My life was transformed not by going to the Olympic Games, but by. The desire and aspirations to go to the Olympic Games and the hard work and dedication that it took to get to that point where I could even fathom going to the Olympic Games, and in that respect, that aspect of life is accessible to anyone. And you don't have to aspire to be an Olympic athlete or a Paralympic athlete, maybe you aspire to be the local political activist or a professor in sociology or an actor or a guru of podcasts.

But I mean, my point is, is that you can do it with applying yourself. And that's where the magic happens, is realizing that if you dedicate yourself towards something, that you can begin writing your own tickets. That's John Moffitt. And this is Episode 558 of the Virtual Podcast. The Rich Roll podcast. What's up, everybody? How goes it? Is anything going on out there? How you guys feeling? Are you OK? I think it's going to be fine.

I do have plenty of election week thoughts, but I'm going to reserve them for this week's Roll Call, which Adam and I are going to be recording on Monday and we'll post Thursday. Other than to say for the moment that I do think our democratic experiment lives and our institutions are indeed intact. So that right in and of itself is good news. I did share some thoughts with Esquire magazine a couple of days ago, some ideas on how to navigate the week that we just weathered and the weeks to come.

So in the event that you missed that, you can check the Cherno links or you can visit the Esquire website. Also, I wanted to thank everybody who has preordered voicing change. My new book, The Early Response, has truly been overwhelming. So thank you for that. I spent five hours the other evening signing copies, all of which will soon be shipped out. The on sale date is November 10th. It's almost upon us. So to learn more and purchase your copy, visit rich roll dot com slash v.c.

We are selling it exclusively through our website and we are shipping globally. And while you're there, take a moment to also check out our plant. Our meal planner, thousands of customized plant based recipes at your fingertips, access to nutrition coaches and more all available to you for just a dollar ninety a week. To learn more and to sign up, go to meals rich roll dotcom. So today's episode, today's episode holds a very special place in my heart.

One of my oldest, dearest friends, John Moffitt, is on the show today. And John is an incredible human. He's a two time Olympian. He was the youngest member of the 1980 Olympic swimming team. He's a two time world record holder and institute champion, a Stanford teammate of mine who upon retirement matured into a storyteller, a filmmaker and a three time Emmy winning television producer. This exchange is long in the making. It took seven years, in fact, one of the many stories we dig into today.

But first, it has been hectic out there, to say the least. Right. Last week has left a lot of people strung out, fried, depleted. So allow me to take a moment to remind you that you can't effectively manage your life or tend to others unless you prioritize rest and self care. So if you are feeling fried or depleted, calm has got you covered commas in apps specifically designed to help you ease stress and get the best sleep of your life.

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Here's the deal. Juv is this wall or dorje mounted device. It's like this big white futuristic panel peppered with tons of little light bulbs that isolate and emit red and near infrared wavelengths of light. Basically you stand in front of it in the comfort of your home and just bathe in the luminescence. This is immensely beneficial to our bodies because when we're exposed to certain colors of sunlight, in particular red and near infrared colors, they stimulate mitochondria in your cells and help you produce more energy.

They enhance your recovery. They support healthy skin and even enhance sleep and circadian rhythms. This is what you've does. It delivers these wavelengths directly to your skin and your cells with. The potential downsides of sunlight like skin damage, I've been using juv consistently for several months at this point and all it takes is just a few minutes a day and it really has helped alleviate some joint pain in my hips and my lower back. And not to mention leaves me feeling refreshed and recharged, especially in these cooler and darker months.

Exciting news for all you guys for a limited time. Juv right now wants to hook you up with an exclusive discount on your first order. Just go to juv dotcom slash ritual and apply my code rich role to your qualifying order. That's juv j o v dot com slash ritual code rich roll at checkout exclusions apply limited time only again that's juv j of dotcom slash rich roll. OK, John Mafate. So this is the story of a swimming prodigy.

It's also the story of heartbreak. It's about a kid who started obliterating national records at 12 who would go on to make his first Olympic team before he even entered his junior year of high school, only to have that dream pulled out from underneath him when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Moscow games. Four years later, John entered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games as the world record holder and gold medal favorite in his specialty, the 100 meter breaststroke, only to severely injure his groin in the preliminary heat, which became this insurmountable setback that once again crushed his dreams.

It's a story that was told in Bud Greenspan's amazing Olympic documentary, Six Days of Glory. And Bud was this legendary filmmaker that would later become John's mentor in the career that he pursued after retirement, a career that began in the pioneering days of reality television and would ultimately lead John to winning three Emmys as an executive producer of The Amazing Race. An athlete I revered, absolutely revered as a young swimmer. I had pictures of John on my bedroom wall when I was a kid.

I first met him when I arrived at Stanford as a bright eyed 17 year old freshman. And I just couldn't believe that I had this opportunity to train and compete with him on the Stanford swim team. It really was a dream come true for me. And John and I have been really good friends ever since. So this exchange is first and foremost about John's life and epic accomplishments. It's a rundown of his legendary swimming career, the Olympic trials and tribulations, and the conglomerate of raw athleticism that was Stanford in the mid 1980s.

It's also about his work in television and journalism, and it's packed with lessons he's acquired throughout his time as an athlete to push and persevere when it matters most. John is now taking this timeless wisdom that he and others have amassed throughout epic athletic adventures and careers and is funneling it into a new, highly anticipated podcast called Sports Life Balance. It's going to be a good one, you guys. It's launching around Thanksgiving, so stay on the lookout for that as a heads up.

This exchange was recorded pre-election in mid-September, so it holds no discussion about the next presidency. But you can expect a solid discussion on the matters of the day in the forthcoming roll on segment of the show that's going to air again on Thursday. Nonetheless, I suspect you will find our discourse applicable to our current moment, packed with keys to mastering transformation, honing aspiration and unlocking potential and perseverance. I absolutely love John. I love what he's about. He is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and I'm super excited to share his words with all of you guys today.

So let's get into it. This is me and my brother, John Moffitt. So we sat down and did a two hour podcast, it must have been 2013, I think it was right after you started, if I remember correctly, I think you might have even been in like the 20s or something like that.

As far as the number goes, what are you up to now?

Five hundred and forty five or something like that at this point. So, yeah, that was over seven years ago. And one of my very few complete mishaps where I believe, like it didn't record at all or something happened, the audio got corrupted, it was unusable or I just didn't have the audio file and I remember going to work.

And you can't just repeat it. You know, it's like we just had this experience and I always thought, like, in the back of my mind, well, we'll do it. Let's let some time pass. Right. And we'll revisit it. And then seven years went by and we never did it so well, which is kind of the way our lives have been.

I mean, certainly living them in parallel. But but, you know, Rich, we do disappear from each other's lives for various reasons, whether it be family or other circumstances.

Just as a prefatory note, John is one of my oldest, oldest friends. I've known you since I was seventeen or eighteen years old. And you you know, we've shared a lot of life experiences over the years, but in adulthood, it's kind of been a pick and roll thing, like I'll see you once a year, I'll see you and we'll make plans to see each other and then life intervenes. And, you know, I take responsibility.

I'm terrible at, like, maintaining my friendships. And a lot of time has passed and time lost spent with you. But I always enjoy seeing you, man, and I'm glad to have you in my life.

One of the strengths of our friendships is that we're able to pick up right where we left off. Yeah, I mean, it's uncanny, you know, how we won't see each other for a year or two and somehow we don't miss a beat. And within a few minutes we're cracking jokes and, you know, just picking up where we left off. So, you know, there's there's room in life for friends like that. And life is complex and we get busy and you just have to be able to pick and choose.

It's like if it's worth seeing somebody, maybe you can only see them once a year, once every two years, or maybe you see them a whole bunch of times in one year, then you don't see them for a few more.

Yeah. And that's kind of been the pattern. Yeah.

Well hopefully we can rectify that a little bit, but I'm reluctant to make broad promises that I can't keep because I've done that in the past.

What's really cool about having you here today?

You know, in reflecting I was reflecting on the history of our relationship and trying to wrap my head around this podcast today is that you've played like this sort of important but kind of shadowy role in my life, like behind the scenes.

Like Bertier. Yeah, it's crazy. Like I wrote a little bit.

Anybody who's read Finding Alzira, you pop up a couple of times in the book. So you might be familiar with who you are.

But in many ways, I'm not sure I would have ever even moved to Los Angeles if it wasn't for you in certain ways, like almost, you know, unbeknownst to you, like I was a lawyer in San Francisco. We'll go back over the history of relationships.

But our relationship. But I was a lawyer in San Francisco. I was unhappy in my professional situation. I really wanted to move down to Los Angeles and get involved in entertainment. And I'd given you my resume right at the time you were working at Not Extra, but was hard copy, hard copy, reality TV 1.0, which we're going to get in. Do you need your career?

And then I just forgot about it. And then suddenly, like, I don't know, maybe four or six weeks later, I get a call from a law firm in Los Angeles saying they want to interview me. But it was a law firm that I'd never sent my resume to.

And I was like, how do they even know? But it was a really good firm.

And I called in sick at my law firm and booked a Southwest flight down from San Francisco to L.A. to do this interview. I board the plane and you're on my flight and we're sitting next.

Yeah.

And these are signs saying back then, did we did we do the math at that point and realized that you had given my resume to Adam Bram and that's how it ended up a Christian center.

I think that was later. Not that not that I recall. I do remember actually giving my resume your resume.

Yeah.

Because I was kind of general counsel for hardcopy and he was and he was an incredibly dynamic, incredibly, amazingly talented and intelligent person. Just would pick up on things so quickly in the subtlety of things were not lost on him. And so I thought that, you know, he would be a good person to pass your resume to. And I remember him being impressed immediately. But I didn't know that subsequently he had passed it on, right? Yeah.

There was no I would meet up once again because of that little thing.

And then I end up getting that job. I moved to Los Angeles. I work at that law firm. And then subsequent to that, I end up leaving that law firm and going to work for a client, that client ended up hiring Adam Bram as his sort of personal Michael Cohen type situation. And I ended up working with Adam, who was the original reason that I got that first job in the first place, which all tracks back to you.

Adam has since passed away. Unfortunately, he was a good friend to both of us. And there's a whole story there.

But yeah, man, I've now been living in L.A. for many years, but it all started with slipping my resume to Adam Brown.

That was probably, what, circa 1990, 594. 94, yeah, 94.

No, 96, sorry, 96. I graduated from law school in 94.

OK, but let's take it back, man.

Well, first of all, to speak to the seven year window in between, you know, when we first in podcasting and doing it now, I've learned to trust that these things happen when they're supposed to, that there's a reason for them. And what's great about us doing this today is that you're launching your own podcast. Right. So we can talk a little bit about that. And hopefully I can blow a little wind in your sales to get people interested in what you're about to launch.

So maybe talk about that for a second.

Oh, yeah. That would be it would be great. Well, first of all, I have always been immensely impressed with your podcast in the scope and breadth of the topics that you are able to tackle and just your overall ability just to be personable and to elicit really authentic responses. And my life I was working on a project that you actually were involved in a long time ago, which was a boycott about the 19 film about the boycott of 1980 Olympic Games and by the United States.

And I was working with LeBron James as people. And we said at the outset, this is at the end of what's been the end of 2018 when he embarked on the partnership that if we can't get it made with LeBron James, we we can't get it made. It's not going to get made because, you know, you and I tried to get it made, right. Thought it was looking good. And it subsequently sort of disappeared from the radar.

And that happened many times through the years. And it was somewhere around 10, 12 years later that I was able to finally partner with LeBron companies. And Springhill Springhill was involved as well. But it was mostly an uninterrupted project, unbelievably intelligent. People over there, they're just they're just masters, they were really, really great to work with. But the bottom line is, is that the after thinking that we were going to get it made last summer for a release this summer, everything blew up once again.

And we had a few opportunities for Hail Marys. Right. You know, toward the end in that last kind of Hail Mary was at the beginning of this year, really before covid hit. And so. I was basically faced with a situation because it it they passed the last. It was like our last last Hail Mary. They passed and I was faced with, what am I going to do now?

Yeah, because I didn't have a stomach for really continuing on with one foot in the entertainment business.

And one for this documentary has been your passion project forever. I mean, that's it's my heart goes out to you, man, not being able to set it up. It's such a great story too.

Well, yeah. I mean, it's the bottom line is that people don't want to hear it. And that's that's the key toward doing anything that can be sold and that people people have to want to hear it. So for whatever reason, there's something in that story that made people not want to want to tell the story with me.

Do you think it's because it just happened so long ago? It's ancient history. It's not relevant to what's happening today. I mean, there's so many themes and threads to pull in that story that are completely pertinent to the geopolitical sports landscape that we're mired in at the moment.

Well, I think yeah, that that is certainly the case. And and with the with the postponement of the 2020 Games in Tokyo, I think that, you know, suddenly, OK, we have another U.S. Olympic team that has to put their dreams on hold, not for four years, like we had to do in 1980, you know, and our next chance was 1984, but for at least a year, provided that the twenty, twenty one games go on.

And as you know, as an athlete and as you know, as the razor thin margin for error that you have to have in order to perform at that level. A year is a long time. Super long. Yeah, super long.

I mean, it will play into the favor of the younger athletes that still could benefit from another year of training. But a lot of the training resources are unavailable at the moment. And for people that are in the twilight of their career, it's devastating. Yeah. Can you really hang on for another year? And, you know, on top of that, there's this, you know, misguided idea that these athletes are well-funded enough to support themselves and train and they're not.

That's just not the case, with the exception of a very few.

It really never has been. I mean, with with the exception of a select few. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's rough.

So, yeah. So I felt I felt as though, OK, you get these times in your life where you're like, OK, I need to reinvent myself, I need to figure out what I'm going to do. And I love storytelling and I love I love athletes.

I love their struggles and the whole endeavor of of striving to do something bigger than yourself for who knows, just to be human, right. To celebrate being human. And so I was trying to figure out, OK, what am I going to do to that? I can you leverage my experience as a storyteller, but something that I can do myself and not carry with me the burden of huge financial implications of actual production where you have cameras and, you know, lots and lots of employees, et cetera.

So I thought, well, let's let's make a crack at doing a podcast. So that's what I'm in the process of doing, huh? I love it, man.

When you told me this on the phone the other day, I couldn't be more enthusiastic.

I think, you know, we're in this, you know, golden moment where podcasting is now, you know, become a really mainstream media outlet. There's lots of people starting podcasts.

So it's much more competitive than it used to be, but. Nobody is better suited to shepherd these athletes stories than yourself, not only because you are an athlete yourself and you have this extraordinary Olympic pedigree that we're going to unpack, but also you have an entire career in storytelling. And I don't know anybody else who is as qualified or well suited to embark upon this project.

Who else is an Olympic athlete who also has this amount of experience and sharing stories and understanding what makes a story work and why it's worthwhile?

Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but as you know, whenever you embark on anything new, there is there is no doubt and we all we you look, I'm fully aware that the market is pretty much completely saturated and that, you know, you did it right, starting your podcast. That was just 2012. Well, luck is a big factor in success for a lot of things in life. You know, some hope. I really appreciate you sitting down as well, because you carry with you a great amount of respect and insight and you wouldn't have the respect and the popularity if you didn't take that insight with you.

But I will be the the the least accomplished athlete to ever be on your podcast.

Probably. Well, I've already interviewed somebody who is a ballerina and didn't have any any experience in athletics beyond that.

So that's an art form. Yeah, but but this person is amazing.

Cool. What do you do? You have a name for it? Because when we talked on the phone the other day, you weren't sure what you were going to call it.

Well, it's a working title right now, so I wish that I had something completely free.

The title the title that we are working with right now is Sports Life Balance, huh? So it's a riff on work life balance that anybody who knows with a family and had to also work, especially for mothers, that it's it's tough.

And so it's the lessons from sports that will can be reapplied for life. And that's the whole premise behind it, that these people who were at one point in their lives, great athletes, they have also been able to parlay that success somehow into having successful, thriving, happy lives. And what what are those ingredients? What is the secret sauce and the pixie dust that goes into somebody leading a happy and balanced life? Yeah, yeah.

It's interesting. And it's it's more complicated than meets the eye. This is something that I explored with Apollo Ono on the podcast recently.

You would think that any athlete that ascends to, you know, the apex of performance understands what it takes to be successful in the world. Like they know how to apply themselves. They know how to set goals and achieve them. They know how to, you know, focus and, you know, they know how to, you know, show up in those specific moments and perform like all of these things that are life skills. And yet it's the exception to the rule when you see somebody retire from their athletic career and then become equally or, you know, significantly successful in civilian pursuits.

Why is that? You know, it's interesting. You would think, like anybody who knows how to do this should be able to just kill it in the real world. And it doesn't happen as often as you would suspect.

No, I think it certainly doesn't. And I know with Apollo, you were talking you were talking about the weight of weight of the world. Yeah. Yeah. Which he is featured in. And the weight of gold is, I think, an amazing hour of of television or it's HBO. So but so it's kind of a short film. But what it what it does is it kind of lifts the veil.

This is this is what when groups of Olympians and Paralympians get together, this is this is a topic of conversation like how do you how do you move on from your time in sport, a time when you are at the pinnacle at a very young age, you have immense respect from your peers and from those in positions of authority around you. And suddenly you retire and you land in Nowheresville and nobody can shut off. And I. Yeah, so there isn't any one particular method that works for everybody.

Everybody is different.

As as you well know, the way I went about doing it is I just decided that I needed to completely reinvent myself. And I turned my back on the sport of swimming because I. I was I was determined to prove that I'm worthy of something other than just being a really good swimmer. I didn't I I did not want to just be known as that swimmer when I was in my teens and 20s. Right. I wanted to do something else.

So you developed a passion for storytelling and film while you were still competing. And we're going to we'll get into that.

But you had that kind of, you know, working in parallel behind the scenes so that when you retired, you already kind of knew what you wanted to do.

Yeah, yeah, I. I kind of did. I had no idea how I was going to go about it. But what you're referring to is that I was featured in Bud Greenspan, the film about the 1984 Olympic Games because they didn't go very well for me.

I just watched that clip. It's on YouTube. Yeah, your little segment, you watch it. It's all grainy and stuff like that. But I watched it this morning and it just pulls on my heartstrings. Still to this day, I wasn't very good day.

But, you know, the the the you know, I spoke that, you know, luck has a great deal to do with success and where you ultimate where your life ultimately ends up leading. And one of those things was Bud Greenspan deciding that he wanted to use me as one of the feature stories with Rowdy Gaines. Right. Kind of like parallel stories of of the agony of defeat and the ecstasy of victory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For those that don't know. But Greenspan was a legendary documentarian who was immersed in the Olympic movement and would make these extraordinary documentaries about each Olympic Games. And probably his finest work was 16 Days of Glory, which was his documentary on the 1984 Olympic Games in which you featured in that segment that you just described.

How fair is that? Fair to say? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's made a lot of stuff. I mean, the guy was a legend. He did. I mean, he was he made I do not know exactly how many official Olympic films, but 16 Days of Glory, which chronicled the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, was certainly one that had a quite a bit of fanfare at the time. And him featuring me that in that film, it didn't it wasn't it wasn't actually being featured in the film that made a difference in my live life.

But it was him and I really hitting it off and him kind of the way I thought about it in my mind was that he was my mentor.

He was my mentor to you. He really did. And we kept in touch through the years. And I certainly would. I kept in touch with all of the updates of what I was up to. And, you know, that's what that's what changed me. It's you know, it's the fact that he was willing to take me under his wing and and he was supportive when, you know, let's face it, people aren't always supportive of you going into a career in the entertainment business.

Yeah, my family was indifferent to, you know, completely not non supportive at all, you know. So, I mean, I'm sure you understand. You understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's it's such a scary thing and so unpredictable. You know, who wants their kid to go into a thing where the future, you know, is the likelihood of success is so rare.

True. And it's it is a tough business. Yeah.

And you grew up in L.A., but L.A. is a big place. You grew up not it's not like you grew up in Hollywood and all of this.

You know, I grew up in Claremont, which, you know, it's a little different then culturally different than Hollywood. Yeah. I went to high school in Newport Beach, which is altogether polar opposites and raised in Hollywood.

Who is the guy who does the voiceovers in those movies? The serious that's serious tone with this is brother, is it? Yeah, because we used to we used to make fun of that guy in college. You remember, you, me and Kurt would be like Wyomingites.

Everyone, just like everyone did that because it's like that was like that was the that's what wrong in your head.

Like when you fall asleep dreaming of, you know, you're standing on the blocks and you picture that voice, you know, coming out of the ether in the.

Huh. There's something just so epic about it. It was timeless. You know, it was there was.

And it lended a seriousness to it. Like this matters like this is a big deal. Yeah.

I think much like like John Williams and his music and his music score, especially the one the the scores that he made for the 84 games, there's a signature there. You know you know exactly what you're getting yourself into when you hear a John Williams, you know, fanfare or you hear the voice from those films.

You're being psychologically teed up for something big, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. All right. So I'm a kid growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, starting to fall in love with the sport of swimming. And the corkboard above my bed started to become a collage of tear sheets from Swimming World magazine. I'm having dreams of, you know, my own career and I had some level of acumen and skill, I certainly wasn't the most talented swimmer on my club team, but I learned early that I could bridge that talent deficit gap by by working really hard.

And so by the time I was 16, I was starting to kind of make a few waves in my local area.

And there was one image on on my corkboard of you. You were it was a I don't know if you remember this and you couldn't have been older than like maybe you were 15 or 16 years old and you were it was like a mid dive, like you were you were bursting off the blocks and you were just like shredded and ripped. And I just thought, like, this guy and like, he's got it going on.

I can't remember that. Must have been must have been after it was probably taken around 80, maybe 83 or something like that in the lead up to the 84 games.

You are this is a long way of saying like you were one of my original inspirations and original heroes in the sport of swimming, just to kind of bring people up to speed. You burst onto the scene relatively quickly in the sport of swimming, distinguished yourself and made your first Olympic team in 1980 at the age of 16, 16. You were 16 years old. Yeah. You were the youngest kid on the team, right?

I was the youngest male on the entire U.S. squad of all sports, all sports. The youngest athlete to make the 1980 team. I have been I've been told that the person that became the youngest after me was Michael Phelps.

So that would have been 2000 was in 2000. Maybe I was his first. I thought he was fifteen. I think he was. I think it was fifteen. Yes.

So wow. Yeah. So what was that like man.

You know, like team. Do you even do you even like. Were you able to even process that at that age. Of course, of course.

I mean I think even at six years old it's the same facilities that allow you to aspire towards something like that. Is is also what makes you understand the gravity in the in the largeness of scale of what you're trying to do. So, yeah, I certainly was aware.

I think it was overshadowed. Which is a nice term to because of the boycott, because we had found out that Carter Carter's boycott succeeded and that we were in fact boycotting a few months before the trials, it was April that we actually found out about that.

So we knew. We knew. And I think that no matter what, there was some luster taken off of it. But we also knew that the United States was still going to pick an Olympic team. Yeah, I will tell you that you are when you're that age, you don't quite know what you're doing. In other words. In other words, you don't have as many scars and wounds. Painful reminders of what it's like to really get your butt kicked when you're really young.

And of course, as we get older, we start experiencing more of that and as we climb up through the ranks. So by the time 84 rolled around, you know, I'd been I'd been around the block as far as swimming against the best in the world and and really getting, you know, you get buffeted about.

And so it's a very different thing in 84, because I just had more experience under my belt and I understood how rare it was to actually make it there. And so many of my friends who were with me on the 1980 team didn't make it in 84, which was a whole lot beardslee.

Yeah. Craig Beardslee in Glen Mills and Sue Walsh and Mary Beth Lindenmeyer. There are there are a number of them. All right. Or then you take a sip, you would head or or a Tracy Hawkins who who in essence missed their prime.

You know what I mean?

So there was a fair amount of heartbreak associated with both those games in my peers because we did get to know each other very well because, you know you know what it's like when you're when you're in the trenches with a group of people, like at let's say, at Stanford, I don't really get to that level.

But yes, I know what you're saying.

The dynamics are not altogether different. You're still just swimmers. You're still dealing with pain. You're still dealing with injuries. You're still dealing with doubt. You know, there's, you know, inevitable politics. The coach giving you a stupid set. I mean, there's all that stuff. It's still is not that different. You're just you've just. Been lucky enough to have been selected to take it to that next level and in 84, you're only 20.

Yeah, you know, yeah, at the time that was like, OK, you're at the peak now.

It's a whole different ballgame. You're you're right. You could have been you could have been still gunning for it at, you know, 32.

It was a very different time back then. And I think what people need to realize is that for the most part, unless you are independently wealthy and your family was willing to support you, you didn't have any sort of work after college.

Well, it wasn't even part of the mental calculus, like who is who is continuing to do it. Like, it's so different now. But at the time it was like, yeah, you're done.

Well, and case in point, myself and Pablo Morales decided to take a, you know, take a year to train for Eighty-eight. And we both graduated at that point. And it didn't it didn't work out right. So, yeah, it's it's fraught with it's fraught with peril. And like I said earlier, alluded to earlier, the older you get, the the more battle scars and and painful reminders you have of what it's like to come up short because shooting high means you land really hard.

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All right, back to the show in 80. You still went to the White House, though, right? Yeah. What was that like?

That is a blur. I remember distinctly being filed into a room and at one point I knew which room it was within the White House. But it was a room. And we were we were all lined up and we were in our little red parade uniforms and our hats.

Right. And our cowboy hats. There was cowboy hats. We had boots on and everything like Levi's did. The uniform of the uniform.

Yeah, both for eighty and eighty four. In fact, the uniforms were exactly the same and eighty four, they were just a bunch of left over.

But but yeah I remember lining up and then in walks the president, which is surreal to be in the same room as the president of the United States. In this case it was President Jimmy Carter, the same same man who basically used us as pawns in order to protest. Politically protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, and we were used, you know, for his political gain, so it was very mixed. I was all of us were upset, upset.

Some people actually said they supported it, but everyone was quite upset. So it's very bittersweet. And I don't remember the exact sequence of things. But at some point we got these medals and it wasn't Carter that gave us the medals, but we had the medals around our neck, is my recollection when he came in. And I remember like thinking, you know, picking up and looking at it and kind of like thinking to myself, great, a fake Olympic gold medal.

This is your consolation prize. Yeah.

I mean, you don't you don't get to that level in sports by by getting a participation trophy. And it really it really felt like that. And I've heard people say, you know, that was really kind of the feeling overall.

But then he came in and he went down the line. I believe he went in reverse alphabetical order. So Moffitt I was about in the middle of middle. Yeah. And was there anyone who didn't shake his hand? No, not that I recall. Yeah. I remember hearing Jesse Bisio.

He asked Jesse Visio, oh, how many medals would you have won? And Jesse said, I would have won two golds in a silver. And. He didn't ask anybody else that question. Yeah, that just sucks the oxygen out of the room. Yeah, it's rough, especially, you know, Jesse Visio is one of those amazing talents. That is Windows 1980. Yeah. And even though he made it 84, he just was a it wasn't what he once was.

Yeah, he was. He was at Mission Viejo at its peak when they were dominating.

And he was the dominant swimmer. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Wild. Yeah.

So you continue on over the next couple of years, you start to develop this rivalry with with Steve Lundquist.

It's like your arch nemesis in the hundred breaststroke and 200 breaststroke. But he would take a crack at me and he beat me. I remember in three and I was not pleased.

Aha. You guys would go mano a mano all the time, but he held the world.

He, he set the world record and reset at a bunch of times that he did, he did years.

I mean a mano a mano like is he was he was dominant. Right.

And he was the one who a mountain of a man too. He was. And he was just immensely talented.

He was also a really he is a very generous competitor, somebody who was always collegial and friendly, despite both of us knowing that we were going for each other's jugular when it came to swimming next to each other in the right.

Well, that gets played out in 16 days of glory. I mean, that was a, you know, very heartfelt moment after the final. But working up to that, you go to Olympic trials in 1984 and you're the one who sets the world record, right, for the first time. Yeah. You beat this guy. Yeah. And you go into the Olympics as the favorite in the Hunter breast. Spotlight's on you. You get up on the blocks for your qualifying heat.

Right. Heat seven. What happens? Well, it was the night before was the opening ceremonies and those of us who were competing the next morning at 9:00 a.m., because that's when the preliminaries started, we we opted not to go to the opening ceremonies because standing for. Right. Six, eight hours in a day, the night before you compete is you just don't do that. You can't do that.

So we were shaving down, actually. And Lundquist was your roommate? He was my roommate. Yeah, so weird that they would put you guys in the same room.

It didn't seem weird at the time, really. No, it really didn't. I mean, I didn't have any problem with it. As far as I know. He didn't either. But it wasn't just the two of us. It was several people in the same room. OK. Yeah, but but but yeah. So we were shaving down the night before and this was the the one of the very first events of the 84 games. And you just you kind of don't know what to expect.

But some of the things that I remember were getting in to warm up and the stadium, which I think it had a capacity of about 15000 people, probably two thirds were already there by the time we were warming up and I was introduced. As I was getting ready to dive in and it was just such a surreal experience and, you know, then the crowd reacts and I'm like, this is weird. I never experienced anything like this before.

To say that I was I was psyched and ready to go is is definitely an understatement. It's a very strange thing that I was never swimming faster in my entire life in the month.

You know, it was a little over a month, I believe, between me breaking the world record of the trials and then competing at the games and the training. I was I was just I was crushing fire. I was on fire. And I had just I knew I was on fire. My body was just working. I felt good. And I you know, you don't really allow yourself to think, oh, OK, I've got this because you don't you never do.

But I was feeling really, really good. Like, I was just kind of pinching myself. I was feeling so good in the water.

So I was ready for the prelims.

And and I, I usually don't remember my races, but for whatever reason, I remember thinking to myself, OK, on that first 50, take it easy.

Whoa, horsey, you know, and I just felt great and but I was I knew that I needed to just really have that easy speed that you don't blow your wad and it's in its heat. And as you know, that easy speed is elusive. But I had it.

And so I touched the 50 wall and I came did my underwater pull. And keep in mind, there are 15000 people and I don't think I'd ever computed it in front of that many people before.

And I came up from my underwater pole and the crowd, like erupted because I guess I was either at or just below world record pace. And I wasn't I wasn't going nearly to.

Yeah, it was it was it was like it was like them that kind of magic, you know, then and then I remember thinking, OK, get off my 50 wall and breaststroke. And I would think you do with Butterfly that you build off the wall. You don't just crank out a hard stroke right off the wall you built.

So I built, you know, usually with three strokes for me, one, two, three.

And then on four, I'm like, OK, let's bring it home. I just wanted to just kind of bring it home. And it was that fourth or fifth stroke boom. My leg just went. I felt it go. And it was a muscle called the adductor magnis, which is the big muscle that basically closes your legs in in your upper thigh on the inside. I just felt it go. You just tore it. Yeah. You can see it when you watch the video, there's a moment, it's sort of subtle, but if you're looking for it, you can see it and then suddenly it's a whole different picture and you still you end up pulling your way, the rest of it to finish.

And you still won, not only won the heat, but you set the Olympic record.

I did. I did end up dragging your legs. Well, those of us who have had, like, sudden injuries and I've had a few too many of them that there is there's adrenaline that kicks in. And when you first injure yourself, you know, you can kind of you can kind of walk it off. You can. And so I even though I felt it go.

I didn't feel any diminishing strength or quickness at that point it was. That afternoon between preliminaries and finals, where the inflammation kicked in and where the blood started, you know, bubbling up to the surface and the bruising began, that the pain really started. But I was. I mean, you've seen my reaction at the end of the race, I knew something was terribly wrong, but the pain didn't really start until probably two or three hours later, right?

When that's when that's when everything collapsed. And I was like, oh, no, this is this is a nightmare.

So you show up for finals six hours later. Did you got a cortisone shot and and your leg is completely wrapped in gauze?

Well, the way the way it happened is once again, I was in hell, absolutely in hell. And I hadn't been able to talk to my parents. You know, there weren't cell phones. My whole family was there. And I remember showing up for the to warm up. And I just I, I couldn't imagine kicking breaststroke like it was hard enough just to I couldn't even ring. And I remember standing on the edge of the pool and again they announced me.

Number one seed Olympic record holder who broke the Olympic record this morning and world record holder John Moffitt is getting in lane for whatever lane it was. And like the the difference between in the morning and that just incredible bursting confidence that I had in the morning was completely deflated and nonexistent. And I got in and I swam and I I did a 50 freestyle and like, OK, I stopped at the other end of the pool and I could actually see all the doctors and the coaches there, several of them, four or five at the end of my lane.

And I remember pushing off the wall and I'm like, OK, here it goes to see if I can get breaststroke. And I couldn't just couldn't get Brusstar. I just couldn't do it.

So I got out after 100 and my coaches and doctors pulled me aside and said, listen, there's some things that you can do that we can do, but, you know, the risk is high. You will certainly be injuring the muscle more.

But what they what they did is they said we can give you injections. And it wasn't cortisone. It was it was actually it was actually a local anesthetic called slicking believe that's the name of it.

And this doctor took out like these big syringes and just started shooting Zalkind into this big muscle and that very sensitive area so that I could, you know, you know, it was basically numb from my belly button to my knee within like ten minutes.

So I had missed warm up and I mean, I had to warm up. So the women's free just happened. And before the medal ceremony, they said, you can get in the diving. Well, and once again, so they wrapped it very tightly with basically it adhesive tape.

They put some sort of sticky stuff on. They sprayed it on and then basically wrapped it in an adhesive tape to hold the muscle together as much as possible. And I got into the diving. Well, which is also within the stadium, right?

It's right there. And you're the only one, right? Oh, yeah. There's nobody else on deck. There might be, you know, like a you know, an usher or something. There were probably half a dozen people even on deck. And so I knew every I was on me, including my parents, and they didn't know what's going on.

But the thing I remember is like, OK, this is this is a moment where. I just don't want to regret this moment. I don't want to regret it because, as we know, regret is something that's very difficult to live with, especially when it comes to competition, like deciding not to do something. But I really couldn't kick breaststroke and I just welled up every ounce of strength that I could muster. And I kicked as hard as I could and I screamed underwater because it just hurt like hell.

But every kick thereafter hurt a little less.

And I just I don't know how far I went. It probably wasn't very far. I just kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked. And it felt like a noodle, like, you know, what it's like to travel. I mean, to have your lip numb, let alone have a limb numb.

Yeah, it's it's it's so so I was able to kick enough where. OK, let's go. And 15 minutes later, I was on the blocks for the finals at the Honda breaststroke.

And was there anything that you did to kind of compose yourself mentally and emotionally to try to approach that mindset or you're just in the moment like taking it one second at a time when you're a competitor, you get good at masking the way you're if you're feeling non not confident. I was panicking. I was completely panicking. I was like, it's over. It was embarrassing. All the people that put so much into helping me through my career and it was just all came crashing down, and I also knew there were I don't know, hundreds of millions of people are watching on TV.

So my most horrible personal defeat was unfolding on worldwide television.

Yeah. You know, in retrospect, obviously, there's nothing to be embarrassed about. You got injured. It's not like you screwed up.

I would get embarrassed when I win. Yeah, it's I think that's part of my makeup, but I don't remember actually doing any sort of calming. I just.

I was. I don't know what I looked like walking out, but I would think I had pretty much of a poker face. Yeah, you did. And I was one of those 100 some odd million people who watched it live as it happened.

And I remember vividly, I think it was Mark Spitz who, when you took your sweat pants off and everybody could see the bandage leg, he said something like, oh, this is some kind of psychological ploy, like you're trying to play mind games with Lundquist or something.

And I was just thinking nobody would do that. That's insane. Clearly, there's something very wrong here.

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, thankfully, I couldn't hear his commentary.

I hear you get up on the blocks.

Steve Lundquist is like in line to write something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

You're in the middle of the pool lane for you end up still pulling out like a fifth place finish in this whole thing, which is insane to me that you weren't like 20 meters behind everybody.

Yeah, I remember I was clearly last when I at the turn because when underwater pool, you can you can see a fair amount and you take a glance where you are. And it was just not a custom. It wasn't something I was familiar. You're not I was used to I wasn't used to looking at the person beside me and seeing their feet. And I saw I knew I was in class. And again, you know what creeped in. It's like, I don't want to regret this.

I don't want to regret this. I want to be able to look back and no, no, that I tried as hard as I could, that I welled up every possible fiber of strength and willfulness in order to to get through this. And I remember my arms felt great, like I still had that halo of my body feeling great. And I just said, OK, legs, legs are one's a noodle.

Just bring it home, bring it home, all those polling sets I did for years and years and years. Now it's time that they come in handy. And I just I just used my arms and I yeah, I end up getting fifth.

But but people who aren't familiar with swimming, you've got to understand that that of all strokes, breaststroke, you know, the vast majority of your power is coming from the legs.

Yeah, I was probably about 70 percent of my stroke came from my kick. Yeah. Yeah.

It's hard to even think about it now, but you can look back on that and know that you gave it everything. And you know that that image of Lundquist winning, he breaks the world record, wins the gold and then he comes over to your lane and leans down and gives you a hug.

Well, that's a relationship that we had. He he he was never anything but a gentleman about. Everything and humbled, humbled by the situation, and he made that very clear to me. But that wasn't the end of your career.

So how do you pick the pieces back up and try to rebuild after that?

Well, I was on this fantastic team called Stamford Swimming.

I've heard of it. Yeah. And, you know, we were we were on a roll. So this was 84 games were the summer between my sophomore and junior year, my second third year. So I had two more years of eligibility. And through various flukes and disappointments and bad luck, we didn't win. Although we were favored my freshman and sophomore year to win the national championships, we didn't Florida ended up winning.

So I had not only the the goal ahead of me to win that team national championship, but also a group of unbelievably tough accomplished. Men that were on the team who cared about me and who who wanted me to be part of their team and I desperately wanted to be part of their team, so I had this built in support network. That's what people maybe don't understand about a college team, is you have you have a support network.

And I certainly had a great support network. So I wanted to get back. I wanted to get back and try for that national championship that eluded us, my freshman and sophomore year. I recall that it was probably about the end of October, beginning of November, before I got back in to swim because the the injury of my leg was was pretty bad. The tear was severe and doctors really, really didn't want me to read it. They wanted to be sure that it's 100 percent healed before I did any breaststroke.

So I really didn't get back into any sort of meaningful training, I think, until sometime before Thanksgiving. So, you know, there's like four or five months I took off. Right, right. Right, right.

And Stanford does end up winning and situates that following year. I mean, that 85, 86, 87 run. I mean, it was I mean, one of the greatest. Swimming franchises of all time, I mean, the talent on the Stanford team during that tenure was unbelievable. It really was unbelievable and it wasn't lost on any of us.

I mean, I remember that objectively, you could you could take world rankings and you can say there is no bigger concentration of world ranked swimmers on the planet than at Stanford in the mid 80s. Right. Right.

I was, you know, admiring it from afar in the pages of Swimming World magazine, which I would hotly anticipate, you know, its arrival in my mailbox, pre Internet. And that was the only way to get any kind of news or information or inspiration about what was going on in the world of this sport, because short of Olympic years, there's no real media coverage happening. So that was the one source of trying to figure out what was happening in this world.

And they would every year put on the cover the team photo of the team that had won. And I vividly remember that year that you guys won that first time and the team photo and everybody there, I was like, that is the coolest thing that I look at.

All of those guys, they're all like so extraordinary in their own respective ways. It was cool. Yeah. It was a once in a lifetime experience. So. So, yeah, I mean, there was more to me as a swimmer and as an athlete than just winning the Olympic gold medal. I would I would count the winning the national championship as as as just as elusive is as winning a gold medal and just as difficult of an endeavor then Olympic gold medal.

But it's not looked upon the same by the public. Right. But it's something that all of us who are part of those teams, you know, we know we did something because there was a fantastic chemistry that existed. And it wasn't just the talent. It was that we all cared about each other and we all had a good time. And swimming's hard, especially, you know, at a place like, well, any college, but a place like Stanford where so much is expected, you above and beyond your athletics.

I mean, we we we really close. And and that's the thing that I will always carry with me. It's not the fact that we won the nineteen eighty five InSitu eighteen championship in 86 NCAA Championship. It's the guys who I had the honor of of of swimming with my teammates. Right. Dave bottom. The bottom started at all. Yeah. I mean what, what a legend that guy is. I mean he when you look back and you try to, you know, deconstruct how that team became what it is, I mean, he really set the tone.

I feel like he set in motion and kind of created the foundation and everything built upon, like, the tone that he set as as a leader on that on that squad.

It definitely extended from him. He was he is an incredibly fun-loving, hard working zest for life, is not aptly describing what he is like, but just incredibly passionate and talented and jovial and a good guy. So I remember arriving at the farm in the fall of 1985 at Stanford just seemed like a fantasy land to me. It was so outside the realm of anything that I thought, you know, would be accessible to me. And when I got in, I just couldn't imagine not going.

But I was a walk on, you know, I wasn't somebody who was coveted or recruited for the team. And I remember getting there early and meeting Dave Bottom and him being so genial and cordial to me and inviting me to go run stadium steps with him. And I got to know him before school even started or formal swim training started. I met you and I met some of these guys. I mean, I was just like I couldn't believe that I was actually meeting these guys who are my heroes, who then welcomed me into this subculture that became so meaningful to me.

And I have vivid memories of of meeting you early on. And I remember you were like you were a postgrad at that point. So you weren't swimming on the team, but you were sticking around to train. No, first time.

The first year I was we were shoulder wrapped. I was when I was a senior. When you were first year. That's correct. But I was coming out of the school where you just do what your coach tells you to do and you're just training four or five hours a day and putting in massive volume and never questioning the protocol, you were like a strange animal that I'd never met before who was actually taking responsibility for your own training.

And there would be morning workouts that you wouldn't show up for or you would say, I'm not doing stadiums. That's not good for me. I know what I need. And I remember being very struck by your confidence and self-assurance about what was going to work for you and what wasn't, which caused a lot of strain with Skip the coach.

There was a lot of early on where's morphic?

Call him like, you know, but you knew what you needed and you always performed when when you needed to, you know, but I had never seen that before.

So walk me through a little bit about that, because I think that was unique in that time. That was, you know, kind of like be your own guy. Yeah.

You know, certainly in hindsight, with the way the swimmers trained now versus the way we train back then, that's, you know, as the backdrop look, I went would go 20000 meters in a day and I was 100 breaststroker.

My race was about a minute long, like, what am I looking back on it?

It's insane. It is it is absolutely insane how much I was expected to train. And it tore me to shreds.

It absolutely tore me up. I did not have one of those bodies that could withstand that kind of punishment day in and day out.

Right. Like you read about Phelps and how he could recover so he could handle that kind of volume.

I couldn't. And there were guys on that, a lot of guys on the team. The good I could and I knew that about me and that that that part about me was really sort of solidified when I was in high school. I didn't I didn't do doubles until I up. And even 1980, I didn't do double workouts. That's crazy to me. I didn't do double workouts until toward the end of my senior year in high school.

And it was done because I had some coaches who actually had some vision and some parents. My parents were who were very supportive, but who clearly also had vision. And they didn't they didn't want to a burn me out because I was I have a personality type that I believe me, I can get burnout in, won't burn me out.

And they didn't want to just tear me apart at like fourteen, fifteen years old, like so many of the kids were already having a problem with. I mean, what's the attrition in swimming like in the teens early, early to mid teens.

And so I also shared like I was like, you know, swimming can write me a ticket somewhere. I don't know exactly where, but can write me a ticket somewhere. So it's just kind of a normal kid. But I was really good at swimming and so I didn't even start weights until college. I would do.

Which is also crazy because you were always super jacked.

Well, that's the reason I didn't have to do weights. Yeah.

The one who's got much bigger calves than me.

Yeah, well, I wish they were a bit smaller, but I always I mean, that's a whole nother topic of people walking up to you in grocery store and saying, what do you do to get such big calves?

I don't mean to digress, but my heavens, I would. I really don't like them very much. They don't fit in jeans.

You can't wear decent jeans.

They're all show. No go pants don't fit. They don't. They don't. Yeah.

So OK, so we digress.

What were you talking about. You didn't touch weights until college. Yeah. And even even a little bit in high school. My senior year I would do like speed circuit stuff. I would do like one of the things I would do sort of do squat jumps, I kinetic squat jumps. That was the closest thing that I did to weights.

And then Skip also realized that I did not need to do heavyweights, especially my freshman year. I didn't do heavy weights. Maybe my sophomore year I began to do more heavy weights because my I actually kept growing in my freshman year in college. And and so I would do plyometrics early before anybody knew it. Plyometrics were, which is basically spending as little time on the ground as possible and jumping, you know, using using your pure fast twitch muscle fiber.

And I would do reaction drills like Dave Bottom and I would do reaction drills where we would have our eyes closed and, you know, somebody would say, you know, go and you'd open your eyes and you'd have to hit whatever it is, you know, just like really neurological, like like teaching your body how to react in an explosive way. That was much more important to me than being physically strong, because I that was not my problem.

And and, you know, as I'm sure you're well aware.

Swimming in a world class environment with really good swimmers, you realize what your weaknesses are very, very quickly and you know what your strengths are. And so I always had the philosophy. It's like I really needed to focus on on my weaknesses, things that I really, really could improve because me getting incrementally stronger was not going to make me a better swimmer.

Right. And thankfully, I was surrounded by people who agreed with me on that topic.

Yeah, well, you were way ahead of the curve because now that's standard protocol for swim training. I mean, it's changed so much. Yeah.

I mean, you know, for people who are unfamiliar, it really was just get in the pool and churn out these sets up to 20000 yards or meters every single day, four or five hours of pool time, couple weight sessions a week and, you know, live your life as a zombie like from fifteen to twenty one. You know, it's like it's all a fog because you're so exhausted all the time and you're banking that when you finally back off and undertake that two week taper, that you're going to bounce back completely and be at your peak.

And it's just crazy when you think about that in the context of a race that last forty nine seconds or 18 seconds. You know, if you're swimming the 50 freestyle.

Yeah. That you would be doing that.

The sport. I don't know how in touch you are now with kind of training modalities, but only a little. It's pretty crazy.

Like I I've I popped into the the postgrad work out at USC a couple times over the last couple of years. Conor Dwyer invited me to join them. I've only got a couple of times, but this is where a bunch of, you know, very accomplished post collegiate swimmers go to train for the next Olympics like Lochte is training there and stuff like that. Urbancic was is coaching. It's like my favorite coach ever.

Yeah. I was so lucky to have been able to be coached under how I was, how amazing and phenomenal is that guy still is still at it.

You know, it's crazy and. The workout resembled nothing like anything I was familiar with, you know, when you get in, you're putting like you're putting like nets on your feet and you're just doing 12 and a half and turning around and all this like short sprint, you know, learning how to explode off the walls like it was all burps and power, which was completely different than the way that we trained.

I wish I would have been able to train like that. But you would have benefited tremendously?

I would have. Well, when you look at the times, you know now and how much they've dropped me, clearly they've figured out something that we didn't.

Now I'm convinced I was in a perpetual state, as I guarantee you were, and over time, you know, perpetual state of being overturned.

Yeah, unless you're that rare freak like that Michael Phelps, who has that biology that allows them to flush the lactate acid out quickly and recover more rapidly.

But I would venture to say that, you know, 85 percent of elite swimmers were overtrain during that era for sure. Yeah, I was.

Yeah, well, you still I mean, by taking control, you are able to create your own trajectory in your own urine.

I was in its bath. Don't don't go thinking I was in complete control. No, I mean, there were a lot of knock down drag outs.

Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't, I would say I got a lot of, a lot of resistance from my teammates who are able to withstand the punishment a little bit more readily than I was able to. And those are the ones I knew Skip was going to give me grief no matter what, because that's his job. Job of a coach is to push you harder than you think you should go. And so I understand I understood that type tightrope, but having, you know, my peers and my teammates.

You know, like saying when were questioning whether or not you're you're you're dedicated. I'm like, you're kidding me, right? You know, it's like that. Right? Right. Right, right.

But I wasn't the only one. I mean, Dave bottom was he was he was the one that he was cut from that mold, too.

Yeah, he was. Yeah, sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Well that was that must have been giving you some comfort because, you know, he kind of established that you could do that. Yeah, I think for some reason I don't, except I was mad at him you got at me? Yeah, I think oh I think where it started is my freshman year.

You know, he would you would call me in the morning morning workouts. I'd wake up my roommates and they'd be all pissed off. And I just realized, like, hey, I can pull this.

I could pull the plug on this thing, you know, cause you haven't touched your phone. Ever made a really bad you didn't answer your phone. It's like, oh, sorry. Yeah.

Let's just say Skip was prone to explosive moments over the years. He was amazing for me. He was very, very good for me and his drill sergeant mentality. Really, that that's what he's known for, but what he did for me was realize that the team was bigger than what I was doing and that we couldn't achieve ourselves without the team thriving as well. And that was a mantra, right? I mean, from the Marines, I'm sure it's like you've got it.

You know, when you're in combat, you have to you have to react as a team, you know each other's backs. And and I think that in that respect, certainly in those eras era from, well, the mid mid 80s and then the 90s to about 2000 last. And yeah, that suited him very, very well because what he did was he created teams that were really, really close. And you don't win national championships unless you're really close.

That was his greatest talent. I mean, you know, Skip is a flawed individual. I'm not sure he was the best coach for me or that the program was, you know, wasn't suited for me. I wasn't going to be a point scorer.

But but he was incredibly talented at trying to create that alchemy that made everybody work in unison. And when you come from club swimming, it's like it's an inherently individual sport. And I go to Stanford and it's all about team. And I just fell in love with that.

It all became about how can we cohere as a group of individuals to work together? And you could feel it. There was something very special about that. Yeah.

I mean, I think it's and it's illustrated I have two photographs from that era that are up in my house. The first first photograph is kind of a ragtag group of us. In 1985, we we assembled in front of Memorial Church in the quad and was a blazingly hot day with President Kennedy, who was then the president of Stanford University, just passed away like within a year ago.

Like actually I think like a couple of months ago, not pretty recently.

He was amazing. He he was amazing. He was incredibly supportive of a student athletes. And he he was in a suit and tie and like I said, and we were all in our Speedos. So we were fine. I mean, it was like one hundred degrees. It was crazy hot.

And so we took the picture and I remember he said, tell you what, if you win next year, you wear the suit and tie and all wear the Speedo and we're like, all right, done. Yeah. Well, a year later we went again. Which year in that picture.

In that photo. And we're all in our suits and ties. I don't remember it being especially hot that day. So he missed out. And in President Kennedy, the president of Stanford University is there in the middle Speedo with his Speedo. Yeah.

Yeah, not about that. Yeah.

Yeah, but but the thing about those photographs that I didn't notice it until years and years and years later, as you know, who's missing in those photographs? I don't know. Skip never thought of that. Skip's missing. And you know why. And I'm I've never asked him about this, but I think this was our victory and this is his job. To coach us to victory, this is our victory, and I would be really surprised if you were to ask him today whether or not that was a conscious decision.

I think I think it was and it's certainly I believe the intentionality all symbolizes the way he looked upon his role on the team was that it was his job, but it was our victory.

He had never reflected on that before. That's a very good point. Yeah. He said to me one time there was a moment of strife. I think it had to do with him and Dave Shravan going head to head with each other, him like screaming at Dave and Dave storming off the pool deck or something like that.

And it was a crack in the armor in the kind of unity of the team.

You could feel it. And Skip said to me afterwards, you know, if.

If it takes. You guys hating me for us to win? I'm willing to do that, and I remember just feeling very conflicted about that.

On the one hand, that's a level of self-sacrifice that I guess I can appreciate, but I just didn't feel like that was the productive, healthy path forward. That's interesting that you have that reaction, because I always assumed that that was the that was the equation. I don't think I ever thought anything that he was perfectly comfortable and at ease with us, not like not liking him. And I think not liking him galvanized us in many ways.

Right. As opposing forces might be unified in its in its antipathy towards the Kurds.

Well, don't you think that that's like not I don't know. When you look at like the way that Pete Carroll coaches the Seahawks or like this this sort of or, you know, this more evolved kind of sense, a Zen master approach to coaching where you're trying to bring out the best in the individual. Yeah, there has to be, you know, a belief in, you know, that potential. Right. Like, there's a there's a trust there.

It's a very that's a very different thing, clearly.

But, yeah, it's all at the same. I mean, you're all trying to do the same thing. And the coaches have different style. Invective is different. I mean, the objective is the same, right?

Yeah. You want to you want to win. You want you want your athletes to be champions and to win. And and I think the best coaches also want your athletes to be happy and also succeed in life, not just in the athletic endeavor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guarantee you he feels that way. Yeah.

So if you were to find yourself coaching the Stanford swimming team, what would be your ethos?

I haven't even thought about it because there's no way in the world I would want to do that. Oh, gosh, I don't I don't know.

I don't think I've even developed that part of my brain. I mean, the the whole athlete side of me is such a stranger to me. It's it's so long ago. I have a hard time even picturing myself as doing that and being able to withstand, you know, how difficult it was in the pressures and all of that. Yeah. So I don't want to cop out of your question, but I just I have no idea what how I'd go about them.

I remember after you graduated and you're still sticking around and doing some training, at some point, you got recruited by USA Cycling, which you have to get on the bike and give it a try. Somebody saw your your calves in your legs and thought this guy might be good on a bike.

Yeah, yeah. They they threw me on. Well, you went up to like the Olympic training center. I did. I spent three months at the Olympic training center. Was that for. Was that for like velodrome racing. It was road cycling.

It was it was the national development team. And it encompassed both road cycling and velodrome cycling. But back then the the velodrome was outdoors and now it's covered. It's in a big bubble. But back then it was outdoors and you couldn't write a velodrome when there's ice everywhere.

So I only had the opportunity to ride on that velodrome a few times. But we were training like a lot of the people that I was training with. I was in a more, more sprint track oriented type of, you know, group.

But several of those guys made the 88 team that I was I was training. Wow.

So what was that like when you just suddenly decided to jump into a brand new sport and you're with some of the athletes?

I just don't I just don't know where I got the hutzpah. I really don't.

I remember being able to mix it up pretty good or was not a blast, not a first. I will remember that I ended up showing up in the middle of the night. It was a really snowy night and it was just dumping. And so I think I got in somewhere around like 10:00 at night, 11 o'clock at night. And they dropped me off at the Olympic training center in front of these barracks, like housing.

Yeah, and they gave me OK, this your key, this your room number by and I have all my bikes and and I like kind of walk in and I can hear down the hall there's a TV and it's really quiet. And I walk in and there's this big giant dude, and I've got all my light gear and everything, and I was like, hey, wondering where I could put my bikes and is this guy named Ken Carpenter? And Ken Carpenter was a match sprinter of a world class match sprinter.

I can't recall whether or not he actually won a medal, but he went he went to the 1988 Olympic Games. And I was and he was he immediately took me under his wing. And I realized that, you know, athletes are they they want to have each other's backs. But I remember falling asleep that night and my roommate was already asleep. And I'm like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done. Yeah. I have no idea what I'm in for, but kind of badass.

I don't know.

Seriously, was that hubris?

Well, I mean, Eric Heiden had kind of set that precedent. Right. And Eric was at Stanford Medical School at the time. Right. Did you ever meet him or talk about it.

Yeah. Yeah, I did. I rode with him a few times.

And the thing is, he had a lot more saddle time than me at this point. You know, I'd been actively riding in training for maybe six months.

Uh huh. And and I remember getting up the next morning, and it was like a clear day in Colorado Springs, but there's about hip deep snow, huh?

And I meet my roommate awkwardly because of this guy sleeping next to me in her bed, I'm going have to live with him for the next three months. And it was run back then by a group of Polish guys. And the main guys are going to be Eddie Eddie, Bora Bora. Shavitz, I think was his last name, but we all called him Eddie B and Voltaire. And they they ran it like an Eastern Bloc country. And I remember him getting in front of about there was about 80 or 90 of us.

And I didn't know anybody. And I remember very clearly Eddie B getting in front of everybody because, okay, guys, today it's Snow Day and everyone's like, yeah, thanks.

And today we place no soccer, no rules. It was just a disaster. What does that mean? Well, we would go if we went on the we went out on the field, which was in the middle of the Olympic training center behind. And like I said, it was hip, deep snow and it gave us a soccer ball. And we divided up into teams and we're supposed to score a goal somehow.

And it was just and it was such a great way for me to get my bearings because I realized that.

You know, these people are not supreme soccer players, they they were great athletes on the bike. And we just laughed and and, you know, the thing, still lifelong friends with one of the guys I was there with and we recall, you know, we kick the ball and you can see the ball, right? Well, then some smart aleck got the idea.

Well, I'm just going to pick it up and run with it because there's no rules, right? So EDB blows whistle.

He goes, guys, guys, come on.

One rule, you know, obviously, because we needed to kick the ball, but that was I remember that kind of ease me into things. But I got I got dropped on my first real ride. It was like a 90 or 100 mile ride. And I got. Dropped like I mean, I had never it was humiliating. Where one of the coaches had to actually take the back of my saddle and grab onto the back of my saddle and catch me up to the group.

And I remember getting up to 65 miles an hour. And I'm like, oh, I'm terrified. Yeah. And that's the other thing about cycling, as you know, because you and I both have had our fair amount of times that there's a fear it doesn't exist in swimming like it does in cycling. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, you have to have. Complete balls and be totally unafraid on these dissents, like its its death defying, I was afraid.

Yeah, yeah.

And if you if you have any fear at all, like that's the edge that's going to prevent you from moving forward. But how long did you do that before. Did you reach. I mean, you got to a certain point, right. And then you had to make a decision. Am I going to continue with this or not?

Well, that postgrad I had I had a series of crashes. I realized that, you know, the bike handling was definitely an issue for me. And I remember in spring, I had a I had a lulu of a crash. And but I did end up making national the national time cut for the kilo. And I kind of was at one of those junctures.

It's like, OK, do it, keep training. I still had it in me something a fire still burned and I thought, well, can I make eighty-eight and cycling new way? Maybe Ninety-two if I you know, if I dedicated myself to it. But I didn't want to wait five years now. I didn't want time to call Bud Greenspan. Yeah. So I. On a new path. Well, and what I ended up doing is I ended training for 88 and and that didn't work out well either live with Pablo and write and trained with, you know, with some really, really good athletes.

And it just didn't it just didn't work out. Mm hmm.

Yeah. I mean, that was that was probably a study in overtraining. Right.

That was a little cohort. That was the hardest I'd ever train in my entire life. And I'm thinking to myself, I was like 20 was I 24 years old? And I remember thinking to myself, why am I training harder now than when I was 16? But I just wanted it so badly. And I and I just you just get caught up in the whole thing, you know, Pablo Morales, who's the world record holder, he was Tre, was he he he'd gone undefeated, basically.

I mean, he was the most winningest and situation swimmer of all time. All time. Still, it was just a foregone conclusion that he was going to make the team in multiple events and be the team captain.

Well, that's what he was doing.

And I kind of got swept up in it, you know, where I had this sort of inner John barometer. It's like, OK, I'm way overtrained right now or I'm I need to recover or I didn't. I ignored that this time because I got swept up in the whole thing. It's like I want this so bad. I want this so bad, you know? And that was really, really bad thing to do. Like mistake wanting something so bad for doing something that, you know, is bad for you.

Because I knew I just felt I just I was getting sucked down the drain and I could feel it. It actually started in in the fall. And I just never I never recovered. And unfortunately, there's a whole bunch of us who ended up getting sucked down the drain as well. And we just it was it was a disaster of a year for so many of us that we're training. I actually quit the program and went back and trained with statistics.

Right. I remember that. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think what's instructive about that is, is this idea that, OK, well, it's game on. We're going to put all our chips on the table. We're going to live like monks. We're going to cloud out everything, and we're just going to push ourselves beyond anything that we've ever, you know, experienced before. And that will reap the result that we seek.

And it doesn't work that way. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. But it's easy to talk yourself into that, especially when you got a group think mentality like you do in certain teams. This team wasn't we weren't we weren't bonded like we were like the Stanford team, you know, where you felt comfortable enough going against the coach or something like that. And it was, you know, led to my ruin as far as that 1988 goes, as far as my swim career in 88.

So when you reflect back on your career now, I mean, you said in eighty four you didn't want to have any regrets. I mean, do you have regrets or what is your relationship to.

To your career, thankfully, I don't yeah, I don't I think the the closest thing that I have to any sort of what if but it's not a regret was in 1992, I believe it was late 1991. And I did this Stanford alumni meet and I was I don't know what got into me, but I started swimming and I got I was swimming so fast and I remember this. I was I was like, I couldn't believe it.

You thought I thought 84. I was swimming fast. I was swimming way faster.

And there was a rule change in breaststroke.

So I started playing with that stroke and I was right. Berriman had kind of revolutionized the rhythm and the technique. Right. So I kind of studied that and a start to click. And I mean, I was just absolutely Halling and that I like I said, I think it was 1990. One would have been like October of 1991. And Pablo was there and I ended up like basically going about the fastest fifty I'd ever gone, including in college and just.

I mean, just was hauling ass off how much training? Not very much like three thousand yards, three times a week as nothing. Yeah, but it just goes to show you how overtrained we were. Right. And how we weren't really sure.

I mean, you're such a racehorse to like you're a guy who can walk away and then come back and just dip your toe in it a little bit and then suddenly you're at a razor's edge. And I know this from seeing you. You kind of you go through these spurts where you're in the master swimming and then you'll disappear for a while. And then you come back and it's like you come back and you're kind of like, you know, not looking so great.

Like a week later, you're like doing world record splits, like a Masters workout, like those days are long over.

Each of you, please go on.

But we go back to my regret. They're the only the closest thing to it was I would call it a word, if not a regret was at that.

Meet Pablo. Unbeknownst to me at that point, would have already started training for 1992 because, you know, like I said earlier, Pablo Morales, the world record holder, the favorite no one thought he could lose, didn't make the team in 1998 or 1988.

Yeah. And he said, what do you think about training for 1992? And I remember in the back of my mind, I was swimming so fast, I kind of like I let that fantasy kind of. Sinkin, that's one of the reasons that I think I actually trained a little bit so that I could see what I could do at that alumni meet. So obviously that was kind of in the back of my mind.

But I had this overwhelming dread of the thought of getting back into the pool and being as dedicated as I needed to be in order to make that 1992 team. And I remember when he asked me to come on train and he asked me, you know, he asked me several times and I remember each time I got more and more resolute that I don't have it in me. I just don't have it in me. So, you know, part of me is physically, physically, I think perhaps it could have been something that could have happened in the 1992 games.

And, you know, just remind your listeners that Pablo Morales ended up winning two gold medals in the 1992 Olympics. Right. And it was redemption for him.

It was one of the greatest moments in Olympic swimming history. I mean, he he doesn't make it in 88 is like, all right, I'm done. Goes to law school, does two years at Cornell Law School, goes home for family reasons and decides to, you know, stick around at home, which is right nearby. The Stanford campus starts kind of dipping his toe in the pool and showing up at the noon Masters workout. And before, you know, it kind of under wraps.

He starts training again. Yeah.

Makes the Olympic team goes and beats. Was it Anthony Nasti that he beat in Barcelona for the hundredth?

I don't remember. I do remember. It was Barcelona. Yeah, it was Barcelona. Just one of the greatest comebacks ever. For sure. For sure. And, you know, his mother had just passed away the previous year. So there was a lot there was a lot to it. He had he had a lot invested personally and he pulled it off, which is. I mean, on it's like serious, serious stuff that he was able to do that because that's difficult and I just was not convinced that I had it in me.

Yeah, and if you have that doubt, I mean, you got to be all in.

Right. Right. And it was one of those things, you know, you ask about regret and it's like, you know, I think about it from time to time. Do I regret not doing that? No, because then I felt very confident that I just didn't have it in me. Right. I didn't want to I had already decided I wanted to reinvent myself at that point, which you did.

You go on to win three Emmys. How many Emmys of you won?

Three was many years later. Yeah. Yeah. How many Olympic athletes have Emmys? I don't know. Probably not very many. Yeah, I couldn't tell you.

But this begins somewhat humbly in the early days of reality TV when reality TV wasn't quite what it is now. I mean, now we live in a reality TV world, of course, but you start out it hard copy, which was kind of like an extra type investigative slash entertainment news show that would air like every night. And then you end up at at the working as an executive producer of The Amazing Race.

I wasn't an executive producer. And that was also many, many years later. Many years later, I was at the Amazing Race. But, you know, I started out I was a Stanford alum, rolled the dice and letting me write a series for Discovery Channel way in the early days.

This was this is around 1992 that I was I got to write this series. And and then that's what led me ultimately to realizing that I love telling stories. I never in a million years thought that I would make my living being a writer. I don't like writing. I really I just don't like the process of writing. But people kept hiring me to write and then that ultimately led me to land the position in hard copy, which back then was nobody knew quite what it was.

They called it tabloid TV, but it was part news. But they also broke many, many, many of the biggest stories of that era. Michael Jackson being one of them. They were there on the forefront of O.J. Simpson. So and that was the era that I was in.

It was this very strange place to be. But I'll tell you that we mentioned Adam Rame. He was just one of them. It was of all the crews that I've ever been part of collectively, that was the most intelligent group, just whip smart ass street smart. Wouldn't have thought that. So smart. Like you, you never doubted the intellectual capacity of any of these people, it was crazy. Wow. Yeah.

So how long were you at hardcopy? I was there for about three and a half years. Yeah. And, you know, I, I got into the Directors Guild because they started having me direct shows or direct episodes and I found my niche, you know, my niche really wasn't.

I actually worked on the Tonya Harding story. Oh, you did? Yeah. In what way? I was the, I believe my title back then.

I don't know if I was on the Directors Guild there, but maybe it was maybe directed by. I directed the episodes.

Uh huh. So in I Tonya the movie. Yeah, they have. Yeah they have the hard copy guy. I remember that.

But he didn't, he didn't do the research because it was actually me with you. Yeah. I mean I was just going oh wow.

I was, I was the point person. I mean there are people out in the field. Yeah. But I was the one responsible for staying up all night and cutting the stories together and making sure that it hit the satellite the next day for a while. Yeah.

And I kind of found my niche. My niche was not necessarily O.J. or Michael Jackson or although I did lend a hand, if they needed, you know, to to do some shooting or writing or whatever, my my niche was kind of like a funny little niche that I thoroughly enjoyed, which was paranormal. I love the paranormal stories.

I love the paranormal stuff, UFO, ghosts, all that stuff. Bigfoot. I just loved Bigfoot.

We probably the most infamous and one my favorite Bigfoot or paranormal stories I ever did was a Bigfoot story about a Playboy playmate who was on a shoot and she was in her motor home and Bigfoot walked in front of her. It was all on camera. And I remember we called it Playmate and the bridesmaid. It was so it was just it was like tongue firmly in. Yeah. In cheek. So much of it. It was more innocent at a time.

And I also approached it, I realized that I had a knack for kind of like figuring out what stories were all about and the way I looked at these. This is like a campfire story. You know, you don't you don't want it too long. And you want to be able you want it to go someplace. You want to deliver, you know, and these paranormal stories are like that. Also, they would send me on all the extreme stuff, like I would every every spring that would send me out to chase tornadoes.

And so there were just fine.

There was there was a lot of I mean, I did get a lot of gratification. I ultimately it wasn't for me. There was kind of a self selection. I wasn't happy there. Yeah. And so I ended up doing network specials after that. I remember though, so I got that job at the law firm and quickly was miserable suffering.

And occasionally I'd go to the paramount lot and get to see you. And it just looked like so much fun compared to my day to day experience.

It was like a big it was like a big rumpus room. You know, we were a whole we accomplished like a huge portion of the soundstage.

It was just we call to the bullpen and it was like, you know, there's the assignment desk. And then there were the segment directors. And then there were the you know, and it was everybody was all in one place. So it was it was always just this like fever pitch of activity just in the energy, you know. In fact, you know, I had to put headphones on so I could concentrate because it was so loud and there's so many distracting things happening all at once.

When you look at news today and the kind of reality TV nature, the performance aspect of what the news cycle has become, you know, do you reflect back upon those hard copy days and see, you know, how A ends up at Z? I do. And I feel bad about that, that I do believe that that this was the very beginning of of kind of like really taking not being completely objective and taking a perspective, because a lot of the a lot of the stories had perspective, but a lot of the stories had had a lot of newsworthiness.

Right.

Well, fundamentally, it was this news entertainment hybrid. Right. Where it was like it was about like, how can we get people engaged?

As my time going on, it went from pretty much a newsmagazine show, a Daily News magazine show to at the end. And I think this is one of the things that made me realize that it's not for me. It became more and more and more like Entertainment Tonight. You know, it was more entertainment based, celebrity based. And I just I just was I knew that wasn't for me.

Right. You just you just become like a publicity adjunct of the studios at that point, feeding up whatever narrative they want about the next movie or TV show. Yeah, I mean, it was an amazing life experience, but it's not necessarily a chapter that I would like. Hold up and write. You know, one of the highlights, something I'm very bright, you know, just super proud of accomplishing. It's not like that.

So how do you end up at The Amazing Race?

Well, I saw the show, the promos for this show. It was 2001.

I called The Amazing Race. And I'm like, I love that show. I love that show. I want to work on that show so quick, short history, I believe they aired one episode and then 9/11.

And so the the show was basically it was put on the shelf because nobody wanted to see a race around the world for a million dollars after what happened in New York City on 9/11. But I also figured out, like, it's almost like all roads lead to hard copy. One of my co-workers at Hard Copy was the executive in charge of production at The Amazing Race. And I got in touch with him and he ended up returning my phone call saying, you just missed it.

You would be perfect here. But basically, we've just hired everybody for season two. But I'll remember you for season three.

So it was that guy who remembered me when they were coming around for season three, hiring for season three. And I got hired on season three. You know, season season three. Excuse me if it's a little bit fuzzy, it was almost 20 years ago. It's crazy, but, you know, season. Season three was a fantastic season. And what they did is they immediately picked up a season for. And so I was I finished up, I think, in like November or something, and then I had to be back.

Boots on the ground. First week in January. Mm hmm. And so then we did season four and they didn't air it. They didn't air season three. And we're all thinking to ourselves, oh, gosh, it's doomed.

They didn't air the entire season. Yeah, they well, they they just they've held it. They just held it. Wow. But some strange things happen. A strange confluence of we talk about luck and luck playing into our own little successes and failures in our lives. And what happened was they held that until the summer, which back then conventional wisdom was if you air something in the summer, you're putting it, you're basically putting it out to pasture to die a slow death silently without much notice.

But a strange thing happened is that people started watching Survivor, which was the sister show. And programmers and networks started realizing that. Much of this, they they underestimated how much pent up demand there was in the summer for new programming, Burnett wasn't behind Amazing Race, known it was what's the Bertram Van Munster?

I was like I knew he had a crazy name. Yeah, not that guy. A couple. I mean, he's a character.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I worked with him quite a bit and I worked with him on subsequent projects as well.

So but but so we were like doing season four and actually the morale was pretty bad because we knew that they weren't airing season three in the fall because. No, I guess that would have been that would've been the winter. They weren't going to air it in the no in the spring. I'm sorry that the cycle they didn't air it in the spring, season three, even though it was all working on four.

And you're on it for we're like, yeah, it's dead. And they so sure enough, they put it out to pasture and and then they aired that summer in the summer of must have been 2003, the air and that summer. And it was just it just crushed it.

Not only did the viewers love it and it got great ratings, but the critics just raved. And that's the first year it won the Emmy. And let me tell you, it was just a furious pace after that. And I didn't win for season three or I wasn't, I would even though I was technically called a show producer, I was responsible for two episodes in the entire season. That's just the way it all worked out, because you had to put it together so quickly.

So I wasn't eligible because I said show in front of producer. Yeah. So then the next season that I did, I was supervising producer. Yeah. And then, then they and then that's, that's what led to that freight train of being able to or gravy train, whatever you want to call it, of being able to be swept up in this whole Emmy craze world. Yeah, I mean it was a phenomenon and it's like this perfect confluence of your talents.

Like you have the storytelling thing. You would cut your teeth in television. You understood what makes for a good narrative, but you also have the athlete and the competitor mindset that allows you to kind of cut to like what's going to work here and what's not.

It was hard. Yeah, I'll tell you the exciting, though, you know, as far as you know, I mean, I'm sure people look at your life. Oh, man, it must've been so exciting to do all these first time feats and things like that. As you know, it's gnarly, you know, and there's a lot of moments where you're left alone inside your head.

And, you know, like what people what people don't always necessarily realize is that, you know, you have these accomplishments and people like to celebrate accomplishments and others. But what you don't necessarily realize is that there are no photographs or videos or mementos of those hard times, those inevitable hard times that it takes of that relentless work that it takes to get there, because without exception, in order to do things that are big like that, it takes an enormous personal sacrifice and an enormous amount of personal dedication and hard work in order to get there.

And then where luck plays into it is bad luck in my case in 1984 and good luck in my case with The Amazing Race that. Yeah, but the the concurrent like through line is you keep showing up, right? Oh, yes, chats with that mindset, like all those tools that you learned as a competitor, as a swimmer, come into play in the professional world that I can't imagine.

You must be sitting on thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of footage and and tasked with trying to figure out how to, you know, create something special out of what's just raw footage of people cruising around. Yeah. Season four, I was responsible for the for the premiere episode and the premiere episode has the most teams, has the most moving parts. It also has just by nature of being the first episode. It's got a lot of things that tend to go sideways.

And, you know, you need to do a lot of workarounds. But I remember that of just raw footage that went into that, I believe would cut that to be 90 minutes. So the clock would be somewhere around an hour and four minutes, I think.

So to make that 90 minute air time, we had over 100 hours of raw footage and you just couldn't do the show. There was there was no they didn't. The digitising process was completely different back then. We watched on VHS like you got really good at shuttling VHS and you you were responsible for everything that was on those tapes. You needed to know it inside and out and just the logbooks after logbooks, just the amount of resource that it took just to absorb what happened, because these cameras and sound people would go out with these teams and it would be it'd be void if you like radio silence you what was happening now it's going on.

And yeah, you had interviews, you know, at the end of the day, but you truly don't know what's going on with each team until you watch everything unfold moment by moment. And that was, I think, probably like just so daunting to put these things together. And you're right. It's like how do you how do you take one hundred hours of raw footage and make it into something that tens of millions of people will tune in and celebrate?

It was it was rewarding. Yeah. Yeah. But it was it was so hard, right?

Yeah. I remember moments over the years where you were completely burned out. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely burnt out. Was probably my biggest enemy. I think ultimately I couldn't withstand just the unpleasant the inherent unpleasantness of the entertainment business that you just have to deal with on a day to day basis to varying degrees. Doesn't mean I wasn't on shows that were just that were absolute choice. There were certainly those.

But but yeah, it just it just wore me down in the way that that hard copy was very much a progenitor of of what news looks like now.

How do you think about, you know, what the reality TV reality kind of lifestyle that we all live on? Like, you know, now it's YouTube and blogging and like everything is reality TV. I mean, you are, you know, early on, like that was the first wave of this kind of programming finding its way and network.

And now it's just, you know, atmospheric. Everywhere you turn.

It's ubiquitous, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's certainly a continuum. I mean, you can you can you can trace back that continuum to those days when, you know, when reality TV was ultimately really sort of embraced by a guy named Mike Darnell, right?

Yeah, that's right. He was he was the guy who really ushered in an absolute genius to don't don't think it's only blind luck that got him to where it was. It was also absolutely brilliant. Mhm.

Do you watch reality TV now.

I don't, I've really never been interested in it. I mean that was, that's great.

That was maybe I need to, I need to throw out a caveat to that. I'm interested in real stories and reality TV is. Basically, highly produced storytelling, say the least, yeah, and although I do, I would agree with that.

But during quarantine, I mentioned this on an earlier podcast, but our family, we would have after dinner, we would watch Queer Eye, which is fantastic. I know.

I know. So fine. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Come on. You had to do Tiger King. Oh well, yeah, we did that because everybody did Tiger. Yeah, but that was a that was a docu series.

Well, still reality TV. All right, you know, those there's a guy who's who's who's been behind the curtain. You know, when you see something like that, you're like, oh, I see what they're doing here. No, not always.

But sometimes I do. Yeah, sometimes they do. It just takes a great deal of work. I mean, what you're doing is the story is already there, like in the raw footage, a story is already there. You just need to sculpt it out and figure out how to tell it, because that's that's what editing is, right. It's compressing time and it's compressing moments in order to make something more meaningful because like the passage of a story is painfully slow and it's certainly not ready for something like a half hour of television or an hour of television vision, much less, you know, 40 seconds of a YouTube.

Right. So it's it's it's all compressed. Exaggerated, of course. Yeah, of course.

All right. Well, let's pivot. The last thing I want to explore with you is the work that you that you do with respect to the Olympic movement.

I know you're really involved in the Paralympic movement and the Olympic movement in L.A.. Twenty four and all that kind of stuff.

So what does that look like?

Well, in it was 2007 and like I said earlier, I kind of consciously turned my back on on all things Olympic athletics wouldn't consider myself necessarily a sports aficionado. However, I am and I love athletes. I love the stories of athletes.

And it doesn't mean I don't watch sports, but I'm not like an avid like football. Basketball, you know what I mean?

That's that's. So you're like me. I love the Olympics and I like watching the Tour de France. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Is that like the greatest thing, you know, weird. I know you're in a Formula One, right. Right.

A weird sports. Yeah. Except in the rest of the world they're words, right. Yeah. The rest of the world is not weird. Yeah.

So how I got how I got I kind of reluctantly. Got sucked into being serving on a board, the board of of the Southern California Olympians and Paralympians Association, which is in essence the alumni group for Olympians and Paralympians in Southern California. It's the biggest and oldest chapter in the country. And the president then asked me to be on the board. And I was it was kind of like I was definitely reluctant.

I was kind of like, oh, I don't know about this.

And so I started doing some work and I kind of enjoyed it.

And there was a there was a familiarity and a joy that in a source like it was it was like getting back to my roots, like when I would hang out with these people, these people who we might not have been on the exact same teams, but we have a shared we have this shared parallel experience, oftentimes very separate. But we all know there's a there's a real bond. There's a real bond in that. And it's really fun. And it's it's also kind of an exclusive club that I found that I shunned it on purpose.

It was part of, like who I was. It's like, oh, I don't need I'm not the Olympian. I'm something else.

But it's kind of I got fun to embrace it. And I got involved in more and more and more things. I started doing some due to being asked to do events with L.A. 24, which is now L.A. twenty eight. But back then it was L.A. twenty twenty for the L.A. bid for the for the for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. And I just started having more and more and more fun and and and as with most paths that you initially resist taking, oftentimes you start realizing, well, maybe, maybe there's a reason that I started down this juncture and the then president of the Southern California Olympians and Paralympians was moving and she asked me if I would like to assume the presidency.

And again, I was reluctant, but I did it. And it's just been kind of a snowball effect. And I've gotten incredible joy out of working with with children. Like I'm I work a lot with already set gold, which is it's an organization that sends Olympians and Paralympians into schools all over Southern California to teach the importance of health and fitness to elementary school and junior high kids. Not not so unlike the message that you, I'm sure you know, talk about all the time throughout your career and and then, you know, various foundations that raise money.

The Trident Swim Foundation, who we are raising money for swim programs in underserved neighborhoods where they don't have access to pools and they don't have access to college counseling. And so it's a hybrid of swim team college counseling to really show kids that aren't necessarily exposed like we were to what the world is outside of high school. And, you know, and as far as undergraduate. Yeah. And so it's just exposing them to that. And I've just been I've just been really, really enjoying it all the while, kind of keeping one foot in, you know, in the entertainment business.

I created a series a game show actually.

Was that the one with the like the stock cars is where you showed me the trailer?

Yeah. Where you strap you strap contestants into the passenger seat of a race car driver being driven by race car driver. And they have to they have to answer trivia questions like a jeopardy.

It's like pulling GS. Yeah. Yeah. Just having having the absolute daylights scared out of them.

It was like that clip in what was the movie? The Ford versus Ferrari. Yeah, right. Like the like where they put the deuce for the second. Right. Yes indeed. It was like that. Except we were, we were trying to to stump them. That seems like a no brainer. It is a no brainer as far as concept goes. But you learn something in production along the way and sometimes things are just they're just there's too many working parts.

There's too many volatile links in the chain that if one breaks, the whole thing falls apart. Yeah. And we just had one. Too many of those things happen. So for that reason, primarily, it just didn't take off. There was a lot of people super excited about that. And I actually joined forces with Bertram Van Munster to tell you that. And we always had a we always shared our gearhead. You know, we love cars, right?

Yeah. You're a car guy. Yeah. Do you have you have a Shelby, right?

Used to. I sold it. I sold it. Yeah, I sold it to my college roommate. I did. Yeah. Yeah.

He sends me pictures every once in a while when he takes her out she must love Ford versus Ferrari.

I did I. Well I know the book is fantastic.

It's called Go Like Hell. And the book is like very much unfiltered. The movie of course is much more filtered and not is authentic. But this. They stuck to the story. That story is absolutely what happened. But yeah, yeah, I totally enjoyed it. I mean, the book is just anybody that wants to is a gearhead, likes that era of racing. Read the book, Go like Hell, right back to the Paralympic thing.

You know, that's a world that I don't know that much about. Like. Yeah, like helped me to understand. Like, what is it that we don't understand about these extraordinary athletes that you have a glimpse into?

Well, you were in it. You are in a unique position where if you chose to, you could work with these athletes. And I know that you've worked with people with impairments, in fact, to I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name. Who was who did the five, four, five the Tyson muster.

Yeah. Who you know, he's got a he's got an arm right there.

Yeah. He he doesn't have the functional use of his right arm, although he doesn't like to identify like he he would prefer to just, you know, do his own thing. But he did win the SB. Oh.

For being like the I can't carry like, you know, disabled athlete of the Year or something like that.

Yeah. I guess I sort of like went off off track of what your question is. But you work with the these aspiring para athletes who have have to use very varying degrees of adaption in order to in order to function athletically.

And you realize that every single one of them is is is a puzzle and it's a puzzle for them, too, because their body doesn't work. Right. And, you know, there's so many different ways. And you and I, we know the basics, the foundations of swimming. But when you work, for example, with with a Paralympic swimmer or an aspiring Paralympic swimmer, there's a there's there's like a there's like a code that you need to crack.

And it's they need you need to help them crack it as well, because and that coat's different for every hour, every hour because they all have a different situation.

And here's the thing. I've worked with a lot of very good swimmers through the years.

I just I haven't really been I haven't really aspired to coach, but I've also seen that oftentimes swimmers specifically and I'm sure it's like this with most athletes who have achieved a certain amount of success.

They have very a very laissez faire attitude toward getting told something new. In fact, there's some resistance. But these para athletes, they're just I mean, put put yourself in their shoes like many of them. They they they were completely functional before an accident.

Some of them were were born that way. But just think of the.

The level of frustration and aspiration and bravery that it takes in order to say, I want to be an athlete, I want to do this even though my arm doesn't work right or my legs are paralyzed, it's it's these people are like enthusiasm turned up to 11 and they're just a they're collectively just incredibly passionate group. And that's what originally sunk the hooks in me. I worked with a organization called Angel City Sports, and the first time I worked with them was, I believe it was 2017, and it was formed specifically to provide a Paralympic style competition and development platform for.

Athletes from all over the world, but specifically the United States, to compete in one place and it's held over the course of a certain amount of days at UCLA.

Oh, cool. Like a national sports festival kind of thing. Exactly. That's called Angel City Games. And so I've been I've been part of that. And as president of Southern California, Olympians and Paralympians, we we take part in not only doing clinics and helping various athletes, but also like in the opening ceremonies.

And and this year was only different and that everything was by remote, like, how the heck do you do a remote swimming clinic?

But we pulled it off and I, I enlisted the the expertise of a very good friend of mine who was on the 1980 Olympic team with me, a guy named Glen Mills who specializes in stroke technique and has probably the greatest repository of swimming videos.

Yeah, it's unbelieve and they're all available online. And he he and his swim TV or something like. Let's go swimming. Steve, go swim TV. Yeah. And he he in. And so thankfully I, I, you know, I thought to bring him because he, he just made it, he made it magic.

And you know there's just a there's just a lot of magic that is involved with the Paralympic movement that is very, very different while being the same as the Olympic movement.

There's a purity to it to. Right. Yeah. It feels uncorrupted by, you know, the the you know, the corporate forces that, you know, grind us all down. Like there's just something more innocent about it and real.

Yeah. I think I mean, maybe that I don't know why that is. Maybe it's just their their collective perspective is so much different than an able bodied athlete. But I think it's also, you know, you talk about the corruption of of of all things commercial. You know, at some point those athletes are going to really start getting some commercial exposure. And it's curious, you know, whether or not things will things will change. You know, that the atmosphere and it's sort of like the movement will will change when these athletes become celebrated for what they are, which is amazing athletes with incredible hearts, which is what the whole Olympic movement is all about.

Yeah. Yeah. Inevitable, I suppose. What do you think is going to happen with Tokyo? I don't know. I have no idea. You ask anybody high up in the Olympic, you know, in the Olympic and Paralympic world, and that's the answer I get.

Nobody, nobody, nobody really knows what some point a decision is going to have to be made, though, because there's so many moving pieces here.

Well, there's so much riding on it. There's so much riding on it. I mean, if they don't do it this summer, what does that mean for the Olympic movement at large? I don't know. I don't know. It makes me it makes me shudder to think the damage. Yeah.

I mean, we're in a we're in a time in covid has created a world where we're looking at so much of what we known and taken for granted is is being is being pulled apart and deflated piece by piece. And I'm terrified that if somehow the twenty twenty one games don't happen, that Tokyo will be fine. Tokyo is a big, you know, city with, you know, lots and lots of money. They will make a rebound.

But the Olympic movement, man, you know, it will it won't be since like 1980 that the U.S. Olympic movement was almost ruined by the 1980 boycott. And I just hope it doesn't get to that point. I just pray that that these these athletes can go and compete and that the Olympic movement can do what they set out to do, which is send athletes to go compete at the Olympic and Paralympic Games and pursue their dreams. Yeah, that's a good place to land this plane.

But before I let you go, words of wisdom from the life experience of an Olympian. When you talk to young people or young athletes, like what is it that you want to impart to that person about personal potential and the path towards connecting with, you know, the best version of who you can be? Yeah, I was just a normal kid growing up. I never had Olympic aspirations, nor did I ever dream that I could achieve such heights.

Like if my teachers and my fellow students were to look at me, you know, in fifth or sixth grade and say, OK, one of you is going to compete in the Olympic Games and eventually go study at Stanford. It wouldn't have been me and it was not on my radar either. And my point is, is that my life was transformed not by going to the Olympic Games, but by. The desire and aspirations. To go to the Olympic Games and the hard work and dedication that it took to get to that point where I could even fathom going to the Olympic Games, and in that respect, that aspect of life is accessible to anyone.

And you don't have to aspire to be an Olympic athlete or a Paralympic athlete, maybe you aspire to be the local political activist or a professor in sociology or an actor or a guru of podcasts such as yourself.

No, no, no.

But I mean, my point is that you can do it with applying yourself. And that's where the magic happens, is realizing that if you dedicate yourself towards something, that you can begin writing your own tickets.

Beautifully put, my friend. Thanks, I love you, John Moffitt. Thank you very much today. I'm so happy that we are able to hang out and share stories and and commune because it is few and far between, unfortunately, just because of of our of our lives being busy.

Yes. We are so grateful to have you in my life and to have this experience with you today. Man, I love you so much.

And that was very meaningful to me. And I think people are going to get a lot out of it. So thanks. Thanks. Thanks for. It means it means a lot for you to want me to be on your podcast because it only it took seven years from the last time I got it done.

Although I look at the folks that you have been able to interview with through the years, and it's just an unbelievable array. The the distance that you have have come from those, you know, from 1990 or 2007 when you were first starting embarking upon your journey, which I remember very clearly to you to now. It's a testament to what I was talking about, that, you know, hard work and dedication and a vision and realizing that that you might be able to write your ticket if you work hard and do it.

It's never guaranteed.

Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. Like I said, I used to visit you at the Paramount lot and I was like, is there any job here?

Could you get you're like, well, you could become in a city. Like I was like trying to figure out what I wanted to do.

And it you know, it took a very long time, but I'm grateful to be where I am and cool.

So if you're digging on John, the new podcast might be called Sports or Life Balance Balance coming towards a podcast platform.

Do you have a release date for it? We're looking toward releasing it during the holidays at some point around Thanksgiving. Okay. Into the holidays. Cool.

I'll be sure to share that out. And and anywhere else you want to point people.

Well, look, look, look for its role as one of my guests. That's right.

We're going to we're going to now we're going to take a break and then we're going to just keep rolling right into your podcast. So, yeah, honored to be a guest on your show. And when, of course, that goes up, I'll I'll let you guys know. So thanks, man. You really appreciate this. Can you feel the love so good? I love John, hope you guys enjoyed that. John is not much of a social media guy.

You can find him on Instagram at John Underscore Murfitt, 27. But the best way to support him is by checking out his most worthy new podcast, Sports Life Balance Lessons from Sports for Life. It launches in a few weeks. It's going to be a good one, my friends. I'll keep you posted with links and all of that as it becomes available. Reminder that my new book, Voicing Change, is available exclusively through my website. Rich Roll Dot com slash v.c.

We're shipping globally November 10th. So pick up your copy today. We also have another roll on amay coming up this week. So give me and Adam a call at four to four, two, three, five, four, six, two, six. Leave me a message with your question and we just might get to it. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, write and comment on it. On Apple podcast, YouTube and Spotify, share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media and you can support us on page or on it.

Rich roll dot com slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show, Jason Camillo for audio engineering, production show notes and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for video. Today's show. Jessica Moran for Graphics. Ali Rogers for Portraits DKA for Avatars of Relationships and Theme Music by Tyler Trapper and Harry, thanks for the love you guys. See you back here in a couple of days. We're going to talk about the election. We're going to answer questions.

We're going to have a good time. It's going to be amazing.

Until then, peace plans a.