two weeks later. And it was from the manager of FK. And his name is Jimmy, he's in the book also. And he was like, so the brothers are like super interested to see what, you know, what you want to do. And I was like, what, what do you mean? And they were like, oh, well, you told them you want to be the first American woman to race solo around the planet, which I was very drunk. I don't remember pitching because I technically was not pitching. I was just talking, you know, and having a conversation with some

• 34:57Speaker 01

  really nice people. And they, FK in particular, was like, yeah, I love it. Let's do it. We need to get more women on the start line. We need to get more boats on the start line. You know, do you want to run your own program? And at this point, it wasn't, this wasn't paid. They said, if you work on the boat for free, then you get to sail the boat for free. You don't have to pay for anything. We'll cover the costs of, you know, the maintenance and things like that, but you still have to do the work on the boat. And I was like, done. That's great.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  This is called being a preparator?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. Where you take care of the boat and set it up and, and get it ready for racing.

• 35:44Speaker 00

  And this is something you already knew how to do?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yes. I think that was actually the blessing behind the whole thing, is that the actual learning part, I had already been spending years being one. I had already been a boat captain. I'd already been like a preparator. I had already been in charge of this boat for five years, even with the previous owner. And FK and Link, they ended up buying the boat from the owner within 60 minutes of the owner putting the boat up for sale.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  And then within a couple of weeks later, the boat was given to me, which is, I have to tell you, that's not very normal. That's not normal in the, in the world of sailing for anyone. But I think FK and Lincoln, they already work in the nonprofit world. They're already used to giving a lot of their money away. They're already used to doing this like Willy Wonka, golden ticket moment with other people. That once I learned that they were used to this, I didn't feel so guilty. Because originally, when they bought the boat and then tried to give it to me, I told them, no. I didn't know what their intentions were. I didn't know what they wanted from me.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  And they just kept telling me, we don't want anything from you. We just want you to do the dream, whatever that dream may be, even if it, the dream was just to do the Bermuda one, too. They were like, we don't, we don't care. We just want you to do it. I mean, it's

• 37:16Speaker 00

  That's incredible.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  It's a totally insane thing. It's a totally insane thing. And I, I, I dedicated the book to them because the dream would have probably still been on the drawing board to this day if it wasn't for them. I mean, they were my guardian angels.

• 37:37Speaker 00

  While the culture of sailing might be this archaic monolith of some sorts, uh, within sailboat racing, there's the, it isn't a monolith. Like there's all these different classes. Like we've seen Larry Ellison and his catamaran, like the world cut, like that, there's that type of racing.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  The like

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Which feels more like that's the Formula One, kind of like the most high end

• 38:01Speaker 01

  The 300,000 or 300 million dollar programs.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  Crazy boats.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Crazy boats. Yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 00

  You, your boat is, what is it called? A class 40?

• 38:11Speaker 01

  A class 40.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  And that means that it is a 40 foot fiberglass

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Racing sailboat.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  You're already there. That's perfect.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  See, I'm trying to understand all of this. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna pretend that I understand this world, but

• 38:26Speaker 01

  You're doing a thousand percent better than anyone I've ever interviewed with, I have to tell you. You're doing really well.

• 38:32Speaker 00

  And what is it about like this class of boat? And in the race around the world, was everybody racing the same class of sailboat? Or were there different, different classes within that? Like, how does that work?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  So the race that I ended up going around the world with in 2023, there was a couple of class 40s that were in that, but you could actually bring in any boat that you wanted to. And that was kind of the fun part of the race. Um, the race is actually called a pursuit race. So the slower boats started sooner than the faster boats and a class 40, uh, like first light, we started in the mid range. We were the halfway point where, you know, a boat that was maybe smaller or older or wooden, um, versus me as being a lighter boat fiberglass, um, would have started in August while I started at the end of October. And then my job as a racer was to

• 39:26Speaker 01

  start and chase them down. And which I actually really liked that. It, it's the only race right now that actually does something like that. Normally most, most boats start at the same time and then they just do the, the handicap system at the end. So even if you cross the finish line, you still don't know where you are. Where with this race, as soon as you cross the finish line, you know, if you're first, second, third, eighth, whatever it may be. And I actually kind of liked that. You knew where you stood from like the get go.

• 39:56Speaker 00

  Right. And you broke the record for your class of boat in that race. Is that right?

• 40:04Speaker 01

  I did. Yeah, I did. I would have broken it by two weeks, but I only broke it by one.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  You described this boat as a, as a tank, you know, this is not built for comfort. It's sort of the, uh, off-road vehicle of racing sailboats. The Day Brothers helped you retrofit it and also helped you rig it with all of these cameras, which created its own sort of shockwave within the culture of sailing. Yes. Like this was very unusual. No one had ever done this before. They configuring it with Starlink and all of the like, so that you could be storytelling.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So we were the first sailboat to go around the planet successfully with Starlink. And that, we had gotten a lot of slack for that. Like in the beginning, um, my marine electrician, uh, Duncan, who lives in Connecticut, he's kind of a, a mad scientist and he, he had been working on a lot of motor yachts. And he was like, hey, we're putting this, this technology on all the motor yachts with like the billionaires. Like, why wouldn't we just put it on a 40 foot racing boat? And also, and I mean, the original Starlink was, we called it the pizza box because it was so big. I mean, it was literally like you had a dash like on the back of the boat. Um, and we

• 41:24Speaker 01

  didn't know, is it gonna work? Like what's gonna happen? And the race organizer was super like, no, this isn't gonna work. And you're still gonna have to deal with your, you know, other sort of uh, satellite companies. And I fought him. I was like, no, if my marine electrician is like, this is, this is where we're going. I trust him because he's, he's, he knows, like he, he does this every single day, installing these things for billionaires. What, what's the difference for just a little 40 foot racing boat? Also Duncan was the, was the guy who actually said that, you know, we, we should put cameras on board. And originally, the whole team was pretty skeptical of it. Like, why? You

• 42:07Speaker 01

  know, it's a, it's a thing. Uh, it seems invasive and, but, um, his son, um, who was only 13, I think 13 or 15 at the time, um, put a big firewall. He's like a little coder. It's so cute. Um, so we had Duncan and then we had his son, William, who were working together to make it so that like only four people had full access to the cameras at all time. They always texted me pre-hand to be like, hey, um, just checking in or whatnot, or like they, they didn't, they wouldn't look inside the boat. They'd just check the cameras outside the boat. Um, and it's actually one of the reasons

• 42:45Speaker 01

  why the, the book is actually named Sailing Solo, But Not Alone. Um, first light, sailing solo, but not alone. Because like, I had FK that put 100% of his trust into me. I mean, he's a, he was the CEO of a major company. Um, and he was like, hey, I'm your investor. This is your company now. Cole Brauer Ocean Racing is your company. I'm just an investor. You hire the people. You put this together. And so he allowed me to hire everyone and anyone that I wanted. And the only person that he wanted on the team was Duncan, who was his marine electrician. And I ended up

• 43:26Speaker 01

  naming the book, you know, first light sailing solo, but not alone, because yeah, I sailed around the world 130 days alone, uh, or solo, but actually technically I had a really amazing team, like behind the scenes all the time checking up on me. And I really wanted the book to show that, that yeah, I was unassisted, of course. Uh, nobody could touch the boat for 130 days at all. If they touched the boat at all, I would be disqualified. But I could call them at like my worst horrible moments and say, I really need help with this or that, or you know, whatnot. And we would Apollo 13 the shit out of it. I, I have to tell you, there was a lot of things that broke.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And I could call my friends on, on shore and just be like, hey, show me how to fix it. And they would take something apart while they had on land to teach me how to, how to fix it off, like in the middle of the ocean. I mean, the book is mainly like for, this was for the team because yeah, everything's about me now, but it's really about them.

• 44:36Speaker 00

  The Apollo 13, uh, comparison is pretty apt, like the system failures that you have. I mean, there's this crazy situation that you get yourself into where like the first and second autopilot fail and it turns out it's the result of like a $200 piece of equipment that wasn't waterproof. But you had gotten tossed about and had broken rib and you're trying to jerry rig this thing by yourself, using your toes to, you know, kind of like keep the, keep the

• 45:11Speaker 01

  The tiller.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  The tiller like straight while you're, you know, I mean, it's a movie, you know, like seeing like, I mean, was that, that had to be one of the lowest, most difficult moments in the race.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  In the race, it was one of the most difficult moments for sure. During the race itself, I would say you have to pull yourselves like out of the depths of despair of like, okay, well, this happened and this happened. And there's a phone call that I actually have with my mother at the time because we're trying to make the decision of whether or not I drop out of the race itself. And I, at this point, I'm a month in, I've now cracked my ribs, um, things are breaking, uh, like I'm, I'm, am I, I haven't got my period, like, so I'm very emotional. I'm very like, my emotions are all

• 46:03Speaker 01

  over the place. I can't control any of it. I'm dehydrated. I'm hungry. Um, and then trying to make the decision of, okay, well, then I'm gonna probably have to sail the next, you know, 3,000 miles to Australia and I'll just give it up. It was a conversation with my mother and my mother was like, we don't stop. Browers don't stop. And it goes back to what we originally were talking about how my mom and my dad were quite strong or are quite strong individuals and always pushed me to be the best of the best, which could now seem maybe a little abusive for like children nowadays, because we just don't push kids the way that we did in like the eighties and nineties.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  And for me, like, I needed that. I needed someone like my mother who was like, no, remember who you are. Like away from sailing, away from being an athlete, remember who you are born to be. You are born to keep moving forward. We never go backwards. And having that moment with my mother was such a strong thing. I mean, she told me not to use anger as fuel, which that was the only thing I argued about with her because for me, as like even as like an angry teenager, I was the same, like that is what fueled me to be the way that I am. Like everyone thinks I'm bubbly and happy because that's

• 47:26Speaker 01

  what they see on the Instagram and that's what they see in interviews. But actually, some of the strongest moments of my life have been fueled by the, the burning fiery anger, the, the anger that goes up the back of your spine and, and creates goosebumps on your arms. The thing that makes you want to like run through walls. That's what made me get through like that hell week.

• 47:53Speaker 00

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• 49:14Speaker 00

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• 50:45Speaker 00

  What is the source of that anger? Like, what is beneath all of that?

• 50:51Speaker 01

  I am still working on myself. I am still trying to figure out. I mean, I have a couple of ideas of where a lot of that anger comes from, just from like being, maybe being brought up in situations, maybe that weren't so great, or, you know, we didn't, we didn't grow up with, with that much money or anything. And so, and you did grow up, you know, kind of in the dichotomy of this super, like financially wealthy place and still always you were, you were the kid from, from Springs. You were one of the dirty Springers. And maybe that comes from always wanting to like prove that, no, I can amount to something

• 51:34Speaker 01

  bigger and better, even though I didn't come from that legacy. Maybe that's one of the, I think there's many different reasons, but I think this is definitely one of them. It's like a frustration that you feel, and you're like, no, but my parents raised me to be the best, and everyone tells me that I'm not. Like, that creates this resentment and this like, but I know that I can be. The same way with going around the world. I have so many people ask me, okay, so like, what made you believe that you could do it? And the answer is, well, there was no other option in my mind. There was nothing inside my head, the three months of prep to do the race. There wasn't one ounce of doubt.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  And where does that come from? Like, that self-belief, like that conviction that you're in the right place, doing what you're supposed to be doing, and that your success is undeniable? Like, of course, this is gonna play out the way that I've envisioned it.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  I think that's from 10 years of focusing on being the best that I could every single day, showing up early, leaving late, in working in the industry, in an industry that's not accessible or really made for me. I don't fit the specific mold in this sailing world and this industry at all. And so then you, you have to learn everything. The amount of times that I would go to the bar and I would sit there and they, you know, all the, the bros would be talking to each other about tactics and navigation and what they were doing and how did they trim the sails to make the boat really fast? They would say all of their knowledge. They would tell everything in front of me because they did not see anything.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  You were invisible.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  I was invisible for years, completely invisible. And they had no idea I was taking notes. They had no idea.

• 53:28Speaker 00

  Right. It's almost a secret weapon, you know, like this, in the midst of this dismissiveness, you're absorbing all of this knowledge like a sponge.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:38Speaker 00

  I wrote down all these S-words that came to mind in, in, in your story. Like, there's subversion, we talked about that. There's self-reliance. There's the silverbacks. There's survival. There's like submission, this tension between like the humility that's required to contend with nature in all its strength and fury. The scaries, which I want to talk about.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  The Sunday scaries, yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  And this strength, right? And kind of this undercurrent of anger. And you mentioned, you know, kind of being this kid in high school who, who, you know, was trying to figure out where you fit in. And you tell this story about like you and your misfit friends created like your own Fight Club. Like, I'm trying to envision this. Like, you legit had a Fight Club where you were punching each other out.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Legitimately had a Fight Club in Carl's basement, yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  This clear path from that to you having to withstand getting punched by a coach at one point, this guy Lewis, right? But developing this resilience that you could withstand that sort of thing, like you could dish it out as much as you needed to take it.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  I think it is the story of me and the, and the Fight Club, the underground Fight Club, was something that kind of flowed out of me really easily, and I never thought about putting it in the book, honestly. And then all of a sudden, I was writing and I was like, you know, my life doesn't make any sense if I don't put the underground Fight Club into it because it, it really epitomizes what growing up, you know, out of Springs, East Hampton, Montauk, as a blue-collar kid is like. Because if you don't have a place to put your frustration with life, because there's, there's nothing to do in the wintertime. Everything is shut down.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  There's, there's zero to do other than drink, do drugs, and then get into fights. And if not, then you end up in a car, in a car accident. You know, there, there really is nothing to do out there. And the way that we actually, I think, protected each other and protected ourselves is that we took all our frustration of, of growing up in boredom and we put it into something that maybe that would help us one day and also keep us like entertained. I mean, it wasn't, it's not something that I, you know, wanted to tell the kids, hey, you should be in a Fight Club and beat the crap out of each other and then, you know, like smoke a lot of weed and drink. And so I don't want to promote that, you know? Like, the me and my track uniform, like whiskey spilled down it and then still going

• 56:23Speaker 01

  next day to go run track. I don't want to promote that side, but also it was, we didn't have the technology growing up that kids have nowadays. And I'm so happy I went through that. I'm so happy that I went through that age in my life of drugs and alcohol and, and making bad mistakes and getting arrested. I'm so glad that I did that because if I hadn't, I would have been doing that in college, which would have been really bad. Like, I'm, I'm quite well-educated because I didn't really drink in college. I didn't do any drugs. By, by 2013, I touched nothing. I was like, that's it.

• 57:08Speaker 01

  Drugs are out of my system. I'm done. Like, I am, I'm gonna push into what, I'm gonna take the type of addiction that comes from my family. My family had huge levels of addiction. My dad was an alcoholic and has been clean for a long time now. And I'm gonna take that same addictive personality that I know as a Brauer I have, and I'm gonna put it into sailing. And I did. I took everything. I didn't drink. I didn't like, do any drug, no, nothing. I immediately became addicted to sailing. And like, if it didn't come from that underground Fight Club of getting, you know, your ass handed to you

• 57:50Speaker 01

  from your friends and showing that, you know, I'd rather have that happen than get into a really bad car accident, you know, driving too fast and wrap myself around a tree as one of those teenagers. Like, at least I was, it sounds crazy, I was safe in the underground Fight Club. You know, we beat the crap out of each other, but at least I knew if I laid down on the ground for a while bleeding, nothing was gonna, nothing was gonna happen. And so I'm really happy that I, as a kid, I did that. And I don't, I don't talk about it as much in the book because for one, when I was first writing the book, I wrote an encyclopedia. My publisher was like, okay, we have to, we have

• 58:31Speaker 01

  to reel this one back a little bit. And so I don't talk about it as much in the book, but you can't have the underground Fight Club without showing how resilience comes through from that. And also protecting myself. I mean, I'm sure I would have been dead. I'm sure, like, from-

• 58:50Speaker 00

  What's happening with the other members of the underground Fight Club? Are they still-

• 58:54Speaker 01

  They never left.

• 58:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:56Speaker 01

  They never left. I recently saw Al, who's in the book, he's in the prologue. He was my boyfriend, who's the fisherman. And I recently saw him, he's never left Montauk, ever. And he's still doing the same stuff. I mean, it's, it's great. He loves his life. I'm not complaining at all or showing, you know, he, but it is really interesting. I went back recently for the first time in 12 years. And the only thing that's changed in Montauk is the name of the bar, but it's still the bar. It's still, used to be called Liars. And you used to walk in there and it was a little dive bar. And there's four stools and he was still sitting on that, on one

• 59:37Speaker 01

  of those stools. And, you know, he's still ordering Budweiser. I mean, he's covered in tattoos. He's got Budweiser tattooed on his arm. And he's got the crown over here. And he's got an octopus under here. And he's, he's covered in tattoos. And I still thought he was adorable when I saw him. He looks exactly the same. Maybe a little like, worse for wear because of like, the drugs and the alcohol and things like that. But I went back to Montauk and it was, nothing had changed. And I was the only one out of any of my friends who went to college. I got out. And now I'm, you know, on your podcast, which is super cool. Maybe if I hadn't had the underground Fight Club,

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I would have ended up in jail, or never leaving, or maybe, maybe pregnant, living in, you know, like, a dirty shack in Montauk, which also would have been fine, too. It just would have been a very different pathway. And the sailing world, what I mentioned in the book is that, that moment that happens later in the book with that coach was such a crazy moment because I felt like I had been found out. I felt like the sailing world, who had always looked at me like this cute marshmallow-y girl that just followed the rules and everything. All of a sudden, I was in

• 1:00:59Speaker 01

  a bar fight, you know, at a yacht club. And now I had to like backtrack, super hard and be like, ooh, okay, we can't let my, my inner Fight Club come out and show this super exclusive, preppy world that I've been, maybe that I don't belong.

• 1:01:21Speaker 00

  There's an interesting tension between authenticity, like the way that you were storytelling on social media during the race, like, really just allowing yourself to be who you are. And there was something infectious about like, the video dinner parties and you would have spa days and there's stuffed animals everywhere and you're, you're basically a teenage girl in your bedroom, like making vlogs.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  That's what it was supposed to be.

• 1:01:50Speaker 00

  Except that you're like, a thousand miles from the closest person in the middle of the ocean, you know, contending with nature in all its fury, in the midst of this race that you're in contention, you know, to, to win as the first American woman to even do this. Like, like, the duality of that is crazy enough. But there was this, like, a sweetness and, and just, you couldn't help but like, fall in love with you and like, you know, wanna go on this journey with you. And you were showing, you know, warts and all, like, what it's like. Like, here's, you know, here's how I, here's how I have to wash my clothes and, you know, all, all the stuff, right? Down to like, opening Christmas presents. And, you know, you being alone and all of that. But then there's

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  the, the chameleon aspect of who you have had to be to get into your position. Like, how to navigate the, you know, this subculture and the tricky personalities in the male-dominated culture. Like, how to be strategic about that to get what you want.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's exhausting.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  And when to be, you know, also, this is in the performance context, like, when to be in a state of surrender to the elements and like, you know, kind of, like, accepting this, this almost powerlessness of like, the situation that you're in. And when to go on the offensive and the attack and, and, and really lean into what you call like, the dragon time mindset to like, really like, force yourself well on a situation to get what you want out of it or what you need.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  No, it's super interesting. I saw a quote recently from, from Darwin, Charles Darwin, that said, something along the lines of, what makes a species last longer is not strength or intelligence, it's adaptability. And I think that's what I've had to learn over time is adaptability. Like, if I'm at the New York Yacht Club, surrounded by a bunch of older men who have been in the industry for a super long time, and they're dressed up to the nines and, you know, they, they walk in a certain way and they talk in a certain way. And I, I can do that. I, give me a martini, let's go. Like, I, I can, I can play that part. But if I'm going and hanging out

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  with a bunch of my girlfriends, who are in the pro world, who are scrappy and they're wild and they're artists, a lot of them are artists. They work in the industry as sailmakers. So that means that they're working with their hands all the time. They're boat captains. They're working on wooden yachts or carbon boats or whatever it may be. They are, I mean, for me, like, that's, I actually feel quite comfortable in that, in that world. But to be able to still go to, you know, the yacht club and, and be treated with respect is you have to be the chameleon. You have to be able to play both sides. And that was what I really liked about, like, my sponsors,

• 1:04:49Speaker 01

  was I didn't have to pretend with them. Because they weren't your typical yacht club, you know, super wealthy people who own super wealthy boats. Like, that, that wasn't them. I mean, they were just regular guys who created a wonderful company, who happened to make a lot of money. And a long time ago, so they're used to having that much money. So I would consider them old money. And they had a lot of trust in me. They looked at me like, hey, you're like, you've been doing this for a long time. What's, why would we step in and tell you what to do differently? I think anyone that gets that type of sponsorship for any athlete, you know,

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Formula One or NASCAR, anything, that's, it's so beautiful for me. Because that's how you really move forward with your investment. If you let your athlete just be creative and have fun, like the Instagram. I could be truly me, which is the teenage girl with my fluffy pillows and my, my stuffed animals and, you know, that, that was me. One day, my music would be piano music. The next second, it was EDM. Next second, it was metal. And that's who I am naturally. Naturally, I'm, you know, flowy and wherever I'm feeling that day. And I wanted the Instagram to be much

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  more of me than I had ever showed anyone in the world.

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  Were you doing all your own editing of those while you're sailing this boat? Like, was there somebody else? They would get sent to them and they would post it? Or you, you were doing all of that?

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  So I had Lydia Mullen, who was fabulous. I had, I had brought her on the team about two days before the start of the race. And then she hit the ground running with me. So the first month, we worked together on the social media side while I was still sailing. And it was her idea, actually, the post every single day. And I hated her for it. Like, literally on the, the first 24 hours, she was like, so we're gonna do another video tomorrow. And I was like, no. And at this point, I was feeling pretty sick. I had gotten food poisoning from land and then got offshore and didn't really go that well. And so she had edited the videos for the first

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  month. And actually, watching her do the edits from afar, then I started to realize that, oh, maybe I wanna change this a little bit, change this a little bit. And oh, maybe, maybe actually it would be better to do this. And that's how I started editing. I started editing after the first month. So I was out there for four months and one week. And after the first month, I started editing all the videos after that. And honestly, it was super fun. Because you're in the Southern Ocean after the first month. And the Southern Ocean is super gray. It's like being here in the wintertime when there's no snow. Like, it can be just brutal on you. Like, your body just feels like it's just shrinking up. So having a purpose to wake up and be like, oh, what am I

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  gonna film today? What am I gonna edit today? It like, kept my mind fluffy and kept it fun and kept it pink and sparkly and like, it, it kept it energized, where I could see a lot of the other guys were doing blogs or something. And wow, the videos and the photos and the things that came out of their boats was heinous. Like they hadn't shaved in months and they had bags under their eyes. And I was like, and my mom kept texting me and going, the guys look really bad. Like it's scary. The guys look really bad.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  But it also gives you like a lens into the competition in real time. Like there's some degree of psychological warfare. Like they're looking bad. And you're like, hi, guys. You know, like today we're gonna like.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Good morning. Today, we're gonna learn how to use my.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  And don't think for a second they're not seeing that, right?

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  I think they partially hated me, but also it was so funny because there was a couple guys that were super sweet and would write to me and they didn't have Starlink or anything. So they would write me emails. I got a few emails from a few competitors that were like, keep going. We love to see it. And every single one of those competitors didn't end up finishing the race. One guy, two guys sank, one guy lost, two guys lost their mass. One guy, well, he had sank, but then the other guy had kidney stones. And then another guy dislocated his shoulder. And so me just cracking my ribs, I thought, wow, I'm doing

• 1:09:37Speaker 01

  fine. Like compared to everyone else, like cracked ribs, took like four or five weeks to heal. I was like, I'm good. Like nothing, I don't have kidney stones, at least like that's way worse.

• 1:09:49Speaker 00

  This is, this is the Fight Club.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  I'm fine. I'm a little broken, but like I, at least I can still stand up. Like I'm, I'm, I'm good. And I was keeping up with my, my diet very well. I had done all the meal prep because.

• 1:10:04Speaker 00

  How do you fit all of that? Like, we didn't even talk about like weight. So you have all of this added weight from Starlink and the batteries and the like, right? Then there's 160 days worth of food.

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  I don't even know how the water works.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Water is a desalinator. So you take water from the ocean, pump it through a high pressure membrane, and it creates perfect, like as perfect water as you can possibly get. There's no minerals. And then you add minerals back in for your own health. Because if not, it would make you more dehydrated. And then you use that water also to cook your food. It's astronaut food. So the food's super light. It's all, it's all dehydrated food. And then you just add boiling water to it, shake it up, leave it for 10 minutes, and then you eat it.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  But you're losing weight, you're losing muscle mass. You have to get comfortable giving yourself IVs.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  That was a new one for me, for sure.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which you have a discomfort with needles.

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  I don't like needles at all. It, to this day, I, I still kind of pass out a little bit.

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  And also, it was interesting, like, as somebody who doesn't know really much about this at all, of course, you're traversing the globe. So you're going to go through all different types of ocean scenarios. But the variance here is, is pretty severe. I mean, you start, you, you mentioned getting food poisoning. I mean, you're in the North Atlantic, there's like, pretty high velocity knot winds that you're contending with, you're sick. Then you get to the equator and it's the doldrums, right? Is this when you're like, okay, now I'm going to edit my own videos. You know, this, this like, you can't even distinguish sky from sea and the disorientation of that. There is a mental kind of malaise that sets in.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the first two weeks were the hardest, for sure. And I talk about it a little bit in the book about like purging land. And we are so used to being surrounded by people, even like, imagine you spend a day alone, alone, right? But then you still go to the grocery store to pick up groceries. You go over and get your coffee from, you know, your barista, you still, good morning, how are you? You do the niceties, you leave. That day still was considered alone, right? Because maybe you came back to edit or work or write or whatever it may be. But like you.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  There's being alone and there's being alone.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  There's being alone and then.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  If something happens, the closest person is a thousand miles away.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes. Best case scenario, especially in the Southern Ocean. And you can't rely on anyone else to come and protect you. You have to be able to fix absolutely everything. And it's actually something that brings me quite a lot of comfort. Because over the, you know, last 10 years, I had learned how to do electrics and mechanics, all just by working in that sector, by, you know, being a sailmaker and, and not professionally, but just making a ton of mistakes. And I mean, like, I, I wish that the book had been in volumes, because there would have been an entire book, 240 pages, just dedicated to

• 1:13:22Speaker 01

  every mistake that I made on first light, before she was named first light, when she was Dragon. I sat down last week with a girlfriend of mine, with Serena, and her, her and I talked about all, all, every mistake that I'd ever done on first light. And there was just not enough pages. I mean, I almost sunk the boat twice. That didn't make it into the book. With different people, too, different mistakes. I had run aground a few times, and then had to try to get myself off this like hump of ground. I almost caught the boat on fire twice. The, actually, the third time that I tried to do it, wasn't my fault.

• 1:14:06Speaker 01

  That was Duncan, that was my electronics guy, which was hilarious. We also did not put that in the book, because he was like, please don't put that in the book, you'll ruin my career.

• 1:14:14Speaker 00

  But here you are talking about it on a podcast.

• 1:14:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. But at this point, at this point, he loves me. He's like a dad to me. So it's okay. And his career is pretty solid. So I don't think he has to worry about that. But there's the amount of mistakes that I made with first light. I mean, we just talk about me losing the mast. That's the only mistake I talk about, but there's thousands. Oh, my God. The amount of learning that happens from every mistake, like dire mistake that you make. That's how I was able to go around the world so successfully and come back as if the boat had never even gone around the world. Like, we came back and the boat did not look in bad shape. Like she, she could have gone again. And she did.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  I, I then sold the boat to a woman in Australia, and we sailed the boat together another 74 days from Spain to Australia together. And like, that's how I had left the boat in such good shape. The first place guy, Philippe, I love him, I still see him in France, he came in with a broken boom. Everything was broken. The boat was like falling apart. And for me, I had already made so many mistakes before that I knew the boat so well. I knew where the, the worst parts were going to be. I knew it was going to be the autopilot. I just didn't think I was going to be dealing with the autopilot with cracked ribs. That was not on my bingo list at all. But I knew where the weaknesses were. And that's what

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  made it a successful race. Because I had already made every other mistake that you could possibly make.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  Even so, there's no way that you could get a handle on all the variables that you're going to have to face. Like, it's just an unmanageable situation. When you're going to be at sea for four months, and you know, anything goes and anything can happen, and you're totally on your own. Yes, you can contact people and communicate what's going on, but ultimately, it's down to you and your, you know, self reliance and resilience to like, problem solve in real time, including a near collision with a gigantic cargo ship. Like, there's some crazy shit that goes down.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, that one.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  Also ends up playing to your advantage in the aftermath of that. Like, you've gained time on Philippe because of a strategic decision that you made.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Oh, on Ronnie. Yeah. Ronnie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another competitor. That was not the, I mean, I don't know if that was the specific moment of like, the cargo ship just happened to be there at that moment, which is funny note, that the guy in the cargo ship ended up seeing my Instagram afterwards. And he wrote me an email apologizing.

• 1:17:00Speaker 00

  Because basically, he wouldn't yield, right? And this was creating a.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  Basically, he just wasn't understanding why I wasn't moving out of the way. And I was kind of like, well, I'm spinning in circles. The doldrums, there's no wind. And I was spinning in circles, trying to get things organized and like, go south. I was like, I just need to get south so I can get into the Southeast trades. And once I'm in the Southeast trades, then I'm, I'm bombing it down to the St. Helena High, and then to the Southern Ocean. You know, it's like a pathway, it's a highway. And you have to get past the, the biggest roadblock, which is the doldrums crossing the equator. And there happened to be a giant cargo ship also right there. And cargo ships love the doldrums because there's very little waves. And there's less bad weather. And so you're not fighting

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  to, to move around. So you know that there's going to be cargo ships around there. And for me, being alone, you know, all your alarms are going off, it's, it's messing with your head mentally. But also, you're trying to, to talk to this guy on the radio where there's static and say, hey, you know, I, I can't move out of your way right now. I don't have, I can't use my engine. And it's not translating well, like, at all. And.

• 1:18:19Speaker 01

  Eventually, it's a near miss. We miss each other, of course.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  I'm still alive today.

• 1:18:27Speaker 01

  And then I keep going. And, and yeah, and then I get this, I get this really wonderful email, which I just recently found it again, because I was like, maybe I made that email up in my head. Because he sent it to me when I was blasting along in the Southeast trades about a week later. And, and he said, oh, my God, like, that was you. Like, I misunderstood who you were and what you were doing.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  And pretty much, I should have avoided you more. Which sailboats do actually have priority over

• 1:19:00Speaker 01

  a lot of vessels. But tonnage always wins. And so I'm a, I'm always a very defensive player when it comes to cargo ships. I'm like, you go first. No, no, no, you, you may go first.

• 1:19:14Speaker 00

  There's no police officer that's going to pull, pull you guys over and sort it out.

• 1:19:18Speaker 01

  No, that's actually the best and best and worst part about being offshore is the best part is that there's guidelines. There is rules, like Cole regs, it's a, it's a rule book. Everyone knows it. Everyone that takes their captain's license like me knows these set of rules. But when you get out there, it's the wild, wild west. Like, if you want to have that cargo ship move out of the way, you call that cargo ship and you go, hey, can you move 20 degrees? And they either say yes or no. And you wouldn't do that on the highway here in New York. Like, they, if, if you had access to call that taxi driver and tell them to move out of the way, they would tell you to fuck off.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  And, and so that is kind of the blessing and the curse of being offshore.

• 1:20:08Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit about, you mentioned Hell Week. And we talked a little bit about the equipment failures and you breaking your rib, ribs, couple ribs, right? Trying to, you know, fix these situations, like what it means to be in like a death spin, essentially. And then there's like the Drake Passage and going around Cape Horn. Like, you talk about like these swells that are the size of school buses that you're like pitching, you know, like, when you think about, you know, contending with the ocean, you know, like, that's what people like are most fearful of or imagining, you know, are the, the experiences that bring you in the closest proximity to disaster or death.

• 1:20:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's so interesting. I think that reducing the amount of variables is definitely important. We were just discussing variables. And I think when you're on a 40 foot boat, at least the variables are less because you understand that, okay, this is how big the boat is. These are all the places that can go wrong electrically, mechanically with sails or whatnot. And so you have a set amount of tools that are on board and you know how to fix just about everything. And you have tools that can work as three different fixes. And we walk through everything before we even leave the dock. I do the same thing, actually professionally now. I am in charge professionally for creating what we call spares lists.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  And so my job is to create what the, the list and I am, I purchase everything and I organize everything. I take pictures of everything. And then the whole team that's on land has access to that Excel spreadsheet. And so when something goes wrong, I know, okay, well, this is the stepwise of how to fix it. Okay, we ripped a sail. This is the stepwise. This is who I'm going to call if I need assistance on any of these things. And so you try before you even leave the dock to reduce the amount of variables altogether. So that when you get into these situations, like going into like a death spin, which just means that the autopilot shuts off, she tacks through the wind and just throws you around.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  And it happened a few times on the race itself. It, it's just part of the,

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  it's part of life on the boat. You have to always be ready for anything and everything. But it's knowing how to fix it. It's knowing, okay, what do I have in my, my list of goodies to be able to fix this? Like, I switched in the secondary autopilot when the first one conked out. And then same with, I had a secondary rudder reference that was the sensor that had also conked out, the one that had gotten wet. And there's things now to this day where I always put a spare rudder reference, even another one on board because of the knowledge that I learned from sailing first light around the world.

• 1:23:09Speaker 01

  And then getting to the Drake Passage, which if, if no one knows what the Drake Passage is, it is kind of the funnel of where the entire Pacific Ocean then tries to funnel all the way through this like 500 mile stretch of water. And if anyone knows what it's like to, you squeeze a hose as tight as possible and then you open that hose back up, what's the first thing that happens? You get hit in the face. That's the Drake Passage. Everything hits the Andes super hard and turns that whole area into Parmesan cheese and then funnels down through that area. And so playing it safe through that whole area is so important.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  And that's actually the reason why I ended up getting second place. Because I chose to protect myself. I chose to protect first light. Then go for the win, which was at this point, Philippe, I was chasing down Philippe, who was in first place. And I had to make the decision of, do I go into the storm that's blowing 85 knots or, you know, 90 mile an hour winds? Or do I protect myself and lose the race? And I didn't mention too much in the book about it. But that is something that is so hard to express to people about how devastating that can be. Like, because you still have to move on.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  You still have to keep sailing your boat. But internally, you almost become two different people. You have to take your competitiveness and you have to put it away, your whole ego and your pride. And you put it away and you say, no, this person who I am needs to go away. And I need to learn just to protect the boat and protect myself before the Drake Passage to avoid these giant storms that I call thing one and thing two.

• 1:25:07Speaker 00

  Which are basically two cyclones.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Giant, like the, the size of Texas and one was like the size of California. And I just recently met up with my, my meteorologist, Chelsea, who I mentioned in the book a lot. We met here in New York. She flew up and, and we were chatting. I haven't seen her in so long. And I, I asked her, like, truthfully, was that the correct decision for me to make? Or did I purposely fall over? And she was like, no, you would have died. And that like is such a relieving moment for me because nobody remembers, like who,

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  like that I got second place in that race. Nobody cares. It doesn't really matter. It really doesn't. And there were so many people on that dock when I arrived. People had flown from California to come all the way to Ocarina, Spain. I mean, people did not care.

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  Did you have a sense of this growing, like this ground swell of support based upon your social meet, your daily posting on social media? Like, obviously, you're seeing the numbers. Like, I don't know how many Instagram followers you had at the outset, but it grows to like 400,000. I'm sure you're seeing the comments and the light. So you have like an abstract idea that like, oh, wow, like people are paying attention to this. But you're still out there alone. You know, it's not until you complete it and you're back on land and there's kind of a media, you know,

• 1:26:44Speaker 00

  sensation, you know,

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  That was super weird.

• 1:26:46Speaker 00

  swirling about you.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  It was super weird. I have to tell you, it was really weird. Because I was super protected on first light. First light was, you know, my everything. And then all of a sudden, that protection was gone. I, I had been watching the numbers, of course, on the Instagram. We started, when I first joined the Instagram, I think I had 2,000 followers or something. It was just my friends. And then it went to 10,000 before the start of the race. And then I finished, you know, with like 450,000 or something crazy. And

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  But I had no idea what that number meant because who does? Maybe Taylor Swift knows what that number means, you know, because she can relate it to stadiums. I did not truly understand what that meant or how many lives that I had impacted or walked into their living room. I had no idea. And my team had done a great job of protecting me. I had told them, you know, no interviews. We take, you know, we'll, we'll take three interviews before I get in. And then we cut off, no interviews, um, five days before I arrive, absolutely not. And the one thing that I wished that maybe I had put my foot down a little bit stronger about

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  was that we, we went into like 30 hours of interviews one, the day I got in. Um, and I was broken. I was completely broken. Um, which now, looking back, it's a great portfolio to have. Like as a, as a business person, I think that that's really great that we did that. But it destroyed me. It took months for me to recover, if not a year to recover just from how destroying those moments were from coming back. Cause it's not like I had even a moment to just sit on first light and thank her

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  for like what she had, what she had accomplished as my trusty steed. And I was thrust into this world. And so as you had asked early, earlier about, you know, what was like the most like difficult time during the race, I say, you know, it was of course hell week, breaking my ribs and stuff like that. The most difficult of the entire thing was coming back to land and being thrust into this media attention world that one, I was not set up to deal with. And two, I didn't know how to act. I didn't know, do I shake people's hand? Do I kiss them on the cheek?

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  Do I, I had no, I hadn't touched anyone for four and a half months. And now all of a sudden I was supposed to just be like Princess Diana. I didn't do really that, that corrective things because I had no idea. And I knew that the sponsorship was ending, like all of us got fired. You know, it's like, okay, the sponsorship goes until the day you arrive. And then you just go back to your normal jobs. And so there was no like weaning off period. There was no recovery period. It was just, I guess I gotta go back and get a job. And so I went back to Newport. I moved back into my van and I tried to get a job again, but I was the most famous sailor on the planet.

• 1:30:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very weird. Yeah. I mean, it's similar to a soldier returning from a deployment, like being in this Yeah. high stakes, high risk environment, uh, for an extended period of time. And then, you know, they get on a plane and 24 hours later, they're back in normal society, trying to figure out how to like acclimate.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  And get a job at the grocery store.

• 1:30:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. You know, coming from such a heightened experience and, and

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:40Speaker 00

  and then an expectation that you should be able to just slide right back in seamlessly. And then the low grade kind of, whether it's PTSD or some, some degree of depression from being in this dopaminergic, you know, environment for such a long period of time and then being in like a dearth of it. Like you shared recently in an Instagram post, it might've even been a couple of days ago. Like you're in France and you're like, I should be all excited about promoting my book and all that, but it's like, you're uncomfortable on land. Like this is foreign territory for you and it hits you different. Like you're happy and alive when you're in a boat on the water and you're a little kind

• 1:31:25Speaker 00

  of confused and disoriented when you have to navigate, you know, the streets of New York City.

• 1:31:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, you couldn't say it any better than that. Honestly, it's, it's so true. It's completely disorienting, completely disorienting. And the positive response on that Instagram post was what actually brought me a lot of, like a lot of love because I didn't speak super openly about it when I first came back. Because for one, I didn't want people to know that I was struggling so badly. Cause I didn't want people to look at me like, oh, she's ungrateful for all of this media attention, or she's ungrateful for this or that. She should be happy.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  And the truth of the matter is I wasn't happy because when I was actually happy, I was with, with her. I was with first light. And now she was like a child that was ripped from my arms. And I was told, okay, so now you should be happy that you, that your child's been ripped from you. And not just the boat being like physically away, but actually just like the mentality of being around her and like the feeling that she gives you when you're on her and you're, you're working with her. And in the book, I talked to her all the time and that's true. I would have put more like cameos with her in there, but I think that that would have made me look a little, a little more crazy.

• 1:32:54Speaker 00

  A little goes a long way.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's true. It is an absolute love story to her. Like writing the book was super cathartic. Um, and we talked about this before we came on camera of why I wrote the book twice. Cause the first time I wrote the book, I was in a really angry place because I hadn't, I, my child had been ripped from me. Like the soul had been ripped from me. And so I wrote the book in a super angry way of everything that had caused me problems in my whole life. I was so angry and mad. And, um, and then I reread it with a different mindset when I was a little bit on a, in a better headspace. And I went, oh my God, I can't publish this. This isn't me. This is, this is, this is a part of me, but this isn't who I truly am.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  And I'm really happy with the way that the book is now because it's much more of a, like it has the happiness, it has the sad, it has the anger, it has exactly who I am. It has all of it. It has the piano music and the EDM. It's got so much more of me, truly me, where the Instagram was that, but you only saw one and a half minutes of that. That's the hardest part about Instagram, this, this short form video. So there's people all over the planet who think that they know who I am, but they've only watched a minute and a half of me. And with the book, the book is truly, truly me.

• 1:34:25Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  And it's long form. And that's, I had so many people come to me and say, oh, we want to make a movie. And I said, no, no, no, we're not going to make a movie yet. We're going to write the book. I need to go through this personally. I need to like sit in my van and really like work through these internal demons myself and find out like what is actually truly going on. And I'm going to do that through words, through my journals. And so if there never is a movie made, that's okay. Like I, I'm okay to die with this. This is, I'm really happy.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  There is a movie in it though. I mean, it's very cinematic. One of the surprising things that I read in the book was that defied my assumptions or expectations. Like you would imagine that circumnavigating the globe in a, in a 40 foot sailboat, that if something should go wrong, it's probably the boat, like you're, I don't know, like you're, you know, like your mast is going to snap or you're going to tip over, you know, all of these kinds of cataclysms. And what you say is, no, it's actually, uh, it's actually like human error that is the biggest problem. It's like, it's like mind and body.

• 1:35:48Speaker 00

  There's sleep deprivation. There's the derangement with sleep deprivation. There's making bad decisions under stress and all of these things. These are what are driving like the disastrous situations. The boat is fine. The boat is built to like withstand all of this.

• 1:36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think that's what's so amazing about the boat is that, you know, you, you first have to take care of yourself because if you don't feel good, the boat's not going to feel good. You need to feel the best of your abilities. You need to be eating and drinking water and keeping up with some exercise and keeping your mind right and listening to music, even when you're stressed out. I mean, that's why I wore the headphones so much. I wore, they died eventually, like the headphones, the Bluetooth wouldn't even connect because there's so much corrosion inside the headphones. And I still wore them. I wore them almost like just, just to muffle some of the sounds, um, to relax my mind and body. Because the more that I could relax, the harder that I would push the boat.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  And I could still hear things, you know, if she was creaking or didn't like what I had just done, okay, well, let's ease off a little bit. We'll do this, we'll do this. Us as humans, we're more likely to screw something up than the boat screwing something up. Because boats are like, as we talked about, she's a tank, she's a machine and she's tried and true. I mean, when I went around the world, she was already 16 years old. That's an old boat, a very old boat. And working with her, who was already tried and true, I knew that the biggest variable was going to be me because I hadn't been sailing for even 16 years. She had been sailing longer than I had been. And so I knew that I could put my trust into her, that she will protect me no matter what.

• 1:37:32Speaker 01

  And a lot of us sailors, at least the smart ones, we know that the boat is our first life raft. You know, we have all this safety equipment onboard, you know, we have two life rafts onboard, actual life rafts onboard, one spare and, and, and one actual one. But the first line of defense, the first thing that you must do is that the boat is your actual first life raft. That's life raft zero. And so you protect the boat at all costs.

• 1:38:03Speaker 00

  Fidelity to the vessel.

• 1:38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  As you say.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  To like go down with your, go down with the ship.

• 1:38:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  That, that old mentality.

• 1:38:10Speaker 00

  And that, that decision to check your ego around Drake Passage and, and, you know, protect the vessel, um, you know, ends up paying off. And I think it's a, it's a lesson in a really important piece here, which is like humility that you have to have to contend with the elements in this way. Uh, and how you reconcile that with the competitive spirit of trying to push the envelope to like win a race in a competition context. Like I'm curious around your intuition.

• 1:38:47Speaker 00

  Around the decision making here, like, how do you, like, you're, you're reading the weather like tea leaves. Yes, you have a meteorologist, but it's also like, it's up to you. And you're like, okay, the clouds are looking like this. I think, you know, my gut is telling me I should make this decision.

• 1:39:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:04Speaker 00

  Even if maybe the data points are saying this, here's where I know I can assert my competitiveness and, and, and maybe like push things. And here is where I need to kind of lay down and let nature have its way.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  Until we get to the other side of whatever it is.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so true. The tea leaves. That's such a good, such a good quote. Actually, it's so funny because it's so true. I think that the tea leaves of the sky, the clouds are 100%. It tells you time. And so you have forecasts, right? We have all these different forecasts. You have six different models of these forecasts and they're all telling you when different storms or things are gonna like hit you, right, are gonna happen. But the clouds are what tell you what actually are happening. They're gonna tell you, okay, is it 30 minutes? Is it two days? Is it a week? When, when is this, this thing that's gonna happen? When is it gonna happen? And so you can have all the models on the planet,

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  you know, and, and, and truthfully, the, the information that you're getting in the Southern Ocean is quite slow. It's not that great of information because we don't have any land down there. And so there isn't like, all of a sudden, these, you know, like different towers and things down there. And there's no boats down there either. So it's not like you can look online and say, oh, a boat recorded that it was 40 knots at this point, you know? There's nothing, there's nothing down there in the Southern Ocean. It's like being in Mars. And so really, the tea leaves, the clouds are your best way of understanding. And I loved that part of it.

• 1:40:45Speaker 00

  How are you decoding that, though? Like, what are you seeing in the clouds that are allowing you to make this decision versus that one?

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, I wish we were walking through a park right now.

• 1:40:55Speaker 00

  You could like, show me.

• 1:40:56Speaker 01

  I would love to show you.

• 1:40:57Speaker 00

  Like, what are we not seeing in the clouds that could help guide our lives?

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, that is like, the question I'm always like, because honestly, I do a lot of these workshops, actually, with kids about like, reducing the amount of fear that we have around weather systems. And, and, okay, will it rain today? Is there a storm coming? Is this, because like, nature doesn't make shit up. It just, she doesn't, she doesn't do it. She, like, weather and, like, has been happening forever. And it's predictable. It's always been predictable. But it's just us as humans, just not observing it. You know, we always look at the meteorologists almost as them doing like this dark science.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  They're not, they're not doing a dark science. We just haven't spent any time to learn it. And they don't teach it to us in school. They say, okay, you know, when it starts raining, you know, you put a jacket on. That's, that's not preventative. You know, that's, that's, that's post. That's already, why did it start raining? What was the last two days in the clouds that showed us that it was gonna rain? So, for instance, I'll give you an example that you could use right now. If you look outside and there's a little rainbow ring around the sun, right? And sometimes it happens here. It's, it pretty much happens everywhere. It's gonna rain the next day. I can promise you on my life, it will rain the next day. Because that shows.

• 1:42:28Speaker 00

  There's moisture.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  There's moisture and ice crystals that are up in the upper atmosphere. If you see these little wispy clouds, like, we call them mare's tails, and they look like little tails in the sky, you're probably gonna have like, a front coming through in the next two days. And if it doesn't come through, it means something stopped it. So that's probably a blocking high. These things, I mean, I said a lot of crazy words. I know I said a lot of crazy words. So don't, don't get hung up on that. But these things I learned as a kid. And I learned these as a kid from growing up in the marsh and, and being a dirty springer. That's where I learned these things.

• 1:43:09Speaker 00

  It's akin to an indigenous tribe, you know, who knows how to forage their food on the land and can track every animal and can read the sky and the stars and just has a, like, such a profound, deep connection to their environment that we have just completely lost touch with. I had this guy, Paul Rosley, on the show, who spends like, half the year living in the Amazon and has just incredible stories about the people that he's met. And just the level of sophistication that they understand their environment and, and what everything is and, and all of the, like, it's more than tea leaves. Like, everything

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  is providing you with information and everything you need to kind of understand what's going to happen, what is happening, et cetera. And, and we have, we just live completely detached from that. And I have to imagine that on some level, like, your love of being out there, 1,000 miles away from the closest person, is connecting you with that, like, very ancient thing about being human that we've lost touch with. And so, you're a competitive athlete, but you're also like, an explorer who's out there and coming back to remind us that this is who we are.

• 1:44:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. That's beautiful. But it's, I couldn't agree more. I think that we have lost this art form, which is appreciating nature for the way that it is and not, not trying to avoid it or change it. And that's, that goes back to your S's, your submission. I don't try to fight nature because I will never win. And we will never win. There's a, there's a quote out there right now about how, you know, the planet is dying because of what we're doing to it as humans. And the truth of the matter is, the planet is

• 1:45:12Speaker 01

  not dying. We, as a human race, we are killing ourselves. And that is super important to know. I know that's controversial, but we, we're over not being controversial. We're clearly destroying the planet. It's a climate crisis. We're not, it's not climate change. It's already changed. And I see it when I'm out there in the middle of the ocean. The storms that used to be quite predictable in the Southern Ocean, they're getting bigger. They're getting a lot scarier. And it's something on a 40-foot boat that I can see so clear as day. But people that, you know, when you're here and you're in, you know, an apartment or something, and, or, we don't see it as much. We're quite protected here, or protected

• 1:45:55Speaker 01

  in this little landmass, you know, from the big hurricanes that come through and they, they grab onto the, you know, onto the Gulf Stream and then they keep going, you know, over. Like, we, we are so protected here. But one day, we're not gonna be super protected anymore. And I just want to be able to learn from these experiences of being offshore. And I, I think that's what's so amazing. We could either learn to battle out Mother Nature and keep fighting her, or we can learn how to live symbiotically with her. It doesn't have to be negative. It doesn't have to say, oh, my God, we're, we're dying. And we can still look at Mother Nature as, as a mother and a protector. But if you slap your mother

• 1:46:40Speaker 01

  in the face, what do you think she's gonna do to you? She's gonna slap you right back. And that's Mother Nature, too. And so I don't battle out Mother Nature. I, like, am very particular about how I work with Mother Nature. And like what you said, you know, when is it time to lay down and let her take over control? And when I went through the drag passage, that was that moment. I knew that, like, losing the race at that moment, getting second place was, that's what I had to do. Like, and that, that storm that was coming through was not something against me. It's not like, it knew that I was there. That storm was coming through whether I was there or not. And so I don't hate the storm.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  I respect the storm. I understand the storm. And now I need to learn how to navigate around that storm so I don't die.

• 1:47:31Speaker 00

  How do these lessons that you've learned out on the open seas translate into things that you can apply in your terrestrial life?

• 1:47:44Speaker 01

  Ah, super, super important. I think the, the last chapter of the book actually touches on that a little bit, on how the presentness that you feel offshore, like, you get into your routine, you wake up, you make your coffee, you go watch the sunrise every single morning, like clockwork. You go and do your checklist. Okay, this has some chief on it. I have to fix this. Oh, there were some birds that hung out. I'm gonna sit with the birds for a minute and just listen to them coo. Okay, I need to do a sail change next. It's coming up in probably about 12 hours. Okay. I'll start, like, internally planning out my sail change. And you just live on this absolute beautiful

• 1:48:25Speaker 01

  plane of presentness. I'm not thinking about, you know, like, what I'm gonna eat in a week from now. I'm thinking what I'm gonna eat right now. And I don't, I'm not thinking about what my future holds, which is quite distracting. I think us as humans, when we come back to the world, we always think, okay, what am I gonna do in a year from now? In 10 years from now? Oh, what's next? What's next? And, but when you're, like, in the middle of the ocean, you can't be thinking like that, because it's distracting. You need to focus on the now. And so when I come back to land, I work super hard to try to stay as present as possible. I wake up, I try to do some form of routine, I try to

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  stay focused, I try not to think too far in advance, which, a lot of my family members don't like that because they're, they're New Yorkers. So they're like, okay, what are we doing next? But I always advise people, when you're going through something that's super hard in your life, you need to take every single moment, step by step. Because if you start thinking too far in advance, you miss out on the beauty of what's happening right now.

• 1:49:39Speaker 00

  Being present and essentially essentialism, you know, what's really important.

• 1:49:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:47Speaker 00

  But there's so much momentum and energy behind a different way of living on land that it can't help but be eroded the moment your foot, you know, steps up onto the dock.

• 1:50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to be honest with yourself about how you feel in that moment, right? As a, as a consumer, as someone who comes back into planet Earth on the land, you know, you have these advertisements thrown at you and oh, buy this and do this and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And when you're offshore, there's none of that. You're not going by any billboards, you know, you're not going by, like, there's nothing around. It's just how beautiful the planet is. It's how it was, you know, a million years ago and how it will be for another million years. There's no billboards, there's no commercialism, there's no capitalism, there's no nothing. There's just, I gotta eat, I have to sleep, I have to shit, and I've got to take care of the boat and myself.

• 1:50:46Speaker 00

  And the occasional cargo ship.

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  And the occasional cargo ship, most of them are-

• 1:50:50Speaker 00

  To remind you that commerce is still happening.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  It's still going. And sometimes you gotta talk to a cargo ship guy, which is okay. Those moments go by pretty quickly. But it's true, when I come back to planet Earth, I have to physically stop myself from being accepted too much back into, you know, a capitalist society of like, oh, I need to go buy this and I need to do this. You don't need any of it. Like essentially, you need to eat and you need to sleep and you need to breathe. And you need to stay focused on being, like, giving love out to the world. And that love comes back. And I think we forget that. And then we wonder why so, so

• 1:51:38Speaker 01

  many things are messed up in our heads and we have a lot of mental illness, we have problems and depression. It's, it's because we've stopped focusing on what actually matters, our families, just focusing on our families and on our friends. And you don't have to go out for really fancy dinners. You can just sit like this, have a coffee and just unload everything that's in your mind. You know, you don't need a super fancy therapist just to enjoy a conversation, man and woman, together. And I, I think it's super important.

• 1:52:17Speaker 00

  On the topic of giving love and receiving love, this is basically what you were doing in your storytelling in the midst of this race. What is the message that you want the young woman out there to hear, the person who is, you know, grappling with like, how they show up in the world, how they manifest their dreams, how they should think about what's important in their life? Because I think you're, you wield a certain degree of influence over a generation of, of girls and young women who are emerging into the world and, and, and trying to figure it out.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  Hmm. So true. That's so true. I think the way that I would speak to like your daughters, for instance, right? I would say that it's okay to fail. I've failed and restarted my life multiple times. And it's okay. And honestly, the more that you fail, you're actually learning exactly who you are. And it doesn't matter what industry you're in, it doesn't matter where you want to go at that moment, it could change massively. For instance, I've watched my sister know exactly what she wants to be since she was 12 years old. She wanted to be a scientist. And then she couldn't get a job. She got fired from this

• 1:53:43Speaker 01

  job or didn't do this. She was part of the park ranger situation, firings. She, she, but she knew exactly what she wanted for so long. And then she would have issue after issue after issue, ending back at my parents' house, living back at my parents' house. And we're twins. And I would say that it's okay to fail. It's okay to cry in your car. I do it all the time. It's okay to like, change your mind. I went to art school and then from art school, I went into medicine and then I became a pro sailor. It sounds insane. And it is, but I can look back and say that the things that I learned at art

• 1:54:28Speaker 01

  school then transferred into the Instagram. The things that I learned from going into nutrition school, then I meal prepped for my around the world race. Every little bit of knowledge that I've learned from all these different industries is what made the book. It's what made me for who I am. The advice that I would give a young woman out there is that it's okay. It's okay to fail. We've been told for so long that it's not okay to fail and we have to do it right the first time. It's not right now. We're, we're moving in to the 21st century. It's okay for women to fail. And it's okay for women to fail and still move up.

• 1:55:08Speaker 00

  And it's okay to be a woman, to be small and to be the youngest and still succeed.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. It shouldn't matter where you come from or what you look like. It just shouldn't. I, I had a wonderful taxi driver when I was coming here from the airport yesterday. And he asked me the same question. What would I tell his seven-year-old daughter? We talked for an hour from JFK all the way to my hotel. He was from India. And he was the, you know, what, what would you, what advice would you give a seven-year-old girl? Like coming up in this world that, you know, we're, we're going through so much geopolitical stuff. And as an immigrant, it doesn't feel that comfortable being here anymore. What would you tell that little seven-year-old girl who doesn't look like me or doesn't look like the rest of the population? And I said, don't care what people say to you.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Just keep working for, like, looking forward, anything. Find your dream, find your passion and push forward. Doesn't matter what you look like. One day, history will look back and say, wow, I can't believe we look down upon people because of the way that they look. Like, you kidding? That's, that's what we had to do? That's all that we had to do is just allow people to flourish, no matter what they look like or their backgrounds? I mean, imagine if someone hadn't looked down upon me. I probably would have gone around the world at 24 instead of 29. But everything happens for a reason.

• 1:56:41Speaker 00

  And what is the message to the parents of the young girls and young women who are trying to instill in their daughters that spirit, you know, that, that fire, that strength that's necessary to not only survive but thrive in this very strange and rapidly changing world?

• 1:57:08Speaker 01

  I think the things that I would tell parents is to let your kids be who they want to be. Like, let them be creative. That was the one thing my parents, even though they were very strict and strong and they pushed me into a lot of different sports and they were, they were quite hard on me. But the one thing they said is that they didn't care what sport or what I did, as long as I did it 110%. They just didn't want me to be 80% of something. They said, you can go anywhere in the planet, you can study whatever religion you want to study. We weren't religious. We didn't have anything to hold us down, nothing. My parents were like, you can travel anywhere in the world, you have

• 1:57:51Speaker 01

  a passport, this is your life. You can do anything. You can learn any language, you can marry anyone that you want, as long as you are happy and you do it at 110%. And that's the one thing that I would say. And that all comes from my parents. And for them to do that in the 90s, for them to go against the squad, like the status quo and say, no, no. Like, you can be whoever you want to be. I mean, it's what made me the way that I am now. And we would definitely not have a book right now if my parents had been, oh, no, you must be a doctor, you must be a lawyer, you must be this. No, like, I had to go to art school to then go into medicine to then become a pro athlete. I had to do that.

• 1:58:35Speaker 00

  But it's only in the rearview, you know, that you have 2020 on how all of those experiences congeal and contribute to, you know, the unique kind of offering that you, you know, are able to make to the world.

• 1:58:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Speaker 00

  But it can be confusing. Like, I think there's, it's like, I'm in art school, but I should be, I don't, you know, like, when you're in it, you can't see that and you don't know how all these things later are going to connect.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  And I think it's okay to try different things. Like, for me, going from art school to like, going into nutrition school, it was one day to the next. That decision happened in one day. And I didn't tell my parents. And I bought a plane ticket with all of my money and I moved out to Hawaii. And that was it. And I would have to say my parents weren't that ecstatic about it. But that's because they are in a tiny town and for them, change is big. But me as already being an artist, change is what you do every single time you finish an art project. Okay, I finished this art project, time to try something else. You don't just keep painting the same painting over and over again. And my parents, who

• 1:59:44Speaker 01

  maybe were less of the creative mindset, maybe couldn't understand why I was leaving, you know, art to go to, you know, nutrition. And for me, I, it didn't really feel like that crazy of a transition. I was 18, 19 years old and I knew I wanted to change. And also, I felt like my wings were just growing bigger and bigger. So like, why, why clip them and stay in some place that maybe, maybe wasn't the right thing? And I never looked back. I flew out to Hawaii and I didn't think about it one bit. And maybe

• 2:00:23Speaker 01

  that's a, maybe that's a little psychosis, a little crazy. But also, I think, like, not limiting yourself to only being one identity. I, I talk to people all the time who are like, oh, no, I'm an engineer. I can't do anything else. I'm just an engineer. And I'm like, well, why? Why put yourself in this tiny little box and do the same job for 30 years when you, when you love to paint? And they're like, oh, well, I can't make any money painting. Well, do you need all the money in the universe to be happy? And the answer is no.

• 2:01:02Speaker 00

  They're also just stories, you know, stories that we create based upon a set of experiences in our past that get cemented in a certain way and make us feel safe and secure in a very uncertain world and keep fear at bay, you know, and then we turn to these stories to feel protected or a sense of self or a sense of belonging. And to challenge them is frightening for most people. But in my experience, the harder you're clinging on to a particular identity, the more you're robbing yourself of the richness of a variety of experiences that are available to you. When you realize like, oh, it is just a story

• 2:01:46Speaker 00

  that I've bought into. It's not actually real in any tangible sense.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  I agree completely.

• 2:01:52Speaker 00

  But that's difficult, you know, and we all want to belong to our certain, you know, communities in certain ways. And, you know, to say, well, I'm going to go do this threatens that sense of belonging that is part and parcel of this identity that you've constructed. And so it's not any one thing. It's, it's important that we feel connected to, you know, certain people and have a sense of grounding while also understanding that we can hold ourselves hostage in those respective roles.

• 2:02:26Speaker 01

  Hostage. That's a good word for it. I think that we, we, we seem to do that. And we seem to be the, the fear factor of trying something new, you know, and, and I just don't, I don't think that we should feel that fear, like fear of judgment, fear of like, oh, well, if I start something new, then maybe I'm not very good at it, but that's okay. I mean, no one's great at something when they first start it. I was not great when I started sailing, like not great at all. Like it was embarrassing, but it was, I still showed up every single day and kept working on it because like feeling the salt

• 2:03:11Speaker 01

  spray and feeling the, the, the amount of work that I needed to put in to make this good. It was, it was something that became an addiction. And that addiction was a lot healthier than it could have been that if I had like kept going with drugs and alcohol and kept moving in that, in that way, because a lot of kids out of boredom get sucked into these, you know, into drugs, into alcohol, into not great social scenes. But sports are such an amazing outlet. I always tell parents, like, if you move kids into sports, it keeps them from being bored enough to do bad things.

• 2:03:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. On the subject of greatness, like, what is it that you think makes you great at this? I mean, when you won the Bermuda 12, like by, you know, a landslide or whatever the term is.

• 2:04:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, landslide's good. That's good.

• 2:04:14Speaker 00

  A seaside, a seaside.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  A seaside.

• 2:04:17Speaker 00

  Like, what is it that you were doing that other people weren't doing that allowed you to, you know, gap your competitors to such a significant degree? I mean, you're doing something.

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:04:27Speaker 00

  That's making you better.

• 2:04:28Speaker 01

  Literally, you couldn't ask a better question. It's because I had no fear. I had zero fear. I had no judgment. I mean, I was at rock bottom. I mean, people-

• 2:04:40Speaker 00

  Nothing to lose, no fear.

• 2:04:42Speaker 01

  No, no, nobody thought I could do anything or amount to absolutely anything in the sport. So when you're already at ground zero, the only way like to go is up. I had the, the Bermuda 12 is a great example of this is that I, and when I do speaking engagements, I talk about the Bermuda 12. And usually people are like, well, why are you talking about this?

• 2:05:06Speaker 00

  We want to hear about the other thing.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  Like, what is this? What, what does this have to do? And I'm like, the Bermuda 12 is actually one of the most important races of my entire life. I had been denied from years from doing it. My sponsorship had dropped out. So I was even more committed to like, this is the race of my dreams. Like this is, this is the moment. And then I get out there. And when you're looking at the weather routing, which just means you're looking at the forecast and you're trying to make the decision on where to go on the course itself. The course is not like a baseball field where it's like, oh, it's only this big. It's actually the whole world is your course. You can take whatever path you want to go. But it's the weather that determines on how fast you go or how slow you go. And

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  because I had nothing to lose at this point, I picked the most insane path that no normal human would choose. And I chose it three days before I left. I talked to my weather router, Chelsea, who eventually became my weather router for the Around the World Race. I talked to her three days before. And I said, what do you think about this path that is, you know, 90 miles off of the rum line, which rum line just means from point A to point B, the fastest, the quote unquote fastest way. Said, what do you think about this crazy path where I'm going to have to point at Delaware at one point, which is very far away from Bermuda?

• 2:06:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's not really in the right direction.

• 2:06:28Speaker 01

  Not really in the right direction.

• 2:06:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  And what if I point in this direction and I go this far off of the actual line that I'm supposed to be going? Do you think that like this would be insane? And she goes, yeah, it'd be completely insane. And none of the other competitors would ever even think about it. And I said, I'm going to do it. 100%.

• 2:06:51Speaker 00

  And the rationale was what? That you would get some kind of boomerang effect from the wind or like?

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. So there was a, this is going to get very technical for a second. There was a front that was coming through. And what that meant is that it was actually chasing me down. So it was following me. And so Bermuda's over here on the right and Newport is on the left. And so what I was going to do is I was going to stay on the left quadrant and then kind of boomerang around. That was the goal. Because the front was actually between Delaware, like in that quadrant of Delaware and Newport. And it was slowly moving down the coast, the east coast like this. And what I knew is that I was going

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  to be in the strongest wind on that side of the quadrant. And it was going to be downwind. So it's going to be coming from behind me. So that means if I put up really big sails, I'm going to go really fast downwind. But the way that fronts work is that if you're too fast, you run through it and then you stop. And so what kept happening is that I would pick up speed and I would run really fast and I'd actually outrun the wind. And then like I'd have-

• 2:08:04Speaker 00

  You'd have to wait and then it catches up.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  And then it would catch up. And so I just did this, but at least I knew the wind was coming. I was for sure. Okay, I know the wind's behind me because it keeps catching up to me. And so for three days, the wind just kept on catching up to me. I'd be too fast, then I'd slow down, then it would catch up to me, like slow down. Where the other guys who were on the other side of the course, the right side of the course, or the right side of the quadrant, just following the rum line, like you would, they didn't have as much wind on that side. But technically, they would be sailing less distance. So they chose that path because it was less distance and less wind. I was choosing more distance, but more wind, which is a, like, you could totally get screwed up by that.

• 2:08:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it could have gone the other way.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  Oh, I could have gotten last place. And this is before technology. So before technology, I couldn't tell where the other competitors were. So it's not like I could look at them and say, okay, this is, they're going there, maybe I should go there or how fast they're going. So I finished the race and I had no idea where I was. So when they came by with the champagne to hand it to me, I was like, am I last? And they were like, no, you've, you've just won. And I was like, what? They were like, and a lot, like a lot, a lot.

• 2:09:26Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 2:09:27Speaker 01

  I had absolutely no idea. But I was so confident in myself and the ability that I had with my vessel with first, like, I, I just knew her like the back of my hand. I knew how to do sail changes, like, eyes closed in the dark. It didn't matter. I mean, I didn't sleep for a couple of days, but I, I was like, I knew how to push her hard enough, but still protect her. And I chose the path that maybe wasn't the like, the one that everyone else would, but it totally paid. And I think that if I had been maybe

• 2:10:05Speaker 01

  a more experienced sailor, or if I had, you know, maybe been in the industry long enough, maybe I wouldn't have taken that. And maybe I wouldn't have won. And because I won-

• 2:10:18Speaker 00

  Because it would have worn that out of you, like that willingness to- Think outside the box or take that kind of risk.

• 2:10:24Speaker 01

  And that is what people with disparity in this world actually do the best. The people who have been pushed into the corner the hardest are more willing to do the crazy path. And so they're more willing to win. They're more, they're, they're, they're actually moving forward faster than your basic white guy. Because they got nothing to lose. It's really amazing to see what people are doing. Like in other countries who just, you know, I got nothing to lose. This isn't part of my culture. This isn't. But hey, I've got one life to live and I'm just gonna go as hard as humanly possible.

• 2:11:06Speaker 00

  That's a really cool message. I know that you ruffle when you step on land and people like your parents ask you what's next, but I'm gonna ask you that question as we wind down here. So

• 2:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's okay.

• 2:11:21Speaker 00

  Tomorrow the book comes out, you're kind of in promo mode, but as much as you live in the moment and are a

• 2:11:30Speaker 00

  tea leaf reader of the clouds, I'm sure you are also planning what's next, like in your identity, at least for now, as a professional sailboat racer. And maybe what's next, like what's on the horizon, near and far?

• 2:11:47Speaker 01

  Well, right now, the book is actually meant to be a stepping stone into my next campaign. So right now, I actually just flew in yesterday from a race that I sailed across the Atlantic. I left New York.

• 2:12:00Speaker 00

  You were in New York, like in Brooklyn, not that long ago, but you had to race a sailboat to France and then come back here.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:12:07Speaker 00

  Like that's another race, but keep going.

• 2:12:09Speaker 01

  I know, we can, we can talk about that one in another interview, but it is, it's true. So I'm racing on this super high performance racing yacht right now. That's 60 feet and first light was 40 feet. And the boat that I'm racing on is actually foiling, which foiling to anyone that doesn't know is where it partially lifts out of the water and has a little foil that sticks down. And you do twice the speeds of what a normal boat would do. And that's why it only took me eight days to get across, seven and a half days to get across the Atlantic, which is like wild compared to what it normally. Normally it would take three weeks, two and a half, three weeks. We're going super fast now. And so my next campaign is actually to,

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  right now I'm working under a team to kind of learn as much as I can from this German French team. Because there's no Americans, and I mean, no Americans that are in the fleet that I am moving into right now. And my goal is to work under this team, almost as like a mentee and eventually take all the knowledge and steal as much knowledge as possible. And then bring it to create my own team here in the United States and bring, bring my team that I had for first light back.

• 2:13:26Speaker 00

  Very cool.

• 2:13:27Speaker 01

  And that's kind of the goal. The goal is to really just have an American flag on the, on the start line and I'm working on that super hard and, but I have to first learn how to sail the boat, which this, this transatlantic, the race that we just did, the video that you saw on Instagram, it showed that like clearly it was an emotional moment because it was the first time that I had felt a boat the same way that I had felt with first light. And that type of emotional connection, like where you talk to her. Like we had a horrible situation on the boat where 40 knots of wind and things are breaking and the boat wiped out and the rudder reference

• 2:14:09Speaker 01

  bracket had broken off and I was in the back of the boat while they're putting a refit, all these crazy things were happening in like 40 knots of wind. And I'm in the back of the boat with glue, attempting to glue this like carbon piece to make a makeshift bracket for this, for the rudder reference, which is also like my little baby bird. Back into its place. And I remember that moment just being like, oh my God, I'm back on first light. How did I get here?

• 2:14:38Speaker 00

  Right. This crazy high tech boat with carbon fiber and everything and you're like gluing it.

• 2:14:44Speaker 01

  I'm like, oh my God, I'm back. I'm so back. And, but the, like, you can probably even tell from my Instagram, I was, I was me again. I was me again. Like it was so cathartic to write the book and then to be now back on this boat. And I think I sailed her a lot better than the other guys that are on the boat right now. The, the boat that I'm sailing on, because the knowledge that I learned from first light of actually just feeling like sitting quietly and taking 20 minutes to actually just, okay, how's she feeling? Oh, she doesn't like that. Okay. Change the autopilot. Oh, it's move a little bit this round, move a little. And then all of a sudden she's blasting.

• 2:15:24Speaker 00

  Locked in.

• 2:15:25Speaker 01

  Super. I had the most amazing moment on the race. So we were, it was about 40 knots of wind. So insane. It's dark and we're doing about 34 knots of boat speed, which is about hmm, just under 40 knots of miles per hour, which is like absolutely insane.

• 2:15:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Speaker 01

  And I'm, I'm there and I'm controlling the boat. It's pitch black. And I have my foot up against like the bulkhead because I'm like, oh, if I hit something right now, I'll die. And so I'm like, there's no airbags or seat belts or anything. So you're like, I might die today, but that's okay. And you're controlling the boat. And the, the, the guy who runs the whole boat, literally like it's his sponsorship and he's in charge and he's been sailing around the planet. And he's done the hardest races on the globe. He comes up and he looks at me and he goes, oh my God, it's scary up here. And I was like, yeah. And he goes, I'm not gonna be up here for this.

• 2:16:28Speaker 01

  And he leaves shift. So when you're sailing with like four people, you have two people on and two people off. And he was like, um, fuck this. And he left shift. He was like, it's just dangerous. Some, one of us is gonna die and it's not gonna be me. And so he goes back down and puts his headphones on and does his breathing exercises. Trying to relax. Like this is insane. I, I don't know if you understand, this guy has sailed around the world seven times. Okay.

• 2:16:55Speaker 00

  He left it and he left his post because he got freaked out.

• 2:16:58Speaker 01

  He was like, oh, absolutely not over my dead body. Bye. And so he left and I was like, is it scary? Because for me, I could feel her so well. I felt in control. But for someone who wasn't feeling her, yeah, okay. She felt crazy. She felt like

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  like alarms were going me, me, me, like mast alarm bat. And then you're like grinding certain things on to get the alarms to stop going off. Like it's, the things were going insane.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  And then another guy came up on deck two hours later. So now I'm, I'm alone for two hours doing what we call solo watch. Because he was like, oh, no, F this. And so the other guy comes up on deck and he goes,

• 2:17:43Speaker 01

  you're gonna break the boat. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, the boat, like you're breaking the boat. Like as if I was like out of control, like, like a crazy psychosis woman, like in a straitjacket, like all of a sudden controlling but. And so he starts to change the autopilot and change things. And I was like, no, no, no. And I see Boris come up behind me and he goes, no, no, don't change anything. Let her go. Let her run. And the other guy, the French guys, they start talking in French and I don't understand French and they start yelling at each other in French. This is the middle of the night. Like it's pitch black. There's nothing around in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And he, they start yelling at each other in French about like, oh no, she's gonna take the mast down. She's gonna break this. Like we can't have her do this.

• 2:18:27Speaker 01

  And Boris goes, I'm, I'm in charge of this boat and the boat feels good. Let her run. And so they like, they let me have it. And so then I turned the boat back to where it was and I put everything exactly the way it was. And she was just blasting along and we made up 55 miles that night. We were a hundred miles behind the third place boat. We made 55 miles up.

• 2:18:52Speaker 00

  You're like a fighter test pilot in the right stuff. No, it's that intuitive feel like you, like you know what the boat's limits are. And you're so in sync with it. You're like, no, this is actually like, we're just in like this flow state with each other.

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  It's a flow state. That's exactly the word for it.

• 2:19:10Speaker 00

  Super cool.

• 2:19:11Speaker 01

  And it is. And we sat down and did a debrief back in France. And the, like our, our technical manager was there and he kind of made a joke and he was like, oh, so I heard that someone told you to try to slow down the boat, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, oh yeah, I'm really sorry. You know, I didn't, I didn't mean to like kind of overstep there or whatnot. Cause like I'm the youngest person on the boat. I'm the newest to the Amoka fleet. I don't speak French in a very French mafia world.

• 2:19:40Speaker 00

  And you're new to this kind of racing and this kind of boat.

• 2:19:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. Like, and Boris was sitting next to me during this debrief, who, you know, has gone around the world seven times. And he was like, no, like it was such a beautiful moment, like you had her and like I trusted you. And the worst thing that we could have done was to take it out of your hands and change what you had done. Because like you were feeling her and he told me that he was proud of me. And he's my mentor. And so, I mean, it was such this amazing moment. But this is something that I had learned from first light. I had learned this through the Drake passage. I had learned this when I did the giant diversion through thing one and thing two to protect the boat.

• 2:20:26Speaker 01

  I knew when I was going to die and when I was needs to push the boat harder. And I learned that all from her. And to be able to actually translate that to my new job on this super intense fighter jet of a boat.

• 2:20:41Speaker 01

  Makes me really proud of myself.

• 2:20:43Speaker 00

  Super cool. You were sending it.

• 2:20:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it was bombing. Oh, I wish it was so cool. It's such a highlight of my last week. And yeah, I, I'm, I'm feeling quite content now that I've let go of first light. Because that's what it was. Like the final chapter is goodbye to first light. And it's taken about two years to recover from that loss of relationship. And that's what the book is all about. The book is a love story.

• 2:21:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's a love affair. It's a, it's a, it's a rom com.

• 2:21:15Speaker 01

  It's a rom com.

• 2:21:16Speaker 00

  It's a, it's a rough go there for a minute, but now you have a new love. And you know what else you're, you're, you're good at sending? Good podcast.

• 2:21:41Speaker 00

  Before we continue with the show, I want to point you toward an award winning podcast. I think a lot of you will get something out of. If you're a parent, you know, this feeling, you want real trustworthy guidance, but most of what's out there either overwhelms you or makes you feel like you're failing. That is exactly the gap that Raising Good Humans fills. And why I'm thrilled to welcome this show into our Voicing Change family. It's hosted by Dr. Eliza Pressman, a developmental psychologist out of Mount Sinai, who has spent nearly two decades working with families and is a mom for herself. Each episode, she sits down with experts and parents and goes deep on the actual tools that work without the guilt and the noise, which is exactly the kind of conversation I respect.

• 2:22:26Speaker 00

  Whether you want advice on how to date after divorce, what new father should expect when their partners are expecting, or how to talk to your tween about the hard stuff, Raising Good Humans is for you. New episodes drop every Friday, so go find Raising Good Humans wherever you're listening to this right now.