Roll On: Merchants Of Chaos

Perhaps you thought 2021 might bring some return to normalcy. So far we have the Capitol insurrection, GameStonk and Jewish Laser Beams. We need to talk. After a much-needed break, Roll On returns with my hype man Adam Skolnick, an activist and veteran journalist perhaps best known as David Goggins’ Can’t Hurt Me co-author. Adam has written about adventure sports, environmental issues and civil rights for outlets such as The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, BBC, and Men’s Health. He is the author of One Breath and is currently hard at work on a novel. We are also mixing up the format with two special guests, Arthur Jones & Giorgio Angelini, the filmmakers behind Feels Good Man (and RRP 576). Serving as our internet culture decoder ring, the lads join the show to help make sense of recent events insanity. Some of the many topics explored in today’s conversation include: the importance of taking a sabbatical; the Capitol insurrection & the impact on the GOP; how Reddit turned the stock market upside down; the future of stock market democratization; David Lynch’s absurd yet wonderfully soothing weather reports; Ultra-runner Jim Walmsley’s 100k American record; and How Nepalese climbers reached the summit of K2 in the winter for the first time. In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do I focus & contribute when I’m so consumed by current events? How do I deal with colossal failure and set myself up for success? How did overcoming substance abuse change your mindset on fitness & life? Thank you to Kevin from St. Louis, John from the Sierra Nevada, and Sarah from Phoenix for your questions. If you want your query discussed, drop it on our Facebook Page, or better yet leave a voicemail at (424) 235-4626. FULL BLOG & SHOW NOTES: bit.ly/richroll578 YouTube: bit.ly/rollon578 It’s good to be back! Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast. We are back. It's 2021 after a much-needed respite. Mr. Skolnick and I are in the saddle with a hotly awaited new edition of Roll On. This is the edition of the podcast where we check in on our respective goings-on, pontificate on certain current events of interest, we share some wins, do a little show and tell, and as always, answer some listener/viewer questions from our voicemail, which you can ring up at 424-235-4626. Before we get into it, a quick reminder that if you enjoy all the free content that

• 1:55Rich Roll?

  we diligently toil week in, week out to create, it would be very meaningful and easy for you if you could take a second to hit the subscribe button on YouTube or wherever you enjoy the audio incarnation of the show. Leave a comment, share the show with your friends or on social media. Also, I should mention, we recently created a clips channel on YouTube. Which is rather anemic right now in terms of subscribers. So if you're into sampling the show, or you want to indulge in just the short nuggets, check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes and in the description below on YouTube, or you can just search Rich Roll Podcast Clips on YouTube. Today is very exciting. We have a tweak on the

• 2:36Rich Roll?

  tweak of our roll on format. We're going to try something new today. For the first time in the history of roll on, how many roll on episodes have we done?

• 2:45Adam Skolnick?

  I think it's like a dozen, over a dozen. I thought it was 14th or 14th, something like that. Yeah, I know.

• 2:51Rich Roll?

  We have some momentum here. Well, today, we're going to bring on a couple guests in a few, Arthur Jones and Giorgio Angelini, who you guys know as the filmmakers behind the wonderful movie Feels Good Man. You're most likely familiar with them, if not from the movie, from a recent episode of the podcast, which although it just posted the other day, we actually recorded it back in early December, sometime in December. So I haven't seen these guys for a minute, even though they're just up on the podcast the other week. These guys are our internet culture decoder ring, and they're coming in hot to help us make sense of a few crazy recent events in culture. Just a few, right?

• 3:33Adam Skolnick?

  Just a few.

• 3:33Rich Roll?

  But first, Adam, how are you doing?

• 3:36Adam Skolnick?

  I'm good. You know, I just subscribed to the YouTube channel earlier today.

• 3:39Rich Roll?

  The Clips channel?

• 3:40Adam Skolnick?

  No, the original YouTube channel.

• 3:42Rich Roll?

  It took you this long? You're actually on the show? You don't even subscribe?

• 3:46Adam Skolnick?

  I don't subscribe to myself.

• 3:47Rich Roll?

  Here's the thing, like, when you look at the analytics on our YouTube channel, we're doing great, but like, something like 96% of the watches are from people that don't subscribe to the channel, which is odd. So come on, you guys, subscribe. Look how long it took you to do it.

• 4:02Adam Skolnick?

  I know. I'm embarrassed about it, but you have a pretty good, it seems like the subscriptions are pretty solid on the main channel.

• 4:07Rich Roll?

  It's doing well. We're in a groove right now. As I tweeted the other day, or shared the other day, the Andrew Huberman podcast eclipsed 4 million views. It's gonna hit like 4.5 in another couple days or something like that.

• 4:21Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, I thought it was 4.5 today already.

• 4:22Rich Roll?

  Was it 4? Is it 4.3 or something like that?

• 4:25Adam Skolnick?

  Something like that.

• 4:26Rich Roll?

  It's insane. Like, that podcast was, I don't know, nine months ago or something like that, and it's still cranking. The YouTube algorithm gods, for whatever reason, maybe Arthur and Giorgio can help us figure this out. Like, I don't know why they decided that one. It's a great episode, of course, but that one is crushing out there and it's bringing all kinds of new people to the show, which is

• 4:47Adam Skolnick?

  Fantastic. Welcome, new people.

• 4:49Rich Roll?

  But back to my question.

• 4:50Adam Skolnick?

  How am I? I'm, you know, everything is good. We're, uh, let's see, it's, I took January, like you, just a little bit at half speed. I was working, um, you know, maybe 15, 20 hours, or at least that was the plan, was to just do some reading, catch up on some books that I've been wanting to read for, forever and, and kind of pitch in a bit more with Zuma and hang out with the family a bit more. And then all hell broke loose in Washington and I was like glued to the television for days on end, doom scrolling. But so that was my downtime.

• 5:23Rich Roll?

  It was impossible not to do that.

• 5:24Adam Skolnick?

  It was impossible from January 6th to the 20th. I was like, I couldn't do anything. It was crazy. But, um, but ran a lot, ran, uh, you know, maybe a hundred, 110 miles this last month.

• 5:36Rich Roll?

  That's gotta be your biggest month.

• 5:37Adam Skolnick?

  Biggest month ever running.

• 5:38Rich Roll?

  You're looking spelt.

• 5:39Adam Skolnick?

  Hey, thanks, man. I mean, it's on two, so I'm not that spelt. But, uh, but yeah, so that, that's good. And Zuma's doing well. And, you know, my wife wants to buy a house. So, you know, we're, we're, I'm growing up.

• 5:54Rich Roll?

  You're living, you're living the dream, the adult, the adult dream, right?

• 5:58Adam Skolnick?

  Latecomer to the adult world.

• 6:00Rich Roll?

  And, and, and, and maybe if you weren't so late to GameStop, you could be buying that house right now.

• 6:05Adam Skolnick?

  You know, it's possible. I don't want to, I don't want, I have some material for GameStop.

• 6:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we're gonna get into that. Trust me.

• 6:13Adam Skolnick?

  Hold on, hold all materials.

• 6:14Rich Roll?

  Um, cool. Well, uh, this is my first podcast, uh, after taking essentially an entire month off. I went to Hawaii.

• 6:25Adam Skolnick?

  Yes. Like, what, how are you? Like, that's

• 6:27Rich Roll?

  I'm good. I feel really good. I feel refreshed. I feel energized. It was certainly needed. I, I wouldn't say I was teetering on burnout, but I definitely needed a break. I've been grinding. The entire year without taking any time off whatsoever.

• 6:41Adam Skolnick?

  You get like one day off a week generally?

• 6:43Rich Roll?

  Not even. I pretty much work every, I mean, every once in a while I'll take a day off and I do, like they'll be, they'll be like in the middle of the week. Pre pandemic, I would like go to a matinee or like just take little mini breaks. And in the weekends I work less, but the show goes up every Sunday night. So typically there's a scramble on Sunday afternoon to kind of do last minute tweaks on the show to get it up. So I feel like I'm always kind of working. So one of the goals, I'll get into my break, but one of the goals for this year is to really utilize this new studio and the manpower that we have now to systematize and make things more efficient and create, you know, a little bit more bandwidth for intermittent rest

• 7:28Rich Roll?

  throughout the year and the weeks. But yeah, I took a month off. I started this the year before I went to Australia for the month of December. This year I decided to go to Hawaii for January.

• 7:40Adam Skolnick?

  Solo or did you bring the family?

• 7:42Rich Roll?

  Well, Mathis went with me for a week. She had a friend that she was with. She went back and then I was solo the whole time and it was fantastic.

• 7:50Adam Skolnick?

  When's the last time that's been that way?

• 7:52Rich Roll?

  First, I will say I got tested a lot of times, so I did it safely. Hawaii has things pretty dialed in. If you go to Kauai, you gotta, you gotta quarantine for 14 days. But on the other islands, they require that you get a test within 72 hours. You gotta fill out all this paperwork. You get a QR code. When you land in the airport, you gotta show them all the paperwork. They scan your QR code and they test you in the airport before you can even get baggage claimed. So they have it, if you're on an island, you can control things a little bit better.

• 8:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Rich Roll?

  And the case incidence on the big island was very low. It was something like 10 to 30 a day. And people were wearing masks everywhere you went, if you went inside somewhere. But overall, it felt much safer to be there.

• 8:36Adam Skolnick?

  I'm sure.

• 8:36Rich Roll?

  And I was just in my own.

• 8:38Adam Skolnick?

  You mean safer than the hot zone on planet Earth?

• 8:40Rich Roll?

  Of Los Angeles. Yeah, I got, I got out of LA. And it was good, you know, I just, I just took care of myself and, and, you know, rented a bike and rode and ran and swam in the ocean, swam with dolphins, which was incredible.

• 8:52Adam Skolnick?

  You just rented like a high end bike from a good bike shop?

• 8:55Rich Roll?

  I did. There's a, there's a shop called Bike Works in Kona, and I have a good relationship with them because I've spent so much time there and raced there so many times. So Grant, who owns Bike Works, is a friend and he hooked me up with a super sweet ride.

• 9:07Adam Skolnick?

  That's cool.

• 9:08Rich Roll?

  So that was great and just went out of my way to not create an agenda for myself. Like I have friends there and I saw a couple of friends, but I tried to not commit myself to anything and to double down, like to go out of my way to not work, which is its own kind of effort, I suppose, for me.

• 9:25Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 9:26Rich Roll?

  And I do want to highlight like swimming with dolphins. I've been swimming, I've been open water swimming like my whole life, never had the experience of swimming with dolphins.

• 9:33Adam Skolnick?

  Never.

• 9:34Rich Roll?

  And I just was out off the Kailua Pier where they do the Ironman Swim and found myself in a pot of like 40 to 50 dolphins. It was like unbelievable.

• 9:43Adam Skolnick?

  Were they spinners? Were they spinning around?

• 9:45Rich Roll?

  They weren't, I didn't see a lot of spinning, but they were like at all depths and just playing with each other and surfacing and it was just the coolest thing.

• 9:53Adam Skolnick?

  That is the coolest.

• 9:53Rich Roll?

  So that experience alone was, made the whole thing worth it.

• 9:58Adam Skolnick?

  That, the Kona Coast is known for that, right? Because they, Kona Now, which is two step where the freedivers go just past Captain Cook, if you go south from Kona.

• 10:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 10:07Adam Skolnick?

  They know, they're known to have spinners around. Voices in the Ocean, that Susan Casey book, which is about dolphins. She did, there's a woman who works out of Kona and does these charters where people go and she, and like, it's very controversial in Kona, like not every diver likes this woman, I forget her name, but like she takes these people out to swim with dolphins off boats and like she has people like sing, like she, she talks to the dolphins and sings like dolphin songs, when the dolphins come or something. And I saw one of her. Acolyte, not in a bad way, like one of her disciples, I guess, in Hona now once. And I remember April and I had just gotten in, not too long ago, I was out there for work.

• 10:50Adam Skolnick?

  And this woman is like singing in the water. And I'm like, what's she doing? At first she like, like she seemed a little kooky, the snorkeler just singing like dolphin songs or whatever, squeaking. And all of a sudden the dolphins came right to her. So I just stuck with her, you know, I stuck with this, you know, eccentric dolphin.

• 11:08Rich Roll?

  But why is she controversial? That just sounds cool.

• 11:10Adam Skolnick?

  It's controversial because some people just are haters. You know, it is cool.

• 11:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:14Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Some people are haters and they think like, oh, you know, they don't believe it. And, you know, there's like, you gotta read voices in the ocean. She like, you know, there is a spiritual side to it. There is like a whole thing beyond just like, hey, it's cool to swim with dolphins.

• 11:28Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 11:28Adam Skolnick?

  But yeah, there's a hater aspect to it around there. But it's mostly I've found like the women who are freedivers there, they like it. They like the woman, they like the people and the men are the ones that are dismissive.

• 11:39Rich Roll?

  That's not shocking.

• 11:40Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 11:41Rich Roll?

  Right. Who's the freediver instructor, coach guy that I texted you about who was doing a course in Kona?

• 11:48Adam Skolnick?

  Kurt Chambers.

• 11:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my friend Anthony Irvin, who's in Oahu, or was at the time, I think he still is. I think did, did something with him and alerted me to this guy. And I was tempted to take the guy's course, but then I was like, I just, I really just need to rest and not do anything. So I opted out of that.

• 12:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, Kurt broke Nick Mavoli's American record. I think he might still hold it or he held it for a while as the deepest American ever.

• 12:14Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 12:14Adam Skolnick?

  In freediving over 100 meters. He competed at Team USA. He's in one breath and a kind of just an aside, interesting guy, great, great photographer and a very prolific teacher out there.

• 12:25Rich Roll?

  Right. He has a cool Instagram too.

• 12:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, very cool. Chambers below.

• 12:28Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:29Adam Skolnick?

  At Chambers below.

• 12:30Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But the upshot is I'm back. I feel energized. I feel fit. I've got good momentum with my fitness. I'm excited about 2021. I do wanna take a moment to welcome Jason Camiolo.

• 12:43Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 12:43Rich Roll?

  To, to the studio. Jason. For people that have been on this podcast journey with us for a while, know him as the audio engineer slash producer slash guy who takes care of all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. He had always been living in the Phoenix area and all of our work was remotely performed. And now he has moved to Los Angeles and he's here full time manning all the dials right now. So, welcome, Jason. We're excited to have you. And it's going to be an amazing year. So, I'm pumped.

• 13:15Adam Skolnick?

  Can I ask you one more question about Hawaii?

• 13:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 13:17Adam Skolnick?

  Were you getting Ironman pangs, like being on the terrain? I mean, you're basically riding and running and swimming similar terrain.

• 13:24Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but I've spent so much time on the big island. Like, for me, it's not that exotic to go there because I have logged so many hours training there and just like living there, basically. So, it's more like a feeling of coming home. Like, it's nice to ride on the Queen K and I got off the beaten track and did some other rides and tried to explore other aspects of the island that I'm less familiar with. But it's very, like, comfortable for me to just kind of go there. And it doesn't feel like vacation. It just feels like another place that I've lived in the past.

• 13:56Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Rich Roll?

  So.

• 13:57Adam Skolnick?

  How is the water?

• 13:58Rich Roll?

  So good.

• 13:59Adam Skolnick?

  Seventy-six, seventy-eight?

• 14:00Rich Roll?

  And there were whales breaching. I was in a condo for half the time and then on this beautiful house on the water in a little neighborhood called Puukha, which is a pretty cool area.

• 14:11Adam Skolnick?

  Is that north of Kona or south?

• 14:13Rich Roll?

  It's north. It's just south of Hapuna Beach and Kauaihi, if you know where that is. So, right, right, kind of a couple miles before the Kauaihi turn, if you know, if you know the island at all. But it's this little, like, hidden neighborhood with all these beautiful homes right on the water and whales breaching off. It was crazy.

• 14:33Adam Skolnick?

  So, you didn't leave?

• 14:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But, part of the goal was to, you know, be off digital devices and, you know, really live an analog life. But the world exploded. And like yourself, I found myself doom scrolling and I could not detach myself from the news cycle, which seemed to be just, you know, getting crazier, you know, by the second, which is what we're going to get into right now.

• 14:57Adam Skolnick?

  It went cra- it went goofier than anyone even thought. Like, you could say that about the entire presidency or the last four years. It went goofier than we ever thought. But like, the end, it was like, it was like a fireworks, you know, when they have a fireworks show? It was like the finale to the fireworks show.

• 15:13Rich Roll?

  A little bit, right? So.

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  Shall we now just dispel the idea that somehow 2021 might normalize? That everything is going to kind of settle into place? Instead, we give you insurrection, game stonk, Jewish lasers, and who knows what else?

• 15:32Adam Skolnick?

  Who knows what else?

• 15:33Rich Roll?

  So let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll be joined by Giorgio and Arthur.

• 15:48Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back with the boys. Four in the house? We got Arthur, we got Giorgio. I'm disappointed, Giorgio, though. I was told that you were going to dress up today as the QAnon shaman.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had my top down on my convertible.

• 16:03Rich Roll?

  Didn't happen?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  The helmet flew off.

• 16:06Adam Skolnick?

  The Viking.

• 16:06Speaker 02

  The Viking gourds. Somewhere on the 101 right now, so.

• 16:10Adam Skolnick?

  You know, say what you want about the QAnon shaman, but at least he eats organic.

• 16:14Rich Roll?

  He's organic, right? Was he on a food strike when he was incarcerated?

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:19Rich Roll?

  What's the latest update on that guy?

• 16:21Adam Skolnick?

  Well, there was a fake news. So a friend of mine sent me a National Post article, which is some bullshit tabloid from Canada, that tried to claim that the judge actually gave it to him.

• 16:34Rich Roll?

  Gave him organic food?

• 16:36Adam Skolnick?

  And that started proliferating through social media and outraged people. You know, how could he get this special treatment? They would never treat a POC that way, blah, blah, blah. But it turns out he didn't get it.

• 16:48Rich Roll?

  Wasn't true.

• 16:48Adam Skolnick?

  No.

• 16:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  I think he's agreed to be deposed in Congress and like speak against, I guess presumably Trump or whoever, like speak to the movement.

• 16:59Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  So that should be interesting.

• 17:00Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, sure. He'll take an invitation to a microphone in Congress.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  He'd been building his brand for a while. Like, I mean, he'd been showing up to all the Save Your Children rallies for months before the Capitol insurgency.

• 17:14Rich Roll?

  Is the face of the whole thing on some level.

• 17:18Adam Skolnick?

  He has, this has to be going exactly as he hoped it would, I would imagine.

• 17:21Rich Roll?

  Perhaps, until he ends up behind bars, I suppose.

• 17:24Adam Skolnick?

  Well, his lawyer, his lawyer is ahead of that, you know, his lawyer said, you know, he's not a bad person. He's a practitioner of yoga. That was one of the early defense lines, I swear to God. Just like the Bikram guy, right?

• 17:37Rich Roll?

  Well, it feels, it feels a little bit.

• 17:39Adam Skolnick?

  Bikram's also a practitioner of yoga.

• 17:41Rich Roll?

  Yes, he is. It feels a little bit weird and dated to like, talk about the Capitol insurrection because it feels like it's 100 years ago. Could you, could you have imagined when that was going on that, you know, a month later, it would feel like old news in comparison to some of the things that are happening now? It's just crazy, right? I do think we need to like, track it a little bit, but what I wanted you guys here for is to help us understand or like decode, you know, how we move from Pepe the Frog, how that becomes QAnon, how that leads to the insurrection?

• 18:17Rich Roll?

  And the interrelation between that or the interplay between that and kind of what we're seeing right now with GameStop and the gamification of Wall Street. I mean, it's insane.

• 18:30Adam Skolnick?

  It is insane, but it is all connected.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  That's a lot of ground to cover.

• 18:32Rich Roll?

  Right, I know.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  No, it's true. There's that amazing meme of, it's, it's, it's like someone standing in front of a, a line of Domino's. And the first Domino's very small and the last Domino's very huge. And the, the beginning push of the Domino on the small Domino is basically Gamergate. And then the final one is all of the COVID deaths.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, Elon Musk tweeted that, that graphic, right? Yeah.

• 18:56Adam Skolnick?

  Oops.

• 18:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:57Adam Skolnick?

  He's somewhere in the middle of that Domino's.

• 19:00Rich Roll?

  Well, he's a player right now.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 19:02Rich Roll?

  He's basically, you know, front and center in terms of which memes get traction and which don't.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  He's a merchant of chaos at this point.

• 19:09Adam Skolnick?

  But chaos is a good place to start, like, where were you all, where were you guys? Like, Rich, like, when, when it started happening and the riots broke out? I mean, I think you, we got, we should start there, like, what, where were you? What were you guys thinking?

• 19:21Rich Roll?

  I mean, I was in Hawaii, trying to be off the computer and off my phone, and I just could not stop scrolling.

• 19:27Adam Skolnick?

  Were you getting texts first or were you like, how, how did you find out about it?

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  I mean, I would, you know, I would check in. It wasn't like I was trying to be completely off the phone, but you know, I would look at Twitter and then, you know, you'd see the news and you're like, I have to understand what's happening. Like, I just could not. Put distance between myself and the device. It was just so compelling and, and strange and interesting and disheartening and unbelievable. Like every adjective under the hood.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:54Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, the, the guy in our film, Joel, who is part of the network contagion. Wait, what's that? I can't remember the, the acronym.

• 20:04Speaker 03

  Um, I don't remember. I mean, he works out of Princeton and he has a, he has a consortium of people called Idrama Lab.

• 20:09Adam Skolnick?

  Idrama.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  And they had been sort of modeling, um, behavior on all of these different platforms. And so a lot of this stuff, I think, was predictable by the academics that followed it. And it was also predictable because this notion of Stop the Steal, specifically like in, when Trump addressed the crowd, he talked about Stop the Steal and he's like, this is something you came up with. But the reality of Stop the Steal is that started in 2016. That was something that was, uh, something that Roger Stone came up with.

• 20:36Adam Skolnick?

  Um, before the election?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they, well, they assumed, I think a lot of people assumed that the race with Hillary Clinton was gonna be very close. And so they were already sort of seeding this notion of Stop the Steal that early. The point where Stone bought the URL. And so this idea that this was like an organic groundswell is ridiculous. Stop the Steal was also used sort of in the midterms. So they're just kind of pulling on the same thread that's been there for a while. But I don't think anyone could have predicted that the Capitol Police response would have been so lax. But I think this was a, a moment of coalition building where they had all of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, the, all the QAnon people, all the Christian fundamentalists, the, the white supremacists, all sort of merging around this one thing.

• 21:23Speaker 03

  And, you know, in the weeks before, you know, we can't forget that all of these people were coming to different state capitals and showing up in real life as well. So.

• 21:31Adam Skolnick?

  And it was the day that they were supposed to certify, right? So it was, everything was kind of, they were, they, we knew they were all going there. That's why we were all tuned in to begin with. Like, it wasn't like I wasn't gonna watch the news that day anyway.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:43Adam Skolnick?

  So it was almost like, plot twist.

• 21:45Rich Roll?

  But, but the inauguration was meant to be the ultimate moment in QAnon history, right? It was all supposed to go down at that moment. So there was a lot of energy and anticipation that was circling around all of that. And in terms of the Capitol policed response, like in the wake of what transpired, you saw all of these internet sleuths sharing screen grabs from 4chan. And it's like, anybody who spent any time or exerted any due diligence leading up to the inauguration could have easily discovered that this was, you know, a possibility or more likely than not, like a plausibility.

• 22:24Rich Roll?

  And so where is, like, where was the, where does the fault get levied in terms of that anemic, you know, kind of response?

• 22:34Adam Skolnick?

  By the cops.

• 22:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  I think that remains to be seen. I mean, they haven't released surveillance footage.

• 22:39Adam Skolnick?

  Today, something came out because tomorrow, I guess, the impeachment proceedings, where the trial begins.

• 22:45Rich Roll?

  Right. And all his lawyers quit, right? Because he wants to maintain the stop the steal argument, and they just can't abide by that. So now he's got these new lawyers.

• 22:55Adam Skolnick?

  They don't want to lose their standing in the bar. So Don Winslow tweeted out a letter that looks, looked accurate to me, but it was from Christopher Miller, the Defense Secretary, because they, or the Army Secretary. Someone else had just left that post, and he got put in as the acting secretary. And in this letter, it basically said, it was before January 6th, it was before January 4th, there had been requests to have National Guard on standby. And in this letter, he basically is saying, you can't have any of that on standby. You need to clear everything through me, or nothing happens at all. And so now, there is a paper trail. So that's the first thing that dropped, and that just happened right before I got here today on Twitter.

• 23:40Adam Skolnick?

  So if you look on Don Winslow's Twitter, you know, the guy that wrote the cartel books.

• 23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, that's so Joel from our film reached out to me like a year ago, and he's been researching Q. This whole time, and he basically told me that a year ago, that at that stage, like, um, that QAnon was essentially like, fully operational at this point. And what the thing that was very concerning, from his perspective, was that it was kind of the first time that there's a leaderless movement like this. And that it kind of was, um, that it was kind of irrelevant whether or not people discovered who Q himself or herself was at that point, because it was like this self-aggregating, self-motivated machine. And that's like what the Capitol insurrection sort of proved out, because at that point, Q hadn't really spoken

• 24:27Speaker 02

  at that point in like a month. And, um, yeah, where we go from here, who knows, but...

• 24:33Rich Roll?

  Well, what was important, though, was that the Q prophecy was actualized. And that certainly did not come to pass. So this bubble gets popped, and then you have a fracture in that community. You have the hard cores who are still reconfiguring the narrative to say, "Well, because of this and this, like, it's still a thing." And then you have a whole other, larger fraction of that population coming to their senses. And now we're seeing, like, did you see the Anderson Cooper interview with the former QAnon guy who had to apologize to him for thinking that he ate babies? We're seeing, you know, a lot of that right now, which is kind of encouraging, I think, on some level. But it had to be fascinating

• 25:15Rich Roll?

  for you guys, who are so steeped in all of this, to kind of watch that transpire, knowing what you guys know about the power of these movements that, you know, for the most part, don't catch the attention of mainstream society. I mean, Adam, you were saying you were, you were, before the podcast, you were talking about how you were researching voting for a book proposal, and you didn't even, you didn't even know anything about Pepe.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  I didn't know about Pepe, no. I was spending a lot of time in the ocean, though, in 2016, so...

• 25:46Adam Skolnick?

  Sounds good.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, right down the street from my house.

• 25:52Adam Skolnick?

  So I don't know. I wasn't like in, I wasn't on the Q, I wasn't in the 4chan's because like by then, I think we'd had, I mean, this goes to why it's important to dive into this like darker, kind of murky shitty stuff, right? As, as awake human beings. It's great that you're talking about this because you'd think like when you, 4chan, I always associated with the UC Santa Barbara mass shooter who, you know, these incels and these like these righteous, self-righteous incels. And I just like, I don't want anything to do with that. So I, I kind of tuned that stuff out. So when I, when I'm looking at an election that happened with how Trump won, I wasn't looking at like 4chan at all. It wasn't even on my

• 26:37Adam Skolnick?

  radar. My radar was like, how could, I was thinking way analog. I was like, Cheermandering. You know, I'm not a gamer. I'm not into that world. So I wasn't thinking like that at all. So to, which is why I love the movie so much because it kind of wakes you up. And this shows like if we'd been tuned in, if the Republican party had been tuned in, maybe like if anybody had been tuned in, it could have been stopped, but maybe it couldn't have been, you know, maybe it was like the, when you have a ground swell like this, there's nothing that can stop it. I don't know.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  I don't know that they were necessarily against.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, I think they were tuned in. I think they chose to ignore it. And I think there's evidence of that. I mean, you know, we've, we've been in contact with this Republican congressman, Denver Riggleman, who was the, the one sort of voice in the wilderness, the one Republican that spoke out against Q over the summer. And he claims that he was basically chastised by the rest of the party. They told him to stop talking about Q because they felt like that was their margin in certain states. And so, you know, he, he tweeted out and said that, you know, Q, there was no coincidence that Q had the same number of letters as moron.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  QAnon.

• 27:46Speaker 03

  QAnon, QAnon, excuse me. And then also that it's mental gonorrhea. And so, you know, the Republicans, I think, knew this, but they realized that it was something that was to their advantage.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, and to back up, I mean, it's to the kind of incel shooter aspect of QAnon and sort of the nexus of when these two coalitions, the, the 4chan community and like the. The burgeoning Trump movement coincided in the film, we kind of tease it out, but it's sometimes it just kind of whizzes past people. So it's worth kind of refocusing on it here because it's really central to the the conversation. But it's like, um, there's a mass shooting in Oregon in 2016, 15. 2015. And, uh, we don't know for sure, but most likely the shooter himself posted on 4chan, uh, a kind of warning that like, don't go to school tomorrow. There's going to be a shooting. And then at the bottom, there's a Pepe holding a handgun.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  And then two weeks later, Donald Trump, who at that point is like a dark horse candidate, posts a meme of himself as like smug Pepe. And for a lot of people, like, first of all, that was the first time that Pepe really made it into the national news was during that shooting. But people didn't really know what it was. He was referred to as a Grinch, a sniveling Grinch. Right, yes. But then also, yeah, but then also like, people didn't really understand the significance of what Trump was tweeting. But in a sense, it was kind of a wink to this collective of online trolls that that were really the vanguard of like hacking the internet at that point, right? And like this, the burgeoning, uh, click based economy, like they really understood,

• 29:24Speaker 02

  they were very savvy at understanding how to manipulate the flows of media. And so Trump at that moment, well, who knows? If there's one question I would ask Trump, it's like, did you know what you were tweeting at that point? Yeah, the self-awareness around that is is up in the air. Totally, totally dubious. But like, you know, Pepe at that point represented something very significant. It was kind of like a preemptor to the stand back and stand by moment, right? And so what he really set off was this kind of wink to that community who all shared a similar sort of, uh, hatred towards PC culture and, you know, minorities and women. And they all kind of shared the same anger towards the same group of people. And he, those people basically started creating like,

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Of like a meme revolution that helped him kind of buttress this burgeoning movement of online meme lords into like, you know, an actual political movement as older people are starting to join social media and stuff, they start like, "Oh, what's this funny frog meme?" You know, "This is fun." And you start to realize that memes are actually really incredible ways to like, capture the imagination of people and like, kind of coalesce around a movement around meme iconography, I guess.

• 30:41Adam Skolnick?

  So what's the connection? Where's the link from Pepe, like you were asking, from Pepe to Q? When does that happen? When does that start happening? Is there a direct link where Pepe becomes like a Q, basically?

• 30:55Speaker 03

  Well, Pepe, in the constellation of Q iconography, Pepe is sort of a satellite figure. You know, it is interesting. So Pepe became very popular on 4chan, and that's where Q started too. Q started out as one of many jokes where people on 4chan, they pretend to be someone they're not, and they post using various sort of aliases. And so people would post often on 4chan pretending to have like, some sort of government access or secret knowledge, and usually this is sort of all taken as like, a LARP or a joke. But Q really started off, you know, when a group of people, when a sort of cohort of

• 31:35Speaker 03

  people who were all trying to create their own personas, very much based on Infowars, kind of found these Q drops, and they started to signal boost them within their YouTube live streams, on Twitter, in these sort of places. And then you started to see Q resonating with a different audience than Pepe resonated with. Pepe resonated with a younger audience, internet savvy audience, an audience that was like, very irony, you know, like, very irony poisoned.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Q found sort of an audience of an older generation, most of whom were evangelical Christians. And they were looking for some sort of way in which Trump was going to be part of God's plan. Was basically going to be their savior essentially. And the narrative of Q was that ignore all of the hypocrisy, the corruption, you know, ignore all of that because Trump is actually kind of running a covert, deep state sort of espionage sting, where he's going to sort of show up triumphant. He's going to maybe kill Hillary Clinton, maybe hang her, maybe imprison her. Different people thought different things.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  And so this was a moment where this really like caught wildfire in Facebook groups and it caught wildfire in Twitter. It was another moment where things moved off of 4chan and into the mainstream. And while this was happening, a lot of the old school people that were using Pepe, maybe in our film, were just laughing. They were like, I can't believe these people believe this stuff.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  This is 2017, maybe?

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so, you know, you started to then see the people who were Q adherents really got kind of addicted to the same sort of like online behavior that a lot of the 4chan people were kind of, you know, it's the same stuff that was the shut-in culture of 4chan. The people that were spending all their time online. This was now happening with a slightly older generation and they were following themselves. They were going down a rabbit hole. They would call themselves white rabbits or they would say follow the white rabbit. And it was this willful kind of crazy-making, where it was exciting and fun to feel like you were part of this other movement. And while this was happening, this is fitting into like biblical revelation.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  It's fitting into a lot of other sort of presumed prophecy that people are already thinking about.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  And just a general good versus evil, right?

• 34:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the revelations parallel, I think, is pretty powerful. Like it was all going to culminate in this reckoning.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:11Rich Roll?

  Where the 5D chess maneuvers were going to come to play and everything was going to change.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Trump represents this really great kind of imperfect hero, right? Which I think is like very familiar kind of character within evangelical community, right? Like you kind of explain away the fact that he's been married three times and he's... A pathological liar. He's like an imperfect person under the light of Christ or whatever.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Well, and he's viewed as a protector.

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:37Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, he delivered the Supreme Court nominations, you know, one third of the Supreme Court now is, you know.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Oops.

• 34:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, is now Trump appointees. There were certain things that he was doing that were really viewed as he was a protector of Christian America, whether, and they knew he was imperfect.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  White Christian America, right?

• 34:56Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  Very much so.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, for single issue voters where it's all about pro-life, it's much easier for them to overlook all the other indiscretions because he's taking care of that issue for them.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, of course, COVID happens and then just hypercharges all of this because now you can't leave your house and you're stuck inside your computer and like the funnel, you know, just gets tighter and tighter.

• 35:20Rich Roll?

  But that's kerosene.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  The funnel gets tighter, but the mouth is wider.

• 35:22Rich Roll?

  That's kerosene on the community aspect of this, which I think is super important. Whether it's 4chan and Pepe or Facebook groups and QAnon, it gave these people something to engage with and created like a really robust community that provided a sense of belonging, that gamified the whole thing. And on some level, I suppose, was addictive and just too compelling to not walk away from.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  It was extremely addictive.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  I mean, there's an alienation problem in America, I think, for a lot of people that pre-existed COVID, right? We are a culture that spends more time commuting than any other culture in our cars by ourselves, you know, like in my, the film we worked on together, the previous film was about housing and like one of the central points of central data points that really fascinated me, that got me into the making of the film was the idea that 60 years ago, the average size of the family was three and a half people and the average size of the home was 900 square feet. And today it's two and a half people and it's almost 3,000 square feet. So we have like fewer people inhabiting more space and like, there's just something inherently distressing and alienating about that. And I think like,

• 36:39Adam Skolnick?

  QAnon just kind of exacerbates all these problems and then COVID layers on top of it and all of a sudden you feel like you're part of a community solving this global cabal of pedophiles and it like it becomes inescapable, the seduction.

• 36:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think in addition to the alienation and the disconnection that so many people experience, it also gave a lot of moralist people a sense of purpose, right? Like, I'm thinking of Clete Keller, you know, he got a lot of attention, the Olympic swimmer who showed up in the rotunda. I don't know him personally, but I have lots of friends that do know him well. And this is a guy who excelled at the highest level in his sport, went to multiple Olympians, medaled, like a huge athletic champion. And then, in the wake of retiring, hit like some really tough experiences. He got divorced, he lost custody of his kids. At one point, for an extended period of time, he was homeless, living in

• 37:39Rich Roll?

  his car. He could not find his groove with his career and he couldn't supplant the sense of purpose that he found in swimming in other areas of his life. And in so many ways, he's almost like the perfect test case for somebody who's going to be susceptible to these kinds of ideas. Like, I tweeted about him being kind of the convergence of Kevin Roos's rabbit hole podcast series with the Weight of Gold HBO documentary. Like, he experienced what so many Olympians experience when they retire, they have mental health issues, they have depression, they can't figure out what to do with their lives, meets, you know, QAnon

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  or these other ideas, and then there you go, down the rabbit hole. And he shows up in the rotunda and thinks it's a good idea to be wearing his Olympic jacket, you know, at the time. So what is the mentality of somebody like that? And I'm trying, when I look at that, I'm trying to look at it from a perspective of compassion and curiosity. Like, I want to understand what led him to that place, rather than just vilify him.

• 38:45Adam Skolnick?

  No, like, there's something, obviously, there's a huge mental health component that we're touching on here, the alienation, you know, the, this specific case. But everybody there was part of this, who decided to enter the rotunda, whether they planned to.

• 39:02Adam Skolnick?

  In advance, which there's certainly evidence that a lot, some of them did, I mean, a lot of them did, or whether they just happened to get caught up. There's something about this, a performative attempt to create an alternate reality that you are starring in. And whether, you know, you see people streaming themselves, Cleat is wearing his outfit. So you knew the Q and on Shaman made sure you knew who he was. People are like, you know, Darren, what's his face? It's Darren's in the rotunda, you know, the guy from West Virginia. There is something about a pride to be a part of this kind of re- alternate reality that they managed to create together, where anything could have happened.

• 39:45Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, like, really, anything could have happened. Like, if they had run into AOC or Pelosi or Pence, there would have been bloodshed, for sure. But in reality, it was just people milling around and doing kind of just vandalizing is what it ended up happening.

• 40:00Rich Roll?

  But fueled by a sense of righteousness. That's why they were so brazen about taking the selfies and live streaming it, because in their minds, they were doing the right thing.

• 40:10Adam Skolnick?

  And that Trump would protect them.

• 40:12Rich Roll?

  At the behest of Trump and Cruz and all these other people who, in their minds, had discharged them for this purpose.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was listening to a podcast recently called Design Matters, and Marina Abramovich was on. And she was talking about her piece in 1974, this famous performance art piece that she did in Naples, which maybe you've heard about, but like, she basically erected the stage and laid out a bunch of different things in front of her and basically invited the audience to do whatever they wanted to her. There was no rules. But the only agreement was that you were coming up on stage, so you were part of the performance. And it went on for six hours. And I'd heard, you know, descriptions of the performance before, but I'd never heard it from her perspective. And what was really striking to me was like, her description of what happened afterwards, because... During the performance, things escalated like very quickly.

• 41:00Speaker 02

  And, you know, she was fearful that she was gonna get raped. A guy at a certain point picked up the revolver that was on the thing and put it up to her head and someone intervened and pulled it out of his hand. And she got cut on the neck and someone like sucked the blood out of her neck. And then she said that at a moment where she thought she was gonna get raped, women in the audience were yelling at the men onstage to do something to her, like something terrible. But so after the performance concluded, she walked out into the audience and no one could look at her in the eye. Everyone was so ashamed at what they had done. And I was like, that is the Capitol insurrection.

• 41:36Adam Skolnick?

  It's like the shock treatment test.

• 41:38Rich Roll?

  Or it's the Stanford prison experiment.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, Trump gave them, yeah, Trump gave them the permission. And you hear it now when like after these people were arrested, they're like, well, Trump said I could do it.

• 41:49Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  And like that is a really powerful.

• 41:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the sheer incredulity that they would be held to account for these actions. Like the surprise, like, wait a minute, what do you mean? Why is the FBI calling me?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:00Rich Roll?

  Confusion.

• 42:00Adam Skolnick?

  What the guy crying in the airport terminal because he got, he was already on the no fly.

• 42:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Adam Skolnick?

  But the thing is, Trump didn't specifically say they could do that. And so like, I'm not defending him.

• 42:12Rich Roll?

  But the whole culture is about cryptic drops, right? Where you have to read the tea leaves.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 42:19Adam Skolnick?

  There's a reason he's the best con man in history. He knows what not to say and how to say what he's not saying.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And get off Scott free every time.

• 42:29Adam Skolnick?

  You're right.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's wild. I mean, Q sort of now, I think, doesn't necessarily represent sort of the adrenochrome and the baby blood and all that sort of stuff anymore. Now it's just basically you're signaling to the world that you have some sort of a spiritual war against the deep state, that you are a person who feels as though you are working on behalf of divinity in some way. And so over the summer, it went from the evangelicals to kind of a new age crowd. And within that new age crowd, it was a lot of influencers as well. Q initially was a lot of people alone in their Facebook groups, trading Q drops. And then over the summer, it really moved into a street movement.

• 43:10Speaker 03

  And it had like a slight, it had a different group of people who were attached to it at that point. And I think a lot of those people who were in the rotunda started from those sort of protests that were happening during the summer, the anti-lockdown protests.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:25Speaker 03

  Those sort of protests. And people were oblivious to their own sedition at that point. They did not understand what they were doing.

• 43:30Adam Skolnick?

  They couldn't define sedition if you asked them to, most of these people. I mean, let's not, let's not be

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:35Adam Skolnick?

  super nice, like, there are some morons in this group. Like, there's some real idiots. I mean, they're not bright.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  And some truly evil people do. I mean, you can't undercount the fact that they're amongst the group of clueless, like, just sort of live streaming.

• 43:48Rich Roll?

  Well, it certainly wasn't a monolith.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:50Rich Roll?

  Like, you had

• 43:50Speaker 02

  There were actual white nationalists.

• 43:52Rich Roll?

  You stumbled in there accidentally and just thought it was like a frat party. And then you have the highly trained, you know, super militarized group of people who are wearing earpieces and have zip ties and, and look like they're in military formation going into the Capitol. Like, those are two different types of people.

• 44:10Adam Skolnick?

  And then there's just like the baby boomers that are like, thought it'd be fun to go to a protest.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:15Adam Skolnick?

  Right? I mean, seriously.

• 44:16Speaker 02

  Man.

• 44:17Adam Skolnick?

  Right?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  No, I, I mean, I have some friends who's, who found out afterwards that their parents were there. They weren't like, it's part of the siege, but they were there and then they left before things went really bananas.

• 44:27Adam Skolnick?

  Or so they say.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. Or so they say.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  And then went to the Hyatt Regency and had a Chardonnay, you know, in the lobby.

• 44:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the larger issue is, you know, like, I have a bunch of family who are very conservative and they would sort of watch the Capitol riots with a lot of the same sort of surprise and revulsion that maybe we would, but ultimately they're sympathetic because they do feel like the election was stolen. They do feel like the Biden doesn't have a mandate from the people. And I don't know what you kind of do with that thinking.

• 45:00Rich Roll?

  Right. So, so

• 45:01Speaker 03

  The larger issue.

• 45:02Rich Roll?

  So, when, in, in the settling of the dust, are we in a situation in which there's a calcification of, you know, like a doubling down on these ideas by a certain subset of this group? Or is there a moment of awakening happening where people are just kind of coming to their senses? Like, what is your, how, you know, how do you take the temperature right now on the culture in terms of what that produced and what will happen next?

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I mean, for me personally, I think it just has to come from accountability. I think the Republicans are still, you know, for like a day after that, there's, there was like just like little breadcrumbs of, that they were offering up to the public of, for like, uh, I don't know, uh, like recognition that this was maybe, had gone a little bit too far, but that was immediately erased like the next day. And now they're saying like, oh, let's just get over this. So you, why are you gonna, why are you gonna impeach the president? He's just a private citizen now. So like, the reality is, is that the Republican Party has always been a party of trolls. And like, now it's just only intensified and they can't sort of relinquish that power because to do that is to admit that they're actually not interested in governing.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Right? Like, they want all of the power of being in office, but they don't want any of the responsibilities. It's much better to just like, keep, uh, people voting for them just based off of fear and anger, rather than like, offering, um, material solutions to people's problems. And so until the Republicans decide to like, throw out, you know, Ted Cruz out of Congress, I don't know that that's ever gonna change.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there was a sense in the immediate aftermath that there was a coming to the senses and some rationality being injected into the GOP.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 46:47Rich Roll?

  And perhaps this whole thing could be stabilized. But as of late, most of the news is about Josh Hawley and about Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and this extreme faction that, that, you know, is a magnet for all the attention and press.

• 47:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's ultimately gonna play out on social media and we don't know, kind of how that's gonna play out. In part because there's been these mass bans and, you know, the data scientists we talked to, um, in the course of Making Feels Good, Man... All sort of talk about how whenever there's a massive deplatforming, there is some sort of reactionary response. Don't know exactly what it is, but that is going to happen. There's a lot of people who I think feel a real sense of like loss without the ability to hear from Trump constantly.

• 47:37Rich Roll?

  There is a weird vacuum.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  There is a, there's a vacuum and I think that's happening in the left.

• 47:40Rich Roll?

  It's strange, like even, yeah, like just let him tweet for five minutes. Like I gotta hear what he knows.

• 47:45Adam Skolnick?

  No, no, I'm sorry.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  The dog needs to hunt.

• 47:50Rich Roll?

  But there was that stat that after Trump was, was deplatformed, that, that there was a 70% drop in all of the kind of hate speech that surrounds all of this. Like it, it was impactful for that.

• 48:04Adam Skolnick?

  It was a great, it was a great move. I mean, it shouldn't have happened before.

• 48:06Rich Roll?

  And then you have the migration to Parler and everything that happened with Parler.

• 48:10Adam Skolnick?

  Well, so I think that, that, you know, you, I think that it was more than just, just for a couple of days, a couple of significant things have happened, right? So one is Twitter deplatformed all these people. Parler got the plug pulled. You know, they'll probably get back up at some point if they're not yet, but at some point.

• 48:30Rich Roll?

  Were they getting Russian money or something like that to be back up and running? Are they back up and running now?

• 48:35Adam Skolnick?

  Not that I know of, but I didn't check today. But then the corporate America stepped in as the, as like the moderator of the political world after being the people that pumped the money in and made it kind of created these conditions. All of a sudden corporate America is like, well, we're, we're keeping track of who's saying what and we're suspending our donations, which is why I think McConnell was originally, again, you know, very vocal anti-Trump. Why you had that change and Lynn Cheney's speaking out. That had to be part of the consensus or part of the, the math. But I've always thought, because the numbers are on the side of.

• 49:12Adam Skolnick?

  Still, they are, the numbers are still on the side of, of people who want to create a workable country. They still are. And we've had 6,000 people in the last few weeks leave the Republican Party in North Carolina, 10,000 in Pennsylvania. Now, if you've been watching these elections, that's enough to swing an election. 5,000 in Colorado, 5,000 in Arizona. Those are concrete numbers. They're reported by Colorado Public Radio today. I sent you that, that link. We can link to it. That's significant. And all we've ever needed is 5 to 10% of the leadership in the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, the rest of the Democratic Party to kind of agree on certain things, like to be able to deal with

• 49:57Adam Skolnick?

  climate change and loss of biodiversity and healthcare and racial justice and criminal justice reform. And that stuff's out there. Like, that's possible. So it is possible that the radical right have succeeded in creating a consensus that never, that did not exist before. It is possible that the breaking of the glass is the breaking of the problem. It is possible. Now, we'll, we'll see. You know, like, obviously, that's admittedly a very optimistic viewpoint on where things are going. But, you know, the Senate right now, as, you know, by the time this airs, it may be old news, but today was kind of trying to-

• 50:35Rich Roll?

  I can almost guarantee that it will be old news, the way that-

• 50:38Adam Skolnick?

  But like, they're, they're trying to work with Biden, like, there's five or 10 senators are trying to work with Biden on a plan to deal with pandemic aid. So, there is, there does seem to be still possible, the building of a consensus of people who are not living in that alternate reality, in that magical land, in that fever dream.

• 51:04Rich Roll?

  On the subject of deplatforming, as I just, I wanted to make this point. I mean, I, I think, I think deplatforming Trump was an easy call in light of everything and should have happened much earlier than it did. So, as late as it was, I still applaud Jack and Twitter for, for taking that action. But I also think that there is- An interesting conversation to be had about the powers that are now held by these gigantic tech conglomerates and the stack that supports these platforms. When AWS pulls the plug on Parler, we can applaud that because Parler is such a shit show or whatever, but let's

• 51:44Rich Roll?

  take a step back and look at what that actually means. And when that much power is vested in one organization, it's not just the platform. It's like these platforms need all of these other things in order to exist. How does that play out when there's a paradigm shift in the powers that be?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Good question. It's a very good point. I think Facebook seems to be doing a marketing move right now where they're basically asking for regulation. They're like welcoming it. Like, we're ready to be regulated. And it feels like they're just kicking the can down the road because it's not something that they necessarily want to instigate internally. You know, I think it's also important to point out that Parler wasn't sort of a passive takedown. It was actually a group of like first generation hackers who came in and basically showed all these security breaches, caused a lot of havoc on the back end.

• 52:33Rich Roll?

  They downloaded the entire app, right?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  They made a million different moderators.

• 52:38Rich Roll?

  Deleted posts are all now on a hard drive somewhere.

• 52:42Speaker 03

  And that helped the FBI find a lot of these people, right? And a lot of that group was like first generation anonymous people.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  The hacker collective anonymous.

• 52:51Speaker 03

  Wow, I didn't realize that. And in part, they were mad just because Q Anonymous was stealing kind of their branding. Right. And so it came from the internet before corporations came in and did their due diligence.

• 53:04Rich Roll?

  That's super interesting.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  So I don't know about.

• 53:06Rich Roll?

  Are you connected to the anonymous guys?

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 53:09Rich Roll?

  Oh, shrug.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  We've filmed too. No, but it's out there too. It's all out there in the public record if you want to look for it. But I do think that, you know, Dorsey has been sort of acting like a moderator, but the reality is, I mean, he made a lot of money off of Trump. There was a lot of friction caused on his platform. A lot of people spent time on it.

• 53:31Rich Roll?

  It's where QAnon really became like a place of radicalization. It was in Twitter as these drops would sort of come in and speed along the agenda of Q. I don't know, it seems like he needs to start acting like a CEO and not like, you know, I don't know.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Passive.

• 53:48Rich Roll?

  A passive moderator sitting on the beach, waiting for his employees to come and tell him to do something, which is what was happening.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  It's also in terms of the broader conversation and the ethical conversation about deplatforming. It's also important, I think, to understand that there's basically like two cohorts to the conversation. There's like the general user, who is maybe fearful for whatever reason of losing their several hundred followers. But then there's like the opportunist, right? Like, you have to be wary of the bad faith argument that's often made during these conversations by people like Alex Jones, who wrap deplatforming in this First Amendment argument, which is of course completely specious bullshit. Because for them, it is an existential crisis for them. If you are a grifter, like, and I mentioned this before in our last conversation, but I think it's fair to mentioning,

• 54:36Speaker 02

  like, before the internet, like, you'd have to print pamphlets and open up a fake church and like, really do the work to bring in people into your flock and like convince them to give you their money. And then social media came out and just basically like, if you want to be a grifter, it's like, it's a gold rush, right? Not only is it easier to find people, but people will put in their own bios, like, please take my money, like, hashtag Q, you know, where we go, where we go, when we go all, like, you're basically advertising to the sheep, I mean, as a sheep, to the wolves, like, please take advantage of me. And so, like, in these conversations about deplatforming, the most vocal people are often the ones who stand the most to gain from like being able to be trolls online.

• 55:20Rich Roll?

  And the most to lose, should they be deplatformed.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 55:23Rich Roll?

  Right. So, how do we, on this, on this theme of like creating some kind of narrative through line from Pepe to President?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 55:33Rich Roll?

  Tracking this through Q, like, now we have, you know, we've got, we've got Josh Hawley, we've got Marjorie Taylor Greene, we've got Lauren Boebert, we got, you know, the Jewish space lasers, and now we have, now we have GameStop, right? Like, is there, like, have you kind of forensically tracked how we have gone in lockstep through these various phases?

• 55:57Speaker 02

  I mean, Pepe.

• 55:58Rich Roll?

  GameStop seems the most similar to the early days of Pepe.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 56:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:03Rich Roll?

  Absolutely.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Rating, like, that's basically a big part of 4chan is about rating. And like, that's the most, uh, rating is basically the idea of like, getting all your online friends to go and focus their energies on doing like, one thing.

• 56:16Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  And affecting reality.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  And affecting reality. And Pepe, essentially, all you have to really think about in terms of Pepe's relationship to all this is that for a long time, Pepe was just the icon for trolling, the icon for that kind of, um, duplicitous, online, uh, maneuvering.

• 56:32Rich Roll?

  Misjudgment.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  Misjudgment. Yeah, so.

• 56:35Rich Roll?

  But there's a glee.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 56:37Rich Roll?

  You know, that comes with this collective energy, like, oh my god, we're all on the same page and we're all, we're gonna actually move culture through our keystrokes.

• 56:47Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:47Rich Roll?

  And that's so intoxicating.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:50Rich Roll?

  Especially if you're, you know, in your mom's basement and it's a pandemic and, you know, you're just on Robin Hood or whatever. Like, are you kidding? Like, that's, it's impossible if you're like a young male to step away from the computer.

• 57:04Speaker 02

  Well, and there's a real sense of, back to the idea of alienation, I mean, in some of the threads I've read for GameStop, you know, there's still a simmering anger from the housing crisis and the bailouts.

• 57:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Right? There's a lot of people who saw their parents lose everything and never recover. I mean, there's some really, I'll send you guys the, some of the links, but like, there's some harrowing stories, personal stories that people have posted on Reddit and stuff about like, why they're all invested in this thing, both literally and emotionally.

• 57:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  And like, the idea for them is like, look, I've been poor my entire life, uh, I'll invest 300 bucks, even though I only have 600, because like, it's all, it doesn't make a difference to me.

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 57:45Speaker 02

  It's more important for me to like, use what little power I have collectively with my other friends to like, Like screw over a bunch of hedge funds.

• 57:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, who cares? It's not about making money. It's about sticking it to the man. And that's why they're able to hold the line even when the stock price, you know, is starting to fall and they're refusing to sell. And the power of that is unbelievable. And to kind of canvas, you know, the reactions of the institutional investors and the hedge funds. I mean, the schadenfreude is delicious, of course, because it's the people again, you know, it's like, let them eat cake. No, you eat cake, you know, and who's gonna, who's gonna, it's a game of chicken and who's gonna blink first? And you have this mob that's really, I think you made a very good point, which is, I think we're at a point

• 58:32Rich Roll?

  culturally where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is reached such a point of division that it's inevitable that we're seeing these things kind of happen. And if you look back in history, when that gap gets to a certain point, that's when the government becomes destabilized and you sow the seeds of this, you know, this is just, this is a revolution in a certain respect, using tools that never existed before to exert power against control.

• 59:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's gonna be the central struggle for the Biden administration is that he has to show the public that government has a purpose. And it has to like, people have to see material improvements in their lives or else we're all fucked.

• 59:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Because of that gap, right?

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, because the accelerationism is happening. It's happening. And I think it's also, you know, talking about context, it's, you know, we've experienced the COVID shutdowns and the stock market has in many cases had gains. There, you know, there's a lot of CEOs that have made a tremendous amount of money. People are aware of this now. And then we're also dealing with, people have a deeper literacy of cryptocurrency on all of this online trading and people no longer have a sense of reverence for any of this stuff. Because they don't see the way that it's affecting them. You know, they're not sort of thinking about their mutual funds in the basement. They're just thinking about causing chaos and then also hoping that this will improve some sort of future that they recognize needs to happen.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  They recognize a change needs to happen.

• 1:00:05Adam Skolnick?

  It's not just causing chaos, though. I mean, they're out to make money. I mean, you know, you have, they're banding together, right? So that like, just for your listener, correct me if I'm wrong, but just to recap it for listeners that maybe haven't read all the GameStop.

• 1:00:16Rich Roll?

  Is there anybody who does? Like, yeah, I'm just assuming everybody knows. I don't know how you could not know what this is.

• 1:00:21Adam Skolnick?

  A little capsule of, you have a group of young investors using Reddit forums and TikTok, and they recruit and explain these kind of mass mobilized stock purchases. And GameStop was one, AMC Theaters the other. It turns out it's all these analog stocks. It's like, instead of like, you know, the Bushwick hipsters that would use a BlackBerry, these people are buying BlackBerry stock and doing it together. But first, but obviously, it was, it was GameStop was the number one.

• 1:00:55Rich Roll?

  It's out of nostalgia.

• 1:00:57Adam Skolnick?

  Out of nostalgia, but also as a fuck you, because it's strategic. They see all these hedge funds who are shorting specific stocks and they know.

• 1:01:04Rich Roll?

  It was the aggressiveness of the short positions that these hedge funds were taking. They had commandeered, you know, more shares than were currently available. Like, I'm no expert, I don't even know how that works, but I think if their short positions hadn't been so aggressive, this might not have ever happened. But the Wall Street Bets subreddit, you know, made everybody aware of how egregious this was and marshaled all of these people to take a stand against it. And I think the other important point to make is that the tools to flex your control over this became so fluid that young people who weren't even old enough to get Robinhood accounts could get them, not only get them, but knew intuitively how to use them. They're so easy to use right now.

• 1:01:49Rich Roll?

  And so those things coalesce to create a perfect storm for this event to occur.

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think the irony is, from what I've read about how the GameStop thing started, it really started like two years ago by one particular user on this particular subreddit, Wall Street Bets, but like, it was kind of.

• 1:02:07Adam Skolnick?

  Kitty, right?

• 1:02:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it was kind of rooted in. Fundamentals, right? Like, he noticed that they actually had a lot of cash on hand.

• 1:02:13Rich Roll?

  They were undervalued.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so it really starts from a pretty shrewd position that came from what, you know, this is the lie that Wall Street tells the public, which is that they know best, right? And here's a perfect example of someone who doesn't have a huge institution behind him, just does a lot of research and sees a hole in the market and an opportunity. And, you know, everyone else piles on, but it took him like two years.

• 1:02:34Rich Roll?

  But Michael Burry piled on too. Like, Michael Burry was early on this as well. He was saying the exact same thing. He went all in on GameStop, like, I don't know how long ago, but quite a while ago.

• 1:02:44Speaker 02

  But what's funny too is that this is a return, you know, it's worth pointing out, because we've kind of trashed 4chan for a while here. When 4chan really got it in its heyday and its early days, it really came from a more kind of hacktivist position. It was really during Occupy Wall Street that it started doing its first big raids. And there, you know, some of the first famous ones were against like the Church of Scientology and other sort of financial institution-based things. But this is an interesting cultural turn back towards what you might otherwise call like a kind of collectivist perspective on like how raids can benefit.

• 1:03:23Speaker 03

  Well, and the things that they're trading are, you know, GameStop is something that people love. Like, it is nostalgia. And it's like, people have gotten rich off of their passion. And therefore, there's some just desserts that are happening.

• 1:03:36Adam Skolnick?

  Oh, and your guy that you're talking about, the guy that started it, invested like 50 something thousand dollars and topped out at over 40 million at one point, he claimed. And who knows what, but like, so that, but it's also a police operation, right? Policing these hedge funds. Now the hedge funds are gonna have to watch.

• 1:03:52Rich Roll?

  Right. But now they're hiring their own meme department. So there's like a countervailing war afoot for, in the attention economy, right? So they're hiring a bunch of young people who are gonna create their own memes that are gonna contravene the memes that are coming out of Wall Street Bets. And there's gonna be a war of ideas afoot. But essentially, when you step back from this and look at it, what's to stop? This community of people from every week just deciding, okay, here's what we're all gonna buy this today. And then millions of people like buy this stuff like they could just repetitively do this at will. And commandeer the entire market.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  It's hard, though. I mean, like, ask Michael Bloomberg, because he spent a lot of money creating memes and it got him nowhere. Or ask us, we're trying to sell our film to the same community of people and as fast as we can, it's hard to like get a huge movement. But, you know, the truth is

• 1:04:44Adam Skolnick?

  It's hard to go viral.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  It's hard to go viral. That's the point.

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, but this is a lightning in the bottle kind of moment where I think people are dawning, like, people are having a system awareness. They weren't aware of before and they realize how easy it is to game these systems. And there's more people willing to sort of be part of that. I think it's also just generational. There's a, there is a younger generation who is really enjoying this that doesn't feel secure in their future. And how are they going to find meaning in America?

• 1:05:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's a super important point.

• 1:05:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the grand narratives of America are going away. And we have to figure out new narratives that we can all latch on to to find meaning in our lives.

• 1:05:26Adam Skolnick?

  But the problem is you have these two, now there's two dueling stock projects, right? Ben Mezrich and the

• 1:05:33Rich Roll?

  So this is so, I mean, on the subject of like the, just the velocity of the news cycle, like Ben Mezrich hasn't even like, all he has is a book proposal on GameStop.

• 1:05:43Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:05:44Rich Roll?

  There's no book yet. He sells the book and the movie rights get picked up by essentially the same team that made the social, the social network, with the exception of Fincher. He's got like the same producing team, the Winklevy are involved.

• 1:05:59Rich Roll?

  No, the Winklevy are involved in this project. Yeah. Because Mezrich also wrote a book about Bitcoin where those two guys are like the starring

• 1:06:08Adam Skolnick?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:06:08Rich Roll?

  feature in that. At the same time, Netflix just announced another GameStop movie project as well, right?

• 1:06:17Adam Skolnick?

  Right. So the reason that's important, though, is that like, you know what it's gonna be? These movies are gonna be like, look at the little guy, got rich at the expense of the big guy. And we're telling the same story in America. And the story is, the answer to your problems is money. And listen, for someone who's been broke a lot of his adult life and just scraping by, but like, and now has made some money, money doesn't buy happiness, it buys happier, it's true. But like, the idea that we need to recalibrate who we are and how we function, I think goes that deep. Like, we really need to start to ask important questions about, like, meaning of life shit, because otherwise, this stuff is going to keep happening. It's, the cycles are just gonna keep repeating.

• 1:06:59Rich Roll?

  But it's more complicated than the money. So much of this is, is just the fuck you to the man

• 1:07:04Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:07:04Rich Roll?

  against a system that has overlooked these people and not given them the opportunities that they feel that they've been promised. And so-

• 1:07:13Adam Skolnick?

  The, the American dream entitlement.

• 1:07:15Rich Roll?

  It's like, that's, you know, the, the guy who's not worried about losing his 300 bucks, even though he doesn't have any money, because the point that's being made is, is more important. And that's the sense of emotional connection to a movement and the community aspect of this. That's so, that's so powerful.

• 1:07:31Adam Skolnick?

  But if the story is, like, the answer is, we, you know, fuck you and we made some of your money. Which, hopefully, the movies are more complex than that, but like, cuz, cuz we don't know how it ends.

• 1:07:41Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:07:42Adam Skolnick?

  But some of these people are gonna lose all their money, and it won't just go back to the beginning. But like, you're saying, you need to see some tangible, like, government has to improve people's lives. There has to be some tangible change in the way we relate to each other and in the way government is, is viewed. Because, a lot of what you're saying, like, this entitlement, it's like, I'm getting screwed. Some of that's just- It's just a story you're telling yourself. It's not all true. You know, like, there are opportunities here in this country to do, to do better. It's, it is hard, it is hard and the, the, the rich are getting richer, it's true. But there is opportunity out there every day you wake up and we all know that.

• 1:08:24Adam Skolnick?

  And so, uh, not all of those things are true, but you, that doesn't mean that people aren't embittered. And so there's this, especially when you look at the rotunda. People who show up, like that real estate woman who showed up in a private jet. There are people who are, I know people who have done very well and are still embittered. So embittered that they think the 1619 project is somehow a personal affront to them. Like this crazy shit, like it doesn't make any sense. There's a, there's a bitterness level to, to this that, that is hard to kind of quantify. And then you have people like Holly that you brought up, um, who's trying to ride that basically to the presidency. Or, or you have these other, you know, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Brobbert, who are just riding the wave because maybe they're part of the wave.

• 1:09:10Adam Skolnick?

  You know, calling for the assassination of the Speaker of the House and that person's now sitting in Congress. Like there's a bitterness level that's just really, we haven't quite figured out yet, right? Like where it's coming from and how to fix it. But, uh, I think there's fundamental questions in this country that need to be answered. And, and, you know, this is a nice story, but like to fix it in order for the Wall Street to be safe, in order for all of us to be safe, in order for people to feel good in their own neighborhoods. Got to fix this stuff.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, the, the through line there, the thing that connects QAnon and the Wall Street Bets, uh, GameStop thing is that it's two groups of people who, um, are experiencing a kind of like,

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  I don't know, rejection of, of, of the American dream, but for two completely different reasons. Like the QAnon people have had to confront a reality that like, um, the truth about America, American exceptionalism has kind of eroded around them. Whether it's like the BLM protests this last summer or just the fact that the internet exists now and that you were exposed to information that you maybe were hidden from for years before. And now you're having to like confront this reality and there's a certain level of, of, uh, What's the term I'm looking for here?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  Like, intellectual...

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  What's this?

• 1:10:29Speaker 02

  Cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance, there we go. There's a cognitive dissonance that's happening. And they want to maintain that perception of American exceptionalism. And so Q very neatly gives them that. That they're on the side of good and the other people are evil. And then with the GameStop people, it's similarly a rejection of the American dream or feeling that like it's not there for them. And they're like using their collective energies to like impact it in ways that they think will help ameliorate the problem. So they're both kind of pretty directly connected.

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  I think it dovetails also with just the religious nature of America.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:07Speaker 03

  We've always been obsessed with apocalypse. Even people who aren't necessarily religious have just... That's become part of who they are and their thinking. You know, for all of these people we've talked about, you know, they believe we're living in the end times. Josh Hawley believes that we are living in Babylon. It's something where he thinks that, you know, the rapture is upon us. There's a lot of people out there who are just hardwired to think that there is no future because they can't conceive of it. And I think that sometimes even understanding that is part of the problem. You have like, we were talking about like the GameStop movie. Like, I'm sure the end of that movie will be kind of like an anti corporate idea.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  At the end of it, but it's being made by a corporation who's making money off of that. So this awareness of the futility is only making us more bitter.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:11:53Rich Roll?

  And ultimately...

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  It's the stories that we're telling.

• 1:11:56Rich Roll?

  Ultimately, the way this is going to shake out is like any casino where the house wins.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:12:01Rich Roll?

  Like, okay, Wall Street Bets upended these hedge funds, but at some point, there's going to be a recalibration where these hedge funds are going to come out on top. If history tells us anything, whether through regulatory measures or what have you, something's going to occur that is going to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. But also... And that's only going to fuel like that level of frustration and discontent.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  Poor Elon. In terms of the house winning, like BlackRock owned a significant chunk of GameStop before this and they made something like $3 billion out of it. So like they're...

• 1:12:37Rich Roll?

  And you also, we should point out, you made a good point on Twitter the other day, Giorgio. It would be terrible and disheartening. Like, we need to know more about who's invested in these hedge funds that took these short positions because... You know, chances are there are pension funds and teachers' union funds and things like that. People's retirement is tied up in these massive hedge funds. And when those short positions tank and those people lose all their money, those are, those are the very people that are, you know, the same community. It's like the parents of the Wall Street Bets people are losing their retirement funds as a result of this.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  It wouldn't be the first time, if that ends up happening, it wouldn't be the first time that a 4chan raid has gone backfired.

• 1:13:19Rich Roll?

  Why, here's a question for you. We were talking about this, Adam.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Rich Roll?

  In this conversation around the regulation of these social media platforms, or how to, you know, deal with speech, it seems like Reddit has gotten somewhat of a pass here. And there's a, there is, the conventional wisdom is that Reddit has done a better job than Facebook and Twitter. I don't know enough about it to know if that's true or not, but what do you, like, the R. Donald existed for-

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  On television.

• 1:13:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  They've had a nas, I mean, so Ellen, when Ellen Powell was the CEO, I tried to get her to be a part of the film, but she politely declined. But I would have really loved to have talked to her about this. But, you know, she was removed as CEO during the midst of the Gamergate thing. And I think in hindsight, that was probably a really bad move. And I think they had been like, living with, I mean, as the board, I guess, they'd been living with that guilt of that mistake, probably. And I think they've taken pretty proactive attempts at like, you know, they took down the Donald. Moderation just operates a lot differently there. I'm by no means an expert, but for sure, they have definitely skirted a lot of blame. But they also took down the Wall Street Bets thing.

• 1:14:33Rich Roll?

  Well, they, they did it, they made it private, right?

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Rich Roll?

  And then it went public again. But I think they pulled that. And now it's up the way it was. It was private for a while. Like, when the, when the trading volume was insane, they made it private for a minute.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean- I'm not an expert on it either. I think that they always try to like, when they pull down like the Donald, they pull down several lefty kind of boards at the same time. So they try to give people the illusion of parody, which I think ultimately is probably good. But I don't think radicalization happens on Reddit the same way it happens in Facebook or in Twitter. I think, also, I mean, taking Parler down, all these, all these sort of things are cursory moves, but you know, everyone uses multiple platforms and the problems still remain on Twitter and Facebook. And those are the places where people, I think, really lose themselves. So.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  It's also like, understanding the nature of their mechanics, right? On Reddit, things get upvoted and downvoted. So there's kind of a consensus there that's much different than, for example, the way 4chan works, which things flow to the top just simply by virtue of the engagement. So in 4chan, if you just post something really incendiary and get a lot of posts, replies to it, it'll, it'll move to the top. So those are, it's like kind of nuanced, but it, it produces much different thinking.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  I think Reddit's more of an entertainment site, whereas these other are more lifestyle sites. You know, so if you're on Facebook, the way that radicalization will often happen on Facebook is you have these sort of extreme ideas coming into places that are not extreme. You have people liking and sharing this stuff and then ultimately normalizing it in the same feed that they're sharing pictures of their grandkids or, you know, memes about Bible verses or whatnot. And Reddit, the, the flow of information isn't quite so chaotic. You're going there for specific reasons to, to be part of a specific community. Facebook, though, you really kind of end up absorbing these ideas in what seems to be a relatively organic way.

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  They're fed to you.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Yes, they're fed to you. And so, um, yeah, we're just, we have this problem right now where there's just a lot of toxic waste in the system and it's mutating people. And I don't know.

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  And we do have zombies out there.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  But it's hard to, it's hard, you know, uh, on 4chan, as related to Pepe, like there's the, the big thing people will say when they haven't seen Feels Good Man yet is that like, Pepe isn't a hate symbol. You took the bait, you normie.

• 1:17:01Rich Roll?

  Right. There was, there was some YouTube comments on our podcast. Like a bunch of those guys and I was like. Did you listen? Did you watch the podcast?

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  But it's like that Pepe represented a way to like what we call, Arthur referred to earlier as like being irony poisoned. That there's a moment at which you can't tell what is joke and what is real. And for a lot of new users of social media in general, older audiences, it's even harder for them to discern what's newer or what's real or what's a joke. And it just like reminded me, I was trying to find the article before we came today, but I remember when the Colbert Report went off the air and there was an article in like The New Yorker or something about it. And they said that something like some astonishingly high number of regular viewers of the show did not discern that it was satire. Like 20% of the regular audience didn't understand that Colbert was doing a bit. And so I think about that.

• 1:17:53Adam Skolnick?

  You should have known then.

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  So like.

• 1:17:55Adam Skolnick?

  We should have all moved to Sydney.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. Exactly. So anyway, I would love to, I'm pretty sure that's, I'm not making that up.

• 1:18:01Adam Skolnick?

  One question before you rabbit rich. Was Pepe in the rotunda?

• 1:18:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, but not as much as you would have thought maybe.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, there were a handful of people there wearing Pepe masks. And then there were some Pepe signs, but I mean, it is interesting to see.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  They were older people.

• 1:18:18Speaker 03

  Some of the people masked were younger, though it was interesting to see like at the rally in Georgia before the election there, there was a number of people who were wearing like Pepe stuff. Like there was a guy wearing a Pepe shirt, but he was an older guy. He was like 65 and all the people who were, who were commenting on it underneath the posting were all like older women who were like, Pepe, Pepe. So the generational shift is apparent in that, in that moment. I mean, obviously memes played a huge part in the rotunda riot. You saw the Kekistani flag, you saw all this different stuff and people were often, you know,

• 1:18:59Speaker 03

  a lot of the Proud Boys were wearing antisemitic, you know, the Holocaust didn't happen, you know, six million is not enough kind of memes. It was a very memed thing in part because I think people really wanted to participate in it through social media. And this was a way to do it. And then obviously to find each other in the crowd because it was so chaotic.

• 1:19:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:21Rich Roll?

  Despite the presence of Pepe, though, it does feel like culture's kind of moved on.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  For sure.

• 1:19:27Rich Roll?

  It wasn't omnipresent in that at all. Like, it was kind of there, but it's, the sense that I got was like, okay, we're on to other things now.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Pepe's played out.

• 1:19:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's played out, right?

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  Pepe is a much, there's a much bigger relationship, like, positive relationship people have to Pepe. For example, on Twitch, it's like the number one. If you look at a list of the 100 most used emotes on Twitch, Pepe occupies like 50 of the top 100, and they all are like... Back to the original Pepe version of just being a funny reaction image.

• 1:19:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Matt's getting his wish.

• 1:19:57Rich Roll?

  Wow, Matt, yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 1:19:59Adam Skolnick?

  I'm still trying to wrap my head around wearing Holocaust denial merch to just stand out in a crowd so your buddy can see you. Yeah, I'm over at 4H. I'm wearing the 6 million is not enough t-shirt. The only guy.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  I'm the only guy. There's a big space around me.

• 1:20:14Adam Skolnick?

  It's okay, folks, I'm Jewish.

• 1:20:15Rich Roll?

  Be careful, though, because a laser might get you from space.

• 1:20:18Adam Skolnick?

  Right. Oh my god, like, can we talk about, is she the dumbest congressperson of our lifetime?

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  I will say, Denver, Denver Riggleman, the former Republican congressman who we shot a little bit with last year, he's gotten into it quite a bit with her online, but he made something very, a very like, simple point to make, which is just that the starting salary for a congressperson, or the salary for a congressperson is like $165,000 or something. He's like, that's more money than most people have ever seen, or will ever see, and like...

• 1:20:51Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, we're overpaying for that.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  What you're seeing is the, is the enmeshing, basically, of like, social media personalities and government, and it's like, if you're gonna be a grifter, it's never been a better time to be in government as a grifter, basically.

• 1:21:06Adam Skolnick?

  Cause you also can, can raise money beyond that. Like, look at, didn't, wasn't it disclosed that Trump made, like, raised how many million dollars, or was it...

• 1:21:16Speaker 02

  31. Oh, well, in the two weeks after the election, yeah.

• 1:21:20Adam Skolnick?

  200 something million dollars.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, something. And he spends zero on the, it was all under the, the one I read was like 31 or 32 million dollars specifically on emails that were about Senate in Georgia, and he spends literally zero dollars.

• 1:21:32Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, cause there was like a...

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  I can't wait for the friend that's counting to come out.

• 1:21:35Adam Skolnick?

  By the way, we don't have to spend this on this.

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:21:37Adam Skolnick?

  We can keep it, slip off it.

• 1:21:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't know if she's the dumbest or not, but she might be. I mean, it's pretty astounding.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  It's pretty bad.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  Like, Boebert and her are wild. Yeah, they're, they're, they're basically just assemblages of memes. I mean, even when you hear them talk.

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  They can't speak. Yeah, it's just like a regurgitation of internet gab.

• 1:21:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they're

• 1:21:56Adam Skolnick?

  Which is why I think Holly is worse, because I didn't know about Holly's feeling about living in Babylon. Like, I think, I was reading, you know, the reporting on Holly is that he was thought of as this star and really an intellectual giant. And, and, and the fact that he is like, you know, it's great to see him disavowed by his mentor, who doesn't have to run for

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  Danforth?

• 1:22:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, but like, the way he's saying it's the biggest mistake of his entire life.

• 1:22:25Speaker 03

  And that carries water. Like, I'm from, I'm from Missouri.

• 1:22:28Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  And so Danforth is definitely a very powerful and well-loved politician in Missouri. I'm curious to see what Holly's future is in the state. In part because Missouri's often been a bellwether. You know, people like, you know, Roy Blunt and John Ashcroft and these sort of people have come out of Missouri and then come into the international stage and had a lot of power. Yeah, Holly is an ideologue. He's unlike Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene. He has like a very specific ideological framework that he talks about. You know, he talks about it in Christian media, more so than in national media. But yeah, he's someone who, like a lot of, a lot of the insurrectionists have given up on democracy.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  It was a coalition of people who have given up on democracy, and he's one of them. He doesn't believe that freedom can exist in the civil society because we're not all Christian evangelicals.

• 1:23:21Adam Skolnick?

  He just wants power.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, completely.

• 1:23:23Rich Roll?

  And it's frightening because

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  And he thinks it's divinely, yeah, he thinks it's, it comes from Jesus Christ.

• 1:23:30Rich Roll?

  And he's not a dummy. You know, that Politico, that Politico article was very revealing. It was, it interviewed a bunch of his professors at Stanford. And David Kennedy, who's a professor that I had at Stanford, like, I know David Kennedy, said that Josh was the most talented student that he ever had. You know, and like, this is a guy who's bright.

• 1:23:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50Rich Roll?

  His ideas might not align with yours, but he should not be underestimated. And he cannot be lumped in with the Boeberts and the Taylor Greens. He's a different animal.

• 1:24:00Adam Skolnick?

  And when he was 15, he wrote in his Lexington newspaper, Lexington, Missouri newspaper, a defense of the militia after the Oklahoma City bombing. And just saying that militia, people who are in militia shouldn't be maligned as racist. They shouldn't be called terrorists as a 15-year-old. So You know, so even though.

• 1:24:20Rich Roll?

  He's not opportunist in his ideologue.

• 1:24:22Adam Skolnick?

  I think he is an opportunist, like to, to your.

• 1:24:24Rich Roll?

  Well, but it's, it's inbred in, it's not, it's not, he's not a Johnny come lately to these ideas because it's opportunistic to be that way. This is the person that he's been.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  I'm curious though, because.

• 1:24:33Adam Skolnick?

  And he's just been masking it in different company.

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  Because he comes across as such an egghead. I think there's a part of Republican politics that doesn't necessarily like the Ivy League education.

• 1:24:44Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:24:44Speaker 03

  You know, I, I'm curious to see, I think him, you know, sort of coming out in, basically in support of the insurrection, um, was him trying to seem alpha, was him trying to sort of play Trump's game to Trump's audience.

• 1:24:58Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:24:58Speaker 03

  And I think they're going to see through it. I think they're going to realize.

• 1:25:00Rich Roll?

  The way they see through Ted Cruz.

• 1:25:02Adam Skolnick?

  Maybe, but you know, here's the thing is that like, so I, I was, I gave you my optimistic view on how this is going to work out well for us.

• 1:25:09Rich Roll?

  Come on, man, we gotta, we gotta land this. We gotta go hardcore.

• 1:25:14Adam Skolnick?

  It's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna segue with Babylon, Berlin. And that is, like, people were talking about Kristallnacht as the, as like the Nazi equivalent of what happened at the Rotunda, but that's not what it was. It was the push, uh, I don't know how to pronounce it right, but in 1929 or 30, I forget when it was, when Hitler's first attempt to take over government, um, he had a mob like this and he was arrested and he was put in jail and he was eventually pardoned and came out of it and ended up, you know.

• 1:25:41Speaker 03

  We all know where that went.

• 1:25:42Adam Skolnick?

  We all know where that went. So the question really is, you know, it's easy, I, I also, my instinct is that anyone who tries to play Trump's game is going to lose because only Trump can play it. And I think Holly will lose, but there is, uh, like if there's any one of those people that scares me, it's him and, and, uh, and we won't know what happens. Like you said, like this is, there's a 10 year timeline to where this is going and hopefully we'll come out of it. I think we can come out of it. I think we mapped out how we'll come out of it, but there is a, there are multiple realities. So we'll, we'll see.

• 1:26:15Rich Roll?

  And if we know anything, we know by next week, everything will be something else crazy will happen and we'll be having a different conversation.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  In the meantime, watch this movie.

• 1:26:25Rich Roll?

  Thank you.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  I love that you're in the shirt. That's amazing. Yeah, thank you.

• 1:26:31Rich Roll?

  I love having you guys here. That was super fun. Please, everybody who's listening or watching, go out, check out Feels Good Man on Apple Plus, preferably. It's a fantastic documentary. If you have not listened to the podcast that I did with these gentlemen a couple of weeks ago, check that out. I'll link that up in the show notes and in the description below. How's it going with the movie before we end it here? It's Oscar week, people are voting.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  People are voting.

• 1:26:57Rich Roll?

  We gotta get attention on this movie.

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  We're a dark horse.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're definitely a dark horse.

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, but it's gone great. We did a big Twitch livestream, actually, with a number of gamers.

• 1:27:09Rich Roll?

  Lots of Academy voters on Twitch, right?

• 1:27:12Speaker 03

  You know, no Academy voters, but Fury was on the line with us. And it was like, great. It was a very like, positive, interesting, engaged conversation. We continue to meet people who the film means something to them. Yeah.

• 1:27:27Rich Roll?

  It's a long-tail film.

• 1:27:29Speaker 03

  It's a long-tail film that, and yeah, it's something we've been so passionate about. It's great to see it out in the world and people responding to it.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the best documentary of the year is definitely Time on Amazon, which you should definitely watch. So by no means do we think we have a chance in hell of winning anything, but it would be nice to just get shortlisted.

• 1:27:46Rich Roll?

  Time is a really good movie.

• 1:27:47Adam Skolnick?

  I like your movie better.

• 1:27:50Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:27:51Adam Skolnick?

  I like Time. I like Time. It's really fascinating how they made that movie.

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  That was one, if there was a movie theater, that's one I really breaks my heart there was. That and that was the last film we saw at Sundance last year and it's like. It's a beautiful movie.

• 1:28:03Rich Roll?

  And Sundance is going on right now. Are you guys doing any panels or you have any involvement with that?

• 1:28:07Speaker 03

  No, but our producers who worked on Feels Good Man with us have a couple of films there. They have a film named Cusp that I haven't seen, but I'm excited to see it. And yeah, it is too bad, it's all online.

• 1:28:20Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  I mean, it's such a fun experience to go there and just.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Have you seen their virtual waiting room thing?

• 1:28:25Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:28:26Speaker 02

  Oh, it's really dystopic.

• 1:28:28Adam Skolnick?

  Is it really?

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's such a fun in-person event. Like, I just can't imagine the virtual version of it.

• 1:28:36Speaker 03

  Well, hopefully, that's how the world will change between this podcast being recorded and put out in the world.

• 1:28:41Adam Skolnick?

  It will help. It will help if people can hang out.

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:28:46Adam Skolnick?

  It will.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  100%.

• 1:28:49Adam Skolnick?

  If the kids can go back to school.

• 1:28:51Rich Roll?

  That's the title of this podcast. I just have the title of the episode.

• 1:28:56Adam Skolnick?

  We don't do well on our own.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in a weird way, the anti-maskers are really just people that are just dying for a hug. That's really all I want at the end of the day. They just can't deal with.

• 1:29:06Adam Skolnick?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:29:08Rich Roll?

  There was a, I think it was, it was either an Onion article or some other kind of satire piece on the internet that said, "Proud boy gets turned with one hug from dad," or something.

• 1:29:24Speaker 02

  That's Hard Times. HardTimes.com.

• 1:29:28Adam Skolnick?

  It's true.

• 1:29:31Rich Roll?

  See, feels good, man. Thanks for coming on, you guys.

• 1:29:33Adam Skolnick?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:29:34Rich Roll?

  Come back anytime. Let's, let's continue this conversation.

• 1:29:36Adam Skolnick?

  Thank you both.

• 1:29:37Rich Roll?

  All right. And let's all go hardcore happy.

• 1:29:39Adam Skolnick?

  Hardcore happy. Hardcore happy. Well, that, you brought your, you have a guest coming up that can teach us how to be, how to connect with each other, right?

• 1:29:47Rich Roll?

  We do, yeah.

• 1:29:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:48Rich Roll?

  We'll talk about that after the break.

• 1:29:49Adam Skolnick?

  All right, cool.

• 1:29:50Rich Roll?

  So we'll take a break. We'll be back with more.

• 1:30:00Rich Roll?

  All right, and we're back. I love those guys. That was great.

• 1:30:02Adam Skolnick?

  Hot.

• 1:30:03Rich Roll?

  I thought it might be like 30 to 40 minutes. How long did we go? Like, an hour, right? There's no way I was gonna interrupt that.

• 1:30:09Adam Skolnick?

  Time stops when I'm with you, Rich, especially when I'm talking.

• 1:30:13Rich Roll?

  So, this is gonna be yet another marathon, roll on, right? But I think we, during the break, we decided to eviscerate the outline a little bit to not make it too long. But I do wanna do a little bit of show and tell, a couple wins of the week, and we'll get to three listener questions. And at the top of my list of show and tells, I've got two things. The first thing is, and this is nothing new, but I just felt like amidst all the darkness, we could all use a little bit of... Innocent happiness.

• 1:30:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:30:46Rich Roll?

  And I wanted to draw a little bit of attention to David Lynch's wonderful weather reports. Are you familiar with this?

• 1:30:54Adam Skolnick?

  I am, I am, I, because I listen to KCRW and so he pops up on Morning Becomes Eclectic.

• 1:30:59Rich Roll?

  Does he do the weather report on the radio?

• 1:31:01Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he's their weather guy.

• 1:31:02Rich Roll?

  Oh, I didn't know that. So I don't know when he started doing this, but on YouTube, every single day, he just looks to camera and he says, "Good morning, today is whatever it is," and then he looks out the window and he tells you what the weather is gonna be. And it's just the best.

• 1:31:15Adam Skolnick?

  He looks great.

• 1:31:16Rich Roll?

  I love it.

• 1:31:17Adam Skolnick?

  You know, there's a short list of people that can stay cool for like four decades.

• 1:31:22Rich Roll?

  He's the coolest.

• 1:31:23Adam Skolnick?

  Bowie and David Lynch, there's only a few people, Prince, there's only a few.

• 1:31:27Rich Roll?

  My son Tyler and Trapper just love David Lynch. Like, they just can't get enough of him. And how old is he now? He's in his seventies, right?

• 1:31:34Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, that's what I mean.

• 1:31:35Rich Roll?

  And he's still the coolest guy in the room.

• 1:31:37Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:31:37Rich Roll?

  No matter what.

• 1:31:38Adam Skolnick?

  He is.

• 1:31:38Rich Roll?

  And all he does is say, "This is what the weather's gonna be like today." And I don't know what it is about his energy, but I'm always glad that I watch it.

• 1:31:47Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, he's happy, he's a happy, like, he makes you feel happier.

• 1:31:50Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 1:31:50Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Rich Roll?

  It's great, we all need more of that. It was trending on Twitter, I think today, because he announced that he was thinking about not doing it anymore.

• 1:31:59Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Rich Roll?

  And all the fans revolted. And so his big announcement was that he would continue with his weather reports.

• 1:32:05Adam Skolnick?

  He's gonna keep doing it.

• 1:32:06Rich Roll?

  Supplemented with also, I don't know if you know this, he also does the number of the day.

• 1:32:11Adam Skolnick?

  Yes, but not everyone has a number of the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, is that like a, does he play the numbers?

• 1:32:19Rich Roll?

  No, he just basically says, "The number of the day is," and he just says a number.

• 1:32:23Adam Skolnick?

  Okay.

• 1:32:23Rich Roll?

  And that's the number of the day, according to David Lynch.

• 1:32:26Adam Skolnick?

  I wonder if like his, his parents played the numbers back in New York or something.

• 1:32:29Rich Roll?

  I think you're attributing too much forethought to all of this.

• 1:32:32Adam Skolnick?

  I'm reading too deep into it.

• 1:32:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, just take it for what it is. I would say a second cousin to this is Anthony Hopkins, little videos that he posts on Twitter and Instagram. They're always full of love and happiness.

• 1:32:45Adam Skolnick?

  Really? Really?

• 1:32:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:47Adam Skolnick?

  You mean Hannibal Lecter?

• 1:32:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's great.

• 1:32:50Adam Skolnick?

  Full of love and happiness?

• 1:32:51Rich Roll?

  Anthony Hopkins, not to be confused with Hannibal Lecter. All right, let's keep it moving. You mentioned earlier... Babylon Berlin, which is a TV show that I wanted to share with all of you guys that I've been enjoying. It's a German series that's airing on Netflix. It was created by writer-director Tom Tyquard, who is the guy behind Run Lola Run and also Cloud Atlas. And I find this show, I'm in, I'm like near the end of season two, there's three seasons currently available that are streaming right now. And I find this show to be really fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all, it's exceptionally photographed, like it's visually arresting and stunning.

• 1:33:34Rich Roll?

  And essentially, it's a story, it's multiple stories that take place in Berlin, post-World War I, in the midst of this newly emerged Weimar Republic, where it's a new democracy, but it's a fragile democracy. And we see this extraordinary wealth disparity. On the one hand, you have this roaring twenties culture of nightclubs and fabulous music and dancing and drinking and revelry, juxtaposed against extreme poverty. And the storylines elucidate the fragility of democratic institutions.

• 1:34:13Rich Roll?

  It's about corruption and it's about the nationalistic creep that ultimately later leads to Nazism through the lens of the protagonist, who is this police investigator and all the kind of people that he encounters.

• 1:34:30Adam Skolnick?

  And a World War I veteran.

• 1:34:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, World War I veteran. And so there's a lot of, there's a lot of, you know, guys with disfigured faces and maimed. And, and he, this protagonist, you know, also has these essentially PTSD panic attacks, where he has to down some unknown pharmaceutical that I assume is like morphine or something like that. He just goes into these, these shaking fits and, and I don't know, I just think it's. Standing in and of itself, it's a fascinating look into a particular culture, but I think it also is prescient and relevant to some of the things that our culture is grappling with right now, the fragility of our own democratic institutions and the nationalistic creep

• 1:35:14Rich Roll?

  that you see when that wealth gap becomes as extreme as it did in Germany at that time and as it's quickly becoming in our country.

• 1:35:25Adam Skolnick?

  Great movie, I mean, great show. Thank you for recommending. I just saw the pilot last night and Run Lola Run was one of my favorites when it came out.

• 1:35:33Rich Roll?

  That's great.

• 1:35:33Adam Skolnick?

  And so I was really excited about it. It's really good. I'm into it. And the best part is that through that show, I finally figured out how to get to subtitles in prestige foreign television on Netflix, because before it was always these horrible dub things and I couldn't get through one episode.

• 1:35:49Rich Roll?

  But you could just select audio and then it gives you all these options.

• 1:35:52Adam Skolnick?

  Hey, I did it.

• 1:35:54Rich Roll?

  It's interesting that you opt for subtitles.

• 1:35:57Adam Skolnick?

  I do.

• 1:35:58Rich Roll?

  And I opted for the dubbing.

• 1:36:00Adam Skolnick?

  You like the dubbing?

• 1:36:01Rich Roll?

  I don't want to read when I'm watching.

• 1:36:03Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:04Rich Roll?

  But here's the thing, you get, the dubbing, of course, it's, it's jarring.

• 1:36:09Adam Skolnick?

  I can't watch a mixed match. I can't do that. I can't.

• 1:36:11Rich Roll?

  It doesn't quite work, but at some point you just get over it and you just go with it.

• 1:36:15Adam Skolnick?

  And the acting's not as good. It's not as good a voice.

• 1:36:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And then, and then if you go back to just the subtitles, the, when you've gotten used to the dub voice and then you hear what their voice actually sounds like, that's also very jarring.

• 1:36:29Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 1:36:29Rich Roll?

  But anyway.

• 1:36:30Adam Skolnick?

  But anyway, I think that the reason it's important, what you're saying is that even today, there's no country that really mirrors what we're going through better than Germany. Not because it's as diverse as we are or has exactly the same problems, but there is this far right QAnon worshiping kind of militia, like white supremacist element that has infiltrated into politics and into even police departments and, and, and the military itself shut down an entire special forces unit. That stuff's all been really well reported by the New York Times. I think we've even maybe touched on it once. And, and so. They're going through the same thing we are. So it's interesting that he's using the 1920s

• 1:37:12Adam Skolnick?

  because when it really first start, you know, the cycle, that same stuff was happening.

• 1:37:16Rich Roll?

  We're familiar. It's a period of time in Germany that I'm just not that familiar with.

• 1:37:20Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:37:20Rich Roll?

  We know about World War I and we know about World War II, but what happened in between those that led to the rise of Hitler?

• 1:37:26Adam Skolnick?

  Right, but that same kind of proto fascist like beginning, like leading towards fascism that leaned the tear between socialism and what was going to become fascism. Those same threads were that same, those same currents are running through America at the same time.

• 1:37:44Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:37:44Adam Skolnick?

  When you had the Lindbergh candidacy and all the would be Lindbergh. So all of that stuff was happening. We've been mirrors of each other for a long, long time. So it's really interesting to watch it now because it's still entertaining because it does transport you. You're not thinking about our problems when you're watching it, but it is, it does give it like that, that relevance.

• 1:38:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And what's great is there's three seasons of it. So I can be enjoying this for quite a while.

• 1:38:06Adam Skolnick?

  Exactly.

• 1:38:07Rich Roll?

  Cool. Why don't you hit me with your win of the week?

• 1:38:10Adam Skolnick?

  My win of the week was the K2 climbers, the Nepalese team of nine climbers that got up to the top of K2 in winter for the very first time. It was the last of the 8,000 meter peaks to be climbed in winter. They've all now been conquered in spring, summer or winter. K2 has by far the highest mortality rate on its slopes compared to any of the others. It's night and days more dangerous than even Everest. And so it was just, I did that story for the New York Times when it happened. I was turned on to the story because I knew Colin O'Brady was among the many climbers that went out.

• 1:38:54Rich Roll?

  Right. He's still like at base camp, right?

• 1:38:56Adam Skolnick?

  He's still at base camp.

• 1:38:57Rich Roll?

  He's been at base camp for months.

• 1:38:58Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And so he was, he was one of that, part of that group. That's how I first got turned on to the fact that people were trying for this. And then. One of the people who I knew about, that he told me about was Nims Dhai or Nims Purja, who is the guy that set the record, world record for climbing all the 8,000 meter peaks in, within a certain amount of time. And he saved, he shaved over seven years off the record.

• 1:39:24Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:39:25Adam Skolnick?

  And, and so Nims Purja is this great Nepalese climber, former British Special Forces, and all these other, and he's not Sherpa, he's not from the Sherpa culture, but everybody else was that was in that group. And so this story is about how they got up to the top and how that all happened. And, and was cool, they've been, they were greeted back in Kathmandu recently with a hero's welcome, like a big, a big motorcade. They've been treated like celebrities or the toast of the town. They were flown out from base camp by the Pakistani militarians and got an audience with the prime minister or the president of Pakistan like right away.

• 1:40:01Rich Roll?

  It did become a big story.

• 1:40:03Adam Skolnick?

  It's a, it's a big deal. It's a big deal because what's cool is all of the 8,000 meter peaks in Nepal were all credit, even though there were, there was always an Nepalese climber right behind whoever got the credit. It was always the European or Western climber that got the first ascent. That's who got credited. So, so this is, this is basically a correction.

• 1:40:26Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very cool.

• 1:40:27Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:28Rich Roll?

  So, everybody check out Adam's article in the New York Times. It's called "How Climbers Reached the Summit of K2 in Winter for the First Time." You've got comments from Renan, Jimmy Chin, Adrian Ballinger, all kinds of cool people.

• 1:40:42Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, hat tip to Rich Roll to get Jimmy Chin to, to connect. Yeah, you did.

• 1:40:47Rich Roll?

  You're the journalist here now. Good stuff, dude. Well, my, my win of the week, hands down, goes to Jim Walmsley, who is an ultra runner extraordinaire, guy who lives in Arizona, for those who aren't familiar, who, just the other week...

• 1:41:06Rich Roll?

  Attempted to break the world record in 100K at this event called the Hoka One Project Carbon X event that was in Chandler, Arizona. He ran 100 kilometers in 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 26 seconds, and ultimately came up just 12 seconds shy of the world record, which was set in 2018 by Japan's Naoko Kazami. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. But he did set an American record by 18 minutes and a PR of 45 minutes. So this is insane. Just so people can grok exactly how extraordinary this is, he ran 556 pace for over 6 hours

• 1:41:51Rich Roll?

  straight. And he clipped a fence at about 3 and 1/2 hours into this thing, and his shoulder was bleeding like it's bananas. And in and of itself, this is an unbelievable accomplishment. But when you set it in the context of this guy's career, it's really noteworthy. Because what's unique about Jim is that he excels not just in ultra running, but in many distances across many terrains. He's won a ton of ultras, of course. He was the victor in the 2018 and the 2019 Western States 100, which is kind of widely considered one of, if not the, most prestigious ultra running race in the world. He set the course record in 2018, and then

• 1:42:35Rich Roll?

  he broke it again in 2019 by 21 minutes. But he also qualified for the Olympic trials in the marathon by running a 64-minute half marathon, and then running a 215 marathon at the Olympic trials. So this is a guy who can kill it on the road, he can kill it at the half marathon, he can go 100 miles, and then some. So incredibly versatile.

• 1:42:59Adam Skolnick?

  Was he set to compete in the Olympics?

• 1:43:00Rich Roll?

  No, I mean, he ran the Olympic trial, he ran 215, so he wasn't going to make the Olympic team with that. But for a guy who, it's unusual for somebody who specializes in ultras or 100-mile races to be a decent marathoner. Because by comparison, the marathon is like, the level of speed that you have to run the marathon in to be at the elite level is a completely different pursuit than running a 100-mile trail race at altitude.

• 1:43:34Adam Skolnick?

  Have you ever run just a marathon? Like not, not the, the, of the Ironman?

• 1:43:40Rich Roll?

  No, I have. I, I ran the Long Beach Marathon before I did any of the Ultramans and it was not a good experience. But it was before I knew what I was doing, but I'm not, I would never be good at that. I'm not, I'm not a fast runner, you know, I'm a, I'm a tortoise.

• 1:43:53Adam Skolnick?

  I was just curious if you've ever done it, like done the New York, I could see you wanting to do the New York Marathon.

• 1:43:57Rich Roll?

  Maybe at some point, we'll see. Um, here's an interesting fact about Jim before we move on. He went to the Air Force Academy and worked as a missileer in Montana, working underground on nuclear weapons at 24 hour shifts. So he's also, you gotta, I would suspect you gotta be a pretty smart dude.

• 1:44:15Adam Skolnick?

  You do, but see, this is always curious to me about people who have dangerous jobs. They shouldn't have 24 hour shifts.

• 1:44:22Rich Roll?

  I agree with that. I agree with.

• 1:44:24Adam Skolnick?

  Like, why, why are surgeons having like?

• 1:44:26Rich Roll?

  Well, the article that I read this in, it just kind of put the 24 hour thing at the end of the sentence, but it doesn't make sense. Doctors, like why?

• 1:44:33Adam Skolnick?

  I don't want my nuclear weapons guy to not get eight hours of sleep.

• 1:44:37Rich Roll?

  I, I'd agree with that. I'd agree with that. All right. Um, let's do some listener questions.

• 1:44:42Adam Skolnick?

  Okay. Um, we didn't get to the Adam Grant book, by the way. Um, do you want to get to that?

• 1:44:47Rich Roll?

  Oh, yeah. So, so today's Monday. On Wednesday, I'm interviewing Adam Grant for the podcast. Uh, for those that don't know, he is a organizational psychologist, multiple New York Times bestselling author, Wharton's most popular professor of all time, like named the most, but you know, he's got millions of views on his TED Talks. He's just an incredible person and his focus is really on trying to help people figure out how to live and pursue meaningful professional lives. Like it's all about like work life. He's got a podcast called Work Life. Anyway, he's got a new book out called Think Again. And so he's very much in the press at the moment and he wrote a New York Times, um, op ed the other day that was kind of relevant to what we were talking about.

• 1:45:30Rich Roll?

  With Georgie Owen Arthur in that it was about how you interface with and communicate with people who have a very different perspective on either an issue or a worldview. And our inclination is to kind of come at them with facts about why they're wrong and why you're right, but that never seems to work. And his ultimate conclusion is really, we need to enter into these kinds of exchanges from a perspective of empathy and curiosity and a true desire to try to understand, like from a question asking perspective, as opposed to an indicting kind of, you know, telling point of view.

• 1:46:14Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:15Rich Roll?

  And that's relevant, I think, when, you know, we're in a divided state at the moment and whether, you know, it's politics or some other, you know, choose your issue, everybody's in their information silo and being, you know, fed a certain type of news that, that, that, you know, satisfies their respective cognitive bias. And it's important for us to understand that just because we see other people with their cognitive biases, doesn't mean that we don't have our own. We all have our own.

• 1:46:44Adam Skolnick?

  Right.

• 1:46:45Rich Roll?

  And in order to kind of create that ability to communicate healthily, we need to be objective about our own biases. And I think when you, when you endeavor to communicate with another person from that perspective of curiosity, you're in a position to perhaps learn something that you wouldn't otherwise.

• 1:47:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. And I liked it because, you know, I definitely fall prey to like my emotions when I get like locking horns on like these issues that are, that I find so important because they are so relevant to like people's lives, right? So you want to, you wanna, I kind of try to tilt towards justice and in that realm and, you know, everyone getting equal opportunity and feeling good in life and having opportunities. So when I end up locking horns, I typically do get. A little too emotional. So it was really helpful to see it laid out because the times I've been effective at communication has always been when I've been more, you know, taken a step back and just ask simple questions.

• 1:47:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:47Adam Skolnick?

  It's a really great article. I can't wait to read the book because one point he makes is process matters in these conversations and how you approach these things matters and who you are and how you feel about yourself ultimately.

• 1:47:59Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:47:59Adam Skolnick?

  So there's that take home as well.

• 1:48:02Rich Roll?

  So more on that in my conversation with Adam.

• 1:48:05Adam Skolnick?

  Looking forward to that one.

• 1:48:07Rich Roll?

  All right, listener questions.

• 1:48:08Adam Skolnick?

  All right. Let's queue it up.

• 1:48:11Speaker 05

  Hey, Rich and Adam. My name is Kevin from the St. Louis area and I have a question about productivity of sorts. So I'm sitting here today watching the events unfold at the Capitol Building, trying to comprehend what's going on and how we've gotten to this point. I'm also using this time amongst other times in 2020 to reflect on my privileges, actions and my role for a better tomorrow. I also have full-time studies as a medical student that today in particular I find very difficult to focus on. In the midst of a global pandemic as well, I find it difficult to be productive. I fail the expectations of my position as a student and during normal times, school is hard enough as it is. My mind tells me that what I'm doing has less importance when our country is hurting so

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  much. My question for you and Rich is your advice on how to focus on school and maybe for others their job and to maintain some semblance of what you're supposed to be doing amidst all that's going on. I'm finding it hard at times to get in the groove with all of this. Feel free to play this on the pod. Thanks for all your insights and discussion to both of you. They mean a lot to me. Have a good one. Thanks. Bye.

• 1:49:16Rich Roll?

  All right. Thanks, Kevin, for that question. Obviously, this question was lodged some weeks ago.

• 1:49:22Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Rich Roll?

  Amidst of the insurrection. And I think, you know, the sentiment that he's conveying is pretty human and pretty normal. I suspect, you know, a lot of people will relate to that and it's indicative of, you know, a very strange and extraordinary time that we're all living through where we're all trying to do our best.

• 1:49:41Adam Skolnick?

  I was glued to that screen.

• 1:49:43Rich Roll?

  We're holding ourselves to a standard of behavior of how we would operate in a normal situation. And these are not normal situations. So the first thing I would say is like, give yourself. A break a little bit right now, be a little gracious with yourself. And that's not to say let yourself off the hook, but I think it's okay to take a breather and not beat yourself up for feeling unproductive in this moment. In terms of how to move forward, I mean, my advice is pretty straightforward and simple and basic. I mean, the first thing is try to control the controllables. There's so much about this that we have no control over. We have no agency over it.

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  The only things we do have control over is our behaviors and our thoughts and our interactions. You're in medical school, so what's the thing in front of you that you need to get done? And break those tasks down into bite sized chunks and try to execute on them in the best way possible. Just do the least amount that you need to do to engender a little bit of momentum and just look for the next right thing. You know, I think it's incumbent upon you as a medical student and somebody who's clearly very busy, it's okay to take a break from the news. Like the news will be the news and you don't have to be, you know, hamstrung in your life because of the news cycle.

• 1:51:07Rich Roll?

  Like you can take that in chunks as well at certain points of the day if you feel you need to, but the news will continue and exist whether you're consuming it or not. I also sense a little bit of guilt or maybe even shame. Like I feel that this person feels like they want to contribute and be of service in a way that they're not feeling connected to in the moment. And I think it's important to just figure out how to be a giver in your own way. That doesn't mean that you have to raise your hand and be some kind of prominent voice in a political movement, but in your own universe, you can be of service to, I don't

• 1:51:50Rich Roll?

  know if you're dealing with patients yet, but your fellow students and your professors. Like, how can you exercise small gestures in a giving type of way that make you feel more connected to the people around you and engender a tighter, a tighter community? On the privilege piece, look, you know, it's fine to acknowledge your privilege, but I don't think that you should feel guilty about the position that you're in. I'm sure you worked very hard to be where you're at. And, you know, if there's anything...

• 1:52:21Rich Roll?

  You don't have to atone for it, but like, I think it's, you should make the most of it. And just to be the best doctor that you can be in service to other people. So to the extent that you may not be able to make a difference, you know, geopolitically, you can find meaning and fulfillment in your work. And that is your unique lever for making a difference. And I think as a doctor, you can make a tremendous amount of difference in so many people's lives. So give yourself a break. It's a pandemic. Things are weird, they're hard. It's all okay. Just do what's in front of you.

• 1:52:58Adam Skolnick?

  Beautiful. I agree. I think sometimes like these bigger storylines that are floating over us, they take on this incredible importance because they, they call into question kind of these stories that we've been telling ourselves about who we are and where we live and what the people around us are up to.

• 1:53:15Rich Roll?

  And they're paralyzing also.

• 1:53:16Adam Skolnick?

  And they're paralyzing, but in reality, real life happens super local. It's on the ground, right around you. And all of that, unless we lived in DC, didn't affect us really like. So it affected us emotionally, but it wasn't like, it didn't change our abilities to move around in our, in our localities.

• 1:53:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:53:35Adam Skolnick?

  And so I think you're right, like finding, keeping it super local, keeping it simple sometimes is the answer. But you know, that's coming from a guy who literally couldn't do anything for like five days. So I'm with you.

• 1:53:49Adam Skolnick?

  You, St. Louis.

• 1:53:50Rich Roll?

  All right. Let's go to John.

• 1:53:51Adam Skolnick?

  All right, John, Sierra Nevada.

• 1:53:54Speaker 06

  Hi, guys. My name's John. I live in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California. It is okay if you play this clip on the air. And my question for you guys is more so directed at Rich, but uh, you know, how do you, how do you address failure? And like, like the colossal type of failure, the type of failure that makes you feel like your, your life's falling apart or you know, the wheels are falling off and you can't grab onto the reins and get control of things again.

• 1:54:28Speaker 06

  You know, when like you know what the higher version of yourself needs to do, but you can't do it because all you can feel is the the lower version of yourself, you know? And how do you tackle things like guilt and shame? And how do you address and like adjust your lifestyle to set yourself up for success? Anyway, thank you, guys. I love the show. I love you, guys. You've done a lot for me, and I appreciate it. Thanks again. Bye.

• 1:54:59Rich Roll?

  That's heavy. I can feel the pain in this one. Yeah.

• 1:55:07Rich Roll?

  It's tough. You know, it sounds like John's going through something extremely difficult. We don't know the details of what that is. But I intuit a sense of of powerlessness in in what he's relating, right? It's the idea of the the two wolves, like which wolf do you feed? And the dark wolf is the one who's getting the best of him at the moment. And there's a sense of an inability to kind of arrest that negative impulse. And I know what that feels like. It's really hard. And, you know, for me, that was in the form of alcoholism. And the solution that I had to come to was breaking the chains of denial and throwing my hands up in the air and literally surrendering rather than trying to control it, letting go.

• 1:55:49Rich Roll?

  And letting go, for me, meant letting other people in. So I think the first thing I would say to John is, you know, I'm empathetic and I feel you. And I think the first thing that you can do to try to get on top of this is to confront those feelings rather than repress them or compartmentalize them, to find a way to bring voice to them. Because things like shame can't survive the light. You've got to shine the light on them. And that's scary. It takes courage to communicate with another person about what you're really going through. It requires a certain vulnerability, and it's very frightening.

• 1:56:30Rich Roll?

  But I can't encourage you enough how important it is to find somebody that that you feel comfortable talking to, that you can be really honest with, that you can convey whatever it is specifically. Particularly specifically, I think it's important to be really specific to let somebody in on this. And the relief that you'll experience just in that alone, I think is tremendous. You have to find the right person, somebody you can trust, somebody that you respect, somebody that can provide you with solid counsel. But I think the process of that communication isn't of itself a little bit of a letting go, and it will allow you to

• 1:57:14Rich Roll?

  get a little more objectivity on what's happening with you, to help you find the cause, the triggers of those behaviors that are sending you sideways, and ultimately help you analyze this story that you're telling yourself, that you're a failure, and you can't help yourself, and everything's out of control, to really deconstruct that, and perhaps construct a better, healthier, less negative story for yourself. Along the way, can you find a way to listen to that positive wolf at all? Can you make any kind of lifestyle adjustments that would move you in a positive direction?

• 1:57:55Rich Roll?

  In recovery, they call it taking contrary action. So when your instinct is, whether it's like, "Oh, I know I shouldn't drink, but I'm gonna take that drink," whatever it is, what is the contrary action? Like, "Oh, I don't want to pick up the phone and tell that guy what I just did." The contrary action is to pick up the phone and tell the guy what you did, right? What is the smallest contrary action that you can take that will break the seal on that and initiate a different direction for yourself?

• 1:58:22Adam Skolnick?

  That's a great little, super doable action step to do. If your mind's telling you one thing, and you know that's the negative thing, just do the smallest version of that.

• 1:58:32Rich Roll?

  What would the good version of myself do? And as heavy as that phone is, or whatever, how difficult it is, if you can just do that one thing, and you're like, "Wow, I did that, and I didn't die," right? I think the other thing is...

• 1:58:47Rich Roll?

  To reframe this word failure and recast it as learning. Like, I don't know what this failure, colossal type of failure is specifically, again, that you're experiencing, but can we look at it instead as a learning experience? Like, what can you, what can be gleaned from whatever it is that you're going through that you can then leverage to be better and grow? And I think in truth, success is about failure. There isn't success that exists outside of failure. Success is about trying. It's about not being afraid to fail and not taking failures personally.

• 1:59:29Rich Roll?

  And the thing that you're attempting to do may have failed, but it's important to depersonalize yourself from that. You didn't fail. This thing failed. You had the courage to try. So can you disassociate your identity, your sense of self, from the thing itself so that your identity isn't tied up in how the thing does? If that makes sense, right? That way, you create a little bit of distance between yourself, your identity, and your actions. And at the same time, keep showing up at the plate and, you know, swing the bat. Because if there's one trait that successful people share, it's that they fail way more than they succeed.

• 2:00:13Rich Roll?

  They just try so often and so regularly, and we forget about the failures. We only see the successes. And this is another message or theme of Adam Grant's work. Like, his, his book Originals was all about this. Like, what makes people originals? And he looks at all these successful people and realizes like, these people failed all the time, whether it's Picasso or Edison. Like, they have tons of failures in their wakes, and we don't look at those or think about those. We just focus on the few successes they had. But they took more bats at plate than anybody else. So if you can kind of reframe this whole thing from that perspective, that might make it easier to get, you know, back up to the plate and swing again.

• 2:00:56Rich Roll?

  And really try to objectively deconstruct what you're going through and find the lessons in there. And if you can do that and start... Figuring out how to implement those lessons to craft a better version of yourself. Five years from now, you could look back on whatever it is you're going through right now and say, that was the best thing that ever happened to me. And that sounds glib, and I don't mean to be insensitive to what you're going through. But I've heard this, I've experienced this myself, and I know so many other people that have. And maybe that'll provide you with a little sliver of hope to dig a little bit deeper to get yourself out of this hole.

• 2:01:33Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. When I hear his message, I think of myself, 40 years old, marriage fell apart, Lonely Planet, jobs like going away because maybe Lonely Planet is failing. That was what was happening then. And that was the worry then. Didn't fail, but I saw all my income going away, which wasn't that huge of an income anyway. I saw my identity as a travel writer adventure going away. I didn't have the life I thought I'd had. And then that was just the beginning of like, it seemed like everything was working against me, just like one thing after another. And it's hard not to take things personally when it just keeps, you just feel like you're in a vicious cycle. And so I totally feel that.

• 2:02:18Adam Skolnick?

  And I know how that can, I know how that is. So, you know, the only thing is, it's like weather. Eventually that luck turns, especially if you take these small steps like Rich laid out. I would add just like, sometimes it helps if in the morning you could do one thing physically that is not, whether it's do 10 sun salutations or sit down and try to meditate for five or 10 minutes and turn your brain off if you can. I mean, it's hard to at first, but like, one physical thing you can do first thing in the morning, right when you get up. So at least that time, right after that, you kind of feel good.

• 2:02:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a little self-care.

• 2:02:56Adam Skolnick?

  Just a little bit.

• 2:02:57Rich Roll?

  And to quote Karamo, can you look at this as something that is happening not to you, but for you?

• 2:03:06Adam Skolnick?

  That's beautiful. I love that. Yeah.

• 2:03:07Rich Roll?

  And I say that you have your version of this story. Look, you know, I've Hit bottom as an alcoholic. I've been unemployable. I've been in a situation where my family didn't want anything to do with me. I've had cars repossessed. I almost lost my house. I've been unable to pay my bills. I've had so many, you know, versions of feeling like a failure and have been able to claw out of it. So I don't know what John's circumstances are, but I do believe and trust that no matter where he is, there is a better place for him and there's always light at the end of the tunnel.

• 2:03:40Adam Skolnick?

  There you go. All right. One last one from Phoenix, Arizona.

• 2:03:46Speaker 07

  Hi, my name is Sarah and I live in Phoenix, Arizona. And I'm wondering if you're willing to discuss just something interesting that I've noticed. So I'm in my first year of sobriety after a long struggle with drugs and alcohol. I'm a long time athlete, playing lots of sports and loving running. And I was wondering if you were willing to discuss how overcoming substance abuse has changed your mindset on fitness, your life, your goals, your athleticism, just things like that. I'm a huge fan of the show and I'm

• 2:04:29Speaker 07

  super happy to even reach out, but hopefully you'll address these kinds of things in the talk because your story is really powerful and I think it would empower a lot of other people to take hold of their life, their bodies, their fitness. Thanks again, and I hope that y'all are having a wonderful day.

• 2:04:50Rich Roll?

  Cool. Thanks for the question, Sarah. Congrats on a year of sobriety. That's a huge deal. Amazing. And it's a great question. It's an interesting question. I mean, the first thing I would say is sobriety first. Like, don't be confused. Like, there is a confused narrative out there that, that somehow like being vegan or being an athlete contributed to me getting sober and staying sober. And that's just not what happened at all. Like, I didn't get in stay sober because I went vegan or became an endurance athlete. I got and stayed sober by

• 2:05:34Rich Roll?

  Overcoming denial, finding people to talk to, being honest, holding myself accountable, working a program in the secret rooms and helping others and working with a sponsor and doing an inventory and making amends. And it's really only when I created a solid foundation of sobriety that I began to expand in other areas like being vegan and becoming this middle-aged endurance athlete came many years after. I got sober at 31. I didn't start doing ultras until I was 42. I got, I got, you know, I went vegan at 40. So there's a decade after getting sober where I was trying to sort my shit out and get my life back on track before any of these other things.

• 2:06:16Adam Skolnick?

  So this idea, this notion that addictive personality can just go from one thing to then you can put an athlete, you could put, make him an athlete instead and he can channel and that, that compensates?

• 2:06:26Rich Roll?

  I mean, you could. It's just, that's not how it played out for me. Like I had a decade of, of, you know, being a workaholic and like eating shitty food. I transferred many addictive tendencies onto other things that weren't drugs or alcohol. And I, it took me a long time in my spiritual evolution to like grapple with those things. And as they say, the road gets narrower. Like when you first get sober, just to not drink is everything, right? Anything else is fine. It's just like, just don't drink, right? And then the more emotionally sober you get, the less tolerant you become of other behaviors and proclivities that you have that used to not bother you. Like you just can't get away with it anymore because the more emotionally sober and mature you become, you realize

• 2:07:11Rich Roll?

  that those things are at odds with you being the most, you know, actualized person that you can be. So whether it's, you know, going to gamble or shopping too much or working, whatever, you know, shitty self-care habits, whatever it is, like those things become If you get sober enough, they become unbearable and they have to go as well. And this is, it's called slow variety. It takes a long time. So in my case, these things didn't happen in lockstep. And so I just want to impress upon anybody who's listening to understand that things like, you know, running, cycling, just, you know, self-care, physical fitness, diet, sleep, meditation, these things are all beneficial to sobriety.

• 2:07:56Rich Roll?

  And meditation is actually a core aspect of sobriety. But none of them can take the place of, of working a program. And I know there's various different ways of getting sober and staying sober. But, you know, I got sober in 12-step and that got me sober. It's kept me sober. It's still the most important thing in my life. I tried all these other ways. They didn't work. This is just work, what works for me. But I will say in more specific response to your question, that getting sober led to performing more esteemable acts on behalf of myself and behalf of other people. And esteemable acts in turn lead to elevated self-esteem,

• 2:08:39Rich Roll?

  which in turn expands your horizon of what's possible for yourself. In other words, you begin to believe in yourself. You begin to believe that you can do more and you can be more. And that means that you end up taking on things that you never would have previously. You get more interested in bettering yourself and in improving the quality of life of those around you. And challenges that once might have seemed impossible, you end up welcoming. And in my case, that took the form of these endurance challenges and later writing books, starting this podcast. For you, it's going to be different, of course. But these are all practices that contribute and reinforce my sobriety.

• 2:09:22Rich Roll?

  But they're not, they're not interchangeable with the program itself. Running specifically, I think is interesting. I think swimming is the same way as this practice of active meditation. It's something that's very honest and, and keeps you honest. It doesn't care who you think you are, who you tell yourself you are, who you tell other people, you know, who you are, because it tells you who you are. Right.

• 2:09:49Rich Roll?

  And that makes it this, this amazing and beautiful template for, for self-discovery and self-improvement. And just, it's just one of the reasons why I love endurance sports. And that's all great. Just don't replace a program, your program for, for running as a solution.

• 2:10:06Adam Skolnick?

  Boom.

• 2:10:07Rich Roll?

  That's it. We did it.

• 2:10:08Adam Skolnick?

  That's good.

• 2:10:09Rich Roll?

  How you feel?

• 2:10:10Adam Skolnick?

  I feel good, man. That was a

• 2:10:12Rich Roll?

  Feels good, man.

• 2:10:12Adam Skolnick?

  It feels good, man, to like unload the, this is gonna be

• 2:10:16Rich Roll?

  It was a lot chambered. There was like six weeks of roll-on energy that needed to be expressed. I don't know how long you've been going on for, but this was like a pressure valve.

• 2:10:25Adam Skolnick?

  It's a filibuster. We're filibustering.

• 2:10:29Adam Skolnick?

  It felt good, man. We, you know, I've wanted to talk to you about this. I even suggested we do a remote one.

• 2:10:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know. And you, you texted me and you're like, let's do, let's, we gotta do, we gotta, maybe you could do a thing, let's go live, we gotta talk about this. And I was tempted, but I was like, no, I'm not working. I cannot do this.

• 2:10:46Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you didn't. It was worth waiting. You know, it's funny, like, there's the thing in journalism, the later you are, the smarter you have to be. And so I think it was good. You brought Arthur and Giorgio in.

• 2:10:59Rich Roll?

  Cause they look, they make both of us look smarter.

• 2:11:02Adam Skolnick?

  Yes.

• 2:11:03Rich Roll?

  Right? They made it seem like we actually know what we're talking about.

• 2:11:06Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:07Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:11:08Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah. No, they, I mean, they, it's amazing how much they know the inner workings and what, and it sounds like Arthur's connected to anonymous.

• 2:11:14Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he was, he was cagey about that.

• 2:11:16Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah, it was interesting.

• 2:11:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Maybe we'll do a little research on that. Who knows? We should also point out that there's, there's been lots of interesting articles that Adam and I read in preparation to talk about the subjects today, which we'll link up in the show notes.

• 2:11:30Adam Skolnick?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:30Rich Roll?

  Some cool pieces by Taylor Lorenz and Kevin Ruse, of course, who are the two journalists that I follow the most to stay on top of these particular issues, as well as that Politico piece on Holly and some other things. So, check the show notes for that. We will be back here in two weeks' time. In the meantime, follow Adam at Adam Skolnick. You can leave us a message if you would like your question considered for the podcast. That number again is 424-235-4626. I already told you guys to check out the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Again, we did create a clips

• 2:12:12Rich Roll?

  channel on YouTube, so if you do dig short chunks from the show, or you want to just sample a guest before committing, you can find a link to that channel in the show notes, or just search Rich Roll Podcast Clips on YouTube. That's it. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo, new to Los Angeles, in the house, audio engineering, production, show notes, interstitial music, and so much more. Blake Curtis for handling all the video aspects of the show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ally Rogers for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK David Kahn for advertising relationships and theme music, as always, by Tyler Trapper and Ari. Appreciate the love, you guys. See you back

• 2:12:53Rich Roll?

  here in a couple of days with, who's coming up next? Oh, Alexi Pappas.

• 2:12:58Adam Skolnick?

  Ooh.

• 2:12:59Rich Roll?

  It's a good one.

• 2:12:59Adam Skolnick?

  That's good.

• 2:13:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Have you checked out her book, Bravy?

• 2:13:02Adam Skolnick?

  Not yet. Not yet.

• 2:13:04Rich Roll?

  It's really good. She's a great writer.

• 2:13:05Adam Skolnick?

  I have to. It's getting so much love and I can't wait to-

• 2:13:08Rich Roll?

  I know. Jake Tapper tweeting about it. Come on.

• 2:13:12Adam Skolnick?

  I mean, she's one of those-

• 2:13:12Rich Roll?

  Adam Grant blurbed it.

• 2:13:14Adam Skolnick?

  I know.

• 2:13:15Rich Roll?

  That's unbelievable.

• 2:13:16Adam Skolnick?

  You know what? I think that's an audiobook because she's so cool. I want to hear her read it.

• 2:13:20Rich Roll?

  She's super cool.

• 2:13:20Adam Skolnick?

  So I think that's an audiobook. I'm gonna, I've got credits.

• 2:13:23Rich Roll?

  I'm with you on that.

• 2:13:24Adam Skolnick?

  I'm gonna grab it.

• 2:13:25Rich Roll?

  Cool. All right, you guys. See you back here soon. Much love. Peace. Lance.