Special Forces Operators On Mindset, Veteran Mental Health & Extreme Challenges

My friend, coach, and frequent podcast guest Chris Hauth is joined by former Navy SEAL Ryan “Birdman” Parrott and former US Army Special Forces Alex Racey to discuss mindset tools for the new year, veteran mental health, the importance of doing hard things, and their impending 7x Project–7 marathons, 7 swims, and 7 skydiving jumps on 7 continents in 7 days. This conversion is equal parts inspiring and important, and I’m honored to share it with you all right now. So please hit that subscribe button, and enjoy. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up 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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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Let's go do something gnarly and then reboot everything. So then we can start to truly showcase the basics again.

• 1:26Rich Roll?

  On the pod today are three guys attempting a most impressive and meaningful feat.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  So could we skydive or base jump, land and run a full marathon, and then plunge into the water or swim on all seven continents in seven days?

• 1:42Rich Roll?

  My friend, my coach, frequent podcast guest, Chris Howth, is one of them. The other two are former Navy SEAL Ryan "Birdman" Parrott, as well as former U.S. Army Special Forces Alex Bracy. Together, they're all here to discuss this insane, crazy, impending feat that they're about to embark upon. It's called the 7X Project.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  We gotta go big. And after meeting Chris and doing some of these runs, I'm like, maybe I went a little too far. Or maybe a lot too far.

• 2:15Rich Roll?

  I've got a couple more things I would very much like to mention before we dig into this one. But first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 2:30Rich Roll?

  Okay, the 7X Project. More impressive than the actual feat itself is the goal behind it, which is to gather data on human performance and, more importantly, recovery from high-stress situations for the purpose of helping retired veterans learn how to recover properly from the traumas they endured throughout a career of selfless service.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  We've never been at war like this for decades at a time. So, when I think about who we can help, there are people out there that maybe just missed it as far as, "Hey, there's some really simple things you can do to take better care of yourself, just focusing on how you eat, sleep, move, and even mindset stuff."

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  On top of all of this, they also hope to shed a light on and find a solution for a silent epidemic in our country, which is that five times more veterans have died by suicide since 9/11 than have died in combat or in active duty in any form, which is obviously a huge problem in dire need of redress.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, it's a massive problem, and that's just that community. When you talk about first responders and you talk about civilians, who knows what that number looks like?

• 3:43Rich Roll?

  So, this conversation, we unpack a lot. It's equal parts inspiring and important, and I'm honored to share it with you all right now. So buckle up, this is a good one, hope you enjoy it. And without further ado, please enjoy.

• 4:00Rich Roll?

  So happy to have you guys here. Really excited to get into all of this. The how, the why, but let's start with the what. Like, who wants to jump in and explain this crazy fucking thing that you guys are about to do right now?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I'm game in. So, the backstory of this event is I've always been fascinated by extreme sports. And so, doing things like skydiving, base jumping, flying wing suits, anything that gets my heart rate going, I've been fascinated by. And I've been doing it, but I wanted to do it in a way that would not only honor veterans for their service, but also be able to give back to them. So how do we raise capital? Well, we do crazy things and then it brings money and then we give that away. And in 2019, I got a phone call from a teammate that my sniper partner, my, one of my true north in life, took his life. And for me, it was, I don't like when people say that sucks, or I'm just gonna mourn them. I wanna do something about it.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  And so I said, what are we missing here? Why does this keep happening? I'm so sick to death of losing friends. So for me, it was, is there more to the story than it just being a brain issue? And my idea was that it was physiologically based, because everything is part of the physiology. And if it's not all in unison, you're gonna have problems. Take a guy like Alex, who's done 25 years in the military. If you compound that effect of breaking them down over that career, of course, they're gonna have issues when they get out. So then my idea was, alright, let's go do something gnarly and break our anatomy, break our physiology, and then reboot everything. So then we can start to truly showcase the basics again. How do you get back to true north? Or homeostasis?

• 5:41Speaker 01

  So the idea of coming up with 7X was, who's gonna care if we run in six states or seven, you know, cities or whatever? We gotta go big. And after meeting Chris and doing some of these runs, I'm like, maybe I went a little too far. Or maybe a lot too far.

• 5:57Rich Roll?

  Chris has experience with that, though. He has overly eager and enthusiastic athletes that approach him with audacious projects. And he has a very delicate touch in trying to, you know, kind of create a sense of reality around that. But, you know, obviously, you're here and this is happening, so.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  It is. And so the idea was, could we do like the SEAL thing, sorry, but sea, air, and land? So could we skydive or base jump, land and run a full marathon, and then plunge into the water or swim on all seven continents in seven days? And I immediately asked some of my dear friends, like Alex, hey, what do you think about this? And it was instantaneously, I'm in. And so we knew that we had a caliber of guys who had the mentality for it, who were willing to get to the athletic place they needed to be. And then we started developing the team, the scientist team around it to say, what are we gonna study? How are we gonna do this thing? And everything we thought of except for like, are we going to get coached? Like, who's going to teach us how to move this way?

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And Alex actually spearheaded finding us Chris.

• 7:04Rich Roll?

  Right, so you're, you're, you're, part of your profession, Alex, is as a coach, right? As a, as a sort of performance coach at large.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do some personal performance coaching, but you know,

• 7:14Rich Roll?

  Try to get in on the mic.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  From an athletic standpoint, not at this level. So, um, actually, I mean, you know, starting with the SEAL Army stuff where we bust each other's chops all the time.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  The only reason I'm at the podcast is because I've heard about him through your book. So I read your book and I was like, you know, went from the couch to doing what he did. And I had to go back, uh, because it was on Audible. I had to listen to the, I'd listened to the book twice already. And I was like, what's that coach's name? What's his company? And then I, uh, I did the cold email off of the website and got a call back and here we are.

• 7:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  A few months later, so.

• 7:56Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I found, I found Chris through you. Your story illuminated, you know, I knew enough about zone two to know that we needed somebody who could.

• 8:07Rich Roll?

  With an endurance background.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Get us there, you know, as opposed to the whole running in the gray zone the whole time. And then being like, wow, we really tanked on the actual event.

• 8:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so there's the actual endurance piece to this whole thing. Running seven marathons on seven continents in seven days. And we'll get into, you know, where those locations are and what that entails. And then there's the extreme piece to this whole thing, which is base jumping into these marathons or parachuting into them. And then there's the logistics piece, right? Which I'm sure you guys are really good at. Like, this is kind of what you're trained at. So it's a very complicated puzzle, right?

• 8:46Speaker 01

  It's a nightmare. It's a, it's a fucking nightmare. So the idea behind, how do we, how are we going to pull this off is my COO is a Green Beret. And my personal belief is that Green Berets are the best at logistics. They're good at going into places and establishing a relationship, establishing like a mechanism within that place. And so not only do we bring the Green Beret and Bryce Hanson to actually run the logistics piece, but then he brought in his Green Beret team to deploy around the world to really get these locations fortified, connect with the locals, make sure that we were set with everything. So it's been a process of about. 15 months of planning and we're about 80% there right now.

• 9:27Rich Roll?

  Okay, so explain the locations and the specifics of the event itself, just so people understand what we're talking about here.

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Certainly, so we're taking a group of about 75 to 80 people on this.

• 9:41Rich Roll?

  That alone, right? When Chris first called me and he told me this, I was like, wait, what? Exactly. Wait, how many runners are there? Go ahead, sorry.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  They don't know that they're all doing it too.

• 9:52Rich Roll?

  That was another question I had, but go ahead.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  So, um, so we'll all fly into Cape Town, South Africa where we stage and that's where our plane will be waiting for us.

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  A 757, this is not like a little plane.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  It's a massive plane. Apparently it seats 400 people, so we went overkill and it's just one of those things that can get us everywhere we need to go. Um, it's quite expensive too.

• 10:14Rich Roll?

  Uh huh.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  So.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  I would imagine.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Just the drama of trying to find the plane that we could actually use, that was available, that was somewhat within reason of cost, uh, that was difficult enough just to find a plane. So we actually worked on that for about nine months to get a plane solidified. Um, so once we get to Cape Town, we'll get on our plane, we'll stay on that plane for the duration of the trip and we go right from Cape Town into a place called White Desert, Antarctica. Very private place, really, really cool place, it's white-desert.com and you can actually go there, but it's very desolate, there's not much there. So our VIPs are going with us, are going to be doing like ice wall climbing and apparently one of the packages they get is they get to have a snowball fight with the special operations afterwards, which is really why everybody wants to go.

• 10:58Rich Roll?

  Is this where people have gone in the past to do their Antarctica marathon, or this is a different part of Antarctica?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  This is completely different. Yeah, so this is runway, ice runway, this is going to be our location to run around several times. Um, but it's really cool, they have pods, they have kitchen, they have warm rooms, they have everything that we need, should we have an issue there. So, cause weather changes pretty quickly and if we can't get out, then we're in trouble. So we're going to try to make it as quick as possible. Uh, so what will happen is when we land in Antarctica, we're going to start off by doing a skydive and the skydive, the second we leave the plane is when it kicks off the seven days. So we could be there for 10 hours and not be part of the seven days, it's when we leap starts the seven day window. So we'll do our deal. It's gonna take him two hours to complete the marathon. It's gonna take us 12. We're gonna get it done.

• 11:51Rich Roll?

  Has anybody parachuted into Antarctica before?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yes, they have. Yes. Yeah, that's, we're not trying, I mean, what we are doing with this specific event altogether, it's not a world record because it's never been done. So this doesn't exist. Right. But that's not our vision here. Our vision is we want answers. We want to really build something at the, we'll talk about it later, but build something at the end that we can give to people to truly help benefit their life. So it's uncharted territory. So we'll do our jump and then we're gonna get right into the run. We're still working out what that's gonna look like. And then, ah, we're gonna plunge. We're gonna pull or plunge. Uh huh. They have those glacial lakes out there, so they're gonna pounce, pound some of that out and we're gonna jump in. How long do you think you're gonna be going in that water?

• 12:33Chris Hauth?

  Uh, three minutes minimum, but I'm gonna try to push four.

• 12:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, nice.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  That's cold.

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  Do you, do you parachute with your running shoes on and just immediately go into the run? Or do you assess when you land?

• 12:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna actually be in cold, cold weather gear for the jump. It's gonna be super cold way up high. And we're not sure exactly what the altitude we're gonna jump at, but way too cold for us to go slick. So we're gonna have time when we land to change out, get ready, and then start warming up. Because one of the biggest complexities with jumping, especially in areas like this and wind, is you can turn an ankle or a knee really quickly upon landing. And if you do that, it's over. There's no getting into the run.

• 13:12Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 13:12Speaker 01

  You're hosed, and you're hosed for the whole trip. So we gotta be very careful about how we do our landings, not just in that type of environment, but because we're gonna be tired, muscles are gonna be completely smoked after each day, the jumps are gonna get more and more detailed, they're gonna be more complex. So we have to really be careful about that.

• 13:29Rich Roll?

  And do you jump from a separate aircraft? Or are you, you're not jumping out of a 757, right? Like, that doesn't work.

• 13:36Speaker 01

  That would be cool.

• 13:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know anything about this. So, yeah, but you must have some other aircraft for that, right?

• 13:43Speaker 01

  It would be a normal, what most jumpers, we jump out of twin otters. So we'll be jumping out of a skydive plane out there.

• 13:49Rich Roll?

  Got it, okay. And there's, there's four total veterans that are actually doing the challenge, is that correct?

• 13:56Speaker 01

  So there's seven in total, four veterans, seven in total that are gonna be doing all of the running. And then four of the seven will be doing the skydive, run and plunge.

• 14:05Rich Roll?

  Got it. Okay. And then the rest of the plane is filled with support team. I mean, on your website, you have this massive team, like there's a lot of people that are contributing to this effort. But then on top of that, you have like VIPs, right? Who are kind of donating money or paying for the privilege of being on the plane for part or all of this endeavor.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:29Rich Roll?

  Correct?

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Every time we go into a little deeper mission planning, we find that, oh, we need this or we need this. And we want to be self sustaining. So we have our medical professionals on the team. We have support staff for our team for the VIPs because we're going to go separate directions. The VIPs get to actually run a mile with us on each continent. They get a tandem skydive over the pyramids of Egypt. I mean, they get to do some really cool things, but then they're off to do a very personalized excursion. While we're completing each mission.

• 14:55Rich Roll?

  I see. Cool.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  So we'll have nutrition support. We'll have physical therapy, you know, PT support. We'll have our doc team and our emergency medical technician.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  You know, on the ground, we need to stick this guy with an IV. Patrick will be with us on, on our part of the adventure. And all of the admin piece of, you know, feeding us and just, you know, being able to react to anything that happens. Some of the runs will be laps, others will be out and back. So there'll be different admin requirements for all of that. And, you know, even just, you know, running in Antarctica. We're going to make a good guess at what we should be wearing, but

• 15:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  Luckily, a few miles later, if we've completely boogered that up, we'll be able to have, have,

• 15:41Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  You know, have what we need right there with our team to fix it.

• 15:45Rich Roll?

  Well, the good news is you have a massive plane that can handle a lot of equipment, right? Don't worry about how many bags you're bringing with you, right?

• 15:54Chris Hauth?

  There's that, but it's also, I mean, knowing what we're getting into and trying to pre-plan that. But I think the bigger story is around all these participants too, from a, from a logistics standpoint. They're part of the experience to then help in the documentary and sort of the information we're gleaning from it. That they're there firsthand to also provide valuable, you know, professional insight.

• 16:18Rich Roll?

  Right. And we'll get into all of that in the why, but I just want to walk through like the experience itself. So from Antarctica, you go where?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  We go to Perth, Australia. So we chose the most, well, I should say this because I'll take ownership. I've chosen the worst scenario of travel. So everybody, the World Marathon Challenge, all those other organizations that do things like this are like, why are you going that way? Yeah. What do you mean? Am I wrong? So that just looked good to me. So we're going Bass Ackwards, but we're going to Perth next. So that's a nice, long leg for us to do some recovery, see how we feel after the first one. And then we're going to start thawing out midway through. And then we get to Australia and it's going to be hot. So we go from super cold, sub-zero temperature, all the way to super hot summertime. So that's going to be interesting in itself. We chose Perth. And really, I chose some of these locations because

• 17:07Speaker 01

  at the, at the beginning, planning of this, we were still heavily in COVID. And so some of these places were locked down, or it was an impossibility. There was one point where I said, this is not even going to be able to happen because Australia was locked down completely. And we were, I mean, we brought in State Department reps and other entities to help us figure out how to circumnavigate. And, I mean, they're like, we'll do everything in our power, but we can't guarantee anything. So I'm like, we don't have a program here. So it got really nerve wracking, but we just kept pushing forward. And then finally, you started seeing things open up. It was a blessing. So Australia will be next. One of our pro base jumper skydivers from Australia. So we've got major connectivity out there. We're connected

• 17:48Speaker 01

  to Australian SAS. So they're going to lay out a lot of the red carpet. And we're choosing more of an area that's more desolate, kind of looks like Australia as far as, instead of city. I don't like spiders much. So I'm kind of, that's going to be my thing on this whole trip. Like, if I see a spider, you'll hear me a million miles away. Well, there's lots of stuff in Australia that wants to kill you. Spiders concern me, though.

• 18:13Rich Roll?

  But you're going to base jump into the marathon from there?

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Uh, let's see. So in Australia, we're also skydiving. I see. So there was only a couple of places. We actually originally wanted to do base jumping everywhere, but it's impossible to do base jumping in seven days on seven continents. It's just too hard. So, skydiving is a lot easier. Everybody on the team skydives, and very few base jump. So we wanted to make sure that everybody who was jumping could truly jump. So Alex and some of our other guys did military jumps and it converts over. And our pro athletes are some of the best jumpers in the world. So Scott having, we're only doing base jumping in two or three locations.

• 18:51Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Of the seven.

• 18:52Rich Roll?

  Right, but those are epic locations. So from Perth, you go, where's next from there?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  To Dubai.

• 18:57Rich Roll?

  Dubai. So there's an epic base jump happening there.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  So it was, it was originally gonna, we were looking at the, the Al Burj and we heard that it was feasible, but for a price tag that we couldn't afford.

• 19:08Rich Roll?

  Right. That's the Burj Khalifa, that, the tallest building there, right?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  No, it's the one on the water. The tall one is definitely an interesting one.

• 19:15Rich Roll?

  The sail one.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 19:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, okay.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's got the helicopter platform. But we've now gotten word that it's the Princess Tower. So, I mean, you can junk a wingsuit outfit. So I'm thinking, hmm, maybe we're gonna do wingsuits. So that'll be a base jump. But everywhere will still contain a Scottdive as well. For the guys that are not base jumpers, so we can still get that going.

• 19:36Rich Roll?

  I mean, how many can do the wingsuit? You, you do that, right?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I do.

• 19:40Rich Roll?

  Does anyone else on the team do it? I mean, you have coaches and stuff like that, but of the people that are running the marathons?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  No, I'm the only one.

• 19:47Rich Roll?

  You're the only one, right?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. I should look at that and say, am I doing something wrong with my wife?

• 19:53Rich Roll?

  I know.

• 19:55Rich Roll?

  By the way, my wife is obsessed with, with like bird suit flying. Like she's constantly sharing those videos. Like she's just like, in a, I think in a, in some parallel universe, she's like a, you know, a bird suit person. Like she just loves it. Like it's fantastic. It's such a cool, I want to get into like what that's all about, but I don't want to derail what we're talking about. Sorry for the diversion.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So it's neat Dubai, really cool place. And for me, I mean, he's traveled everywhere around the world. I spent most of my time in Iraq. So I haven't seen the world like he has. I have never been to any one of these locations minus London. So I'm really excited. It's gonna be new. Yeah. So we go to Dubai and after we complete the jump, then we're going to run, I think that they've considered the marathon that they do out there, the marathon route. And then we'll plunge in the water and get back to our plane and we're out to the next location, which would then be Cairo, Egypt.

• 20:49Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  That one's gonna be fun.

• 20:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so you're gonna parachute over the Great Pyramids?

• 20:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 20:56Rich Roll?

  There has to be some logistical backchanneling with political bigwigs in order to pull that off, right? No one gets to do that.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  It's hard. It's been difficult. It's, yeah, sign this paper and then submit it and we'll tell you in three weeks if you're good to go or not. It's been a lot longer than three weeks, so we're still working through it. But it happens. We've, you know, plenty of our guys have jumped it before, so not really worried about it. It's gonna be an interesting marathon because some of it's soft sand. Takes me back to the days of SEAL training, which sucked. So, running in soft sand is not the most fun. So it won't be all soft sand. And then we actually have to get into a helicopter, or we're gonna get into a plane and fly to a different location and jump in the water. Because the Nile's really, really bad. There's a lot of bacteria in there and apparently Americans are not allowed at all to go in the water.

• 21:47Rich Roll?

  And what is the swim piece in all of this? So what does that mean, getting in the water?

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, of course, the athletes always ask that question where everybody else is like, "Oh, you're gonna get in the water." So, it was just a plunge. And the idea for me was, "See, Aaron Lance, let's just get in the water because I didn't think we were gonna have enough time to actually do a swim on each location." It's more so just doss yourself off in the marathon and enjoy, so.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, that was my first question when Bird brought this up. I was like, "When you say swim, what do you mean?" Because that's a significant emotional event for some Army guys, right? So, me being one of them.

• 22:20Rich Roll?

  There's a reason you went into the Army and not the...

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a reason I went in the Army. That is absolutely true.

• 22:24Chris Hauth?

  Navy Army.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, he was like, "Oh, just a plunge, man." I was like, "All right, I'm good with that."

• 22:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 22:30Chris Hauth?

  I'm looking forward to swimming.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course you are.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm looking forward to watching Chris swim.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  You're gonna have some lawn chairs parked right at the base and see him go on out. It's gonna be great.

• 22:41Rich Roll?

  You all plunge, Chris is gonna go on a little mini-adventure of his own, right?

• 22:46Chris Hauth?

  Again, unique locations. When else am I gonna have a chance to do those swims?

• 22:49Rich Roll?

  And Chris, are you gonna run all the marathons also?

• 22:52Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I'm gonna run all the marathons. And we have two pacers along, guys who run ultras and so on, so friends of theirs and they've been around them for a while, but then when we were about a month into the coaching, six weeks into the coaching, they... Said, "We'd love to have you along." And I was like, "Well, all right." Twist my arm.

• 23:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:12Chris Hauth?

  So, although, you know, you go through the training, you're like, "Yeah, marathon for seven days in a row is gonna be a little painful."

• 23:21Rich Roll?

  A little bit. You're no stranger to these things, though.

• 23:24Chris Hauth?

  I am not.

• 23:25Rich Roll?

  But this is a little qualitatively different, right?

• 23:27Chris Hauth?

  It is.

• 23:28Rich Roll?

  Base jumping. Are you gonna jump?

• 23:30Chris Hauth?

  I'm tandem jumping in Egypt.

• 23:34Speaker 01

  That's right, you are.

• 23:35Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  It's at a minimum.

• 23:37Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we'll see.

• 23:40Rich Roll?

  Just, you're gonna just push Chris out the door, right?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we're gonna get it on camera, too.

• 23:45Chris Hauth?

  They've already said, a few times, the fact that I've put them through this Training Peaks torture, they're like, "We're gonna get it all back."

• 23:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 23:53Chris Hauth?

  In one single push, out the window. "We'll catch ya, we'll catch you as you're free falling and release the chute."

• 24:00Rich Roll?

  Right. Alright, so from Egypt, then to...

• 24:04Speaker 01

  To London.

• 24:05Rich Roll?

  To London, yeah. And here's where it gets pretty cool, right?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I'm super excited about London because I believe personally that I'm James Bond, so I'm super excited to go back to my homeland, so. Now, London was just one of those deals where I'd work with some of the British SAS, and I've got a lot of friends out there. So I said, "This was gonna be a really unique place for us to go." Initially, we worked on jumping the bridge out there, and the bridge is very unique. It's called London Bridge, and a lot of people know it, significant. What people don't know is it was the place where they first did base jumps, and it was like in the 1800s, like late 1800s, for military testing. So, it has been jumped once since then, and it's very difficult to get done. Well, one of our guys on our team is friends with the guy who makes all that happen, so we said, "Alright, let's go for that."

• 24:55Speaker 01

  And then we were gonna jump into the water, so we would actually land, run the full marathon first, and then jump off the bridge into the water. We have since then had to change it because getting a parachute wet in saltwater, it really taxes your parachute. We can't use it the rest of the trip. So, the idea now is we're actually going to... Land and we're gonna run our marathon and then what will happen is at Chelsea Hospital, we're gonna park a crane and we're gonna base jump off the crane right near Chelsea Hospital and there's water right there. For the skydivers, they will go on a helicopter to a new location and make their jump and then we'll all come back together.

• 25:31Rich Roll?

  Wow, that's cool. That's a bummer though, they won't let you do it off the bridge.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  They won't let them do it, it's just because of the chute.

• 25:38Rich Roll?

  Oh, because of the chute, right, okay, gotcha.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  We are still working on it, you know, we're just gonna keep going until they say absolutely no.

• 25:46Rich Roll?

  Can't you get a different chute?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  It just becomes more money.

• 25:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean you got a 757, I mean you're going, you know, you might as well go the extra mile. Get it back up, get another chute.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  This logistics weren't enough.

• 25:59Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Wow, cool. And then from there, Cartagena?

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Cartagena.

• 26:05Rich Roll?

  And that's the last stop?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  The last stop will be America.

• 26:08Rich Roll?

  Oh, America, oh that's right, yeah, okay, so, sorry, walk us through the last two.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we're gonna go to Cartagena. Originally it was gonna be Brazil, we chose Cartagena because it's closer. Gets us into town, we can do what we need to do and then it's a shorter stunt from where we're going in Colombia to America so that we could get on the ground and rest for a bit and acclimatize before we start moving. So we chose Cartagena and it's really nice because they're super about working with us. We've partnered with the Colombian Navy, they're offering an experience of a lifetime to our VIPs where they can go out and shoot fully automatic machine guns off their boats at targets and just metal targets and plastic targets and things like that. But it's something that they don't offer to anybody. So that's what we were looking for with the VIP experience was could we do things that you can't pay to do, period. It's things that we

• 26:55Speaker 01

  are using our connections and our friendships to say, we're doing something unique and this is for the greater good, what can we really do? Because these VIPs are our benefactors. They're the ones who are making this whole thing happen for us. So we're showing them an incredible experience while we are almost dying, so.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you guys are gonna be fine. You're in good hands with Chris. You're gonna be all right.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Rich Roll?

  I don't know about the chute not opening up, I mean Chris can't help you with that part, but the running part, I think you guys aren't gonna be good.

• 27:22Speaker 01

  If he twisted his ankle upon landing, he would still run faster than us.

• 27:29Rich Roll?

  We're gonna get into the training, don't worry. All right, and then you end up at in the United States at like the SEAL Museum, right?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So we were initially trying for that and we ended up deviating to Texas now. We're gonna go just near Dallas, Texas. So it brings everybody back to where we're originally starting from. We can bring all our gear back. And then after we finish, we're gonna have a couple of days of R and R and enjoyment with families and that. And then we've got brain scans for the athletes. So we partnered with the Center for Brain Health and they're doing pre and post-brain scans just to see what happens when somebody goes through something like this.

• 28:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  So be able to quantify some data. Because one thing is we focus on physiology, they focus really on the brain, so let's bring it all together.

• 28:14Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 28:23Rich Roll?

  Well, I think that's a pretty good segue into the why behind all of this. I mean, you shared a little bit about your background and your colleague who took his life. I know veteran health, mental, emotional, physical, spiritual is really the backbone of this whole thing. So, you know, talk to me about, you know, the inspiration for this and, you know, maybe even contextualize it with some sense of, you know, what's going on with veterans right now, what the problems are and how you are looking at the solutions to these problems.

• 28:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Love to tag team this one with you.

• 29:00Rich Roll?

  Sure, yeah. Let's do it. Alex Moore on the mic here.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it would be my

• 29:08Speaker 01

  David MacCaff is my sniper partner's name. And it would be like me and Alex. Alex is a leader, he was higher ranking than me. And he's a guy that everybody around him looks at as, hey, you're the go-to guy. Because you're always on point, you're always ready to go, you're the guy we look to for good word and advice. So that was David for me.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  We have this suicide epidemic and it's not just the veteran community. It's across the globe. It's an issue, a terrible issue. But you never think about your mentor, your true north, taking their life. You feel completely helpless when that happens. And that's what I felt. I mean, I felt like I was, I had no guidance at that point. And then I couldn't understand why he of all people did it because this is not David. Some people say that. David was the guy that we all went to. And we never saw it. His wife didn't see it. I mean, there was nothing up until the very end. And we've been dealing more and more with the post-traumatic stress of the wars, the TBIs, traumatic brain injuries. You're hearing about CTE within the NFL and that. And so it's becoming a bigger problem.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Personal take, as we've talked about it, what we try to understand and try to take our minds to where that could be to better understand it because it's hard. You know, I've been low before. I've had my, my dealings with depression and anxiety and I didn't get to that point where that was a thought. So I'm trying to get there for David's sake and for all the others. And one is being away from the tribe. That's a humongous thing. You know, you're a part of something. I was eight years in. I did eight years in the military. 25 years, you've been in athletics your whole life. And then let's say that you can't be around that community anymore. You know, how does that make you feel? What do you do?

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And it's not easy to get through it. You gotta figure out who you are deeper and we're not trained to do that. We don't talk about that stuff. We're supposed to be tough, right? We tell ourselves that. So being part of the community is something that we're trying to teach people is hey, you gotta stay connected with the brotherhood, the sisterhood. You have to stay involved, even though you don't wear the uniform. Because it's not the uniform, it's the camaraderie. That's what matters and what builds us to do the jobs that we do. So that's one of the biggest pieces. The second piece is... They don't try to reinvent themselves. You know, it's the don't we don't want people to live in the past. You got to move forward and you're going to say, okay, I still am that person, but I want to add to it now. So what's next for me? And I'm going to go for it. What are your thoughts on that?

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I think to just add on to what Birdman said, and I've been out of the military since 2016. So my experience is way different than what people leaving the military now are experiencing. And I hope they're experiencing a much better transition than what was going on back when I when I got out. And I had a great transition, but I don't know that it was, you know, my unit did as much as, you know, we were always kind of on the cutting edge of how do we just get better at everything, whether that was performance while you're in the job to, hey, we need to transition guys out better and gals out better. And we're always just trying to learn. As I think about everything that we're talking about, I'm fortunate in that I've never had

• 32:25Speaker 02

  someone very close to me from the military commit suicide. And I try to think about, you know, how do people get to that spot? And I just, you know, obviously anybody sitting here talking about it can't can't really relate to that, or at least in my mind, they can't. What I've been thinking about a lot as part of this project and, you know, the things we're trying to help our community with and, you know, and that's firefighters, police officers, you know, people in the medical field that just have these incredibly stressful situations that generally people, you know, a lot of people in their common day to day life don't experience like the military. So, so I would, you know, I kind of look at that whole group as our, as our community

• 33:10Speaker 02

  that we want to be able to help affect mainly. I keep coming back to transitions and relationships and.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  I'm fortunate and that I have, I had great, you know, my big thing was I love the people I worked with. And I was in the same organization for over 17 years. Last 17 plus years of my career was with the same people. And, and I'm, you know, it's, I mean, it's, they're your family. You know, some years I spent more time with them than I did my, my wife and kids.

• 33:43Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Biological family. So, so it is, it's interesting to think about how that can affect certain people when they, when they lose that, when they lose that identity. You know, you put all your eggs in one basket. Hey, I'm a, I'm a, I'm an Army Special Forces stud. I'm a Navy SEAL. I'm a Marsac guy. I'm, I'm, I'm a SWAT operator. I'm a, you know, I'm the whatever, the best firefighter in my county. And then all of a sudden you lose that or you just age out.

• 34:18Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  How does that affect people? And how do we, like, like Birdman was saying, how do we, how do we maybe focus on keeping people from ever getting to that spot where they think, like, think about that as an option? Cause I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know who's ever going to figure out how to fix the, well, I'm already here, but you know, I

• 34:43Rich Roll?

  Like walking them off the ledge versus like preventing them from even getting that far down the line.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, let's just keep them off, you know, away from the cliff altogether.

• 34:52Rich Roll?

  It's a, you know, it's a, it's a great point. And it's a much more complicated conversation about how you solve that connection piece than it is to talk about TBI or PTSD. Like, I feel like, you know, we've, we have come a long way in terms of awareness of these issues. I don't know how great, you know, the Veterans Administration is or what the care looks like for, you know, people in your situation when you're exiting out of that life. I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of work that still needs to be done to, you know, properly attend to these issues. But at least we're talking about those issues and there are. You know, sort of medical solutions to those on some level or psychological solutions to those.

• 35:35Rich Roll?

  But the connectivity piece, the community piece, like when you exit out of this thing that was so intense, where you're so bonded to this community of people and then overnight it's gone. Then that leaves you with, you know, this search for meaning in your life that can be existential. You know, like, that's a much harder thing. I mean, Chris, when we were talking the other day about just, you know, I was trying to wrap my head around how to approach this conversation. I mean, you had some interesting thoughts about this as well.

• 36:01Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I mean, for me, and I can relate it to what we even talked about last year or two years ago with regards to athletes, right? You're playing in front of 100,000 people one Saturday. Suddenly you're graduated or not even graduated and done. Your entire identity, your entire life since you're two, three, four, five years old is gone. Right? And so relating, not understanding, but relating. And we talk a lot about it and you talked about it to me early on in this project about how just the tools and techniques are not available from, you know, nutrition guidance to supplements, to what kind of strength work or PT work you should be doing.

• 36:42Chris Hauth?

  Or just, you know, in order to keep yourself healthy and sharp and with purpose. I mean, that's the main component we as the group keeps talking about. And we just spent four or five days together in Scottsdale, training and getting to know each other better before this trip. And sort of do the simulations that I like to do so much. But the constant conversation revolves around why is there not a better platform for these operators who are human performance, you know, specialists at the highest level? That we as athletes are given that, right? And they're not given that in the same way, the education, the insights, the knowledge.

• 37:27Chris Hauth?

  And they're the front of the spear. They're putting their life on the line and they're not given these tools.

• 37:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this was.

• 37:32Chris Hauth?

  I'm swimming in a pool.

• 37:33Rich Roll?

  And this was shocking to learn, right? Like you think, oh, buds and all the, you know, sort of rites of passage that you guys have to go through in order to become, you know, the elite of the elite in our armed forces, that you're being armed with the absolute, you know, best science, best tools, mindset, physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, to equip you to handle the highest stressful situations that, you know, any human being could ever place themselves in, which would in turn, later down the line, serve you as you're exiting. But, you know, I'm learning through what Chris has shared, and I'm interested in what you guys have to say about this, that there are significant gaps in that training

• 38:17Rich Roll?

  or in that toolbox that need to be rectified.

• 38:22Speaker 01

  I'll just take it from my perspective, because we serve in two different, entirely two different units. So, and I was back at the beginning of the war, and I got out when the war I thought was dying down. So I did eight years. So I only had an eight-year glimpse into what performance was, and we didn't have it. So if you get broken, they're going to send you to a specialist and they're going to help you rehab to get that brokenness back. But we don't talk about diet or nutrition. We talk about sleep. It was purely, let's just do the workout that the PT is asking you to do to rehab yourself to getting back to war. The problem is that we go and we do a hard work up where we train, and then we go deploy and we do the work overseas. You're breathing in all kinds of crap. You're

• 39:03Speaker 01

  running over undulating terrain. You're asked to do the unforgiving jobs. And then when you get done, in the backend, it's wash, rinse and repeat. There's no stop, pause and reboot. And that was a big point. And I never knew any of this in my career.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Up until doing this project, I didn't have a lot of this. The godsend is my wife. My wife, she got into health and nutrition a long time before me. And when I first met her, I went into her fridge and she had nothing but green in her room. And I'd never seen half these plants before. I'm like, where's the food? And she's like, that's the food. We're gonna eat that. I'm like, hmm. She puts it in my belly. I'm like, whoa, this is pretty cool. But I didn't know any of that. And that's the problem is they're not teaching that stuff. And how vital, how important. I mean, just this last couple of days, talking about the nutrition and the supplementation, pre, during, and post, how vital that is. Well, why didn't I do that overseas? I could have been a better performer. I am tired of relying on brain matter to get me through something. If I could be that much more of

• 40:00Speaker 02

  a performer, because I'm doing the right things, then I don't have to really push it that hard with my brain. So that when I choose to, I can go even further. That would be the goal.

• 40:09Rich Roll?

  And what does it look like from your perspective?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  So from my perspective, I look at it over, you know, the decades. And the bottom line is, we don't have any, we've never been at war like this for decades at a time. So I completely agree with Birdman, especially in the fact that everybody has their own experience, right? So some people get out of the military and they have the ability to transition into their civilian, you know, life with, and maintain the same standards that kept them very high functioning while they were in the military. And others don't. So I mean, when I, when I think about who we can help, I don't know who all it might

• 40:57Speaker 02

  be, but there are people out there that maybe just missed it. Like, they didn't hear it the way they needed to hear it. As far as, hey, there's, there's some really simple things you can do to take better care of yourself, just focusing on how you eat, sleep, move, and even mindset stuff, right? My experience was, just like Birdman's, it was like, hey, this, we're going to war. Oh, this'll, this is gonna, you know, neat, finally. You know, I've been training for over 10 years in the military, and now we get to go do what we got hired to do. Fast forward 10 years later, after 10 years of deployment, that was an unknown. So even in wanting to affect performance at the individual and group level,

• 41:43Speaker 02

  there was no model for that. So preservation, so SOCOM are all the special operations highest headquarters, which is in Tampa, threw a ton of money at this around 2013, 2014. And it was called the Preservation of the Force and Family Program, or POTIV is what a lot of people have had. It's been a very successful program and the four buckets of care or focus were physical, mental, what I call, uh, social and spiritual. So, you know, how, how are you performing physically, mentally? How are you performing as a, as a member of society and as a member of your family? And then the spiritual component and all of the special operations units were able to take money out of this pot

• 42:29Speaker 02

  and, and bring in contractors to support in all four of those domains. So I was fortunate enough to be the first preservation of the force and family director for my unit. And they were like, hey, we want somebody who actually, we want the customer that's, you know, the operator and everybody who's just going down range over and over and over again, just getting, you know, the wheels run off of them and their families. We want somebody like that representing us in this, in these discussions and these planning meetings for who, who, who needs what and who gets what. And you know, the fact that I wasn't an expert in any of those four domains made it really easy for me to just kind of go down there again, as, as the representative and go,

• 43:12Speaker 02

  yeah, we want to, we want, we want all of it and we want as much as we can get. So that's what I did in my last three years in the army for my unit and I retired from that position. So I was personally very fortunate to start interacting with all of these next level professionals in the mental space and in the, in the, you know, physical performance space. Cause what, where we were trying to pull expertise from is, is Professional in college level athletics and you know, all of the top drawer performers in outside of the military space, we said, hey, we want your expertise. We want to try to fix some of our problems with your expertise. And so I learned a ton and honestly, that

• 43:57Speaker 02

  kind of led me to my current situation where I'm doing personal performance coaching. Right.

• 44:03Chris Hauth?

  Did it help? Did it help the team?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  It's absolutely helping and you know, the program overall is, is, is still, I mean, it's still in existence. We're still pulling a lot of contractors in to support all of this. Again, kind of back to my initial point is we're at some level, we're guessing, you know, and I left years ago. So I'm sure we have a better picture of what right looks like now. But it's like, hey, what, what do you do when somebody's been going overseas over and over and over again for 10 years?

• 44:35Chris Hauth?

  We have one guy on the team who's still pretty active.

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:39Chris Hauth?

  Is active. And, you know, there's saunas, there's cold plunges, there's state of the art facilities, but he's asking me what to do.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 44:50Chris Hauth?

  And how to apply the protocol.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:52Chris Hauth?

  And why it works.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  They're making these things available, but it's not connecting. I remember like I went to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and they have a whole like mindfulness program there, but none of the athletes do it or sign up for it, right? Like there's a gap in that. And if it was, I mean, it's great that this program exists and hopefully it's, you know, growing and improving, but the mental health statistics and the suicide statistics tell the real story of outcomes. And you know, on the website you or in your deck that I went through, like there's some pretty, it tells a pretty dire story. I don't remember the numbers, but maybe you do, but they're, you know, it's not great.

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. The last statistic they released, 7,500 soldiers have been killed in combat and training since nine 11. Since the same date, we've lost just over 30,000 to suicide.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  That's an unbelievable number.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost five times. And so yeah, it's a massive problem. And that's just that community. And you talk about first responders and you talk about civilians. Who knows what that number looks like?

• 45:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So, in an alternate universe, if you found yourself in the seat of being the Secretary of Defense and you had a massive budget at your disposal to deploy, to address these problems, what do those solutions look like for you? What do you think needs to be done? Where are the blind spots? How can we better address this crisis and create a better path for all of these veterans who are exiting into civilian life?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  It's a great question. Well, since I'll never be offered that job, the first thing I'm gonna do is legalize base jumping in America. That'd be great. That would be my number one plan.

• 46:31Rich Roll?

  Is that within the purview of the Secretary of Defense? I don't know if that's his job.

• 46:34Speaker 01

  Keeps people very energized and on alert. So for me, my vision with hopefully what would come from this project, and it's a lofty goal, but it's a goal, is can we put a humor performance program together for every workup? Not just for the special operations for the military, for the first responder communities, for the education system. It's mandatory. It's not just something where you have the ability to go to the gym and lift weights or you can go run. This is a protocol that happens for, let's say we get back from deployment, we have a couple of weeks of post-deployment leave where we get to dial it down, reboot, see our family, our loved ones, put all the gear away. And then when we get ready to start back up, the first week of training, or two weeks,

• 47:17Speaker 01

  whatever it may be, is humor performance only. Let's get you back to homeostasis. And here's the protocol on how we're gonna do that. And you're gonna do it as a team. That's something that doesn't exist in our community, and I think it's super important. I think that it, there's things that are mandatory that don't need to be mandatory or don't even need to be there, period, and they're not this. And if I were to say anything as the Secretary of Defense was mandatory, if we're supposed to be in charge of national security... We need to be at optimal levels. And the only way to preserve that is to continue to go back to the basics. That's what we do in training. When we get on a gun, we go back to the basics on a pistol, back to the basics on a rifle. Doesn't matter how good we are. I was a sniper.

• 47:59Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Still go back to the basics, even though I know I can make the shot. I need to bring it all the way back and simplify things to make sure I know exactly what I'm doing, or maybe I just need to readjust.

• 48:09Rich Roll?

  Right, so in this context, getting back to the basics from a well-being perspective means, how's your sleep? Like, how's your mood? How's your temperament? How's your relationship with your family? Like, all of those kinds of things, like making sure that there's a baseline and protocols around, you know, sort of apprising that from time to time to making sure that those buckets are all being adequately filled.

• 48:31Chris Hauth?

  I mean, from a, it's so crazy, right? Like, because this is the world I live in with regards to health and wellness, like wearables and like

• 48:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Chris Hauth?

  breath work and thermal regulation and all the

• 48:43Rich Roll?

  HRV.

• 48:43Chris Hauth?

  things we do.

• 48:44Rich Roll?

  And HRV.

• 48:45Chris Hauth?

  Yet, this is, this is, they should be the ones doing it.

• 48:48Rich Roll?

  Right, I would, I would have thought that, like, the special forces were pioneering all of this stuff and like, beta testing all these things that ultimately find their way to the consumer markets. And it's sort of shocking to discover that, like, this isn't being taught, or these aren't protocols that are, you know, part and parcel of like, your daily routine.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Well, the special operations are doing a lot. Don't get me wrong. But you think about big Navy, big Army, they don't have the budgets that we have, they don't have all the opportunities we have, so they are truly struggling.

• 49:17Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 49:17Speaker 01

  And so this would be more of a play for them.

• 49:19Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  But the things that we do will transfer to them. So if special operations adopted, it bleeds into the military. So, it's sad.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, and it's like a lot of things. If it's not mandatory, and I'm not saying any, you know, everything needs to be mandatory that I think is good for personal performance, but

• 49:42Speaker 02

  There's, you just kind of have this like shoulder shrug kind of, yeah, we got all that, but that's not my thing, you know, and I didn't, you know, I like sauna, I got in the sauna for 10 minutes, I didn't like it, didn't do it, you know, I didn't notice any difference, whereas, you know, if you look at the protocols of, if you look at the science behind even just dry saunas, right, you know, and the protocols that all the different talk, you know, all that, there's a ton of performance podcasts out there that talk about, hey, it's this simple, do this, this many times a week, this temperature, this duration, and here's what the science shows as, you know, all-cause mortality goes

• 50:21Speaker 02

  down by, and it's just like, ah, you know, you kind of have, and I had it for a lot of years, so I can speak to it clearly, you don't really think about your demise, you know, you don't think about being, what's going to be good for me, oh, I'm, you know, I'm in my 50s.

• 50:39Rich Roll?

  You're 25 years old.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's going to be good for me?

• 50:41Rich Roll?

  You're like an alpha, you know, highly trained, you're like, I don't need that, like, I'm invincible.

• 50:45Chris Hauth?

  But even, but that's the interesting thing, like, I like the word homeostasis because it's an interesting dynamic, if you think of it from exercise physiology, that the fact that this is what it feels like to feel good, right, that when my nutrition is right, and I'm sleeping right, and I'm fully alert, and I'm strong, and I'm capable, and I'm rested, and wow, this is my baseline, and now before I deploy, right, that I know, okay, these are my values, I mean, cycling, we have biological passports where they know everything, right, like, I can go through any sport, and they have homeostasis, they have values and numbers so that you know, okay, when things a little bit off, therefore,

• 51:27Chris Hauth?

  you might not be as sharp, you might not be as durable, you might not be as capable in what you guys need to do, right, and so, having this sort of mental, physical recharge, reboot, where nutritionally, you're like, you're getting all those things that'll last you for a few weeks, right, like, or months, where you set a baseline of, okay, these are clearly foods I need, and we can get them when we're deployed or not, but at least I know what I'm missing, again, constantly optimizing yourself so that you can be of better service to others.

• 52:03Rich Roll?

  Coming back for more, but first.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Back to the mental health piece. What is the ambition with the 7X Project and how it can sort of address these issues in terms of veteran well-being? How are you creating some connectivity there?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  So, the full outlook of this project is at the end, we're going to make a documentary, and that's going to explain everything from the trials and tribulations of how this was, the fact that each one of us have had our injuries or learning curve to what we're doing and the completion of it, and then the science behind it. But ultimately, all of this is going to be comprised in a manual. And the manual is something that we're going to sell publicly across the world, and 100% of that proceeds are going to veteran causes to continue their mission to help support. I believe that's how the mental side works is, I'll just give you a real test subject here. So, we have a person on the team who, at the beginning of this project, I called him

• 53:05Speaker 01

  because if not the best, he is one of the top five base jumpers in the world. He's certifiably insane. He is unbelievable, too. He's just got this gifted gab. Australian dude, and he's got this, I love those accents. And so, I called him and I said, "Hey, I need you on the team," because I always put safety advisors. Everybody on this team is so good that I don't even know why I'm part of this team. I kid you not. It's just, it's amazing to me. Well, I asked him to be a part of it, and I didn't know that he was struggling. And it's amazing, right? We don't know what people are going through. So, he called me a couple of weeks later after he said, "You know, I love the mission here. I want to be a part of this. I'm in." A couple of weeks later, he's in Brazil, he's sitting on the beach, and he's a surfer.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  And he's like, "I'm at the lowest point in my life right now. I don't know what I'm here for. I don't know what I want to do, or I don't even know how to move forward." And all I said to him was, "Well, get up off your ass and go run a mile." That's it. I said, "Then they call me when you're done." And I'm no expert in anything, so I just threw that out of my ass, right? And he called me right after, apparently did like a 5K or something. He has a tendency to overdo it. Yes, he does. But he did it, and he called me afterward, and he's like, "Great, that was just great, mate." And since then, he's like, "All right, I've just seen this switch in him where he's..." Just that one little step forward was everything to say, "Okay, somebody cared about me to call me. Somebody tell me to do, go do something."

• 54:31Speaker 01

  And that's all we really need to nurture people is to get them moving forward, just one step at a time. If somebody told me when I got out and I was having a bad day, "I need you to go eat a meal right now, and then I need you to go, you know, rest for a second, and then I need you to get up, and I need you to go run, and then journal, and then call me afterwards." Check. I know that. And that's not just military, that's anybody, like, "Thank you for giving me some guidance. I'm gonna go do that right now, and then you're gonna feel a little bit better." Like, "Man, I just accomplished something." And that's something that we're losing sight on is accomplishments. You know, we don't have to be the first class, the best in the world or anything. It's just gotta be our best version of ourselves.

• 55:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and it's those simple things, right? Like, in recovery parlance, they say, "Halt." Like, if you're feeling like that, low, or, you know, down, or not great, halt is hungry, angry, lonely, tired. Are you hungry? Are you angry? Are you lonely? Are you tired? Like, and the solutions to all of those are pretty simple, like, eat a meal, take a nap, like, move your body, you know, call a friend, things like that. But, you know, we're always looking for that behind the velvet rope thing. Like, where's the secret that I don't know when the solution is kind of self-evident? And it just, all it is, is a friend reaching out and saying, "Hey, go run a mile and call me afterwards." Like, that idea that someone cares, and you got that person to move his body. It's cool.

• 55:51Rich Roll?

  I think that the piece that I wanna explore a little bit further is the community piece, like, the, you know, this notion of, you know, when you're in the military and then you leave, or you're a professional athlete and you're done with that career, and, you know, the, it's just gonna be impossible in your civilian life to find that kind of... Heightened experience where you're so bonded to people because you're doing hard things together. And the best that we can do is to recreate some version of that through like these 29029 experiences. Or, you know, a lesser version of this extreme thing that you guys are about to do. That can, you know, bring those, those communities of people back together.

• 56:34Rich Roll?

  So that they can maintain some kind of cohesion with those people that were so important to them for that, you know, formative period of their lives.

• 56:42Chris Hauth?

  And that's what we're looking to do. I mean, that's what we've talked about. But before we get to that, also the, the, the part that Ryan and the team are looking to do that it just, it's not a solution to the mental health, but it contributes, right? Physical activity, good nutrition, good sleep, good recovery. And also having a purpose and aim towards something, something whether it's outside of myself or greater than myself, or with my group, or with my team. And that ties back into your question just now. Yeah, this project that we're on sounds very audacious and it is going to be very difficult and complicated. And that's not necessarily the answer, but it's to highlight that next time we do this,

• 57:27Chris Hauth?

  we do this as a greater community, more approachable, do an annual thing that allows many veterans to say, you know what? I had a chance once a year to see my brothers and sisters, to get together, to do something hard, to grow, to learn, to calm down, to be with each other, the people that get it. And that filled my cup. That filled me up and it allows me to say, snap out of it or somewhat snap out of it. Again, nothing permanent solution, but more like a reprieve. And whether it is something like a 29029 where it's all veteran based and they have an opportunity to bond and get closer and be healthy and feel good

• 58:09Chris Hauth?

  and learn and nutrition and mindset and breath work. And you put all that together and then off they go. And hopefully that carries them for four, five, six months.

• 58:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah. It's crazy that something like that. Doesn't already exist.

• 58:22Chris Hauth?

  It does.

• 58:23Rich Roll?

  Maybe something does.

• 58:24Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I feel like Wounded Warrior Foundations and there's many veteran foundations that offer a lot of activities. Let's say mountain biking, excursions and so forth. And there's a lot of veteran owned businesses that offer these things. But almost like an annual like Sturgis or something like that, right? Where if you can get 100,000 motorcycle riders in North Dakota.

• 58:45Rich Roll?

  Itinerant motorcycle, yeah.

• 58:47Chris Hauth?

  You should be able to get a couple.

• 58:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it should be a lot easier.

• 58:51Chris Hauth?

  So, but that's why I've been bugging Ryan a lot about this, about like, let's just use this as a catalyst to create something where annually it's known as the Human Performance Project. But it's not like they have marathons. It's something that's approachable, meaningful, that they have to train for. So you're getting ready for it for a few months and that creates community and bonding already, right? Because you're looking for people in your community or even your former teammates and so forth that you can say, hey, are you training for this too? Like, how are you doing? And just another platform to get closer and beyond.

• 59:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's, it's, it's a pretty cool thing. You mentioned the Human Performance Project. So that's your like sort of umbrella company. The 7X Project is just but one, you know, project that lies underneath that umbrella. So what is the broader like Human Performance Project mission? What's that all about?

• 59:51Speaker 01

  Well, so it all umbrellas under a company we call American Extreme. And so they'll be broken into three components, one being extreme live sports stunts. Because we know that that's something that people want to see. I think it's that people want to see me crash and burn. I think that's why people follow it. I hope I never give them that opportunity. But it draws people in and it draws our younger generation and that's something that we need to really focus on is, yes, this is applicable for everybody, but we got to start making these kids and getting these kids to understand it right from the get go. So that's why this manual that we're creating is for a 14 year old kid and up. So they can truly understand like, I want to live with True North to start. How do I do that? And I don't want to go to Google and find all these bio hacks and all these other things when I don't even know the baseline.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  So we'll have that. We're going to have the Human Performance Department that we're going to continue to add to by doing different types of hard things to develop human performance, both on the mental side and the physical side. And then we're gonna have event. So that way it's a community because a short story on the community. So when I got out 2010, I moved to Dallas. I started working in a job that I didn't want to work for. And I had no community around me of my community I considered. So I was by myself. I didn't like the job I was doing. It became very difficult and I did it because you know, you're motivated. You get out, I gotta work hard because this is what I'm disciplined to do. And over a couple of years, it really started to weigh on me. And I felt like I had zero meaning of purpose in life. It was terrible.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  A friend of mine said, hey, you need to go back to San Diego and see your teammates. And I was like, you know what? You're right. I need to. And he's like, well, let's book it right now. And I was like, um, okay. Booked it. I went back to San Diego. I got into San Diego before I even texted the guys. And then I said, hey, I'm in town. Does anybody want to show up tonight and have a drink? And the whole platoon came out.

• 1:01:36Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  And it was just this unbelievable feeling of acceptance again, that I shouldn't have had to have thought I did, I didn't feel because I thought I left the tribe. And it was just ridiculous that I put it in my own head. But ultimately nothing had changed. And it was mostly hearing stories of me and some of the fun stuff that I used to do that they still have in picture. Uh, but it was just everything. And that gave me not just a refill for the, the, the time. It recharged my batteries forever. So now I make it a point, I'm going to continue to go back to the community because the better served I can be for myself inside, now I can start helping everybody.

• 1:02:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And when did the base jumping and, and bird suit stuff come in? Cause that was also sort of a curative thing that you found after, right? After you left the military.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's not just one day you wake up and say, I'm going to jump off a cliff or I'm gonna, with a parachute. Let me just make sure to say that. Uh, don't do the other thing. And then, um, or fly a wingsuit. Now, everybody thought, well, I'm bird man. So initially that's what I'm supposed to do. I was actually terrified of everything growing up. I didn't like heights or anything, whatever. Uh, but you get into skydiving and it becomes a progression. I always wondered why the base jumpers were leaping off of cliffs. And I wondered if I could do that, just if I had it inside. And I remember getting trained in it, uh, years after I started skydiving. And I remember being on the exit point in Switzerland, in the Swiss valley, looking down and saying to myself, what the hell have I gotten myself into? This is insane.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  I'm standing there, probably 180 beats a minute, not doing a thing. And I'm like, I can't believe this. And You know, of course, you don't want to let your guys down. So you're like, I'm gonna do this. And you breathe. And when you jump, what happens is you initially start falling, and then you go head down, until your body picks up enough speed for you to actually start gaining air underneath you. And then you start flying, if you're good at body position. And it puts you into a flow state. And it was so incredible. It's like meditation. You don't focus on anything else. I don't care what's going in your life. It's gone. And you're right in the moment. And you're super alert. And everything means something. So when you pull, if you have a problem with your canopy, you have to be on it in a split

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  second, or you're dead. So that's not the exciting thing to me. That's the stuff that I just like switching my brain on and having to make quick decisions fast and making the right decisions. And everything's on you. So this is the only thing that I do as an individual sport, yet it's always with a community of base jumpers. So that progression led into, I didn't get into it because I just wanted to do it for fun. I didn't get into it because I wanted to make myself a profile on Instagram or whatnot. I purely got into it because I knew that people were watching it. And I saw the number of likes underneath it. And I figured, maybe we can do this in such an extreme way to hook people in the younger generation. And then we can use that hook to now engage them with the right things.

• 1:04:31Rich Roll?

  Right. Like, that gets people's attention. But that's the Trojan horse for the bigger conversation that you want to have. The obvious question, you probably get this a lot, is that you're, you know, you're finding a way to, you had this extreme experience as a member of the SEAL Teams. You exit that. And then you find this other super extreme, you know, pursuit activity that satisfies your kind of hormonal baseline, right? Like, it's sort of like, well, I don't have that other thing that was so, you know, intense. And you found this other really intense thing. The question being like, short of, you know,

• 1:05:11Rich Roll?

  base jumping in that Swiss Valley, like, is there a way for a more normal person to acclimate to, you know, a more kind of sedated civilian life without having to go chase extreme pursuits? Like, that's the bigger question that most veterans are facing, right?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  So, I mean, my answer is, find homeostasis at home.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  That is my number one because I think we put a lot of that off. Like I look at, I have two wonderful children, mostly wonderful. And then I have an awesome wife and me trying to engage and move forward so fast and do all these things and I'm like, what, what's the real meaning here? And the meaning is I'm a dad. That's my number one and I have to be a husband. So helping people engage with their families again is really, could be the catalyst for everything. Extreme sports for me was never a thrill seeking thing because I just love adrenaline. I'm actually quite terrified when I jump. But I know that the bigger push is if we can do these things as a team, we can engage people and then we can really with the experts around us, give them the information they deserve.

• 1:06:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:06:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Making it about service, right? Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  I had no desire ever to get on a cliff and jump off. So when he's like, I wonder what, why they do that? I never, I never, I never crossed my mind. But unlike him, jumping, you know, I jumped my entire career, literally from February 1992 to retiring in August of 2016. Just the first few years, static line and then free fall the rest of my, my career. I'm back to jumping again for this project and it still scares me like it always did. And I, in, in an enjoyable way, if that makes sense. Like I, you know, feel very alive prior to, during the jump and obviously once I've safely landed on the ground.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  But I, the transition piece out of the military for me at 25 years, I kinda, I mean, I'd been in the same place for, you know, I feel like I grew up in the army, obviously. I retired at 45, so I spent 25 years in the army, more than half my life. And then, you know, I kinda, as I was transitioning out, I was like, well, you know, am I who I am? Like, can I be a productive? Person outside of this. Yeah. Organization like it kind of I was curious, right? And then I get this opportunity to go all the way to Colorado from North Carolina. And so I, you know, and my wife agreed to it like all four of our kids had been born right there in North Carolina. We pulled them all

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  out of everything they'd ever known and moved to the Denver area and, uh, and it worked out. Actually, well, I could be a productive citizen, at least at some level in Denver. But it was having something to focus on going, oh, I was, I was really good at this. Now I'm in this corporate environment and I'm rebuilding this security program for this company and, and, you know, what can I, can I be successful at that? And that, that went fairly well. I got, um, I got bored of it pretty quick. And that's where I started a side coaching business. Um, but, but to speak to this project, when I heard about the project and I didn't hear it initially from Birdman, I heard it from one of the

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  other athletes, Danny P. And the first thing that hit my mind about this whole thing, it was fully like me focused. I was like, I couldn't do that. Seven, and I just went right to the marathons. Seven marathons in seven days. I couldn't do like thinking about moving on an airplane from location to location. I was just like, I'm thinking the time involved and the recovery and my immediate thought was I couldn't do that. And then of course, the next thought was I, you know, I would love to do that, like having that, just like we're talking about, something in the distance that I would really have to like get to a whole new level on for being prepared for and to be able to execute that, you know,

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  barring any Murphy's in an accident here or there or sickness or something. And if we can get a lot of attention doing this crazy adventure, or what I tend to call the expedition, to get people to then realize, well, you know,

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  I can, why am I not doing a little bit of movement? Why am I not eating a little better? Why am I not focusing a little more on how, how to sleep better? You know, I'm gonna start and see what happens. I think that, that's gonna be great. So, I mean, it's funny, cause running, jumping off a cliff and running seven marathons in seven days? I don't know why one was more appealing to me than the other, but for some reason, I picked a long, the long slog to get excited about, I guess.

• 1:10:00Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm, I'm interested in, in what you, your experience has been, you know, pivoting into this world of endurance and taking on a challenge where you have, you know, Chris kind of guiding you with some, some training principles that are probably new and different from what you're used to in the military. And then conversely, Chris, who's had a career coaching endurance athletes and aspiring endurance, endurance athletes, what has it been like to now train and coach military athletes? Like, how is, how is that different? So, I don't know who wants to start, but.

• 1:10:34Speaker 02

  Go ahead, guys. Throw me under the bus. I'll start, I'll start. Um, so, so I knew enough to know that I didn't know enough, right? Um, I'd been a general physical preparedness guy, like, hey, I wanna be, I wanna be fast. I wanna be, have a little bit of endurance. I wanna be strong, powerful, all 165 pounds in me. And then we, then I started running, as we talked about this, and I, you know, I was like, oh, let me grab this book and that book, and I'll start reading, and oh, here's what a perfect week looks like for a marathon, you know, 16 week plan. So, multiply that times, you know, seven, you know, okay, this is not, this is not, this is not answering, this is not answering the mail, right?

• 1:11:17Rich Roll?

  Chris is laughing over there.

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  So, you know, and, and where I was in the military, if we wanted to do something good, we found whoever we could get a hold of, that was the best, you know, the best person in the world that we could get a hold of, whether that was shooting a pistol, driving a car, driving a truck, driving a, you know, whatever, parachuting.

• 1:11:35Rich Roll?

  Find the expert.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've, we were like, hey, let's find the expert. And, you know, I'd, I'd obviously run a ton over my lifetime, but, uh, nothing.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  Like this, I ran the one marathon in my life in 2011 and it was very ugly the following 24 hours. So I, again, yeah, your book, I found Chris through your book and I said, and listening to your story, I was like, thinking about four milit-, you know, special operations chuckleheads, for lack of a better term, I was like, this is the guy that's probably going to be able to get through to us, if anyone can.

• 1:12:12Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I mean, I've had, you know, it's, it's been an interesting experience. I have some experience with working with,

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:12:18Chris Hauth?

  former operators and, you know, guys trying to get into it. And then I worked with a couple of guys getting through Ranger School and so on. So the protocols and so forth were familiar, but, you know, you're putting something together that you have four different people doing something that they've never done before. And, you know, 184 mile run week, however you slice it.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:41Chris Hauth?

  Whether you're an endurance runner or not, it's still a huge week. So it's been a, it's been a fun experience on putting it on paper and then seeing how four people apply it in different ways, where they are in their lives and how they train and how they sort of retain the information. And so we've been, we've been progressing quite nicely. We had a specific training plan in mind. And so what we started with is that we just started running for a little bit, but then I'm a simulation guy.

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Chris Hauth?

  And so, as you know.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm familiar, Chris.

• 1:13:16Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. And so we started, and I always said, you know, you don't need to run seven marathons in order to prep for this. We'll, we'll build up to, let's say, five, or close to five. That's plenty. If you can do five close marathons, you're ready for seven when you're rested. And by the time the durability and the endurance kicks in. So we literally started in June with. Five by eight miles, one week. And then we went back to marathon training and general stuff. And then we went to five by 10 miles. And then a month later, we went to five by 13.1, right? And so constantly learning in that process. What do I need for fuel? And you don't really know that yet at five by eight and five by 10. But at 13.1, you're starting to pay attention to what you need to eat during the week and recover.

• 1:14:00Chris Hauth?

  And then we went to five by 16. But as we discovered at five by 16, the rails started getting a little screwy because people just weren't able to do that type of volume. You know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a big run week. And keeping these guys healthy and durable for the day, the week will be the primary objective. And so we just got together. We progressed to technically on the timing to five by 20. That was going to be this past week. And we pulled the plug on that mainly because we don't want to get injured. And different people have progressed differently. Like Alex, for example, he's fully ready for five by 20.

• 1:14:45Chris Hauth?

  He did the five by 16, felt good. We have another guy, he built up some good volume, but he got some niggles and injuries along the way. And I don't want to put that load on him right now. We've got Ryan, he's been in and out some injuries and trying to keep his body in one piece. Same thing, pulled the plug. So right now, we're sort of pulling a thread from now until February.

• 1:15:08Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:15:08Chris Hauth?

  And trying to figure this out.

• 1:15:10Rich Roll?

  But meanwhile, these guys are masters of self-discipline. They know how to, you know, sort of follow a chain of command. Like, there's not a lot of excuses and wimping out and like, that's going to be a little bit different, right?

• 1:15:21Chris Hauth?

  That's a problem.

• 1:15:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, because for overtraining or not.

• 1:15:25Chris Hauth?

  And I put it on the training piece, they're going to figure out how to do it despite being broken. Right? And so this is the whole coaching thing once again, that they're not very familiar with. They're receiving commands, but they're like the whole, I need feedback. Tell me how you're feeling, what you're observing. Are there any niggles? How was yesterday's run? Like silence, got it done.

• 1:15:50Chris Hauth?

  Executed.

• 1:15:51Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Chris Hauth?

  Check. That's what I get back. Or I don't get anything back. And I hear like a month later, oh, don't worry about him. He's getting it done.

• 1:16:01Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Chris Hauth?

  All right. So it is.

• 1:16:05Rich Roll?

  These guys are like, what's with Chris and all this touchy feely stuff? Like, I know, you know, he told me to do it and I did it.

• 1:16:11Chris Hauth?

  Yeah. So it's, it's, it's been a, it's been a interesting journey and here we are. And again, we're going to figure, now it's individual, right? Everybody has their individual. There is no group plan in the beginning. And I knew that, we talked about this early on. I knew that we would go our separate ways with regards to everybody having an individual plan and keeping it together for as long as we can. Problem is when you're in a team in a unit like these guys are, if the one guy hears, hey, what, you did 20 miles? Next thing you know, he's out the door doing 20 miles. And I'm like, dude, you're supposed to stop at 14. Like, we want to keep you healthy. So it's been fun in that respect of just giving them a

• 1:16:53Chris Hauth?

  hard time. But there is a, you know, I'm concerned, not in a negative way, but I'm concerned in paying attention that, hey, we've got 10 weeks to go till we fly to Dallas. And I need you guys to sort of, now we're now in the dirty part. And everybody needs to go their separate ways with regards to, this is your training plan. This is your training plan. And let's stick to it.

• 1:17:15Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And with a puzzle this complex, the chances of it going completely smoothly are pretty low, right? Like, there's going to be obstacles and shit's going to get fucked up and not go correctly. But you guys know, I mean, you, you guys are masters of navigating that kind of thing, right?

• 1:17:32Chris Hauth?

  Yeah. I mean, and I'll, I'll answer into this part because Alex even asked me the other day with regards to like, how you feel about the team and you know, They know their world, but getting into this space of just being that exhausted and broken down and from a physical activity like this and just going to have to run 26.2 miles the next day, even letting go and walking some of it, right? We just got to execute. There's going to be so many dynamics in this that because I don't know them in a past experience of doing an event like this, I'm more worried of like, wow, that shit's gonna hit the fan, right? I know that they'll be fine and they'll bond and they'll be like, yeah, isn't this hilarious?

• 1:18:17Chris Hauth?

  Like, my femur's broken, but look, it's pretty funny. Like, you know, I don't want that. I don't want that, right? So, there's my nerves, right? Like, I'm, you know, I, my conversations with, whether it's at home or with Alex is like, you guys, I'm very nervous because I want you guys to have this positive experience, this amazing experience versus go through misery for four or five days, so.

• 1:18:42Rich Roll?

  Hmm. Is there anything particular that you guys are like, top of mind worried about? Or what's the, what's the, yeah, like, the one thing that is waking you up in the middle of the night about the whole thing?

• 1:18:55Chris Hauth?

  I know what you're gonna say already.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  The next training peaks that comes in tomorrow? Always comes in at 6:00 PM, like, ah, I saw that email, I'm gonna just check that later. So, the big thing for me when I started to put this team together is, I knew that I needed experts, but I wanted them to have good attitudes. That was the biggest thing for me. It's like, great, I know a ton of experts in different genres, but you gotta have a good attitude. And so that's why I chose the individuals on the team, because I know it's gonna get hard. 2014 or 15, I did a 100 mile run, and you hit those walls where you just hate, or at least I did, I hated, like, from mile 65 to 80, I was in this terrible wall and it was just so miserable and I didn't have positive attitude always around me, it made it even worse.

• 1:19:40Speaker 01

  And so, I know that we're gonna hit these walls, going through hell week in SEAL training, it's five and a half days where you're up, just getting crushed the whole time. And so you've got the positive side of the house, where there's people that wanna be there, or just like, in the psychopaths that are laughing at you with the femur exploded out of your leg and they're just like, this is awesome, and you're holding it like, it could be a war game or something like that, and then there's the ones who quit. So for me, like he said, it's keeping myself durable enough. Mentally, I know that I can do something like this if I were forced to do it or tasked to do it. But physically, will my body hold up? Because again, we're not trying to prove to ourselves that we're you guys, that we're these awesome athletes. We're trying to prove that a normal human being like myself can do this so you can't too.

• 1:20:24Rich Roll?

  Right, but you're not a normal human being.

• 1:20:25Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean.

• 1:20:27Rich Roll?

  I don't think he's a normal human being.

• 1:20:33Speaker 01

  But I'm not an ultra distance runner.

• 1:20:35Rich Roll?

  I get that part. I get that part. Well, maybe that's a good opportunity to ask you guys about, you know, the experience of being in the armed forces, being part of special forces. There is, you know, now we're in a culture where there's a lot of books out there, there's a lot of kind of internet influencer, podcaster type people. Like, we know a lot more about what that experience is like. But I think the normal person also projects an idea of what that experience is all about that probably doesn't exactly match the reality of it. Like, how do you, you know, kind of characterize, like, how do you think about that experience and, you know, how people might, you know, sort of get it wrong or have a different wrong-headed

• 1:21:18Rich Roll?

  idea about what it was all about for you guys?

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I talked to a lot of kids that want to go on the program, and I specifically talked to them about SEAL training because I don't know anything else. And I ask them why they want to be a SEAL. And there's not a perfect answer, but I want to see where their minds at because I didn't know anything about being a SEAL when I went in. I knew about being a student in training. That's what we could see publicly. But 90% of the job is either miserable or it's boring. So it's that 10% that's just absolutely amazing that drives you to continue to do it all the time. And it's the people that really make it worthwhile. So, I mean, the job of putting all the gear together to go actually do the mission, it takes a long time and a lot of prep, and it's not fun and it's not sexy. And then, for instance, in the SEAL teams, let's say you skydive at night where you can't

• 1:22:05Speaker 01

  see anything, and then you have to land in water and you know that it's the ocean and there's sharks and they love to eat things that look like seals. And we got to dive underwater for four-hour exhaustion dive, and you can't see anything and you keep getting vertigo from the algae out there and you're just looking at a tack board the whole time. And you finally get to your place for two minutes of glory, and then it's over and now you got to get out of there. That's not fun. You know, especially when you're doing it day and day and day again. It's just, so, it's about how much do you want it? And... For me, that's, there's a huge misconception and they also think that we're just these unbelievably unique people and I don't believe that. And I think it's that you either have to be

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  super stubborn to get through the training, or you have to want it so bad. And that's something I don't think people give themselves enough credit for. I think there are a lot more people that can make it into the special operations community. It's just not their thing, or they're not interested in it. But for those who try and attempt, and I just don't think they give themselves enough credit to be there if they want it that bad. Because we could have a bigger populace in our community.

• 1:23:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And what is the difference between the person that is able to make it and see it through and have a successful career versus the person who flames out?

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  I think the big thing is like not setting your aperture on what you're trying to complete close enough. You know, it's not, yeah, I'm joining the military and 20 years from now, I'm going to be in this perfect unit, doing this perfect job, you know, looking like this perfect special operator. It's more like, can I get through the, you know, hey, what if I make it to lunchtime? That would be pretty cool. Let me focus, let me focus on getting to this next stop point successfully. I mean, and you know, if that's not, I talk to my kids about that all the time, whatever they've got going on, right? It's about just kind of keeping your perspective smaller on, you know, eating the elephant

• 1:24:03Speaker 02

  one bite at a time. On what people get it wrong, you know, if you watch a movie, it looks like it's super exciting all the time. And, and you know, even in, even in like the chaos of a busy rotation overseas, you know, that's, there's not a whole lot of that. It's not like you're doing that every, you know, you're having these amazing, these significant engagements. At least I never, you know, it wasn't for me, like you have these significant engagements every night, you know, for four months in a row. It's, it's just every, you know, it's a lot of, a lot of operating, just like you do in training. And then occasionally, there's this

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Wow, wasn't expecting tonight to be like that kinda experience and, and then you come back and you, you just go right back to what you've learned to do in training with regard to finishing up the night and preparing for the next, you know, getting ready to go out again for what may be an, you know, some people would consider an exciting night or a boring.

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  And, and not knowing when you're gonna go out again, right? Like, there's a lot of waiting around and.

• 1:25:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were definitely rotations like that. And then there were some rotations where you knew even before you left the States, it was gonna be, it was just gonna be a super busy rotation. But the training is, there, there's not this magic where it's like, well, would it, you know, wow, when you get to this level, like, what's, you know, what's, tell me the secret. And there is, the secret is, there's no secret. It's like, hey, the stuff you learned from day one, just keep getting better at it. Shoot, move, communicate, get better at it to the point of being a master. And, you know, and, and like, hey, I used to be able to shoot a gun really good and, you know,

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  laying in this one position to now I can do it, you know, moving through three dimensional target with three, you know, three dimensional environment with targets who knows where and successfully finish that type of training. There's, there is no magic. It's just getting better at the basics.

• 1:26:11Rich Roll?

  And Chris, is there anything, you know, qualitatively different about working with these guys or these types of guys that, that, that you've seen and, and learned from, from, you know, that distinguishes them from the other just, you know, sort of civilian endurance athletes?

• 1:26:27Chris Hauth?

  No, actually. They're humans. You know, they're humans like everybody else. They have a desired outcome. They're looking to achieve a goal. A pretty audacious goal and it's out of their comfort zone, but overall the human side and who they are comes forward and you're dealing with the same same sort of versions of humans. I mean, the only thing is you and that's maybe a mistake. You make assumptions of, oh, well, they won't, they're mentally this, or they're not going to quit on this. And that might be true, but you can't necessarily assume that on everything. You got to treat them just like any other athlete because they're breakable too.

• 1:27:07Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:08Chris Hauth?

  Right? And they can overtrain too and so forth.

• 1:27:10Rich Roll?

  We have a sort of a tradition here on the podcast that we kick off January with with some special forces guys. We've done this a number of times. And because I have you guys here, I think it would be cool to talk a little bit about habit change because that is, that just happens to be on everyone's mind at the beginning of January when people are thinking about their, their goals, their dreams, their aspirations, their New Year's resolutions, what they want this new year to look like, overcoming, you know, past bad habits and replacing them with healthier ones. How do you think about goal setting and, and, and habit change? Like what practices have worked for you? Which ones haven't? And, you know, what are, what are some kind of words of wisdom that you can impart to that

• 1:27:55Rich Roll?

  person who's trying to put the pieces together to create something, uh, you know, different and more exceptional than their previous lived experience?

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  There's a lot there. Um, this, this next year is going to be different for me because I'm still going to be focused on getting through this one. So I'm going to be very focused in training peaks. But ultimately, I think for me, because I've done this, um, 2022 is a self-reflection. Am I happy? And do I love myself? That was my biggest thing. And so for me, I would say instead of focusing on, okay, what are the new objectives for the year would be like more internally, how can I actually focus on myself to make myself feel much better? How can I love myself again and be human and be happy again? Then I can start to project all the cool things I'm going to do because if you love yourself,

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  everything else is easy. So that's something I had to do and take a deep look in. And it's not easy, but it very well may be the hardest thing, but the best thing you can do for yourself.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  I like the, I mean, I think there's always, there's never a better time than right now to have a habit change that's for the positive, right? With the people I work with and with myself, I try to, you know, I used to, if I couldn't, if I lost my window to go to the gym for this perfect workout, I just wouldn't go at all. And I've realized that as a dad of a bunch of kids and husband and a guy trying to make money in the civilian world, you know, sometimes I just got to accept, you know, B minus work, right? So my biggest recommendation for anyone trying to move into a set of better habits is start

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  small, don't boil the ocean, take any positive progress, you know, day to day as a win, you know, kind of, the army, the military has task condition standards, right? So you can be like, oh, the standard is, you know, here's the task, here's the conditions, here's, here's the standard that I pass. Yes, well, make your standard, you make it a window, but have the bottom of that standard where you can say, did I pass? Yes, low, right? So yeah, I want to have this optimal day tomorrow where I eat perfectly and, you know, my salad, the chef like sang to the greens before he put them in the bowl that I, or whatever, you know, like that's perfect.

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  Well, have perfect as an ideal, but accept, accept like a day as a win if you, if you get some movement in and you, and you eat pretty decently and you get a little bit of, you know, basic focus on sleep done so that you're, you're not just a train wreck every day. And then, and then when you, when you, even when you don't make that minimum standard, you know, give yourself a little grace and get right back on the horse. Cause the problem is people are like, oh, this is how I'm going to live my life. I'm going to change all these habits and then they miss a day and then they miss two days and then they're like, well, I'll, I'll start again next year.

• 1:30:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:30:57Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. What's interesting about, it's great advice. I think that's really good advice. But as you're recounting that, I'm thinking, you know, guys in the military, they're So disciplined, like these guys have, you know, their habits dialed in, they know what they're doing, but you're also in this highly regimented environment where accountability checks are built in and you have an agreed upon goal that you're collectively working towards. Like there's systems in place to kind of, these guardrails, right, that are directing you towards a certain kind of outcome. And then in the civilian world, it's kind of just up to you, right? Like you have to create that accountability for yourself. Like you have to try to recreate whatever, you know, kept those guardrails up in the

• 1:31:38Rich Roll?

  military in your own personal life. And that's a different type of skillset. Did you find that challenging when you, you know, left the military? Has that, has, or do you just have like, that's so ingrained in you that you kind of know how to do that for yourself?

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  I mean, for me, I saw it right away that people around me weren't operating at a standard that I would have felt was sufficient. But it didn't change how I operated. But it became difficult because they weren't operating. So yes, that's, it's very difficult. So that's why you form a team around you. So that way you can put out word and you can better serve like, hey, I want to help you with this, but this is the way that I'm going to do things. And this is what I expect in the military. When a senior leader would come by and say, okay, here's the word of the day. And this is what we got to get done. Check, check, check. And then by the end of the day, all he has to do is say, bird, check, we're good. He knows it's done. And it's the only community, if you did that in the corporate, how are we doing? Well, let's talk to HR real quick. It's gonna be

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  a long time. So that's personally why I form a team around that are better than me so that I'm held accountable, even though I'm creating these things, because it's a lot.

• 1:32:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:32:47Speaker 01

  And it's not easy. It's definitely not easy being a civilian. It's very difficult. It's not just because of the military. It's difficult. Tough times out there. There's a lot at stake. I mean, you want to build a family someday. You want to retire someday. So you got to put the work in while you're younger and fortify yourself.

• 1:33:04Rich Roll?

  Chris, you always have a lot of wisdom around habit change.

• 1:33:08Chris Hauth?

  Well, I'm about aiming at something, right? Like, it doesn't have to be the perfect goal, but aim at something. And along that journey, you're going to discover a lot of things about yourself, but also what you don't like and what you do like. And we know that the human being is most happy when they're making progress. Even if it's miniature little progress goals like Alex was talking about, we get a little dopamine hit. We get some validation that we're on the right path towards what we're aiming at, right? And standing still leaves us somewhat unhappy. Actually, digressing makes us very unhappy. So find something to aim at. And so when it's around something, whether it's New Year's or something that you're missing a direction,

• 1:33:52Chris Hauth?

  aim at something that fulfills you, that gets you excited, that makes you curious. And from there, start taking small steps and actions. And again, it's the small things that we keep saying that keep adding up. And everybody that I talk to is, when we come up with adventures, with a lot of athletes that I work with, they ask me, well, what should I do? What's the adventure I should take on? What do you think I should do next? And it's more diving into what they're curious about or what invigorates them or what they've always wondered, hmm, I wonder if I can do that. And if there's a string to pull there, that's the direction to start heading in. Because then you're satisfying a deeper need, curiosity, a deeper why, and that's fun.

• 1:34:37Rich Roll?

  There is something magical and mystical about what happens when you just string a few sort of actions together that are self-esteem building or moving you towards a certain goal, even if they're super tiny, right? Like, you create this momentum. And that momentum builds. Suddenly, you're more enthusiastic about taking that next step than you were one step prior because you did these two. It could be tiny. It could be like I brush my teeth, you know, in the, whatever it is that you're struggling with. And then you do that. It's like, you know, this idea of self-esteem is a function of doing esteemable acts. And those esteem- Can be on behalf of yourself, right? And when they're small.

• 1:35:18Rich Roll?

  But those things like they really like build in this compounding kind of way that can really redirect your life. So it is really important to start small. It's that idea of like atomic habits, right? That James Clear book like.

• 1:35:30Chris Hauth?

  But it's also about looking back, right? You, if you do those small things, you look back and you go, man, I've come pretty far. Even in a short time, because I've strung those little things together. And I think that's also an accelerator to where you're, where you want to go.

• 1:35:46Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:35:46Chris Hauth?

  There's one thing pulling you to, or you're aiming for, but you're also moving away from something. And you combine those two motivations, that's a pretty powerful tool. Meaning I no longer want to be this person, whether that's in a health way or in a personal way or in a career way. And you're moving towards something you're striving towards or you're aiming towards. That's pulling you, that's pushing you away. Now you have double momentum. And when you're in that sweet spot and you've identified that you can do both. It helps you on days when you're not that excited to move in that direction.

• 1:36:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:21Chris Hauth?

  But you're reminded, I no longer want to be that version of myself. So it gives you that little bump that you're talking about, that little extra step forward.

• 1:36:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. I, I think that that, to Ryan's point, it begins with that first question, which is like, how do you feel about yourself on the inside? Right? Are you happy with who you are? And if you're not, it is reflecting upon, you know, the past, like who have I been in the past? And how do I want to show up in the future as a solvent to that notion of like, I don't feel good about who I am right now. And, and that's a, an exploration of your values, right? Like you have to be clear on like your values, because your values paint the portrait of the person you aspire to be. Like, how well are you living up to these values that you feel are important, right?

• 1:37:09Rich Roll?

  And then dissecting that into actions that you can take that will move you towards that more aspirational version of yourself. That is living up to that value set that fundamentally you feel like is important and a reflection of the person that you want to be.

• 1:37:25Chris Hauth?

  And it's dynamic, right? It's constantly moving where you're with regards to your values, right? And it's and who I don't want to be and who I do want to be. And so there's that that's constantly sort of in this little flux state. And so if you're kicking that forward a little bit, I think that's when you're also finding it easier to do the hard things.

• 1:37:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And and and that idea that if you're not feeling good about who you are, it's probably because there's tension between, you know, how you're showing up in the world and how you wish you were showing up in the world, right? That makes you feel like shit. And then you beat yourself up and you go down that shame spiral of, you know, making the second mistake that compounds in the negative direction.

• 1:38:05Chris Hauth?

  Well, that's especially when you think of New Year, right? We create those expectations. We created that story of who we want to be.

• 1:38:13Rich Roll?

  Which is just a story.

• 1:38:14Chris Hauth?

  Exactly. And so then we're stuck and we give ourselves a hard time for something we created.

• 1:38:19Rich Roll?

  No one else is giving you a hard time. Yeah.

• 1:38:22Chris Hauth?

  And so the hardest judge is on ourselves. And so that's why I talk to a lot of athletes too. It's like, wait a moment, you set that expectation to do X time or do X distance or take on X goal. It's like, we can modify that? Like, well, I gave my word. Okay, that's a very important thing. And it's it's meaningful to a lot of people that they gave their word. But you can still move towards that by sort of creating a little bit more leeway around that expectation. You still can achieve it, but give yourself maybe a different timeline or give yourself some, you know, a different path towards it. But expectations are hard, hard, hard drivers of how we judge ourselves. And that's one of the nice things about this project. We have no expectations on how we're going to

• 1:39:07Chris Hauth?

  do it. We just know we are going to do it. It's not like, am I going to run a 3:30 marathon everywhere? No. In the Antarctic, we're going to

• 1:39:14Rich Roll?

  Absolutely not. Yeah.

• 1:39:16Chris Hauth?

  We'll be walking a lot of this in the snow, right? So it is, it is what it is. And you're just going to achieve your outcomes and don't judge yourself on the expectations you created for yourself.

• 1:39:27Rich Roll?

  Yeah. The other really important piece there is sustainability, right? So we all know people set these New Year's resolutions. And you know, two weeks, two months, three months, whatever, flame out, you know, here we are again. I said I was gonna, you know, go to the gym every day, or whatever it is, and it's unsustainable, and they lose interest, or they miss a day, and do that thing you were talking about, where it's just like you throw the baby out with bathwater. Well, I can't do it, and so I just, I'm giving up altogether. So how do you think about and communicate around this notion of sustainability to create these habits and practices that, you know, conserve you long term? Because it's not about what you're gonna do over the next two months, it's like, where are you gonna be next January?

• 1:40:12Rich Roll?

  And beyond?

• 1:40:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think something that some people, you know, but one way to maybe change the thought process for people is, you know, hey, I wanna lose 40 pounds. Well, that's great, you wanna lose 40 pounds, but let's not focus on that. Let's focus on the behaviors that we can measure, right? You know, like, hey, every day, I'm going to, I'm not gonna have any food until this time, and then, you know, this is what my first meal is gonna look like, and I'm gonna do all the stuff we know to do from a nutrition standpoint, based on my lifestyle, that's gonna move me towards that goal, but I'm not measuring, I'm not getting on the scale every day to see if I lost 40 pounds, because that's just like punching yourself in the face, right?

• 1:40:53Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  But I can go, okay, did I, did I eat the way, you know, did I eat within my protocol? Did I keep my food, well, the time, the amount of hours I ate throughout the day, in the, in my, you know, my target range? Did I, did I get my baseline protein requirements in? Did I stay away from added sugar and all the, you know, highly processed and highly refined foods that caused me to gain this weight? Like, you, like, I'm not, yeah, I have this goal, but I'm gonna keep track of... Of my, of my behaviors and measure those and base success on that.

• 1:41:32Rich Roll?

  And maybe not even set losing 40 pounds as the goal, but set living your life as a healthy person as the goal, where the 40 pounds comes off as a byproduct of the goal of, you know, adhering to the habits that a healthy person would, because being a healthy person is a value that, you know, I want to manifest in my own life.

• 1:41:52Chris Hauth?

  Well, that's an identity question too, right? 40 pounds is a, is a, is a projection, whereas I want to be the type of person who is active or who is leaner or healthier. Now you have a wider runway to achieve that. Your, your, your goals along the way, your many objectives and how you're progressing towards that give you a lot more leeway from a sustainability standpoint versus, oh, I've only lost two pounds in the last, you know, month. Well, that's disappointing, but if you're sort of saying, well, I am already living out the lifestyle of somebody who I'm looking to become, who eats healthier, who's more active, who gets a lot of sleep and, you know, who cares about how they're caring for their

• 1:42:36Chris Hauth?

  body and their health and wellness. Now you're already that identity and along the way, you're going to get those benefits. I'm the type of person who, well, I can do that. I can do that in two minutes from now, walking out this door. I can be the type of person who lives like that. And now it's just, all right, that's already who I am. It's non-negotiable. It's an identity of mine and I can be that person. The other thing I always look at is how am I progressing from yesterday? It's those many steps, like I don't, maybe I didn't eat perfectly. Maybe I didn't do that workout, but I thought about it and I took care of myself in other ways, so I'm a little bit better than yesterday.

• 1:43:17Chris Hauth?

  And again, I'm moving towards I'm the type of person who, because then now we're dealing with identity versus judgment.

• 1:43:26Rich Roll?

  Why do you think most people abandon their New Year's resolutions?

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Because it's, it's the end of the year. They're probably eating the worst they eat most, you know, of the whole year. They're probably already not treating themselves the right way. Um, I mean, if, if I had to think about, you know, we're as busy as we ever are, it seems like as a family. So, oh, I'm as busy as I'm ever going to be and I'm going to make this. I'm not even going to take time to think about my New Year's resolution and and actual execution. I'm just gonna throw it out there.

• 1:44:01Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:02Speaker 02

  And then, you know, January 1st, you're like, what was it? Yeah.

• 1:44:05Rich Roll?

  It's a weird time, too, because everything in my DNA is telling me to, you know, uh, hibernate and go under the covers. Like, it gets dark early. I don't have the energy that I have in the summertime. Like, you know, we're sort of programmed for this time of year to like, slow down and kind of stop doing things. And yet, it's the time of year where we have more social obligations and expectations around holidays and social, all this kind of pressure on top of it, that, that like, it's like, I don't, this is not the time of the year that I want to do these things, you know?

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  Throw big goals at myself.

• 1:44:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah, a big goal. Yeah, like, I want to sleep.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:43Rich Roll?

  Gather the chestnuts.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  I think another interesting thing, and I think about this from the military in general, and I'll just tell a story that maybe will paint the picture, but I would get my new guys from training as a leader.

• 1:44:57Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  And, and I would immediately take my new team guys to the O course that we had access to every day of the year. Knowing that they hated the O course because

• 1:45:08Rich Roll?

  What is the O course?

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  The obstacle course, excuse me. So I'd take them down to the obstacle course, knowing that they probably hated it because every time they'd run it to that point, they were timed. And it was a test, and they either passed or they failed. And if they passed, maybe they were first, and so they loved the O course. But maybe they were last in the whole training group. And just, and it was just a super stressful thing that when they heard, when they saw it on the schedule, they were just like, oh, great, I've got to go run the obstacle course and, and see how bad I do. Um, I would take them down there, and I would be like, alright, uh, everybody give me your watch, because we're just going to play on the O course. We're not going to

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Do the O course as a timed event and try to immediately change their aperture on what the O course was because it was an amazing training opportunity that just, I mean, it was just amazing. You're in all these different dimensions of moving across ropes and, and different planes of momentum and stuff and, and learning transitions in that environment and stuff was amazing. People get out of the milita- so, so hey, let me, let me take something that you hate about the last little bit of your life and, and, and change your perception of it. I think a lot of people get out of the military and they are like,

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  man, I spent 20 years having to come in every morning, five days a week or three days a week and do these stupid runs in formation and call cadence and then I had to do these stupid pushups, whatever the case may be. So they get out of the military and like, not having to do that anymore. I'm not, you know, and then they, because of some angst they had about something they hated, they lose the ability to identify that as part of a healthy life maybe in the future. And, and of course, that's catastrophic as we all know. I think New Year's resolutions are kind of probably the same thing. I mean, it's like, oh, I have to have a New Year's resolution.

• 1:47:11Chris Hauth?

  You're bringing up a great point. And that's what I was just thinking when you were saying that is like, wait, you're forcing a goal into this window where you're not really thinking about a goal. Like if, if it comes to you naturally where you say, oh, I want to do that. I want to achieve that outcome. But we put January 1 and we go, okay, I've got to think of a goal. I've got to think of a New Year's resolution. It's not natural. It's not your natural rhythm of figuring out a goal. Instead, maybe a short term like I like to do, who do I want to be on February 1st, right? That gets me all right through the holidays. Well, who do I want to be on the Q1, when Q1 ends? So that now I'm just thinking for the next 12 weeks versus this whole annual thing where even you have to

• 1:47:54Chris Hauth?

  sit down and think about your year and reflect on your past year. That's overwhelming to me and I live in the goal space. And it's fabricated and artificial. Like you feel this pressure, like you have to, you have to come up with this thing. Then how are you going to stick to that? Right? You're not gonna stick to that. Now, but if you say, I, once again, I wanna be in six months, somebody who looks like this. Okay, well, that why? Well, that's because X, Y, Z, I'm going on vacation, I'd like to look good, it means a lot to me. Whether it, it, that should be something that means a lot to you or not, is a totally different question. It's more, if it's important to you, good. Now, we have a goal that's important to you, we have a timeline, and we can gradually start moving to it. But this whole forcing a square peg in a round hole, just because it's January 1.

• 1:48:39Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:48:39Chris Hauth?

  Seems like doom for failure in the first place.

• 1:48:43Rich Roll?

  And, and to Alex's point, how can we reframe or tell a new story around the pursuit of hard things? So that it's more like play or fun than regimented in this artificial kind of performance construct, right? Like, remove the timing, I mean, especially like, as we're getting older, right? Who gives a fuck? Come on, you know? Like, can we just do this for the joy of it?

• 1:49:08Chris Hauth?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:09Rich Roll?

  And, and, you know, be, be nourished through community and the collective pursuit of doing hard things? As opposed to qualifying for X, Y, or Z, or, or meeting some kind of artificial performance goal? That we may or may not achieve, and if we don't, we feel less than about ourselves? When, honestly, it doesn't really matter.

• 1:49:32Chris Hauth?

  As long as we're staying healthy.

• 1:49:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:33Chris Hauth?

  And progressing forwards, that we feel good about ourselves, nourishing, exactly. Nourishing ourselves, that's the part.

• 1:49:40Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:49:40Chris Hauth?

  If you can figure out a New Year's resolution where you're nourishing your soul and yourself from a physical standpoint, in a positive way, it's gonna be so much easier.

• 1:49:52Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:53Chris Hauth?

  That should be our word, nourishing.

• 1:49:54Rich Roll?

  Nourishing, there you go. Um, all right, well, for this 7X insanity, uh, are you feeling the pressure, Chris? To keep this thing on the rails?

• 1:50:03Chris Hauth?

  Yeah, I am, I am.

• 1:50:06Rich Roll?

  You guys are making great.

• 1:50:07Chris Hauth?

  Look, he's gonna be fine. He's worried.

• 1:50:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:50:13Rich Roll?

  I did see on the Instagram account, though, there's this woman, Katie Hernandez, who's gonna do a mile in a bomb suit. Like, tell me about that. I want to hear a little bit about that.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  She's Officer EOD, which is Explosive Ordnance Disposal. So she's a bomb tech. They're the psychos. They're the ones who take bombs apart. We like to blow stuff up. They like to take the stuff apart. So she's awesome. She's a world record holder in doing a mile in the bomb suit the fastest. Bomb suit can weigh anywhere from 190 to 150 pounds.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  So she is an awesome, awesome person. She's a great human being, good attitude, and she really wants to challenge herself, continue to challenge herself. So she's raising money for this cause. And as a function of that, instead of her doing the marathons, she's gonna go a mile.

• 1:50:56Rich Roll?

  One mile in each of them.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  She won't be cold in Antarctica.

• 1:51:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, she was right, right? You know, yeah, I just, I'm thinking of like Jeremy Renner in the bomb suit in the movie, of course. Yeah, 100, I didn't realize it was that heavy.

• 1:51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you imagine a bomb going off. You want something to protect you. It probably won't do the job, but I think their running joke is that if you mess up, you'll never know. So I guess that keeps them at peace.

• 1:51:24Speaker 02

  They'll be, they'll all be in one spot if they mess up.

• 1:51:27Rich Roll?

  Right. The bomb suit's not really saving you.

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  No, but after, after she's done with it and I get out of the plunge, I'm jumping right in that thing.

• 1:51:34Rich Roll?

  Well, I'm, I'm really excited about this for you guys. I can't wait. Are we gonna be able to kind of watch it in real time on the internet somehow? Like, how, how can people support what you guys are doing? What are some of the, you know, charities that are, you're supporting? Where do you want to direct people so that they can, you know, stay up to speed with everything that's going on?

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  I appreciate that. So it's 7xproject. You can follow it on social media. And americanextreme.com is our website. We'll be giving updates and we will be doing live segments and we will be putting everything online at americanextreme.com. And we'll continually blast social media through this event.

• 1:52:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  There's gonna be news coverage and all the jazz with it. And then we are going to build this into something that people from any genre can come and participate in after.

• 1:52:22Rich Roll?

  Right. And what are some of the nonprofits that you guys are supporting?

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  So we focused on a plethora of different organizations. We didn't want to double tap. So they could be anything from mental health related to physical ailments, so injury. Gold Star families, helping veterans transition. They're all veteran and first responder focused and not just American, but elsewhere. So every one of our charities is up on americanextreme.com. We have 14 organizations globally.

• 1:52:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we'll link that up in the show notes. I saw that, like the beneficiaries, that page, right?

• 1:52:55Speaker 01

  That's correct.

• 1:52:55Rich Roll?

  That's what it is, right?

• 1:52:58Rich Roll?

  Final thoughts? How are you feeling?

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  I feel pretty good. I mean, again, once you get the professional in and he's telling you what to do and you're able to execute it, and knowing that, you know, it's more to task, not to time.

• 1:53:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13Speaker 02

  I think it's gonna be a hoot and it's, it's gonna be the hardest. In some ways, it's already the hardest thing I've ever done, just because of the hours of

• 1:53:23Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  of, you know, training requirement, etc. And like, planning this out over the next few months. It's gonna be awesome.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  Lots of Murphys, I'm sure. We're gonna have lots of, oh, we weren't expecting that to happen. But yeah, I think, I think it's gonna be very exciting in a run a marathon every day kinda way.

• 1:53:45Rich Roll?

  So we're recording this in early December. This will go up at the beginning of January and then the event kicks off in late February, February 23rd, is that right?

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  Mid-February.

• 1:53:55Rich Roll?

  Mid-February?

• 1:53:56Chris Hauth?

  February 13th is where we're congregating and

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Yep. February 16th is actually when we'll be out in Cape Town to get ready to go.

• 1:54:03Rich Roll?

  And if people are listening and they live in one of those respective regions, can they come out and be boots on the ground to support you guys or run alongside you or any of that kinda thing? Like, what happens if, you know, people are listening, they're in London and they wanna, you know, watch this all go down when you guys are there?

• 1:54:19Speaker 01

  Bring it on. Share it with your friends. Tell everybody. Tell the Queen. Or the King now. Tell everybody. And we do have a few seats available.

• 1:54:28Rich Roll?

  You gotta figure out this London Bridge thing, man. You gotta jump off the bridge.

• 1:54:30Speaker 01

  So, to his point of, he's feeling good. I'm the opposite because I'm also on the logistical side of the house. So we're still in all the planning. So there's a lot to still accomplish. We still have a few seats available. If there are those who love adventure who wanna go along with us.

• 1:54:46Rich Roll?

  How many seats? How many, how many seats on the 757? It's like 400 seats for 400 people.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  I think it's an Airbus, actually.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  It's an Airbus.

• 1:54:54Speaker 02

  It's a wide-body aircraft.

• 1:54:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:57Speaker 02

  It, it's gonna have

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  More seat, yeah, way more seats than than we need and we'll actually turn part of the aircraft into more of a

• 1:55:08Chris Hauth?

  Recovery lounge.

• 1:55:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, you're gonna, you wanna sleep, right? So you're not gonna sleep in normal airplane seats, right?

• 1:55:15Speaker 02

  Like, we'll have a whole athlete section of, you know, hopefully even some soft side hyperbaric chambers and stuff like that and go back to to do a little bit of recovery work in. But well, the other interesting thing from an admin point is for every seat, like for every X amount of seats you keep on the aircraft, you have to have a stewardess just due to regulatory requirements.

• 1:55:38Rich Roll?

  Flight attendant.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

  Excuse me, flight attendant. Sorry, wrong word there. But the, so we're trying to, like, from an admin standpoint, as I listen to all of those calls occasionally, there's even those issues of of trying to really be precise with how we keep the aircraft set up.

• 1:55:56Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:55:57Speaker 02

  But as a wide body, I think, you know, over 400 seats would potentially be the capacity.

• 1:56:04Rich Roll?

  I can't help but think when we, when in talking about like customizing an Airbus for an endurance adventure, I'm like looking at your all day running company hat and I'm like, we gotta get Jesse Isler to just buy this plane when this thing is over. Call it the all day running company Airbus. Just put sauna and cold plunge and it'll just go from one 290 29 to the next.

• 1:56:28Chris Hauth?

  To next all day running event. Exactly. I think there's an outcome there.

• 1:56:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, paging Jesse Isler on that.

• 1:56:35Chris Hauth?

  But I think we're, how many seats do you still have available?

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  We have six. So we're only allowing 30 right now. And that's

• 1:56:43Rich Roll?

  And it's a high ticket item. If people are, if some baller out there is interested in contributing and participating in that, they just go, they go to the American Extreme website and they can get information and contact you that way.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  Yep. You'll contact me directly and we'll just run you through everything.

• 1:56:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And are you, have you met your, like, sort of fundraising goals just to execute the adventure? Or are you still looking to raise some money? I mean, obviously you want to be able to give back to these nonprofits and beneficiaries, right? But

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've met the goal for this to actually happen, but there's going to be that oh shit effect. So we're still raising capital so that we can cover down on everything. And then how we're splicing this is 100% of the net proceeds from the documentary and the manual that's sold go to these charities in perpetuity. So it'll be that everlasting gobstopper for them to continue to fund them.

• 1:57:31Rich Roll?

  Cool. Right on that. Final thoughts, Chris?

• 1:57:35Chris Hauth?

  Well, I've never done something like this before, so I'm pretty-

• 1:57:39Rich Roll?

  Nobody has.

• 1:57:40Chris Hauth?

  That's true. But it's, I'm doing the scariest thing I've ever done, which is jumping out of a plane. It's one of those things where I've always said, you know what? Not for me. And so I'm happy to go to the edge of my comfort zone a little bit. But yeah, it's going to be an adventure for sure. And final thoughts would be, I just want to get back on boots on the ground in Dallas. Everybody's safe, healthy, had the experience of a lifetime, and then I can sort of exhale.

• 1:58:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, cool. Final thing, you mentioned you're putting together this manual, which I think is great. Like, is there an ETA on wrapping that up and making that available? Or is that TBD on the website?

• 1:58:25Speaker 01

  It is TBD on the website, but 2023, having it completed. And we're not sure on when we're going to debut it, but we're going to get to work on it pretty soon.

• 1:58:34Rich Roll?

  Well, I appreciate you guys. This is, in addition to just being an epic adventure that you guys are about to embark upon, the broader mission of addressing veteran rights and, and just mental health issues at, at large, you know, in this very strange and kind of difficult time that we live in, where a lot of people are suffering unnecessarily is really important work. And I applaud you for that and wish you, wish you guys well. I'm at your service. If there's anything I can do to support you or help you guys out, please hit me up.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:59:05Rich Roll?

  Can't wait to hear about it on the backside.

• 1:59:07Speaker 01

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:59:08Rich Roll?

  Yeah, absolutely. Cool.

• 1:59:10Chris Hauth?

  Here we are.

• 1:59:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we did it. We did it. Good. Happy New Year, everybody.

• 1:59:13Chris Hauth?

  Happy New Year.

• 1:59:14Rich Roll?

  Happy New Year. Right on.

• 1:59:26Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting

• 2:00:10Rich Roll?

  the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica

• 2:00:53Rich Roll?

  Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.