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All right, let's do the show. We are back, we're here, and we are ready to take a roll call in another edition of Roll On with my bestie, my man, Adam Skolnick, journalist, environmentalist.

Large personality here, oxygen room to satisfy us and soothe our soul and another conversation about Semih, current topics of interest, pertinent and possibly not depending upon how this goes, depends on your point of view, I guess.

How are you doing? I'm good, man. Good. I've been able to get some actual exercise this week and like, you know, out there five, six days and and I did a six mile swim run, Nathan, which was kind of the first long like not long.

But how's the sleep you're getting?

You're able to bank a little bit. So, yeah, sleep in.

Like maybe he's sleeping like six and a half hours one time and then four hour shift, but much, much better.

Yeah. He's he's grown. He's really grown up. That's cool. Yeah.

Well, good to be back with you. A lot has happened since we last sat down in our personal lives and in the world.

Of course, before we get into it, be sure to hit that subscribe button if you haven't already. I appreciate that. Hit that notification bell so you can be alerted when we post a new video. What we do here is we break down some events of the day. We kind of share some stories from our personal life. There's a loose format that's continuing to evolve, I suppose. And we answer in the second half. We answer listener questions.

So if you'd like your question considered for us to discuss, you can leave us a voicemail for two, four, two, three, five, four, six, two, six. So last weekend I was in Austin. Yes, my uncle, who is my dad's older brother, is in his final days of life. He's somebody that I'm not super close with. But my dad wanted to go out and be with him for the last time and I went out to do the same, but also to support my dad.

So the circumstances under which my first experience traveling were right, not exactly, you know, fantastic. But it was really nice to see my dad and I'm really glad that I went it really brought us together, brought us much closer. We were able to have some deep and meaningful conversations about life. Yeah. And it just reminded me how precious life is and also how fleeting it is and how when these moments arise, these opportunities to, you know, be with the people that you love, how you have to seize them.

And I wasn't looking to jump on a plane and travel in the middle of a pandemic. I haven't been on an airplane since this whole thing began. But I was willing to kind of roll the dice to have the experience that I had. And I'm glad that I did. It was it was meaningful. I posted about it on Instagram. You said your uncle was actually upbeat to write a review.

It was my uncle was well, he was alert and basically looking at maybe another 24 to 48 hours unless he wanted to have a feeding tube inserted because he wasn't able to digest food. Initially, he passed on that, which is why my dad and I jumped on a plane at the last minute to go see him. He changed his mind and decided he did want a feeding tube. So he's still with us now, although it's kind of up and down.

So I was not able to actually see my uncle after all of that because they would only allow one person a day to visit. And I didn't want to take up that day spot because he had his kids coming into town from all over the place. And I just felt it was inappropriate.

But I was there for my dad, basically be with him for the better part of a day where he so my uncle is like eight years older than my dad. So my dad grew up as the youngest and there was a lot about his older brother's life that he didn't know and he wanted to ask him before he passed. So that was kind of a cool thing. That is cool. Yeah. How did he handle everything? Was he pretty emotional?

My dad was, yeah. My dad was. Yeah. And my uncle was still is. He's still around an amazing guy. He went to Yale and then he got his PhD in physics from Princeton in the department that was made famous by Einstein who had since retired by the time my uncle was there. But that legacy kind of still lived on like it's this amazing program.

And it went off mine, guys. He went, Yeah, yeah. And he went on to design like the helped design, like the nuclear. Power plants for four submarines like he's you know, he's like a genius. Yes. And he was also an expert at the French horn who probably could have been a really musician. So he's an amazing guy. Yeah, it is amazing. Yeah.

But one thing about being outside of Los Angeles and being in Austin was just a reminder of what a cool place that is. I was able to go swim at Barton Springs. The pool was open running around the lake and. Yeah. And just being in kind of a little bit more of an urban environment than I'm used to living out in the countryside out here. It's nice and definitely lifted my spirits. It was interesting, though.

I thought I would have thought there would be a lot of people pushing back against the mask. And basically everyone was wearing masks. Yeah, except the guy who decided to sit next to me on the flight home.

What, you can't take your mask off on a plane, right? I mean, they make a big announcement. They've got to wear your mask unless you're eating or drinking. But he ordered a cocktail and then proceeded to nurse that cocktail for almost the entire flight and kept his mask off for the whole time. Sheesh.

They should put, like, Norn mask where you could you can fly, but you're going to have to fly in the cargo hold or just exert a little bit of courtesy, like put your mask on in between sips.

If you're going to sip this thing for the entire time, you should get a time limit when you drink.

Yeah, but I got tested when I got back. I'm fine, but it was a little bit hectic. You didn't have traveling. Yeah. Yeah. That's where you where you stressed going in was. It was, it was the airport like a ghost town or that it was a pretty busy.

I haven't been in a while. I was in, I had connecting flights because it was a last minute reservation and flying back I had to fly through Phoenix and that airport was mobbed. Really that was a little bit dicey.

Crazy being around that many people. Yeah, but it was good. I had a cool experience when I was. Have you have you swum at Barton Springs? No, I've never been to Austin. So it's this amazing one of my favorite pools in the world. It's basically crafted out of the lake, which is really a river. Right.

An outdoor pool that I think was built as a public works project, maybe as part of the New Deal, I'm quite certain.

But you're it's like swimming in a giant quarry that's maybe, I don't know, three hundred three hundred fifty meters across.

And I'm swimming and I get to one end and I'm kind of catching my breath. And this guy comes up to me probably about my age, maybe a little bit older. And he's like, hey, I love the podcast. I want to talk about the podcast. And it turns out he's a retired Army colonel and master flight surgeon who had been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and Jordan, like all over the world. And from what I gather like was a pretty high ranking military officer for a long time who's now living in Galveston, I believe, and is the chief medical director for this kind of burgeoning industry that's popping up around space tourism, like space travel, like he's from what I understand, and I might have this wrong, he's in charge of, like trying to create the systems and the infrastructure for how you're going to medically screen people when eventually, you know, they're going to get on these SpaceX or Virgin Galactic flights and go into orbit, go into the office was pretty cool.

And the reason I bring it up, it's like a heavy medical screening for that. Right. You can't just have I would imagine. Yeah, I would imagine. My point being that every time I think I have a handle on who the typical podcast listener or viewer is, I think, oh, people that are eating a vegan diet or they're in a triathlon or running or, you know, being in nature like an army colonel isn't the first person that comes to mind know.

And it always is touching to know that there's a broader diversity in the people that are tuning in than I would have suspected, which I think is great. That's great.

Anyway, it shows the breadth of people that are interested in this subject matter as well. So it's like gives you kind of hope about the world, too, for sure. People from all walks of life interested. I'm sure someone's listening to you and in a prison somewhere. I've gotten I've gotten emails from people in prisons, which is wild. Yeah, yeah. So what do we got today? What do we got? We got. Well, I think you have something special that you and I talk about.

It's you got a book out or come back to come out.

I do. Yeah, I do. It's been a big past couple of days. First of all, we launched a brand new website. So I want to thank all the people at at Emory Agency who have been working hard behind the scenes to create the next iteration of Rich Roll Dotcom. We launched the first version of that last night. So that's pretty cool. And we've got a lot of bells and whistles to come. Basically, what I want to do, what we're working on is twofold.

One is taking all of this content that we've created in the eight years of doing the show and better organizing it so that the site becomes an educational destination.

In other words, breaking the podcast into categories that align with very specific topic categories like the microbiome or addiction and recovery or meditation, and then organizing the top episodes in each category accordingly, and then also providing additional resources like books and documentaries and other ways for people to more deeply immerse themselves in that specific subject. So we're working on that now. That will launch soon and also this new subscription offering that I'll get into later. But the big thing today, in addition to the podcast with Matthew McConaughey dropping, which is very exciting.

Yes, I was we were watching a little bit of that this morning and at the house. Yeah, it's cool. It's very cool.

What's funny about these things, we'll get into the book in a second. But what's interesting is when I scheduled that, which was a while ago. I should have realized that he was going to be on every podcast because he he was on every television show. There's no reason why he wouldn't pop up on every podcast. But for some reason, I deluded myself into thinking I had not an exclusive, but maybe, you know, maybe an inroad that other people didn't have.

And then, of course, he's on all the top shows, which is great.

He should be right.

So my hope I mean, I haven't listened all those other episodes, but my hope is that I got some interesting things there that are a little bit different.

Yeah, you're going to find and the other part, my question is, how do Dan Buettner and Matthew have the same nickname for each other?

I know. I think that seems strange. I know. Well, I think I think Matthew is the one who came up with the nickname for Dan. And then Dan just, you know, as Matthew said, boomeranged back on to him.

I like that Dan thought he was Bradley Cooper for like three days.

But you have to understand, Dan is the most charming person you're ever going to meet, and he does all of that on purpose.

That was hilarious. So I went up I went up and saw Dan in Santa Barbara the other day and rode mountain bikes and went hiking with him.

Yeah, that's cool. It's such a beautiful guy.

In any event, the book Voicing Change. He's in that book. Dan, isn't that. Yes, Matthew is not. But he will be in a future iteration.

Yeah, I seem to be voicing change is this book that I basically completed during the pandemic and that we're self publishing. It's essentially a compendium of the podcast, timeless wisdom and inspiration lifted from the show itself. And the motivation behind it really was to create a keepsake for the fans or a way to go back to meaningful episodes and see those words that were uttered auditorily obviously in print as a reminder and also as an introduction to people who are not familiar with the show to get a sense or an idea of what it's all about.

So basically, we took 50 guests that we've had over the years, which was no small thing to try to figure out who would be most appropriate.

Of course, many years ago I was going to be people. I spent eight years of coming up on eight years. Yeah, there's going to be people missing that are certain people's favorites, et cetera. Like, you can't you know, it's like 50 out of five hundred and fifty. You know, you're not going to be able to hit everyone. But I think we got we canvassed a really good cross-section of the people that we've had. And we transcribed all of those episodes and we took out we lifted out the most kind of relevant, pertinent, impactful things that those people said.

We put that in there. I wrote introductions for each of the guests. Some of the guests contributed essays like Russell Brand, because you believe that John Joseph, a couple of other people, and there's, you know, some my friend Jeff Gordon wrote the introduction. I'm really proud of it. And it's really a coffee table book. It's a beautiful book. It's a beautiful book. The idea is you can leave it out. Yeah, it's like art book quality.

So here's for those that are watching on YouTube. Here's the box that it comes in, which is kind of like a pizza box. Yeah, you open it up. Here's the book just like that with the book out. I'll just take this one and you can see I'm not going to go through the whole thing, especially for people that are listening. But you can see it's you know, there's beautiful photographs. It's really meant to be open to any page and you can kind of enjoy.

Was it hard to figure out the line up?

Like, did you move the pieces around, like where to put the different people in, like build a crescendo or like have or did you put all the athletes in one section? All the know we curated it. I tried to mix it up, kind of like the way that we do on the podcast itself. Like not not too much of any one thing in a row. Yeah. And, you know, making sure that there's an appropriate ratio of males to females in and the like.

So I'm really proud of it. It was certainly a team effort. Everybody, you know, who I work with on the show worked very hard to put it on. It didn't do it myself, so very excited about it.

It is officially available for preorder. Now, preorder elusively on my website. We're not selling it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Like I said, we're self publishing. It's a ship it from. We're shipping globally. You can ship anywhere. We have flat shipping within the United States for ten dollars. And of course it's more expensive if you're international and it's only a print. Only print. Yeah, only print. No Kindle or digital.

You know, it reminds me of it reminds me, I remember when I was younger, I was like super stoked on this Playboy interview collection.

Like Anthology was like fifty years of the Playboy interviews. And that's what I think about with this book. But obviously from your your perspective, because I've always told people I think you're one of the best interviewers in all of broadcasting.

That's how you got this job. Pandering to my ego. I told you that you got those emails.

So, yeah, so I think it's so perfect to have have that kind of as like complimentary to the podcast that are coming out. You can go back and look at your favorites. You know, I know I think of some of my favorite episodes still. So.

Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, it's it's really, you know, just a way to canonize the mission of the show, to further honor all the guests and also to honor the audience.

You know, give them a little piece of this.

Do the guests know that they're in this beautiful book? Yeah.

I mean, we had to get releases from them. Yeah, they all know and they're all being shipped a book right now, the book. Surprise. Yeah. The old guy put me in his book, right?

No, they all had to sign off on it, including your boy Goggins. I'm going to talk a little bit more about him in a minute.

Yeah, the book is shipping November 10th, but it is, like I said, available for preorder now. So if you want to learn more about it and reserve your copy, go to rich roll dotcom slash v.c or forcing change dotcom like check it out.

Super proud of it. And I want to thank everybody who I worked with who worked very hard to create it. It's a beautiful book. Nice work. Yeah, man, there's another big thing coming up that we've all been thinking about. We can't help but think about it. It's everywhere.

Even if you're not in the United States, which, you know, that's what's so funny is that.

But it's not that like so the debate people in Australia watch the debate. Right. And they like it because it's entertaining. I remember when Rob Ford was the mayor of Toronto. Right. I loved Rob Ford stories. I couldn't get enough Rob Ford stories.

I love them because he was so wacky and they couldn't get rid of him.

And and now we have not a Rob Ford, but we have our own situation where people who don't live here think it's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With very real world ramifications, very real world ramifications. It affects everyone.

But we have a week to go.

This is a very unique moment in history. We've never seen anything quite like this before. I mean, because we weren't around during the Woodrow Wilson pandemic. So what do you think?

Where where are we in this moment, Rich?

I think we're at a very important turning point in the history of our country.

And I want to say up front that this podcast has never been a political podcast. I'm certainly not a political pundit. And for anybody who's been tuning in for a while, there shouldn't be any confusion about where I stand on all of this.

But in the event that it needs to be said, I'm casting my vote for integrity and for character and for the environment and for stability. And so I'm voting for Joe Biden, the Biden Harris ticket know.

And I think it's really important, irrespective of your politics, that you take a stand for character and integrity and that we dispense with this narcissistic, egomaniacal, compulsively lying Orange Goblin and vote him out of office once and for all so that we can move forward with some level of cohesion for the future of our country.

Yeah, here, here, man. The way I try to explain it to people who are maybe leaning Trump and I don't know that many, but I do know some. And what I try to say is, if you care about the ocean and you care about the environment, you cannot vote for it's voting for Trump is the opposite of that because he's already trying to reduce the size of marine protected areas. He's trying to open up previously protected land to development.

He's waiving environmental laws to build a border wall. There's so much I could go on and on and on. If you care about the ocean, you care about the land, you care about animals. There's really only one vote you can possibly make. And that's not even getting to the part if you care about people. And I think the divisiveness that you're mentioning, it's time to vote for love over fear.

One guy's kind of playing into this big the big hack and helping to divide us and helping to hack us. And the other guy, he's not the most captivating candidate we've ever had.

Yeah, I mean, it's not like, you know, Biden is the choice candidate of all time. I'm not saying that. But to the people who, you know, leave comments and and point out all of, you know, Biden's misdeeds or or, you know, his failures or you know, why he's not perfect, that's not the decision that we're here to make.

We're not adjudicating that right now. We're adjudicating between Trump and Biden. So who is it going to be? You know, he's Biden for whatever you might think of them, and the debate stage is not necessarily the best place for him to reveal his gifts, but he is. And he does seem like a nice guy. And we could use a little more nice guy.

He's certainly a decent a decent human being who has a heart and is capable of compassion. Yes.

And that's what I think we need a little bit of that right now.

But we don't know what will happen. A lot could happen. You know, I'm optimistic. So far, the turnout in the mail in voting is through the roof in terms of youth doing it, that is a good sign. But there's also this idea that mail in ballots always skew blue. It's called the what is it? The blue shift.

And the night of the election, the election day ballots could be could reveal a Trump victory at first.

That would shift later, which could be problematic. So we don't know how it's going to go. It could take a day to find out who won. It could take weeks. It could take over a month. I think that we're so used to knowing that day that and somehow if it takes longer, it seems more suspicious when in reality it seems like the longer it takes, we should trust the result more. But we're just not wired that way.

Now, the longer it takes, the more we so distrust in those results. And I think two things. I mean, I think, first of all, it's highly unlikely that we're going to have decisiveness at the end of Election Day.

Yeah, I think that it's more likely than not that it's going to take weeks or months so that the election is certified on December 9th, right? Yeah. So that's December 9th or 14th.

I forget. I can't remember.

It's somewhere around that time. Yeah. I think it's unlikely that will that we'll know before that date. But my hope is that upon that date that we will have some level of certitude. And the second thing is short of a landslide and with the foundation that Trump has been laying around, distrust of results. What happens in the event that and I think, you know, potentially likely event that he just decides he's not going to leave?

Right. So there's a great Radiolab episode we can link to. It's called What If That Came Out?

And my buddy Chico was up here, sent me that so race and they did these war games with some Washington insiders, you know, people who worked at the Pentagon, people who worked for the Democratic Party, Michael Steele, the Republican, I think he ran the Republican Party at one point.

A bunch of people that you've heard the names of and some people you haven't but have higher up in Washington. They got together and they did kind of war game scenarios like where they'd actually roll dice like it was a little deanda, a little kind of brainstorming, you know, war room stuff.

And different people got divided up into teams and they played on Biden campaign. I'm the Trump campaign. I'm so and so and so and so.

And they revealed the takeaways are it is possible that a governor or legislature in a state level could send electors that are not bound by the popular vote in a state, although the Supreme Court has ruled that that's unconstitutional, that could still happen.

It is possible it's also possible that the Joint Chiefs of Staff can decide who they trust to give the nuclear codes to. And they have the power to take them from Trump and give them to Biden in a disputed election.

So all these things could there are what if scenarios. I mean, I personally am optimistic about a blue a big blue wave. But, you know, what do I know? I thought we'd win.

Yeah, I thought Hillary Clinton would be the president.

Well, if we know anything, it's not to put too much trust in the way things have gone down in the past. Yeah. And that truly anything can happen. They need to be prepared for anything happening.

Which brings me to the news segment, the quick five. Ready for the quick five. I'm not sure I am. This is the quick five. Just you're springing this on. I'm going to give you I don't know where this is going.

I think I'm going to give you a subject and I want a quick five takes from you.

Five things from the top of your mind. OK, all right. Quick five. So tell me why. Explain to me why, no matter what happens on Election Day, whoever wins, even on Election Day, whoever wins the election period, why everything will be OK.

Have you ever seen that Charleson regimes film The Power of 10? I have not.

So it's a little short film that these the designer, the legendary designer couple, create all the furniture and architecture created.

It's it's on display. It's on permanent display at the Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., which is where I saw it as a kid and I never forgot it. But it's basically a telescoping up from somebody sunbathing in a park in Florida and it moves upward in altitude at the power of 10, like every at interludes of a couple seconds or whatever. So you until you see this person, you know, like a drone flying above them. And then from the perspective of an airplane and then from orbit, and then you just further and further distance yourself from that until you gain some perspective on just how small all of us are on this tiny little blue orb hurling itself through space.

And our biggest problems are then placed into proper perspective over the course of history.

You know, regimes have risen and fallen, empires have dominated the planet and then been overthrown. Hmm. Humanity somehow finds a way to prevail. So that's one so big. Basically, in the greater scheme of things, I think we're going to be OK. And the greatest dealing with something that's very dramatic. Not, you know, not to, like, diminish. I think the impact of what's going to happen can have on on everyday lives, whether that's America and the world and what has happened, of course.

But we have air to breathe. We still have clean water to drink, which we're going to we're going to get into more about that and write it. And we can all find things to be grateful for. And there are only so many things that we have control over. We can cast our vote. We can make our voices heard. We can assemble, we can do all of these things that we have fundamental rights to do. But ultimately we have to find a way to.

Trust and have faith in a plan that exists, lives and breathes outside of ourselves and to continue to live our lives.

With some level of peace that we can't control everything, so we'll see if we have five things.

One is this is all smaller than we think it is. When you look from space, this doesn't register right to the center. That's kind of nihilistic, though.

Yeah, but I kind of like it's a little dark, but I like it. Then you have we have the air to breathe. We have water to drink. If we have food on the table, if we're feeling safe, that's you know, we can we have each other and we have each other. Then you said something about what else? The Serenity Prayer, essentially. Yeah.

Understanding and appreciating that there's only so many things that we can control and those things are very limited.

So if you remember that and you control what you can control, then everything will be OK in your world. Right.

And also that every problem doesn't need to be your problem. And what I mean by that is we're all. In some sense, victims of a news cycle that wants us to believe that every problem is our problem and it ratchets up our anxiety but doesn't give us a productive outlet for that energy. Yeah, right.

So we don't have to hang on every facet of the news cycle. Yes. You know, I didn't watch the second debate because my mind's made up. I didn't really need to see it. I caught some clips of it later. But I don't need to be informed at the micro level on that specific decision because I've made that decision. And I don't need to ratchet up my anxiety and threaten my own sort of sense of equanimity over that event.

You made the right decision because I was watching it with Zuma and about 20 minutes, and he he expressed exactly how I felt about it when he threw up all over my shirt.

Right.

And are you better for having watched it? And it's not as if you were going to buy it. It's not as if you were going to change your mind.

No. And the problem the reason I don't like it is because, God, Biden's great. But he does have because he has a history of stuttering and it's harder for him. Debate formats, not a great place for him. And then Trump is the more commanding presence. And unfortunately, people are drawn to that.

So if you're a supporter of Biden, then you really want this thing to change. It's only going to drive your anxiety because you're going to look for reasons why. A perfect example of something you can't control. Right.

But the one thing I would also add that's great, by the way, what you just said is that, like, basically keep it and you can't make the world's problems, your problems all the time. You've got to get through your day and that. And that's one making it OK to have. You do have the control to make your life OK, to make your life better on the individual level, at least we do here. And that's one thing.

I think a fifth thing I'll add a fifth thing for you is that remember when the covid started and like there were empty shelves everywhere in the grocery store and people were terrified that, you know, they were building the remote hospital at Dockweiler State Beach. And I was joke texting with my buddy. I'm like, hey, dude, if I end up in a trailer in Dockweiler, please come get me right. And he's like, right. And so that kind of thing was happening.

We were we were all kind of wondering what was going to happen next. But the food systems did not break down. The power systems did not break down. We did not break down. We had people step up. We had people in hospital step up. There are good people throughout this country, in every city and every town trying to make it work and not trying to divide, but trying to make it work. And that is what I rely on.

We are bent, but we are not broken. And no matter what happens, we won't we we won't be broken. And that's that's my I believe that we won't. And so that kind of faith I have, it's not even a spiritual faith. It's just faith on what I've seen with the caliber of people that do exist in this country on in both parties, and that we can be bent, but we're not going to break. And that's what's happened so far.

I think that's a great point. Yeah, I believe we talked about this previously. I can't recall.

But we have this sense that or many of us have the sense that that Twitter and these social media platforms are a proxy for where most Americans are mentally, emotionally and in truth, Twitter is like two percent of the American population or two percent of the American population is on Twitter. Right. And we over index for the importance of the conversations that are going on there as a litmus test for the conversations that are going on at the Panera Breads across America.

And I just don't think it's accurate.

And as somebody who just traveled and was in a bunch of airports and, you know, talking to a lot of people along the way, I'm always left hopeful from those exchanges, realizing that the tactile one on ones that you have with people when you go out on the road are very different from the picture that gets cast on social media, which gives us, you know, this this sense that we're more fractured than I think we actually are. And I think we are being tested and our systems, our institutions are being challenged and they are being bent.

But I have faith in our democratic processes and I think that democracy is more resilient than perhaps we are willing to trust at the moment. And we're going to find out. But I don't think that we're on the precipice of democracy completely failing. I don't believe that.

And even though we talked about kindling in civil war, I don't think we're going to have that either, because, quite frankly, that takes a lot of effort.

And Americans are not really going to leave Netflix and the couch to go fight a civil war over. A presidential candidate, I suspect there will be whatever happens, there'll be skirmishes, there'll be skirmishes, but I don't see that escalating into, you know, some kind of systemic cultural warfare that's going to, you know, betray our institutions wholesale.

I agree. And I think that what you were just talking about relates to that. There was an op ed by some political scientist that I read in The New York Times, I think the last couple of weeks. And it was that talked about that Twitter percentage, but it also talked about that actually 80 percent of Americans don't and don't give a fuck about politics.

Even now, even with this, we're supposed to be so polarized. But 80 percent of Americans actually are not that polarized. They're kind of in the middle. And it used to be when I was going to really was in my activist days before I was writing for a living. That kind of thing would be discouraging because you'd think, oh, God, 80 percent of people are apathetic. But now, like, it's comforting. Yeah, yeah.

80 percent of people just want to get on with it, you know, and that's actually comforting for me now. And, you know, I don't know what that means. Maybe it's because I'm a dad now or something or. I don't know.

You're getting soft. I've gotten such a revolutionary streak is.

Yeah, but my feet are still are still not sore. Yeah. I'm not tender footed. Well, we'll have more information in a week.

We'll know. We'll know. We'll know next time for for the election.

I'm glad I'm glad it's happening again to the point and to kind of close this section out. I mean just you know, look, regardless of your political perspective, go and have your voice be heard. Yes. Cast your vote and participate in this democratic experiment that still is continuing to evolve just now.

If you vote for Trump, you hate whales and dolphins and baby dolphins. OK, just. All right. Well, what do we got next? That was a joke, friends.

So next, the big story. I think they kind of like this whole thing with the election.

It kind of teases to this theme of we need to be responsible for cleaning our own house, for taking care of our own shit and like making sure that we really close the loops within ourselves and within our communities and within our country.

And this story kind of gets into that in a way.

It's a story about barrels of DDT that were discovered in the deep water three thousand feet deep in the channel between Catalina and Palos Verdes.

And just essentially for people that don't know, just off the coast of Los Angeles. Yeah, it's about what is it like twenty eight miles from. Yeah. From Palace Firdous to Catalina.

Yeah. And it's somewhere in the middle there and the channel three thousand feet deep, they, they dump these barrels.

Some of them were actually hacked with an axe in order to sink them because they were floating and so they were just leaking.

Just leaking. This is in the 70s. Yes. Even before that I think it was prior to this somewhere between the 40s in the 70s, because it was over a period of time.

But so this was, I think, Pulitzer level reporting from Rosana Shia.

She's an environmental reporter at the New York at the L.A. Times excuse me, this L.A. Times story. And it kind of points out the DDT is this nightmare that never ends. For those who don't know. I'm not going to try to pronounce DDT. I'm not a scientist and I'd screw it up. Do you know how to pronounce that word? Very long words. The longest word I've ever seen. I don't. But it was for a first was synthesized in 1874, became a Swiss chemist, kind of discovered the its insecticide properties.

And then it was deployed in World War Two by the allies to control malaria and typhus among troops and civilians, mostly in the South Pacific.

And and then it was deployed as an insecticide, as a pesticide all over the United States. And it was kind of responsible for the agrarian revolution. All this food, you know, people gave DDT props for allowing us to grow incredible amounts of food and export it.

Yeah, and kind of fuel prosperity is what people thought it was.

It's basically the the precursor to what would later become glyphosate. Right, if it was the Hodgy pesticide.

Right. Right. And by the way, it's die chloro di fennel trichloroethylene. All right. I believe is how you pronounce it.

So, Paul, Herman Miller from Switzerland, he's the guy that first kind of found these countryside properties. But strangely, he was not in favor of of utilizing it as a pesticide because he knew that we don't know how it's going to interact with life and we don't we don't know the long and it needs to be studied for years. And he was right, of course, that, you know, that that it should have been discovered for years because then sometime around 1962, a marine biologist named Rachel Carson you probably have heard of because of her book.

Silent Spring, she was able to trace it or posited that this rampant use of DDT and pesticides in general were killing birds and, you know, not just any birds, but peregrine falcons, bald eagles, lots of birds. And like all of a sudden, the sky was silent in spring.

She was a marine biologist, by the way. Her book, The Sea Around US, which was published in the early 50s, is absolutely incredible. I read it recently, won the National Book Award. She's amazing. She's like on that Mount Rushmore of Women in Science with Jane Goodall and Sylvia Earle. Yeah, right.

And basically, DDT is almost entirely responsible for the near extinction of bald eagles. Right.

Which is crazy. You know, it's crazy. And certainly it chased them from the Channel Islands here. And so basically, this company in L.A. after the war, Montreaux Chemical Corporation opened a plant in Torrance and Southern California here and they cashed in big on the DDT kind of boom.

And the US used to used to make 80 million pounds of DDT every year is incredible.

And then anyway, nineteen after Carson's book, 1972, finally a law was passed saying you can't use DDT anymore.

It was it was traced to harming the environment and and human health and human health and then.

Yeah, so it's crazy.

Basically there was some of that he was getting into the sewage system and flowing offshore right around Palos Verdes and two hundred foot deep water very close to shore. That became a Superfund site. And that was very, you know, Montreaux Chemical Company and the EPA. We're in a big legal battle over that.

But no one really paid attention to the fact they were also dumping barrels of the stuff in the deep water. That was kind of nobody even knew about it until like seven years ago, five to seven years ago.

And at the time, it was legal to do so. It was legal to do so. It was legal because it just go out into the ocean and dump whatever because the ocean is so vast, it'll just absorb whatever polluted toxicity it's faced with. And it reminds me of that scene in Mad Men. Do you remember which one?

There's one scene in one of the episodes where they're having a picnic, like on a park and they've got all this food out and you like fast food or whatever. And then when they're done, they just get up and walk away and they just leave all their garbage sitting there on the park.

But the Drapers were kind of greedy people, but that was a cultural norm of the time. People used to just throw their paper drink cup out the window when they were driving and never think twice about it.

Well, right. Well, that's the big problem with the plastic. And in Southeast Asia, because it used to be when you went and got your noodles at the at the stall, it was wrapped in a banana leaf and you could throw it out and nothing would be a problem.

And now it's in a plastic bag. And for years people didn't realize the problems, which is now doing corrected. But it was a cultural thing that had to shift, like give a hoot, don't pollute, has to happen everywhere.

So how does this reporter discover this? Like, this is kind of a big breaking story. I mean, it was published in the L.A. Times. Yeah. And they did kind of one of those beautiful graphic photograph, heavy, you know, kind of presentations of it where it's it's very much a visual story as it is a journalistic story. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that this an academic from UCSB had kind of studying methane, not leaks.

I guess methane seeps in the deep water and had gotten access to a ROV, a robot that could kind of go down there and study this. And they they completed their studies and still had a little time. And I think there he had a hunch that there was something going on and there were barrels out there.

I mean, he'd been following that a little bit and he was able to locate a research site and were able to locate about 60 of these barrels, just leaking DDT everywhere and take samples. And periodically people had been on to this story. But what I think makes the report so great is that she spent the time to go back into the logs and was able to trace them to Montreaux through the logs and through through kind of people had still had these files.

They still existed. Right. And so she could trace it to Montreaux. And Montreaux had paid one hundred plus million dollar settlement to the EPA without admitting fault. And that had this one of those beautiful legal kind of ties, ribbons on top, which basically exposed to anything you discover falls. Right.

So this this discovery doesn't obviate that settlement like that, doesn't expose them to any additional liability.

From what from my read on that story. Doesn't seem to be. Yeah, so but yeah. So who's going to clean it up. Right.

So now we're faced with trying to clean this up and these are these barrels. I mean if they've been down there forever, are they still leaking.

They're still leaking. Apparently DDT does not dilute very well. Depends on the on the samples they're getting. But one sample was forty X, the Superfund site at Palos Verdes, which I've been to that Superfund site offshore on a boat. And you still see people. Fishing there. I mean, it's like that's and that's the point, right? So we treat the ocean and it's not just us, by the way. It's all over the world. The ocean has been treated historically that way because we didn't have an understanding, because the dominator culture that we developed in that we all grew up in does not look at things holistically or there hasn't to this point.

That's what we all want to push for. We want to push for a holistic view of on of land and life. And we've just never gotten there.

And so but what that means is, like people are actually fishing for, you know, in areas where fish have come up with lesions and tumors, you know, where sea lions have been found and dolphins have been found dead with high concentrations of DDT in their blubber. I mean, this is all detailed in this story.

And it just makes me think like, you know, the way that we view I mean, first of all, the ocean gives us art every second breath and we're treating it like a dumping ground. And we just got to change that. It has to change.

Well, there's just this sense that it's so vast that we can't possibly harm it. And yet, you know, fishing has become overfishing by definition. We've we've completely overfished the oceans.

The the statistics on the denigration of coral reefs are, like, staggering. I just read something like the other day about how half of the Great Barrier Reef is now dead, half of it.

We are past that tipping point where every additional strain on the ocean has very serious downstream implications and we've got to reverse this.

It's unbelievable. Yeah, to treat this resource in this way.

And it's really a mindset shift as much as it is anything else.

Yeah, I mean, we're we're we're at a point now where we know what the ocean does for us, right? It's absorbing carbon.

It's it's giving us food, it's giving us oxygen. We know that. And yet even today, there are companies lining up to try something called deep sea mining to get precious minerals. We need biotech and in in remote South Pacific countries that are giving them the permits, it's all lined up to go. And we don't know the ramifications of the silt that's going to come up from that, how that will affect life at the deep sea or in the mid sea.

It's happening right now.

And we just make this mistake over and over again, this idea of short term gain financially for for a long term problem that we have to live with, like DDT.

They didn't think that's the thing is the people dumping this DDT didn't think it was going to hurt the ocean, like you said.

But they were cutting. They were they were cutting. There were cutting corners. This was a short cut. Yeah. And if the barrels didn't sink, let's just poke holes in them and let the DDT flow out. I mean, they had to know, like, this is not good, but like, who's ever going to find out, you know? Right.

And to your point of this being kind of an example of the importance of cleaning house on an individual level, it's the idea that these corners that we cut or these things that we try to push aside and rationalise always come back.

Yeah, right. The disease always found. Yeah. It doesn't it doesn't break down. No. Right.

It remains there. And it took many years, but it was ultimately discovered. So how do you think about how that applies to our individual responsibility?

Well, I mean I think we as a culture, I see it in a lot of different places where we don't want to take responsibility because it's a lot of work. And on an individual level, sometimes we don't want to do the little things and then the house and and batten down the hatches and, you know, like put away the clothes. Right. Or put the recycling stuff in the recycling and do the composting and all of that. We don't want to because it's a pain in the ass.

But if you don't do those kinds of things, there are ripple effects in the future. You could look at the Supreme Court justice that's happening right now.

Right. Like we're putting someone on the Supreme Court in a way that was Obama was not allowed to put his justice on the Supreme Court because it was election season. The Republicans are doing the opposite, are doing the exact opposite of what they said was right then.

And we're putting someone on the Supreme Court who doesn't tell us how she feels about things. And we've gotten to the point where it's so partisan, like Ruth Bader Ginsburg was 97 to three approved. Bork was 100 zero or something. And we're putting someone on there that it's completely partisan, just like Cavnar forced through completely partisan. And these kinds of things have ripple effects. You know, like we're not.

No, both parties don't want to even clean control their own house, their own damage.

Yeah, Bork was 100 to zero, something like that. And he didn't make it because he smoked a little pot or something like that, right? Yeah, I think that's what it was. Yeah. That derailed him. Derailed them. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I don't know, I think of the thing and you have to clean your own house or it will come back and bite you, your house will burn down.

And so we're at that point now you ask where, where. We do need to understand what we're doing to our land, understand what we're doing to our people, understand what we're doing to our food. We need to make big changes now because, you know, it's tick tock, would climate change tick tock with nature?

And the more closely we can align with nature, the more we can vote in favor of the ocean in favor of nature.

It will benefit us in the end. It's not really a choice anymore, you know. You know, which makes the election all the more pertinent. Because of this issue, if for no other issue, you know. All right, let's move on, moving on. Yeah, what do we got now? The teachable moment, we should point out that the Arctic Ocean still is not frozen, right? In late October, a record date for freezing ice in the Arctic.

I don't know. Or maybe not like you. Right.

You just tired because this is a film review podcast. Right. We had to do a documentary. The documentary that we selected to talk about in this edition is The Perfect Weapon on Netflix, which is a pretty compelling deep dive into cyber warfare, how it originated the current state of cyber warfare, the implications of it and what the future looks like. I watched it the other night. I was terrified at what I discovered and what I learned. How did it land for you?

My biggest takeaway is that I want to see the interview now of The Interview, a movie.

The movie was. Yeah, so good movie. The movie is basically it kind of traces the origins of cyber warfare and, you know, kind of breaks down what exactly this is about and takes us up to the present and how nation states are kind of weapon ising hacker communities to disrupt countries like ours. And it starts with a dissection of the Stuxnet virus, which is the first time that the United States used cyber warfare techniques in an offensive way, as opposed to kind of, you know, defending our systems against being hacked.

They actually were able to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, which was completely blocked off from the Internet. Right. What do they call that like air gapped where all the computer systems are not networked and not connected to any outside, you know, Internet access. Somehow they were able to get a thumb drive into one of these computers and it disrupted their systems, but did it in such a subtle way that it was somewhat imperceptible and allowed the United States to kind of tweak with their machinery and their equipment to derail it.

Yeah. Grounded their reactors to a halt. Or basically. Basically.

It begins there then that some cyber harbor, right? Yeah, basically, and it gets leaked, this this virus, somehow it gets leaked and people become aware of what? That's why we've heard of it. Stuxnet virus.

And the next time that it gets used in accordance with the way the documentary tells the story is with the when Iran hacks the Sands Casino.

Right. Because Adilson. Right. Sheldon Adelson. Well, he went on television and spoke sideways about Iran in an unflattering way, something about why we should bomb.

We should we should deploy nuclear weapons to their deserts and who cares anyway. And that was deeply offensive to Iran for obvious reasons. So they patiently take their time looking into his, you know, Sands Casino empire. This is a guy who is a billionaire Venetian, basically, and figure out a vulnerability, find their way in and completely disrupt his entire operation that way. Really out of spite.

Yeah, they they took like they were in there for like two weeks and like really took their time to figure out how to destroy it or something. That's not right. Or is that.

Yeah. No, you know, they were very they they were, they were patient. I mean, I think that's a hallmark of all of this. Like it doesn't have to happen overnight.

They way, they way, they way they do their homework and they cost them 40.

The important point being the asymmetry here, because we're a superpower and we put so much money into defense, does not make us impregnable to these attacks that can be launched by a small number of young people who have advanced computer hacking skills. So it doesn't take a, you know, a smaller nation state or a third world country to be to completely derail a superpower. You have this capability which is not that expensive. Right?

Right. And they were I mean, these were state agents that did that. And it cost, I think, what it cost them 40 million dollars, they said. And then then North Carolina and North Carolina. North Korea, excuse me, North Carolina. North Korea did the same thing right.

When because the interview was the next thing they cued up, which was basically a comedy about a guy with a popular interview show that Kim Jong un happens to be a fan of. Right. James Franco plays the character of a talk show host, a controversial kind of outspoken talk show host. Seth Rogen is his producer. The concept for the movie is is Kim Jong un is a fan of the show and wants to get on. So they travel to North Korea to have him on the program.

And it's a satirical and the government says, well, if you're going to do that, like we want you to assassinate him. Right. So that's the setup for a satirical comedy that Seth Rogen and his writing partner sell to Sony set up at Sony. And it's going forward. North Korea gets wind of this. They're not happy.

And that's what sets in motion what ultimately became the big hack of Sony that we're all aware of, where all the emails were exposed and computers were, 70 percent of the computers were basically destroyed.

Right. Cause some tens of millions of dollars. They had like a snappy, like producer gossip and racism accusations and all sorts of nastiness that was seeping out.

And, you know, some of that leaked out to the media. But then some of it was leaked out to WikiLeaks. And that's one of the big takeaways for me for this, is that WikiLeaks was very available to North Korea and Russia to do their bidding. Yeah, that's interesting. And I've always thought that about Assange. It's like, you know, there are people on the progressive left who like to think of Assange as this guy is all about civil liberties and let us see the dirty secrets of the governments.

And I guess I understand that. But at the same time is he's got he's basically become an agent for other governments with zero transparency. And I mean, there's no other way to read that when he's taking the fruits of Russian hacks of the DNC, which is the next thing that's in this document. Right. Or the North Korea hacks of Sony. I mean, what other way is there to look at at at WikiLeaks other than a political operation?

Right.

So it fast forward to the DNC. Yeah. And basically takes us up to present by demonstrating the evolution of these tactics from what were originally basically inserting viruses into networked computer systems to now a virus of ideas. Right. By by basically propagating memes and other kind of, you know, ideas, fake news into, you know, into people's social media feeds the people themselves, then do the work of the hacker for them by amplifying these messages that essentially pit people against each other and destabilize our insta.

Yeah, we've been hacked, basically, right, we as a people, not yeah, not in the sense of our computers necessarily being hacked, but we our consciousness has been hacked. The result being the disruption of the stability of our nation, which is the the the goal that they're trying to achieve.

It's always been the goal. Right. Right. And and you even see that in the in the handshake between Putin and Trump, where you could totally see Putin as the alpha and that and that famous photograph, you know, and he's basically. There's they want they want the country to flail, right?

Yeah, well, the alarming kind of takeaway and the reason for bringing it up is that this is not going away and these methodologies are only becoming more savvy and sophisticated. Less easy to detect and more virulent with time, so it's not going away, and I don't know that there's much that we as individuals can do other than to make sure that our own houses are in order in terms of our own security, etc. and understanding that anything that you share online is there forever, I think is also important.

And to know that. You need to approach the information in your timeline with critical thinking skills, because we don't always know where these things are coming from, which brings up, you know, another thing that I wanted to talk about, which is the advent of deep fakes. There was a podcast last week, Sam Harris's podcast, with a woman called Nina Schick, who is an expert in the emerging technology around deep fakes. And I think it's quite terrifying as this technology continues to develop and iterate on itself the idea that.

Videos you watch, people can be manipulated to say and do anything, and it's not going to be very long before we bridge the uncanny valley and it will be imperceptible to the eye and the ear, whether something is real or something has been fabricated. And with that comes the most virulent virulent power to disrupt society. Because when you can't trust the veracity of anything that you see or hear, where does that leave us in terms of our ability to communicate, let alone run a functional society?

What is to prevent somebody from weaponize that technology to pit world leaders against each other and lead us to the brink of nuclear annihilation? Like it truly is terrifying. And much like doping in sports, the technology is always in advance of the detection methodology.

Hmm. What do you think? I think it's scary.

You know, I think about my kids, my youngest daughter, and I wonder about the world that she's going to inherit where when you see a video of somebody speaking, you have to think, is that really the person? Did they really say that? And myself, as somebody who's in the public sphere, who has recorded thousands of hours on the Internet and been on lots of videos, how hard would it be once this technology is is adequately sophisticated to make me say anything and have it appear to be real?

So on a personal level, it's scary. But think about, you know, anybody saying anything.

I think the one takeaway I have on that is that, I mean, my hot take is that tech doesn't work that well.

And hopefully it'll just well, you'll see glitches. You'll see the glitch, you would hope. But you're old enough to listen to this podcast and you may think differently after listening to it.

I mean, that is I will I will listen to it.

That is, you know, one thing from the movie that I think could play to this is that that the reason that we have such we had a hard time with fake news here in this country, especially during the 2016 election and even up to the twenty eighteen, they kind of stop it at the twenty eighteen midterms was that there was a small office in St. Petersburg, Russia, called the Internet Research Agency, which was basically sounds like to me a state operation.

But it was with like hackers that were going in and creating not even hackers, but they were creating real Facebook accounts like Meems and and they were like becoming and they were ingratiating themselves into different forums and they were spreading these bullshit stories and all the way up to covid this was going on and creating events in the real world where they would protest.

They would they would schedule opposing groups to show up at the same place at the same time for the sole purpose of fomenting chaos.

Yeah, and I think Clapper was the was the head of intelligence at that time. I think he was under Obama. And then he stayed on for a period of time and he left. And the guy that took his place, at least under Cyber Command, General Nakasone. Yeah. I mean, we criticized Trump a lot. We should say this Nakasone came in in 2017, I think, and did a much better job and really cared about securing the 2008 election.

And what they did is they went in and they destroyed Iara. They destroyed the Internet research. What is that? What they call agency. Agency completely destroyed it and made them basically muted them. Right. The run up to twenty eighteen. And, you know, he's like that's what gives me hope when we were talking about before, is that there's people like Nakasone out there who understand it and are up to the task.

I mean I think the thing with Clapper is that, you know, this guy's a degenerate or what. He's been in intelligence forever. He's a traditionalist. And these tools are unlike anything a guy like that had ever seen in his career. And it's not his fault that he was ill equipped to be able to deal with it because it's so new and different from traditional warfare methodologies that he was reared on. Totally. It feels like a Gladwell thing waiting to happen.

Clapper, the old guard who is like really brilliant and has had this great career but couldn't handle it.

He kept getting you know, he kept getting bested. Yeah. Even after he was apprised of what was actually going on, he was always playing catch up and coming from behind.

He was in North Korea negotiating for the release of prisoners while Sony was being hacked. Right. That's that's put in there. Right. Another not necessarily relevant aside. Is that one of the primary talking heads in this movie? The Perfect Weapon is a one called Amy Zegart, who is somebody that I dated in my 20s briefly that I do. I haven't talked to her in a very long time, but. She's essentially a genius, graduated magna cum laude at Harvard, did a Fulbright scholarship in Hong Kong, worked at McKinsey, which in New York City for a couple of years, which is where I met her, then went and got her Ph.D. in political science at Stanford.

I believe Condoleezza Rice was her thesis advisor and she became very close with Condi. And Amy has, you know, done a lot behind the scenes for, I think, a couple administrations and served unofficially in a variety of capacities. Became a professor at UCLA and is now a professor at the business school at Stanford. And she's also a member of the Hoover Institute, which is a conservative think tank. But she's distinguished herself as one of the leading world's leading experts on cyber threats, cyber warfare, cyber terrorism and basically in counterintelligence at large.

And which is cool to see her in the movie speaking so eloquently and informed about the gravity of this predicament, this situation that we find ourselves in.

She was great. I mean, the fact that there's all these brilliant minds kind of coalescing around this stuff has to be encouraging, although the deep face does sound scary.

It is, but it's OK, man. You have a really cool podcast. So, you know, I'm sure she knows about it.

You know, it's a cool podcast until the deep fakes make me say something that I never said. Yeah.

Then we're going to get a lot of phone calls for this question. Yeah.

All right, cool. So we ready to take a break for a minute. Let's take a break. We'll take a break.

We'll be back with a little show and tell and listener questions and more goodness. So we'll be back in a few.

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I did the whole voicing change.

I had it all open here. What happened? I got pushed away. That's my big show and tell. All right. Get the book that we already talked about that. So I'm not going to belabor that point. What do you got?

I got my Goggins t shirt.

So David Goggins just released his swag line. His apparel line? Yes. In fact, I'm going to take organza coat off gorgons it, you know, because it's good for me because first I've heard of David Goggins was on your wonderful neighborhood podcast.

And after hearing him talk about his hundred mile run, because at the time I, I hadn't started running again from a foot injury. And I thought, no, I can't I we're not from the original foot injury and I can't I can't run and hearing that, I'm like, OK, I'm going to start running. And April and I started saying, Goggins it to each other whenever you want to quit in a in a workout. Right. And so the fact that Goggins it is his inaugural clothing line, basically what was happening was people were putting out a bunch of bullshit clothes using like taking souls and using his kind of oh, they were kind of pirating his pirating.

And sometimes sometimes they would just put it out there. Sometimes they'd say, hey, is this cool? And he'd have to say no and they'd have to scrap it. I mean, even Rock, even Sylvester Stallone put out round 14 T-shirts. You can go on Sylvester Stallone website and you can buy round 14 T-shirts. Obviously, that's a connection to Gardens in his book. And so he's like, I might as well do it myself.

And so he's got this great line of, you know, using his phrasing and he has this kind of trite end style d.g. Right.

He's got this logo. That's that that's a trident. And I've got it in the blackout form the logo and then taking solos in the back. And so it's his favorite is best catchphrases. He's got a Merry Christmas shirt. It's great. I mean, it's fun. It's fun. Clothing fits well. I love it. It's so shop. David, go shop. David Gorgons dotcom. Good for. And I bought this by the way, this is not this is not swag didn't you.

I pay you. He didn't send it to you is his co-author.

No. Because I want you know I support. Right. Support the fam.

That's cool. Well good for him man. Especially you know his whole thing is speaking gigs now. Right. So with covid I would imagine he's probably not doing as much of that as he could be ordinarily and he's doing OK. I've got to make a living. Is it. Yeah, it's cool. Here's the one thing. Here's the one thing that that here's here's the one thing that keeps coming up for me, though. Yeah. Is would David Goggins ever wear anybody else's line?

No, he never identifies with playing with anybody else's statement on it.

So people that truly want to be Goggins esque would assume that, would they not?

Yeah, but there's something inspirational about him that like for me that Goggins is perfect because it's like that's something that I actually created. I thought of it myself, like without even knowing it was something.

I think he's kicking around L.A. right now. Yeah. A buddy of mine texted me the other day and he was out running somewhere in Los Angeles. I won't say where. And he came across Goggins who passed him. And so he ran to catch up to him and he said, Hey, David, can I talk to you for a little bit? And he goes, No, I run alone. And he just darted off, which I respect.

Yeah, man. As somebody who enjoys my alone time running.

And he he's running. He was running only a few days after the 240 mile race. Right.

That's what's crazy. Yeah.

Because it's only been like a week and a half. Two weeks. Yeah, something like that.

Yeah. And I heard some stories about about the race. It was. Yeah. Incredible. Take souls. He's out there doing it and so. Yeah. So don't worry about his speaking gigs. He's, he's doing in some books. Yeah.

Yeah. All right. What are we doing. Are we doing this. Let's go for it.

OK, here's Randall from Nebraska.

Hey Rich and Adam, this is Randall from Nebraska. I need to ask both of you guys. It is a question for both of you. How do you handle when you get burned out and then running primarily road running? I did my first marathon and I really thought I was going to make to the end of the year trying to get twenty, twenty and twenty twenty and plus feeling burned out. And I'm not sure what to do to rejuvenate. I've been more vegan than normal.

Just curious, Reggie and Adam have Adam, thanks for the show. I appreciate what you guys do. That's a great question, Randall. I think it's very relatable and also not surprising if you do any one thing for too long, you're going to burn out or at a minimum, get stale. Right. And if you want to have longevity and whatever it is that excites you, you have to take breaks or you have to mix it up in order to rejuvenate yourself.

So my first piece of advice would be to loosen your rigidity around the road running. Is there a trail? Can you go running on a trail? Can you get on a bike?

Can you go do yoga virtually through some class online, like find a way to spice up your regimen to keep it fresh. And ultimately, if all you're doing is running all the time, a not only are you going to get tired of it, b it's not going to make you the best runner that you can be. I think the best athletes are the ones that.

Are connected enough to themselves to understand when they're starting to get stale and innovating on their routine to make them a more like resilient athlete through functional fitness, strength training corps, training, other types of exercises, both endurance and strength oriented, flexibility oriented that ultimately, you know, keep you engaged in your fitness journey because sustainability is the name of the game. Right. And if all you're doing is one thing and you're sick of it at this point, you're not going to be able to go the distance unless you interrupt that routine with new and fresh things.

Like not to belabor Goggins, but look at what David does. Like here. He runs crazy amounts and I think he sets an example that most people are never going to be able to live up to. But he's also in the gym and he's doing pull ups. And, yes, you know, he's improvising in hotel rooms and he's always doing things, I think, you know, for his own sanity. Keep him, you know, engaged in what he's doing by not by not just being very, you know, monochromatic or one dimensional.

And that's just his exercise stuff. But, yeah, I mean, you know, keeping it fresh in your life can be, I think, tapping back into the beginner mind and, you know, do something pick up something that you're really a beginner at. And if you've run a marathon and you're good at distance running, maybe that's not it. Maybe like Richard saying, picking up a different fitness modality. But it could also be something completely unrelated to fitness, you know, taking a cooking class or doing something completely different.

Just to kind of refresh your mind, there's something about being new at something. This kind of hit me when I've been kind of in the same old rut, swimming and free diving and writing. And that's kind of what my whole life was and went and volunteered at the wildlife center near your place and was helping with marine mammal rescue and feeding marine mammals. And I'm like doing something completely different. I'd never thought I would do it. And I just like completely let me up.

It was like so fresh and different and new that I loved it. I mean, even volunteering. So I would I would keep a real open mind. The new thing doesn't even have to be fitness related. It could be anything. Right.

I think that's a great point. You know, on the on the fitness tip, though, I remember when I. Finally retired when I retired from swimming, and I never thought I'd see them again, I was so over it like the idea of jumping into a swimming pool just seemed like the last thing I would ever want to do. And the idea that I found my way back to it and figured out a new way to fall in love with it was something I never would have predicted, but also something I don't think I would have been able to perpetuate if I'd just gone back to swimming like it was triathlon.

The mix of those three disciplines, that always keeps it fresh. Like if I was just riding my bike or just running, I think I would have difficulty perpetuating that. So, you know, that's an example of mixing it up within something that still is, you know, a sport itself. But the idea of going out of your comfort zone and trying new things I think is super important.

Like you hit in the gym with the weights, again, throwing weight around.

Yeah, exactly. And that and that's also a function of feeling a little bit not rejuvenated or doing the same thing that I've been doing for like over a decade at this point. Right.

And this guy's run, you know, Reynolds, sounds like you've you've done one marathon. So, you know, there's an argument to be made that you're still in the starting gate of this exploration of running. And the fact that you're already having difficulty motivating yourself, I think is a pretty strong indicator that you need to figure out a different relationship with this discipline that can keep you, you know, engaged. And a lot of it is, you know, I don't know him.

I don't know you well enough to presume anything. And I don't want to overly project. But if you're feeling burned out after one marathon, perhaps you're putting too much pressure on yourself or you're too performance oriented, that it feels laborious or like a chore rather than being something that should be fun and should bring your life joy. So if you can recalibrate your relationship to it, so you're approaching it and embracing it from a perspective of joy and exploration and curiosity, as opposed to a rigid relationship where you're, you know, wed to your garment and caught up in the numbers and overly focused on performance gains.

Yeah, I think you'll find, you know, perhaps an opening to enjoy it a little bit more.

I love your advice about trails because it could be the road is right when I was in Nebraska.

So I don't know what the trail situation is, where he lives, but maybe there still is still, you know, get off the road. Maybe.

Yeah. OK, let's hit Missoula, Montana. Hey, Adam. Hey, Rich, my name is Robel and I'm from Missoula, Montana. I've got kind of a unique name and I'm kind of just curious if you've ever met another Rogow. Parents gave it to me, and I have yet to find another one for that. Be kind of cool to know if you know Hrabal out there. But anyways, I had a question in regard to navigating living in alignment with your values.

I know that there's a lot of issues with corporations, Big AG, all those things. But in terms of like corporations, what do you consider living in alignment with your values? I'm not purchasing on, say, Amazon to get all my things, but I have a Roth IRA with stock in Amazon and I'm making money and I'm kind of vested in that community. I'm just having trouble kind of navigating if it's even possible to perfectly live in alignment with your values.

And I'm just curious if you're that anal or maniacal about it or do you just do your best part? Thank you so much. I appreciate your guys work and roll on. Thanks, guys.

I don't know another Wrobel to you. I've never met another Wrobel. You're my you're my first. Yes, the very first.

You'll always have a place in our heart. Froebel for that alone. Wrobel from Missoula.

It's an aspiration. No, you can't. If you become overly rigid with these things, you're going to drive yourself crazy. The idea is to always be striving to improve, to bring your actions into greater alignment with those values. But I think if you're overly stringent or strident about the minutia, ultimately, you know, my answer is not dissimilar from the response we gave Randol, like, you're going to burn out and it won't be sustainable because you're not going to be able to adhere to it over the long haul.

And I think getting caught up in the details, in the minutia is to threaten losing sight of the bigger picture. So all we can do is try to tackle the biggest levers, the most important, the most impactful things that we can do to align those actions with our values and understand that nobody's perfect. We live in a material world. Nobody is living without making some kind of impact on the planet deleterious. The idea is to try to reduce that.

But if you lose sight of the forest for the trees and get caught up in like the diaper's, like Adam was, you know, we talked about you talked about like the diaper situation with you and like and being, you know, caught up in that like.

But in the grand scheme of things like you're doing more than most and, you know, I would say at home that you're in relatively very good alignment with those things, but not everything is going to is going to fall into place perfectly. My diaper game could be upgraded. You could, yeah.

Usher buddy Usher texted me, what's up, Usher? And said so tell Adam to relax a little bit about the diapers. I'm doing good. He might. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Usher. On the other hand, I've gotten like three messages this week. Different advice, but always very kind and nice advice. Helpful. Good. And I will we will upgrade.

But I didn't expect to talk about diapers with rebels questions. I agree. I think. You know, it's it's always going to be a moving target, there's always your life's going to change, it's going to expand and contract. It's nothing is is static and so you do the best you can. I think there are ways to be the most impactful is kind of like bring your own and looking at your diet and things like that. And that's probably the diet is probably the single best way you can make a move on.

Right.

If you take taking a tip from like the drawdown. Yeah. Blueprint playbook, focus on the things that move the needle the most and moving towards a more plant rich, plant centric diet is a huge thing. If you can develop a garden and start growing some of your food like these are huge things and not getting caught up in like, well, I ordered this thing from Amazon and I was like, yeah, there's better ways of doing everything right.

But I think that the interesting existential dilemma that he's pointing to, though, which I share, is that the market economy is kind of problematic for sustainability. I mean, it's problematic for a more egalitarian society. The fact that the stock market dictates so much of the moves companies make is the reason that they squeeze wages is the reason that wage growth has not kept up with CEO pay even close. It's the reason that we have environmental problems and a political landscape where money is buying votes, you know, in favor of special interests.

All this comes back to the market economy. And so, you know, if you're being good about not buying stuff through Amazon because of the extra packaging and you're invested in Amazon as a stock, you know, what are you doing?

And I am sympathetic to that because for a long time I wasn't an Amazon customer at all. I did become an Amazon customer. Now I like to be completely transparent. A good part of my living is based on sales through Amazon, the book sales. So, you know, like, I'm I'm I'm a party to all of that. And I do understand that the tension there and like like does that align with who I am? And, you know, I mean, to be quite honest with you, I stopped thinking about it that much, you know, and I just try to keep it more simple than that.

But I like that Hrabal that you're bringing it up because I think it is it is fair to bring up and I understand where you're coming from, and I don't have a perfect answer for you.

Mm hmm. Yeah. I think we'd all benefit from doing an honest, objective inventory of our behaviors and our kind of daily practices and how they implicate these problematic systems. But we live in a capitalist society and, you know, short of completely reconfiguring, you know, how we live our lives and the way our government functions, there's going to be, you know, things that we do that are not great. Right. And all we can do is try to continually, you know, iterate on what we do to, you know, bring those things closer into alignment.

There you go. I mean, there are shareholder activists that kind of like that try to organize shareholders to go and push companies towards a social or environmental goal.

There is kind of that whole movement as well. It'll be interesting to see where things go. But I guess the short answer is not that maniacal or anal about it.

Right. But Wrobel could become an activist shareholder and start accumulating lots of shares of Amazon. And then you can show up at the shareholder meeting and make a big step. And Jesus would have to talk to you.

Right. Okay, last one. We're going down to Fullerton, California.

There is an ATM. My name is Evan. I'm 26 and I live in Fullerton, California. We've been a big fan of the podcast for a few years now. And as a graduate student pursuing my master of public health degree, these discussions are very inspiring. In my early 20s, I experienced some body dysmorphic issues and even developed somewhat of a binge eating disorder as a result of competing in bodybuilding shows. I was just wondering what your thoughts are on eating disorders among males and if this is also an issue that you encountered within the ultramarathons community.

Over time, I've developed a better relationship with food. However, I believe that it is an issue that needs more discussion, especially among males. So thank you both so much for taking questions and for all that you do. Thanks.

That's a great question. And I'm really grateful for this question because I do think that it's kind of a sleeping lion or an elephant in the room that doesn't get enough air time or discussion. There's plenty of conversations around eating disorders in females, and it's almost never discussed how that. Dysfunction impacts men, but I think it impacts tons more than tons of dudes.

I think more so now than ever with social media and everything. Oh, yeah, 100 percent.

So whether you're a bodybuilder or a gym rat who's trying to, you know, basically, you know, inhabit an impossible physique or you're a runner or you're a triathlete or a cyclist who's trying to drop weight and get super crazy lean. And I've been part of that community. I've noticed those tendencies in myself. I've seen it in other people. And basically, I think it's I don't know if I would call it an epidemic, but I think it's a very real thing that doesn't get enough airtime or discussion.

And I think it's important to shed light on the fact that it does exist and it exists in numbers. I think that would surprise a lot of people.

There's a swimmer I know named Antonio Auxois, who was the seventh ever to do the Oceans Seven. The seven channel swims around the world. Mexican swimmer I've written about before for The New York Times. And then I actually helped him write his book, which is published in Spanish in Mexico. And I think there's an e-book in English now called The Forever Swim. And he tells a story is similar progression to you. He came up in swimming in Mexico and ended up swimming at Stanford.

But when he was in high school, he moved to Northern California in high school, you know, as a way to kind of train and try to get better and make the Olympic team. And in senior year, his times were suffering because he he was a bigger guy and he had he had bulimia and he never talked to anybody about it. He's just kind of recently started to talk to people about it. And he has a lot of heart for people who are like chubbier kids that are athletes.

You know, you just don't see that many that are there are a lot of great athletes that are just bigger guys. And so he had that a lot. So Antonio Vargas is someone I think you should look to and write and and he's accessible online. So that's the first experience I had with talking to someone about it in depth. And it was he was suicidal. He had all sorts of issues with it and he was able to write himself.

And but, you know, it takes therapy sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah.

I don't know of a prominent male athlete or otherwise who's taken this cause up to speak about it publicly at a high level. Maybe there is somebody is doing that. I'm not sure, but somebody certainly should and I would cautious by saying that. I'm certain that the eating disorder statistics would show that this is this is a much bigger problem among women, like the pressure on women to adhere to a certain yes physique and the appearance pressures that they're shouldering outweighs what males endure for sure.

Yes. So I want to be sensitive to that. But at the same time, I think it's important to acknowledge that this is a very real problem among males. And I think, you know, Instagram culture is exacerbating this when you see rip dudes and Photoshopped images of guys. And I think there is more pressure on men and young men to look a certain way. And there's a more robust, like kind of body conscious culture around males than there used to be, maybe even five or 10 years ago, no doubt about it.

So let's talk about this more. I should I should maybe try to find somebody to come on the podcast to talk about. I mean, I've talked about this with some women athletes. I had Amelia Boonen and I had Darcy Bausch, but I've never had a guy come on to talk about totally sex performance. I mean, Antonio, he writes about it in his book, all about his experience in senior year level. And he was trying to compete for an Olympic spot at that point, you know, like and to see his time zero.

It took a while, though. He was able to still succeed for a while before his body really started to suffer. Breakdown. Breakdown. Yeah, I think it's a great question.

And I appreciate your kind of being open on the subject. And I wanted to say to all the young listeners out there, I do feel for you guys. This this covid thing is just continuing to drag on.

It's a real bummer. And I feel for like people seven to 27, to be honest with you. Like, I can't imagine having to deal with that at a young age. You know, when I you know, I mean, it's easier for us because we have a stable life and we have way. We don't we're not we're not in that like young people need the community a little bit, even more and rely on it. And and so I really feel for you guys and thinking about you guys.

Yeah, I agree. I had a final thought. I wanted to share about that. Yeah. I think. Oh, well, two things. First of all, in the case of of. The guy that you wrote about, one of the good things is that when you become a marathon swimmer, like you got to get you kind of got to get fat. Yes, right. He calls it his bioprinting. Yeah. You get to put on a ton of weight because you need that fat layer to keep you warm in the open water.

All the open water marathon swimmers are like big people.

They tend to be. But there's like Kim Chambers even thinks that that there is it's like the same idea with yardage equals faster times was an old concept in swimming, you know, in training yardage. She thinks that's an outdated marathon. Swimming. That's interesting. Yeah, but she's just kind of after doing it is when she's realized that. Yeah.

And when you look at sports like wrestling, boxing, memory and cycling and triathlon where weight is is, you know, highly pertinent, whether you're trying to cut way to make weight for a fight or you're focused on your power to weight ratio, which is critical in cycling. It's all about like getting as lean as you can without sacrificing power and finding that finding that inflection point. And most people take it too far. I got to then at one point I was like one fifty eight going into the 2011 Ultraman.

And when you're in that state you don't realize that you're too light, like you're just like I can get lighter, you know, and it's dysfunctional and you know, I immediately put weight back on after that and I've never gone to that place again. But I can see how it happens. And being an addictive personality myself who's had issues with food, you can lapse into this and it takes on an energy of its own and becomes a thing before you have any objective perspective on it.

And I think with dudes, you can hide it or because there's not a permissiveness around talking about it, that it perpetuates more than it should because. You know, dudes don't feel confident being vulnerable with other dudes, like have an eating disorder, like you just don't hear those conversations in a male locker room or anywhere else. And to the extent that we can create a welcome environment for those conversations to happen, I think we could, you know, all be better off.

Evan's starting it right now. He is. So, Evan, thank you for that, sir.

I think we did it. We done. We did it. That's another one. I think this might be the most succinct roll on that we've done.

Is it we're going to land this plane. How long?

We've been at it for a while. Yeah. Well, are you bored now? You're bored of yourself? I'm never bored of my own. My own speaking voice. I could keep going.

I feel good. And as we head into the election a week from now. Hmm. I maintain my optimism.

ME2, I believe. I believe. I believe in I believe in three things. The Lakers, the Dodgers and old Joe, one down, one on the brink and old Joe bringing up the rear.

I believe in I believe in myself, the American people and our democratic institutions vote for dolphins and rainbows.

Good. Cast your vote.

Participate in our Democratic. Experiment, yeah, and we'll catch you on the other side. Just vote, it's OK. We love you anyway. I love you. I love you, Adam.

I love you too, Rich. Good.

We'll be back in two weeks with more roll on. Until then, you can follow Adam and Adam Skolnick on the Sociales Imit. Rich roll, pick up or preorder, I should say, the new book Voicing Change on the New Rich Roll website ritual dot com slash v.c or voicing change dotcom.

Leave us a message if you want your question answered on the show. Four two four two three five four six two six. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify and YouTube.

You could check out the show notes, as always, on the episode page for this episode where we'll have links to everything that we talked about today to watch the documentaries and to read the news articles, everything that we discussed. You can also submit your question on our Facebook group. And that's it. That's it, man. Right on. Be good at. Right on. Right on. Right on. Right on. Right. That's right. And to the generally heroic Adam Skolnick, to the generally heroic ritual, I'm going to call everybody now.

That's the thing. Cool.

I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show, Jason Kamela, for audio engineering, production, shout outs and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Ashley Rogers for portrait's. Georgia Waili for copywriting. DKA in the flesh here today. Yeah, for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Trapper and hurry. Appreciate the love you guys see back here in a couple of days with another great episode. Until then, go to the ballots.

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