Has Cancel Culture Gone Too Far? Plus: Training Principles, Favorite Gear, Listener Questions & More

Welcome to another edition of Roll On—my bi-weekly deep dive into (semi) current events, topics of audience interest, and of course answers to your questions. Once again serving up co-host duties is Adam Skolnick, an activist and veteran journalist perhaps best known as David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me co-author. Adam has written about adventure sports, environmental issues and civil rights for outlets such as The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, BBC, and Men’s Health. He is also the author of One Breath, which chronicles the life and death of America's greatest freediver, and is currently hard at work on a novel. Some of the many topics explored in today's conversation include: An update on ultrarunner Tommy Rivs' battle with lymphoma; Endurance training first principles; Why building a Zone 2 base is critical; DHS failures & overreach; Cancel culture: the Harper's Letter & Bari Weiss; Gear review show & tell; and Wins of the week: Kai Lenny & Valarie Allman In addition we answer the following listener questions: How to live with an angry & abusive alcoholic? The paralyzing perils of self-help addiction Daily habits to thrive What changes should be made to public education? Is it worth writing and sharing your story? How to effectively work with your spouse or partner Thank you to Jake from Kansas City, Jackson from Wyoming, Adam from Alberta, Canada, Jeremy in Sant Michael, Minnesota, and Henry in Los Angeles for your questions. If you want your query discussed, drop it on our Facebook Page, or better yet leave a voicemail at (424) 235-4626. The visually inclined can watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the audio version streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:24Rich Roll?

  Okay. Me and my hype man, Adam Skolnick, are back. I'm taking roll call on everything from cancel culture to endurance training principles, plus some gear show and tell, and of course, listener questions, and so much more. So let's do this thing.

• 1:45Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. We're back with another AMA roll-on edition of the show. I'm back with Adam, my man, Adam Skolnick. Hype man, podcast hype man.

• 1:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  Journalist, author, adventurer, swim-run aficionado, co-author of David Goggins Can't Hurt Me. That's the bio, right?

• 2:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's good. I always like it when you read it. I love it.

• 2:08Rich Roll?

  I didn't read anything.

• 2:09Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 2:09Rich Roll?

  I know it.

• 2:11Adam Skolnick?

  You speak it.

• 2:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's good to see you again.

• 2:15Adam Skolnick?

  Good to see you, man.

• 2:16Rich Roll?

  I've been enjoying this. I feel like we're finally hitting a groove with this, trying to figure out how we want to leverage this type of podcast. And I think we're starting to narrow. In on what it is that we want to do here, which feels good.

• 2:29Adam Skolnick?

  Agreed. It feels great. It's good to have the template and it's fun to figure out what the, where we decide to dive in. It's always interesting to like, figure that out, especially this week, which was, there wasn't this, you know, the big news story this week was kind of the same as last week. So we had to kind of figure out how to, how to approach things.

• 2:49Rich Roll?

  So the news cycle moves so quickly that even two weeks ago, when we put up a show, it was somewhat dated from the two days that lapsed in between recording it and putting it up. The cycle has slowed a little bit, but just, you know, a little behind the scenes for everybody who's watching or listening. Adam and I put together an outline and we kind of go back and forth over the course of two weeks. And what was relevant seven days ago, we end up mixing that and updating it because the news moves so quickly here. And again, this is not a news show. We're trying to laser in on topical issues that are somewhat evergreen, but show up in the news cycle.

• 3:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but this was one of the few times we were kind of ahead on what was happening in Portland and that's kind of stayed as one of the biggest stories, that and the COVID relapse. So, so, you know, instead of boring everyone on the same old topics, we don't go there this time.

• 3:47Rich Roll?

  Right. So if you're new to the show, we have a couple of segments that we do, some opening remarks, a little bit from the news, a little show and tell. We take an advertiser break and then we come back with listener questions. If you would like your question considered and read on air, you can leave a voicemail for us at 424-235-4626, or you can leave it on our Facebook group page. But I'm liking these voicemails.

• 4:14Adam Skolnick?

  They're great. And I have to thank everybody who's called. The calling is definitely, there's been an uptick in messages. And, and so we're seeing that. And I appreciate everybody who's calling and I'm going through every single one, listening to every single one and slotting them in. And if we don't get to you today, we still have you in the, in the, in the. Can and we will get to them over the course of the life of this AMA.

• 4:39Rich Roll?

  It's cool to listen to them. I think it takes a certain amount of courage and vulnerability to leave your voice and your name. And you know, I understand some people want it to be anonymous and that's fine, but it's cool. And it makes me feel like this is a community, which is the whole idea. And really, the impetus behind this version of the podcast to try to make it a more communitarian, inclusive version of what I typically do when I just interview people.

• 5:07Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's a chance to interact and to get into topics you can't, you don't have time when you're talking to a Huberman, Dr. Huberman, or someone like that, you know? You're not going to talk to him about stuff that, you know, that isn't relevant.

• 5:19Rich Roll?

  No.

• 5:20Adam Skolnick?

  So this is a chance to be more generalist, as you like to say, to get into the, into the range of what Rich Roll's all about.

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  So we got good stuff for you guys today. I want to open it up with a little update on our boy Tommy Rives. We spoke about him, was it two weeks ago, I think? Yes. At that time, Tommy Rives, for people that don't know, is a legendary ultra runner. He's beloved in the endurance community. He's just a beautiful, beautiful human being who is suffering from some very significant and dire health circumstances at the moment. When we last recorded this podcast, he was experiencing what was being characterized at the time as quote unquote COVID-like symptoms, some severe respiratory distress. Since we recorded that, in between

• 6:08Rich Roll?

  the time in which we recorded that and it went live, he went into a coma. And then the family got to work trying to figure out a way to move him to a facility that could properly diagnose him because he was undiagnosed at that time. He got moved to a facility in Scottsdale from Flagstaff, where he was previously, and received a diagnosis, which is a very rare and aggressive form of lymphoma called primary pulmonary NK T cell lymphoma. I understand that he is now Out of that coma, but very much, you know, still in a very serious situation.

• 6:51Rich Roll?

  He's sedated. According to his brother Jacob, he's less inflamed, his oxygen levels are improving. So that's good news. It feels like it's moving in the right direction and I understand that he's going to be undergoing, if he hasn't already, some cancer treatments. And I don't know the details of that. But thank you to everybody who reached out, who contributed to the GoFundMe campaign. I'm going to put a link to that again in the show notes. They have raised over $433,000 to this point, which is incredible. Tommy, of course, because he's such a big-hearted individual, is asking that that people also consider donating to Clean Water for the Navajo Nation. There's a link to that up in the GoFundMe

• 7:35Rich Roll?

  for Tommy and his family as well. So I can link that up as well. And in addition, his brother and his family organized a Run With RIVS, which is a, you know, communitarian kind of run to raise awareness and funds for Tommy and his family. The idea is you pick a day between August 1st and August 9th to run, hike, walk, whatever, just move, put some miles in for RIVS. And they also just announced an auction called the Rage On Auction, which you can find on Facebook, and that's live between August 3rd and August 13th. If you go to facebook.com/rageonauction, you can find more information there. I'm

• 8:18Rich Roll?

  going to donate a couple of books for that. People are just bidding on on stuff, and that's another way to support him and his family.

• 8:26Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing.

• 8:26Rich Roll?

  In the meantime, if you want to stay current with his condition, the best place to do that is just following his brother Jacob on Instagram, @JacobPuzey, P-U-Z-E-Y, and he's posting daily updates to keep everyone apprised of how he's doing.

• 8:42Adam Skolnick?

  And the Run With RIVS is kind of like as many miles as you want, or whatever you want?

• 8:46Rich Roll?

  I think it's it's like a social media thing. Like you put some runs in, you post it, you help raise awareness for him and what he's going through. So, heart goes out to Tommy and his family.

• 8:56Adam Skolnick?

  Hell yeah. It's gonna be a longer journey than even just COVID.

• 8:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. But I'm glad he's been diagnosed and he's getting the treatment that he needs and deserves. Meanwhile, on the subject of putting miles in, you just put in your first 10 mile swim run the other day.

• 9:12Adam Skolnick?

  I did.

• 9:13Rich Roll?

  You posted.

• 9:14Adam Skolnick?

  I did, I did.

• 9:14Rich Roll?

  In all your gear.

• 9:17Adam Skolnick?

  In my climate change chic gear.

• 9:19Rich Roll?

  How'd that go?

• 9:21Adam Skolnick?

  It went well, you know, I had, I had been having problems with my foot again. It was like the same foot that I broke ages ago, which without realizing it and then walked on it for several months and then became a chronic condition. And slowly was able to get back and, and first on a treadmill and then finally running. And but it's something I have to manage. It's like a pain thing. And so it had just come back and I was, and I was having trouble. But then I decided to give it a go and lace them up and go out and do a 10, I ended up, I think it was like 10 and a half miles.

• 9:57Rich Roll?

  Like eight, eight running to swimming?

• 9:59Adam Skolnick?

  That's right. A little bit. Yes. Eight and a little bit over two. Yeah. Two and a quarter swimming, I think.

• 10:03Rich Roll?

  And around Santa Monica?

• 10:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. So I run from my place down to the beach and then up to the end of the bike path there by Bellar Bay. And then swim down and then ran up Amalfi. So I did a full rich roll, running through the neighborhood in my, in my gear. And I definitely got some looks this time. Cyclists, when a cyclist totally decked out in Lycra are giving you looks about how you look, then you know, you know, you're in new territory.

• 10:33Rich Roll?

  You gotta check it out. The, the best, I found the best swim run training that's most appropriate for the courses that you find in the Otello races is in and around the, the bluffs of Point Doom. Like that original swim that you took me on around the point and then going up those trails. I don't know if those, they may be closed right now. I don't know.

• 10:55Adam Skolnick?

  Well, no, they're open. I mean, that's where I trained for Catalina when I was doing that. But it's just such a halt for me to get out to Point Doom and back. If, even if I'm just diving the reef like I do. It's like four and a half to five hours. And it's just impossible. But from this, what I love about this is it gets me in the ocean without having to do that. I'm like, literally, it's it's two hours. Like normally, if I just do a seven mile or six mile or one, it's like under an hour and a half and it's right from my door. And so it just feels like what this sport's supposed to be about. Like you leave from your door. And you're back like that's the beauty of living in Santa Monica. So for a long time I was avoiding the bay. Cause I love doom and I love how clear it is and the water's clean and it's an MPA.

• 11:37Adam Skolnick?

  And I still love doom, but that's now really mostly a dive site for me. And if I'm doing swim workouts, it's in the bay. And it's cleaner than I thought. I've seen white sea bass there. There was a, I mean, there was a fourteen foot shark sighting off Sunset Point. Far from there.

• 11:52Rich Roll?

  Wow, I didn't hear about that.

• 11:53Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's it's wild out there too, to a lesser degree. You get dolphins coming by. But, uh, but yeah, it's it's just, I do love it. I am addicted to it. I feel so much better than just if I run eight straight. Like just doing the.

• 12:07Rich Roll?

  It's a different thing. The switching gears really puts it over the top.

• 12:12Adam Skolnick?

  I feel like it's a better workout, like the the full body workout. Yeah.

• 12:16Rich Roll?

  And you never, like when you're doing it, I mean, you did longer segments, but when you're doing these shorter segments, you're never comfortable. Like, once you settle into a rhythm, then you gotta switch it up again and your heart rate's bouncing all over the place.

• 12:28Adam Skolnick?

  That too.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  And that's a huge difference from triathlon or cycling where you're kind of in a certain groove and you kind of hold it for a long time.

• 12:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but now I'm I'm ready. I could do a fifteen. I could do like the the fifteen now, which is like what I wanted to prove to myself. And I mean, I could see if you just, if you have enough water and food, you could just keep going. Cause like even three mile runs. I mean, even multiples of them, they're not that, they're not that hard. So, yeah, yeah.

• 12:55Rich Roll?

  When it, when it was, when I was training for the world championship version of that race at its peak, I was doing my, I should have been training much more in the ocean than I was. I was doing it in a pool, but it would be in and out and in and out like, you know, like for like hours and hours.

• 13:09Adam Skolnick?

  And it like, and I think the world championship has a twelve mile run in there somewhere.

• 13:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, late, like, like two thirds into it or three, three quarters into it. Yeah. Well, I was grateful for that because I just wanted to get into a rhythm.

• 13:23Rich Roll?

  You know, all the switching gears was much more challenging for me than just the plane running. But correct me if I'm wrong. You're just kind of winging this, right? It's not like you're working with a coach or you've got a plan or a program. You're just like, I think I'll do this today.

• 13:38Adam Skolnick?

  Well, our friend Ted McDonald helped me get ready for Catalina.

• 13:41Rich Roll?

  Hmm, shout out to Ted.

• 13:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, shout out to Ted. And, and, and that was really helpful. But basically what happened is quarantine happened and I don't really go anywhere. I go to the farmer's market once a week. I come here every two weeks. Other than that, I'll either drive to Point Dume for a dive or I'm swimming and running.

• 13:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:00Adam Skolnick?

  And mostly it was running at first because the, the trails were closed and the beaches were closed. And so I started doing these double digit runs for the first time. And, uh, which was great. And so then when the beaches opened and we can get back out there, I started to kind of switch it up and I still was doing one run a week. But it was really just, you know, the gyms were closed, everything was closed. So I just started winging it and, um, and, you know, seeing if my foot could hold up and it's mostly has.

• 14:25Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 14:26Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that's a good place to talk a little bit more generally and broadly about training principles. We can have a segment, training principles. Because as, as, as proud as I am of what you've been doing, I think that you would benefit from having a little bit of a program or...

• 14:45Adam Skolnick?

  Is this an intervention, right?

• 14:46Rich Roll?

  A little bit, a little bit. I don't want to rain on your parade or anything like that. But in my experience, when you're just out like waking up in the morning and saying, oh, I think I'll do this today and spontaneously going out, like that's great. And I think you'll, first of all, the most important thing is that you love what you're doing and you're enjoying it because that will, you know, basically give you the, the impetus and the level of emotional engagement to keep going. So I'm not dissuading you from that in any way whatsoever. But I do think there's wisdom in having a little bit of a plan and intentionality about what you're doing. In my experience, when people are just haphazardly going out and doing whatever, you can reach

• 15:27Rich Roll?

  a certain level of fitness and competence, but you will inevitably reach a plateau.

• 15:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 15:34Rich Roll?

  And most people just are never able to break through that plateau to the next level because they're not intentional in what they're doing. They're just going out and winging it. Um, and I think... Quarantine, this stay in place moment that we're all experiencing, you know, along a spectrum because

• 15:52Adam Skolnick?

  Not all of us.

• 15:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. Depending upon where you live and, you know, many other variables. It is an opportunity to think about first principles here and get back to basics and really be mindful about what it is that you're trying to do, trying to achieve, trying to accomplish. And because there are no races on the calendar, we can all rest easy and take a breath and say, I don't have this thing on the calendar right now, so how can I make the most of this moment of repose? And I think what I keep coming back to is the idea of not necessarily starting over, but essentially building a proper foundation.

• 16:33Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 16:33Rich Roll?

  Starting from the very beginning, no matter how fit you are, saying, okay, let's be a beginner here. A perfect example is, I see this all the time with swimmers in Ironman and triathlon, people who didn't grow up swimming and don't necessarily have the best technique. And because they're time crunched and because the race is on the calendar and coming up in a number of weeks or months, they feel so compelled to get in their volume and their wattage, you know, whatever, like making sure that they're fit, but they're overlooking their technique. So they're slapping around in the pool.

• 17:09Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 17:09Rich Roll?

  And it's like, no, if you would just stop and not worry about your fitness for a minute and hone in on your technique and spend a month just focused on proper technique, you will have tremendous gains that will allow you to break through that plateau and reach the next level. And I think we have that opportunity right now. So I would encourage anybody and everybody who's fitness minded to think about how to build a foundation, to focus on technique. And this is the moment to focus on functional body strength, things like core, core strength and

• 17:42Adam Skolnick?

  I was thinking that actually.

• 17:43Rich Roll?

  Whether you're running or you're swimming or you're on a bike or whatever discipline it is that you're, that you're doing, being technique minded in this moment right now, I think will pay off in the long run.

• 17:55Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but I was thinking in functional body strength and overall, like doing the 10 miles, I was thinking, God, if I, if I, because I do want to try to get to the point where I can do like the, not, not the world championship necessarily, but like the, the longer version of this, which is what, 40K? 45K or something like that.

• 18:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:16Adam Skolnick?

  Um, and to do that, it's not just fueling yourself better, but you do need to have beyond just the ability to run longer distance. You still need to build in your long distance run of the week. You still need to do all that. But you also need to still be, I think, lifting weights and doing weight training or some sort of like functional body training.

• 18:35Rich Roll?

  A hundred percent. And I can tell you that when my core is strong and my back is strong, that I'm a much better athlete and I'm able to maintain that technique under duress. When you start to get tired, instead of turning into a wet noodle when you're running, you're able to maintain your form and that's going to obviously manifest in better performances. So with your example of trying to prepare yourself for a longer version of this swim run, the focus should be on those annoying, those things that are really annoying and that you don't want to do when you're time crunched, like the core body strength.

• 19:10Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Rich Roll?

  And the technique work and the drills and all those sorts of things. And at the same time, that building that foundation to create the ultimate aerobic engine, right? The most efficient aerobic engine that you can. And the way that you do that, and I learned this through my tutelage under Chris Howth for many years.

• 19:31Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 19:32Rich Roll?

  Is to focus on zone two training. So what does that mean? This is something that I talked about extensively in Finding Ultra, and I'll recap it briefly here. But essentially, the body has two energy systems. You have your aerobic system and you have your anaerobic system. Your aerobic system, which is the energy system that you use when you're exerting yourself at a moderate level, relies on oxygen and fat for fuel. You have enough fat in your body to propel you for, you know, umpteen hours. You don't have to worry about it. Your anaerobic engine relies on glucose and essentially that's something that can get burned out in 45 minutes.

• 20:13Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 20:14Rich Roll?

  You know, you have to be constantly refueling yourself. So your anaerobic system is what kicks in when you notch it up to that higher gear and you start exerting yourself. Work, tempo work and the like. Endurance sports and especially ultra endurance sports rely on the efficiency of your aerobic system and you build that very slowly over time by spending a tremendous amount or percentage of your training time in what we call zone two. So there are different zones for training, one through zone five. Zone one would be anything from a walk to a brisk walk. Zone two is the next level up. Think of it as conversational speed, whether you're riding a bike or you're running, it's the cadence with which you can carry on a conversation

• 20:59Rich Roll?

  with your buddy and complete your training without feeling over exerted. There are ways of calculating specifically what that zone two is for you specifically through heart rate training, lactate testing and the like. And we don't need to go down that rabbit hole now. I talked about this in Finding Ultra. For running, for me specifically, my zone two is a heart rate in the range of 130 to 145 typically. For cycling, it's 120 to 130. People read that in my book and then just assumed that that's applicable to everybody. I would get people tweeting me saying I ran at a 140 heart rate. I was like, that's great, but I don't know if that's your zone two. That's my zone two. Everybody's

• 21:43Rich Roll?

  going to be a little bit different. And I've done lactate testing to establish those zones. So what people will find, even people who are fit and have been out running or cycling or whatever haphazardly like yourself for a considerable period of time and feel like they're fit, they'll quickly realize, once they really understand what their zone two is, if you're wearing a heart rate monitor, which everybody should when they're training and or at least when you're endeavoring to train intentionally, you will realize that it's not very hard to tip into Z3 and to cap your heart rate at zone two. I mean, according to my watch, I'm living in zone four. Very humbling. It's very humbling. And it takes a very long time and a certain Different kind of discipline. We think of discipline as like what gets you out of bed

• 22:28Rich Roll?

  in the morning and like the Goggins-esque like hit it hard all the time. But the discipline with building this aerobic engine is the discipline to hold back when you feel like you want to go harder. Yeah. Because you want to finish your workout and feel like you got something out of it or that you did something. When you're training in zone two, oftentimes you're going to complete your workout and go, is that it? Like, I want to go harder. So you have to hold yourself back. When you're out on a trail and you hit an incline, oftentimes you have to walk in order to cap that heart rate until you develop the efficiency, the proficiency, and the aerobic capacity to be able to handle those inclines without going over your zone two. Right. It's a patience game. It takes a lot of time. What we have right now is time. So

• 23:12Rich Roll?

  I think now is the moment to invest in that. And I can tell you from personal experience and many other people that I know in this space, that this is the ultimate secret to breaking through that plateau to the next level. Because when you have invested in that zone two methodology of training and you've applied it over a long period of time and built your volume up very slowly, you will find, like in my own personal experience, when I first started training for Ultraman, when I would go out for a run, I would have to run like 10 minute pace, 10:30 pace in order to not go over my zone two threshold. But by the time I lined up for Ultraman, I could run 7:30 pace at the same heart rate. That's crazy.

• 23:55Rich Roll?

  So it's not about going out and running fast. It's becoming so efficient in these motions that they are less taxing over time. And that's really what you're trying to work on. And what most people do, the mistake that most people make is they spend the vast majority of their training time in what we call the gray zone. And the gray zone is sort of in between your aerobic energy system and your anaerobic energy system, where you're training too hard to really effectively develop your aerobic engine, but not hard enough to develop the power and the speed that anaerobic training avails you. Right? So it's what happens when you go out and you're just like, I'm going to run for 45 minutes, you know,

• 24:40Rich Roll?

  three days a week and just go as hard as I can sustain it for 45 minutes. Most likely, you're in the gray zone. And again, you will develop a certain level of fitness doing that, but you will quickly become stuck and never be able to improve and certainly not

• 24:55Rich Roll?

  Experience any quantum improvements until you are mindful of your training, spend most of that time in the slower zone two, and then pick your anaerobic moments for threshold work and tempo work a couple of times a week. But most of the training you're going to be doing is going to be in that zone two space. And again, it takes humility to do it because you know, you got to be willing to let people who are who appear less fit than you pass you on the road or on the trail and and just say, it's okay, I've got a plan. And that's the difference between exercising and training.

• 25:29Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 25:29Rich Roll?

  The mindfulness and the intentionality that goes into it. When you become adept at zone two aerobic training, what you're doing is you're you're you're increasing mitochondrial density in those big muscles, and you're developing this efficiency and this aerobic capacity that once you've honed it, and it took me many years to do this, again, it's a patience game, it's it's like a superpower.

• 25:56Adam Skolnick?

  Hmm.

• 25:57Rich Roll?

  But it doesn't happen quickly. It's not a hack. It's the opposite of a hack.

• 26:01Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 26:01Rich Roll?

  It's being willing to put in the time.

• 26:03Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 26:04Rich Roll?

  Over and and have a long view of of what performance gains mean.

• 26:11Adam Skolnick?

  Are you offering to coach me, Rich?

• 26:13Rich Roll?

  I'm not a coach. I got a I got a coach for you. You got Ted. He probably knows about this stuff.

• 26:19Adam Skolnick?

  He does. He does. I mean, I think the first time I heard about this beside your book, because I obviously read about it in the book, but Mark Allen, I think, on your show, talked about he won Ironman this way.

• 26:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Adam Skolnick?

  That's how he beat Dave Scott, is like completely revamping his training.

• 26:34Rich Roll?

  Exactly. And there were other things, too, like visiting the shaman and and and becoming one with the island.

• 26:41Adam Skolnick?

  Getting rid of the hex.

• 26:41Rich Roll?

  That was truly his real secret. I will tell you that, and I believe that. But we did talk at length about zone two. You should go back and listen to that interview if you didn't listen to it the first time around.

• 26:51Adam Skolnick?

  It impacted me a lot.

• 26:52Rich Roll?

  But he would say that, you know, in the in the winter, when he would Start training again for the following year, Ironman World Championships are in October every year, that he would have to walk the hills. And this is the, you know, Ironman World Champion, and he'd be like, "Yeah, I gotta walk these hills because I don't want my heart rate going over whatever his zone two threshold was." So if Mark Allen can walk a hill, you can too.

• 27:14Adam Skolnick?

  Well, yeah, and I have done that because I've been trying to keep track as opposed to pace, uh, heart rate on this Garmin. I have the descent, which I got because it's good for freediving and, and has all the bells and whistles, or you think, but obviously we're going to get into that later on how accurate it is. Um, and I don't wear a heart rate monitor, but I have tried to, um, hold back at times, but obviously at times I don't. Um, and I have gotten a little bit quicker, but obviously I'm not doing, I'm mostly living in orange, like which I guess zone four on almost every run.

• 27:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's not good.

• 27:48Adam Skolnick?

  And that's not good.

• 27:49Rich Roll?

  No.

• 27:50Adam Skolnick?

  So, um, I have to go slower.

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  Right. So we'll work on that. And to reiterate, it's not about the gear. We're going to do a show and tell segment where we're going to talk about gear because so many people want to know about the gear.

• 28:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Rich Roll?

  But my refrain is always, it's not about the gear. Gear is helpful. It's fun. Um, but when it becomes an impediment to you just going out and doing like what you did yesterday.

• 28:17Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 28:18Rich Roll?

  Then it's a problem, but we'll, we'll get to that in a later section.

• 28:20Adam Skolnick?

  All right, cool. I, um, I'm excited about it. I mean, I am, I, I totally see how I can do 10, and it's not like I got off the couch to do it. I mean, I've been building up to it. I've done some, you know, 11 mile runs. I've done seven mile swim runs. I mean, I've been building up to it. So it's not like I, I wouldn't encourage people to get off the couch to do it, but I could see how the difference between 10 and 20 is like, it's, it's, the difference between five and 10 is nothing compared to the difference between 10 to 20.

• 28:48Rich Roll?

  And there's, there's a reason why everyone falls apart at mile 18 on the marathon.

• 28:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 28:52Rich Roll?

  Because that's the difference between somebody who has truly, um, honed their aerobic engine versus somebody who's spending all their time. Like if you're, if you're a gray zone trainer, then you're going to fall apart at mile 18.

• 29:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Rich Roll?

  Pretty much every time. You see it time and time again. So.

• 29:09Adam Skolnick?

  Shout out to all my homies in the gray zone.

• 29:12Rich Roll?

  Like yourself.

• 29:13Adam Skolnick?

  Like, definitely like me. I have, I have.

• 29:16Rich Roll?

  That could be the title of this podcast. Don't live in the gray zone.

• 29:19Adam Skolnick?

  I may have a smart watch, but I'm not a smart swim runner.

• 29:23Rich Roll?

  Right. So that's, that's the thing about the gear. The gear are tools, but if you're not using those tools effectively and properly, what use are they?

• 29:31Adam Skolnick?

  Okay, I'm suitably shamed. I'm going to buckle down.

• 29:34Rich Roll?

  Right. All right. Well, let's put a pin in that for now. And pivot to teachable moment.

• 29:39Adam Skolnick?

  I'm open to all advices. So, yes, my mitochondria need it.

• 29:56Rich Roll?

  This is a segment we call Teachable Moment. What are we going to learn today, Adam?

• 30:00Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you know, I kind of, I teased this a little bit, but said we're not going to get into, we're not going to get into the weeds of Portland, but I wanted to get into this, like, what the F is DHS doing? The Department of Homeland Security.

• 30:13Rich Roll?

  What are they doing?

• 30:15Adam Skolnick?

  And basically what I've been thinking about watching Portland go down is we have this department called Department of Homeland Security, which just really, to recap it very briefly, came, came about after 9/11. The idea was it was this overarching government, federal agency that could more efficiently exchange information with local law enforcement so that we don't have a repeat of the failures that allowed people to train to bomb the, you know, to fly planes into the towers. That was the intent behind it. There was always this, the dissenters were always a little bit worried about giving government that, that kind of power for federal agencies to be kind of interacting with local law enforcement.

• 30:57Rich Roll?

  And the scope is dictated by the Patriot Act?

• 31:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. The Patriot created the agency, as far as I remember. And so in this, also TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, Customs, ICE, they all fall under DHS. And so, but if you just say that you believe in the idea that there's this agency out there to protect the people that live in the United States, to give us safety and security. Well, to me, like, what's the point of having a DHS if you can't help contain a virus? Right? And so. Cut to last fall and early winter, the virus is, has gotten out from Wuhan. It's all over the place. Italy's having its problems.

• 31:43Adam Skolnick?

  And we don't do anything. They're like, people are getting off planes from Europe. And they are, yeah, from China, yes, there was some containment. People were brought to military bases and quarantined for a period of time, but not, not from Europe.

• 31:55Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 31:56Adam Skolnick?

  People were just like walking off flights from Italy.

• 31:58Rich Roll?

  We all saw that viral video of people backed up in Chicago when they finally decided they were gonna try to test. And it just became this like Petri dish.

• 32:08Adam Skolnick?

  March 15th, they, they decided to, in about half dozen, or no, a dozen or more airports. O'Hare was the big one that we saw the video of. And it became like a two, three hour line, which is the exact wrong thing to do. Under the auspices of, okay, we're now gonna start to manage this thing.

• 32:25Rich Roll?

  And in stark contrast, sorry to interrupt, but in stark contrast to some of the videos that I saw, I'm sure you did too, of airports in Seoul and in Beijing where they had their testing completely dialed in and there were no lines.

• 32:39Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly. And so we have this, this is the backdrop. The reason I'm bringing it up is here's this agency that's supposed to protect us, keep us safe, keep us secure. Drops the ball so poor, they did such a poor job of managing Corona. And yet they're putting their personnel, Border Patrol Tactical Teams, BOR-TAC is what they're called in Portland, Oregon. Same people also were deployed to Standing Rock, by the way. Also deployed to Portland to deal with these protests that have been ongoing since George Floyd was killed. And just recently, I just saw last week, because of my reporting in the Sonoran Desert, because of my reporting on the border wall. I was in contact with an organization called No More Deaths, who drop water off for migrants as they come across the border.

• 33:25Adam Skolnick?

  And they also have humanitarian aid stations set up. So if, if people are suffering from heat related or cold related, whatever it is, there's, there's places they can go for water to be checked out by EMTs that are volunteers, all volunteer run. And the Border Patrol hates No More Deaths because No More Deaths reports on over, you know, abuses of, of migrants and arrests. And that camp, a camp in Aravaca, Arizona, a tented camp, was raided by 20-plus vehicles, a chopper. This is on Friday. They were just raided at gunpoint.

• 34:02Rich Roll?

  Under what stated purpose?

• 34:04Adam Skolnick?

  There was a warrant to collect, basically, they were, No More Deaths believes that Border Patrol is thinking they're a smuggling operation. They had, they had a warrant for financial records. They took everyone's phones, all their computers. But in actuality, what happened is tents were slashed, 30-plus migrants were rounded up. The volunteers were zip-tied and held cuffed with zip ties for two hours. And, you know, medicines were overturned, beds were overturned, the place was trashed. Cell phones that were being used to photograph it and log it were confiscated. Volunteers won't get their, their cell phones back for

• 34:49Adam Skolnick?

  a couple of hours. The judge that signed the warrant had signed one previously on No More Deaths. So there's this, and, and No More Deaths thinks, they had just released a report about the Border Patrol, that, that implicates the Border Patrol Union in these raids on No More Deaths. And they think it was payback. But who knows? I mean, I haven't reported the story out, so I have not gone to Border Patrol, so I should say that right, right away. I'm getting this straight from No More Deaths. But knowing what No More Deaths does, having researched them extensively, they are not a migrant smuggling operation. They are humanitarian aid agency. They're a nonprofit. And that's what they do. So the point is, what is going on with DHS? Why do we have a guy who's running DHS getting

• 35:33Adam Skolnick?

  into feuds with governors? Like, what is going on?

• 35:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Yeah. The, the, the fumbling of the COVID response in stark contrast to the, the sort of authoritarian overreach of this organization in places like Portland raises a broader issue about power in general, federal power versus state power, and how we're allocating our governmental resources. For the behest of the people.

• 36:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Rich Roll?

  By definition, the DHS is to protect homeland security.

• 36:05Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 36:06Rich Roll?

  The biggest threat to that at the moment is this virus that shut down our economy and is forcing us to not interact with each other and is creating tremendous havoc that will have a ripple effect for who knows how long to come. And yet, we've been incapable in getting a grip on how to manage this. We're still seeing these crazy spikes. The United States is spiraling out of control with respect to new cases, etc. Meanwhile, we've dispatched this, you know, basically paramilitary organization to places like Portland. And the, the, the, the argument being that there, it's an effort to protect federal property.

• 36:47Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 36:48Rich Roll?

  Which is one small portion of what's actually transpiring in these places. And this organization has gone on to, you know, rather than, I mean, the whole, it's a misuse of government systems. This, this was all meant to, you know, basically combat terrorism, essentially. And under the, under the broad authority of the Patriot Act, it's allowed overreach. So now we're seeing these lists being made about journalists, names being, you know, put on a ledger.

• 37:24Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, dossiers on journalists.

• 37:25Rich Roll?

  Baseball cards being made of arrested protesters, which all feels very Orwellian and dystopian and concerning irrespective of whatever your political perspective is, this should give one pause.

• 37:38Adam Skolnick?

  And, and the guy who is integral in creating like, tracking those two journalists that were in the Washington Post story, which I think you're going to link to, that guy was reassigned, but he wasn't fired. I mean, so, so what is happening, you know, like, and why? That's, that's the question here. You know, like, what should we be asking of our government agencies? And, and why? And so that's the teachable moment.

• 38:03Rich Roll?

  What's your, what's your take on that?

• 38:05Adam Skolnick?

  Well, my take is that everything's upside down, obviously, under this current administration. But, you know, you have an environmental protection agency that is cutting environmental laws.

• 38:17Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know. My takeaway on this is that I'd like to hold this agency accountable. This agency, to me, is dangerous. It's dangerous to the civil liberties of everyone who lives here, and we should be watching it. And, you know, I don't have a petition to give you. I don't have anything else, but I would just like listeners to pay attention to what is happening at the Department of Homeland Security right now, and be very skeptical, to the point, not to where you don't believe everything, but that you're really paying attention to the statements being made by Chad Wolf and by everything that comes out of the DHS.

• 38:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What's interesting also is that a core principle of republicanism is states' rights.

• 38:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 38:58Rich Roll?

  And here we have an overriding of state mandates for the purposes of a federal flex.

• 39:04Adam Skolnick?

  And that, but that's been, since Trump became president, it's kind of cut both ways, whereas the Democrats were always for big federal kind of policy, and now it really, it's states that are fighting for like democratic principles like the state of California. So that's kind of cut both ways. It just so happens that that's the way it was, but it didn't happen that way under the Bush administration. So it's interesting how that all has transpired. But yeah, so I just wanted to flag that for the listeners, because I know listeners are super concerned about, you know, how to be better people and how can we be a better country? And it doesn't seem like safety and security are, right now, the mandate of the DHS. It's a control thing.

• 39:47Rich Roll?

  It's so strange.

• 39:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, Department of Homeland Security. Do you feel more secure?

• 39:53Rich Roll?

  And it's also bizarre how we kind of haphazardly normalize things depending upon our political perspective.

• 40:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that's true. What do you think about that?

• 40:05Rich Roll?

  Well, I think it's concerning. It speaks to our cognitive biases. You know, if you're of a certain political persuasion, you're going to have a lens on what the DHS is doing that's going to differ from somebody who's on the other side of the aisle, when in truth, these things should not be partisan.

• 40:23Adam Skolnick?

  But we're not even talking about like the protests in Portland. Like, I'm not there. I'm not watching it every day. It's not, you know, I read about it from time to time.

• 40:32Rich Roll?

  And your sense of what's transpiring there, if you're not there, depends wholly upon your information silo.

• 40:38Adam Skolnick?

  It does. But like, no matter what's happening there... Like, we have to have, we have to expect the DHS to be an impartial, partial arbiter of the Constitution and how that's laid out. And so, and it doesn't seem like that's the case. When you're, when you're enforcing, when you're cracking down on a humanitarian aid organization in the middle of fucking desert, and you're cracking down on protesters, it seems like it needs to be either disbanded because it's a failure, or overhauled completely to include some, you know, the CDC, or some sort of like offshoot, or corridor that links the CDC with the DHS.

• 41:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 41:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't seem super wise that DHS is vested with authority of, of, you know, maintaining, or trying to establish some kind of security around the spread of COVID.

• 41:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Rich Roll?

  When its real mandate has to, you know, emanates from 9/11 and terrorism.

• 41:41Adam Skolnick?

  Right. And I would like to point out that the failure with containing COVID wasn't just international borders, it wasn't just customs. TSA should have been like taking everyone's temperature on every single domestic flight in this country. That wasn't happening. So maybe now it is, but it wasn't then.

• 41:57Rich Roll?

  All right, let's shift gears here.

• 41:59Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it.

• 42:00Rich Roll?

  We're going to talk about a couple of letters.

• 42:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 42:02Rich Roll?

  Aren't we?

• 42:03Adam Skolnick?

  We are. So this is, this news came out, I forget when it was, was it like three weeks ago, four weeks ago? It was like four weeks ago, I think we talked about it.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 42:12Adam Skolnick?

  When it first, well, no, we talked about it right before it dropped.

• 42:15Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 42:16Adam Skolnick?

  It dropped about four weeks ago. We were talking a little bit about cancel culture and redemption, and the notion of redemption. And then like literally the next day, the Harper's letter dropped. And so this is a letter that was spearheaded by journalists named Thomas Chatterton Williams, and George Packer, and a few others. And it was signed by legends, really. Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, Wynton Marsalis, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, most of whom, or all of whom are liberal, right, liberal minded. There's, I think, 100 plus.

• 42:50Rich Roll?

  There was, there was, there was a bunch of conservatives too. I mean, the whole point was that it crossed that aisle, and it was a, it was a panoply of perspectives.

• 42:57Adam Skolnick?

  And the idea was, it was kind of speaking out against illiberalism. Illiberalism not being a political statement, but like on the idea of free flow of ideas. Liberal ideas like free speech and free expression. And so I'll just read a little excerpt here for you. And, and then we can discuss kind of what we think of it. The excerpt is this, "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture, and intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

• 43:40Adam Skolnick?

  We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters, but it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought." It goes on. But, you know, and it's in response to people losing their jobs, losing their positions, not based on something like Me Too, but based on action, like speaking the wrong thing, saying, making the wrong move. A guy was removed from a position in Harvard for actually being the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein. That was his big offense. He represented Harvey Weinstein. Like, these are illiberal, dangerous forces.

• 44:23Rich Roll?

  My original knee-jerk reaction when this broke the news, was it like two and a half weeks ago or something like that? Was that this is a conversation that we need to have. And very rapidly, there was a, there was a, a reaction to this, a counter-reaction to this letter that was pretty severe.

• 44:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it came out right, right away. There was the, the people who are, I guess. The letter was targeting, didn't take it too well. And people were being accused of, the signees were being accused of being elitist. And a lot of them are very accomplished and elite people. But there was, there's one of the poets that signed it was a black poet who was an ex-prisoner, like is an ex-con. So it's not like everyone's this elitist.

• 45:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Adam Skolnick?

  But here, but I think Hannah, I hope I'm not butchering her last name, Gorgas, from The Atlantic, probably had the best rebuttal and it explained itself the best. And, and so I'm going to read a little bit of it right now. "Across the globe, the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of Twitter scorn. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 250 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting. In the US, the Trump administration continues to threaten reporters' safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in a democracy. The country is moving deeper into an economic recession, decimating industries including journalism and academia. And yet, the suddenly unemployed people the Harper statement references clearly lost

• 45:54Adam Skolnick?

  their jobs, not because of a pandemic or government pressure, but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups. This small group includes James Bennett, the former editor of the New York Times editorial page, who was forced to resign after the op-ed page he supervised published an article by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that endorsed state violence."

• 46:13Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:14Adam Skolnick?

  And she was basically saying what? That like, these elitists are complaining about being criticized, not complaining about something that's real?

• 46:24Rich Roll?

  Right. The criticism was, was essentially that these are a bunch of whiny elitists who, who now for the first time are being forced to confront criticism of their writing because none of them are actually in jeopardy of, of being deplatformed or losing their ability to express themselves. They all have massive platforms and they're all going to be just fine. But the broader truth here, and where the conversation really needs to center, is on this trend towards illiberalism and the censoriousness that is at play across so-

• 46:58Rich Roll?

  Social media in a sort of Orwellian sense, not that the government is cracking down in any kind of authoritarian way, but that there is this social media kind of mob at large that self polices what's acceptable speech and what isn't.

• 47:14Adam Skolnick?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:14Rich Roll?

  You know, I'm no fan of Tom Cotton, but I don't think that the editor of the New York Times editorial page should have been fired for publishing that letter, certainly not because of the content of the letter.

• 47:27Adam Skolnick?

  I think he resigned under pressure. I'm not exactly sure. I think it was like resigned.

• 47:32Rich Roll?

  It was a resignation.

• 47:33Adam Skolnick?

  I think so, but it was under pressure. And I think that the reason that they gave is that he didn't read Tom Cotton's piece before it went to print.

• 47:42Rich Roll?

  Right, right, right, right. That's a different issue.

• 47:44Adam Skolnick?

  However, Brett Stevens, who's another favorite punching bag of left wingers at the New York Times, wrote a really convincing op ed about that. And he said, you want people like Tom Cotton to tell you what they're thinking. And what you don't want is to make Tom Cotton somehow a sympathetic figure to people who care about free speech. Because this guy is advocating for state violence, like advocating basically what we just were flagging for people.

• 48:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:14Adam Skolnick?

  And, and he's not for civil liberties, clearly. And now he's the darling of people who, you know, he was able to be set up as this conservative avatar for like being abused by this so, you know, a biased media. You're basically showing the world that you have a bias. And that's not, and obviously I don't think New York Times does have a bias, but that's what you're, that's the perception that could come up.

• 48:40Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:41Adam Skolnick?

  And so it's dangerous. I mean, like the one thing that I think that Gorgas didn't get right is that these overreaches by the left can lead to a more hostility toward journalists exactly for that reason. Because you're overreaching and then it becomes more convincing when someone says fake news. It becomes more convincing. Look, they are biased.

• 49:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's certainly a danger. I mean, this is something that, that Bill Maher talked about in his episode this past week. Interviewed Chatterton Williams and Barry Weiss as well, who we're going to get to. And he pointed out this study, I don't know the origin of the study, the Cato Institute, I think, where 62% of people were afraid to share their honest opinion. And I think that that's worth exploring, because I just know personally, in my circle of friends and journalists and writers, that there is this, what Chatterton Williams calls this onlooker effect, that it's not about the criticism, that cancellation is not about bringing the elites down to earth, but it's about this chilling effect, this stifling,

• 49:45Rich Roll?

  this narrowing influence on all of our behavior, where we have to pause and consider whether we really want to share what's on our mind. And just the fact that you're going through that calculus at all, I think speaks to the current health or lack of health in public discourse at the moment, which should be concerning to everybody.

• 50:07Adam Skolnick?

  I think so. I mean, right after the letter came out, I tweeted it and retweeted it and agreed, my own agreement, I mean, listen.

• 50:17Rich Roll?

  Right before the backlash?

• 50:20Adam Skolnick?

  Before the backlash. When I tweet, it's like a lonely man on the Alpine Lakes skipping a rock, like that's the kind of effect it has on the greater world. I'm not a tidal wave maker like you, Rich Roll.

• 50:31Rich Roll?

  I'm not that on Twitter, I can tell you that.

• 50:34Adam Skolnick?

  But, so no one really pays attention. But even that, you know, like, as soon as the backlash started to roll out, even I was, and I'm very progressive.

• 50:44Rich Roll?

  You're a progressive contributor to the New York Times.

• 50:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, and I have put myself in harm's way to report stories that I'm proud of, that are human rights stories, and they're, but, and I was, I thought about deleting my tweet.

• 51:00Rich Roll?

  It's problematic, knowing you as well as I know you, it's problematic when somebody who is as progressive and liberal minded as you, somebody who is so devoted to human rights causes, and the kinds of stories that you devote your life to, like going to the, you know, going down to the wall in Arizona and trying to understand the, you know, deleterious environmental impact of what that construction project is all, like, these are the, you know, you've, you've reported on GMOs in Hawaii, like, these are, these are very liberal minded.

• 51:33Rich Roll?

  Stories to pursue and and when somebody of your ilk is being accused of not being liberal or progressive enough and being shamed for pointing out that we we need like the the health of our society depends upon the free exchange of ideas, then it's problematic.

• 51:52Adam Skolnick?

  It is. And to be clear, I wasn't shamed because nobody really pays attention to my Twitter, but.

• 51:57Rich Roll?

  You said you got a little bit of.

• 51:59Adam Skolnick?

  I was worried about that.

• 52:00Rich Roll?

  I see.

• 52:01Adam Skolnick?

  I was worried about about being.

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  You're thinking about.

• 52:03Adam Skolnick?

  I was the onlooker. You know, I was concerned about it.

• 52:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 52:07Adam Skolnick?

  I stuck, I kept it out there. And and I didn't have a backlash. And I kept it out there. And I actually then tweeted at Williams and thanked him for the letter. And so I'm because I believe in that. I believe in the idea that we should have free speech, you know, like it's Dave Chappelle is constantly complaining about he won't play colleges. Most comics won't play colleges anymore. That was like a lifeblood for comics, like playing the college circuit. That's what kept people out of bars all the time. And they were making a lot of money on that college circuit. It's no longer there. They don't do it. And and I think this whole thing points to this weird co-mingling of academia and

• 52:49Adam Skolnick?

  newsrooms, which wasn't the case, like when a guy like Carl Bernstein, who with Woodward broke the Watergate story. He was a cub reporter that came out out of high school, got a job at a paper. You can't get a job at a paper as a cub reporter in high out of high school anymore. Doesn't exist. Part of that is that we don't have local papers that are as robust as they used to be that that's harder. So now you have academia feeding your feeding newsrooms. That's different than we ever had before. And in some ways, that can be good. I'm not saying it's all bad. But I'm just saying it like this, this idea is one that came out of academia first. This idea of the proper way to speak and that there is, you know, that that closed societies was first a problem on campus before it was

• 53:34Adam Skolnick?

  a problem in newsrooms.

• 53:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I think it started with student bodies and then those those students matriculate and go out into the world and they begin to populate the newsrooms and they they slowly begin to, you know, have their have their voices being shared on social media and and you know, the result is is kind of what we're seeing right now.

• 53:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And then you wanted to get to Barry as well, right?

• 53:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Adam Skolnick?

  She was a signatory on a letter. She resigned from the New York Times in her resignation letter. She claimed to be a target of progressive forces within the newsroom there. And this is what she wrote. A new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper, that truth isn't a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few, whose job is to inform everyone else. And so that's what her take is.

• 54:28Rich Roll?

  Right. Right. This is an interesting situation. It's related to the Harper's letter, although it's distinct and it's its own unique thing, I think, independent of that. As somebody who who is a contributor to the New York Times, you have a sense of what the inner workings of that newspaper are like. I do know other writers for the New York Times who take issue with Barry's characterization of what that climate is like there. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't, you know, consider myself a big Barry Weiss stan or fan or anything like that. I think she's done some interesting reporting. I don't agree with everything that she says. But it does speak to the Chatterton Williams

• 55:11Rich Roll?

  letter in the sense that there is this feeling of orthodoxy that supersedes fact finding or science or the pursuit of truth.

• 55:23Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I think it's the same thing that we're talking about DHS. I think overall, and I wouldn't put it just to the New York Times. I think overall, it's more of a, let's be aware of what's really happening. My experience in the New York Times is confined to the sports desk. I've never had any issues. It's always been like, like the best people that I've ever worked with in journalism. So, and I have no insight into how the newsroom operates. And

• 55:49Rich Roll?

  Part of the criticism of Barry, though, is that, is that this was like a press release for her next move, whether that's her creating some new media platform or whatever it is. There was a little bit of grandstanding.

• 56:01Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, for sure. I mean, she is, she is. But at the same time, it's like this idea, like, I think the ideas concerns me more than the way the New York Times operates. Fine, they're great. To me, the issue is, are we going to confront, is the left kind of setting themselves up as this new McCarthyist type era? Is there a purity test? Because we've joked about purity tests in the past, and it is like becoming true. Like, are there purity tests that people are gonna have to pass in order to get to a certain level?

• 56:32Rich Roll?

  It's deeply concerning. And Bill Maher pointed this out. He's like, who are these perfect people out there that are holding us all to account according to some impossible standard? And how deep does that reach extend in terms of, you know, what's required to escape this cancellation?

• 56:52Adam Skolnick?

  And where are they in terms of like the cancel culture type people who are so ready to cancel people for saying the wrong thing, when antisemitism is the issue? You know, we had 17,000 people marching in Berlin against COVID restrictions. But it was like the people who created that protest were far-right politicians. There were neo-Nazis involved. There is a big fear in Germany right now that neo-Nazis are deeply embedded in all forms of government there, and certainly in police forces and in the military. Here we had issues with like Ice Cube speaking up, Deshaun Jackson speaking up, Nick Cannon

• 57:34Adam Skolnick?

  on his podcast said some pretty terrible things about Jews quoting Farrakhan. Deshaun Jackson thought he was quoting Hitler at one point. And some people, you know, Deshaun Jackson then is gonna go to Auschwitz. He's been counseled. Nick Cannon has been counseled. And Barry Weiss actually just shouted him out on Twitter about how great it is that he is educating himself and welcoming, you know, basically being the model of allowing for redemption. Of course, Nick Cannon did read her book. That might have something to do with it.

• 58:10Rich Roll?

  Well, there has to be a path to redemption and rehabilitation. You know, if somebody missteps, and in this culture where- People are misstepping all the time to just expect that they're going to go away forever is not, you know, that's not an enlightened, you know, perspective to have like, what are we doing? If somebody, look, nobody's, nobody's perfect and people are, are, you know, in the world and on social media communicating and people are going to say the wrong things. And in those instances, and look, there's a spectrum of severity here that we're speaking about. There are some horrible things that are happening and some minor transgressions.

• 58:49Rich Roll?

  But we have to, we have to determine the half-life on these cancellations and how we're going to create a culture in which it's conducive to people learning and growing in real time in the public sphere.

• 59:11Adam Skolnick?

  It's, it's, it's the difference between, I think the real concern here with the onlooker effect is it creates, it seeds apathy, not empathy. And to communicate and to exchange ideas and even to misstep like Nick Cannon did. But now he's showing publicly empathy and to have Barry Weiss, who feels like she got chased out of a newsroom.

• 59:38Rich Roll?

  And this is her core issue. Like this is the main, she wrote a book about this.

• 59:42Adam Skolnick?

  Right. About antisemitism, the rise of antisemitism. I mean, look, I mean, we've had, we've had shootings in synagogues. We've had, I mean, this is not a small thing. And even on the left, I hear it in the wellness community all the time. People who are suspicious of George Soros as he's like some Svengali, which is this whole antisemitic trope that has revitalized. So it's not just right wing. It's not just left wing. It's all over the place. But.

• 1:00:08Adam Skolnick?

  What do we, where do we want to encourage people to be? Do we want them to become spectators of a big Twitter fight that causes, that doesn't solve anything? Or do we want to have empathy for one another? Are we creating apathy or are we creating empathy? I think that's what the letter is getting to with this onlooker effect is like, is that that creates-

• 1:00:28Rich Roll?

  I don't know if we're creating apathy, but we're creating antipathy.

• 1:00:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:32Rich Roll?

  Right? Versus empathy.

• 1:00:33Adam Skolnick?

  Or like this idea that you're a frozen onlooker, that you're not going to get in the fight.

• 1:00:37Rich Roll?

  That's the, well, that's, that's the true onlooker effect.

• 1:00:41Adam Skolnick?

  Right, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:41Rich Roll?

  I think people are just opting out.

• 1:00:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, the apathy.

• 1:00:43Rich Roll?

  And they're just saying, I'm just not, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm not participating in this.

• 1:00:47Adam Skolnick?

  Not for me.

• 1:00:48Rich Roll?

  Because it's too fraught.

• 1:00:48Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  And for me to express myself honestly is this minefield that I'm not going to subject myself to. And that's the stifling and the chilling effect.

• 1:00:59Adam Skolnick?

  Right. For me, it's just like, that's why I swim and run without any sort of intelligence, because I just want to get, get out there, flail around for hours.

• 1:01:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Adam Skolnick?

  Um, no, I think that's right. I mean, I, uh, anything else you want to share on that?

• 1:01:13Rich Roll?

  No, I think we'll, we'll close it with that and we'll move on to, what are we moving on to? Show and tell?

• 1:01:18Adam Skolnick?

  Show and tell.

• 1:01:19Rich Roll?

  Hard pivot.

• 1:01:20Adam Skolnick?

  Hard pivot.

• 1:01:21Rich Roll?

  Hard pivot, Adam Skolnick.

• 1:01:22Adam Skolnick?

  We just watched Weight of Gold. It's the hard pivot to the Weight of Gold, the HBO doc, um, featuring Apollo Ono and Michael Phelps is the narrator and Lolo Jones, great sprinter turned Bob Slater. Um, and it explores the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face during training, competing, and then obviously after the, the torch is extinguished.

• 1:01:46Rich Roll?

  So this documentary just premiered on HBO this past week. I saw the trailer getting circulated by a bunch of the athletes and thought, this is, this is like right up my alley. I want to know more about this. I reached out to Apollo Ono. I just did a podcast with him that's going to go up in a couple of weeks. Um, but why not take a moment now to talk about the movie? I mean, I think it's, it's great that Michael and all of these athletes are, are, have created this project that focuses on what I think is a very important- And overlooked issue, which is the mental health of our elite athletes, whether they're professional or Olympic. The lens in this documentary is is is honed solely on the Olympic athletes.

• 1:02:27Rich Roll?

  And you could make the argument like, oh, woe is me, like they're Olympic athletes, like they're having a hard time. But the truth is that there isn't, you know, sort of an existential crisis that's created when you're somebody who is at the height of their powers. And whether you stand atop the podium or you end up in 20th place matters little. What does matter is that almost overnight, when you become a civilian in the aftermath of that experience, you're left without any resources to manage how to move forward with your life. Right? When you're used to being surrounded by tons of people who support you, who are there for you, who are all invested in your success.

• 1:03:11Rich Roll?

  And every waking moment of your life is devoted to this very specific window of time in which you're expected to perform at your best. When that moment lapses and is over, how do you then become a normal human being? And a lot of these people have severe, you know, mental issues trying to grapple with that. And I think it's incumbent upon the organizing committees of all of these respective sports to create structures and programs for these athletes to better help them make that transition. You're seeing that in some of the professional leagues now. I know they do it with finances, like, you know, how to manage your money and all that kind of stuff.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  But, you know, the mental aspect of high performance is, you know, only now starting to get the weight that it deserves.

• 1:04:02Adam Skolnick?

  What I thought was interesting was a good point made by one of the figure skaters. Not Sasha, but the other one, I forget.

• 1:04:11Rich Roll?

  Gracie Gold.

• 1:04:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she was saying if I tore up my knee, I'd have the best surgeon.

• 1:04:16Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:16Adam Skolnick?

  In the world looking at it. Um, but I don't have any, I didn't have anybody and, uh, to look at my, after my mental health. Uh, that I got recommendations of a therapist, but I didn't have them like paid for and, and on the payroll and available to me like on the spot.

• 1:04:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Adam Skolnick?

  And I find that interesting because, you know, obviously sports psychology and sports psychologists, that's been a booming field for a while, but it's always about performance.

• 1:04:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:04:39Adam Skolnick?

  That's surprising to me that the sports psychologist, um, role hasn't spanned overall mental health. I'm surprised by that.

• 1:04:47Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that the resources are available and this is a point that Apollo made. It's not that they weren't there and available if you reached out for them, but you have to take into consideration that these are people who, who are trained to never show weakness.

• 1:05:02Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:05:02Rich Roll?

  And so the idea of being vulnerable enough to say, hey, you know, I'm feeling not good, like I need help is a stretch for a lot of these people. And so they end up not availing themselves of what is available.

• 1:05:14Adam Skolnick?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:15Rich Roll?

  And I think that makes it even more incumbent upon the coaching staffs and the, you know, people that are in these people's entourages to pay closer attention to how they're doing. But, you know, the movie's good. I think that it, it, you know, if I had a criticism of it, I think it lives a little bit on the surface.

• 1:05:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Rich Roll?

  It could have probed a little bit more deeply.

• 1:05:33Adam Skolnick?

  There's some great stories there that weren't fully fleshed out.

• 1:05:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:05:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:37Rich Roll?

  Exactly. Um, and, you know, come on, Michael Phelps. Are you going to come on the podcast or what?

• 1:05:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, why can't, why haven't, why hasn't Michael Phelps been on this microphone?

• 1:05:45Rich Roll?

  I've tried, I've been trying for years to get Michael on. I've made many overtures. I've never met Michael Phelps, but I have friends that are friends with him. I know coaches that have coached him. Um, I emailed, recently I emailed Peter Carlisle, his agent. I just get no, I get no response.

• 1:06:01Adam Skolnick?

  No response, huh?

• 1:06:02Rich Roll?

  So come on, Michael, what are you doing?

• 1:06:03Adam Skolnick?

  Come on, Michael.

• 1:06:04Rich Roll?

  I got a chair ready for you.

• 1:06:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. I mean, he looked amazing in the, in the film.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  He looks amazing.

• 1:06:09Adam Skolnick?

  He looks like he's ready to compete is what he looks like.

• 1:06:11Rich Roll?

  He looks amazing. He's really shouldered this mantle of being a mental health advocate in a meaningful way.

• 1:06:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Rich Roll?

  And I think it's super cool. And. And it's powerful and these are stories that need to get told. So kudos to Michael.

• 1:06:25Adam Skolnick?

  Kudos to Michael.

• 1:06:26Rich Roll?

  You know, one day he will show up on this podcast and share with us about it.

• 1:06:30Adam Skolnick?

  Michael, if you're listening, you don't look like a retired athlete.

• 1:06:32Rich Roll?

  He definitely does not.

• 1:06:33Adam Skolnick?

  You look like an athlete in prime condition. Um, and if you're not gonna-

• 1:06:37Rich Roll?

  Are you saying he's maybe thinking about a comeback?

• 1:06:39Adam Skolnick?

  I, I thought about it, but like if you're not gonna do that, I think you should try freediving. Because I think Michael Phelps would be an incredible, like, you know, it could be an interesting way of going. It's a much more introspective, kind of like, um, meditative sport. It's a huge challenge. And there's never been an athlete like Michael that did that crossover. That's something Alexei Molchanov, one of the, the, right now, the number one ranked freediver in the world. He has two of the world records, um, in, in depth. Uh, he's wanted to see that. He's wanted to see like someone from-

• 1:07:11Rich Roll?

  An elite athlete crossover from another discipline.

• 1:07:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, cause Alexei was a national ranked swimmer in Russia, um, when, nationally ranked swimmer in Russia and his mother was too. When he, then he transitioned into freediving. And so he's an elite athlete and so is William Trubridge. So there are elite athletes in the sport. But you don't get like the swim, there's no swimmer pipeline.

• 1:07:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:31Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Rich Roll?

  Right. That would be an interesting crossover. I think it's much more likely that he'll try to make the PGA than go into freediving. Golf seems to be his thing.

• 1:07:42Adam Skolnick?

  Is that right?

• 1:07:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Well, there's no ocean in Arizona.

• 1:07:44Rich Roll?

  Right. Um, couple more things to, uh, talk about really quickly before we get into audience Q and A. Um, I did want to mention that my buddy, Dotzy Bausch, uh, who's been on the podcast before, you guys know her, you love her. Uh, Olympic track cyclist. She started an organization called Switch for Good, um, which is this incredible nonprofit promoting, uh, the benefits of a plant-based diet. It's really kind of an- Anti-dairy advocacy group. And I was privileged to tape some PSAs for Switch for Good recently that were directed by Luis Ahoyas, who many might know as the director of Game Changers and Cove and Racing Extinction.

• 1:08:29Rich Roll?

  He's an amazing Academy Award-winning director. And I got to spend the day with a bunch of incredible plant-based athletes like Rebecca Sony, who's a six-time Olympic medalist. She's been on the podcast as well. Dotzy, of course, Georgia LaRocque from the NHL, Derek Morgan from the NFL, Heather Metz, three-time Olympic medalist soccer player, and a bunch of other really cool people. And those PSAs aired on NBC during the Today Show. And I think people keep coming up to me saying they've seen them. So I think they were on NBC subsequent to that, too.

• 1:09:04Adam Skolnick?

  I saw one.

• 1:09:05Rich Roll?

  Ran for like a month or something.

• 1:09:06Adam Skolnick?

  I saw one.

• 1:09:07Rich Roll?

  Did you?

• 1:09:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 1:09:10Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:11Rich Roll?

  So that's really cool. And if you missed those, you can find them on the Switch for Good YouTube channel, and I'll link that up in the show notes as well. So Dotzy's doing great work. It's basically a response to the kind of Got Milk Chocolate Milk campaign that the dairy industry promoted.

• 1:09:30Adam Skolnick?

  As like an energy food.

• 1:09:31Rich Roll?

  Well, what happened is, in my estimation at least, the dairy industry, noticing shrinking demand for its products, made this interesting decision to reposition chocolate milk, not as like the drink that kids, you know, elementary school kids drink at lunch, but as an athletic recovery supplement of some sorts that would enhance your recovery. And they put a lot of money behind this, a lot of money into advertising, into sponsoring athletes. And Dotzy and her organization and a bunch of athletes like myself were like, that's, it's not right.

• 1:10:10Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:10:11Rich Roll?

  It's really not right.

• 1:10:12Adam Skolnick?

  Makes sense.

• 1:10:13Rich Roll?

  So this is sort of a response to that, to correct the record as much as anything else. So shout out to Dotzy.

• 1:10:18Adam Skolnick?

  Well, I mean, I think athletes have been playing a huge role in this growing

• 1:10:27Adam Skolnick?

  Plant-based movement, movement away from animal products. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that performance and athletics and mentors from the sports community has been a big driver in that. Don't you agree?

• 1:10:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Do you think chocolate milk is the ultimate recovery drink?

• 1:10:46Adam Skolnick?

  No, I can't drink milk, man.

• 1:10:50Rich Roll?

  Most people can't.

• 1:10:51Adam Skolnick?

  No, I can't drink milk. I can't even eat ice cream.

• 1:10:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55Adam Skolnick?

  I eat nut milk ice cream now, or oat milk. That's the new one.

• 1:10:59Rich Roll?

  Oat milk is the new thing.

• 1:11:00Adam Skolnick?

  I'm into oat milk.

• 1:11:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah, oat milk's good.

• 1:11:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:03Rich Roll?

  Couple other quick things. My brother-in-law Stuart Mathis, Julie's brother Stuart.

• 1:11:09Adam Skolnick?

  That's your brother-in-law. I forgot the link up. He was great.

• 1:11:13Rich Roll?

  He is a brilliant guitar player.

• 1:11:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:17Rich Roll?

  And this is a guy who picked up a guitar when he was, I don't know, eight or nine years old and just never looked back. Like, there was nothing else that he was ever gonna pursue in his life, other than music and the guitar. And he, you know, I wouldn't say suffered is the wrong word, but like, he bled for his art for many, many, many years, like, living in LA, in all different kinds of bands, cutting his own records. And it took a long time for him to finally hit his groove, but now he's, like, lauded and in the music community, like, most people know who he is. This is incredible guitar player. And he's played, he was Jules' tour guitar player.

• 1:11:57Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:11:58Rich Roll?

  He toured with LeAnn Rimes, and then he was in The Wallflowers.

• 1:12:02Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, really?

• 1:12:03Rich Roll?

  For many years.

• 1:12:03Adam Skolnick?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:12:04Rich Roll?

  And he's been playing with Lucinda Williams for, he moved to Nashville, lives in Nashville now. But the reason I'm bringing it up is that Lucinda and Stuart just played an NPR Tiny Desk concert. For those who aren't familiar, NPR does this series called Tiny Desk, where these amazing musicians play these intimate little contained concerts. And the one with Stuart and Lucinda just published recently, so I'll link that up in the show notes. And you could see my brother-in-law, Julie's brother, and you'll get why her side of the family is so musically inclined.

• 1:12:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:35Rich Roll?

  Which is cool.

• 1:12:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I liked it. Thanks for sharing that.

• 1:12:38Rich Roll?

  Final thing, there's a new documentary that just came out called Takeout by Michael Sawirsky, who is documentary filmmaker who's made some cool movies over the years, Food Choices being one of them. And this is a documentary produced, executive produced by Moby. I have not watched it yet. He, Michael, just sent me a link to check it out. So I'll, I'm gonna watch it this week. But it's another sort of look at the environmental impact of our food choices through the lens of how the Amazon is being destroyed to create fields for cattle grazing and growing crops for cattle.

• 1:13:17Adam Skolnick?

  Okay, one of those uplifting docs.

• 1:13:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the fires in the Amazon.

• 1:13:22Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 1:13:24Rich Roll?

  So that's it. So should we talk about some gear?

• 1:13:26Adam Skolnick?

  Let's talk about gear. Let's talk about the gear that's gonna change my game.

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  This is the real show and tell.

• 1:13:30Adam Skolnick?

  That's changed my game.

• 1:13:31Rich Roll?

  So hold on, I got a couple.

• 1:13:32Adam Skolnick?

  I, you know, I just want the listeners to realize that I had no idea how much Rich didn't approve of my training habits.

• 1:13:39Rich Roll?

  I didn't say that. I didn't say that. I'm celebrating what you're doing. I just wanna put a little structure into it.

• 1:13:49Adam Skolnick?

  I'd love it, man. I'd love it, yeah.

• 1:13:51Rich Roll?

  So on the gear tip, again, my disclaimer is that it's not about the gear. You don't need any of this gear to perform. And when people reach out to me and ask me questions about what watch are you wearing or what should I get, I essentially never respond because I just don't even wanna be involved in that discussion. Because, again, it's not about that. And I feel like this is an example of analysis paralysis where people get so caught up in what watch they need, or what pair of shoes they need, or what kind of bike they should buy, that they never end up just going outside and moving their bodies.

• 1:14:23Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:14:24Rich Roll?

  Until they have this, this sort of equation completely figured out, which of course, they never figure out, because the whole point is to protract the process of being focused on the gear.

• 1:14:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  That being said, because I'm asked so often and so frequently about this, I'm gonna take this moment to discuss it and then maybe never discuss it again.

• 1:14:41Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe never.

• 1:14:42Rich Roll?

  So the first thing is, people on YouTube have been leaving comments like, why are you wearing two watches?

• 1:14:49Adam Skolnick?

  Because it's cool.

• 1:14:50Rich Roll?

  So. Does this look like a watch? I don't know what that is. So on my right hand, I have an old Garmin GPS watch, a Phoenix, uh, Phoenix 3 heart rate. And on my left wrist, I have the Whoop band. That's the Whoop. So if you're, if you're watching this on YouTube, you haven't heard the ad reads, the sponsored ad reads that I do for Whoop on the audio version of the podcast. This Whoop, this thing is a, and again, I'm, this is not a sponsored post at all. Like I'm just sharing what I use. The Whoop is a wristband, essentially fitness tracker that connects with a mobile app. But it's, it's, it's not about gauging your workouts per se.

• 1:15:35Rich Roll?

  It's much more about rest and recovery and sleep. And so by leaving it on all day, it monitors your heart rate and monitors your heart rate variability, your metabolic rate. It tracks your sleep and breaks down how much time you spend in the various sleep stages. And then it kind of crunches all of this data and delivers these metrics on how rested you are, how recovered you are, how much strain you should undergo that day or shouldn't. And it also calculates the strain that you put your body through every day. So basically it's kind of a helpful tool in helping you calibrate your workouts so that you're not overtraining or not, not undertraining, right?

• 1:16:18Rich Roll?

  Like, how do you kind of meet your strain goals every day and make sure that your body is properly recovering? And when you're training really hard, it's a great way of adjudicating whether you've pushed too hard the day before, when you should like sort of ease back and when you kind of have the green light to push harder than you have in past days. So I haven't taken this thing off since I got it, maybe, I don't know, six months ago or something like that. Maybe I've had it longer. Really? I can't remember. Like, yeah, I love it. It's waterproof. And it's amazing, like I swam this morning. You don't have to push any buttons or there's no interface or anything like that. And I swam and then I've refreshed my app and it's like, oh, you swam this far for this long. Really?

• 1:17:00Rich Roll?

  Knows your heart rate and it has a little optic sensor on the, the back of it that,

• 1:17:06Rich Roll?

  Is how it's calibrating the data.

• 1:17:08Adam Skolnick?

  This guy's getting jealous.

• 1:17:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Adam Skolnick?

  I have to tell this guy what I'm doing.

• 1:17:11Rich Roll?

  But then, in terms of working out, I prefer, I prefer a proper GPS watch in terms of the data that I want to look at and analyze.

• 1:17:22Adam Skolnick?

  For distance and pace?

• 1:17:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it has an interface, so you can see it when you're, like, if I'm out running, I want to know what my heart rate is.

• 1:17:32Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:17:32Rich Roll?

  So I can look at my watch and know what that is at any given moment. It also will, will via Bluetooth, connect with a heart rate monitor strap around the chest, which I think is much more preferential than these optic sensors that you see on the back sides of these GPS watches that are calibrating your heart rate from your wrists, which I have found, at least to date, I think the science is and the technology's always iterating and getting better and better and better, but I found that, that gauging your heart rate off your, a chest strap is much more accurate and stable.

• 1:18:06Adam Skolnick?

  Better than your arm as well, right?

• 1:18:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, much, much more so. So I highly suggest getting a chest strap for your heart rate. In terms of what kind of GPS watch to get, like I said, this, this is a Garmin that I'm wearing right now, and it's super old. Like, there's been many iterations on this since I bought it, but I still love it. It works perfectly fine, and I don't know that it matters that much which watch you have. I tend to wear this one, kind of because it's like, nice and heavy and metal, and it just feels like a real, regular watch that you can wear out into the world, kind of like yours. Yours is, I mean, yours is just a different variation of mine.

• 1:18:42Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:18:44Rich Roll?

  And...

• 1:18:45Adam Skolnick?

  Mine just has a dive component.

• 1:18:46Rich Roll?

  And it works perfectly fine. The, the sort of user interface, in terms of getting the screens to do what you want them to do, is a little bit, kind of, clunky, I would say. And that's where a competitor watch, this is, this is the Coros watch.

• 1:19:02Adam Skolnick?

  Coros, is the brand?

• 1:19:04Rich Roll?

  This is the Coros Vertex.

• 1:19:05Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:19:06Rich Roll?

  Vertex. And it's very similar to the Garmin. But the advantages of this watch, which I should disclose, they sent to me for free. This is not a sponsored thing at all. I'm not getting paid to say this, but they did send me a free watch. And I really like this watch, too, because the user interface is much more intuitive. It's much more easy to navigate through the different screens and to get to the data that you want. Its interface with its mobile app is incredibly seamless. It uploads to Strava without any hassles whatsoever, and it has unbelievable battery life. So this thing you can wear for like weeks without charging it, whereas the Garmin you have to charge much more frequently. So I like them both for different reasons. The Garmin feels more

• 1:19:51Rich Roll?

  like a knock around, wear every day watch, but this one I also found is, has some wonkiness in, in the swim metrics that the Garmin doesn't have, but the Garmin isn't always super accurate with swimming.

• 1:20:04Adam Skolnick?

  On ocean, ocean swims, the Garmin fades in and out of GPS connectivity.

• 1:20:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I agree with that. And these are things that are like software pushes that are always improving. But I like them both. And the Coros is like a small little startup, and they're making waves in the space. And I think what they're doing is super cool. So you can check them out.

• 1:20:23Adam Skolnick?

  Can you swim in a chest heart rate monitor?

• 1:20:26Rich Roll?

  You can. I don't. I don't worry that. I mean, since I've been swimming my whole life, I'm pretty intuitive. I can intuitively gauge my, my sort of perceived effort. A lot of people do. A lot of triathletes wear the strap when they're swimming.

• 1:20:38Adam Skolnick?

  So it's okay. Doesn't, doesn't impact electronics?

• 1:20:40Rich Roll?

  You definitely need a chest strap. That would be one thing that I would suggest.

• 1:20:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, I need one.

• 1:20:44Rich Roll?

  And then just get really connected with, with your heart rate. And I don't need it all the time now because I've been using one for so many years that I just know, like, I'm like, I, I, I know how I feel and I know basically where my heart rate is all the time without looking, but that only comes through experience. So there's that. Here's something I bet you've never heard of or seen before. And these are, this is a pair of goggles, and they're made by a company called Form. Have you heard of these?

• 1:21:11Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:21:12Rich Roll?

  These are cool. And also, these were sent to me for free as well.

• 1:21:15Adam Skolnick?

  Are they night vision goggles?

• 1:21:17Rich Roll?

  They are. They look kind of like that, too.

• 1:21:19Adam Skolnick?

  Night vision swim goggles?

• 1:21:20Rich Roll?

  They look like some kind of futuristic swim goggle. They've got this little doodad on, on one, one side of it, a little computer thing. And basically what they do is, it's like, it's like an AR device. When you put them on.

• 1:21:35Rich Roll?

  And turn it on, you'll see a little digital readout in your visual field.

• 1:21:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:39Rich Roll?

  And when you hit start, it's basically a GPS watch for swimming.

• 1:21:43Adam Skolnick?

  It's Google Glasses for swimming.

• 1:21:44Rich Roll?

  Basically.

• 1:21:45Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Rich Roll?

  And when you're swimming, it will, you, you, you input like the, the size of the pool, 50 meters, 25 meters or whatever, and there's a running clock and you can, you can kind of adjust, customize the data fields, but basically it gives you a, a running time and also a tally on your distance. And it knows when you are doing an interval set, like it'll say, like if I'm doing a set of 10 100s, it will, when I finish the 100, it'll flash like the time that I did that 100 yards in. And then it'll do a running clock of like how long I've rested before I push off again. So it's essentially like using a pace clock, but the pace clock is just in your visual field while you're swimming. And when these were sent to me,

• 1:22:28Rich Roll?

  I thought, there's no way these things are going to work. Like it's just not going to be that good. But I was really amazed.

• 1:22:34Adam Skolnick?

  So you're seeing it in the field of your vision?

• 1:22:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Adam Skolnick?

  You're seeing all that?

• 1:22:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah. You see, you see it like, it appears like in, like a, like an alternate, you know, AR, like a VR kind of experience.

• 1:22:45Adam Skolnick?

  You're the Terminator.

• 1:22:45Rich Roll?

  When you're wearing these. And they work really well. And I'm blind, like without my glasses. Like, I was like, I'm not even going to be able to read these numbers, but I could see them totally fine. And so this has been a really fun doodad gadget.

• 1:22:56Adam Skolnick?

  I love that.

• 1:22:57Rich Roll?

  I've been playing around.

• 1:22:58Adam Skolnick?

  I would totally buy them if it, if it had like, you know, like, um, the parking, like you can get, you get cars that automated parking. If it could do an automated flip turn, I'd buy it tomorrow.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  If it trains for you and you can like,

• 1:23:12Adam Skolnick?

  It does my flip turn for me.

• 1:23:13Rich Roll?

  What if you lay in bed and you put them on and it pretends like you're swimming?

• 1:23:16Adam Skolnick?

  And then every time I walk across the room, it flips me upside down. That would be crazy.

• 1:23:20Rich Roll?

  All right. One more thing. These things are the Jaybird Vista earbuds. Jaybird is a podcast sponsor.

• 1:23:27Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:23:27Rich Roll?

  And I'm sponsored by them personally as well. So they're not, they didn't sponsor me talking about this right now, but they are a partner of mine. And I love this, I love this product. So do you ever wear earbuds when you're training?

• 1:23:39Adam Skolnick?

  I don't. I don't. I don't listen to.

• 1:23:40Rich Roll?

  Which is fine. That's good. You know, I think it's important to go out in nature and just experience. For what it is. If you are going to listen to podcasts or audiobooks or music when you're training, though, I highly suggest these be your choice. And I Are they waterproof? Obviously, I'm biased because I work with this program, but I sought them out because I love them. They're not, you can't swim, like go diving in them or anything like that, but they're incredibly, they're waterproof to the extent that you could sweat on them and you could jump in a pool or whatever, and they would be fine. I've dropped these in the pool and they they're perfectly fine. Wow. And no matter how much I sweat, they stay in my ear. They never fall out. They're super easy to use.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  And and I love them. So, you know, again, just another like cool fun. They come in this this pack that charges the that charges them, charging pack, and the battery life's excellent, and they're incredibly durable. Do you have to have your phone with you when you're to have them work? Or do you download it onto your watch? No, no, I don't have an Apple Watch. I don't know what that would be like, because I think you can. This one has like, I could put, I could put music on this thing. I don't even know about that. You're the one who should be doing that. Maybe, possibly. I mean, they just, they just connect via Bluetooth. So they connect to my phone via Bluetooth. So you just bring your phone on your runs? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. All right. Final thing. Oh, yes. Did you see this? Yes, that's Mathis work, right? I know, right? So if you're listening and you're not watching on YouTube, I'm holding up a T-shirt that I

• 1:25:04Rich Roll?

  shared on Instagram the other day. Yes. It's a graphic illustration of me, I guess, loosely based on me, I suppose.

• 1:25:14Rich Roll?

  Earthy. That Mathis had made for Father's Day. I thought we were all getting T-shirts. So her friend Sterling is the artist who's like this 15 year old kid, and he's the one who came up with the design. But Mathis kind of produced the project with us. And and I posted, I mean, it's like, I can't wear this. I can't, I can't go in the world with like me on my, yeah, like my name on it. It's like preposterous, right? You can't wear your own T-shirt. Although Roger Federer wears, Roger Federer wears an RF hat. Does he? Yeah, he does. I feel like when you reach a certain level, you can get away with that. Like, I can't imagine, like, You're not there yet. in the world. But I posted on Instagram, Mathis is like, ask him who wants merch. And like, a lot of people seem like they were into it. So I don't know, you know, if you It's great work.

• 1:25:59Rich Roll?

  Leave a comment on on YouTube below if you If you would be interested in this and maybe we can do a limited run and make them available on the podcast.

• 1:26:07Adam Skolnick?

  I would love that. I'd wear one. Yeah. I'd love to be the kind of guy that could wear the t-shirt with my own.

• 1:26:11Rich Roll?

  There's mushrooms growing out of my shoulders.

• 1:26:12Adam Skolnick?

  There are. Someone invited you to take mushrooms, but I think that's against the sober thing.

• 1:26:16Rich Roll?

  I think it is.

• 1:26:17Adam Skolnick?

  Wouldn't you agree?

• 1:26:18Rich Roll?

  Unless they're four-sigmatic mushrooms, a different kind of mushroom.

• 1:26:23Adam Skolnick?

  Well, no, but there's this whole idea of psychedelics to cure addiction.

• 1:26:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:26:27Adam Skolnick?

  You don't buy into that.

• 1:26:28Rich Roll?

  No, I don't. I'm not. I'm not. I mean, this is, we could do a whole podcast on that.

• 1:26:34Adam Skolnick?

  We should probably do that.

• 1:26:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I mean, and I've spoken about this in the past on the podcast. Like, I'm a product of 12-step. I believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I got sober that way. I stay sober that way. And I've seen countless lives transformed as a result of working 12-step. It's just, it's a miraculous and beautiful program that is unlike anything I've ever experienced. But that's not to say that I also, I know plenty of people who've gotten sober in other ways.

• 1:27:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  And I've never, I've never done psychedelics. So for me to speak to that with any authority, I think would be foolish.

• 1:27:17Adam Skolnick?

  I have.

• 1:27:17Rich Roll?

  And I know that there's, I'm sure you have.

• 1:27:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. But just like for my training, not with any intelligence whatsoever.

• 1:27:23Rich Roll?

  Right before you go out for your swim run, just a handful of, a handful of mushrooms.

• 1:27:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:27:29Rich Roll?

  When I was in treatment, there was a guy who, in my rehab, who, he had like long, white hair. And he said that he used to, for like a decade, he, he was in the restaurant business and he owned a restaurant. He would wake up in the morning and he would, he would take LSD and he'd go on a 10-mile run. He said he did that every day.

• 1:27:52Adam Skolnick?

  That's crazy.

• 1:27:54Adam Skolnick?

  I could barely, I could barely sit up when I was on LSD. I was lying down most of the time.

• 1:27:59Rich Roll?

  But I know that there's a lot of interesting science happening right now, specifically at Johns Hopkins around the use of psychedelics and depression.

• 1:28:08Adam Skolnick?

  PTSD.

• 1:28:09Rich Roll?

  Exactly, exactly. And I think that's a good thing.

• 1:28:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:28:11Rich Roll?

  That's a good thing.

• 1:28:12Adam Skolnick?

  And ayahuasca, obviously, a big one. Win of the week. I got a win of the week. I dug one up.

• 1:28:18Rich Roll?

  Go for it.

• 1:28:19Adam Skolnick?

  My win of the week is congratulations to Kai Lenny for his five nominations in the Big Wave Awards, the WSL just announced on July 20th. If you don't know about Kai, he is a true innovator in surfing. He's one of the best, if not the best, big wave rider alive. He has crossed the Molokai Channel, riding wind bumps on his foil. He's a master windsurfer. And even this year, when COVID broke out, he was in Tahiti competing on the qualifying tour. Now, remember, this is a guy who wins big wave contests, but he was competing on the qualifying tour so that he could be on the WSL championship tour as

• 1:28:58Adam Skolnick?

  well, to be one of the rare riders that competes in both formats at the same time. Often, it's, surfers choose one or the other. And he's kind of the heir apparent to Laird Hamilton at Jaws, kind of innovating with foils, innovating with a windsurfer who also is a resident, basically lives right, right at Jaws. And he got nominated for five nominations, three of, there are five biggest waves of the year nominations in the category. He rode three of them, so he's got three of those. One of those was at Jaws, two of them were Nazaré. He's also nominated for best overall performer and for wave of the year from Jaws.

• 1:29:37Rich Roll?

  Nazaré is that ridiculous wave in Portugal.

• 1:29:39Adam Skolnick?

  It's the mountain of the wave, like.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  Where you always see there's that building that's in the foreground every time.

• 1:29:45Adam Skolnick?

  Kind of that rocky, kind of bluff that's like right there. And yeah, that's the one, the 100-foot waves that people ride. And he got a crazy ride there. And he said, he rode, he got that wave. Everyone took the videos, everyone took the pictures, and then he went out and surfed for three more hours there. That's what he told me, because I was interviewing him for a different story.

• 1:30:05Rich Roll?

  That's like, that's like David Goggins, when he, when he parachuted into the Ironman World Championship swim start, did the race, finished it, and then went and worked out later that day.

• 1:30:19Rich Roll?

  Did you know that?

• 1:30:20Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, yes, I remember that story. Yeah, yeah, he told me that story. And that story of that is that he parachuted in, he was doing that with another Navy SEAL who was, who they both parachuted in together, swam in, they did the thing, it was all, you know, it was basically the TV kind of, was gonna be one of their, their things they ran. And he was behind the other SEAL the entire race until the, like, cause he had problems, I think, he fell behind in the swim, and then he had issues at the beginning of the run where he couldn't like, get his rhythm and he was walking a lot of it. Then he found his rhythm and started hammering as he does. And then he caught the guy, like, right at the end, and the guy looked at him and goes, "Fucking goggins, man."

• 1:31:04Rich Roll?

  I think that's exactly what I said to him when we started our podcast. That's how I opened our podcast.

• 1:31:09Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. And they finished together. David could have beat him, but they finished together.

• 1:31:13Rich Roll?

  That's classic.

• 1:31:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:15Rich Roll?

  Good deal. I have a quick win of the week, and that is shining a spotlight on Valerie Allman. I tweeted this the other day. Valerie is a discus athlete, and she just broke the American record in discus. And I shared this video, we'll link it up in the show notes, of her, of her breaking the record and her swinging the discus. Did you see this?

• 1:31:38Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:31:39Rich Roll?

  It's hypnotizing. It's like ballet and performance art in extraordinary athleticism. Check that out. I'm having Adam watch this right now.

• 1:31:50Adam Skolnick?

  I'm watching discus.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  It's, I like, watched it like, 10 times in a row. I couldn't stop watching it.

• 1:31:54Adam Skolnick?

  Wow.

• 1:31:55Rich Roll?

  It's so extraordinary. And she's a Wazelle athlete. Wazelle is the kind of women-first apparel brand that works with athletes like Lauren Fleishman, who's been on the podcast before, a really cool company.

• 1:32:09Adam Skolnick?

  Amazing. She's like a whirling dervish.

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  I know. Isn't that amazing?

• 1:32:12Adam Skolnick?

  But for gold.

• 1:32:12Rich Roll?

  So.

• 1:32:13Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, beautiful.

• 1:32:13Rich Roll?

  Congratulations. Congratulations to her.

• 1:32:16Adam Skolnick?

  The footwork of elite athletes is always incredible. Like, like the footwork of some of these athletes is just next level.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  I think that she, you know, I don't know because I haven't spent a bunch of time looking into her background, but I think she has a background in dance or ballet.

• 1:32:30Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:32:31Rich Roll?

  Which is not surprising.

• 1:32:32Adam Skolnick?

  That's probably why I can't throw the discus that well.

• 1:32:34Rich Roll?

  No. That's the reason?

• 1:32:36Adam Skolnick?

  That's what it comes down to.

• 1:32:37Rich Roll?

  It's only because of your lack of dance background.

• 1:32:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, and my bad foot. I'm not sure if I brought that up yet, but.

• 1:32:42Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 1:32:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:44Rich Roll?

  All right. So that's it. Let's take a quick break and we'll be back with questions from the audience.

• 1:32:49Adam Skolnick?

  All right.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back. Let's do some listener questions. What do you got, Adam?

• 1:33:04Adam Skolnick?

  Let's do it. We got two that were emailed. One is from an anonymous woman, and let's get into it. She wanted to keep her name out of it. "I live with an angry, manic alcoholic and things seem to be getting worse, or perhaps it's that my tolerance and patience levels have diminished. But it's gotten to the point where not only am I affected by this, but also my family. Every day is like walking on eggshells, never knowing when the next bomb is going to go off, but you know it will. He's also had episodes of threatening suicide and not coming out of the room for days. When I suggest therapy, he pooh-poohs it and says he will change with diet and exercise and will go super extreme and fast for days or even for a week. Sometimes he'll

• 1:33:46Adam Skolnick?

  continue to drink beer while he's fasting, but not always. He's told me I'm useless, asked if I'm retarded, etc. I know that this is a disease and I'm trying to stick by him, but it's getting more and more difficult. I certainly do not find it acceptable to treat me and my sisters in an unloving way. We have been together for over 20 years and I've never believed in giving up, but I don't want to live the rest of my life with this negative energy. How can I help him and myself?"

• 1:34:14Rich Roll?

  Thank you for the question. It's a super important topic, subject matter. My heart goes out to you. It's an incredibly difficult situation, and knowing how to navigate it is one of the most fraught and emotionally challenging things I can possibly imagine. So first of all, I'm empathetic to your situation. You're in a very difficult spot, and I can't tell you what you should or should not do. You have to make those decisions for yourself. But perhaps I can give you a couple light posts here. And one is, first and foremost, you have to take care of yourself. You've got to figure out how, you know, you

• 1:34:57Rich Roll?

  have to figure out how to protect yourself and insulate yourself against the unhealthy, his unhealthy behaviors. And it's not indulgent for you to do so. You shouldn't feel guilty for doing that. And in fact, it's of service to him for you to do so. The way that you can do that is to seek out Al-Anon. I think that you would find great solace in that program, to participate in a community of people who have experienced going through exactly what you're going through right now, and understand that there are only so many things that you can control here. You can control your behavior, you can control your

• 1:35:41Rich Roll?

  response to your spouse, but what you can't control is him or his behavior. So to the extent that you're trying to get him to change, you're in a situation in which that's very unlikely to occur. Hopefully, he will reach a point in his addiction where he will develop the willingness to try to get better. But from what you've written here, it doesn't sound like he's in that place right now. He is succumbing to the great obsession of every alcoholic, which is the effort to try to control your drinking. And he's going through the machinations and the experimentation.

• 1:36:21Rich Roll?

  To convince himself that he can do that, whether it's fasting or exercise, his pursuits in those regards are all in extremis. So it's clear that they're manifestations of the underlying disease that he has, which is addiction. And your ability to manage or control that will result in a lot of unhappiness on your part. So I think your focus needs to be placed on yourself, making sure that you're safe and healthy. Nobody should have to submit themselves to that kind of abuse, whether it's emotional or physical. I can't tell you whether you need to end the relationship or not. You need to make that decision for yourself.

• 1:37:04Rich Roll?

  But I can tell you that you are valuable in this world, and nobody should be talked to in that regard. So take the steps that you need to take to protect yourself and your family members who are on the receiving end of this kind of abuse. There are resources available to you, even in the age of COVID. And again, that's where I think your priority needs to be. In terms of how you communicate with him and perhaps be of service to him, you can set healthy boundaries around what is and is not acceptable. You can tell him, "Look, if you speak to me that way, again, I'm going to leave,"

• 1:37:46Rich Roll?

  or whatever it is, whatever esteemable act you take on behalf of yourself to create that boundary, I think is important. And letting him know where that boundary exists, so that if he disobeys it or transgresses it, then there will be a ramification or a repercussion. Whether that means you leave him or not, again, you have to figure out that for yourself. But I think establishing those boundaries is the first step in terms of letting him know that his behavior is not okay. And I think the more specific and concrete you can be around that, the better it is for yourself and for him. You can make suggestions. "Hey, listen, I think you should go to treatment.

• 1:38:31Rich Roll?

  You should go to detox. You should check out AA." You can make those suggestions, but it's important that you remain divorced from expectations as to whether he will avail himself of that advice and also any attachment that you have to outcomes. If you have an expectation that he's going to get sober, or he's gonna do what you advise him to do, then I think you're setting yourself up for, for a lot of emotional woe. So it's fraught, it's very difficult, especially with loved ones, because you can see the person beneath the disease, and you are able to hold out, hold space for that individual.

• 1:39:14Rich Roll?

  But sometimes they're just unable to see it for themselves. And in truth, you can't get an alcoholic sober. The alcoholic gets sober when the alcoholic develops the willingness to take the actions and the steps required to get sober. And that's a very personal journey. So as harsh as it may sound, this person might have to suffer greater repercussions, might have to be in more pain than he is in right now in order to hit that bottom and have that reconciliation for himself. You can make yourself available for him if and when he reaches that point, but you need to protect yourself emotionally and not make

• 1:39:56Rich Roll?

  yourself available for all of the abuse and the unhealthy behavior that he is manifesting at the moment.

• 1:40:04Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Heavy, the only thing I can add is, you said "safe," making sure you're safe. And I can tell you from my previous reporting and things that I've learned, is that physical abuse doesn't necessarily have to build up from like a push or a slap. You could get, you could be in danger already. And I don't want to make you hysterical or anything like that, but, but this kind of emotional abuse, you're already on a path that you don't want to be on. And so I would, I don't know if Al-Anon has domestic, I'm sure they do have like domestic abuse counseling recommendations, but I would also, I'd look into some domestic abuse hotlines that you can call.

• 1:40:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, maybe we could put some resources up in the show notes for that.

• 1:40:52Adam Skolnick?

  And I would call someone ASAP. And I'm not suggesting anything other than calling, and just make your own decisions on how you want to proceed. But you're already in a place that leads to, that could lead to a dangerous situation for yourself.

• 1:41:08Rich Roll?

  I think I would add that I can't diagnose another person as an alcoholic. You know, this anonymous person is saying her husband is an alcoholic. She's diagnosing him as that. Maybe he perhaps admits it to her. I don't know. The diagnosis of alcoholism is, is something that only the alcoholic can, can diagnose for themselves. But if this person is an alcoholic, and it would appear that he is, these things don't tend to just get better. They get worse. The best case situation is they stay the same, but generally they degrade and devolve. And with that comes a notching up of the abuse and the unhealthy behaviors that circle around that.

• 1:41:53Rich Roll?

  So, short of an intervention or this person developing the willingness to get better for himself, this is going to continue to progress. And again, that just means that it's all the more important that you take care of yourself.

• 1:42:08Adam Skolnick?

  Hundred percent. All right. Let's go to Jake in Kansas City. This is another emailed question. "You've talked in the past about people getting addicted to self-help, that we mistakenly search for the next hack, the next optimization strategy. I've felt this way in my own experience to self-improvement. I tend to consume all that's out there, and while I live out some of it, I find myself being more concerned with reading or listening to the next thing, whatever that may be. So how do I go about choosing the top three to five things I find most valuable and just walking that path? How do you stay committed to learning and growing while also remaining steadfast to a short list of pursuits that you're 100% committed to?

• 1:42:52Adam Skolnick?

  How do we avoid consuming self-help as an end in itself, instead of just a means to a greater end? Thanks."

• 1:42:58Rich Roll?

  It's a great question. It goes back to analysis paralysis, what we were talking about before. Whether it's the gear or self-help literature, these are just devices to distract you and prevent you from actually moving forward. I've got nothing against self-help literature. It helps lots of people.

• 1:43:19Rich Roll?

  You know, I think it's good that it exists in the world, but I've also become a little bit cynical about it. As a podcaster, I'm now on these lists with all the publishing houses. So I get all the galleys of all the nonfiction books in the mail before they come out. So every week I get like 10 self-help books in the mail.

• 1:43:38Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:43:38Rich Roll?

  And every author wants to come on the podcast. And after receiving like 100 of these over the year, you're like, how much self-help literature do we need?

• 1:43:46Adam Skolnick?

  There can't be that many secrets to getting better.

• 1:43:49Rich Roll?

  And then I think about David Goggins, and I'm like, how many self-help books did that guy read? You know how many he read?

• 1:43:54Adam Skolnick?

  Zero.

• 1:43:55Rich Roll?

  Zero. He got off his ass and he got to work.

• 1:43:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:58Rich Roll?

  Right? So self-help is fine. You know, if you, if you need some guidance, if you lacked mentorship or education in your life such that these are helpful to you, I think that's great. But when you start to use them as a shield to insulate you from taking any actions, obviously they're becoming an impediment. They're the very thing that is preventing you from helping yourself.

• 1:44:22Adam Skolnick?

  It's interesting.

• 1:44:23Rich Roll?

  The irony in that, right?

• 1:44:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Like this, this, this fact that neuroscience has become so popularized, it kind of makes us like attuned to optimization. And in this tech world where everything's supposed to optimize, like there's a whole, like Tim Ferriss's kind of position and how to optimize like the work week, or how to do this or that. It's, uh, it's interesting. I think there are people out, there's a whole segment of population that are interested in how to be optimal. But then the pursuit of that.

• 1:44:52Rich Roll?

  But when you look at the most optimal people in the world,

• 1:44:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:55Rich Roll?

  They're not the people that are focused on optimization necessarily.

• 1:45:01Rich Roll?

  So it is a weird kind of paradox, I suppose. And I would say to Jake, listen, like here, he's like, how do I go about choosing the top three to five things I find most valuable and just walking the path? How about one thing?

• 1:45:15Adam Skolnick?

  Oh.

• 1:45:15Rich Roll?

  You know, I can't tell you what your values are, but you know, if you can get clear on what your values are and establish something that you want to manifest in your life, let's begin that process. I think the analysis paralysis comes in, in the plotting and the map making and what is the trajectory and how am I going to get there? And there's so much mental masturbation that goes into that at the behest of taking that first step. So. Again, I think it goes back to simplifying this process. We want to overcomplicate it and think that we have to lay on top of our goals, some crazy lattice work, right?

• 1:45:59Rich Roll?

  And I think that those can become handicaps as much as tools.

• 1:46:06Adam Skolnick?

  It's interesting. I think about the Huberman thing, talking about like how habits first and then thought and perceptions and everything follow.

• 1:46:14Rich Roll?

  Right, behavior first.

• 1:46:15Adam Skolnick?

  Behavior first and then everything else follows. And the construction of habits, it sounds like maybe he's the type of guy that gets bored from doing the same thing over and over again. And there is a certain boredom in creating a habit that becomes like a daily ritual. But you got to stick with something about like creating habits for yourself, maybe every morning, coming up with a morning practice, whether it's a meditation or a yoga and then a meditation or something that you commit to doing every day, something, one thing that you commit to doing every day and then see, see what that gets you. As opposed to whatever you got out of a self-help book, maybe there's some habits that you can take, that you can build your days around, that you can lock in, you know.

• 1:46:57Rich Roll?

  I think that that's good advice. I would say, and we talked about this last time, I think, that it's important to understand that when you're consuming a self-help book, that that's not the accomplishment. The accomplishment is in applying that wisdom to your life, right? And so the first step is understanding that just because you read a book doesn't mean that you did anything. And I think what happens is you read these books and you feel like you're accomplishing something or growing in your life simply in the consuming of that book. But that in and of itself will, it's like in 12-step, they say. Half measures will avail you nothing, right?

• 1:47:39Rich Roll?

  So like, reading a book, it's good, you've consumed this piece of knowledge. But unless you figure out how to apply it in some fungible, tangible way in your life, it will avail you nothing, right? So it's disabusing you of that notion that you've done something just because you've read a book. And it's reconfiguring your perspective to focus more on actions. You know, to bring it back to Huberman, behavior, like lead with the behavior. So we're sitting here, having a podcast, episode 500 and whatever. I didn't start the podcast because I read a self-help book and tried to figure out what my values were and created some roadmap to where I would be seven years later.

• 1:48:21Rich Roll?

  I just thought, this'll be cool, and I turned on a mic. It was a behavior, it was an action, like, hey, this might be fun. And I was like, that was cool, let's do it again.

• 1:48:30Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:48:31Rich Roll?

  It wasn't like, a whiteboard situation.

• 1:48:35Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 1:48:35Rich Roll?

  You know, and I think that's the problem with our optimization-obsessed culture, is that we think we have to have all of these things figured out before we begin. And in truth, in my own personal experience, it's in the doing that the path is revealed.

• 1:48:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, you never really know what the end product is going to be. And we don't even necessarily know what optimal is while we're experiencing it.

• 1:48:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:00Adam Skolnick?

  It's all, it's all kind of through analysis later.

• 1:49:03Rich Roll?

  Well, there's also a binary nature to that very conversation around optimization anyway. You know, I lean more towards the ethereal unknowing of it all.

• 1:49:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:14Rich Roll?

  Right?

• 1:49:16Adam Skolnick?

  That you can never know.

• 1:49:16Rich Roll?

  There's a spirituality to all of this as well, that I think gets lost in the conversation around optimization, which is, you know, this assumption that we can drill everything down to ones and zeros and create an equation for success. And I just don't think it works that way. That doesn't mean that we can't learn and improve by virtue of these tools, but I think there's a bigger dance at play. And broadening your perspective and understanding that, I think, at least it's been helpful to me.

• 1:49:47Adam Skolnick?

  We've talked about that before. I mean, just recognizing you're a speck of consciousness in this great sea is liberating in a way, because it means that there's so much more going on than you can possibly be aware of. And if you just handle your stuff in a systemic way, systematic way, on a day-to-day basis...

• 1:50:07Adam Skolnick?

  It's gonna get you to a good place. You just don't know where that good place is necessarily, which is also a beautiful thing.

• 1:50:13Rich Roll?

  Just think about this. Self-esteem comes from esteemable acts. Like, that's a truth, right? Why is that the case? Can that be defined in some kind of binary optimization vernacular? Like, I think it's a spiritual principle.

• 1:50:34Adam Skolnick?

  That we are the sum total of our actions and if we do esteemable act-

• 1:50:37Rich Roll?

  We're more than that. We're more than the sum total of our actions. But I think that, that, you know, having a, just being able to broaden your aperture a little bit and understand that if you, if you are, um, if you are clear in your intentions and you are full of heart, pure of heart, that when you, whatever path that you pursue, and I talked about this in my book, like, I believe that the universe will conspire to support you. If you've done the inside work, if you are coming from a place of love and compassion and gratitude, that the world will greet you in kind. And that has nothing to do with, you know, neuroscience necessarily.

• 1:51:23Rich Roll?

  You disagree?

• 1:51:26Adam Skolnick?

  I, I agree to a point. I think that, uh, chaos theory exists and sometimes chaos descends on your head.

• 1:51:35Rich Roll?

  Also, luck plays a huge part.

• 1:51:36Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I don't think it's always, it can always be that way, but some, but I, I can say that if you tend to greet your experiences,

• 1:51:47Adam Skolnick?

  I do think it comes down to how you deal with the hand you're dealt. So, um, sometimes you're dealt a really shitty hand and it's really hard to stay open and positive about it.

• 1:52:00Adam Skolnick?

  But that doesn't mean that the person who does stay open and positive about it isn't gonna have more success than the one that doesn't. So I, I, I think it's, I think it's complex, but I do believe you're right. A lot of the time, I also believe that chaos, you know, hurricanes, hurricanes brew. Yeah, and, and that does happen.

• 1:52:17Rich Roll?

  Point taken.

• 1:52:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:18Rich Roll?

  All right, let's move on.

• 1:52:19Adam Skolnick?

  Moving on. Let's listen to some voicemails.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  Hey Adam, hey Rich. This is Jackson from middle of nowhere Wyoming. I delivered coronavirus tests across the state and I love listening to you guys when I'm on the road. My question for you today is, as a 25-year-old, along with plant-based eating, what are some other habits, things I can do in my life now that I will appreciate in the next 10 years? Thanks guys.

• 1:52:54Rich Roll?

  That's such an awesome question, Jackson. I know, right? I'm just, all I can think about is like, what was I doing when I was 25? I was such a knucklehead. I certainly wasn't like trying to better myself by leaving voicemails for podcasters.

• 1:53:09Adam Skolnick?

  Or delivering coronavirus tests in an epidemic.

• 1:53:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. I was just, oh god.

• 1:53:13Adam Skolnick?

  Big respect, Jackson.

• 1:53:15Rich Roll?

  Huge respect. Very cool. Well, yeah, plant-based diet, that's good. That's a good start. You know, look, there's no behind the velvet rope here. You know, I think the habits that you form at your age, at age 25, are things that you want to kind of, you know, establish in your life that then create their own momentum, so that when you're 40, 50, and 53, they become second nature and rote. I know personally, because I'm at my age, I have a lot of friends who are now starting to deal with a lot of health stuff that they never really had to think about,

• 1:53:57Rich Roll?

  but they never formed proper, healthy habits early on, and now they're confronted with having to undo all of their unhealthy habits and create new ones, which is much harder than just creating a healthy habit when you're young, that becomes second nature and just part of who you are, part of your lifestyle, as opposed to something that, you know, you feel like you have to focus on. It's just, it doesn't even require any brain bandwidth, because it's fundamentally who you are. I think at the top of that list, I'd put some form of exercise or movement, preferably something that you enjoy, because then it becomes second nature and part of your lifestyle. It almost doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's something that gets you outdoors,

• 1:54:41Rich Roll?

  breathing fresh air, gets your heart rate up a little bit, and is something you can do consistently throughout the week. I think that's super important. Plant-based eating, he's already got the diet part down. I think developing a meditation and mindfulness practice at 25, I mean, what a gift. If you could really figure that out and nail that down at your age, the benefits that you'll see in your life will be tremendous. And I think also developing a habit of reading, not to go back to the guy who reads too many self-help books, but you should always be reading books. Every single interesting person that I've ever met in my life is an avid reader.

• 1:55:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:55:18Rich Roll?

  So if you can make reading a go-to habit, it doesn't even matter to me what you read.

• 1:55:24Adam Skolnick?

  Doesn't really matter.

• 1:55:24Rich Roll?

  As long as you're reading all the time, I think that will make you stand heads and shoulders above your peers and just make you not only an interesting person, but a person who is interested in the world.

• 1:55:38Adam Skolnick?

  Well, that's what makes it, that's those who are the most interesting people, right? The ones that are still like trying to figure it out.

• 1:55:44Rich Roll?

  Of course.

• 1:55:44Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think one thing that helped me when I was younger, kind of build good habits just in general, was starting a yoga practice, morning yoga practice. I started by just doing nine sun salutations every morning before I did anything else. And just that alone kind of got me to the point where I could like try to become a writer, basically, like to like.

• 1:56:11Rich Roll?

  Oh, is that right?

• 1:56:12Adam Skolnick?

  It gave me discipline. I never considered myself a disciplined person until I started doing that.

• 1:56:16Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:56:17Adam Skolnick?

  It taught me discipline. So creating some sort of morning ritual for yourself, it doesn't have to be that. You can go run and, but I think some sort of meditation aspect, some sort of like metaphysical, like spiritual aspect to your day, does help you kind of stay grounded, stay humble, and, and stay ready.

• 1:56:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What is your connection to Source?

• 1:56:37Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:38Rich Roll?

  What does your higher power look like?

• 1:56:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:40Rich Roll?

  And how does that infuse your life and set you on a trajectory to, to bring meaning and purpose in your life? The other aspect of this that I would mention is, is finding a way to be of service, but this is a guy who's delivering coronavirus tests across the state.

• 1:56:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Rich Roll?

  Like, he's doing it. He's providing a service. But I think when you approach your life from a service perspective, from a perspective of how can I contribute? How can I give? How can I provide? As opposed to what am I getting out of this for myself? That will not only make you a happier person, it will make you a more productive person, a more contented person, and just a better individual, I think, and somebody who other people want to be around also.

• 1:57:22Adam Skolnick?

  I'll add one more thing to the list. I don't want to overload you, Jackson, but travel internationally.

• 1:57:28Rich Roll?

  Ah.

• 1:57:30Adam Skolnick?

  And not just to like, nice places, but to places that might be fraught, to places that might be challenging. Make yourself, put yourself where you're one of the only foreigners on the ground and, and just go explore.

• 1:57:47Rich Roll?

  That's the Henry, Henry Rollins philosophy of life.

• 1:57:49Adam Skolnick?

  That's right.

• 1:57:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Pack a bag and go to some weird corner of the planet.

• 1:57:54Adam Skolnick?

  Go to Papua New Guinea or somewhere like that.

• 1:57:56Rich Roll?

  I think that's, I think that's really good advice.

• 1:57:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Rich Roll?

  And I think also, you know, to avoid overwhelming you, just break these things down into tiny little chunks, you know, and don't beat yourself up for not doing it perfectly every single day.

• 1:58:10Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:58:11Rich Roll?

  And I'll cap it off by just saying, it sounds like you're, you're in a car or a truck for a lot of hours during the day. That's where you listen to the podcast. Thank you for doing that. But to the extent that you, you know, have all this time in the car, like, what else are you listening to? Like, don't just turn the radio on and let it tell you what it wants to tell you. Be mindful about how you're programming your audio throughout the day when you're spending all that time in a vehicle, whether it's audiobooks or other podcasts and the like.

• 1:58:39Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Make sure you got your Q non-feed.

• 1:58:44Adam Skolnick?

  Kidding.

• 1:58:45Rich Roll?

  Alright.

• 1:58:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Alright, let's go to Adam in Alberta, Canada.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  Hey, Rich and Adam. My name is actually Adam too. In fact, my name is Adam Rurka, and I live in Alberta, Canada. I've been a long time listener of the podcast. In fact, I've been listening since episode one, way back when you were recording in Hawaii, which means I've literally listened to you talk for thousands of hours, as I've listened to 99% of your podcasts. The question I have, which you do have my permission to play on the podcast is this. The topic of education has come up frequently in your podcast and I happen to be a teacher in a public school. In fact, I'm a school administrator in Canada. I often think about how somebody can influence the world in a positive way and how educators are positioned in a highly influential role. While there are an increasing number of mainstream education

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  alternatives for students, which I think are wonderful, I still believe that public education remains an important avenue for a significant percentage of the population. Whenever health-related guests are on your show, you ask them if they were to wake up in a parallel universe as the surgeon general, what health changes they would make to the system. So I'm going to ask you the same question. If you were to wake up in the education world's equivalent of surgeon general, what changes would you make to the education system as a whole so that one could positively influence children who I believe to be our most valuable resource and whom the future of our planet relies on? Keep up the great work, guys.

• 2:00:14Rich Roll?

  That's an amazing question. I like how well thought out it is, too.

• 2:00:18Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. Well, he's a teacher.

• 2:00:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know, right? Thanks, Adam. And thank you for listening to the podcast for so long. I really appreciate that. I will say this, that surgeon general question that I ask to doctors when they come on the podcast, those people are trained in their specific discipline. So should they become surgeon general, they actually have some level of expertise. So now I'm being asked to be education czar, but I'm not an educator.

• 2:00:46Adam Skolnick?

  But yet you're an education podcast.

• 2:00:48Rich Roll?

  Right. But I would not consider myself a teacher nor an expert in education in general. So my answer will be couched in that caveat.

• 2:00:57Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:00:58Rich Roll?

  That said, and I've touched on this before, I think that our educational system is a legacy of a bygone era. It was developed in Victorian times to develop good factory workers to be productive in an increasingly industrialized society. The world has changed. And I think we need to take a hard, long look at what we're teaching and why we're teaching kids what we're teaching them. There's plenty in the current curriculum that I think should remain. I'm not for just overhauling it and being completely radical and revolutionary about it, but I do think we need to resort to first principles and really try to understand

• 2:01:41Rich Roll?

  how much our culture has changed and How that impacts what we're teaching children and more importantly, how we're teaching them. I think that with technology, and I've said this before many times, everybody's got a supercomputer in their, in their, in their pocket that will answer any question that they ever want to ask it. So this rote memorization kind of default methodology of teaching needs to be called into question. And I think we need to shift away from the memorization strategy that has predominated and monopolized our, our education system for, for too long and focus on how do we

• 2:02:25Rich Roll?

  create amazing, adaptable human beings who will be lifelong learners, who are interested in learning and interested in the world. And I think that needs to start with focusing on developing the esteem of the students and then orienting curriculum around where they sit and what they're interested in and expanding from there. We need to develop young people who know how to work in teams, who understand leadership, who understand and appreciate listening, who know how to collaborate, who know how to work alongside each other on a project basis methodology of learning as opposed

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  to the singular individualistic approach of reading a textbook and regurgitation. That would be a start.

• 2:03:15Adam Skolnick?

  Away from memorization towards analysis of the material that is available to you to...

• 2:03:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and I, I think in terms of being surgeon general, like what are the changes that I would make? Well, I would certainly reallocate budgets such that public education is adequately and properly funded. I think it's woefully underfunded right now.

• 2:03:35Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:03:36Rich Roll?

  And I think the funding is not directed in the best directions. We have in the United States, teachers that have to do GoFundMes to... Raise money so that they have equipment to teach. It's ludicrous, right?

• 2:03:50Adam Skolnick?

  It's crazy.

• 2:03:51Rich Roll?

  Every kid should have a laptop or an iPad or some form of device. We have this opportunity because of COVID to learn more about how digital learning can inform our educational procedures and processes. And I know there's a lot of smart people that are looking at this and that are studying this. You know, the fact that that kids are now learning from home, how does that affect long term? What happens when we finally, you know, get over the hump here and return to classroom learning? How much should we retain of what we've experienced now versus how much do we go back to the way that it was before? And I think this forced moment right now is instructive in that we should be really

• 2:04:36Rich Roll?

  trying to understand how kids learn in a better way. And when we return, ply what we've learned to create a better classroom experience for all. And I say all of that, like, this is all very off the cuff. Like, I feel bad, Adam, because I feel like I should have mapped out my response to that. But

• 2:04:54Adam Skolnick?

  No, you get into it.

• 2:04:55Rich Roll?

  I think that, you know, young people going into the world right now and into the workforce need to, no longer are we in a situation where somebody joins a corporation and spends their entire career there. No longer are we in the situation where a young person is even going to have the same career field for maybe even a small percentage of their professional life, right? So with that understanding, how do we train young people to be better equipped to handle the strange vicissitudes of a technologically oriented global economy?

• 2:05:37Rich Roll?

  And I think adaptability comes to mind as one of the most important things.

• 2:05:42Adam Skolnick?

  Spoken like a competitive swimmer turned entertainment lawyer turned podcaster.

• 2:05:46Rich Roll?

  I don't know.

• 2:05:47Adam Skolnick?

  And when you graduated law school, did you ever anticipate doing something called a podcast?

• 2:05:52Rich Roll?

  Well, there was no, like, when I was in law school, there was no internet.

• 2:05:55Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly. No, but that's, you're the proof of that. Adaptability is my point, is like, that.

• 2:06:03Rich Roll?

  But then I look back and I'm like, well, all the things I did. Were in education and making me better at being able to do what I'm doing today.

• 2:06:12Adam Skolnick?

  That's true.

• 2:06:12Rich Roll?

  But I couldn't have known that.

• 2:06:13Adam Skolnick?

  Right. I mean, but you've said, you already couched that in there, saying you would keep a lot of what already exists, because clearly you got a lot out of your education.

• 2:06:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but there was a lot of wasted time, too. A lot of it forgotten due to blackout trunks.

• 2:06:26Adam Skolnick?

  That too.

• 2:06:27Rich Roll?

  You know?

• 2:06:28Adam Skolnick?

  I think you hit the nail on the head with the number one thing would be put some more money where our mouth is.

• 2:06:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:34Adam Skolnick?

  And to me, that, that, that place is teacher's salaries, number one.

• 2:06:38Rich Roll?

  Teacher's salaries.

• 2:06:40Adam Skolnick?

  We need to get, we need to attract talent to, to the pool.

• 2:06:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Adam Skolnick?

  And you're not going to do that by paying people peanuts. And it's absurd, the level of salary.

• 2:06:50Rich Roll?

  We need a cultural, social shift in our perception of educators.

• 2:06:55Adam Skolnick?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:06:56Rich Roll?

  These people are rock stars and heroes, and we need to treat them as such. We were talking before the podcast about how, how this medium has created rock stars out of scientists.

• 2:07:10Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Rich Roll?

  In a way that is unprecedented. We were talking about Andrew Huberman and David Sinclair and Matthew Walker, these amazing scientists who are doing, you know, phenomenal work in terms of longevity and sleep and, you know, neuroscience, et cetera. In the past, they would have written a book, maybe the book would have done well, who knows? But now they can go on these podcasts and talk for two or three hours, and people are like so thirsty for their wisdom. And the response to the podcasts that I've, that I've had with these people has been unbelievably tremendous. People revere these people. And it makes me think, well, we should have the same perspective for secondary educators and primary educators.

• 2:07:54Rich Roll?

  What if we were able to, you know, shift our perception of this professional career path and understand that, you know, these, these are people that we need to hoist up and that we need to celebrate in a way that we don't right now. And to attract. The best talent to enter into that. We're talking about, you know, not just the future minds of America in the world, but literally the, you know, the future of the planet.

• 2:08:23Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 2:08:23Rich Roll?

  When we're in this existential crisis of whether or not humanity is going to survive.

• 2:08:28Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 2:08:29Rich Roll?

  The very real threats that we face.

• 2:08:32Adam Skolnick?

  So, yeah. So, we can't be paying people 40 grand a year.

• 2:08:35Rich Roll?

  No.

• 2:08:35Adam Skolnick?

  To do it. So, uh, yeah, you got it. I mean, that's the best way to uplift them is pay them properly.

• 2:08:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41Adam Skolnick?

  And, uh, yeah. I love it. Beautifully. Well said. Rich. All right. Let's go to Jeremy in St. Michael, Minnesota.

• 2:08:51Speaker 04

  Hey, Rich. Hey, Adam. Uh, this is Jeremy from St. Michael, Minnesota. And I, first of all, just want to say thank you to Rich for the podcast. It's been really life-changing for me. Um, I've been listening for about, almost two years now, I think. And, uh, the knowledge and insight it's given me has been super helpful in everyday life. So, I appreciate it. Uh, the question I have is, for both of you, I guess, you're both writers, and I was curious, maybe more from the sense of a personal story, when you feel like you know that your story is worth writing and putting out to the world and that it might

• 2:09:33Speaker 04

  be received and kind of, um, ah, I don't, I don't know exactly how to ask the question. But, you know, I have a story. I have, you know, I've been through recovery. I've been sober for 15 years. I've, you know, done some things after recovery that I feel, you know, would be of worth for people to hear and maybe, uh, give them hope to do things in their own lives. And I'm just curious how you come to the, the reality that this might be something good to put down on paper and that your story might be received well in the world. So, hope that makes sense. Uh, keep doing what you're doing and thank you. Bye.

• 2:10:14Rich Roll?

  All right, Jeremy. Listen, of course, you should write.

• 2:10:21Rich Roll?

  Your story. It sounds like you have an amazing story. I think everybody should write their own story. And if you have even the slightest inkling that you want to share something and that what you have to share could be helpful to another human being, of course you should do that. I can't encourage you enough to write what is inside of you that clearly I can feel from, from your words is yearning to be expressed. I sense some hesitancy and perhaps a lack of, of confidence around doing this, maybe a little bit of

• 2:10:59Rich Roll?

  fear. And, and my sense is that that fear is linked to how what you would write will be received. And what you have to do is let go of that. Like, who cares how it's going to be received? Detach those two things. Yeah, you have to detach. These are two different things. There's the self-expression, there's the telling, and then there's the reaction to it. If you get caught up into the reaction, you're dead out of the gate. Back to that paralysis. You can't think about that at all. You have to just basically get into a place of pure expression and allow it to, you know, emanate from there, I think. And, you know,

• 2:11:39Rich Roll?

  I can only share my own experience. There's, I'll, I'll tell two quick stories. One is how the book Finding Ultra came, came to be in the first place, because it wasn't like I set out to write a book. I thought maybe in the back of my mind, one day I'll write a book, but it wasn't like I had set this goal that I was going to write, write a memoir. Right. What happened was, um, somebody who I didn't know, read about me in a magazine article, reached out to me by email and asked if I would be willing to talk to him because he had just gotten out of treatment and was having a hard time. And it was somebody

• 2:12:22Rich Roll?

  that I didn't know, but was somebody that was friends with other friends of mine. So I struck up a friendship with this guy and we would talk from time to time on the phone. And I was trying to kind of help him acclimate to, to being newly sober. And

• 2:12:39Rich Roll?

  At one point, he said, hey, you've got this amazing story. Have you ever thought about writing a book? And I was like, well, not really. I mean, kinda, maybe, but like, it wasn't a top of the mind thing. And he was like, I know this book agent, you know, this book agent worked with Dean Karnaz's and helped him with his books and, you know, you should, would you like me to introduce you? Like, it was like that, right? And that led from what, that led to me being introduced to this book agent and this book agent being like, well, if you want to write a proposal, I'm happy to read it. You know, this is a tough thing. You have to thread the needle here. I wrote, I worked really hard on a proposal and she was still very, you know, like grounded

• 2:13:20Rich Roll?

  in her, you know, trying to, you know, basically prevent me from having high expectations. And we ended up selling the book and that's how the book got made. And when I reflect on that story, what I take from it is that the good thing, whether you can qualify it as good or not, like the fact that I wrote a book, all started from basically being of service to somebody else, like taking somebody's phone call and talking to them about recovery. That was it. I didn't have an agenda and that process led to something that I could have never anticipated that has changed my life in unbelievable ways. And in the writing of that book, I had plenty of moments of personal terror, thinking like,

• 2:14:05Rich Roll?

  do I want to be this open? Do I want to be this vulnerable? Is this a good idea? And I would become paralyzed because I was thinking about the audience reception. And the only way that I could get through it was to completely block that out and just pretend that I was writing in a private journal and that no one would ever read it. And every moment, every, you know, once in a while, I'd have this flash of like the book being on a shelf in a bookstore and I would panic because I would get caught up in that reception. And that ultimately is the enemy of creativity. So just pretend you're writing in your personal journey and maybe you don't share it with anybody and maybe you do. And maybe it impacts one person or maybe it impacts a million people. You don't know.

• 2:14:47Rich Roll?

  But the point of the exercise is to engage with your creative voice and to try to, you know, basically be authentic to who you are.

• 2:15:00Adam Skolnick?

  I love that. So well said. And it echoes something that our friend Elizabeth Gilbert has talked about, which is kind of in her book, Big Magic, she gets into that a lot. Is, is the point is the creative output. It's not the, you have to divorce yourself from expectation. You can't expect something out of it, especially when you're first starting. Because you don't know, it's about, you don't know where this one act will take you. You know, I've never written a memoir like you, but I wrote a, my, the way I got an agent was I wrote a fictional, a novel, kind of loosely based on my life. And I did put a lot of stuff in, in there that was very personal. And ended up getting me an agent, which helped

• 2:15:44Adam Skolnick?

  my, you know, got me into, into the publishing houses. So, so that's how it started for me too, by doing that. Didn't sell the book, didn't, didn't make a dollar off of middle of somewhere. It's still in, it's still somewhere. It's still in my computer though. But you know what I mean? But I never, you know, and I, obviously I had ambitions for it, but, but it led me somewhere else. And, and so that's the point is, is if you wanted, if you're feeling the passion, you're feeling the urge to create, you gotta, you gotta give it some energy. Yeah.

• 2:16:14Rich Roll?

  Right. So clearly I could feel there's something inside of him yearning to be expressed. And that's really the only important thing.

• 2:16:22Adam Skolnick?

  Awesome. Cool. Cool. All right. One last one. This is a personal, more of a personal question for you.

• 2:16:30Speaker 05

  This is Henry from Los Angeles, California. From what I've gathered, you, Rich and Julie Srimati have a relationship that is pretty similar to me and my wife. And by that, I mean you're both clearly spiritual and empowered in your own ways. But you, Rich, seem to be more practical, rational and grounded, whereas Julie is the more esoteric, receptive, intuitive one. In my experience, that relationship balance has been really beneficial for personal growth, for me and my partner. But my question is about working together. When you collaborate on projects, how do you balance each other's energy without getting dragged down by differences in work styles and priorities?

• 2:17:13Speaker 05

  What rules or guidelines, whether they're unspoken or formal, have you set up to bring out the best in each other and not let disagreements grind projects to a halt? Thank you.

• 2:17:23Rich Roll?

  That's a great question, Henry. Thank you for that. This has been an evolving journey for Julie and I to figure this out and definitely a tricky equation to solve, but I think we've done a good job and figured it out. And I think the key for me has been not needing her to do things the way that I would do them and respecting that difference, right? So Julie and I are incredibly different. We have our own respective projects, but then we come together to collaborate on things from time to time. And early on in that adventure, I would say, you know, it's like, this is how you do these

• 2:18:08Rich Roll?

  things. You have to do it like, and she would not do that, you know? And I would get frustrated and angry, and I'm sure she was angry with me because, you know, she has her perspective on how you would do project X and I'm not meeting that expectation. So we had to go through it in order to figure out a language around communicating and also guideposts and boundaries about how to work together. So we did it.

• 2:18:37Adam Skolnick?

  Did he have it right? The way that, did he handicap it right in terms of you're the rational, grounded, and she's the esoteric kind of intuitive?

• 2:18:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I think, I think that that, what's missing in that is that Julie is incredibly smart and competent and she gets shit done, like she's a doer. So it's not like she's all airy-fairy and up in the clouds and like can't, you know, make any practical progress, like. She gets shit done and she knows how to get shit done and she's better at a lot of things that I am. So a lot of it has been figuring out where she excels and where my handicaps are and where I excel and where there are areas that she doesn't care about. And then we try to meet each other so that she's doing the things that she's best at and I'm filling in the gaps where, you know, she is, you know, less competent in. So Julie,

• 2:19:28Rich Roll?

  for example, is very good at the global picture and I'm a very, I get mired in the details. So you need both of those, right? You need a detail-oriented person and you need somebody who's thinking more broadly about what it is that you're actually doing. And that functions when you understand that those are your roles. Julie's a much better team person. She's a leader. She knows how to get a lot of people around her who are excited about what she's doing. And I'm a, like a solo guy, like I'm very good when I'm just by myself. So those are different, those have, you know, positives and negatives. So it's where do those, where do all, when you look at a certain project, like how are

• 2:20:12Rich Roll?

  we going to fit together? And let's allocate the tasks so that we're focused on the things that we're best at and most interested in. And I think when you do that, and this doesn't happen overnight, like this happened over time for us, then you can become like, like a superpower because you're meeting each other, like you're, you're filling in each other's gaps, right? And then the product of that collaboration tends to be exponential rather than, than just additive, I suppose. But I think it has to do with self-understanding and also really understanding your partner and then developing really effective communication

• 2:20:56Rich Roll?

  between you guys. Because these things, especially when you're working together, Emotions can run hot and things can get heated and things can get misunderstood. And it's really critical that you have a way of communicating in a balanced and objective way, because otherwise, these things can be combustible and they blow apart a lot of relationships. So the communication has to be strong, the self-understanding and the understanding of your partner has to be intact before you even launch into one of these projects. But if you're, if you have that sorted out, then I think you're in a good position to collaborate together. And it's beautiful to do that. I've had amazing creative

• 2:21:37Rich Roll?

  professional experiences working with my wife. But it's also important that at the same time, we have our own respective things that we do outside of our collaborations, so that we're not sort of solely resting on, you know, our co, our sort of co-collaborations for our kind of, you know, professional wellbeing.

• 2:21:59Adam Skolnick?

  Well, you just need to have those silos that you go into on your own, so that you can be your own whole human being outside of raising kids and having a life and having a romantic life and also having a business.

• 2:22:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:10Adam Skolnick?

  You gotta have your own. So it sounded like communication skills, a solid understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses, and, and shared understanding of both of your collective strengths and weaknesses together.

• 2:22:21Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:22:21Adam Skolnick?

  And how those fit.

• 2:22:22Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:22:23Adam Skolnick?

  And then making sure that, yes, you, collaboration can be awesome, but you also have to have some room to do your own projects too, which will feed the collaboration.

• 2:22:32Rich Roll?

  Right, right. The communication, I can't, I can't overstate how important that is, because if you're in the heat of the moment and you can't figure out a way to get balanced and give each other objective feedback that isn't then completely emotionalized.

• 2:22:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:47Rich Roll?

  You're gonna be doomed.

• 2:22:49Adam Skolnick?

  So really, what you should do is just get a lot of IKEA furniture and both try to put it together. And then by the end, you'll have communication.

• 2:22:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, exactly. You'll either be divorced or...

• 2:23:04Adam Skolnick?

  That's great. Anything to add?

• 2:23:05Rich Roll?

  I think that's it. That's what I would say for now.

• 2:23:08Adam Skolnick?

  We've rocked it.

• 2:23:09Rich Roll?

  Thank you, Henry. I think we did it. We're done.

• 2:23:11Adam Skolnick?

  We took a one and a half hour podcast and made it three hours.

• 2:23:13Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 2:23:14Adam Skolnick?

  That's hard to do.

• 2:23:14Rich Roll?

  We were gonna try to do this in an hour. I don't know what we're doing. Are we getting better at this? Or worse?

• 2:23:19Adam Skolnick?

  I don't know. Depends who you ask.

• 2:23:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:22Adam Skolnick?

  Don't ask Chad Wolf.

• 2:23:23Rich Roll?

  But, listen, you know, it's a podcast. You can listen to half of it. You can listen to half of it later. You can abandon it. I don't know. But I like what we did today.

• 2:23:30Adam Skolnick?

  I did too, man. It was fun.

• 2:23:32Rich Roll?

  Thank you, my friend. We'll be back here in two weeks. You can follow Adam on all the socials at Adam Skolnick. I'm at Rich Roll. If you want your question answered on the show, you can leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626.

• 2:23:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:23:47Rich Roll?

  Don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, that notification little bell. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify. Check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. We'll link up everything that we discussed here today. You can also submit your questions on the Facebook group. And I think that's it. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Davy Greenberg, right over here, shooting some awesome portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Hari Mathis.

• 2:24:27Rich Roll?

  Appreciate you guys. I don't take your attention for granted. Thank you for taking this journey with Adam and I. And we'll see you back here in a couple of days with another awesome episode. Any closing thoughts?

• 2:24:39Adam Skolnick?

  No, it's just, thanks for listening.

• 2:24:41Rich Roll?

  It's your moment to be profound.

• 2:24:42Adam Skolnick?

  This is it?

• 2:24:45Adam Skolnick?

  No, I appreciate everybody who listens and cares about getting better and being better. It's really cool to be a part of this journey. I really appreciate it. Don't take it lightly. And I thank you, Rich, and for all who listen. Thank you man, appreciate it. Yeah. See you guys soon, peace. Plants. Namaste.