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OK, so we got a lot in store for you today. Adam and I recap his recent Goggins challenge experience. We dive into the bizarre and quite fascinating world of NFTE. We take listener questions and a bunch more stuff.

So let's do the thing.

Hey, everybody, thank you for allowing us to once again hold you pod hostage for another rendition of Roll On Where in my commutative, neighborly and rather magnanimous Sidecar Hype's Mr. Adam Skolnick.

And I told you with droll repartee, raillery, shrewd observations on concepts, issues and matters of importance, both great and probably not so much.

Yes, usually. Right. Yes. We also do a wee bit of show and tell and of course, answer some of your listener questions from our voicemail. You can leave us a message at 44 to 35, five, four, six, two, six.

So lean back or lean in, smash that subscribe button, hit the notifications bell, wherever that is. Click the like. Leave your comments in the comments section below as all those YouTube ers are fond of saying. And let's get into it. Adam, how are you doing?

Doing great, man. Feeling good. I've enjoyed the rain a little bit. Got in the water yesterday.

It rained pretty hard, rained this pretty hard last night. You don't want to be getting in the water right after a rainstorm.

We snuck one in yesterday. It was nice and crisp, 55 degrees Fahrenheit. That's pretty good. Yeah. How thick is your what's your wetsuit?

Your website. My my website.

So thank you. My I have a few different ones, but the one I use yesterday is like a triathlon suit, so it's kind of piecemeal. So there's a five millimeter in the chest, four in the thighs and then it's like point five in the shoulders and, you know, just different. So you're not wearing your swim run wetsuit for your adventures around the point?

No, but then when you're when you do a few dives after a while, like the area where it's point five starts, I feel the cold there first and it starts to radiate down.

But it's fun.

You know, I wear I wear some weight to swim out and back against the current with weights is kind of around right at the end of of Zumba there where you go around the the the point. The point.

Yeah, yeah. We start different places. Yesterday we walked down to the last lifeguard tower and launched from there and then I went out and back. My friends usually go around the point, but for me I have the family on the beach.

So I try to you know, I don't get to see Big Dume, but if I can grab an hour at the reef, that's like also you're you're more likely to steer clear of predatory marine life that way. I don't know if that's true. Going around that point is dicey. When I tell people that I swim around that point with you, they look at me like I'm a crazy person. We've talked about this before.

Right. But like where even the the pinnacles themselves have so much life that anything that could get you around the point can get you at the Pinnacles, because that's where the like the main reef structure is.

That's not making me feel better, but about my next outing with you at this moment, though, it's like the beginning of the whale migration. I mean, it started, you know, a few weeks ago, but it's becoming more and more every day. There's more whales coming through. So if you can go to an out and back, you have a better chance of seeing them because you often see them off the beach where the waves are more often than where the pinnacles are.

What about the sharks, though? How are the sharks impacted by the whale migration?

There is a shark season and you start to notice it when the sea lions wash up on the beach with bites taken out of them, but also a confidence booster when you're putting on the wetsuit.

Yes, but I think I have to I have to look at it.

But I think that the shark season is coming up.

I think the main shark season is like in May, June, and it doesn't really dovetail as far as I know, in terms of the breeding, because what's happening is just not too far off shore. And in Santa Monica Bay, I mean, sunset, where the surf break is right, like a half mile out there, that's a shark nursery, as far as I understand it. And there has been more juvenile whites this season than they've seen in a long, long time.

At least that was what the reporting was excuse me, last season. So I'd have to look, you know, offhand, I forget when the when the breeding season is, but that's when the pupping season because their live birth, you know, like a fish that actually gives live births, right.

Yeah. I haven't heard of any attacks in recent memory, though.

No. We don't have a great history of, like, fatal attacks. You know, we have had some bites and stuff. Usually it's again, it's it's connected to a swimmer swimming under the pier. And the fishermen had a juvenile white on the line and it was angry and it hit the swimmer.

That was the most recent one. What is the conventional wisdom about how long you should wait after a big rain to go in the ocean because there's so much toxic runoff? Yeah. So I know that you're not supposed to do it for a couple of days, three days, three days, 72 hours is what they usually do.

Yeah. Yeah. If it's rained a bunch in a row, probably can get away with two days because it's not like the first coat of that slick grime from the streets, because what happens is that all that gets into the storm drains, storm drains end up in the ocean. And that's the main reason. Right? So it's like the toxins and the fertilizers and things like that.

Have you ever gotten sick because you got into early after? I have not. I have not. I've been lucky, but I usually do abide by the 72 hours. I don't mess around. Surfers are less likely to abide because they have to surf when the waves are there and and but they're not under water the same way. So they're mostly above water. They're not getting.

What would be the symptoms like? What would you catch?

I think your ear infections would be the first thing. Your infection could be sinus infection, diarrhea, dysentery. It could be if you'd like to drink seawater.

Yeah, I just remember when when I was I probably told this story before, but it's been a really long time if I have when I was living in New York City right after college, like eighty nine, ninety, ninety one, my roommate, Matt Nath's, who was a teammate of mine on the Stanford swim team, decided that he wanted to do the swim around Manhattan that they hold every year.

Yes. At that point in time, I was not interested in endurance sports, so I opted out of that. In fact, he wanted me to crew for him and I had a family vacation in Michigan. So I missed the whole thing. But I remember when he was training for that and getting ready for it, they send you like a like a binder full of information that includes, you know, all the all the shots you have to get before, you know, because you're literally swimming in the Harlem River.

You know, you're going all the way around Manhattan.

And he had to get all these shots. And then he told me that, you know, especially up in the northern points, he would just run into garbage like constantly as he was swimming it. And then he got a terrible urine infection afterwards that he claimed had nothing to do with him swim.

But I can't imagine it didn't. Right. And I also remember that near sort of near the George Washington Bridge is this I don't know if it's still there or if this is still a thing, but there was this giant like suckhole, like there was something under the water that was like, you know, basically creating a vacuum effect in this whirlpool.

And you had to steer very clear that or suffer the consequences of flooding down into the black hole. Right. Is it was at the East River, the no no. In the Hudson.

In the Hudson, I think like a little bit south of the George Washington Bridge. If memory serves me, I could be wrong about that.

Yeah. That's the East River to Harlem River. To Hudson. Right. It's not the route or something.

You start down you start down near Wall Street. And I think you go up the East River first. Yeah. And you come down the Hudson. OK, yeah.

And he got second place. I think he I think at the time it was probably ninety or ninety one. He broke the men's record, but he got beat by a fifteen year old Australian girl who was like this, the queen whose name escapes me.

But she was like the queen of open water swimming. Well I mean, that was the Triple Crown. Right. So for many. And his crew was comprised of, like, my hungover buddies, whoever you could find.

Yeah. I need you to just hand me water everything. Right. Who had no idea what they were in for.

And now I feel I have tremendous regret that I wasn't there for him to be in that way.

But anyway, I don't know how we got off on that tangent tangent over water swimming.

Yeah. Speaking of the reins, yeah. I in anticipation of it raining last night, I had to go and get a new tent because which is something I have to do like every six months because the sun really beats down on my right cheap tent. Yeah. And it becomes like tissue paper and it free.

So there were all these holes in my it was like raining in there.

I was getting wet and you slept through the rain. Well there were portions of it where like water started to pool and I was just too busy or lazy to go replace the tent. So, you know, I had like the bottom of my sheets would be wet when I wake up in the morning.

And I was like, I got to fix this. So I went, I got a new tent and I was kind of taking everything out and setting it up and putting everything in. And I realized some stuff as mold in it. Like, this is not good.

So the thought occurred to me since I am sleeping in a tent basically every night, like, why am I spending four or five hundred dollars on a new tent every six months? I should get like a proper outdoor like canvas camping tent that could stand the test of time. So I've been researching like I like I could just get a huge tent and like create like a whole room, you know.

So you're going now you're going from r.i to Vegas, Kobana, something like that.

Yeah. So I'm looking into like some cool tent designs. There's any canvas high end camping canvas tent manufacturers out there that want to talk to me.

I'd love to, I'd love to hear from them. Because, yeah, these tents just get shredded like they're just the sun beats down on them and then literally they just rip into the wooden canvas, also kind of take a beating up there or. No, not really.

Well, I would imagine. But, you know, they're going to last a couple of years. Yeah. Yeah. Like a paradise. You get like a year there. Yeah, we have a teepee. Yeah.

But it's way down a far away from the house. I don't know. So anyway, that's what I'm thinking about would be cool. A clamping tent. Adam, imagine the planet going up on the roof. Yeah.

So we're sort of constructing this new little section of our home, like on the side where which is where my container office is and where I have this tent and we just got a cold plunge.

We're going to talk about that in a little bit. I just talk about it.

Could just talk about it right now. These guys, Michael Garrett and Ryan Duey, who are out of Sacramento, have this new company called the Cold Plunge, the cold plunge dotcom. And they reached out to me and just wanted to gift me a cold plunge, which is one of the side benefits of hosting a podcast.

I suppose they create these next level cold bars that are really beautiful, like these beautiful tubs that have a filtration system and a temperature gauge on them.

So you can just set the temperature and it has a cover on it and it's always good to go. So you don't have to worry about buying tons of ice or trying to jerry rig, you know, a top drawer freezer so that you don't electrocute yourself. What a lot of people do, which that's what I was thinking of doing, because I've done cold plunging before, but never consistently because I don't have it at my house and I'm not going to be, you know, just go into the store and buying bags and bags of ice all the time.

Like people like take one of those freezers, the top drawer, top drawer freezers. Yeah.

And you have to customize them. And I think you have to put like a lining.

It's like a it's a little bit more of an elaborate process than you might suspect rather than just filling it with water and getting into it because it's not built for that. Right. But these guys just created like a stand alone situation that is very aesthetically cool and it works really well and doesn't require like almost any maintenance whatsoever. Must be so calming you.

I think you just have to put they were telling me you just have to put I can't remember how much like a quart or two of hydrogen peroxide in it every two weeks or something like that. But it's filtering the water all the time.

So it's always it's always, you know, it's always filled with water. OK, yeah.

And it's filtering the water all the time and then it has a temp gauge on it. So you can set the temp wherever you want it. It will go down to 39 degrees. And I hate cold water so much like this is. Part of why I'm doing this is because I have such an aversion to this, right. That I started it out at the whimp temperature of like fifty eight and I've been going down two degrees every day. So I'm down to like today will be forty eight.

OK, pretty good place. That's great. And I'm digging it. It's been really great. How are you doing there for. So I do three rounds of four minutes. We also have an outdoor tub right next to it so I fill that with hot water.

I eventually want to get a barrel sauna like a proper sauna. We don't have that now, but until that point, just alternating between getting in the cold plunge and then getting into the hot tub and then doing three rounds of that four minutes each, which has been great. And it's so refreshing. It is addictive. You hear that like. Yeah. And it's not that it gets easier.

There's always that like, I definitely don't want to get in this freezing cold tub, but I've gotten better at it. And it's really a great kind of meditative practice because it forces you to be present like you can't be thinking about anything else except your breath.

The brain gets like, yeah, brain is right. So I wanted to thank those guys publicly. Michael and Ryan, if you want to learn more, you can go to the cold plunge dotcom. It is an expensive item and it was so gracious of them to gift it to me. And this is not a sponsor thing like that. They didn't ask me to do anything right, but I just wanted to acknowledge them and let them know that they knew they appreciate it and that I'm that I'm putting it to use.

So that's been really fun.

What's that been doing physically for you? I definitely sleep better. Mm hmm. You know, sleeps like my whole thing. Yeah, I'm always trying to optimize that. So I've noticed that it's not that I don't have problems falling asleep, but like around the middle of the night, I'll often wake up. And I found that I was sleeping more soundly throughout the night and in a deeper state, according to my wub, which is good.

It also has, you know, because it's so antiinflammatory, it's really been helping my back. So really when I'm like in the hours after doing it, like my back feels better than it's felt in a long time.

So that's another initial I mean, I've only been doing this for five days or something like, OK, but you already feel I'm making it a daily practice and I can definitely feel the difference. And it's also a mood enhancer, like, you know, when you kind of in the middle of the afternoon, you're a little you've worked and you're kind of burned out. You're a little bit tired. If you do it midday, it's sort of like taking a power nap, like you just feel completely fresh again.

So that's been cool to it.

It's cool. I love it. And I do it in the morning and then.

Well, it's it's just been based on my schedule. Like yesterday I did it after a long bike ride. Doing it in the morning is great, but I did it in the afternoon the other day and like I haven't had a consistent like I do it at this time every day or kind of catch as catch can, but I'm digging it and fun. You have to come over and check it out. I got to do it. I love that thing.

Kevin Roo's went up on the podcast. That was super fun.

I felt like I was cheating on you a little bit, not as a fellow New York Times writer.

He's he's he's a tenured professor over there. He is he's he's an he's an elder statesman. I'm even higher up in New York Times pecking order. I'm not on the pecking order, but it was really fun, actually. There were moments during that podcast where I felt like.

It would have been good to have you also. Yeah, on the mic, yeah. So he's got an open invite to come on the show next time he finds himself in L.A. So maybe if and when that happens, we'll do it as a threesome. Perfect. But that was really cool. Since we talk about his work so often on the show and we've been such champions of rabbit hole, it was really fun and cool to talk to him.

I should also mention that Alex Honnold dropped by I've heard of late last week.

For those that don't know, is he climbed a very steep wall in Yosemite without any ropes. They made a movie about it that won an Oscar. Yeah, and that was really cool. He's been on the show before a long time listeners now, but it was cool to have him back on. He's got this podcast. Yeah, he's starting called Climbing Gold. It's about the history of climbing and also about the upcoming introduction of climbing into the Olympics.

So we talked about that.

That was a couple of cool things about that experience. He brought the van. So the van was here at the studio.

He still drives. Amazing.

And it's got the little the little finger grips inside the door that he does his workouts on. And, you know, he was doing like two finger pull ups with one arm and stuff like that, every which was crazy to see here.

And that interview is cause a little bit different from, I think, most interviews he has done of late, because it's not about free solo. It was more about kind of what he's up to now. How do you move forward for something like that? Yeah. He recently spent a month in Guyana for a Nat Geo project. So we talked a lot about the environment, all the work that he's doing with his foundation, the Hudnall Foundation, Solar Energy, Renewables.

And that episode is going to go up, I believe, March 29th. So everybody has that to look forward to.

It's very cool. I can't believe I'm really surprised he's still driving around that I shouldn't be based on. I think it is his second one, though.

At some point he upgraded it, OK? I mean, it looked it didn't look new. I mean, it looked like, you know, he was apparently he was going to sleep in it.

I'm sure he. Yeah. So, like, anywhere I parked it here. Yeah. Hopped a flight to Guyana. Came back.

He was he lives in Vegas. So he drove here. Yeah. And then he had some other press stuff but his plan was to just he was going to see some friends and I'm sure he told me he was just going to sleep in the back of the truck. And so, of course, it's comfortable for him, right? Yeah.

Should we recap the Goggins challenge? All right. It's been a recarpet. You've had time to reflect on the profundity of this endurance feat that you accomplished. How are you feeling?

You know, I feel good. Like my body feels totally fine. I'm it was it was fun to do. It was. I mean, I'm very appreciative of, you know, you came out to visit, I had other friends pass me, you passed me on your bicycle and people paced running. I was getting messages galore from listeners and their interest encouragement was just like I didn't expect it. And so it was really cool. It was cool to be a part of I mean, I think early on.

After the first run, the first run, I was kind of too keyed up until eight o'clock hits and my legs have kind of are heavy and lactic acid on that very first run. And I'm thinking to myself, that's OK, because after this first run, I can take care of my body, hydrate up and and then that'll be over. And then because because you're going to get tired eventually. So it's fine if it happens early on, because the point is to run when you're tired.

So that first run, I was a little bit not feeling that great but but pushed through. And then from then on it just was kind of like a clockwork thing.

And yeah, I was able to get through each phase. And Jason Crioulo, who's right behind me right now, he did it as well.

So you guys were I know you guys were on the blower with each other throughout the whole. Yeah. Messaging after every single one. And and I'd say, like the the second run, I stayed up to midnight the first day. Well, let's take a second. And just if somebody brand new and they don't know what we're talking about, the Gorgons challenge is this challenge that David Gorgons proposed as kind of a crowd crowdfunding, not crowd funding, but a participatory challenge where you run four miles every four hours for 48 hours straight.

It starts on a Friday night at eight o'clock. Yeah, right. Yeah. And you go through late Sunday afternoon. Yeah. Basically.

And and so like the first run kind of I was a little keyed up and my, my calf, my left calf was tightening up a little bit. But you know that was fine. I had a bit of an adrenaline, adrenaline crash after and I didn't want to sleep before the first midnight. I wanted to stretch and be ready and so I didn't sleep. The second round was a lot better, slept a little bit after. And then it was like, you know, the the four a.m. run, which was not very fast.

Yeah. Sleep. I was running past people who sleep in their van.

How much did you sleep before that run?

Probably two and a half, three hours. That's probably the longest sleep in the entire situation. And then the fourth run found a rhythm again. And I was listening to earbuds for the first time. That was eight a.m. on Saturday. And I found that it kind of took away from the experience like I was. I thought I would get through all of Brorby or something or like like the whole I was just going to listen to books, but I found that it just wasn't working for me.

Like, I'd rather have the quiet and and so I stopped doing that. April ran two of the segments with me and she usually I push the pram, but she was pushing the stroller the whole time. So she did. I think I pushed it for maybe a half a mile at one point. But she she was she did sixteen miles.

So she was with me and she rising and the fastest of the weekend was at six run the twenty to twenty four miles.

And then all of a sudden people started calling me wanting to pace me my my buddy Adam DOWL.

Right. Calls me Adam. Early podcast. Early podcast.

Guess. Yeah. And and shout out Adam Dole and he called me like Hey do you want or texted me do you want a pacer. It's OK if you say no. I'm like, sure at that point I'll take any help. Yeah. And so he came in. Another friend reached Pacheco who runs WSP for the environmental organization. He came in for noon and for the last day Adam was at eight p.m. Then he came back for four a.m. I mean, just incredible.

That's cool. And yeah. And so through it all, I didn't sleep much the second day I slept, but after the eight p.m.. To midnight, and that was the craziest time because I set my alarm for 11, 30 instead of 23, 30, and so then I slept through the midnight and I woke up just like in a start, like drenched in sweat at 12, 20 a.m. I'm like, fuck. And so then I disqualified.

I had to, like, race to get my shit because I thought I knew Adam was coming in fourth and there was no pushing the four run. So at that point, that's all off. Right. So I just ran out the door. And so then I stopped kind of like my legs started tightening up. My knees started to hurt a little bit. But for the most part, my body held up really well. And, you know, it was just a great experience.

Like I have to say, it's the. It's the greatest athletic feat, I think, of my lifetime that I've ever done so cool and I didn't, you know, go into it thinking that was going to be the case. But looking back, I have to say, I don't think there's anything close. Maybe kill. I climbed Kilimanjaro, but that's I think less people have done this than have Clonakilty.

How would you compare those two? I mean, it's apples and oranges, but this is way more demanding.

I mean, if you're in shape, Killie is is not a killer. You know, it's it's a you know, there's there's difficult moments and you're going into altitude. So altitude is a game. Anybody could suffer from altitude at any time. So there's some there's some variables that are beyond your control with with altitude. But if you're in shape, you know, it's not like that hard of a thing you do. But this, you know, 48 miles in two days, I don't know.

Is that an ultra or anything?

Well, I don't know.

I mean, Goldburg, technically, an ultra is defined as anything longer than a marathon. But I don't know when you break it up.

Right. How that, you know, who cares? I mean, you know, you did a hard thing.

It's like you had to put a label on it. You know what it's like? It's like the the the braking, the breaking it up made it easier for sure. Yeah. No question about it. And that was the accessibility that you were pointing out. That's what's so cool about it. Right.

But it sneaks up on you because you're like I could do I could run for miles every four hours slow. Right. Which then, you know, it incrementally. The the degree of difficulty gets notched up in a second.

Nice as the sleep slips away, the second half second night stuff.

But, you know, like I think they were a couple of moments. I think after the first 16 miles, I looked up and I was like, OK, thirty two to go.

You know, you try not to check the scoreboard.

No, but then once you get past the first day, just focus on what's right in front of you to do, which is get through those four miles. I mean, you know, I rode my bike down. Yeah. On Saturday afternoon to do attempt check on you and you were in good spirits. And yeah, April was out there with you pushing the baby and you were all smiles and laughs.

Yeah. I mean, I try to keep it that way. You know, I think look, a couple of things. I didn't go into it saying I'm going to try to do this.

I went into it, you know, feeling like I'm going to do this.

So it's never really and especially once I realized how many people were paying attention, like there was no yeah, there's no graceful bow out.

And yeah, then it becomes a whole other thing that I did to myself. But I did it casually without realizing.

Well, that was part of, you know, me posting it on Instagram and the stories too. It's like you can't back out. And this is like public.

I never was going to. And and you know, in terms of like the why because Misti from Nantucket called in. She's not going we're not going to play her question, but her question was basically, did I did I find a way because I couldn't answer that. And she said, you scolded me and did I scold you?

I was challenging you. You challenged me.

So my why? I still didn't really figure it out in the moment, partly because the Pacers take some of that introspection away, which I don't think is a bad thing. It's just the way it goes when you have a friend next to you in life, you're just not thinking about yourself as much.

But listening to Steven Pressfield on your podcast and just thinking about. And what you guys were talking about around finding your hero's journey and going through that hard thing and thinking about my life, which, you know, for a long time was defined by. You know, travel and going to different cultures and being kind of alone in those scenarios and having the pandemic come through, and that's completely wiped out and then, of course, life changes. You know, I do think there was part of me was just hungry for some test like that, a test of self.

And and so I do think that was like the subconscious pull. I didn't realize it. I didn't even think about it when when I got her message, I thought about it listening to to you guys talk about it. And I do think there's something there that there was a call to action and to find out what was inside me to see if I could do it and the fact that I could do it, stay good humored and stay positive. I think it is a good.

It's a good feeling. I'm satisfied with that answer. I'm not going to scold you all right on that. I think what happens is, yeah, you have that pull that call to doing something hard and then you do it.

And what that does is put another brick in the wall of. This identity that you craft around being somebody who does hard things like I do, like I do hard things, I can do hard things.

Yeah, I, I'm not afraid of the degree of difficulty or the unknown of something I've never experienced before. Yeah. I welcome that into my life.

And each one of those experiences that you have is like another notch in the belt that I think leads to greater self-esteem and kind of how you, you know, navigate the world in every other facet of your life.

Hmm. I do feel like I got a self-esteem bump. Like I felt it like the next couple of the day after I was a bit of a wreck, you know, and I had a deadline.

Do you ever have any, like, chromatographs moments where you are like short, where they all are like, oh, no, no, that's what happens to me.

Yeah, but I mean, I think part of that is I didn't push myself to the edge in terms of pace. I was very relaxed in my pace.

So I was worried about you at one moment because you were talking about how your knee was acting up. And I just didn't want you to bury yourself and injure yourself. Right. Because you felt the public pressure of completing this thing.

Well, I would have kept going. You know, even if the knee was a problem, I would have walked, you know, I wasn't going to stop, so. You know, when you when you work with David Goggins, you don't stop when you're No. It's a little bit and since you are working with David Goggins, you can't not you couldn't have not done this anyway, right?

Well, I could have. I mean I mean, David didn't put any pressure on you personally. No, I brought it up to him.

And then once I brought it up to him, it was it was basically a done deal. Yeah. Yeah.

But he was really I mean, let's let's put it this way in this time, where everyone's so polarized at each other's throats, he creates this thing, some 30000 people that have a repeat. Yeah. It's like in the 20 or 30 range, I think closer to 30 signed up to do this thing, this really hard thing altogether. There's a real feeling of unity among the people that we're doing it. Camaraderie and, you know, just shows what what if you focus in versus focusing out?

The positive repercussions are, I think, impossible to calculate.

And it's just a ripple effect. And, you know, so kudos to David for recognizing that, seeing that leading that. And, yeah, definitely he was leading I was checking in with him on his Instagram stories every time. And then afterwards I had a little debrief with him, but not during, you know, during I kind of it was left to my own devices and him, too.

And he was doing a bunch of pull ups and push ups in addition to all of this.

So, yeah, so he he was doing a combo of of like a circuit because he's he's recovering from injury, which I'm sure he'll get into at some stage. But but so he didn't he wasn't running because he's got a run. He was on a treadmill sometimes and then he was doing whatever. He was doing a circuit.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. 20 to 30000 people. I think it also speaks to, you know, we're in this moment where there's no races, right? Yeah. Normally people would be signing up for this or that. And, you know, without that being available to people, they have turned to these virtual events and that kind of digital community that can be created this way. It's pretty cool.

It is cool. And people raised, you know, millions of dollars for different charities. Right.

So everyone is kind of raising money for their own various whatever. Yeah.

And he put out a story like last year, he's always said if running if you can't run, get on your bike. If you can't buy, you know, do do whatever you can. He pointed out to a guy who was 500 pounds when he heard about this last year and his whole goal every four hours was just to get up out of his chair as much as he as many times as he could every every four hours. And so he did that.

A year later, he's 300 pounds and he was running it. Wow, that's cool. So it just shows you you don't have to do it that way. You could have done you know, if you have a peloton at home, go do that at a low pace or walk around the block, you know, ten times whatever it is.

So where does that leave you? You've got some momentum now. You just did this hard thing. Does it does it make you enthusiastic to keep it up? Continue it. Yeah. Need to figure out another new challenge.

Well, yes. So shout out also also to Nicolas Ramirez, who I've been talking to about my goals and coach the Anvil, coach the team Anvil, who's the champion swim runner and has this or this team swim run team called Team Engvall. And you could join it for pretty cheap price. And he gives he gives kind of group workouts. Or you could work with him personally and he can give you some personalized stuff. And I was telling him my goal, one of my main goals is just to get faster at zone two.

And he told me this little tale that many years ago, his whole thing was to try to get a sub three marathon. And it was like took him to the ultimate limit to barely get under sub three. And then last Saturday on an empty stomach, a little bit hung over and just delivering something across town in Stockholm, we decided to run there and back instead of driving, ran a marathon in Zone two and a little bit in zone three under three hours.

Wow. And just the fact that the human body can do that and it just it inspired me a bit more. So I'm definitely interested in continuing that Zonta journey to see to see how comfortable I can get running, because for so many years I was uncomfortable running. I do it anyway.

And but in terms of activities, we're looking at cactus, the clouds, hopefully, you know, my wife can break away from the baby long enough to where we could do that together. What is that? And that is a 10000 foot elevation climb from the desert to the top of San Jacinto peak in Palm Springs and Palm Springs.

Yeah, yeah, that's cool. I'm thinking about that for the fall. And then Attilio Catalina. Right. That's in November. November, yeah.

Are the pools open in Santa Monica at Santa Monica College?

Are you don't you never go to the, you know, some of the pool do you go to pools. You might want to think about that. I know that's my next talking to team involved.

Might have an idea or two. No, he doesn't. I me going in the ocean, yeah, he's like, just do my drills in the ocean. I'm like, so far my drills are just swim. The great thing about Point Doom is that it's the only. Like part of the coastline in our vicinity that approximates a swim run experience, because you have, you know, that steep ascent, you know, up the cliff and all of that, whereas most of the shoreline around here is very flat.

So it's hard to really get a proper swim run workout that's going to approximate the kind of terrain you're going to have in one of those races.

Yeah, I mean, most of my if I'm just swimming, I usually just go right right down in the Palisades somewhere. Right. But Doom is is kind of I did when I when I was training for Catalina, I did use Dune and that's probably what I would do again. Yeah. Are you going to do Catalina this year? I think so. I've done no swimming though. Like I you know, unlike you.

That's your that you don't need to. Yes, I do. Well you will, but you don't need to now for November. Yeah.

I would like to be able to do that. I mean there are some pools open, but you've got to fill out these online forms and schedule your time way ahead of time. And my week, the way it unfolds every day is different. And I will go through periods of, you know, filling out time slots throughout the week and then only hitting like one out of the five or whatever. And it's just, you know, that's my own stuff or whatever.

There are there are pools open. You just have to be I have to be a little bit more organized about my training than I have that. Yeah. And they only let you in for like 45 minutes, right? And that's not enough for you, not enough. You know, it's better than nothing. I mean, I'm just 45. I've been I've been really enjoying gravel riding. That's been my thing lately. So I'm just building a base on the bike right now and exploring all these trails that I've never experienced on two feet like this whole world is opened up to me, which has been really fun.

Maybe I like Sandy Tijuana to Vancouver. Right. Is in your future.

I don't know what I don't know what is in my future.

I do. Shifting gears a little bit, I do want to shout out the Iron Cowboy. Yes. We're today's Monday. What's the day today? The 12th.

The 13th, 13th, 15th. Today is the 15th. James is on as of today, day 15 of his attempt to do 100 iron in 100 days. He's been sharing all of this on Instagram. Like the stories I watch him every day is pretty cool. Like to see him just get up every single day and do in Ironman. He's been going strong and he's not without his challenges.

I mean, he like I think I'm like the third or fourth day his ankle had swollen up such that anybody in their right mind would have pulled the plug on this thing. And he was just walking the marathons until in his mind, the way he articulated it, like his body, you know, sort of clicked in and adapted what he was trying to do.

And now he's back to running. And, you know, this is all happening in the on the outskirts of Provo, Utah.

So the other day, the whole thing, it was snowing and riding like all day. And he's out there with a smile on his face. Hi vibes, tons of community. It's cool to see so many people turn out every single day to do a leg or a portion with him.

And he's getting it done. Like the guy's just an absolute machine. But I think most impressive is is like this positive attitude that he's made.

I mean, just like he's he's on his 15th consecutive Ironman. But he's still got 85 to go. You know, like how do you you know, it's just unbelievable to wrap your head around that.

I have a like a miniscule taste of that kind of thinking, though that must be in any ultra event. That's how it is. Right. You just. Here we go.

And this is what we're doing. Ran a marathon. You're now you have to run still 110 more to finish Badwater, right.

That's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. He did have I think with with all the the weather, the inclement weather, that that definitely presented some challenges. And he posted on Instagram a caption today, James, today, James Lawrence goes away and the Iron Cowboy comes to life.

And I love that that idea of the alter ego. This is something that I spoke about with Todd Hermann, who's an author who was on the podcast a couple of years ago.

He wrote a book called The Alter Ego Effect, which is all about this idea of kind of transposing your identity into this, you know, superhuman like Avatar. And this is something that David does, Goggins does, right? It's like there's David and then there's gogin. Right. Right. And he goes into he goes into Gorgons. When he does these things like it's it's almost.

It's not fair to call it a character, but it's something outside of the self that allows you to create like an arm's length relationship with the feet that you're trying to accomplish.

That, I think is empowering and instructive in terms of how you and it's not like somebody told David, create an alter ego for yourself or told James create.

And it's like these were just natural, like survival tactics that they crafted in order to survive these difficult challenges.

Right. And I think it's cool. It's empowering as a means of helping you, you know, exceed your sense of personal limitations. Yeah.

So much love to James, a.k.a. the Iron Cowboy. Amazing. That's an amazing, amazing effort. How long are our times? Is he sharing his time?

Yeah, it's all on Strava and there's a live tracker and they're very transparent about all of it. I mean, he's going slow like hell. You know, his marathons are like six hours, right?

You know, or, you know, five and a half hours or something, or his bike rides.

It's like it's just about like, look, I got the whole day to do this.

I just have to do it such that I get enough sleep, you know, enough and cover in between.

And he's got so much community around him, like tons of people are showing up every day. And then in his house, he's got Petey's and his family and his kids are involved, like his daughter is always on the Instagram talking about the live tracker and where you can meet up with him. So if anybody wants to go and support this guy, you can just show up in Linden, Utah, and, you know, go ride your bike with him or go run with them.

Incredible. So really cool party. You want to get out there. I might at some point we'll see, I mean, I did it last time when he when he was finishing his 50, I showed up in Utah and ran the final marathon with.

Amazing. Either way, whatever happens, he's definitely coming back on the podcast to tell us about it. If he survives and I have no doubt that he will survive. Is going to make it. Yeah, he is. It's incredible.

It's incredible. I've never even heard of anything close to that. Unbelievable, right? Yeah.

And he's just banging them out like another Iron Man, another ironman. Every single day becomes normal. Yeah.

On the same loop, like the mental drudgery of all of it as well.

You know, the same loop is good, though.

Like I use the same loop for my I mean, terrible comparison, but for my little. Are you comparing yourself to the other way around.

Yeah, but the point is, is like some people said, one piece of advice was use different routes. But I found that I used one different route and it was just it was actually distracting.

You always know what to expect. Yeah. And you can mark, you know how you like mentally. You take notes like this is how I felt last time when I crossed this intersection. And this is how I feel now.

But again, thank you to everybody who support because, like, I was really surprised and your community was like fully rallied.

Well, it's a huge accomplishment.

I'm proud of you. Proud of Jason Zambello, who also did it as well. So lots of love here for all you guys. And that's it for him. He's milers.

He has, but his whole thing is like he just shows up and does it. It's pretty impressive, which is its own form of very impressive.

I think he was worried about me after the midnight at midnight when I didn't turn up. Like he's like, what happened to him? Yeah.

All right. Well, let's take a break and we'll be back with the big story. The big story. We'll be right back.

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OK, let's get back into it. All right, and we're back at them. Yes, sir. Do you know what an NFTE is?

I do now. It's unbelievable what's happening with all of this, isn't it? It's literally unbelievable. I could not believe it when I heard about it. Right. I'm fascinated by this. I wanted to do a little bit of a deep dive. I will couch the conversation to come with a disclaimer that I am the furthest thing from an expert in the block chain or anything. So this is definitely coming from a layperson's, you know, perspective in every regard.

So to the extent that that we get anything wrong here and I'm sure that we will, you know, don't don't at me with this.

Yeah. You know, the crypto heads, you get pissed off because we've mischaracterized something here, which I'm sure we will.

Don't bother us with our own ignorance. We're aware. Yes, I'm self aware of my limitations. All right, NFTE, for people that don't know, this is all about ownership rights to at least right now, digital art, ephemera and media.

It's really one of the craziest aspects of an already insane year. And I think under maybe not underappreciated or underreported, but perhaps. Not discussed enough is the complete upending of finance that we've been seeing, not just with the insane swings of Bitcoin and crypto and all these surges, but also with the whole Robin Hood GameStop thing and the kind of crowdsourcing of energy around stock purchases, the advent of of sparks, which are special purpose acquisition companies that are like the new hot thing and M&A.

We don't need to get into all of that. But like, there's a lot of interesting things happening. But can I say something else right now?

Like icepacks, like there was literally the Jay-Z story about how he started his own spac and all the stars are doing it. And then immediately it's wiped off the front pages of business when the NFTE story breaks, like you're not even hearing about him anymore.

There's a lot of SPAC activity, though, and I only know the you know, the very surface level of like what all of that entails. But we're going to talk about NFTE today.

What is it, NFTE? So NFTE is it's funny. I was riding bikes with a buddy of mine the other day who's a big private equity guy.

And I was like, let's talk about NFTE. I started talking and he was like, I don't know what that is. And I'm like, you're a money guy. Like, it's amazing. Like this finance guy. This was like news to him, which made me more enthusiastic about talking about it today, because I think there's a lot of people that really have either never heard of this or only caught, you know, a headline about crazy price that was paid for a piece of digital art.

So and NFTE, NFTE stands for Non-factual Token. It's an asset verified using block chain technology in which a network of computers records transactions and gives buyers proof of authenticity and ownership. The current boom is mostly for digital assets like images, gifs, songs, videos, and it's different from crypto in that crypto is fungible.

You can use it as a mode of you can use it as a currency, as a as a method of exchange. But in NFTE cannot be traded at equivalency because it's unique.

It's one of one.

And in diving into the history of all of this, I mean, I you know, I don't know about you, but the first time that I came across an attempt was watching.

Feels good, man. When it got to the rare Pepi's thing. And I was like, what is this?

I didn't quite put it together there. And then and then it jumps to this story with people which we'll get into. But like, that's when they kind of first hit my face. But now now that you mention it, yes. We heard about it and feels good, man, but I just didn't think about it.

And I thought, like, well, that's got to be the craziest, most fringe thing ever. And in the period of time in between that documentary and now, like, it's become a completely different can of worms.

Now, Matt, should should should drop.

I think it's like those guys did post something. I wish I looked at it before we were talking today, but they posted something on Instagram about how somebody, you know, somebody did and then left around something related to Pepé and it got it garnered an amount of money that would have financed their entire movie.

That but Matt should make all of his artwork, even the print that he gave to the studio here to us that should definitely be in NFTE.

Well, here it is rare Pepé most important NFTE in art history. I'm looking at it right now and it sold for three hundred twenty grand.

Wow. Yeah.

So real money is getting exchanged for these things and diving into the history of all of this. Like all things internet, of course it started with cats because everything important about the internet begins with cats and ends with it's going to end with guys with cats.

Right.

So the technology has been around since the mid 2010s, but it didn't hit the mainstream until around 2000, 2017 with Crypto Kitties, which was a site that allowed people to buy and breed, quote unquote, breed limited edition.

Digital cats do currency. Right. Which sounds so weird, but fast forward to now. And Christie's is auctioning people's, you know, piece of piece of art.

And it goes for how much should it go for 63, sixty nine point sixty nine million dollars.

Yeah. And I was trying to wrap my head around what that means, like what exactly is being conveyed in terms of ownership. What's interesting is there is no acquisition of trademark or copyright or even sole ownership. It's really bragging rights and knowledge that your copy, if you purchase something, is the quote unquote authentic one, which is a mindbender given that these works don't exist in the three dimensional world. Right. These are digital works that are easily replicated.

Like you could just take that jpeg and copy it a bazillion times, slide it on. Your desktop, but it's the idea that this is the authentic one and it's locked on the block chain and you're the one who has the certificate of authenticity or ownership of that.

The Internet is the museum. The art is in the in the museum of the Internet. And everyone can see it because they're also on the at the museum. But you're the one that owns it. Right. Right. Which is still weird.

It's still. Yeah. It's like it bends the noodle completely. Yeah. Like why. Right. Right.

What's also interesting is that you can then sell portions of it like a stock you could sell like a percentage of ownership of your NFTE, OK, to a variety of people.

So it becomes like. Like the mortgage? Well, yeah, I mean, it becomes a financial asset in a very interesting way, I think. Yeah. And and, you know, as a 54 year old man trying to wrap his head around this, it's very easy to be dismissive or cynical or just think this is all insanity. But when you think about it. This is the future, and I think it portends much more than a change in how we think about the art world, it really brings up a broader conversation about what ownership means in the digital age, as we, you know, slowly progress towards this matrix like existence exacerbated, of course, by the pandemic where we're all at home and we're living our lives more and more online than ever.

Right.

So rather than, you know, going to the fancy store and buying a wristwatch, that's going to impress your friends. The version of the digital version of that is owning a piece of artwork on the block chain, right, because in the digital world, because we're all interacting digitally now.

Right. And it's interesting that you're saying that. It's like because if it's if it if it changes the way. Like, would you rather own a piece of a multinational company or some digital art piece and trade that as your commodity, you know, like it changes what commodities are to it actually democratizes art ownership in ways if they're going to start taking away pieces of the 69 million dollar thing and you can own a piece of it. Right. And because I don't think you can do that with with art on a wall anymore or before, I don't know.

I think it's interesting. It's. At the same time, it's kind of like the epitome of manufactured need, but that's what all consumer goods are on some level.

Like if you look at like look at look at the companies that are thriving, particularly during the pandemic, and they're the ones that are very good at manufacturing demand by by sort of messaging around limited supply, like a sneaker drop.

Right, right. Like like the sneaker that goes for 500 dollars because it's a limited run cost the same to manufacture as the one that's at the outlet store. It's like five dollars of plastic or whatever. And, you know, it's a great person.

And yet one is lauded and coveted and the other one is is, you know, basically considered, you know, not valuable at all. Why is that? It's all imagined, right?

Like it's like baseball card values, right? It's all.

But baseball cards are limited because there's only there's only so many players. Right. Guys like the Honus Wagner card, which is the most valuable card. He only allowed a certain amount to be printed because he didn't want to do business with a cigarette. Right. And so so he and so because of that, it was this need that was created by the moment. And there's only a few. And in all of the cases, there's so many, but only a few survive because people throw them away.

And so then it becomes collectible or like the same idea with with what's called the action figures and that kind of market.

Right.

And in sneakers, similar idea. But in the digital landscape, there's no limitation on supply. Right. Right. It could be anything.

And right now all the attention is around art and in particular, this work by this artist called People. He's got this piece called The First 5000 Days. It's a collage of 5000 images that he created, like using some kind of computer. He's like a digital artist. Each one of these little images that are a composite of this larger work are all very interesting in their own right. Christi's the, you know, white shoe auction house auctioned off. It's not the first time that they've auctioned off and NFTE, but it's definitely the the the biggest one that they've done.

And this thing went for sixty nine point three million. It was purchased using Ethereum, which is the preferred crypto for NFTE in this NFTE like economy.

By I mean, it just gets weirder by a guy called Meta Chavannes. Like we don't even know his real name. Right. He claims that he got it at a steal.

Right. And that makes people the third highest selling artist alive. Right.

And no one had ever heard of people. Right. So, like I mean, street artists did there were people in the digital art world knew who he was. But it's not like Jackson Pollock or Picasso.

No Picasso.

Yeah, because they never did that well on one piece that he missed the NFTE boom. Yeah.

You know, I think you're you've hit the nail on the head with the pandemic playing into this, because our galleries are closed, art dealers didn't know what to do. Artists didn't have an outlet to sell their wares in any way and has created a way for digital artists to sell something without having to put it in a gallery and not only sell something would sell something at such a high price point that they never had before. And so now everyone's look, pepé the frog, everyone's going for it because it's a gold rush.

There's one aspect to it that is getting a little bit of buzz, but not as much as like the big price price tags, something I never knew was native to block chain and all cryptocurrency. But just the fact that there is a huge carbon footprint associated with block chain.

Right. Which I never knew about really until I started looking into this.

Basically, the idea of mining, which is what you do when you have when you're creating cryptocurrency or any sort of block chain is you have a huge amount of computer power being sucked by this network of computers that are running millions and millions of crypto graphs, which is basically checking each block in the chain for sequencing errors, making sure they're all original and minting a transaction, a transaction meaning here's this new string of letters and numbers that is completely unique. Block chain is is being used not just in art and in currency.

It's been used. There's people who want to use it for voting. There's people who want to use it for or are it is being used in fish, in fisheries right now to be able to authenticate where certain harvest is coming from, in which fishery I know that's happening. So, you know, the fact that it's being used all this way and there is a carbon footprint is interesting. Ethereum is really bad. It's not the worst of the crypto currencies, but it's really bad when it comes to its carbon footprint.

And a Turkish digital artist named Memmo Acton, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly with a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence.

So a pretty smart dude, right?

He started seeing everything in the NFTE and he was excited about it like everybody else. And then he started looking into the crypto carbon footprint. And what he found out was a single NFTE transaction demands the same amount of energy an average European Union household would need for an entire month.

Right.

The average NFTE. So that's going to that's going to run the gamut, of course. But right. But the the the main point just being that, like, there's a huge carbon footprint here and it just seems like, oh, it's all happening digitally. Right.

And what we don't see is what's powering this whole thing, which, well, demands a tremendous amount of energy and computing power.

Right. And the sum of all these 18000, 189 NFTE has consumed an average EU residents electricity consumption of 2000 years. Mm hmm. Using a laptop for fifty four thousand years, boiling a kettle 78 million times. I mean, just crazy. This is all from memos. Great, great. Medium post. There's another artist who a French artist who became a climate activist. His name is John Le Mersea is and he's based out of Belgium. And he has been an artist for a long time.

Digital artists has had has his own studio in Belgium. And but when he became a climate activists, he uses art to kind of highlight issues with climate, and yet he drops some mufti's. And he was approached by Memmo and explained what was happening and how it kind of impact, because he's he's taken a studio and he's done a lot of work on that studio to make it as energy efficient as possible. And he found out that his first NFTE drop can see more energy in 10 seconds than his studio had in almost two years.

Wow. So, like, it's a crazy amount of energy. Yeah.

Who knew for something that doesn't exist in the real world or something that doesn't. Yeah.

That's not just bends the noodle even further to even like appreciate or understand that. That just because something is online, like we think it's just there's there's a seamlessness to it. Yeah. And there's no kind of real world repercussions to it, but there's real world repercussions.

But there's no real world thing. Right. Right. Yeah, exactly. Which is even weirder.

It's what I do know that that a theory is, is is working or planning to cut this absurd energy consumption with plans to reduce it by 99 percent. And I don't know enough about block chain to know how that would be accomplished or how realistic that is.

I would suspect, though, with with advances in technology and and creating greater scale, that they will figure this out at some point. Do you have a sense of where things stand with that?

So basically the push back from 3M and Superieure, which is one of the platforms where you can buy these assets, is that, you know, if you read that, you're assuming that there's no carbon footprint associated with regular dealing, which there is with, you know, miles of travel and airfare and all that. But in reality, that still would pale in comparison to what's happening.

Ethereum has a new software they've been working on. I think it's called the 2.0. They want to they want to cut their carbon footprint. This new software will allow them to do that. It's not out yet. There's no there's no you know, two years ago they were we were told it was happening and now it's two years now. Now it's two years away from being two years away, which is probably where it stands. So, yeah, I don't I'm not an expert in that.

I can't really say when it'll be available, but they're not saying it's coming around the corner. So they're saying they're working on it, right? Yeah. Hopefully they'll figure that out.

And the idea is if it's scale's, it should be able to be right out.

But that's like the excuse we use for a lot of things as human beings. It's, you know, yes, it's a problem now, but when it scales, it's going to be a lot easier.

This is something I talked about with Alex on the podcast the other day. That's an argument that comes up. To poo poo renewables, right, because when you have a renewable, you still have to sort of supplant the old technology and there's going to be, you know, a carbon footprint to that that's going to exceed what it will eventually become if you just continue to push it forward. So that's part of the evolution as well. Yeah, it's like a transaction cost that's built into it.

I don't know. This is what they say. That's what it's about. You know, the super people are saying that same thing is that, like, people are using the climate deal as an excuse to not change the world. But my question would be, do you know how this world changes from here? Because what happens is. It's the unintentional consequences of good intentions, like I'm not saying the intention is to ruin the environment, I'm saying it's an unintended consequence of something that they think is great for the world.

Right. And that is like basically the recipe for a lot of disasters that we've had. So, you know, the idea of thinking 100 years down the line is not something that's happening in Silicon Valley. Yeah, right. And never has an America, really, since, you know, the native cultures are kind of subjugated because, you know, thinking what happens after you're gone three generations, seven generations later, seven generations, that's something that we don't do.

Would be nice to start doing that, considering where we're at in the environment and climate crisis and.

The the energy around NFTE has been in the context of of art and the art world, but I think what's more interesting, that's just like NFTE 1.0, which is where we're at right now with pieces being auctioned.

There's all these sites where you can call it minting, like you can upload your work and then hold it out for sale or auction.

All these sites like Foundation Foundation DOT app, but we're also seeing Twitter posts being turned into NFTE.

Jack Dorsey is turned his first tweet into an NFTE, and it's at like 2.5 million for charity. Logan Paul did a run of like collectible cards, you know, and musicians, Dead Mouse, Grime, Steve Aoki, Kings of Leon Threlfall.

This guy, like, got eleven point seven million on NFTE related to, like an old album where he was also providing access to new music and and like a vinyl version of some of his work.

So I think that we're going to see it. Expand into other areas of creative expression beyond just like digital visual arts.

So like the first episode of the original podcast, I think why it's funny because I thought about that, like Kevin Rose just launched a new podcast called Modern Finance, which is all about like Krypto and SFD. And he made that initial episode and Nfld and I thought it would be cool. Maybe I should make the very first episode of this podcast and NFTE. The environmental considerations that get packed into that are probably going to prevent me from doing that right now.

But it would be cool, right, just to experiment and see what would happen. I really want to understand the environment implications of that before I do that.

But I think where we're going to see value is in artists or creators who create an NFTE that isn't just the thing itself, but also packed into it. Are all these other kind of benefits. Like if you're a band or a musician, if you purchase this limited run of NFTE, you also get a backstage pass or you get you know, you'll you'll get the you'll get access to the new music first or all these other things that can be built into the block chain.

Because part of what the benefit of the block chain is, is you can create these contracts. Right. That that work in lockstep with technology. So when when X happens, then Y gets this. And as we see this kind of ecosystem become more robust and mature, I think the the broader implications on culture beyond just this painting, you know, this digital work of art sold for this this much is going to be impacting all of us. And I think.

To kind of telescope out even more. It's an interesting philosophical exploration of what ownership means, and we were talking about supply and demand, like how do we think about the material world and the digital world in terms of our relationship to it? And this is bringing up a new way of seeing all of that. And I find that to be like endlessly fascinating. I mean, there this there are these guys called Bernt Banksy that own Banksy paintings, at least one of them, and like burned the banks, like scanned a work of Banksy, burned the original and then minted the scan as an NFTE and sold it for like three times the value of the actual original physical, three dimensional piece of art.

So what does that tell you about how we think about ownership and value? What does it tell you?

Well, I think that it's changing.

I think that we're I think it's I think that it is an indication that we are inching closer and closer to the Matrix, like we're entering into this liminal space between the material world and the digital world, where we're grappling with with, you know, how we want to live our lives.

Are we living them here in the here and now and the tactile world, or are we living them as avatars in this digital space? And the pandemic has accelerated something that I think was an inevitability. But the fact that we're seeing more people value these things in the digital space more than they value things in the real world is a very interesting concept.

It's fascinating because, like, really, in the end, you and I can still go and see these same things online with a click of the mouse. Right, and but the argument is you can see you can do that with the Mona Lisa as well, where you have to go to live. Well, yeah, but you can see a jpeg of it, right?

Like, why would you why do people line up in front of the Mona Lisa and take a photo of it? Leonardo Da Vinci's charisma is what it is. You know what I mean? Like like there's plenty of photos of it. It's it's.

Yeah, what really? And why would you want. Why would you want to own that painting when there are images of it and you could you can eat with one click. You can find you can enjoy an image of. Right.

Yeah. Like like what.

How is this different. It's like our art is freighted with history and stories. Right. So we're told, we're told things about where a piece of art comes from and who made it. And all that together creates a certain amount of value. Right. Plus the rarity aspect of it. And I guess the same thing is true in the digital world. We're just I just have a hard time like his. You can also get NAFT of sports highlights and they're selling for a lot of money, like a lot of money, like millions of dollars in NBA highlights.

Right. The NBA. So you can own a highlight, like a poster like I used to put a Michael Jordan poster on my wall. I not now own a Michael Jordan highlight in NFTE, but what is that like?

I am going what is the value of being the original certified authentic owner of that clip? In my in my estimation, it's zero like that does nothing for me in my life like but but, you know, I could the argument and I'm just saying is from a perspective of of of being a devil's advocate.

How is that different from from owning the Mona Lisa? When it's a ubiquitous image. It's a good question. It goes back to feeling an ego more than anything else, right? The ownership ego. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's also. A crypto punk sensibility that's at play here, too, like let's blow up the system and and we're going to you know, you know, Mr. Etherial billionaire is going to buy this digital work for an insane amount of money as a as like a as like an F you to everything you ever thought about the art world.

Right. Because he can. And that's very punk rock. It is, and there's something cool about that. Also, like, let's blow up the system and just reimagine this entire structure. It's all online and digital and it's untaxable because that's the idea is like a block chain. And that's why it's it's good is that it's on hackable. Right. Right.

You can't hack it, but but it's also important to understand that this is very early days and there's no question that this is like a crazy bubble. It's like Internet 1.0. Right. Like this is going to blow up. There's some people that are going to make a lot of money and there's going to be a lot of people that are going to lose a lot of money. And this will sort itself out and over time mature into a more kind of robust ecosystem.

But right now, I find it to be very like if you were going to spend an insane amount of money on a digital work of art right now like that is so risky and crazy risky.

Goeden wrote about this. I don't know if you saw his piece yet. He's basically saying the title is NFTE are a Dangerous Trap, which is basically walking you through this bubble idea.

Yeah, he thinks the bubble and there's another aspect of it that's dangerous and that even though the net itself will be certified as one of one, you actually don't know if the seller is the creator. So there's a rights aspect to it because it's the it's what's lagging behind is the authenticity of the seller. Right. Because right now people are using, you know, avatars and manhandles and you don't know.

But I do think what if they're if there's another thing to celebrate about all of this? It's the empowerment of the creator. Right. Like the artist no longer has to be hat in hand. It puts the creator of artistic works in more of control over the destiny of the work that they create. Yes. And it allows them to get value for it. And, you know, this can be anything like you could write a series of short stories or a book and do a limited run as NFTE like there's so many different variations on this that I think we're going to start seeing.

So this is just the very beginning. I think it's only going to continue to get more and more fascinating.

So like the on the road scroll is NFTE on the road. You know, there was a famous Jack Kerouac. Glued or taped pages together so that when he was riding high on Bensedrine, his first draft of On the road, it like came spooling out of him and in a matter of like, you know, a couple of weeks or something. And he had it on a scroll so that he never had to add type paper to his typewriter and he just kept going, kept going in that scroll, ended up getting edited down over the course of months or over a year, and it became the manuscript.

But that scroll itself was and the scroll itself was republished eventually, but it was bought by a collector. The guy who owns the Indianapolis Colts bought it.

And he and the scroll has all the characters as the people who they really were, Jack and Neil Cassidy, all those. And and so that scroll is the original because it's one of one. Right.

But that's the antithesis of what we're talking about. Right. Because that is like a like a relic that exists in the real world.

But you were saying like like an author could do that with his first manuscript, could could mentor anything like an author right now, could just say, I'm not going to publish my book with a traditional publisher.

I'm going to I'm going to make it an NFTE.

And whoever wants to buy it can buy it, and then if you're what if Malcolm Gladwell said, I'm my next book is going to be announced and then on pub day, he uploads it, he mints it on one of these sites, and then that's that's it. That's the I mean, it's a it's it exists in the digital world.

So you can copy it. Right. But who, you know, would that at auction, would that go for a lot of money? I bet it would.

Just one of one just publish it. One copy of his book. Yeah. And then let it replicate out. Yeah. And then let it replicate out and see what would happen. You still have the rights to. Yeah. Because he's not transferring copyright.

OK, so it doesn't give the the owner, the buyer permission to replicate it, just have only a certification that they have the authentic original copy of this.

Right. Even though originality is like the wrong word because something that exists in ones and zeros that can be duplicated. With, you know, absolute precision begs the question of what original means to begin with.

I mean, do you think that you are bending? What do you think?

Do you think do you think if Keroack was around now that he would be in a krypto? Ph.D.. I know, I know, I know. All right, maybe we've talked enough about this for now anyway, I'm going to be keeping an eye on this.

I think it's super interesting.

It just came up with my conversation with with Kevin Roose, too, because he was like, I want to learn more about this. I want to write about this. I was like, you should write. You should write a book about NFTE and release it as an NFTE, and it would be like this weird Charlie Kaufman adaptation, like Medda experiment, I was into it.

I don't know, maybe we'll see, you know, it does show, like we had talked about on the phone earlier, which is like it's the cleaving of culture from you're right about that. Like the crowbar of the digital world is cleaving culture from the from the original owners.

So the creators but creators narrowly defined, like the creators that choose certain new mediums are the beneficiaries. And then people like your buddy, the hedge fund or my friend the screenwriter or whoever these people who are used to things the way they used to be and all of a sudden they don't even know, you know, cutie pie on YouTube is the most powerful person in media or whatever or or Joe Rogan is in podcast.

And when they get hip to it, that train has already left the station and they're going to do everything that that is in their power to hold hold on to the reigns of, you know, the traditional mechanisms, because all of this is a threat to business as usual. Right. And that's frightening. If you're like when I see Christi's doing what they just did with people, like they're trying to be current and modern with where all of this is going.

But if you're, you know, the competitor stodgy auction house and you're like NFTE, that's bullshit. We're not doing that. You're going to get pushed out and antiquated pretty quickly because this is where culture is heading. And the fact that this has been around for 10 years, it's now hitting. This is really interesting and strange inflection point. But the block chain is not going away and it's going to continue to revolutionize so many of it's not just crypto and it's not just art.

Like it's going to it's going to have massive implications on how we do pretty much everything.

Yeah, it's already is in different ways. This is in this way.

It's like it still has that that whiff of individuality, individual individualism, not individuality, individualism of look, look at me, look, look what I own and which the Internet is really good at.

Right.

I know. Can you imagine having enough of a theorem lying around that you could just shed 69 million dollars worth of it for a piece of digital art? I mean, how much how much a theorem does metacognition have? More.

You can do that, right? Well, let's just say less now, because, you know, if you were hoarding crypto way back in the day, like the amount of money that that a lot of these people have right now is absolutely bananas. Do you have crypto now? I have. I had like three or four Bitcoin years ago when I picked them up for, like under when they when it was like under a thousand. And then I was broke and I had to get rid of all of it to like, pay some bills.

But I never and I have friends way back who are always telling me, you've got it, you've got it going, you know, it's always that, like, you know, Foma meets, it's too late because now it's so high. But I think it's going to continue to go up.

I know when there was a period where we bought a little bit of Krypto and we were like, we don't want even a theory and was like, it was so high. Like you end up with like a couple of number theory or something like that. Yeah. Or percentage of Bitcoin.

Instead, we're like, now let's find the one that might pop. So we have ripple, but it hasn't popped.

And I said, well, I have other friends that spend way too much time just watching the graphs all day and trading in all these smaller cryptos and putting it into Bitcoin. And it monopolises all their time and energy.

Exactly. Anyway, I'd rather be in the ocean right where you are. OK, Boomer. Hey, Ultimate. OK, Boomer. All right, let's switch gears here.

We got we have a little news piece here that I know you wanted to share about.

Oh, yes. Just a few minutes about it. I don't know if you've been keeping tabs, but there are mass protests in Myanmar. They've been going on for quite a while. Myanmar is a country in Southeast Asia.

It borders Thailand, China, India, Bangladesh. And I've covered it quite a bit. There's been humanitarian crisis in Myanmar for generations. Basically, what happened after World War Two, you know, it was an English colony. After World War two, General Ansun tried to get all of these different ethnicities that were all part of this country called Burma at the time to to come together in a in a democratic, self-governing way.

And he got all these different warring militias and ethnicities to come together and do it with the with with the majority German population. And then he was murdered right on the eve of the constitution kind of happening. And ever since then, the military has controlled the country in in various degrees and for for much of our lifetimes. It's been a straight up military dictatorship. I've covered it in that these the same military has has been running people off their native lands and exploiting the natural resources for private gain.

And when I mean private gain, I mean, they're actually take the generals are actually taking money and just filling their bank accounts with it.

And, you know, the the crisis. Anyway, so fast forward to 2007, 2008, there was a big uprising on San Suu Kyi was under house arrest at the time, and she was the freedom fighter. And and there was there were mass protests then. But they were they were stomped down pretty quickly by the military government. But a few years later, they decided to allow for voting again. And so they've allowed the the political parties to engage in debate.

And 25 percent, I believe, of the parliamentary seats are reserved for the military. But but everyone else is competing in voting. And that was the way it was announced on Suu Kyi. This hero was elected president. She's been president ever since then.

But then on February 1st, after another landslide victory for the NLD National League of Democracy, which is Suu Kyi s party, she was arrested along with other leaders, NLD and the military took over again for the first time in years. And and basically they've been using all sorts of cybersecurity technology to crack down on pro-democracy activists and party leaders. And people have taken to the streets ever since February. First and at first, there was tolerance of these peaceful protests.

But then rubber bullets came out, tear gas came out, and now they're literally shooting into crowds. And dozens of people have been murdered by security forces. And that's where it's at right now.

What is America's foreign policy stance towards Myanmar?

So for years, when it with the military who was in charge and Suu Kyi was under house arrest for, you know, shoot and San Suu Kyi is the daughter of General Aung San. And so she was this hero that came that rose up at different times to speak truth to power. She became this. She won the Nobel Peace Prize as president. She's been she's had her own problems because of the what's been happening in in with the why MySpace thing on the Rohingya population.

She was in power when the the Myanmar military was running the Rohingya off their land and she didn't speak up for the Rohingya at all. And all of a sudden, people were calling for her Nobel Prize back.

So she's kind of the she sided with the military in certain ways.

And she was doing that, I think, to preserve peaceful power sharing. But it didn't work. So not only did she sell her soul, but then she ends up getting under house arrest. And so for years when she was under house arrest, the first time, the it was a sanctions policy. So the the we sanctioned the Myanmar. We weren't helping them whatsoever. We were helping with some humanitarian stuff in the the ethnic states that were at war because there was an active war like these.

There are militias and second stage or Korean state where I visited many times, going to see displaced people and they're displaced people's camps spending time with with rebel military. There was active war and there was some aid. But but for largely our stance with the Myanmar government was, you know, sanctions. And then when Obama was in power and they gave power back to the people at in various degrees, at first it was like fifty percent of the parliamentary seats and it was twenty five percent.

You know, the Obama was engaging and not just Obama, but Europe to Europe started engaging with Myanmar. Myanmar's economy was growing. And it was actually a really vibrant place to be because the people are wonderful and they want to engage and they want to grow and they just they just want freedom. And now it looks like it's coming back to where it used to be, where certain people get rich and everyone else suffers.

And what is the U.N. doing anything about this right now? Everyone's sitting on their hands, like what can you do short of invading? You know, like what can you do? And we never did invade because China has interests there. You know, for the U.N. to come up with a peacekeeping force, you need to get the U.N. Security Council needs to vote in favor. And any one dissenting vote kills the resolution so that that means China. China does business with Burma, Myanmar and China is not alone.

Right. But yeah.

So how does this play out, in your estimation? It's a good question.

I'm kind of flagging it just so people kind of pay attention to what's happening, you know, thanks to right now at first after the coup. And I think it's still happening. The news got cut off, cable got cut off, Internet access was was spotty. You have to find it in all of Yangon, the main major city. There was one hotel that an Internet, Internet access for a little bit. You know, I don't know. I've been thinking of the business owners there and what they're going through and what they're thinking.

Like, imagine sinking your life savings into a business there. You can't leave because there's no money to live with. Yeah.

Is there is there an egress, though? Are there refugees that are fleeing?

No, I have I have not heard of mass refugees fleeing yet, but. But if they do, it'll be the Thailand. Border. That's how I always accessed it, you know, I would go to Thailand and then get into the ethnic provinces from there, which a lot of journalists do, and you can do it legally.

So we'll see. There's already refugee camps on the timeline board that have stood for 20, 30 years, but people have left them and gone back and started businesses and done well. But now it's all coming back around in those same villages that people went back to are getting overrun by military again now. Right. All right, well, we'll keep an eye on this. Yeah, sorry, I feel like I'm talking too loud. I think you're all right.

OK, Jason, I'll modulate you.

You'll end up sounding like.

But let's do some listener questions. Let's do it. Hey, guys, this is Wolf from Portland, Oregon, had a question. I was vegan for a while, was inspired by refugees, first started the podcast, read your memoir and all that, and did my first marathon about seven years ago after my father passed away. And his life happens, you kind of just lose all motivation and something that you can stop running completely. And I'm a lot heavier than I used to be.

And I just wanted to know for heavier folks who are trying to get back into a game we just started. It's not a lot of information out there of how to do it. It's it's hard to ego check yourself and know that you can't do what you once used to do. I just wanted to know if you guys had any advice on starting over for folks who have kind of lost it all and are trying to grasp the reality of where we're at and where we once were and just the mind game that that plays sometimes.

Feel free to play this clip. Thank you guys so much. I love listening to you guys. Big fan.

Thanks for your question, Will. It's a good question. I think it's a question that a lot of people can relate to. And I have a few thoughts on this. I mean, first of all, the only day better than yesterday to begin something like this is today. Right. And the good news is you've done it before, so you actually already know what to do. You mentioned that there's not a lot of information out there on how to do it.

I disagree. I think there's plenty of information. I don't think that were, you know, thirsting for information that doesn't exist on how to, you know, make this kind of trans transformation. So information, in my opinion, you know, you did this before you read my book. You went vegan. You ran a marathon. Like information is not your malfunction. Action is your problem. And I think that you're a victim of your own kind of shame at the moment.

So my suggestion is to find a way to bury that shame spiral and to put an end to the pity party and just begin by putting one foot in front of the other. What is right in front of you to do right now? Can you go out the door and go for a walk? What is your next meal going to be? And I think with that, with those tiny steps, you start to create a little bit of momentum and there's huge power in momentum.

If you can create just the tiniest positive change, it's a little bit different from your daily ammo that will help free you from this position that you're in right now, which is being stuck in a negative cycle. So. The focus should be on. What can you do right now, you can't run a marathon, you haven't been vegan for a while, you put on a bunch of weight, you can go for a walk, you can eat a salad, and you can celebrate those tiny wins until you slowly get more emotionally connected to this arc of improvement.

And with that, the path will present itself. Right.

You don't need somebody to deliver you an information packet with your plan for the next two years. What you need to do is to take action. And I think. At odds with that right now, this enemy that you're facing is comparing yourself to this person that you were seven years ago, comparison is the thief of joy. So stop comparing yourself to your past self or to other people. It's this idea of not training where you think you should be.

Like if you go out for a jog and you get tired after a block and you feel like you have to walk and then you're beating yourself up. Because I used to run a marathon and look at how much weight I put on. It's not about that. It's not about training where you think you should be. It's about accepting and embracing where you are right now and doing what you are capable of doing, because that's the only way that you get anything done or make any progress.

So. You have everything you need and I think. You need to disabuse yourself of this idea that you're going to stay in your status quo until you experience some windfall of motivation like you're waiting to be motivated, like you've said, I just don't feel motivated. I don't have any motivation. And I think when you're in that mindset, you're waiting to feel motivated to do something. And that's not. How it works, like that's in fact, a trap, you don't need to be motivated to make change, you just need to do like mood follows action, which is what I always say.

Right. So a day at a time, just like they say in 12 step, like, what can you do today? Can you eat a little bit better? Can you move your body in a way that you didn't yesterday? Can your head hit the pillow with a little bit more self-esteem because you exercise some self care and some self love by moving the needle ever so slightly in the right direction? And when you start to string some days together of doing just that.

It doesn't take long before you wake up a little bit more excited for that walk that turns into a jog that eventually over time will turn into a run and just might bring you back to the starting line of of another marathon. I love it. It's reminds me of like, you know, baseball season around the corner reminds me of, like, those hitters that are in a slump. What do they do is they just focus on their approach to each at bat because you can't control getting a hit, you know, because there's so many bad bounces or the way the ball, you know, you just don't know.

Balls and strikes are called differently every day. But can you change your approach to each at bat and then start stringing some good ones together? And then eventually you start seeing a couple of hits and the momentum turns and your confidence turns?

Yeah, I mean, I just can't stress the importance of tiny little actions, like if if if Will's running shoes are are in the closet, pull them out of the closet and put them in the hallway. Like if all you did was that, well, that's more than you did yesterday.

Next time, put them next to your bed the next day. Like, why don't you put them on when you sit up in the morning and, like, you know, walk to your front door, like, what can what can you do? And then do those tiny things that are very digestible and doable countermoves, wins and build on that momentum?

That's great advice. And the fact that you're listening will shows that you're still your head, right? The game, of course. Yeah. All right.

We're going to Europe for this one here tonight. This is Tanya from Lucerne, Switzerland. I love to hear your thoughts on this topic. So I've been living composed for over five years. I try to mostly buy things like in hand. I always pop the question if I want to buy something that I really need. And I do this partly because I'm really concerned for our planet's future and its resources, but also because I have a one year old kid and I really want him to grow up living consciously and making deliberate choices.

So I try really hard to remind myself that I'm in control only of myself. I often struggle with older people from other generations who live very frivolously with, like, seemingly little concern about the impact they are having on the planet. I know that grandparents can have a massive influence on their grandchildren. So have you found good talking points to address this, or do you just try to not think about it too much and let people live how they want to?

Thanks so much. Yes, it's OK for you to play this on the podcast. Thanks, guys. Take care. Tanya from Lucerna. Yes.

Lucerna in the house. Isn't that where they make the butter that they make? The bowl is a shout out Lucerna.

So thanks for your question. This is tricky.

Hmm. I think it's important to, of course, make the best choices that are in alignment with your values.

And that's what Tanya's doing. She's conscientious about her needs and her wants and tries to make sure that her consumer choices are in alignment with her values. And that's something to be celebrated. And certainly that's healthy modeling for your child, because it's not about what you say. It's about it's about what you do. It's about your behavior. But I also think this question has a lot to do with controlling the control of understanding what you can control and what you can't control and really having a healthy mindset around how you calibrate all of that.

As a parent, you lead by example and action.

Again, you model this behavior for your kids.

But it's also important to not be a martyr, especially if you're part of your interest is in trying to inspire the next generation. If you're suffering, then that doesn't become an aspirational way to live your life. And ultimately that's going to set you up for your kid to just rebel saying, I don't want to live my life like that.

That doesn't look like any fun. Right. I want to thrive. And, you know, why was I deprived of all these things? I'm going to go out into the world and get that my kids are always going to differentiate in that way and they're going to want to explore the opposite of what they've been presented with. So you have to be mindful about that a little bit. And I think it's important to not overly in an unhealthy way attach to how your child's moral compass will evolve.

And I say that as a parent of four and two teenagers right now, like I've experienced a variety of permutations on this, everything from we love the way that you parented us and we want to model our own value system based upon how we were raised to I don't want anything to do with this.

Let me get that vegan burger out of here. And a lot of that just has to do with how they come out of the womb, you know, like but my point being that the only Hadlock change, you only have so much control over these things, right? Yeah, exactly.

The ultimate block chain DNA. And I guess I would also say that I can appreciate how it can at times feel dispiriting, that perhaps you feel like you're not making enough of a difference, like you make these small choices in your life. But how much is this really moving the needle? But I do think they hold symbolic power and they do model for other people in your orbit, like what's important to you.

And it sends the message out that this is something of value to you and perhaps would be of value to other people, but because there's so little we can control in the kind of climate trajectory of our planet, there are other ways that you can contribute through activism or charity or organizing, because ultimately, the real change, the big change is going to have to be systemic and that's going to come through legislative and regulatory changes, not by a few isolated people sacrificing all of their happiness and well-being on the altar of like martyred sacrifice.

So I think it's important to thinking about all of this, to to reframe how you approach the mindset of your parents, I assume your parents, your child's grandparents, this idea that you're going to change their minds or that I think it's in-laws.

Is it in law? I'm OK. I'm in laws setting in laws. We don't know we don't know what's going on in Lucerna.

Yeah. Is it Buttar or in-laws?

I think it's in laws. You know, that's you're setting yourself up for for a losing battle there. Like these people are set in their ways. It's very unlikely that you're going to get them to see things differently. And you don't want to leave yourself, you know, frustrated. And irreparably eroding a relationship that is perhaps healthy in other ways, I think that you have the opportunity as your child gets older to contextualize, you know, where your grandparents are coming from and their life experience, you know, for your child as he gets older.

But in the meantime, you know, all I have is like my own kind of approach to all of this, which is less about being in the business of trying to change other people's minds and more about just being a lighthouse. Like if you could just be a beacon of positive energy and positive change and living your life in accordance with your values, that's much more attractive. And I also think magnetic and powerful than bitching about how other people, you know, don't get it.

No doubt you have in-laws. I have.

I did a little research. Really. I don't really I have my my wife is like Jason Bourne. She comes from nowhere. Really interesting. She's kind of she's got a past.

So, no, we're not really super. We do have I do have in-laws, but it's not like it's a close thing. They're all in Australia. But she has in-laws. I'll tell you that. My wife has in-laws.

Right. So maybe she should be sitting here. No. You know, I think and she's vegan, but, you know, it's different. Like, my my parents aren't trying to yet feed. You know, he's obviously still nursing and he's just getting into people food. And and so at some point he'll be spoiled with ice cream and things that she won't feed him in that exact way, I'm sure.

But that's not really on our on our plate.

I think this is interesting. I think you made a really good point in that all the people I know involved in environmental activism from a consumer perspective, like the marine plastic pollution, people like the real professionals, five gyres and other organizations like that, they will tell you the fight is upstream. It's not about, you know, learning how to do everything with reuseable. It's not about like you can't erase all plastic from your life. It's about stopping the production of future plastic, stopping those plastic plants exactly like you were saying.

The fight, the changing of the world is upstream.

It's not necessarily in your daily life. Now, on the other hand, I can see how having a certain ethos is a lifestyle in itself and it can actually be a confidence booster for you. But you're flagging that it could also be repellent for the child as the child grows jobs.

One years old, right?

It's not a problem yet, but like more will be revealed. More will be revealed. But I think those are all interesting points and great points. And, you know, the boomers are the boomers, right? What are you going to do? Boomers are going to boom, boom, boom, boom.

All right, let's go first. Let's go to Christopher from Boston. Hi, my name is Christopher Hick's.

I am currently living in Boston, Massachusetts, but I'm from Montana. But nonetheless, big fan. I'm an alcoholic and in recovery for quite a while, but nonetheless, getting the insurance bug and finding enough inspiration from your story right now. Currently training for the Fifty K Start running ultra endurance race in Big Sky, Montana. Some friends and I are racing from around the country, but my question is how to optimize training for altitude. The races actually range between 7000 up to just over 11000 feet.

But living at sea level, how is it that I could optimize my training here at sea level in order to benefit my race coming up in September? So anyways, any tips, tricks or just opinions that you have? That would be great and thank you. Good question.

Christopher, thanks for that. There's a couple of things that you can do. Some are expensive and some are free. And I'm sure you've probably already heard of these. I mean, you can, of course, purchase an altitude tent. Right, and sleep in that every night.

What is an altitude?

You haven't watched Aleksi Papacies movie? No, no, I have not tracked down.

Yeah, she she her whole bedroom is set up as an altitude tent in this movie. That's hilarious. Yeah. It's basically a pressurized tent that you can put in your bedroom and sleep in that approximates the what it's like to be at altitude by like, you know, it's a reduction in the amount of oxygen basically that acclimate to you to altitude. And then when you go out and you go out of the tent and then you train, you're obviously at sea level.

So you get this boost. So it's the back in the fourth decompression chamber, kind of sort of like that. Yeah.

And I actually don't know how expensive those things are. I just assume they're probably crazy expensive hard core endurance junkies swear by them.

Of course you could take a weekend trip to altitude and try to get, you know, some training in, you know, at 7000 feet. I don't know if that's possible, especially during a pandemic. And obviously, that's something I'm sure you've. That's occurred to you, right, at some point, so I don't know how helpful it is for me to mention that another thing that that some people have expressed positive results from is wearing a training mask, which is basically like it kind of we're all wearing masks right now, but was like a gauge on it.

And it reduces the amount of airflow that you get. I think it's just training mask dotcom, but yeah, there's running in your mask alone. Could do could you do basically.

But there is a difference between a true altitude there. It's a there's a lower oxygen content and what you're breathing, but you're not restricting air flow.

And there's something different about restricting the air flow while the oxygen ratio remains the same, that scientists have basically said this is not this is a pretty ineffective way of approximating altitude training.

There's an article on train right about this. I'll link it up in the show. Notes that basically do altitude training, mass work for endurance athletes. The central conclusion is really not so much. It might be good for mental training, though, to like feel what that feels like to have a little bit of a reduced just to sort of prepare yourself for that experience.

But short of an altitude tent or being able to train at altitude, there are certain things that you can do in training. You might want to over index a little bit more than you would ordinarily on interval training and training your training for a 50 K Trail race. It's probably, you know, a pretty Zonta approach that wouldn't require a lot of interval training or like Hill repeats high intensity stuff. But there are indications that weaving that kind of work into your daily routine, not your daily routine, your weekly routine can have some benefits and how your body's going to process altitude.

I also would suggest arriving at the event as early as possible, you know, as many days in advance as you possibly can. What would you say? Ideal while seven days, it really takes seven days to acclimate. You may not be able to go a whole week ahead of time to reap that benefit, but every day, I think, is going to be a little bit better if you can do that so that you can get used to it a little bit.

I also think you're going to have to boost your hydration and your caloric intake at altitude. Your needs are going to be different. So over indexing on hydration and carbs is going to be important. And short of all of those things, as you just go out and train on a daily basis, anticipate that the suffering you're going to experience is going to be different than what you're experiencing in in, you know, in Boston, running around, running around Massachusetts, it's going to be harder.

So just start to wrap your head mentally around that and adjust your expectations accordingly, because nothing really compares to training at altitude or racing at altitude.

So you got to let go of whatever goals you have around space and time and focus on exertion. Right. Because that's really the only metric that's important in trying to train at sea level and race at altitude.

Right. Like your whatever your Garmin says about your pace, like is meaningless because it's just going to be a lot harder and you're going to suffer.

Is your hydration 2x would you say? That's a good question. I think it's a personal thing. I wouldn't I wouldn't say to X off the bat, I think it's something that is going to be different for everybody. But just to be mindful and ahead of it, I think is going to be important because you get that lung burn when you first run at altitude, right?

It's the worst. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you feel like you're the only one who's feeling that, like there must be something wrong with me or I didn't train or this is going to be terrible. So I think just mentally, you know, preparing yourself for that is, is something that would be wise to do. And if he gets there seven days early, how many runs should he get in?

Well, I think you should go if you get there seven days early, go to the highest point that you can, because there's probably a variety in elevations, you know, once you get to the venue. So the more time that you can spend at the highest altitude possible and doing your your training leading up to the event, I think will be beneficial as well. Fair enough. Cool. All right. We did it. We done did it.

How are you doing. How you feel. I feel good, man. I feel I feel good. Man Do you feel like a podcast or. I do.

I feel like I could be NFTE right now. That's just NFTE and everybody just left me. Yeah. You could do a digital scan if it wasn't so enviromental print you if it wasn't so environmentally intensive, I would just be coming.

NFTE Well, that is the future that we're all looking at right now. Right. Especially if you read Kevin Russo's new book, Future Proof.

I can't wait to read that book. Yeah, and I might have left one breath at some point, you know. Really at odds with your environmental activism that I can't see that happening unless you buy carbon offsets. Right. You can always balance it out. The other thing about NAFTA is, is there's all these hidden costs as well, because you have to you have to pay for the computing costs.

I think so. People who sold stuff or bought stuff then get these bills that they didn't expect for because you. No, I don't know exactly.

I read something about that. I should just stop talking because I really don't know what I'm talking about. Starting off. Right, Seida, are we back here in two weeks?

Until then, you can find Adam on Twitter and on Instagram at Adam Skolnick on that rich roll. Leave us a message if you like. Your question fielded on a future edition of Roll on the Numbers. Four, two, four, two, three, five, four, six, two, six. Check out the shout outs on the episode. Page will link up tons of articles on all the stuff that we talked about today. You can find that at troll dot com again.

Please subscribe to the show on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the places and that's it. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show, Jason Carmello, for producing today's podcast, as well as audio engineering it and doing all kinds of behind the scenes stuff. Blake Curtis for videoing the show for YouTube and all the clips that we share.

Jessica Miranda for graphics, Ali Rogers on portrait's duty today. Georgia Waili for copywriting, DKA for advertising relationships and theme music by my boys Tyler Chopper and Harry Rescate. You guys, thanks for the love. See you back here in a couple of days with another awesome episode. I don't even know what we're putting up next, but it's going to be good.

I think I will be. Will it be one on one? It will be. It will be a one of one, yes. What if you just made everything that you did on the Internet and NFTE, like every tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram SANZAR, just not your entire experience. Yes, think about that. All right. I'll see you in two weeks. Piece plants. Noma's de.