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Hey, everybody, welcome to the podcast. We're back with another amay role on edition of the show. I'm back with Adam, my man, Adam Skolnick, hype man podcast. Hype man. Yes, journalist, author, adventurer, swim run afficionado, co-author of an Gorgons Can't Hurt Me. That's the bio, right? Yeah, that's good. How are you. I always like it when you read it. I love it if I didn't read anything.

Now I just know it. You speak it. Yeah.

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

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

So the news cycle moves so quickly that even two weeks ago when we put up a show, it was somewhat dated from the two days that lapsed in between recording it and putting it up, the cycle has slowed a little bit.

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

Yeah, but this is one of the few times we were kind of ahead on what was happening in Portland. And that's kind of stayed is one of the biggest stories that and the covid relapser. Right. So, you know, instead of boring everyone on the same old topics, we don't go there at this time, right?

Yeah. So if you're new to the show, we have a couple of segments that we do, some opening remarks a little bit from the news, a little show and tell. We take an advertising break and then we come back with listener questions.

If you would like your question considered and read on air, you can leave a voicemail for us at four two four, two, three, five, four, six, two six.

Or you can leave it on our Facebook group page. But I'm liking these voicemails. They're great. And I have to thank everybody who's called. The calling is definitely there's been an uptick in messages and and so we're seeing that. And I appreciate everybody who's calling. And I'm going through every single one, listening to every single one and slotting them in. And if we don't get to you today, we still have you in the in the can. And we will get to them.

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

Yeah, it's a chance to interact and and to get into topics. You can't you don't have time when you're talking to a Huberman's doctor Huberman or someone like that, you know, you're not going to talk to him about stuff that, you know that isn't relevant. So this is a chance to be more generalist, as you like to say, to get into the into the range. Right. What ritual's all about.

So we got good stuff for you guys today.

I want to open it up with a little update on our boy, Tommy Rivers. We spoke about him was a two weeks ago, I think. Yes. At that time, Tommy is for people that don't know, is a legendary ultra runner. He's beloved in the endurance communities, the beautiful, beautiful human being who is suffering from some very significant and dire health health circumstances at the moment. When we last recorded this podcast, he was experiencing what was being characterized at the time as quote unquote, covid like symptoms, some severe respiratory distress since we recorded that in between the time in which we recorded that and it went live, he went into a coma and then the family got to work trying to figure out a way to move him to a facility that could properly diagnose him because he was undiagnosed at that time.

He got moved to a facility in Scottsdale from Flagstaff, where he was previously and received a diagnosis, which is a very rare and aggressive form of lymphoma called primary pulmonary N.K. t cell lymphoma. I understand that he is now out of that coma, but. Very much still in a very serious situation. He's sedated, according to his brother, Jacob, he's less inflamed. His oxygen levels are improving. So that's good news. It feels like it's moving in the right direction.

And I understand that he's going to be undergoing, if he hasn't already, some cancer treatments. And I don't know the details of that.

But thank you to everybody who reached out, who contributed to the Go Fund Me campaign. I'm going to put a link to that again in the show notes they have raised over four hundred and thirty three thousand dollars point, which is incredible. Tommy, of course, because he's such a big hearted individual, is asking that that people also consider donating to clean water for the Navajo Nation. There's a link to that up in the go fund me for Tommy and his family as well, so I can link that up as well.

And in addition, his brother and his family organized a run with ribs, which is a, you know, communitarian kind of run to raise awareness and funds for Tommy and his family. The idea is you pick a day between August 1st and August 9th to run, hike, walk, whatever, just move, put some miles in four ribs. And they also just announced an auction called the Bridge on Auction, which you can find on Facebook, and that's live between August 3rd and August 13th.

If you go to Facebook, dotcom slash rage on auction, you can find more information there. I'm going to donate a couple of bucks for that. People are just bidding on on stuff, and that's another way to support him and his family. Amazing. In the meantime, if you want to stay current with his condition, the best place to do that is just following his brother Jacob on Instagram at Jacob Puzey UI. And he's posting daily updates to keep everyone apprised of how he's doing.

And the run with ribs is kind of like as many miles as you want or whatever you want. I think it's it's like a social media thing, like put some runs in you post it to help raise awareness for him and what he's going through. So heart goes out to Tommy and his family.

Oh yeah. It's going to be a longer journey than even just covid. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure.

But I'm glad he's been diagnosed and he's getting the treatment that he absolutely deserves.

Meanwhile, on the subject of putting Miles and Miles put in your first ten mile swim run the other day I posted I just did it all here in my climate change chic gear. How'd that go? I went well, you know, I had I had been having problems with my foot again. It was like the same foot that I broke ages ago and without realizing it and walked on it for several months and then became a chronic condition and slowly was able to get back and first on a treadmill and then finally running.

But it's something I have to manage. It's like a pain thing. And so I had just come back and I and I was having trouble. But then I decided to give it a go and lace them up and go out and do a ten. I think it was like ten and a half miles. Like running. Running to swim. That's right. A little bit. Yes, eight and a little bit over two. Yeah. Two and a quarter swimming I think.

And around Santa Monica. Yeah. So I run from my place down to the beach and then up to the end of the bike path there by Bel Air Bay and then swim down and then ran up Amalfi. So I did a full roll running through the neighborhood in my, in my year and I definitely got some looks this time. Cyclists when cyclists totally decked out in Lycra are giving you looks about how you look, then, you know. Yeah.

You know, you're in your territory. You got to check it out.

Yeah, the best I found the best swim run training that's most appropriate for the courses that you find in the Otello races. Yeah. Is in and around the the bluffs of Pointe Doom, like that original swim that you took me off around the point and then going up those trails. I don't know if those there may be closed right now. I don't know.

Well, they're open. I mean, that's where I trained for Catalina when I was doing that. But it's just such a hard for me to get out to point and back if and even if I'm just diving the reef like I do, it's like four and a half to five hours and it's just impossible. But from what I love about this is it gets me in the ocean without having to do that. I'm like, literally it's it's two hours.

Like, normally if I just do a seven mile or six mile run, it's like under an hour and a half and it's right from my door. And so it just feels like what this sport supposed to be about, like you leave from your door, right. And you're back like that's the beauty of living in Santa Monica. For a long time, I was avoiding the bay because I love doom and I love how clear it is. And the water's clean and it's an NPA and I still love Doom, but that's now really mostly a dive site for me.

And if I'm doing swim workouts, it's in the bay and it's. Cleaner than I thought, I've seen White Sea Bass there, there was a I mean, there was a 14 foot shark sighting off Sunset Point. Was that far from there? Wow. I didn't hear about that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's wild out there to you to a lesser degree, get dolphins coming by. But but yeah. It's just I do love it.

I am addicted to it. I feel so much better than just if I run eight straight, like just doing a different thing. Switching gears really puts it over the top.

I feel like it's a better workout. Like the full body workout. Yeah. And you never like when you're doing it, I mean you did longer segments, but when you're doing these shorter segments, you never comfortable. Like once you settle into a rhythm, then you got to switch it up again and your heart rate's bouncing all over the place, too. And that's a huge difference from triathlon or cycling where you're kind of in a certain groove and you kind of hold it for a long time.

Yeah, but now I'm ready. I could do a 15 car. I could do like the 15 now, which is like what I wanted to prove to myself. And I mean, I could see if you just if you have enough water and food, you could just keep going even three mile run. Yeah. I mean, even multiples of them, they're not that they're not that hard. So. Yeah. Yeah. When, when it was when I was training for the world championship version of that race, at its peak I was doing, I should have been training much more in the ocean than I was.

I was doing it in a pool, but it would be in and out and in and out like, you know, like for like hours and hours, you know, and like and I think the world championship has a 12 mile run in there somewhere. Yeah. Like like two thirds or three. Three quarters into it. Yeah. Well, I was grateful for that because I just wanted to get into a rhythm.

Yeah. You know, all the switching gears was much more challenging for me than just the playing running.

But correct me if I'm wrong, you're just kind of winging this, right? It's not like you're working with a coach. You've got a plan or a program. You're just like, I think I'll do this today. Well, our friend Ted McDonald helped me get ready for Katalina shot. Yeah, shout out to Ted. And and that was really helpful. But basically what happened is quarantine happened and I don't really go anywhere. I go to the farmer's market once a week.

I come here every two weeks. Other than that, I'll either drive to point doom for a dive or I'm swimming and running. Right. And mostly it was running at first because the trails were closed and the beaches were closed. And so I started doing these double digit runs for the first time and which was great. And so then when the beaches opened and we can get back out there, I started to kind of switch it up and I still was doing one run a week.

But it was really just, you know, the gyms were closed, everything was closed. So I just started winging it and and, you know, seeing if my foot could hold up. And it's mostly has. Right. Yeah.

Well, I think that's a good place to talk a little bit more generally and broadly about training principles.

We can have a segment training principles, because as as as proud as I am of what you've been doing, I think that you would benefit from having a little bit of a program or this intervention a little bit a little like I don't want to rain on your parade or anything like that. But in my experience, when you're just out, like, waking up in the morning and saying, oh, I think I'll do this today and spontaneously going out like, that's great.

And I think you'll first of all, the most important thing is that you love what you're doing and you're enjoying it because that will, you know, basically give you the impetus and the level of emotional engagement to keep going. So I'm not dissuading you from that in any way whatsoever. But I do think there's wisdom in having a little bit of a plan and intentionality about what you're doing. And my experience, when people are just haphazardly going out and doing whatever, you can reach a certain level of fitness and competence, but you will inevitably reach a plateau.

And most people just are never able to break through that plateau to the next level because they're not intentional in what they're doing. They're just going out and winging it.

And I think quarantine this stay in place moment that we're all experiencing, you know, along a spectrum because not all of us.

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

And I think what I keep coming back to is the idea of not necessarily starting over, but essentially building a proper foundation starting from the very beginning, no matter how fit you are saying, OK, let's be a beginner here. A perfect example is I see this all the time with swimmers in Ironman and Triathlon. People who didn't grow up swimming and don't necessarily have the best technique and because their time crunched and because the race is on the calendar and coming up in a number of weeks or months, they feel so compelled to get in their volume and their wattage, you know, whatever, like making sure that they're fit, but they're overlooking their technique.

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

And this is the moment to focus on functional body strength, things like core core strength. And I would think that whether you're running or you're swimming or you're on a bike or whatever discipline it is that you're that you're doing, being technique minded in this moment right now, I think will pay off in the long run.

Yeah, sorry to interrupt, but I was thinking in functional body strength and overall, like doing the 10 miles, I was thinking, God, if I, if I because I do want to try to get to the point where I can do like the not the world championship necessarily, but like the longer version of this, which is what, 40 K forty five K, something like that. Right. And to do that, it's not just feeling yourself better, but you do need to have beyond just the ability to run longer distances, you still need to build in your long distance run of the week.

You still need to do all that. But you also need to still be, I think, lifting weights and doing weight training or some sort of like functional body training. One hundred percent. And I can tell you that when my core is strong and my back is strong, that I'm a much better athlete and I'm able to maintain that technique under duress. When you start to get tired instead of turning into a wet noodle, when you're running, you're able to maintain your form.

And that's going to obviously manifest in better performances. So with your example of trying to prepare yourself for a longer version of this swim run, the focus should be on those in those things that are really annoying that you don't want to do when your time crunch. Like the core body strength. Yeah, and the technique work and the drills and all those sorts of things. And at the same time, that building that foundation to create the ultimate aerobic engine.

Right. The most efficient aerobic engine that you can. And the way that you do that. And I learned this through my tutelage under Chris Hallatt for many years. Right. Is to focus on zone to training. So what does that mean? This is something I talked about extensively in finding Ultra and I'll recap it briefly here. But essentially, the body has two energy systems. You have your aerobic system and you have your anaerobic system, your aerobic system, which is the energy system that you use when you're exerting yourself at a moderate level, relies on oxygen and fat for fuel.

You have enough fat in your body to propel you for, you know, umpteen hours. You don't have to worry about it. Your anaerobic engine relies on glucose and essentially that's something that can get burned out in 45 minutes. Right. You know, you have to be constantly refueling yourself. So you're anaerobic system is what kicks in when you notch it up to that higher gear and you start exerting yourself sprint work, tempo work and the like. Endurance sports and especially ultra endurance sports rely on the efficiency of your aerobics system.

And you build that very slowly over time by spending a tremendous amount or percentage of your training time in what we call zone two. So there are different zones for training one through Zone five. Zone one would be anything from a walk to a brisk walk. Zone two is the next level up.

Think of it as conversational speed, whether you're riding a bike or you're running. It's the cadence with which you can carry on a conversation with your buddy and complete your training without feeling over exert it. There are ways of calculating specifically what that zone to is for you, specifically through heart rate training, lactate testing and the like. And we don't need to go down that rabbit hole. Now, I talked about this in finding Ultra for running for me specifically.

My Zonta is a heart rate in the range of 130 to 145. Typically for cycling, it's 120 to 130 people read that in my book and then just assumed that that's applicable to everybody. I would get people tweeting me saying I ran at a 140 heart rate. I was like, that's great. But I don't know if that's your zone too. That's my zone. Everybody is going to be a little bit different.

And I've done lactate testing to establish those zones, so what people will find, even people who are fit and have been out running or cycling or whatever, haphazardly like yourself for a considerable period of time and feel like they're fit, they'll quickly realize once they really understand what they're zone to is if you're wearing a heart rate monitor, which everybody should when they're training, or at least when you're endeavoring to train intentionally, you will realize that.

It's not very hard to tip into Z3 and, yeah, keep your heart rate down. I mean, according to my watch, you're living in very humbling. Yeah, it's very humbling. Yeah. And it takes a very long time and a certain different kind of discipline we think of discipline is like what gets you out of bed in the morning? And like the Gorgons ask like hit it hard all the time. But the discipline with building this aerobic engine is the discipline to hold back when you feel like you want to go harder.

Yeah, because you want to finish your workout and feel like you've got something out of it or that you did something. When you're training in zone, oftentimes you're going to complete your workout and go, is that it? Like I want to go harder. So you have to hold yourself back when you're out on a trail and you hit an incline. Oftentimes you have to walk in order to keep that heart rate until you develop the efficiency, the proficiency and the iRobot capacity to be able to handle those inclines without going over your zone, too.

Right. It's a patient's game. It takes a lot of time. What we have right now is time. So I think now is the moment to invest in that. And I can tell you from personal experience and many other people that I know in this space that this is the ultimate secret to breaking through that plateau to the next level, because when you have invested in that zone to methodology of training and you've applied it over a long period of time and built your volume up very slowly, you will find, like in my own personal experience, when I first started training for Ultraman, when I would go out for a run, I would have to run like ten minute pace, 10 30 pace in order to not go over my own two threshold.

But by the time I lined up for Ultraman I could run seven thirty pace at the same heart rate. So it's not about going out and running fast. It's becoming so efficient in these motions that they are less taxing over time. And that's really what you're trying to work on, are what most people do. The mistake that most people make is they spend the vast majority of their training time in what we call the gray zone. And the gray zone is sort of in between your aerobic energy system and your anaerobic energy system, where your training too hard to really effectively develop your aerobic engine, but not hard enough to develop the power and the speed that anaerobic training avails you.

Right. So it's it's what happens when you go out and you're just like, I'm going to run for 45 minutes, three days a week and just go as hard as I can sustain it for 45 minutes. Most likely you're in the gray zone. And again, you will develop a certain level of fitness doing that, but you will quickly become stuck and never be able to improve and certainly not experience any quantum improvements until you are mindful of your training.

Spend most of that time in the slower zone, too, and then pick your anaerobic moments for threshold work and tempo work a couple of times a week. But most of the training are going to be doing is going to be in that zone to space. And again, it takes humility to do it because, you know, you've got to be willing to let people who are who appear less fit than you pass you on the road or on the trail and and just say, it's OK, I've got a plan.

And that's the difference between exercising and training, the mindfulness and the intentionality that goes into it.

When you become adept at zone to aerobic training, what you're doing is you're you're you're increasing mitochondrial density and those big muscles and you're developing this efficiency and this a capacity that once you've honed it and it took me many years to do this again, it's a patient's game. It's it's like a superpower. But it doesn't happen quickly. It's not a hack. It's the opposite of a hack. Right.

It's being willing to put in the time right over and have a long view of of what performance gains mean.

Are you offering to coach me, Rick? I'm not a coach. I got I got a coach for you. You got Ted.

He probably knows about this stuff. Does he does. I mean, I think the first time I heard about this besides your book, because obviously I read about it in the book. But Mark Allen, I think on your show I talked about he won Iowa this way. Yeah. That's how he beat Dave Scott is like completely revamping his training. Exactly. And there were other things, too, like visiting the shaman and and becoming one with the island, getting rid of the head.

That was truly his real secret. I will tell you that. And I believe that. But we did talk at length about Zonta. You should go back and listen to that interview. If you listen to it the first time, it affected me a lot. But he would say that, you know, in the in the winter when he would start training again for the following year, Ironman World Championships are in October every year that he would have to walk the hills.

And this is the, you know, Ironman world champion. And he'd be like, yeah, I got to walk these cells because I don't want my heart rate going over whatever his Zonta threshold was.

So if Mark Allen can walk a hill, you can do well.

Yeah, and I have done that because I've been trying to keep track as opposed to Paice heart rate on this Garmin. I have the descent which I got because it's good for freediving and and has all the bells and whistles or you think, but obviously we're going to get into that later on how accurate it is. And I don't wear a heart rate monitor, but I have tried to hold back at times. But obviously at times I don't. And I have gotten a little bit quicker.

But obviously I'm not doing I'm mostly living in Orange Lake, which I get stoned for. I'm almost. Yeah, that's not good and that's not good. So I have to go slower. Right. So we'll work on that.

And to reiterate, it's not about the gear. We're going to do a show and tell segment where we're going to talk about gear because so many people want to know about the gear. Yeah, but my refrain is always it's not about the gear. Gear is helpful. It's fun. But when it becomes an impediment to you just going out and doing like what you did yesterday. Yeah. Then it's a problem. But we'll get to that in a later section.

All right, cool. I, I'm excited about it. I mean, I am I totally see how I can do ten and it's not like I got off the couch to do it. I mean I've been building up to it. I've done some, you know, eleven mile runs, I've done seven mile swim runs. I mean, I've been building up to it. So it's not like I wouldn't encourage people to get off the couch to do it.

But I could see how the difference between 10 and 20 is like it's the difference between five and ten is nothing compared to between ten to twenty.

Oh, there's a reason why everyone falls apart at mile 18 on the marathon. Yeah, because that's the difference between somebody who has truly honed their aerobic engine versus somebody who's spending all their time.

Like if you're if you're a grey zone trainer, then you're going to fall apart at mile 18, you know, pretty much every time you see it time and time again.

So shout out to all my homies in the gray zone like Beverley, like me. I could be the title of this podcast, Don't Live in the Gray Zone. I may have a smartwatch, but I'm not a smart swim runner. Right.

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

OK, I'm suitably shamed. I'm going to buckle down. Right. All right. Well, let's put a pin in that for now. Pivot to teachable moment. I'm open to all advices. So, yes, my mitochondria need it.

This is a segment we call teachable moment. What did you learn today, Adam? Well, you know, I kind of I teased this a little bit, but said we're not going to get into it. We're not going to get into the weeds of Portland. But I wanted to get into this like what the F is DHS doing, the Department of Homeland Security? What are they doing? And basically what I've been thinking about watching Portland go down is we have this department called Department of Homeland Security, which just really to recap it very briefly came came about after 9/11.

The idea was it was this overarching government, federal agency that could more efficiently exchange information with local law enforcement so that we don't have a repeat of the failures that allowed people to train to bomb the, you know, to fly planes into the towers. That was the intent behind it. There was always this the dissenters were always a little bit worried about giving government that that kind of power for federal agencies to be kind of interacting with local law enforcement.

And the scope is dictated by the Patriot Act. Yes, the Patriot created the agency, as far as I remember. And so in this also, TSA is part of Department of Homeland Security, Border Patrol, Customs, ICE. They all fall under DHS. And so but if you just say that you believe in the idea that there's this agency out there to protect the people that live in the United States to. Give us safety and security. Well, to me, like, what's the point of having a DHS if you can't help contain a virus?

Right.

And so cut to last fall and early winter, the virus has gotten out from Wuhan. It's all over the place. Italy is having its problems and we don't do anything like people are getting off planes from Europe and they are from China. Yes, there was some containment. People were brought to military bases and quarantined for a period of time. But not not from Europe. Right. People were just like walking off flights from Italy.

We all saw that viral video of people backed up in Chicago when they finally decided they were going to try to test. And it just became this like. Petri dish. March 15, they decided to in about half dozen or a dozen or more airports, O'Hare was the big one that we saw the video of, and it became like a two, three hour line, which is the exact wrong thing to do under the auspices of, OK, we're now going to start to manage this thing.

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

Exactly. And so we have this this is the backdrop. The reason I'm bringing it up is here is this agency that's supposed to protect us, keep us safe, keep us secure, drops the ball so poor, such a poor job of managing caronna. And yet they're putting their personnel, border patrol tactical teams. BORTAC is what they're called in Portland, Oregon. Same people also were deployed to Standing Rock, by the way, also deployed to Portland to deal with these protests that have been ongoing since George Floyd was killed.

And just recently, I just saw last week because of my reporting in the Sonoran Desert, because my reporting on the border wall, I was in contact with an organization called No More Deaths who drop water off for migrants as they come across the border. And they also have humanitarian aid stations set up. So if people are suffering from heat related or cold related, whatever it is, there's there's places they can go for water to be checked out by EMTs that are volunteers, all volunteer run.

And the Border Patrol hates no more deaths because no death reports on over, you know, abuses of migrants and arrests and that can't. A camp in Arivaca, Arizona, a tented camp, was raided by 20 plus vehicles. A chopper, this is on Friday. They were just raided at gunpoint. Under what stated purpose? There was a warrant to collect.

Basically, they were the no more deaths believes that Border Patrol is thinking they're a smuggling operation, that they had a warrant for financial records. They took everyone's phones, all their computers. But in actuality, what happened is tents were slashed, 30 plus migrants were rounded up. The volunteers were zip tied and held cuffed with zip ties for two hours. And, you know, medicines were overturned, beds were overturned, the place was trashed. Cell phones that were being used to to photograph it and log it were confiscated.

Volunteers don't get their their cell phones back for a couple of hours. The judge that signed the warrant had signed one previously on No More Deaths. So there's this and No More Deaths. Thinks they had just released a report about the Border Patrol that that implicates the Border Patrol union in these raids on no more deaths. And they think it was payback. But who knows? I mean, I haven't reported the story out, so I have not gone to Border Patrol.

So I should say that right right away. I'm getting this straight from no more deaths. But knowing what no more deaths does, having researched them extensively, they are not a migrant smuggling operation. They are humanitarian aid agency. They're a non-profit, and that's what they do. So the point is, what is going on with DHS? Why do we have a guy who's running DHS getting into feuds with governors? Like what is going on? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

By definition, the DHS is to protect homeland security. Yes, the biggest threat to that at the moment is this virus that shut down our economy and is forcing us to not interact with each other and is creating tremendous havoc that will have a ripple effect for who knows how long to come. And yet we've been incapable in getting a grip on how to manage this. We're still seeing these crazy spikes. The United States is spiraling out of control with respect to new cases, et cetera.

Meanwhile, we've dispatched this. You know, basically paramilitary organization to places like Portland and the argument being that there it's an effort to protect federal property, right. One small portion of what's actually transpiring in these places and this organization has gone on to, you know, rather than I mean, the whole it's a misuse of government systems. This this was all meant to, you know, basically combat terrorism essentially. And under the under the broad authority of the Patriot Act, it's allowed overreach.

So now we're seeing these lists being made about journalists names being, you know, put on a ledger. Yeah. Dossiers on journalists, baseball cards being made of arrested protesters, which all feels very Orwellian and dystopian and concerning. Irrespective of whatever your political perspective is, this should give one pause.

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

Well, my take is that everything's upside down, obviously, under this current administration. But, you know, you have an Environmental Protection Agency that is gutting environmental laws. I don't know. My take away on this is that I'd like to hold this agency accountable. This agency to me is dangerous. It's dangerous to the civil liberties of everyone who lives here. And we should be watching it. And, you know, I don't have a petition to give you.

I don't have anything else. But I would just like listeners to pay attention to what is happening at the Department of Homeland Security right now and and be very skeptical to the point not to where you don't believe everything, but that you're really paying attention to the statements being made by Chad, Wolf, and by everything that comes out of the DHS.

Yeah, what's interesting also is that a core principle of Republicanism is states rights. Yes. And here we have an overriding of state mandates for the purposes of a federal Fleck's.

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

And it doesn't seem like safety and security are right now the mandate of the DHS. It's a control thing. It's so strange. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Department of Homeland Security, do you feel more secure?

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't seem super wise that DHS is vested with authority of of, you know, maintaining or trying to establish some kind of security around this.

Out of covid, yeah, when it's real mandate has to, you know, emanates from 9/11 and terrorism. Right. And I'd like to point out that the failure with containing covid wasn't just international borders, it wasn't just customs. TSA should have been like taking everyone's temperature on every single domestic flight in this country. That wasn't happening. So maybe now it is, but it wasn't then. All right. Let's shift gears here and let's do it. We're going to talk about a couple letters.

Yes. Aren't we? We are.

So this is this news came out. I forget what it was was like three weeks ago. Four weeks ago. It was like four weeks ago. I think we talked about it right when it first you know, we talked about it right before it dropped. Yes. It dropped about four weeks ago. We were talking a little bit about Cancela culture and redemption, the notion of redemption.

And then, like, literally the next day the Harper's letter dropped. And so this is a letter that was spearheaded by a journalist named Thomas Chatterton Williams and George Packer and a few others. And it was signed by legends really Margaret Atwood, Gloria Steinem, Wynton Marsalis, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, most of whom are all of whom are liberal. Right. Liberal minded. There's I think a hundred. There were there were signs there was a bunch of conservatives, too.

I mean, the whole point was that it crossed that aisle and it was a it was a panoply of perspectives.

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

But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. It goes on.

But, you know, and it's in response to people losing their jobs, losing their positions, not based on something like me, too, but based on action, like speaking the wrong thing, saying they're making the wrong move. A God is removed from a position in Harvard for actually being the lawyer for Harvey Weinstein. That was his big offense. He represented Harvey Weinstein. Like, these are illiberal, dangerous forces.

My original knee jerk reaction when this broke the news, was it like two and a half weeks ago or something like that? Was that this is a conversation that we need to have.

And very rapidly, there was a there was a reaction to this, a counter reaction to one letter that was pretty severe.

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

Your last name, gorgeous from the Atlantic, probably had the best rebuttal and explain itself the best. And so I'm going to read a little bit of it right now. Across the globe, the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of Twitter scorn. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least two hundred and fifty journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting in the US, the Trump administration continues to threaten reporters safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in democracy.

The country is moving deeper into an economic recession, decimating industries including journalism and academia. And yet, the suddenly unemployed people the harbor statement references clearly lost their jobs not because of a pandemic or government pressure, but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups. This small group includes James Bennett, the former editor of the New York Times editorial page, who was forced to resign after the op ed page he supervised published an article by Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton that endorsed state violence.

And she was basically saying what?

That, like these elitists are complaining about being criticized. Not right. Not complaining about something that's real. Right.

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

Not that the government is cracking down in any kind of authoritarian way, but that there is this social media kind of mob at large that self polices what's acceptable speech and what isn't. You know, I'm no fan of Tom Cotton, but I don't think that the editor of The New York Times editorial page should have been fired for publishing that letter. Certainly not because of the content of the letter.

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

And I think that the reason that they gave is that he didn't read Tom Cotton's piece before it went to print. That's a different issue.

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

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

I mean, like the one thing that I think that Gorgas didn't get right is that these overreaches by the left can lead to a more hostility toward journalists. Exactly. For that reason, because you're overreaching and then it becomes more convincing when someone says fake news becomes more convincing.

Look, they are certainly a danger. I mean, this is something that that Bill Maher talked about in his episode this past week.

He interviewed Chatterton Williams and Barry Weiss as well, who were going to get to and he pointed out this study, I don't know the origin of the study, the Cato Institute, I think, where 62 percent of people were afraid to share their honest opinion.

And I think that there that's worth exploring because I just know personally in my circle of friends and journalists and writers that there is this what Chatterton Williams calls this onlooker effect, that it's not about the criticism, that cancellation is not about bringing the elites down to earth, but it's about this chilling effect, this stifling, this narrowing influence on all of our behavior where we have to pause and consider whether we really want to share what's on our mind. And just the fact that you're going through that calculus at all, I think speaks to the current health or lack of health in public discourse at the moment, which should be concerning to everybody.

I think so. I mean, right after the letter came out, I tweeted and retweeted it and and my own agreement I mean, listen up right before the backlash for the backlash, when I tweeted like a lonely man on the Alpine Lakes sipping a rock like that's the kind of effect it has on the greater world. I'm not a tidal wave maker like you, Rachel, but I'm not that on Twitter. I told you that. But so no one really pays attention.

But even that, you know, like as soon as the backlash started to roll out, even I was and and I'm very progressive.

You're a progressive contributor to The New York Times. Yes. And I and I and I have put myself in harm's way to report stories that that I'm proud of that are human rights stories. And there but and I was I thought about deleting my tweet. It's probably it's problematic leading it, knowing you as well as I know you.

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

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

It is to be clear, I wasn't shamed because nobody really pays attention to my Twitter, but said you got a little bit of I was worried about that. I said I was worried about about being you're thinking about I was the onlooker. You know, I was concerned about it. Yeah, I. I kept it out there and and I didn't have a backlash and I kept it out there. And I actually then tweeted at Williams and thanked him for the letter.

And so I because I believe in that, I believe in the idea that we should have free speech, you know, like Dave Chappelle is is constantly complaining about he won't play colleges. Most comics won't play colleges anymore. That was like a lifeblood for comics, like playing the college circuit. That's what kept people out of bars all the time. And they were making a lot of money on that college circuit. It's no longer there. They don't do it.

And and I think this whole thing points to this weird commingling of academia and newsrooms, which wasn't the case. Like when a guy like Carl Bernstein, who with Woodward broke the Watergate story, he was a cub reporter that came out out of high school, got a job at a paper. You can't get a job at a paper as a cub reporter in high at a high school anymore doesn't exist. Part of that is that we don't have local papers that are as robust as they used to be, that that's harder.

So now you have academia, feeding, feeding newsrooms. That's different than we ever had before. And in some ways that can be good. I'm not saying it's all bad, but I'm just saying like this, this idea is one that came out of academia first, this idea of the proper way to speak and that there is, you know, that closed societies, it was first a problem on campus before it was a problem in newsrooms. Yeah, I think it started with student bodies.

And those those students matriculate and go out into the world and they begin to populate the newsrooms and they they slowly begin to, you know, have have their voices being shared on social media. And, you know, the result is, is kind of what we're seeing right now.

Yeah. And then you want to get to Barry as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. She was a signatory on a letter.

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

This is an interesting situation. It's related to the Harper's letter, although it's distinct and it's its own unique thing. I think independent of that, as somebody who who is a contributor to The New York Times, you have a sense of what the inner workings of that newspaper are like. I do know other writers for The New York Times who take issue with Barry's characterization of what that climate is like there. And I wouldn't I wouldn't, you know, consider myself a big Barry Wystan or fan or anything like that.

I think she's done some interesting reporting. I don't agree with everything that she says, but. It does speak to the Chatterton Williams letter in the sense that there is this feeling of orthodoxy that supersedes factfinding or science or the pursuit of truth.

Yeah, I think it's the same thing that we're talking about. DHS, I think overall and I wouldn't put it just to The New York Times, I think overall it's more of a let's be aware of what's really happening.

My experience, a New York Times is confined to the sports desk. I've never had any issues. It's always been like a like the best people that I've ever worked with in journalism. So and I have no insight into how the newsroom operates. And part of the criticism of Barry, though, is that is that this was like a press release for her next move, whether that's her creating some new media platform or whatever, it is a little bit of grandstanding and.

Oh, for sure. I mean, she is. She is. But at the same time, it's like this idea, like I think the ideas concerns me more than the way The New York Times operates.

Fine. They're great to me. The issue is, are we going to confront is the left kind of setting themselves up as this new McCarthyist type era? Is there a purity test? Because we've joked about purity tests in the past and it is like kind of true, like are there purity test that people are going to have to pass in order to get to a certain level, whether it's deeply concerning it?

Bill Maher pointed this out. He's like, who are these perfect people out there that are holding us all to account according to some impossible standard?

And how deep does that reach extend in terms of, you know, what's what's required to escape this cancellation? And and and where are they in terms of like the cancer culture, people who are so ready to cancel people for saying the wrong thing when anti-Semitism is the issue? You know, we had seventeen thousand people marching in Berlin against covid restrictions, but it was like the people who are who created that protest were far right politicians.

There were neo-Nazis involved. There is a big fear in Germany right now that neo-Nazis are deeply embedded in all forms of government there and certainly in police forces and in the military here, we had issues with like Ice Cube speaking up to Sean Jackson, speaking up.

Nick Cannon on his broadcast said some pretty terrible things about Jews quoting Farrakhan. Deshawn Jackson thought he was quoting Hitler at one point.

And and some some people, you know, Deshawn Jackson then is going to go to Auschwitz. He's been counseled. Nick Cannon has been canceled. And Barry Weiss actually just shouted him out on Twitter about how great it is that he is educating himself and welcome. Well, you know, basically being the model of allowing for redemption. Of course, Nick Cannon did read her book. Might have something to do with it.

Well, there has to be a path to redemption and rehabilitation. You know, somebody missteps. And in this culture where people are mis stepping all the time to just expect that they're going to go away forever is not you know, that's not an enlightened, you know, perspective to have.

Like, what are we doing if somebody look, nobody's nobody's perfect and people are are, you know, in the world and on social media communicating and people are going to say the wrong things. And in those instances and there look, there's a spectrum of severity here that we're speaking about. There are some horrible things that are happening and some minor transgressions.

But we have to we have to determine the half life on these cancellations and how we're going to create a culture in which. It's conducive to people learning and growing in real time in the public sphere. It's it's the difference between I think the real concern here with the onlooker effect is it creates its seeds, apathy, not empathy, and to communicate and to exchange ideas and even to misstep like Nick Cannon did. But now he's showing publicly empathy. And to have Barry Weiss, who feels like she got chased out of a newsroom and this is your core issue.

And this is the man she wrote a book about this, right.

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

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

Is that the enough for creating apathy or creating Antep antipathy? Yeah, right. Versus empathy.

Or like this idea that you're frozen onlooker, that you're not going to get in the fight because that's. Well, that's that's the true onlooker. I think people are just opting out. Yeah. And they're just saying I'm just not you know, I'm not participating. Not for me, because it's too fraught. Yeah. And for me to express myself honestly is this minefield that I'm not going to subject myself to. And that's the stifling and the chilling effect.

Right.

For me, it's just like that's why I sweat run without any sort of intelligence, because I just want to get it. Get out there and flail around for hours. Right? No, I think that's right. I mean, anything else you want to share on that? No, I think well, we'll close it with that and we'll move on to what are we moving on to show and to show and tell. Hard pivot.

Hard pivot or pivot. Why we just watched Weight of Gold, the hard pivot to the weight of gold. The HBO doc featuring Apolo Ohno and Michael Phelps is the narrator and Lolo Jones, great sprinter turned bobsledder and explores the mental health challenges that Olympic athletes often face during training, competing and then obviously after the torch is extinguished.

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

The lens in this documentary is is is honed solely on the Olympic athletes. And you could make the argument like, oh, woe is me. Like they're Olympic athletes, like they're having a hard time. But the truth is that there isn't, you know, sort of an existential crisis that's created when you're somebody who is at the height of their powers. And whether you stand atop the podium or you end up in 20th place matters little. What does matter is that almost overnight, when you become a civilian, in the aftermath of that experience, you're left without any resources to manage how to move forward with your life.

Right. When you're used to being surrounded by tons of people who support you, who are there for you, who are all invested in your success. And every waking moment of your life is devoted to this very specific window of time in which you're expected to perform at your best. When that moment lapses and is over, how do you then become a normal human being? And a lot of these people have severe, you know, mental issues trying to grapple with that.

And I think it's incumbent upon the organizing committees of all of these respective sports to create structures and programs for these athletes to better help them make that transition. You're seeing that in some of the professional leagues now. I know they do it with finances like, you know, how to manage your money and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, the mental aspect of high performance is only now starting to get the weight that it deserves.

What I thought was interesting, what a good point made by one of the figure skaters, not Sasha, but the other one. Forget Gracie Gold. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And she was saying if I tore up my knee, I'd have the best surgeon right in the world looking at it. But I don't have any. I didn't have anybody. And to look at my after my mental health, I got recommendations of a therapist, but I didn't have them like paid for and on the payroll and available to me on the spot. Yeah. And I find that interesting is, you know, obviously sports psychology and sports psychologists, that's been a booming field for a while, but it's always about performance.

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

Well, I think that the resources are available and this is a point that Apollo made. It's not that they weren't there and available if you reached out for them, but you have to take into consideration that these are people who who are trained to never show weakness. Right. Right. And so the idea of being vulnerable enough to say, hey, you know, I'm feeling not good like I need. It is a stretch for a lot of these people, and so they end up not availing themselves of what is available.

Interesting. And I think that makes it even more incumbent upon the coaching staffs and the, you know, people that are in these people's entourages to pay closer attention to how they're doing.

But, you know, the movie's good. I think that it you know, if I had a criticism of it, I think it lives a little bit on the surface. Yeah. It could have probed a little bit more deeply. There's some great stories here that was great.

Fully fleshed out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, come on, Michael Phelps, are you going to come on the program?

Why can't why. Why isn't Michael Phelps.

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

So I responded, What are you doing? Come on, Michael. I got to chair my body. Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. In the in the film, he looks like he looks like he's ready to compete is what he looks like. He looks amazing. He's really shouldered this mantle of being a mental health advocate in a meaningful way. Yeah. And I think it's super cool and it's powerful. And these are stories that need to get told.

So kudos to Michael. Kudos to Michael.

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

Michael, if you're listening, you don't look like a retired athlete. You don't leave now. You look like an athlete supergiant condition. And if you're not going to say he's maybe thinking about a comeback, I thought about it.

But like, if you're not going to do that, I think you should try free diving, because I think Michael Phelps would be an incredible, like, you know, be an interesting way of going. It's a much more introspective, kind of like meditative sport. It's a huge challenge. And there's never been an athlete like Michael that did that crossover. That's something Alexey Multination, one of the VIX right now, the number one ranked free diver in the world.

He has two of the world records in depth. He's wanted to see that.

He's wanted to see like someone totally at a loss over from another. Yeah, because Aleksey was national ranked swimmer in Russia when a nationally ranked swimmer in Russia and his mother was to when he then he transitioned into free diving. And so he's an elite athlete and so is William Trubridge. So there are elite athletes in the sport. But you don't get like the swim. There's no swimmer pipeline, right? Yeah, right.

That would be an interesting crossover. I think it's much more likely that he'll try to make the PGA go into free diving. Golf seems to be his thing. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's no ocean in Arizona. Right. Couple more things to talk about. Really quickly before we get into our audience Q&A, I did want to mention that my buddy Dossi Bausch, who's been on the podcast before, you guys know her, you love her Olympic track cyclist.

She started an organization called Switch for Good, which is this incredible nonprofit promoting the benefits of a plant based diet. It's really kind of an anti dairy, um, advocacy group. And I was privileged to tape some pizzas for Switch for Good recently that were directed by Louisa Hoya's, who many might know as the director of Game Changers and The Cove and Racing Extinction. He's an amazing Academy Award winning director. And I got to spend the day with a bunch of incredible plant based athletes like Rebecca Soni, who's a six time Olympic medalist.

She's been on the podcast as well. Dottie, of course, George Laraque from the NHL, Derek Morgan from the NFL, Heather Mills, three time Olympic medalist, soccer player and a bunch of other really cool people. And those pizzas aired on NBC during the Today show. And I think people keep coming up to me saying they've seen them.

So I think they were on NBC subsequent to that to. So I saw it. Did you. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's really cool. And if you missed those you can find them on the switch for good YouTube channel and I'll link that up in the show notes as well.

So is doing great work.

It's basically a response to the kind of got milk chocolate milk campaign that the dairy industry promoted as well. What happened is, in my estimation at least, the dairy industry noticing shrinking demand for its products, made this interesting decision to reposition chocolate milk, not as like the drink that kids, you know, elementary school kids drink at lunch, but as an athletic recovery supplement, some sports that would enhance your recovery. And they put a lot of money behind this, a lot of money into advertising and sponsoring athletes and Dottie and her organization and a bunch of athletes.

Like myself, we're like, that's it's not right. No, no, it's really not right. So this is sort of a response to that to correct the record as much as anything else. So shout out to Darzi. Well, I mean, I think athletes have or have been playing a huge role in this growing plant based movement and movement away from animal products. I mean, I don't think there's any doubt that performance in athletics and mentors from the athlete, from the sports community has been a big driver in that.

Don't you agree? Yeah.

Do you think chocolate milk is a is the ultimate recovery drink?

No, I can't drink milk, man. Most people can. No, I can't drink milk. I can't even eat ice cream. Yeah, I eat not not milk ice cream now or oat milk. That's the new one. Oatmeal new thing. I'm Mindo. Yeah. Looks good. Yeah.

A couple other quick things. My brother in law, Stuart Mathis, about his brother Stuart. That's your brother in law. I forgot. I forgot the link-up. He said he was great.

He is a brilliant guitar player.

Yeah.

And this is a guy who who picked up a guitar when he was, I don't know, eight or nine years old and just never looked back like there was there was nothing else that he was ever going to pursue in his life other than music and the guitar.

And he, you know, I wouldn't say suffered is the wrong word, but like, he bled for his art for many, many, many years, like living in L.A. in all different kinds of bands, cutting his own records. And it took a long time for him to finally hit his groove. But now he's like lauded. And in the music community, like most people know who he is, this is incredible guitar player. And he's played he was Jewelz to our guitar player.

He he toured with LeAnn Rimes and then he was in the Wallflowers. Oh, really many years. I did. Yeah. And he's been playing with Lucinda Williams for he's he moved to Nashville is in Nashville now. But the reason I'm bringing it up is that Lucinda and Stuart just played an NPR Tiny Desk concert. For those who aren't familiar, NPR does this series called Tiny Desk, where these amazing musicians play these intimate little contain concerts and the one with Stewart and Lucinda just published recently.

So I like that up in the shorts. And you could see my brother in law, Julie's brother, and you'll get why her side of the family is so musically inclined. Yeah, which is cool. Yeah, I like that.

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

OK, so uplifting ducks. Yeah, the fires in the Amazon. Oh, really? Yeah. All right. So that's it. So should we talk about some gear?

Let's talk about gear. Let's talk about the gear that's going to change my radio show until the change my and I got a couple.

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

So I didn't say that. I didn't say that I'm celebrating what you're doing. I just want to put a little structure in. I love it. I love it. Yeah.

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

Right. Until they have this this sort of equation completely figured out, which, of course, they never figure out, because the whole point is to protract the process of being focused on the gear. Yeah, that being said, because I'm mass so often and so frequently about this, I'm going to take this moment to discuss it and then maybe never discuss it again, maybe never.

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

Right. It's cool. So does this look like a wash? I don't know, because that's cool.

So on on my right hand, I have an old Garmin GPS watch Phoenix, Phoenix, three heart rate. And on my left wrist I have the woop band.

That's the rules. So if you're if you're watching this on you. To you haven't heard the ad reads, the sponsored ad rates that I do for loop on the audio version of the podcast, this wub, this thing is a and again, this is not a sponsored post at all.

Like I'm just sharing what I write.

The group is a wristband, essentially fitness tracker that connects with a mobile app. But it's it's it's not about gauging your workouts per say. It's much more about rest and recovery and sleep. And so by leaving it on all day, it monitors your heart rate and monitors your heart rate variability, your metabolic rate. It tracks your sleep and breaks down how much time you spend in the various sleep stages. And then it kind of crunches all of this data and delivers these metrics on how rested you are, how recovered you are, how much strain you should undergo that day or shouldn't.

And it also calculates the strain that you put your body through every day. So basically, it's kind of a helpful tool in helping you calibrate your workouts so that you're not overtraining or not not under training. Right. Like how do you kind of meet your string goals every day and make sure that your body is properly recovering? And when you're training really hard, it's a great way of adjudicating whether you've pushed too hard the day before when you should, like, sort of ease back and when you kind of have the green light to push harder than you have in past days.

So I haven't taken this thing off since I got it. Maybe, I don't know, six months ago or something like that. I had really no like, yeah, I love it. It's waterproof and it's amazing. Like, I swam this morning. You don't have to push any buttons or there's no interface or anything like that. I swam and then I refreshed my app and it's like, oh, you swam this far for this long, really knows your heart rate and has a little optic sensor on the back of it.

That is how it's calibrating the data.

So it's pretty cool. Yeah. So I have to tell this guy what I'm doing.

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

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

It also will well via Bluetooth, connect with a heart rate monitor strap around the chest, which I think is much more preferential than these optic sensors that you see on the back side of these GPS watches that are calibrating your heart rate from your wrist, which I have found at least to date. I think the science is in the technology, always iterating and getting better and better. Better.

But I found that that gaging your heart rate off your chest drop is much more accurate and stable. Better than your arm as well, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Much, much more so. So I highly suggest getting a chest strap for your heart rate in terms of what kind of GPS watch to get. Like I said this, this is a Garmin that I'm wearing right now and it's super old, like there's been many iterations on this since I bought it, but I still love it.

It works perfectly fine and I don't know that it matters that much which what you have. I tend to wear this one kind of because it's like nice and heavy and metal and it just feels like a real regular watch you don't wear out into the world. Kind of like yours years, some years. It's just a different variation of mine. Right.

And mine just has a dive component and it works perfectly fine. The sort of user interface in terms of getting the screens to do what you want them to do is a little bit kind of clunky, I would say. And that's where a competitor watch this is this is the chorus watch chorus. This is the end. This is the chorus vertex and cortex.

And it's very similar to the Garmin. But the advantages of this watch, which I should disclose, they sent to me for free this sponsored thing at all. I'm not getting paid to say this, but they did send me a free watch. And I really like this watch, too, because the user interface is much more intuitive. It's much more easy to navigate through the different screens and to get to the data that you want. It's interface with its mobile app is incredibly seamless.

It uploads to Strava without any hassles whatsoever and it has unbelievable battery life. So this thing you can wear for like weeks without charging it, whereas the Garmin you have to charge much more frequently. So I like them both for different reasons. The government feels more like a knock around where every day watch. But this one I also found is has some wonkiness in in the swim metrics that the government doesn't have. But the government isn't always super accurate with swimming in an ocean.

Ocean swims, the Garmin fades in and. Out of GPS connectivity, yeah, I agree with that. And these are things that are like software pushes that are always improving. Yeah, but I like them both and the chorus is like a small little startup and they're making waves in the space. And I think what they're doing is super cool. So you can check them out. Can you swim in a chest heart rate monitor and can I don't I don't worry that I mean, since I've been swimming my whole life, I'm pretty into it can intuitively gauge my sort of perceived effort.

A lot of people do. A lot of triathletes where the strap when there's so it's OK. Doesn't doesn't. But you definitely you definitely need a chest strap. I did one thing I would suggest. Yeah. Yeah, I. And then just get really connected with, with your heart rate and I don't need it all the time now because I've been using one for so many years that I just know, like I'm like I know how I feel and I know basically where my heart rate is all the time without looking.

But that only comes through experience.

All right. So there's that here's something I bet you've never heard of or seen before. And these are this is a pair of goggles and they're made by a company called Form. Have you heard of these? No, these are cool. And also, these were sent to me for free as well.

Are they night vision goggles? They are. They look kind of like that, too. They swim goggles. They look like some kind of futuristic swim goggle. They've got this little doodad on once one side of it, a little computer thing. And basically what they do is it's like it's like an art device. When you put them on and turn it on, you'll see a little digital readout in your visual field.

Yeah. And when you hit start, it's basically a GPS watch for swimming. It's Google Glasses for swimming, basically. Yeah. And when you're swimming it, will you input like the size of the pool, 50 meters, twenty five meters or whatever. And there's a running clock and you can, you can kind of adjust, customize the data fields, but basically it gives you a running time and also a tally on your distance. And it knows when you are doing an interval set, like it'll say, like if I'm doing a set of ten one hundredths, it will when I finish the hundred, it'll flash like the time that I did that one hundred yards in and then it'll do a running clock of like how long I've rested before I push off again.

So it's essentially like using a pace clock, but the clock is just in your visual field while you're swimming. And when these were sent to me, I thought there's no way these things are going to work, like it's just not going to be that good. But I was really amazed how well they were. Yeah. And all that. Yeah.

You see you see it like it appears like in like, like an alternate, you know, a.. Like a VR kind of experience. You're the Terminator wearing these and they work really well and I'm blind like without my glasses I was like I'm not going to be able to read these numbers, but I could see them totally fine. And so this has been a really fun doodad gadget I've and playing around.

I would totally buy them if it if it had like, you know, like the parking, like you can get you get cars that automated parking. If we could do an automated flip turn I'd buy it tomorrow if it trains for you and does that and you put them on and it pretends like you're swimming and then every time I walk across the room it flips me upside down.

I'm crazy. All right, one more thing. These things are the Jaybird Vista Earbuds. Jaybird is a podcast sponsor and I'm sponsored by them personally as well. So they're not they didn't sponsor me talking about this right now, but they are a partner of mine. And I love this. I love this product. So do you ever wear earbuds when. I don't I don't I don't listen to it, which is fine. That's good.

You know, I think it's important to go out in nature and just experience it for what it is. If you are going to listen to podcasts or audio books or music when you're training, though, I highly suggest these be your choice. And I are they mostly obviously I'm biased because I work with this program, but I sort them out because I love them. They're not you can't swim like go diving in there or anything like that. But they're incredibly they're waterproof to the extent that you could sweat on them and you could jump in a pool or whatever and they would be fine.

I've dropped these in the pool and they they're perfectly fine. And no matter how much I sweat, they stay in my ear. They never fall out. They're super easy to use. And and I love them. So, you know, again, just another, like, cool fun. They come in this pack that charges the that charges them charging back. And the battery life is excellent and they're incredibly durable.

Do you have to have your phone with you when you're to have them work or do you download it onto your watch? No, no, I don't have an Apple Watch. I don't know what that would be like because I think you can.

And this one has like I could put I could really click on this thing. I don't even know about that. You're the one who should be doing that. Maybe. Possibly. I mean, they just they just connect via Bluetooth. So they connect to my phone.

Vibrates your phone on your runs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Final thing.

Oh, yes. You see this? Yes. That's Mathes work, right? Oh, right.

So if you're listening and you're not watching on YouTube, I'm holding up a T-shirt that I shared on Instagram the other day.

Yes, it's.

A graphic illustration of me, I guess, usually based on me, I suppose, earthy at that Mathes had made for Father's Day, I thought we were all getting tea.

So her friend Sterling is the artist who's like this 15 year old kid, and he's the one who came up with the design.

But Mathes kind of produced the project with Nice and and I posted I mean, it's like I can't wear this.

I can't I can't go in the world. Yeah. Like, you're just like you can't. I don t shirt like Roger Federer wears in RF hat, does he. Yeah, he does. I feel like when you reach a certain level you can get away with that. Like I can't imagine, like you're not there in the world.

But I posted on Instagram, Mathes is like asking me what's Mirch? And like a lot of people seem like they were into it. So I don't know, you know, if you it's great work. Leave a comment on on YouTube below. If you if you would be interested in this and maybe we can do a limited run and make them available on the on the.

I would love that I'd wear one. Yeah. I'd love to be the kind of guy that could wear mushrooms growing out of my shoulder there. Someone invites you to take mushrooms. But I think that's against the sober thing. I think it is.

Wouldn't you agree, unless they're for stigmatic mushrooms, a different kind of mushroom?

Well, no, but there's this whole idea of psychedelics to cure addiction. Yeah, I know. You don't buy that. No, I don't. I'm not. I'm not. I mean, this is we could do a whole podcast on that. I should probably do that. Yeah. I mean, and I've spoken about this in the past on the podcast, like I'm a product of 12 step, I believe in Alcoholics Anonymous. You know, I got sober that way.

I stay sober that way. And I've seen. Countless lives transformed as a result of working 12 step. It's a it's it's just it's a it's a it's a miraculous and beautiful program that is unlike anything I've ever experienced.

But that's not to say that I also I know plenty of people who have gotten sober in other ways, and I've never I've never done psychedelics. So for me to speak to that with any authority, I think would be foolish. I have and I know that there's I'm sure you have.

Yeah. But I just saw my training, not with any intelligence whatsoever, right before you go out for your swim from just a handful of handful of mushrooms. Yes.

When I was in treatment, there was a guy who in my rehab who he had like long white hair.

And he said that he used to for like a decade. He he was in the restaurant business and he owned a restaurant. He would wake up in the morning and he would he would take LSD and he'd go on a ten mile run.

He say that every day. That's crazy. You know, I could barely I could barely sit up what I did. I was lying down most of the time. But I know there's a lot of interesting science happening right now, specifically at Johns Hopkins around the like psychedelics and depression, PTSD. Exactly. Exactly. That's a good thing. Yeah, it's it's a good thing. And Ayahuasca, obviously, big one winner of the week. I got a win of the week I dug.

Why not go for it? My winner of the week is congratulations to Kaylani for his five nominations and the Big Wave Awards the WCL just announced on July 20th. If you don't know about Kai, he is a true innovator in surfing. He's one of the best, if not the best, big wave rider alive. He is cross the Molokai Channel riding wind bumps on his foil. He's a master windsurfer. And even this year, when covid broke out, he was in Tahiti competing, competing on the qualifying tour.

Now, remember, this is a guy who wins big wave contests, but he was competing on the qualifying tour so that he could be on the OSL championship tour as well, to be one of the rare riders that competes in both formats. At the same time, often it's surfers. She's one of the other, and he's kind of the heir apparent to Laird Hamilton at Jaws, kind of innovating with Foyles, innovating with a wind surfer who also is a resident, basically lives right.

Right of Jaws.

And he got nominated for five nominations, three of their five biggest waves of the year nominations in the category. He rode three of them. So he's got three of those. One of those was at Jaws. Two of them were Nazare. He's also nominated for best overall performer and for Wave of the Year from Jaws.

Nazare is that ridiculous wave in Portugal. It's the mountain of the wave like you always see. There's that building that's in the foreground every time, kind of that rocky kind of bluff that's like right there.

And yeah, that's the one the one hundred foot waves let people ride. And he he got a crazy ride there and he said he rode, he got that wave. Everyone took the videos, everyone took the pictures and then he went out and surf for three more hours there. He told me, because I was interviewing for a different story that's related.

That's like, yeah, David Goggins, when he when he parachuted into the Ironman World Championship swim. Yes. The race finished it and then went and worked out later that day. That's right. Yeah, it did. You know that. Yes. Yes, I remember that story. Yeah. Yeah. He told me that story and that story of that is that he parachuted in. He was doing that with another Navy SEAL who was who. They both parachuted in together, swam in.

They did the thing. It was all you know, it was basically the TV crew was going to be one of their things. They ran and he was behind the other seal the entire race until the end because he had problems. I think he fell behind in the swim and then he had issues at the beginning of the run where he couldn't, like, get his rhythm and he was walking a lot of it. Then he found his rhythm and started hammering, as he does.

And then he caught the guy like right at the end of the guy, looked at him and goes, fucking garbage, man.

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

That's how I opened our podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they finished together. David couldn't beat it, but they finished together. That's good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Good deal.

I have a quick win of the week and that is shining a spotlight on Valerie Almen. I tweeted this the other day. Valerie is a discus athlete and she just broke the American record in discus and I shared this video. We'll link it up in the show.

Notes of her of her breaking the record and her swinging the discus. Did you see this?

No, it's hypnotising.

It's like ballet and performance art in extraordinary athleticism. Check it out. I'm having Adam watch this right? I'm watching the discus. I like watching it like 10 times in a row. I couldn't stop watching it. Wow. So extraordinary.

And she's a Warzel athlete. Warzel is the kind of women first apparel brand that works with athletes like Lauren Fleshman, who's been on the podcast before, a really cool company.

Amazing. She's like a whirling dervish. I know it's not a gold, so. Yeah, beautiful Miletic. Congratulations. Work of elite athletes is always incredible. I like the footwork of some of these athletes is just next level.

I think that she you know, I don't know because I haven't spent a bunch of time looking into her background, but I think she has a background in dance or ballet which is not surprising. It's probably why I can't throw the discus that well.

No, that's the reason that that's what it comes down to, only because of your lack of dance background. Yeah, and my bad, but I'm not sure if I brought that up yet, but OK, that. All right. So that's it.

Let's take a quick break and we'll be back with questions from the audience. All right. Back in a sec for more.

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Let's do some listener questions where you got out of its do it. We got two that were emailed. One is from an anonymous woman. And let's get into it. She wanted to keep her name out of it. I live with an angry, manic alcoholic and things seem to be getting worse. Or perhaps it's that my tolerance and patience levels have diminished, but it's gotten to the point where not only am I affected by this, but also my family.

Every day is like walking on eggshells, never knowing when the next bomb is going to go off. But, you know, it will. He's also had episodes of threatening suicide and not coming out of the room for days. When I suggest therapy, he pooh it and says he will change with diet and exercise and we'll go super extreme and fast for days or even for a week. Sometimes he'll continue to drink beer while he's fasting, but not always.

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

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

But perhaps I can give you a couple light posts here. And one is, first and foremost, you have to take care of yourself. You've got to figure out how you know, you have to figure out how to protect yourself and insulate yourself against the unhealthy, his unhealthy behaviors. And it's not indulgent for you to do so. You shouldn't feel guilty for doing that. And in fact, it's of service to him for you to do so.

The way that you can do that is to seek out Allanah. And I think that you would find great solace in that program to participate in a community of people who have experience going through exactly what you're going through right now and understand that there are only so many things that you can control here. You can control your behavior, you can control your response to your spouse. But what you can't control is him or his behavior. So to the extent that you're trying to get him to change, you're in a situation in which that's.

Very unlikely to occur. Hopefully he will reach a point in his addiction where he will develop the willingness to try to get better, but from what you've written here, it doesn't sound like he's in that place right now. He is succumbing to the great obsession of every alcoholic, which is the effort to try to control your drinking. And he's going through the machinations and the experimentation to convince himself that he can do that, whether it's fasting or exercise.

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

You need to make that decision for yourself. But I can tell you that you are valuable in this world and nobody should be talked to in that regard. So take the steps that you need to take to protect yourself and your family members who are on the receiving end of this kind of abuse. There are resources available to you even in the age of covid. And again, that's where I think your priority needs to be in terms of how you communicate with him and perhaps be of service to him.

You can set healthy boundaries around what is and is not acceptable. You can tell him, look, if you speak to me that way again, I'm going to leave or whatever it is, whatever esteemable act you take on behalf of yourself to create that boundary I think is important. And letting him know where that boundary exists so that if he disobeys it or transgresses that, then there will be a ramification or a repercussion whether that means you leave him or not.

Again, you have to figure out that for yourself. But I think establishing those boundaries is the first step in terms of letting him know that his behavior is not OK. And I think the more specific and concrete you can be around that, the better it is for yourself and for him. You can make suggestions. Hey, listen, I think you should go to treatment. You should go to detox. You should check out you can make those suggestions.

But it's important that you remain divorced from expectations as to whether he will avail himself of that advice. And also any attachment that you have to outcomes if you have an expectation that he's going to get sober or he's going to do what you advise him to do, that I think you're setting yourself up for for a lot of emotional woe. So it's fraught. It's very difficult. Especially with loved ones, because you can see the person beneath the disease and you are able to hold out hold space for that individual, but sometimes they're just unable to see it for themselves.

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

But you need to protect yourself emotionally and not make yourself available for all of the abuse and the unhealthy behavior that he is manifesting at the moment.

You know, you. The only thing I can add is you said safe, making sure you're safe. And I can tell you from my previous reporting and things that I've learned is that physical abuse doesn't necessarily have to build up from like a push or a slap you could get. You could be in danger already. And I don't want to make you hysterical or anything like that. But but this kind of emotional abuse, you're already on a path that you don't want to be on.

And so I would I don't know if Allanson has domestic. I'm sure they do have like domestic abuse counseling recommendations.

But I would also I'd look into some domestic abuse hotlines that you can maybe we could put some resources up in the asked for that and I would call someone ASAP. And I'm not suggesting anything other than calling and just make your own decisions and how you want to proceed. But you're already in a place that leads to to that could lead to a dangerous situation for yourself.

I think I would add that I can't diagnose another person as an alcoholic. You know, this anonymous person is saying her husband is an alcoholic. She's diagnosing him. Is that maybe he perhaps admits it to her? I don't know. The diagnosis of alcoholism is is something that only the alcoholic and can diagnose for themselves. But if this person is an alcoholic and it would appear that he is, these things don't tend to just get better. They get worse.

The best case situation is that they stay the same, but generally they degrade and devolve. And with that comes a notching up of the abuse and the unhealthy behaviors that circle around that.

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

All right. Let's go to Jake in Kansas City. This is another emailed question. You've talked in the past about people getting addicted to self-help, that we mistakenly search for the next hack, the next optimization strategy. I felt this way in my own experience to self-improvement. I tend to consume all it's out there. And while I live out some of it, I find myself being more concerned with reading or listening to the next thing, whatever that may be.

So how do I go about choosing the top three to five things I find most valuable and just walking that path? How do you stay committed to learning and growing while also remaining steadfast to a short list of pursuits that you're 100 percent committed to? How do we avoid consuming self-help as an end in itself instead of just a means to a greater end? Thanks.

It's a great question. It goes back to analysis paralysis. What we were talking about before, whether it's the gear or self-help literature, these are just devices to distract you and prevent you from actually moving forward. I've got nothing against self-help literature. It helps lots of people. You know, I think it's good that it exists in the world, but I've also become a little bit cynical about it as a podcast or I'm now on these lists with all the publishing houses.

So I get all the galleys of all the non-fiction books in the mail before they come out. So every week I get like 10 self-help books in the mail. Yes. And every author wants to come on the podcast. And after receiving like 100 of these over the year, you're like, how much self-help literature do we need?

There can't be that many secrets to get better. And then I think about David Goggins and I'm like, how many self-help books did that guy read? You know, how many read zero. He got off his ass and he got to work.

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

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

But then the pursuit of that, when you look at the most optimal people in the world, they're not the people that are focused on optimization necessarily.

So it is a weird kind of paradox, I suppose.

And I would say to Jake, listen, like he's like, how do I go about choosing the top three to five things I find most valuable and just walking the path? How about one thing?

Oh, you know, I can't tell you what your values are, but, you know, if you can get clear on what your values are and establish something that you want to manifest in your life, let's begin that process. I think the analysis paralysis comes in, in the plotting and the mapmaking and what is the trajectory and how am I going to get there? And there's so much mental masturbation that goes into that at the behest of taking that first step.

So, again, I think it goes back to simplifying this process.

We want to overcomplicate it and think that we have to lay on top of our goals some crazy lattice work.

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

It's interesting, I think about the Huberman thing talking about like how habits first and and thought and perceptions and everything follow. Right. Behavior, behavior, behavior first and then everything else follows. And the construction of habits. It sounds like maybe he's the type of guy that gets bored from doing the same thing over and over again. And there is a certain boredom in creating a habit that becomes like a daily ritual. But you've got to stick with something about like creating habits for yourself.

Maybe every morning coming up with a morning practice, whether it's a meditation or a yoga and then a meditation or something that you commit to doing every day. Something one thing that you commit to doing every day and then see see what that gets you as opposed to whatever you got out of a self-help book. Maybe there are some habits that you can take, right. You can build your days around that you can lock in.

You know, I think that that's good advice. I would say and we talked about this last time, I think that it's important to understand that when you're consuming a self-help book that that's not. The accomplishment, the accomplishment is in applying that wisdom to your life, right, and so the first step is understanding that just because you read a book doesn't mean that you did anything. And I think what happens is you read these books and you feel like you're accomplishing something or growing in your life simply in the consuming of that book.

But that in and of itself, well, it's like in 12 step, they say half measures will fail you nothing. Right.

So like reading a book, reading a book, it's good you've consumed this this piece of knowledge. But unless you figure out how to apply it in some fungible, tangible way in your life, it will avail you nothing. Right. So it's disabusing you of that notion that you've done something just because you've read a book and it's reconfiguring your perspective to focus more on actions, you know, to bring it back to human behavior like lead with the behavior.

So we're sitting here having a podcast, episode 500 and whatever. I didn't start the podcast because I read a self-help book and tried to figure out what my values were and created some roadmap to where I would be seven years later. I just thought this will be cool. And I turned on a mike I had it was a behavior. It was an action like, hey, this might be fun.

And I was like, that was cool. Let's do it again. Right. It wasn't like a white board.

No situation. No. You know, and I think that's the problem with our optimization obsessed culture is that we think we have to have all of these things figured out before we begin. And in truth, in my own personal experience, it's in the doing that the path is revealed.

Yeah. You never really know at the end product is going to be and we don't even necessarily know what optimal is while we're experiencing it. Right.

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

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

I think at least it's been helpful to me.

We've talked about that before. I mean, just recognizing you're a speck of consciousness in this great sea is liberating in a way, because it means that there's so much more going on than you can possibly be aware of. And if you just handle your stuff in a systemic way, systematic way on a day to day basis, it's going to get you to a good place. You just don't know where that good place is necessarily, which is also a beautiful thing.

Just think about this. Self-esteem comes from esteemable acts like that's a truth, right? Why is that the case? Can that be defined?

In some kind of binary optimization vernacular, like I think it's a spiritual principle that we are the sum total of our actions and if we do esteemable, more than that, we're more than the sum total of our actions.

But I think that that, you know, having just being able to broaden your aperture a little bit and understand that if you if you are if you are clear in your intentions and you are full of heart, pure of heart, that when you whatever path that you pursue and I talked about this in my book like that, I believe that the universe will conspire to support you if you've done the inside work, if you are coming from a place of love and compassion and gratitude, that the world will greet you in kind.

And that has nothing to do with, you know, neuroscience necessarily. You disagree? I agree to a point, I think that chaos theory exists and sometimes chaos is on your head. Well, also, luck plays a huge. Yeah, yeah. So I don't think it's always it can always be that way. But but I can say that if you tend to greet your experiences. I do think it comes down to how you deal with the hand you're dealt, so sometimes you're dealt a really shitty hand and it's really hard to stay open and positive about it.

But that doesn't mean that the person who does stay open and positive about it isn't going to have more success than the one that doesn't. So I think it's I think it's complex. But I do believe you're right a lot of the time. I also believe that chaos, you know, hurricanes. Harry Brew. Yeah. Yeah. And that does happen. Point taken. Yeah. All right. Let's move on. Moving on. Let's listen to some voicemails.

Hey, I am here. This is Dassin from middle of nowhere while I deliver coronavirus tests across the state and I love listening to you guys when I'm on the road. My question for you today is, as a 25 year old, along with classmates eating, what are some other habit things I can do in my life now that I will appreciate in the next 10 years? Thanks, guys.

That's such an awesome question. I know, right? I'm just all I can think about is like, what was I doing when I was 25? I was such a knucklehead. I certainly wasn't, like, trying to better myself by leaving voicemails for podcasters, you know, delivering exactly that. I mean. Yeah, you know, I got big respect. Jackson huge respect. Very cool.

Well, yeah. Plant based diet. That's good. Yeah, it's a good start. You know, look, there's no behind the velvet rope here.

You know, I think the habits that you form at your age at age 25 are things that you want to kind of, you know, establish in your life that then then create their own momentum so that when you're 40, 50 and 53, they become second nature.

And wrote, I know personally, because I'm at my age, I have a lot of friends who are now starting to deal with a lot of health stuff then they never really had to think about, but they never formed proper, healthy habits early on. And now they're confronted with having to undo all of their unhealthy habits and create new ones, which is much harder than just creating a healthy habit when you're young. Right. That becomes second nature and just part of who you are, part of your lifestyle, as opposed to something that you know, you feel like you have to focus on.

It's just it doesn't even require any brain bandwidth because it's fundamentally who you are. I think at the top of that list, I put some form of exercise or movement, preferably something that you enjoy, because then it becomes second nature and part of your lifestyle. It almost doesn't matter what it is, as long as it's something that gets you outdoors, breathing fresh air, get your heart rate up a little bit and is something you can do consistently throughout the week.

I think that's super important. Plant based eating. He's already got the diet part down, I think developing a meditation and mindfulness practice at twenty five. I mean, what a gift. If you can really figure that out and nail that down at your age, the benefits that you'll see in your life will be tremendous. And I think also developing a habit of reading to go back to the guy reads too many self-help books, but you should always be reading books.

Every single interesting person that I've ever met in my life is an avid reader. Yes. So if you can make reading it go to habit, it doesn't even matter to me. What you read doesn't really matter. As long as you're reading all the time, I think that will make you stand heads and shoulders above your peers and just make you not only an interesting person, but a person who is interested in the world.

Well, that's what makes it. That's those who are the most interesting people, right? The ones that are still like trying to figure it out, of course. Yeah, I totally agree with you. I think one thing that helped me when I was a younger kind of build good habits just in general was starting a yoga practice morning yoga practice. I started by just doing nine sun salutations every morning before I did anything else. And just that alone kind of got me to the point where I could, like, try to become a writer, basically, like to like I was that right discipline.

I never considered myself a disciplined person until I started doing that. It taught me discipline. So creating some sort of morning ritual for so it doesn't have to be that you can go run and but I think some sort of meditation aspects. I'm sort of like metaphysical like spiritual aspect. You know, day does help you kind of stay grounded, stay humble and and stay ready. Yeah.

So what is your connection to source? What is your higher power look like. Yeah.

And how does that infuse your life and set you on a trajectory to to bring meaning and purpose in your life. The other aspect of this that I would mention is, is finding a way to be of service. But this is a guy who's delivering coronavirus tests across the state like he's doing is providing a service. But I think when you approach your life from a service perspective, from a perspective of how can I contribute, how can I give, how can I provide as opposed to what am I getting out of this for myself, that will not only make you a happier person, it will make you a more productive person, a more contented person, and just a better individual, I think, and somebody who other people want to be around also.

One more thing to the list overload you, Jackson, but I travel internationally and not just like nice places, but to places that might be fraught, to places that might be challenging. Make yourself put yourself where you're one of the only foreigners on the ground and just go explore.

That's the Henry Henry Rollins philosophy of life. That's right. Yeah. Pack a bag and go to some weird corner of the planet.

Go to Papua New Guinea or somewhere like that. I think that's that's really good advice. Yeah. And I think also, you know, to avoid overwhelming, you just break these things down into tiny little chunks, you know, and don't beat yourself up for not doing it perfectly every single day. Exactly. And I'll cap it off by just saying it sounds like you're you're in a car or truck for a lot of hours during the day. That's where you listen to the podcast.

Thank you for doing that. But to the extent that you, you know, have all this time in the car, like, what else are you listening to? Like, don't just turn the radio on and let it tell you what it wants to tell you. Be mindful about how you're programming your audio throughout the day when you're spending all that time in a vehicle, whether it's audio books or other podcasts and the like.

Yeah, make sure you get your Kuhnen feed. You're kidding already. Yeah.

All right. Let's go to Adam in Alberta, Canada. Hey, Rich and Adam. My name is actually Adam, too. In fact, my name is Adam Irka and I live in Alberta, Canada. I've been a long time listener of the podcast. In fact, I've been listening to this episode one way back when you were recording in Hawaii, which means I've literally listened to you talk for thousands of hours ago and 99 percent of your podcast.

The question I have, which you have my permission to play on the podcast, is that the topic of education has come up frequently in your podcast. And I happened to be a teacher in a public school. In fact, I'm a school administrator in Canada. I often think about how somebody can influence the world in a positive way and how educators are positioned in a highly influential role. While there are an increasing number of mainstream education alternatives for students, which I think are wonderful, I still believe that public education remains an important avenue for a significant percentage of the population.

Whatever health related deaths are on your show, you asked them if they were to wake up in a parallel universe as the surgeon general, what health changes they would make to the system. So I'm going to ask you the same question. If you were to wake up in the education world, the equivalent of surgeon general, what changes would you make to the education system as a whole so that one could positively influence children who I believe to be our most valuable resource and in the future of our planet relies on keep up the great work that.

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

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

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

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

I think that with technology and I've said this before, many times everybody's got a supercomputer in they're in their in their pocket that will answer any question that they ever want to ask it. So this rote memorization kind of default methodology of teaching needs to be called into question. And I think we need to shift away from the memorization strategy that has predominated and monopolized our our education system for for too long and focus on how do we create amazing, adaptable human beings who will be lifelong learners, who are interested in learning and interested in the world.

And I think that needs to start with focusing on developing the esteem of the students and then orienting curriculum around where they sit and what they're interested in and expanding from there. We need to develop young people who know how to work in teams, who understand leadership, who understand and appreciate listening, who know how to collaborate, who know how to work alongside each other on a project basis, methodology of learning, as opposed to the singular, individualistic approach of reading a textbook and regurgitation.

That would be a start away from memorisation towards analysis of the material that is available to you, too.

Yeah, and I think in terms of being surgeon general, like what are the changes that I would make? Well, I would certainly reallocate budgets such that public education is adequately and properly funded. And I think it's woefully underfunded right now. And I think the funding is not directed in the best directions we have in the United States. Teachers that have to do go fund me to raise money so that they have equipment to teach.

It's ludicrous, right?

Every kid should have a laptop or an iPad or some form of device. We, you know, have this opportunity because of covid to learn more about how digital learning can inform our educational procedures and processes. And I know there's a lot of smart people that are looking at this and that are studying this. You know, the fact that that kids are now learning from home, how does that affect long term? What happens when we finally get over the hump here and return to classroom learning?

How much should we retain of what we've experienced now versus how much do we go back to the way that it was before? And I think this first moment right now is instructive in that we should be really trying to understand how kids learn in a better way. And when we return, apply what we've learned to create a better classroom experience for all. So I say all of that, like this is all very off the cuff.

Like, I feel bad about them because I feel like I should have mapped out my response to that. But no, you get into I think that that, you know, young people going into the world right now and into the workforce need to no longer are we in a situation where somebody joins a corporation and spends their entire career there. No longer are we in the situation where a young person is even going to have the same. Career field for maybe even a small percentage of their professional life, right?

So with that understanding, how do we train young people to be better equipped to handle the strange vicissitudes of a technologically oriented global economy? And I think adaptability comes to mind as one of the most important things.

Spoken like a competitive swimmer turned entertainment lawyer turned podcast.

I don't know when you graduated law school. Did you ever anticipate doing something called a podcast? Well, there was no like when I was in law school. There's no Internet, so. No, but that's you're the proof of that adaptive. You know, adaptability is my point is right. It's like that that.

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

But I should have known that. Right. I mean, but you said you already couched that in their saying you would keep a lot of what already exists because clearly you got a lot out of your education.

Yeah, but there was a lot of wasted time to a lot of it forgotten due to blackout drunks that, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head with the number one thing would be put some more money where our mouth is. And to me, that that that place is teachers salaries. Number one, we need your salaries. We need to get we need to attract talent to to the pool. Yeah. And you're not going to do that by paying people peanuts.

And it's absurd the level of we need a cultural social shift in our perception of educators. One hundred percent. These people are rock stars and heroes and we need to treat them as such. We were talking before the podcast about how. How this medium has created rock stars out of scientists in a way that is unprecedented, we were talking about Andrew Duberman and David Sinclair and Matthew Walker, these amazing scientists who are doing phenomenal work in terms of longevity and sleep and, you know, neuroscience, et cetera.

In the past, they would have written a book. Maybe the book would have done well, who knows? But now they can go on these podcasts and talk for two or three hours and people are like so thirsty for their wisdom and their response to the podcast that I liked that I've had with these people has been unbelievably tremendous. People revere these people and it makes me think, well, we should have the same perspective for secondary educators and primary educators.

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

Right. The very real threats that we face.

So, yeah, so we can't be paying people 40 grand a year now to do it. So, yeah, you got to I mean, that's the best way to uplift them is pay them properly. Yeah. And yeah, I love it beautifully. Well said Rich. All right, let's go to Jeremy in St. Michael, Minnesota. Hey, Rick. Hey, Adam. This is Jeremy from St. Michael, Minnesota. And I, first of all, just want to say thank you to Rich for the podcast.

It's been really life changing for me. I've been listening for about almost two years now, I think, and the knowledge and insight it's giving me is super helpful in everyday life. So I appreciate it. The question I have is for both of you, I guess you're both writers. And I was curious. And maybe more from the sense of a personal story, when you feel like you know, that your story is worth writing and putting out to the world, that it might be received and kind of I don't I don't know exactly how to ask the question, but, you know, I have a story.

I have you know, I've been through recovery. I've been sober for 15 years. Have, you know, done some things after recovery that I feel, you know, would be of worth for people to hear and maybe give them hope to do things in their own lives. And I'm just curious how you come to the reality that this might be something good to put down on paper and that your story might be received well in the world. So I hope that makes sense.

Keep doing what you're doing and thank you.

All right, Jeremy, listen. Of course, you should write your story, it sounds like you have an amazing story. I think everybody should write their own story. And if you have even the slightest inkling that you want to share something and that what you have to share could be helpful to another human being, of course you should do that. I can't encourage you enough to write what is inside of you that clearly I can feel from from your words is yearning to be expressed.

I sense some hesitancy and perhaps a lack of of confidence around doing this, maybe a little bit of fear. And my sense is that that fear is linked to how what you would write will be received. And what you have to do is let go of that.

Like, who cares how it's going to be received attached to this. You have to detach. These are two different things. There is the self-expression, there's the taling, and then there's the reaction to it. If you get caught up into the reaction, you're dead out of the gate. Back to that.

Can't think about that at all. You have to just basically. Get into a place of pure expression and allow it to, you know, emanate from there, I think and, you know, I can only share my own experience.

I'll tell two quick stories. One is how the book Finding Ultra came came to be in the first place, because it wasn't like I set out to write a book. I thought maybe in the back of my mind one day I'll write a book. But it wasn't like I had set this goal that I was going to write and write a memoir. Right. What happened was.

Somebody who I didn't know read about me in a magazine article, reached out to me by email and asked if I would be willing to talk to him because he had just gotten out of treatment and was having a hard time. And it was somebody that I didn't know but was somebody that. Was friends with other friends of mine, so I struck up a friendship with this guy and we would talk from time to time on the phone and I was trying to kind of help him acclimate to to being newly sober and.

At one point, he said, hey, you've got this amazing story. Have you ever thought about writing a book? And I was like, well, not really. I mean, kind of maybe, but like it wasn't top of the mind thing. And he was like, I know this book agent. You know, this book agent worked with Dean Kearns's and it helped him with his books. And, you know, you should would you like me to introduce you like it was like that?

Right. And that led from one that led to me being introduced to this book agent and this book agent being like, well, if you want to write a proposal, I'm happy to read it. You know, this is a tough thing to thread the needle here. I wrote I worked really hard on a proposal and she was still very, you know, like grounded in her, you know, trying to, you know, basically prevent me from having high expectations.

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

I had plenty of moments of personal terror thinking, like, do I want to be the soap and do I want to be this vulnerable? Is this a good idea? And I would become paralyzed because I was thinking about the audience reception. And the only way that I could get through it was to completely block that out and just pretend that I was writing in a private journal and that no one would ever read it. And every moment, every once in a while, it how this flash of like the book being on a shelf in a bookstore.

And I would panic because I would get caught up in that reception. And that ultimately is the enemy of creativity. So just pretend you're writing in your personal journey and maybe you don't share it with anybody and maybe you do. And maybe it impacts one person or maybe it impacts a million people you don't know. But the point of the exercise is to engage with your creative voice and to try to, you know, basically. Be authentic to who you are.

I love that so well said, and it echoes something that our friend Elizabeth Gilbert has talked about, which is kind of in her book, Big Magic, she gets into that a lot is the point is the creative output, it's not the you have to divorce yourself from expectation. You can't expect something out of it, especially when you're first starting, because you don't know about that. It's about you don't know where this one act will take you.

You know, I've never written a memoir like you, but I wrote the way I got an agent was I wrote a fictional novel kind of loosely based on my life. And I did put a lot of stuff in there that was very personal and ended up getting me an agent which helped my, you know, got me into into the publishing houses.

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

Right. Yeah. Right.

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

Awesome. Cool, cool. All right. One last one. The personal, more personal question for you.

This is Henry from Los Angeles, California. From what I've gathered, you, Rich and Julie Sumati, you have a relationship that is pretty similar to me and my wife. And by that, I mean you're both clearly spiritual and empowered in your own ways that you seem to be more practical, rational and grounded. Whereas Julie is the more esoteric, perceptive, intuitive one. In my experience, that relationship has been really beneficial for personal growth for me and my partner.

But my question is about working together. When you collaborate on projects, how do you balance each other's energy without getting dragged down by differences in work styles and priorities? What rules or guidelines, whether they're unspoken or formal, have you set out to bring out the best in each other and not let disagreements grind projects to a halt? Thank you.

That's a great question, Henry. Thank you for that. This has been an evolving, you know, journey for Juliani to figure this out and definitely a tricky equation to solve. But I think we've done a good job and figured it out. And I think the key for me has been.

Not. Needing her to do things the way that I would do them and respecting that difference, right. So, Julian are incredibly different. We have our own respective projects, but then we come together to collaborate on on things from time to time.

And early on in that adventure, I would say, you know, it's like this is how you do these things you have to do like and she would not do that, you know, and I would get frustrated and angry. And I'm sure she was angry with me because, you know, she has her perspective on how you would do Project X, and I'm not meeting that expectation.

So we had to go through it in order to figure out a language around communicating and also guideposts and boundaries about how to work together. So we did he have it right the way he did handicap it? Right. In terms of you're the rational grounded and she's the esoteric kind of intuitive.

Yeah, but I think I think that that what's missing in that is that Julie is incredibly smart and competent and she gets shit done like she's a doer. So it's not like she's all airy fairy and up in the clouds and like, can't, you know, make any practical progress. Like she gets shit done, like and she knows how to get shit done and she's better at a lot of things that I am. So a lot of it has been figuring out where she excels and where my handicaps are and where I excel and where there are areas that she doesn't care about.

And then we try to meet each other so that she's doing the things that she's best at. And I'm filling in the gaps where she is, you know, less competent. And so Julie, for example, is very good at the global picture. And I'm a very I get mired in the details.

So you need both of those, right?

You need a detail oriented person and you need somebody who's thinking more broadly about what it is that you're actually doing and that functions when you understand that those are your roles. Julie's a much better team person. She's a leader. She knows how to get a lot of people around her who are excited about what she's doing. And I'm a like a solo, like I'm very good when I'm just by myself. So those are different. Those have positives and negatives.

So it's where do those where to when you look at a certain project like how are we going to fit together and let's allocate the tasks so that we're focused on the things that we're best at and most interested in. And I think when you do that and this doesn't happen overnight like this happened over time for us, then you can become like like a superpower because you're meeting each other like you're you're filling in each other's gaps. Right. And then the product of that collaboration tends to be exponential rather than than just additive, I suppose.

But I think it has to do with self understanding and also really understanding your partner and then developing really effective communication between you guys, because these things, especially when you're working together, emotions can run hot and things can get heated and things can get misunderstood. And it's really critical that you have a way of communicating in a balanced and objective way, because otherwise these things can be combustible and they blow apart a lot of relationships. So the communication has to be strong.

The self understanding and the understanding of your partner has to be intact before you even launch into one of these projects. But if you're if you have that sorted out and I think you're in a good position to collaborate together and it's beautiful to do that, I've had amazing creative, professional experiences working with my wife. But it's also important that at the same time we have our own respective things that we do outside of our collaborations so that we're not sort of solely resting on, you know, our coach, our sort of collaborations for our kind of, you know, professional wellbeing.

Or you just need to have those silos that you go into on your own so that you can be your own whole human being outside of raising kids and having a life and having a romantic life and also having a business. You've got to have your own. So it's kind of like communication skills, a solid understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses and and shared understanding of both of your collective strengths and weaknesses together and how those fit and then making sure that, yes, you collaboration can be awesome.

But you also have to have some room to do your own projects to which will feed the collaboration. Right. Right. The communication.

I can't I can't overstate how important that is, because if you're in the heat of the moment and you can't figure out a way to get balanced and give each other objective feedback, that isn't then. Completely emotionalized, yeah, you're going to be doomed. So really what you should do is just get a lot of IKEA furniture and both try to put it together and then by the end is better, you know. Exactly. You'll be divorced or.

Yeah, that's great. Anything to add. I think that's it. That's what I would say for now. Thank you, Henry. I think we did it. We're done. We took a one and a half hour podcast and made it three hours.

I know that's hard to do. We we're going to try to do this in an hour. I don't know what we're doing. Are we getting better at this or worse? I don't know. Depends on you. Yeah. Don't ask Chadwicks. But listen, you know, it's a podcast. You can listen to half of it. You can have it later. You can abandon it. I don't know. But I like what we did today. I did do, man.

All right.

Thank you. My friend will be back here in two weeks. You can follow Adam on all the socials at Adam Skolnick on that rich roll. If you want your question answered on the show, you can leave us a voicemail at forty four two three five four six two six. Yes. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button on YouTube. That notification little Bell subscribe on Apple podcast on Spotify. Check the show notes on the episode page at which WorldCom will link up everything that we discussed here today.

You can also submit your questions on the Facebook group and I think that's it. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show, Jason Kamela, for audio engineering, production, shutouts and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing today's show, Jessica Moran for graphics. Dave Greenberg right over here shooting some awesome portraits. Georgia Waili for copywriting, DKA for advertising relationships and theme music by Tyler Chopper Pilot and Harry Mathis. Appreciate you guys. I don't take your attention for granted.

Thank you for taking this journey with Adam and I. And we'll see you back here in a couple of days with another awesome episode. Any closing thoughts?

No, just thanks for listening. It's your moment to be profound. This is it. You know, I appreciate everybody listens and cares about getting better and being better. It's it's really cool to be a part of this journey. I really appreciate it. Don't take it lightly. And I thank you, Rich. And for all who listen. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Yeah.

So you guys soon peace plans a.