Cancel Culture, Training Principles, Listener Q's & More | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] hey everybody welcome to the podcast we're back with another ama roll on edition of the show if you're new to this youtube channel hit subscribe hit that little notification bell so you can be alerted we're putting out tons of great content and i love seeing the youtube channel the version of this podcast on youtube grow and i appreciate everybody who's taken that journey with us i'm back with adam my man adam skolnick hype man podcast hype man yes journalist author adventurer swim run aficionado co-author of david goggins can't hurt me that's the bio right yeah it's good i always like it when you read it i love i love it i didn't read anything no i know it you speak it yeah um it's good to see you again good to see you i've been enjoying this i feel like we're finally hitting a groove with this trying to figure out how we want to leverage this this this type of podcast um and i think we're we're starting to narrow in on what it is that we want to do here which feels good agreed it feels great it's good to have the template and it's fun to figure out what the what where we decide to dive in it's always interesting to like figure that out especially this week which was there wasn't this you know the big news story this week um was not kind of the same as last week so we had to kind of figure out how to how to approach things yeah so the news cycle moves so quickly that even two weeks ago when we put up a show it was somewhat dated from the two days that lapsed in between recording it and putting it up the cycle has slowed a little bit but just you know a little behind the scenes for everybody who's watching or listening adam and i put together an outline and we kind of go back and forth over the course of two weeks and what was relevant seven days ago we end up mixing that and and updating it because the news moves so quickly here and again this is not a new show we're trying to laser in on topical issues that are somewhat evergreen but show up in the news cycle yeah but you know this was one of the few times we were kind of ahead on what was happening in portland and that's kind of stayed as one of the biggest stories that in the covid relapse so right um so you know instead of boring everyone on the same old topics uh we don't go there to this time right yeah so if you're new to the show uh we have a couple segments that we do some opening remarks a little bit from the news a little show and tell we take an advertiser break and then we come back with listener questions if you would like your question considered and read on air you can leave a voicemail for us at 424-235-4600 or you can leave it on our facebook group page but i'm liking these voicemails they're great and i i have to thank everybody who's called the calling it's definitely there's been an uptick in messages and and so we're seeing that and i appreciate everybody who's calling and i'm going through every single one listening to every single one and slotting them in and if we don't get to you today um we still have you in the in the in the uh can and and uh we will get to them over the course of the life of this uh ama it's cool to listen to them i think it takes a certain amount of courage and vulnerability to you know leave your voice and and your name and you know i understand some people want it to be anonymous and that's fine but uh it's it's it's cool and it makes me feel like this is a community which is the whole idea and and really the impetus behind this version of the podcast to try to uh make it a more communitarian inclusive version of what i typically do when i just interview people yeah it's a chance to interact and and to and to get into topics you could you can't you don't have time when you're talking to a hoover dr hooverman or someone like that you know you're not going to talk to him about stuff that's you know that isn't relevant no so uh this is a chance to be more generalist as you like to say to get into the into the range right of what rituals all about so we got good stuff for you guys today i want to open it up with a little update on our boy tommy rivs uh we spoke about him was it two weeks ago i think yes um at that time tommy rizz for for people that don't know is a legendary ultra runner he's beloved in the endurance community he's just a beautiful beautiful human being who is suffering from some very significant and dire health health circumstances at the moment when we last recorded this podcast he was experiencing what was being characterized at the time as quote unquote covid-like symptoms some severe respiratory distress since we recorded that in between the time in which we recorded that and it went live he went into a coma and then the family got to work trying to figure out a way to move him to a facility that could properly diagnose him because he was undiagnosed at that time he got moved to a facility in scottsdale from flagstaff where he was previously and received a diagnosis which uh is a very rare and aggressive form of lymphoma called primary pulmonary nkt cell lymphoma i understand that he is now out of that coma but um very much you know still in um a very serious uh situation he's sedated according to his brother jacob he's less inflamed his oxygen levels are improving so that's good news it feels like it's moving in the right direction and i understand that he's going to be undergoing if he hasn't already some cancer treatments and i don't know the details of that but thank you to everybody who reached out who contributed to the gofundme campaign i'm going to put a link to that again in the show notes they have raised over 433 thousand dollars which is incredible um tommy of course because he's such a big-hearted individual is asking that uh that people also consider donating to clean water for the navajo nation there's a link to that up in the gofundme for tommy and his family as well so i can link that up as well and in addition um his brother and his family organized a run with rivs which is a um you know communitarian kind of run to raise awareness and and funds for tommy and his family the idea is you pick a day between august 1st and august 9th to run hike walk whatever just move put some miles in for rivs and they also just announced an auction called the rajon auction which you can find on facebook and that's live between august 3rd and august 13th if you go to facebook.com rageonauction you can find more information there i'm going to donate a couple books for that people are just bidding on on stuff and that's another way to support him and his family amazing in the meantime if you want to stay current with his condition the best place to do that is just following his brother jacob on instagram jacob pusey p-u-z-e-y and he's posting daily updates to keep everyone apprised of how he's doing and the run with ribs is kind of like as many miles as you want or whatever you want i think it's it's like a social media thing like you put some runs in you post it you help raise awareness for him and what he's going through so heart goes out to tommy and his family hell yeah it's going to be a longer journey than even just covid yeah yeah for sure for sure but i'm glad he's been diagnosed and he's getting the treatment that he absolutely needs and deserves meanwhile on the subject of putting miles in you just put in your first 10 mile swim run the other day i did in my climate change chic gear how'd that go i went well you know i had i had um been having problems with my foot again it was like the same foot that i broke uh ages ago which without realizing it and walked on it for several months and then became a chronic condition and slowly was able to get back and and first on a treadmill and then finally running and but it's something i have to manage it's like a pain thing and so it had just come back and i was and uh i was having trouble but then i decided to give it a go and um lace them up and and go out and do a 10 i didn't think it was like 10 and a half miles um like running to swimming that's right a little bit yes eight and a little bit over two yeah two and a quarter swimming i think and around santa monica yeah so i run from my place down to the beach and then up um to the end of the bike path there by bellar bay and then swim down and then ran up a multi so i did a full rich roll running through the neighborhood in my in my uh gear and i definitely got some looks this time uh cyclists when cyclists totally decked out and lycra are giving you looks about how you look then you know you know you're you're in new territory you gotta check it out yeah the the best i found the best swim run training that's most appropriate for the courses that you find in the otillo races yeah is in and around the the bluffs of point doom like that original swim that you took me on around the point and then going up those trails i don't know if those tr they may be closed right now i don't know well no they're open i mean that's where i trained for catalina when i was doing that but um it's just such a haul for me to get out to point doom and back um if not even if i'm just diving the reef like i do um it's like four and a half to five hours and um it's just impossible but from this what i love about this is it gets me in the ocean without having to do that i'm like literally it's it's two hours two like normally if i just do a seven mile or six miler one it's like under an hour and a half and it's right from my door and so it just feels like what this sport's supposed to be about like you leave from your door right and you're back like that's the beauty of living in santa monica so for a long time i was avoiding the bay because i love doom and i love how clear it is and the water's clean and it's an mpa and i still love doom but that's now really mostly a dive site for me and if i'm doing swim workouts it's in the bay and it's cleaner than i thought i've seen white sea bass there there was a i mean there was a 14 foot shark sighting off sunset point wasn't far from there wow i didn't hear about that yeah yeah yeah um so it's it's wild out there too to a lesser degree you get dolphins coming by um but uh but yeah it's just i do love it i am addicted to it i feel so much better than just if i run eight straight like just doing that like a different thing switching gears really puts it over the top it gives i feel like it's a better workout like the full body workout yeah and you never like when you're doing it i mean you did longer segments but when you're doing these shorter segments you're never comfortable like once you settle into a rhythm then you gotta switch it up again and your heart rate's bouncing all over the place that too and that's a huge difference from triathlon or cycling where you're kind of in a certain groove and you kind of hold it for a long time yeah but now i'm i'm ready i could do a 15k could do like the the 15 now which is like what i wanted to prove to myself and i mean i could see if you just if you have enough water and food you could just keep going it's like even three mile runs i mean even multiples of them they're not that they're not that hard so yeah yeah when it when it was when i was training for the world championship version of that race at its peak i was doing my i should have been training much more in the ocean than i was i was doing it in a pool but it would be in and out and in and out like you know like for like hours and hours different yeah and like and then i think the world championship has a 12 mile run in there somewhere yeah late like like two-thirds or three or three quarters into it yeah well i was grateful for that because i just wanted to get into a rhythm uh yeah you know all the switching gears was much more challenging for me than just the plane running but correct me if i'm wrong you're just kind of winging this right it's not like you're working with a coach or you've got a plan or a program you're just like i think i'll do this today well our friend ted mcdonald helped me get ready for catalina shout out to ted yeah shout out to ted and and and that was really helpful but basically what happened is quarantine happened and uh i don't really go anywhere i go to the farmers market once a week i come here every two weeks and other than that i'll i'll either drive to point doom for a dive or i'm swimming and running right and mostly it was running at first because the the trails were closed and the beaches were closed and so i started doing these double-digit runs for the first time and uh which was great and so then when the is opened and we can get back out there i started to kind of switch it up and i still was doing one run uh a week but it was really just you know the gyms were closed everything was closed so i just started winging it and um and you know seeing if my foot could hold up and it's mostly has right yeah well i think that's a good place to talk a little bit more generally and broadly about training principles we can have a segment oh training principles because as as as proud as i am of what you've been doing i think that you would benefit from having a little bit of a program or is this an intervention right a little bit what am i doing here i don't want to rain on your parade or anything like that but in my experience when you're just out like waking up in the morning and saying oh i think i'll do this today and spontaneously going out like that's great and i think you'll first of all the most important thing is that you love what you're doing and you're enjoying it because that will you know basically give you the the the impetus and the level of emotional engagement to keep going so i'm not dissuading you from that in any way whatsoever but i do think there's wisdom in having a little bit of a plan and intentionality about what you're doing in my experience when people are just haphazardly going out and doing whatever you can reach a certain level of fitness and competence but you will inevitably reach a plateau and most people just are never able to break through that plateau to the next level because they're not intentional in what they're doing they're just going out and winging it and i think quarantine this stay in place moment that we're all experiencing you know along a spectrum because not all of us yeah exactly depending upon where you live and you know many other variables it is an opportunity to think about first principles here and get back to basics and really be mindful about what it is that you're trying to do trying to achieve trying to accomplish and because there are no races on the calendar we can all rest easy and take a breath and say i don't have this thing on the calendar right now so how can i make the most of this moment of repose and i think what i keep coming back to is the idea of not necessarily starting over but essentially building a proper foundation okay starting from the very beginning no matter how fit you are saying okay let's be a beginner here a perfect example is i see this all the time with swimmers in iron man and triathlon people who didn't grow up swimming and don't necessarily have the best technique and because they're time crunched and because the race is on the calendar and coming up in a number of weeks or months they feel so compelled to get in their volume and their wattage you know whatever like making sure that they're fit but they're overlooking their technique so they're slapping around in the pool right and it's like no if you would just stop and not worry about your fitness for a minute and hone in on your technique and spend a month just focused on proper technique you will have tremendous gains that will allow you to break through that plateau and reach the next level and i think we have that opportunity right now so i would encourage anybody and everybody who's fitness minded to think about how to build a foundation to focus on technique and this is the moment to focus on functional body strength things like core core strength and i was thinking whether you're running or you're swimming or you're on a bike or whatever discipline it is that you're that you're doing being technic technique-minded in this moment right now i think will pay off in the long run yeah sorry to interrupt but i was thinking uh in functional body strength and overall like doing the 10 miles i was thinking god if i if i because i do want to try to get to the point where i can do like the not the world championship necessarily but like the longer version of this which is what uh 40k 45k or something like that right um and to do that it's not just fueling yourself better but you do need to have beyond just the ability to run longer distance you still need to build in your long distance run of the week you still need to do all that but you also need to still be i think lifting weights and doing weight training or some sort of like functional body training 100 yeah and i can tell you that when my core is strong and my back is strong that i'm a much better athlete and i'm able to maintain that technique under duress when you start to get tired instead of turning into a wet noodle when you're running you're able to maintain your form and that's gonna obviously manifest in in better performances so with your example of trying to prepare yourself for a longer version of this swim run the focus should be on those anoint those things that are really annoying and that you don't want to do when you're time crunched like the core body strength yeah and the technique work and the drills and all those sorts of things and at the same time that building that foundation to create the ultimate aerobic engine right the most efficient aerobic engine that you can and the way that you do that and i learned this through my tutelage under chris health for many years right is to focus on zone two training so what does that mean this is something that i talked about extensively in finding ultra and i'll recap it briefly here but essentially the body has two energy systems you have your aerobic system and you have your anaerobic system your aerobic system which is the energy system that you use when you're exerting yourself at a moderate level relies on oxygen and fat for fuel you have enough fat in your body to propel you for you know umpteen hours you don't have to worry about it uh your anaerobic engine relies on glucose and essentially that's something that can get burned out in 45 minutes right you know you have to be constantly refueling yourself so your anaerobic system is what kicks in when you notch it up to that higher gear and you start exerting yourself sprint work tempo work and the like endurance sports and especially ultra endurance sports rely on the efficiency of your aerobic system and you build that very slowly over time by spending a tremendous amount or percentage of your training time in what we call zone two so there are different zones for training one through zone five zone one would be anything from a walk to a brisk walk zone two is the next level up think of it as conversational speed whether you're riding a bike or you're running it's the cadence with which you can carry on a conversation with your buddy and complete your training without feeling over exerted there are ways of calculating specifically what that zone two is for you specifically through heart rate training lactate testing and the like and we don't need to go down that rabbit hole now i talked about this in finding ultra for running for me specifically my zone two is a heart rate in the range of 130 to 145 typically for cycling it's 120 to 130. people read that in my book and then just assumed that that's applicable to everybody so then i would get people tweeting me saying i ran at a 140 heart rate i was like that's great but i don't know if that's your zone too that's my zone too everybody's going to be a little bit different and i've done lactate testing to establish those zones so what people will find even people who are fit and have been out running or cycling or whatever haphazardly like yourself for a considerable period of time and feel like they're fit they'll quickly realize once they really understand what their zone two is if you're wearing a heart rate monitor which everybody should when they're training and or at least when you're endeavoring to train intentionally you will realize that it's not very hard to tip into z3 and and oh yeah cap your heart rated zone i mean according to my watch i'm living in zone 4 humbling yeah it's very humbling yeah and it takes a very long time and a certain different kind of discipline we think of discipline as like what gets you out of bed in the morning and like the goggins-esque like hit it hard all the time but the discipline with building this aerobic engine is the discipline to hold back when you feel like you want to go harder yeah because you want to finish your workout and feel like you got something out of it or that you did something when you're training in zone 2 oftentimes you're going to complete your workout and go is that it like i want to go harder so you have to hold yourself back when you're out on a trail and you hit an incline oftentimes you have to walk in order to cap that heart rate until you develop the efficiency the proficiency and the aerobic capacity to be able to handle those inclines without going over your zone two right it's a patient's game it takes a lot of time what we have right now is time so i think now is the moment to invest in that and i can tell you from personal experience and many other people that i know in this space that this is the ultimate secret to breaking through that plateau to the next level because when you have invested in that zone two methodology of training and you've applied it over a long period of time and built your volume up very slowly you will find like in my own personal experience when i first started training for ultraman when i would go out for a run i would have to run like 10 minute pace 10 30 pace in order to not go over my zone two threshold but by the time i lined up for ultraman i could run 730 pace at the same heart rate so it's not about going out and running fast it's becoming so efficient in these motions that they are less taxing over time and that's really what you're trying to work on and what peop most people do the mistake that most people make is they spend the vast majority of their training time in what we call the gray zone and the gray zone is sort of in between your aerobic energy system and your anaerobic energy system where you are training too hard to really effectively develop your aerobic engine but not hard enough to develop the power and the speed that anaerobic training avails you right so it's it's what happens when you go out and you're just like i'm going to run for 45 minutes you know three days a week and just go as hard as i can sustain it for 45 minutes most likely you're in the gray zone and again you will develop a certain level of fitness doing that but you will quickly become stuck and never be able to improve and certainly not experience any quantum improvements until you are mindful of your training spend most of that time in the slower zone two and then pick your anaerobic moments for threshold work and tempo work a couple times a week but most of the training you're going to be doing is going to be in that zone 2 space and again it takes humility to do it because you know you got to be willing to let people who are who appear less fit than you pass you on the road or on the trail and and just say it's okay i've got a plan and that's the difference between exercising and training right the mindfulness and the intentionality that goes into it when you become uh adept at zone 2 aerobic training what you're doing is you're you're you're increasing mitochondrial density and those big muscles um and you're developing this efficiency and this aerobic capacity that once you've honed it and it took me many years to do this again it's a patient's game it's it's like a superpower but it doesn't happen quickly it's not a hack it's the opposite of a hack right it's being willing to put in the time right over and and have a long view of of what performance gains mean are you offering to coach me rich i'm not a coach i got a i got a coach for you you got ted he probably knows about this stuff he does he he does um i mean i think the first time i heard about this beside your book um because i obviously read about in the book but mark allen i think on your show talked about he won iron right in this way yeah that's how he beat dave scott right he's like completely revamping his training exactly and there were other things too like visiting the shaman and and and and becoming one with the island getting rid of the hacks that was truly his real secret i will tell you that and i believe that but we did talk at length about zone two you should go back and and listen to that interview if you didn't listen to it the first time around but he would say that you know in the in the winter when he would start training again for the following year uh ironman world championships are in october every year that he would have to walk the hills and this is the you know iron man world champion and he'd be like yeah i gotta walk these hills because i don't want my heart rate going over whatever his zone two threshold was so if mark allen can walk a hill you can too well yeah and i have done that because i've been trying to keep track as opposed to pace uh heart rate on this garmin i have the descent which i got because it's good for free diving and and has all the bells and whistles or you think but obviously we're gonna get into that later on how accurate it is um and i don't wear a heart rate monitor but i have tried to um hold back at times but obviously at times i don't um and i have gotten a little bit quicker but obviously i'm not doing i'm mostly living in orange like which i guess zone four on almost yeah that's not good and that's not good no so um i have to go slower right so we'll work on that and to reiterate it's not about the gear we're gonna do a show and tell segment where we're going to talk about gear because so many people want to know about the gear yeah but my refrain is always it's not about the gear gear is helpful it's fun um but when it becomes an impediment to you just going out and doing like what you did yesterday yeah um then it's a problem but we'll we'll get to that in a later section all right cool i um i'm excited about it i mean i am i i totally see how i can do 10 and it's not like i got off the couch to do it i mean i've been building up to it i've done some you know 11 mile runs i've done seven mile swim runs i mean i've been building up to it so it's not like i i wouldn't encourage people to get off the couch to do it but i could see how the difference between 10 and 20 is like it's it's the difference between 5 and 10 is nothing compared to the difference between 10 to 20. there's a reason why everyone falls apart at mile 18 on the marathon yeah because that's the difference between somebody who has truly um honed their aerobic engine versus somebody who's spending all their time like if you're if you're a gray zone trainer then you're going to fall apart at mile 18 yeah pretty much every time you see it time and time again so shout out to all my homies in the gray zone like yourself like you're definitely like me i haven't i haven't that could be the title of this podcast don't live in the gray zone i may have a smart watch but i'm not a smart uh swim runner right so that's that's the thing about the gear the gear are tools but if you're not using those tools effectively and properly what use are they okay i'm suitably shamed i'm going to buckle down right all right well let's put a pin in that for now all right pivot to teachable moment i'm open to all uh advices so yes my mitochondria need it this is a segment we call teachable moment what are we gonna learn today adam well you know i kind of i i teased this a little bit but said we're not going to get into it we're not going to get into the weeds of um portland but i wanted to get into this like what the f is dhs doing the department of homeland security what are they doing and basically what i've been thinking about watching portland go down is um we have this department called department of homeland security which uh just really to recap it very briefly came came about after 9 11. the idea was it was this overarching government federal agency that could more efficiently exchange information with local law enforcement so we don't have a repeat of the failures that allowed people to train to bomb the you know to fly planes into the towers um that was the intent behind it there was always this the dissenters were always a little bit worried about giving the government that that kind of power for federal agencies to be kind of interacting with local law enforcement and the scope is dictated by the patriot act yes the patriarch created the agency as far as i remember and so in this also tsa is part of the department of homeland security uh border patrol customs ice they all fall under dhs and so uh but if you just say that you believe in the idea that there's this agency out there to protect the people that live in the united states to give us safety and security well to me like what's the point of having a dhs if you can't help contain a virus right and so cut to last fall and early winter the virus is is has gotten out from wuhan it's all over the place italy is having its problems um and we don't do anything like people are getting off planes from europe and they are yeah from china yes there was some containment people were brought to military bases and quarantined for a period of time but not not from europe um right people were just like walking off flights from italy we all saw that viral video of people backed up in chicago when they finally decided they were going to try to test and it just became this like petri dish march 15th they they decided to in about half dozen or no a dozen or more airports o'hare was the big one that we saw the video of and it became like a two three hour line which is the exact wrong thing to do under the auspices of okay we're now going to start to manage this thing and then start contrast interrupt but in stark contrast to some of the videos that i saw i'm sure you did too of airports in seoul and in beijing where they had their testing completely dialed in and there were no lines exactly and so we have this this is the backdrop the reason i'm bringing it up is here's this agency that's supposed to protect us keep us safe keep us secure drops the balls so poor they did such a poor job of managing corona and yet they're putting their personnel border patrol tactical teams bortak is what they're called in portland oregon same people also were deployed to standing rock by the way also deployed to portland to deal with these protests that have been ongoing since george floyd was killed and just recently i just saw over last week because of my reporting in the sonoran desert because my reporting on the border wall i was in contact with an organization called no more deaths who drop water off for migrants as they come across the border and they also have humanitarian aid stations set up so if if people are suffering from heat related or cold related whatever it is there's there's places they can go for water to be checked out by emts that are volunteers all volunteer run and the border patrol hates no more deaths because normal death reports on over you know abuses of of migrants and arrests and that can't a camp in eravaca arizona a tented camp was raided by uh 20-plus vehicles a chopper um this is on friday they were just raided at gunpoint under what stated purpose there was a warrant to uh collect basically they were susp the no more deaths believes that border patrol is thinking they're a smuggling operation they had they had a warrant for financial records they took everyone's phones all their computers but in actuality what happened is tents were slashed 30 plus migrants were rounded up the volunteers were zip tied and and held cuffed with zip ties for two hours uh and you know medic medicines were overturned beds were overturned the place was trashed uh cell phones that were being used to to photograph it and v and and log it were confiscated um volunteers won't get their uh their cell phones back for a couple of hours um the p the judge that signed the warrant had signed one previously on no more deaths so there's there's this and and no more deaths thinks they had just released a report about the border patrol that that implicates the border patrol union in these raids on no more deaths and they think it was payback but who knows i mean because i haven't reported the story out so i have not gone to border patrol so i should say that right right away i'm getting this straight from no more deaths but knowing what no more deaths does having researched them extensively they are not a migrant smuggling operation they are humanitarian aid agency they're a non-profit um and that's what they do so the point is what is going on with dhs why do we have a guy who's running dhs getting into feuds with governors like what is going on yeah yeah yeah the the the fumbling of the covid response in stark contrast to the the the sort of authoritarian overreach of this organization in places like portland raises a broader issue about power in general federal power versus state power and how we're allocating our governmental resources for the behest of the people yeah by definition the dhs is to protect homeland security yes the biggest threat to that at the moment is this virus that shut down our economy and is forcing us to not interact with each other and is creating tremendous havoc that will have a ripple effect for who knows how long to come and yet we've been incapable in getting a grip on how to manage this we're still seeing these crazy spikes the united states is spiraling out of control with respect to new cases etc meanwhile we've dispatched this you know basically paramilitary organization to places like portland and the the the argument being that there it's an effort to protect federal property right which is a small portion of what's actually transpiring in these places and this organization has gone on to you know rather than i mean the whole it's a misuse of government systems this this was all meant to you know basically uh combat terrorism essentially and under the under the broad um authority of the patriot act it's allowed overreach so now we're seeing um these lists being made about journalists uh names being you know put on a ledger yeah dossiers on journalists they're baseball cards being made of arrested protesters which all feels very orwellian and dystopian and concerning irrespective of whatever your political perspective is this should give one pause and and the guy who is integral in creating like tracking those two journalists that were in the washington post story which i think you're gonna link to um the that guy was reassigned but he wasn't fired i mean so so what is happening you know like and why uh that's the that's the question here you know like what should we be asking of our government agencies and and why and uh so that's the teachable moment what's your what's your take on that well my take is that uh everything's upside down obviously under this current administration but um you know you have an environmental protection agency that is cutting environmental laws um i don't know my takeaway on this is that i'd i'd like to hold this agency accountable this agency to me is dangerous it's dangerous to the civil liberties of everyone who lives here and we should be watching it and um you know i don't have a petition to give you i don't have anything else but i would just like listeners to pay attention to what is happening at the department of homeland security right now and and and be very skeptical uh to the point not to where you don't believe everything but that you're really paying attention to the statements being made by chad wolfe and by everything that comes out of the dhs yeah what's interesting also is that a core principle of republicanism is states rights yes and here we have an overriding of of state mandates for the purposes of a federal flex and that but that's been since trump became president it's kind of cut both ways whereas the you know democrats were always for a big federal kind of uh policy and now it really it's states that are fighting for like democratic principles like cal state of california so that's kind of cut both ways it just so happens that that's the way it was but it didn't happen that way under the bush administration so it's interesting how that all has transpired but yeah so i just wanted to flag that for the listeners because i know listeners are super concerned uh about you know how to be better people and how can we be a better country and uh it doesn't seem like safety and security are right now uh the mandate of the dhs it's a control thing it's so strange yeah yeah i mean department of homeland security do you feel more secure and it's also bizarre how how we um kind of haphazardly normalize things depending upon our political perspective yeah that's true you know what do you think about that well i think it's it's concerning it speaks to our our cognitive biases you know if you're of a certain political persuasion you're going to have a lens on what the dhs is doing that's going to differ from somebody who's on the other side of the aisle yeah when in truth these things should not be partisan but we're not even talking about like the protests in portland like i'm not there i'm not watching it every day it's not it's you know i read about it from time to time and your sense of what's transpiring there if you're not there depends wholly upon your information silo it does but like no matter what's happening there like we have to have we have to expect the dhs to be an impartial partial arbiter of uh the constitution and and and how that's laid out and so and it doesn't seem like that's the case when you're when you're enforcing uh when you're cracking down on a humanitarian aid organization in the middle of [ __ ] desert and you're cracking down on protesters it seems like it needs to be either disbanded because it's a failure or overhauled completely to include some you know the cdc or some sort of like offshoot or or corridor that links the cdc with the dhs yeah yeah yeah yeah it doesn't seem super wise that dhs is vested with authority of of you know maintaining or trying to establish some kind of security around the spread of covid yeah when its real mandate has to you know emanates from 911 and terrorism right and and i'd like to point out that the failure with containing kovid wasn't just international borders it wasn't just customs tsa should have been like taking everyone's temperature on every single domestic flight in this country um that wasn't happening so maybe now it is but it wasn't then all right let's shift gears here let's do it we're going to talk about a couple letters yes aren't we we are so this is um this news came out i forget what it was was it like three weeks ago four weeks ago was it like four weeks ago i think we talked about it right when it first well no we talked about it right before it dropped yes it dropped about four weeks ago we were talking about a little bit about cancer culture and redempt and the notion of redemption and um and then like literally the next day the harpers letter dropped and so this is a letter that was spearheaded by a journalist named uh thomas chatterton williams and george packer and a few others and it was signed by legends really uh margaret atwood gloria steinem wynton marsalis uh malcolm gladwell salman rushdie gnome chomsky most of whom or all of whom are liberal right liberal-minded uh there's i think a hundred there were there was a bunch of conservatives too i mean the whole point was that it crossed that aisle and it was a it was a panoply of perspectives and the idea was it was kind of speaking out against illiberalism illiberalism not being a political statement but like on the idea of free flow of ideas liberal ideas like free speech and free expression uh and so i'll just read a little excerpt here for you um and uh and then we can discuss kind of what we think of it uh the excerpt is this the free exchange of information ideas the lifeblood of a liberal society is daily becoming more constricted while we have come to expect this on the radical right sensoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture an intolerance of opposing views a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues and a blinding moral certainty we uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter speech from all quarters but it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought um it goes on um but you know and it's in response to people losing their jobs uh losing their positions not based on something like me too but based on uh action like speaking the wrong thing saying they're making the wrong move a guy was removed from a position in harvard for actually being the lawyer for harvey weinstein that was his big offense he represented harvey weinstein like these are uh illiberal dangerous forces my original knee-jerk reaction when this broke the news was it like two and a half weeks ago or something like that um was that this is a conversation that we need to have and very rapidly there was a there was a a reaction to this a counter reaction to this letter that was pretty severe yeah it came out right aw right away there was the the people who i guess the letter was targeting didn't take it too well um and people were being accused of uh the the signees were being accused of being elitist and a lot of them are very accomplished in elite people um but there was a there's one of the poets that signed it um was a black poet who was an ex-prisoner like he's an ex-con so it's not like everyone's this elitist yeah uh but here but i think hannah uh i hope i'm not butchering her last name uh gorgeous uh from the atlantic probably had the best rebuttal and it explained itself the best i and and so i'm gonna read a little bit of it right now across the globe the challenge facing journalists and intellectuals is not the pain of twitter scorn the community to protect journalists estimates that at least 250 journalists were imprisoned worldwide last year for their reporting in the u.s the trump administration continues to threaten reporters safety and undermine the belief that journalists play a valuable role in democracy the country is moving deeper into an economic recession decimating industries including journalism and academia and yet the suddenly unemployed people the harper statement references clearly lost their jobs not because of a pandemic or government pressure but for actions criticized as potentially harming marginalized groups this small group includes james bennett the former editor of the new york times editorial page who was forced to resign after the op-ed page he was supervised published an article by arkansas senator tom cotton that endorsed state violence and she was basically saying what that like uh these elitists are complaining about being criticized not right not complaining about something that's real right the criticism was was essentially that these are a bunch of whiny elitists who who now for the first time are being forced to confront criticism of their writing because none of them are actually in jeopardy of of being de-platformed or losing their ability to express themselves they all have massive platforms and they're all going to be just fine but the broader truth here and where the conversation really needs to center is on this trend towards illiberalism and the sensoriousness that is at play across social media in a sort of orwellian sense not that the government is cracking down in any kind of authoritarian way but that there is this social media kind of mob at large that self-polices what's acceptable speech and what isn't you know i'm no fan of tom cotton but i don't think that the editor of the new york times editorial page should have been fired for publishing that letter certainly not because of the content of the letter i think he resigned under pressure i'm not exactly sure i think it was like resigned i think so but it was under pressure and i think that the reason that they gave is that he he didn't read tom cotton's uh piece before it went to print um that's a different issue however uh brett stevens who's another favorite punching bag of left wingers and at the new york times wrote a really convincing op-ed about that and he said you want people like tom cotton to tell you what they're thinking and what you don't want is to make tom cotton somehow a sympathetic figure to people who care about free speech because this guy is advocating for state violence and like advocating basically what we just were flagging for people yeah and uh and he's not for civil liberties clearly and now he's the darling of people who you know he was able to be set up as this conservative um avatar for like uh being abused by this so you know uh a biased media you're basically showing the world that you have a bias um and that's not and obviously i don't think new york times does have a bias but that's what you're that's the perception that could come up right and so it's dangerous i mean like the one thing that uh i think that um gorgeous didn't get right is that these overreaches by the left can lead to a more hostility toward journalists exactly for that reason because you're overreaching and then it becomes more convincing when someone says fake news it becomes more convincing look they are certainly a danger i mean this is something that that bill maher talked about in his episode this past week he interviewed um chatterton williams and and barry weiss as well who we're going to get to and he pointed out this study um i don't know the origin of the study the cato institute i think where 62 of people were afraid to share their honest opinion and i think that they're that's worth exploring because i just know personally in my circle of friends and journalists and writers that there is this what chatterton williams calls this onlooker effect that it's not about the criticism that cancellation is not about bringing the elites down to earth but it's about this chilling effect this stifling this narrowing influence on all of our behavior where we have to pause and consider whether we really want to share what's on our mind and just the fact that you're going through that calculus at all i think speaks to the current health or lack of health in public discourse at the moment which should be concerning to everybody i i think so i mean um right after the letter came out i tweeted it and retweeted it and and agreed my own agreement i mean listen principally when i tweet it's like a lonely man on the alpine lakes uh skipping a rock like that's the kind of effect it has on the greater world i'm not a title wave maker like you rich role but i'm not that on twitter i can tell you that but uh so no one really pays attention but even that you know like as soon as the backlash started to roll out even i was and and i'm very progressive i mean you're a progressive contributor to the new york times yes and i and i and i have put myself in harm's way to report stories that uh that i'm proud of that are human rights stories and they're but um and i was i thought about deleting my tweet it's probably it's probably automatically knowing you as well as i know you it's problematic when somebody who is as progressive and liberal-minded as you somebody who is so devoted to humans right human rights causes and the kinds of stories that you devote your life to like going to the you know going down to the the wall in arizona and trying to understand the you know deleterious environmental impact of what that construction project is all like these are the you know you've you've reported on gmos in hawaii like these are these are very liberal-minded stories to pursue and and when somebody of your ilk is being um accused of not being liberal or progressive enough and being shamed for pointing out that we we need like the health of our society depends upon the free exchange of ideas then it's problematic it is i to be clear i i wasn't ashamed because nobody really pays attention to my twitter but um you said you got a little better i was worried about that i see i was worried about about being you're thinking about it i was the onlooker you know i was concerned about it yeah i stuck i kept it out there um and and i didn't have a backlash uh and i kept it out there and i actually then uh tweeted at williams and and and thanked him for the letter and and so i i'm because i believe in that i believe in the idea that we should have free speech you know like it's dave chappelle is is constantly complaining about he won't play colleges most comics won't play colleges anymore that was like a lifeblood for comics like playing the college circuit that's what kept people out of bars all the time and and and they were making a lot of money on that college circuit it's no longer there they don't do it and and i think this whole thing points to this weird uh co-mingling of academia and newsrooms which wasn't the case like when a guy like carl bernstein who with woodward broke the watergate story he was a cub reporter that came out out of high school got a job at a paper you can't get a job at a paper as a cup reporter in high schoo out of high school anymore it doesn't exist part of that is that we don't have local papers that are as robust as they used to be that that's harder so now you have academia feeding feeding newsrooms that's different than we ever have before and um in some ways that can be good i'm not saying it's all bad but i'm just saying it like this this idea is one that came out of academia first this idea of the proper way to speak and that there is you know the the close societies was first a problem on campus before it was a problem in newsrooms yeah i think it started with student bodies and then those those students matriculate and go out into the world and they begin to populate the newsrooms and they they slowly begin to uh you know have their have their voices being shared on social media and and you know the result is is kind of what we're seeing right now yeah and then you want to get to barry as well right yeah yeah um she was a signatory on a letter she resigned from the new york times in her resignation letter she claimed to be a target of progressive forces within the newsroom there and this is what she wrote a new consensus has emerged in the press but perhaps especially at this paper that truth isn't a process of collective discovery but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to re inform everyone else um and so that's what her taking right yeah right this is an interesting um situation it's related to the harper's letter although it's distinct and it's its own unique thing i think independent of that as somebody who who is a contributor to the new york times you have a sense of what the inner workings of that newspaper are like i do know other uh writers for the new york times who take issue with barry's characterization of what that climate is like there and i wouldn't i wouldn't you know consider myself a big barry weiss stan or fan or anything like that i think she's done some interesting reporting i don't agree with everything that she says um but it does speak to the chatterton williams letter in the sense that there is this feeling of orthodoxy that supersedes fact-finding or science or the pursuit of truth yeah i think it's the same thing that we're talking about dhs i think overall and i wouldn't put it just to the new york times i think overall it's it's more of an uh let's be aware of what's really happening my experience in new york times is confined to the sports desk i've never had any issues it's always been like like the best people that i i've ever worked with in journalism um so and i have no insight into how the newsroom operates um and part of the criticism of barry though is that is that this was like a press release for her next move whether it's right that's her creating some new media platform or whatever it is there's a little bit of grandstanding oh for sure i mean she is she is but at the same time it's like this idea like i think the ideas concerns me more than the way the new york times operates fine they're great um to me the the issue is are we going to confront is is the left kind of setting themselves up as this new mccarthyist type era is there a purity test because we we've joked about purity tests in the past and it is like becoming true like are there purity tests that people are gonna have to pass in order to get to a certain level um with it's deeply concerning and bill maher pointed this out he's like who are these perfect people out there yes that are holding us all to account according to some impossible standard and how deep does that reach extend in terms of you know what's what's required to escape this cancellation and and and where are they in terms of like the cancel culture people who are so ready to cancel people for saying the wrong thing when anti-semitism is the issue uh you know we had 17 000 people marching in berlin against uh covid restrictions but it was like the people who are fo who who created that protest were far-right politicians there were neo-nazis involved uh there is a big fear in germany right now that neo-nazis are deeply embedded in all forms of government there and certainly in police forces and in the military um here we had issues with like ice cube speaking up desean jackson speaking up um nick cannon on his broadcast said some pretty terrible things uh about jews quoting farrakhan um desean jackson thought he was quoting hitler at one point and and and some some people uh you know desean jackson then is is going to go to auschwitz he's been counseled um nick cannon has been canceled and barry weiss actually uh just shouted him out on twitter about how great it is that he is educating himself and welcoming well you know basically being the model of allowing for redemption right of course nick cannon did read her book that might have something to do with it um well there has to be a path to redemption and rehabilitation you know if somebody missteps and in this culture where people are misstepping all the time to just expect that they're going to go away forever is not you know it that's not an enlightened you know perspective to have like what are we doing if somebody look nobody's nobody's perfect and people are are you know in the world and on social media communicating and people are going to say the wrong things and in those instances and look there's a spectrum of severity here that we're speaking about there are some horrible things that are happening in some minor transgressions but we have to we have to determine the half-life on these cancellations and how we're going to create a culture in which it's conducive to people learning and growing in real time in the public sphere it's it's it's the difference between the i think the real concern here um with the onlooker effect is it creates it seeds apathy not empathy and to communicate and to exchange ideas um and even to misstep like nick cannon did uh but now he's showing publicly empathy and to have barry weiss who feels like she got chased out of a newsroom and this is her core issue like this is the main she wrote a book about this right about anti the rise of anti-semitism i mean look i mean we've had we've had uh shootings in synagogues we've had i mean this is not a small thing and even on the left i hear it in the wellness community all the time people who are suspicious of george soros as he's like some bengali which is this whole whole anti-semitic trope that has has revitalized um so it's not just right-wing it's not just left-wing it's all over the place um but what what do we where do we want to encourage people to be do we want them to become spectators of a big twitter fight that causes that doesn't solve anything or do we want to have empathy for one another are we creating apathy are we creating empathy um i think that's what the letter is getting to with this onlooker effect is like is that that you know for creating apathy but we're creating an tip antithesis yeah right versus empathy or like this idea that you're a frozen onlooker that you're not going to get in the fight because that's the because well that's that's the true onlooker exactly i think people are just opting out yeah and they're just saying i'm just not you know i'm i'm i'm not participating not for me because it's too fraught yeah and for me to express myself honestly is this minefield that i'm not going to subject myself to and that's the stifling and the chilling effect right for me it's just like that's why i swim run without any sort of intelligence because i just want to get get out there flail around for hours right no i think that's right i mean i i uh anything else you want to share on that no i think we'll we'll close it with that and we'll move on to what are we moving on to show-and-tell show-and-tell hard pivot hard pivot hard pivot we just watched uh weight of gold it's the hard pivot to the weight of gold the hbo dock featuring apollo ono and michael phelps is the narrator and lolo jones great sprinter turned bobsledder um and it explores the mental health challenges that olympic athletes often face during training competing and then obviously after the the torch is extinguished so this documentary just premiered on hbo this past week i saw the trailer getting circulated by a bunch of the athletes and thought this is this is like right up my alley i want to know more about this i reached out to apollo ono i just did a podcast with him that's going to go up in a couple weeks but why not take a moment now to talk about the movie i mean i think it's it's great that michael and all of these athletes are are have created this project that focuses on what i think is a very important and overlooked issue which is the mental health of our elite athletes whether they're professional or olympic the lens in this documentary is is is honed solely on the olympic athletes and you could make the argument like oh woe is me like they're olympic athletes like they're having a hard time but the truth is that there isn't you know sort of an existential crisis that's created when you're somebody who is at the height of their powers and whether you stand atop the podium or you end up in 20th place matters little what does matter is that almost overnight when you become a civilian in the aftermath of that experience you're left without any resources to manage how to move forward with your life right when you're used to being surrounded by tons of people who support you who are there for you who are all invested in your success and every waking moment of your life is devoted to this very specific window of time in which you're expected to perform at your best when that moment lapses and is over how do you then become a normal human being and a lot of these people have severe you know mental issues trying to grapple with that and i think it's incumbent upon the organizing committees of all of these respective sports to create structures and programs for these athletes to better help them make that transition you're seeing that in some of the professional leagues now yeah i know they do it with finances like you know how to manage your money and all that kind of stuff but um you know the mental aspect of high performance is you know only now starting to get the weight that it deserves what i thought was interesting was a good point made by one of the figure skaters um not sasha but the other one um i forget gracie gold yeah yeah yeah and she was saying if i tore up my knee i'd have the best surgeon right in the world looking at it um but i don't have any i didn't have anybody and uh to look at my after my mental health that i got recommendations of a therapist but i didn't have them like paid for and and on the payroll and available to me like on the spot yeah and i find that interesting because you know obviously sports psychology and sports psychologists that's been a booming field for a while but it's always about performance right that's surprising to me that the support psychologist um role hasn't spanned overall mental health i'm surprised by that well i think that the resources are available and this is a point that apollo made it's not that they weren't there and available if you reached out for them but you have to take into consideration that these are people who who are trained to never show weakness right right and so the idea of being vulnerable enough to say hey you know i'm feeling not good like i need help is a stretch for a lot of these people and so they end up not availing themselves of what is available interesting and i think that makes it even more incumbent upon the coaching staffs and the you know people that are in these people's entourages to pay closer attention to how they're doing but you know the movie's good i think that it it you know if i had a criticism of it i think it lives a little bit on the surface yeah it could have probed a little bit more deeply there's some great stories there that weren't fully fleshed out yeah exactly yeah yeah exactly um and you know come on michael phelps are you gonna come on the podcast yeah why can't why haven't why isn't michael phelps i've tried this i've been trying for years to get michael on i've made many overtures i've never met michael phelps but i have friends that are friends with him i know coaches that have coached him um i emailed recently i emailed peter carlisle his agent i just get no i get no response so we're just commando what are you doing i come on michael i got a chair on the mic buddy yeah i mean he looks amazing in the in the film he looks like he looks like he's ready to compete is what he looks like he looks amazing he's really shouldered this mantle of being a mental health advocate in a meaningful way yeah and i think it's super cool and it's powerful and these are stories that need to get told so kudos to michael kudos to michael one day he will show up on this podcast and share with us about it michael if you're listening you don't look like a retired athlete you don't you look like an athlete in prime condition right um and if you're not going to be saying he's maybe thinking about a comeback i thought about it but like if you're not gonna do that i think you should try freediving because i think michael phelps would be an incredible like you know it could be an interesting way of going it's a much more introspective kind of like meditative sport it's a huge challenge and there's never been an athlete like michael that did that crossover that's something alexi molchanov one of the the right now the number one ranked freediver in the world that he has two of the world records um in depth uh he's wanted to see that he's wanted to see like someone else crossover from another yeah because alexi was a national ranked swimmer in russia um when a nationally ranked swimmer in russia and his mother was too when he then he transitioned into freediving and so he's an elite athlete and so is william schubert so there are elite athletes in the sport but you don't get like the swim there's no swimmer pipeline right yeah right that would be an interesting crossover i think it's much more likely that he'll try to make the pga than go into free diving golf seems to be his thing is that right yeah yeah well there's no ocean in arizona right a couple more things to uh talk about really quickly before we get into audience q a i did want to mention that my buddy datsy bausch uh who's been on the podcast before you guys know her you love her uh olympic track cyclist she started an organization called switch for good which is this incredible non-profit promoting the benefits of a plant-based diet it's really kind of an anti-dairy advocacy group and i was privileged to tape some psas for switch for good recently that were directed by louis ahoyas who many might know as the director of game changers and the cove in racing extinction he's an amazing academy award-winning director and i got to uh spend the day with a bunch of incredible plant-based athletes like rebecca sony who's a six-time olympic medalist she's been on the podcast as well dotsy of course george larocque from the nhl derrick morgan from the nfl heather mitz three-time olympic medalist soccer player and a bunch of other really cool people and those psas aired uh on nbc during the today show and i think people keep coming up to me saying they've seen them so i think they were on nbc um subsequent to that too yeah yeah that's cool yeah yeah so that's really cool and uh if you missed those you can find them on the switch for good youtube channel and i'll link that up in the show notes as well so datsy's doing great work it's basically a response to the kind of got milk chocolate milk campaign that the dairy industry um promoted that's like which well what happened is in my estimation at least the dairy industry noticing um shrinking demand for its products made this interesting decision to reposition chocolate milk not as like the drink that kids you know elementary school kids drink at lunch but as an athletic recovery supplement of some sorts that would enhance your recovery and they put a lot of money behind this a lot of money into advertising into sponsoring athletes and dotsy and her organization and a bunch of athletes like myself were like that's it's not right no no it's really not right so this is sort of a response to that to correct the record as much as anything else so shout out to dotsy well i mean i think athletes have are have been playing a huge role in this uh growing uh plant-based movement movement away from animal products i mean i don't think there's any doubt that performance and athletics and mentors from the athlet from the sports community um has has been a big driver in that don't you agree yeah do you think chocolate milk is a is it the ultimate recovery drink no um i can't drink milk man most people can't no i can't drink milk i can't even eat ice cream yeah i eat not nut milk ice cream now or oat milk that's the new one oatmeal oatmeal the new thing i'm into oatmeal yeah it looks good yeah a couple other quick things uh my brother-in-law stewart mathis julie's brother stewart that's your brother-in-law i forgot i forgot the link up he's like he was great he is a brilliant guitar player yeah and this is a guy who who picked up a guitar when he was i don't know eight or nine years old and just never looked back like there was there was nothing else that he was ever gonna pursue in his life other than music and the guitar and he you know i wouldn't say suffered is the wrong word but like he bled for his art for many many many years like living in la in all different kinds of bands cutting his own records and it took a long time for him to finally hit his groove but now he's like lauded and in the music community like most people know who he is this is an incredible guitar player and he's played he was jules uh tour guitar player he uh he toured with leanne rimes and then he was in the wall flowers oh really many years yeah and he's been playing with lucinda williams for right he's he he moved to nashville it was in nashville now um but the reason i'm bringing it up is that lucinda and stuart just played an npr tiny desk concerts for those who aren't familiar npr does this series called tiny desk where these amazing musicians play these intimate little contained concerts and uh the one with stewart and lucinda just published recently so i'll link that up in the show and you could see my brother-in-law julie's brother and you'll get why her side of the family is so musically inclined yeah which is cool yeah i like that thanks for sharing that um final thing there's a new documentary that just came out called take out by michael cewerski who is documentary filmmaker who's made some cool movies over the years food choices um being one of them and this is a documentary produced executive produced by moby i have not watched it yet he michael just sent me a link to check it out so i'll i'm gonna watch it this week but it's another um sort of look at the environmental impact of our food choices through the lens of how the amazon is being destroyed to create uh fields for cattle grazing and and growing crops for cattle okay one of those uplifting docks yeah the fires and the amazon oh really yeah all right so that's it so should we talk about some gear let's talk about gear let's talk about the gear that's going to change show-and-tell i'm going to change my game i got a couple you know i just want the listeners to realize that i had no idea how much rich uh didn't approve of my training habits until i sat down i didn't say that i didn't say that i'm celebrating what you're doing i just want to put a little structure in it i'd love it man yeah i'd love it yeah so uh on the gear tip again my disclaimer is that it's not about the gear you don't need any of this gear to perform and when people reach out to me and ask me questions about what wash are you wearing or what should i get i essentially never respond because i just don't even want to be involved in that discussion because again it's not about that and i feel like this is an example of analysis paralysis where people get so caught up in what watch they need or what pair of shoes they need or what kind of bike they should buy that they never end up just going outside and moving their bodies right until they have this this sort of equation completely figured out which of course they never figure out because the whole point is to protract the process of being focused on the gear yeah that being said because i'm asked so often and so frequently about this i'm going to take this moment to discuss it and then maybe never discuss it again maybe never so the first thing is um people on youtube have been leaving comments like why are you wearing two watches right that's cool so does this look like a watch i don't know because that's cool um so on on my right hand i have a an old garmin gps watch a phoenix uh phoenix 3 heart rate and on my left wrist i have the whoop band so if you're if you're watching this on youtube you haven't heard the ad reads the sponsored ad reads that i do for woop on the audio version of the podcast um this whoop this thing is a and again i'm saying this is not a sponsored post at all like i'm just sharing what i do right the woop is a wristband essentially fitness tracker that connects with a mobile app but it's it's it's not about gauging your workouts per se it's much more about rest and recovery and sleep and so by leaving it on all day it monitors your heart rate and monitors your heart rate variability your metabolic rate it tracks your sleep and breaks down how much time you spend in the various sleep stages and then it kind of crunches all of this data and delivers these metrics on how rested you are how recovered you are how much strain you should undergo that day or shouldn't and it also calculates the strain that you put your body through every day so basically it's kind of a helpful tool in helping you calibrate your workouts so that you're not over training or not not under training right like how do you kind of meet your strain goals every day and make sure that your body is properly recovering and when you're training really hard it's a great way of adjudicating whether you've pushed too hard the day before when you should like sort of ease back and when you kind of have the green light to push harder than you have in past days so i haven't taken this thing off since i got it maybe i don't know six months ago or something like that maybe i've had it really remember like yeah i love it it's waterproof um and it's amazing like i swam this morning you don't have to push any buttons or there's no interface or anything like that and i swam and then i refresh my app and it's like oh you swam this far for this long really knows your heart rate and it has a little optic sensor on the the back of it that um is how it's calibrating the data this is pretty cool jealous yeah but then in terms of working out i prefer i prefer a proper gps watch in terms of the data that i want to look at for distance and pace um yeah for a couple reasons first of all uh it has an interface so you can see it when you're like if i'm out running i want to know what my heart rate is right so i can look at my watch and know what that is at any given moment it also will um via bluetooth connect with a heart rate monitor strap around the chest which i think is much more preferential than these optic sensors that you see on the the back sides of these gps watches that are calibrating your heart rate from your wrists which i have found at least to date i think the sciences and the technologies always iterating and getting better and better better but i found that that gauging your heart rate off your a chest strap is much more accurate and stable better than your arm as well right yeah yeah yeah much much more so so i highly suggest getting a chest strap for your heart rate in terms of what kind of gps watch to get like i said this this is a garmin that i'm wearing right now and it's super old like there's been many iterations on this since i bought it but i still love it it works perfectly fine and i don't know that it matters that much which watch you have i tend to wear this one kind of because it's like nice and heavy and metal and it just feels like a real regular watch that you can wear out into the world kind of like yours years yeah some years it's just a different variation of mine right um and uh mine just has a dive component and it works perfectly fine the the sort of user interface in terms of um getting the screens to do what you want them to do is a little bit kind of clunky i would say and that's where uh a competitor watch this is this is the koros this is the brain this is the coros vertex in cortex and it's very similar to the garmin um but the advantages of this watch which i should disclose they sent to me for free this is not a sponsored thing at all i'm not getting paid to say this but they did send me a free watch and i really like this watch too because the user interface is much more intuitive it's much more easy to navigate through the different screens and to get to the data that you want its interface with its mobile app is incredibly seamless it uploads to strava without any hassles whatsoever and it has unbelievable battery life so this thing you can wear for like weeks without charging it whereas the garmin you have to charge much more frequently so i like them both for different reasons the garmin feels more like a knock around wear everyday watch but this one i also found is has some wonkiness in in the swim metrics that the garmin doesn't have but the garmin isn't always super accurate with swimming on ocean ocean swims the garment fades in and out of gps connectivity yeah yeah i would agree with that and these are things that are like software pushes that are always improving yeah um but i like them both and the koros is like a small little startup and they're making waves in the space and i think what they're doing is super cool so you can check them out can you swim in a chest um heart rate monitor you can i don't i don't worry about that i mean since i've been swimming my whole life i'm pretty into it i can intuitively gauge my my sort of perceived effort um a lot of people do a lot of triathletes wear the strap when they're swimming so it's okay it doesn't doesn't impact you you definitely need a chest drop that would be one thing i would suggest yeah yeah i need one and then just get really connected with um with your heart rate and i don't need it all the time now because i've been using one for so many years that i just know like i'm like i i i know how i feel and i know basically where my heart rate is all the time without looking but that only comes through experience all right so there's that here's something i bet you've never heard of or seen before and these are um this is a pair of goggles and they're made by a company called form have you heard of these no these are cool and also these were sent to me for free as well are they night vision goggles they are they look kind of like that too they like swim goggles they look like uh some kind of futuristic swim goggle they've got this little doodad on on once one side of it a little computer thing and basically what they do is it's like a it's like an ar device when you put them on and turn it on you'll see a little digital readout in your visual field yeah and when you hit start it's basically a gps watch for swimming it's google glasses for swimming basically yeah and when you're swimming it will you you input like the the size of the pool 50 meters 25 meters or whatever and there's a running clock and you can you can kind of adjust customize the data fields but basically it gives you a running time and also a tally on your distance and it knows when you are doing an interval set like it'll say like if i'm doing a set of 10 100s it will when i finish the 100 it'll flash like the time that i did that 100 yards in and then it'll do a running clock of like how long i've rested before i push off again so it's essentially like using a pace clock but the pace clock is just in your visual field while you're swimming and when these were sent to me i thought there's no way these things are going to work like it's just not going to be that good but i was really amazed how well they were you're seeing all that yeah you see you see it like it appears like in like uh like an alternate you know ar like a vr kind of experience you're the terminator you're wearing these and they work really well and i'm blind like without my glasses i was like i'm not even gonna be able to read these numbers but i could see them totally fine and so this has been a a really fun doodad gadget that i've been playing around i would totally buy them if it had like you know like um the parking like you can get you get cars that automated parking if you could do an automated flip turn i'd buy it tomorrow if it trains for you and you can like does it what if you lay in bed and you put them on and it pretends like you're swimming and then every time i cross the room it flips me upside down that would be crazy all right one more thing these things are the jaybird vista earbuds jaybird is a podcast sponsor and i'm sponsored by them personally as well so they're not they didn't sponsor me talking about this right now but they are a partner of mine and i love business i love this product so do you ever wear earbuds i don't i don't i don't listen to it which is fine that's good you know i think it's important to go out in nature and just experience nature for what it is if you are going to listen to podcasts or audiobooks or music when you're training though i i highly suggest these be your choice um and i are they obviously obviously i'm biased because i work with this program but i sought them out because i love them they're not you can't swim like go diving in them or anything like that but they're incredibly um they're waterproof to the extent that you could sweat on them and you could jump in a pool or whatever and they would be fine i've dropped these in the pool and they they they're perfectly fine wow and no matter how much i sweat they stay in my ear they never fall out they're super easy to use and uh and i love them so you know again just another like cool fun they come in this this pack that charges the that charges them charging pack and the battery life's excellent and they're incredibly durable do you have to have your phone with you when you're uh to have them work or do you download it onto your watch no no i don't have an apple watch i don't know what that would be like because i think you can and this one has like i could put i i could i could really music on this thing i don't even know about that yeah you're the one who should be doing that maybe possibly i mean they just they just connect via bluetooth so they connect to my phone via bluetooth so you just bring your phone on your runs yeah exactly yeah all right final thing oh yes did you see this yes that's mathis work right right so um if you're listening and you're not watching on youtube i'm holding up a t-shirt that i shared on instagram the other day and it's a yes it's a it's a it's a graphic illustration of me i guess loosely based on me i suppose um that mathis had made for father's day um i thought we were all getting uh t-shirts so her friend sterling is the artist who's like this 15 year old kid and he's the one who came up with the design but mathis kind of produced the project and uh and i posted it i mean it's like i can't wear this i can't i can't go into the world you can't wear your nose yeah like i can't wear yours it's like preposterous shirt roger federer wears an rf hat does he yeah he does i feel like when you reach a certain level you can get away with it yes like i can't imagine like you're not there yet in the world but i posted on instagram mathis is like asking who wants merch and like a lot of people seem like they were into it so i don't know you know if you it's great leave a comment on on youtube below if you if you would be interested in this and maybe we can do a limited run and make them available on that on the board i would love that i'd wear one yeah i'd love to be the kind of guy that could wear that there's mushrooms growing out of my shoulders someone invited you to take mushrooms but i think that's against the sober thing i think it is wouldn't you agree unless they're four sigmatic mushrooms a different kind of mushroom well no but there's this whole idea of psychedelics to cure addiction yeah i know you don't buy into that no i don't i i'm not i'm not i mean this is we could do a whole podcast on that i should probably do that yeah i mean and i've spoken about this on in the past on the podcast like i'm a product of 12 step i believe in alcoholics anonymous you know i i got sober that way i stay sober that way and i've seen countless lives transformed as a result of working 12-step um it's it's it's just it's a it's a it's a miraculous and beautiful program that uh is unlike anything i've ever experienced um but that's not to say that i also i know plenty of people who've gotten sober in in other ways and i've never i've never done psychedelics so for me to speak to that with any authority i think would be foolish and i know that there's i'm sure you have yeah but just like for my training not with any intelligence whatsoever right before you go out for your swim run just a handful of uh a handful of mushrooms yes when i was in treatment there was a guy who uh in my rehab who uh he had like long white hair and he said that he used to for like a decade he he was in the restaurant business and he owned a restaurant uh he would wake up in the morning and he would he would take lsd and he'd go on a 10-mile run he said he did that every day that's crazy i could barely i could barely sit up when i was on lsd i was lying down most of the time but i know that there's a lot of interesting science happening right now specifically at johns hopkins around the use of psychedelics and depression ptsd exactly exactly and i think that's a good thing yeah that's a good thing um and ayahuasca obviously a big one um win of the week i got a win of the week i dug one up go for it um my win of the week is congratulations to kai lenny for his five nominations in the big wave awards the wsl just announced on july 20th if you don't know about kai he is a true innovator in surfing he's one of the best if not the best big wave rider alive he is crossed the molokai channel riding wind bumps on his foil um he's a master windsurfer uh and even this year when uh kovet broke out he was in tahiti competing competing on the qualifying tour now remember this is a guy who wins big wave contests but he was competing on the qualifying tour so that he could be on the wsl championship tour as well to be one of the rare writers that competes in in both formats at the same time often it's surfers choose one or the other um and he's kind of the heir apparent to laird hamilton at jaws kind of innovating with foils innovating with a windsurfer who also is a resident basically lives right right at jaws um and he got nominated for five uh nominations three of their five biggest waves of the year um nominations in the category he rode three of them so he's got three of those um one of those was at jaws two of them were nazare he's also nominated for best overall performer and for wave of the year from jaws nazare is that ridiculous wave in portugal it's the mountain of the wave like where you always see there's that building that's in the foreground every time kind of that rocky kind of uh bluff that's like right there and uh yeah that's the one the hundred foot waves right where people ride and he he got a crazy ride there and he said he rode he got that wave um everyone took the videos everyone took the pictures and then he went out and served for three more hours there that's what he told me because i was interviewing him for a different story that's like yeah david goggins when he when he parachuted into the iron man world championship swimsuit did the race finished it and then went and worked out later that day did you know that yes yes i remember i remember that story yeah yeah he told me that story and that story of that is that he parachuted in he was doing that with um another navy seal who was who they both parachuted in together swam in they did the thing it was all you know it was basically the tv kind of it was going to be one of their their uh things they ran and he was behind the other seal the entire race until the because he had problems i think he fell behind in the swim and then he had issues at the beginning of the run where he couldn't like get his rhythm and he was walking a lot of it then he found his rhythm and started hammering as he does and then he caught the guy like right at the end and the guy looked at him and goes [ __ ] goblins man i think that's exactly what i said to him when we started our podcast that's how i opened our podcast yeah yeah yeah and they finished together david couldn't beat it but yeah they finished together that's classic yeah yeah yeah good deal um i have a quick win of the week and that is shining a spotlight on valerie allman i tweeted this the other day valerie is a discus athlete and she just broke the american record in discus and i shared this video uh we'll link it up in the show notes of her uh of her breaking the record and her swinging the discus did you see this no it's hypnotizing it's like ballet and performance art in extraordinary athleticism check that out i'm having adam watch this right i'm watching discus it's i like washed it like 10 times in a row i couldn't stop watching it wow it's so extraordinary and she's a wazelle athlete wazelle is the kind of women first apparel uh brand that works with uh athletes like lauren fleschmann who's been on the podcast before a really cool company amazing she's like a whirling dervish i know it's not about gold so yeah beautiful congratulations of elite athletes is always incredible like like the footwork of some of these athletes is just next level i think that she you know i don't know because i haven't spent a bunch of time looking into her background but i think she has a background in dance or ballet okay which is not surprising that's probably why i can't throw the discus that well no that's the reason that's what it comes down it's only because of your lack of dance background yeah and my bad foot i'm not sure if i brought that up yet but okay all right so that's it let's take a quick break and we'll be back with questions from the audience all right all right and we're back let's do some listener questions what do you got adam let's do it we got two that were emailed one is from an anonymous woman and let's get into it she wanted to keep her name out of it i live with an angry manic alcoholic and things seem to be getting worse or perhaps it's that my tolerance and patience levels have diminished but it's gotten to the point where not only am i affected by this but also my family every day is like walking on eggshells never knowing when the next bomb is going to go off but you know it will he's also had episodes of threatening suicide and not coming out of the room for days when i suggest therapy he pooh-poohs it and says he will change with diet and exercise and will go super extreme and fast for days or even for a week sometimes he'll continue to drink beer while he's fasting but not always he's told me i'm useless asked if i'm [ __ ] etc i know that this is a dis-ease and i'm trying to stick by him but it's getting more and more difficult i certainly do not find it acceptable to treat me and my sisters in an unloving way we have been together for over 20 years and i've never believed in giving up but i don't want to live the rest of my life with this negative energy how can i help him and myself uh thank you for the question it's a super important um topic subject matter my heart goes out to you it's an incredibly difficult situation and knowing how to navigate it uh is is one of the most fraught and emotionally challenging things i can possibly imagine so first of all i'm empathetic to your situation you're in a very difficult spot and i can't tell you what you should or should not do you have to make those decisions for yourself but perhaps i can give you a couple light posts here and one is first and foremost you have to take care of yourself you've got to figure out how to you know you have to figure out um how to protect yourself and insulate yourself against the unhealthy his unhealthy behaviors and it's not indulgent for you to do so you shouldn't feel guilty for doing that and in fact it's of service to him for you to do so the way that you can do that is to seek out al-anon i think that you would find great solace in that program to participate in a community of people who have experience going through exactly what you're going through right now and understand that there are only so many things that you can control here you can control your behavior you can control your response to your spouse but what you can't control is him or his behavior so to the extent that you're trying to get him to change you're in a situation in which that's very unlikely to occur hopefully he will reach a point in his addiction where he will develop the willingness to try to get better but from what you've written here it doesn't sound like he's in that place right now he is succumbing to the great obsession of every alcoholic which is the effort to try to control your drinking and he's going through the machinations and the experimentation to convince himself that he can do that whether it's fasting or exercise his pursuits in those regards are all in extremis so it's clear that there are manifestations of the underlying disease that he has which is addiction and your ability to manage or control that will result in a lot of unhappiness on your part so i think your focus needs to be placed on yourself making sure that you're safe and healthy nobody should have to submit themselves to that kind of abuse whether it's emotional or physical i can't tell you whether you need to end the relationship or not you need to make that decision for yourself but i can tell you that you are valuable in this world and nobody should be talked to in that regard so take the steps that you need to take to protect yourself and your family members who are on the receiving end of this kind of abuse there are resources available to you even in the age of covid and again that's where i think your priority needs to be in terms of how you communicate with him and perhaps be of service to him you can set healthy boundaries around what is and is is not acceptable you can tell him look if you speak to me that way again i'm going to leave or whatever it is whatever esteemable act you take on behalf of yourself to create that boundary i think is important and letting him know where that boundary exists so that if he disobeys it or transgresses it then there will be a ramification or a repercussion whether that means you leave him or not again you have to figure out that for yourself but i think establishing those boundaries is the first step in terms of letting him know that his behavior is not okay and i think the more specific and con concrete you can be around that the better it is for yourself and for him you can make suggestions hey listen i think you should go to treatment you should go to detox you should check out a.a you can make those suggestions but it's important that you remain divorced from expectations as to whether he will avail himself of that advice and also any attachment that you have to outcomes if you are if if you have an expectation that he's going to get sober or he's going to do it you're going to what you advise him to do then i think you're setting yourself up for um for a lot of uh emotional woe so it's fraught it's very difficult especially with loved ones because you can see the person beneath the disease and you are able to hold out hold space for that individual but sometimes they're just unable to see it for themselves and in truth you can't get an alcoholic sober the alcoholic gets sober when the alcoholic develops the willingness to take the actions and the steps required to get sober and that's a very personal journey so as harsh as it may sound this person might have to suffer greater repercussions might have to be in more pain than he is in right now in order to hit that bottom and have that reconciliation for himself you can make yourself available for him if and when he reaches that point but you need to protect yourself emotionally and not make yourself available for all of the abuse and the unhealthy behavior that he is manifesting at the moment yeah um heavy the only thing i can add is you you said safe making sure you're safe and i can tell you from my previous reporting and things that i've learned is that um physical abuse doesn't necessarily have to build up from like a a push or a slap you could get you could be in danger already and i don't want to um make you hysterical or anything like that but but this kind of emotional abuse you're already on a path um that you don't want to be on and so i would instead i don't know if allernon has uh domestic i'm sure they do have like domestic abuse counseling recommendations but i would also i'd look into some domestic abuse hotlines that you can yeah maybe we could put some resources up in the show yeah and i would call someone asap and i'm not suggesting anything other than calling and just make your own decisions on how you want to proceed but you're already in a place that leads to that could lead to a dangerous situation for yourself i think i would add that it's not i ca i can't diagnose another person as an alcoholic you know this anonymous person is saying her husband is an alcoholic she's diagnosing him is that maybe he perhaps admits it to her i don't know the the the diagnosis of alcoholism is is something that only the alcoholic can can diagnose for themselves but if this person is an alcoholic and it would appear that he is these things don't tend to just get better they get worse the best case situation is they stay the same but generally they degrade and devolve and with that comes a notching up of the abuse and the unhealthy behaviors that circle around that so short of an intervention or this person developing the willingness to get better for himself this is going to continue to progress and again that just means that it's all the more important that you take care of yourself 100 all right um let's go to jake in kansas city this is another emailed uh question you've talked in the past about people getting addicted to self-help that we mistakenly search for the next hack the next optimization strategy i felt this way in my own experience to self-improvement i tend to consume all that's out there and while i live out some of it i find myself being more concerned with reading or listening to the next thing whatever that may be so how do i go about choosing the top three to five things i find most valuable and just walking that path how do you stay committed to learning and growing while also remaining steadfast to a short list of pursuits that you're 100 committed to how do we avoid consuming self-help as an end in itself instead of just a means to a greater end thanks that's a great question it goes back to analysis paralysis what we were talking about before whether it's the gear or self-help literature these are just devices to distract you and prevent you from actually moving forward i've got nothing against self-help literature it helps lots of people you know i think it's good that it exists in the world but i've also become a little bit cynical about it as a podcaster i'm now on these lists with all the publishing houses so i get all the galleys of all the nonfiction books in the mail before they come out so every week i get like 10 self-help books in the in the mail yes and every author wants to come on the podcast and after receiving like 100 of these over the year you're like how much self-help literature do we need there can't be that many secrets to getting better and then i think about david goggins and i'm like how many self-help books did that guy read you know how many he read zero he got off his ass and he got to work yeah right so self-help is fine you know if you if you need some guidance if you lack mentorship or education in your life such that these are helpful to you i think that's great but when you start to use them as a shield to insulate you from taking any actions obviously they're becoming an impediment they're the very thing that is preventing you from helping yourself it's interesting the irony in that right yeah it's interesting like this this fact that neuroscience has become so popularized it kind of makes us like attuned to optimization and in this tech world where everything's supposed to optimize like there's a whole like tim ferriss's kind of position and how to optimize like the work week or how to do this or that um it's uh it's interesting i think peop there are people out there there's a whole segment of population that are interested in how to be optimal but then the pursuit of that but when you look at the most optimal people in the world they're not the people that are focused on optimization necessarily so it is a weird kind of paradox i suppose um and i would say to jake listen like he's like how do i go about choosing the top three to five three things i find most valuable and just walking the path how about one thing you know i can't tell you what your values are but you know if you can get clear on what your values are and establish something that you want to manifest in your life let's begin that process i think the analysis paralysis comes in in the plotting and the map making and what is the trajectory and how am i going to get there and there's so much mental masturbation that goes into that at the behest of taking that first step so again i think it goes back to simplifying this process we want to over complicate it and think that we have to lay on top of our goals some crazy lattice work right and i think that those can become handicaps as much as tools it's interesting i i think about the hubermann thing talking about like how habits first and then thought and uh perceptions and everything follow right behavior behavior behavior first and then everything else follows um and the construction of habits it sounds like maybe he's the type of guy that gets bored from doing the same thing over and over again and there is a certain boredom in creating a habit that becomes like a daily ritual uh but you got to stick with something about cr like creating habits for yourself maybe every morning coming up with a morning practice whether it's a meditation or a yoga um and then a meditation or something that you commit to doing every day something one thing that you commit to doing every day and then see see what that gets you as opposed to whatever you got out of a self-help book maybe there's some habits that you can take that you can build your days around that you can lock in you know i think that that's good advice i would say and we talked about this last time i think that it's important to understand that when you're consuming a self-help book that that's not the accomplishment the accomplishment is in applying that wisdom to your life right and so the first step is understanding that just because you read a book doesn't mean that you did anything and i think what happens is you read these books and you feel like you're accomplishing something or growing in your life simply in the consuming of that book but that in and of itself will it's like in 12 step they say um half measures will avail you nothing right so like reading reading a book it's good you've consumed this this piece of knowledge but unless you figure out how to apply it in some fungible tangible way in your life it will avail you nothing right so it's disabusing you of that notion that you've done something just because you've read a book and it's reconfiguring your perspective to focus more on actions you know to bring it back to huberman behavior like lead with the behavior so we're sitting here having a podcast episode 500 and whatever i didn't start the podcast because i read a self-help book and tried to figure out what my values were and created some road map to where i would be seven years later i just thought this will be cool and i turned on a mic i had it was a behavior it was an action like hey this might be fun and i was like that was cool let's do it again right it wasn't like a whiteboard no situation no you know and i think that's the problem with our optimization obsessed culture is that we think we have to have all of these things figured out before we begin and in truth in my own personal experience it's in the doing that the path is revealed yeah you never really know what the end product is going to be and um we don't even necessarily know what optimal is while we're experiencing it right it's all it's all kind of through analysis later well there's also a binary nature to that very conversation around optimization anyway you know i i i lean more towards the ethereal unknowing of it all yeah right that you can remember there's a spirituality to all of this as well that i think gets lost in the conversation around optimization which is you know this assumption that we can drill everything down to ones and zeros and create an equation for success and i just don't think it works that way that doesn't mean that we can't learn and improve by virtue of these tools but i think there's a bigger dance at play and broadening your perspective and understanding that i think at least it's been helpful to me we've talked about that before i mean just recognizing your speck of consciousness in this great sea is liberating in a way because it means that um there's so much more going on that you can possibly be aware of and if you just handle your stuff in a systemic way systematic way on a day-to-day basis um is going to get you to a good place you just don't know where that good place is necessarily which is also a beautiful thing just think about this self-esteem comes from esteemable axe like that's a truth right why is that the case can that be defined in some kind of binary optimization vernacular like i think it's a spiritual principle that we are the sum total of our actions and if we do a steamboat more than that we're more than the sum total of our actions but i think that that you know having a just being able to broaden your aperture a little bit and understand that if you if you are um if you are clear in your intentions and you are full of heart pure of heart that when you whatever path that you pursue and i talked about this in my book like the i believe that the universe will conspire to support you if you've done the inside work if you are coming from a place of love and compassion and gratitude that the world will greet you in kind and that has nothing to do with you know neuroscience necessarily you disagree i i agree to a point i think that uh chaos theory exists and sometimes chaos descent on your head well also luck plays a huge part yeah yeah yeah so i don't think it's always it can always be that way but some but i i can say that if you tend to greet your experiences i do think it comes down to how you deal with the hand you're dealt so sometimes you're dealt a really shitty hand and it's really hard to stay open and positive about it um but that doesn't mean that the person who does stay open and positive about it isn't going to have more success than the one that doesn't so i i think it's i think it's complex but i do believe you're right a lot of the time i also believe that chaos you know hurricanes hurricanes brew yeah yeah and and that does happen point taken yeah all right let's move on moving on let's listen to some voicemails hey i am hey rich uh this is jackson from middle of nowhere wyoming uh i deliver coronavirus tests across the state and i love listening to you guys when i'm on the road uh my question for you today is as a 25 year old along with plant-based eating what are some other habits things i can do in my life now that i will appreciate in the next 10 years thanks guys that's such an awesome question i know right i'm just all i can think about is like what was i doing when i was 25 i was such a knucklehead i certainly wasn't like trying to better myself by leaving voicemails for podcasters you know or delivering kinder eyes exactly epidemic yeah god big respect jackson huge respect very cool um well yeah plant-based diet that's good yeah that's a good start um i you know look there's no behind the velvet rope here you know i think the habits that you form at your age at age 25 are things that you want to kind of um uh you know establish in your life that then cr then create their own momentum so that when you're 40 50 and 53 they become second nature and wrote i know personally because i'm at my age i have a lot of friends who are now starting to deal with a lot of health stuff that they never really had to think about but they never formed proper healthy habits early on and now they're confronted with having to undo all of their unhealthy habits and create new ones which is much harder than just creating a healthy habit when you're young right that becomes second nature and just part of who you are part of your lifestyle as opposed to something that you know you feel like you have to focus on it's just it doesn't even require any brain bandwidth because it's fundamentally who you are i think at the top of that list i put some form of exercise or movement preferably something that you enjoy because then it becomes second nature and part of your lifestyle it almost doesn't matter what it is as long as it's something that gets you outdoors breathing fresh air gets your heart rate up a little bit and is something you can do consistently throughout the week i think that's super important plant-based eating he's already got the diet part down i think developing a meditation and mindfulness practice a 25 i mean what a gift if you could really figure that out and nail that down at your age the benefits that you'll see in your life will be tremendous and i think also developing a habit of reading not to go back to the guy who reads too many self-help books but you should always be reading books every single interesting person that i've ever met in my life is an avid reader yes so if you can make reading a go-to habit it doesn't even matter to me what you read it doesn't really matter as long as you're reading all the time i think that will make you uh stand heads and shoulders above your peers and just make you not only an interesting person but a person who is interested in the world well that's what makes those who are the most interesting people right the ones that are still like trying to figure it out of course um yeah i totally agree with you i think um one thing that helped me when i was younger kind of build good habits just in general was starting a yoga practice um morning yoga practice uh i started by just doing nine sun salutations every morning before i did anything else and uh just that alone kind of got me to the point where i could like try to become a writer basically like to like was that right discipline i never considered myself a disciplined person until i started doing that wow it taught me discipline so creating some sort of morning ritual for yourself doesn't have to be that you can go run and but i think some sort of meditation aspect some sort of like metaphysical like spiritual aspect to your day does help you kind of stay grounded stay humble um and and stay ready yeah so what is your connection to source what does your higher power look like yeah and how does that infuse your life and set you on a trajectory to to bring meaning and purpose into your life um the other aspect of this that i would mention is is finding a way to be of service but this is a guy who's delivering coronavirus tests across the state like he's doing he's providing a service but i think when you approach your life from a service perspective from a perspective of how can i contribute how can i give how can i provide as opposed to what am i getting out of this for myself that will not only make you a happier person it will make you a more productive person a more contented person and just a better individual i think and somebody who other people want to be around also i'll add one more thing to the list i don't want to overload you jackson but travel internationally uh um and not just to like nice places but to places that might be fraught to places that might be challenging uh make yourself uh put yourself where you're one of the only foreigners on the ground and and just go explore that's the henry henry rollins philosophy of life that's right yeah pack a bag and go to some weird corner of the planet go to papua new guinea or somewhere like that i think that's yeah that's really good advice yeah and i think also you know to avoid overwhelming you just break these things down into tiny little chunks you know and don't beat yourself up for not doing it perfectly every single day exactly um and i'll cap it off by just saying it sounds like you're you're in a car or truck for a lot of hours during the day it's where you listen to the podcast thank you for doing that but to the extent that you you know have all this time in the car like what else are you listening to like don't just turn the radio on and let it tell you what it wants to tell you be mindful about how you're programming your audio throughout the day when you're spending all that time in a vehicle whether it's audiobooks or other podcasts and the like yeah make sure you get your qnon feed kidding kidding yeah uh all right let's go to rich no no that's you let's go to adam in alberta canada hey rich and adam my name is actually adam too i'm i in fact my name is adam burka and i live in alberta canada i've been a long time listener of the podcast in fact i've been listening since episode one way back when you were recording in hawaii which means i've literally listened to you talk for thousands of hours as i listen to 99 of your podcast the question i have which you do have my permission to play on the podcast is this the topic of education has come up frequently in your podcast and i happen to be a teacher in a public school in fact i'm a school administrator in canada i often think about how somebody can influence the world in a positive way and how educators are positioned in a highly influential role while there are an increasing number of mainstream education alternatives for students which i think are wonderful i still believe that public education remains an important avenue for a significant percentage of the population whenever health related guests are on your show you ask them if they were to wake up in a parallel universe as the surgeon general what health changes they would make to this edu or to the system so i'm going to ask you the same question if you were to wake up in the education world equivalent of surgeon general what changes would you make to the education system as a whole so that one could positively influence children who i believe who i believe to be our most valuable resource and whom the future of our planet relies on keep up the great work guys that's an amazing question i like how well thought out it is too yeah um well he's a teacher yeah i know right thanks adam um and thank you for listening to the podcast for so long i really appreciate that i will say this that surgeon general question that i ask to doctors when they come on the podcast those people are trained in their specific discipline so should they become surgeon general they actually have some level of expertise so now i'm being asked to be education czar you're not an educator but yet you're an education podcast right but i i would not consider myself a teacher nor an expert in education right in general so my answer will be couched in that caveat yes um that said and i've touched on this before um i think that that uh our educational system is a legacy of a bygone era it was developed in victorian times to develop good factory workers to be productive in an increasingly industrialized society the world has changed and i think we need to take a hard long look at what we're teaching and why we're teaching kids what we're teaching them there's plenty in the current curriculum that i think should remain i'm not for just overhauling it and being completely radical and revolutionary about it but i do think we need to resort to first principles and really try to understand how much our culture has changed and how that impacts what we're teaching children and more importantly how we're teaching them i think that uh with technology and i've said this before many times everybody's got a super computer in their in their in their pocket that will answer any question that they ever want to ask it so this rote memorization kind of default methodology of teaching needs to be called into question and i think we need to shift away from the memorization strategy that is predominated and monopolized our our education system for for too long and focus on how do we create amazing adaptable human beings who will be lifelong learners who are interested in learning and interested in the world and i think that needs to start with focusing on developing the esteem of the students and then orienting curriculum around where they sit and what they're interested in and expanding from there we need to develop young people who know how to work in teams who understand leadership who understand and appreciate listening who know how to collaborate who know how to work alongside each other on a project basis methodology of learning as opposed to the singular individualistic approach of reading a textbook and regurgitation that would be a start away from memorization towards analysis of the material that is available to you yeah and i i think in terms of being surgeon general like what are the changes that i would make well i would certainly reallocate budgets such that public education is adequately and properly funded i think it's woefully underfunded right now and i think the funding is not directed in the best directions we have in the united states teachers that have to do gofundmes to raise money so that they have equipment to teach it's ludicrous right every kid should have a laptop or an ipad or some form of device we you know have this opportunity because of covid to learn more about how digital learning can inform our educational procedures and processes and i know there's a lot of smart people that are looking at this and that are studying this um you know the fact that that kids are now learning from home how does that affect long term what happens when we finally you know get over the hump here and return to classroom learning how much should we retain of what we've experienced now versus how much do we go back to the way that it was before and i think this this forced moment right now is instructive in that we should be really trying to understand how kids learn in a better way and when we return apply what we've learned to create a better classroom experience for all so and i say all of that like this is all very off the cuff like i feel like i feel bad adam because i should i feel like i should have mapped out my response um no but you i think you asked that but no you get into it i think that that uh you know young people going into the world right now and into the workforce need to no longer are we in a situation where somebody joins a corporation and spends their entire career there right no longer are we in the situation where a young person is even going to have the same career field for maybe even a small percentage of their professional life right so with that understanding how do we train young people to be better equipped to handle the strange vicissitudes of a technologically oriented global economy and i think adaptability comes to mind as one of the most important things spoken like a competitive swimmer turned entertainment lawyer turned podcaster and when you graduated law school did was did you ever anticipate doing something called a podcast well there was no like when i was in law school there's no internet exactly so no but that's you're the proof of that adaptive uh you know adaptability is my point is right it's like that that but then i look back and i'm like well all the things i did were in education and making me better at being able to do what i'm doing today but i couldn't have known that right i mean but you've said you already couched that in there saying you would keep a lot of that art that keep a lot of what already exists because clearly you got a lot out of your education yeah but there was a lot of wasted time a lot of it forgotten due to blackout drunks yeah that too you know i think you hit the nail on the head with the number one thing would be put some more money in where our mouth is and and to me that that that place is teachers salaries number one um we need your salaries we need to get we need to attract talent to to the pool yeah and you're not gonna do that uh by paying people peanuts and it's absurd the level of we need a cultural social shift in our perception of educators 100 these people are rock stars and heroes and we need to treat them as such we were talking before the podcast about how how this medium has created rock stars out of scientists in a way that is unprecedented we were talking about andrew huberman and david sinclair and matthew walker these amazing scientists who are doing you know phenomenal work in terms of longevity and sleep and you know neuroscience etc in the past they would have written a book maybe the book would have done well who knows but now they can go on these podcasts and talk for two or three hours and people are like so thirsty for their wisdom and the response to the podcast that i that i've had with these people has been unbelievably tremendous people revere these people and it makes me think well we should have the same perspective for secondary educators and primary educators what if we were able to you know shift our perception of this professional career path and understand that you know these these are people that we need to hoist up and that we need to celebrate in a way that we don't right now and to attract the best talent to enter into that we're talking about you know not just the future minds of america in the world but literally the you know the future of the planet right when we're in this existential crisis of whether or not humanity is going to you know survive right the very real threats that we face so yeah so we can't be paying people 40 grand a year no to do it so uh yeah you got it i mean that's the best way to uplift them is pay them properly yeah and uh yeah i love it beautifully well said rich all right let's go to jeremy in st michael minnesota hey rich hey adam uh this is jeremy from from st michael minnesota and i first of all just want to say thank you to rich for the podcast it's been really life-changing for me um i've been listening for about almost two years now i think and uh the the knowledge and insight it's given me has been super helpful in everyday life so i appreciate it um uh the question i have is um for both of you i guess you're both writers and i was curious maybe more from the sense of a personal story when you feel like you know that your story is worth writing and putting out to the world and that it might be received and and kind of um i don't i don't know exactly how to how to ask the question but you know i have a story i have a you know i've been through recovery i've been sober for 15 years i've you know done some things after recovery that i feel you know would be of worth for people to hear and and maybe give them hope to to do things in their own lives and i'm just i'm just curious how you come to the the reality that this might be something good to put down on paper and that your story might be received well in the world so hope that makes sense uh keep doing what you're doing and thank you bye all right jeremy listen of course you should write your story it sounds like you have an amazing story i think everybody should write their own story and if you have even the slightest inkling that you want to share something and that what you have to share could be helpful to another human being of course you should do that i can't encourage you enough to write what is inside of you that clearly i can feel from from your words is yearning to be expressed i sense some hesitancy and perhaps a lack of of um confidence around doing this maybe a little bit of fear uh and and my sense is that that fear is linked to how what you would write will be received and what you have to do is let go of that like just who cares how it's going to be received detach those two yeah these are two different things there's the self-expression there's the telling and then there's the reaction to it if you get caught up into the reaction you're dead out of the gate back to that can't think about that at all um you have to just basically get into a place of pure expression and allow it to you know emanate from there i think and you know i can only share my own experience there's i'll tell two quick stories one is how the book finding ultra came came to be in the first place because it wasn't like i set out to write a book i thought maybe in the back of my mind one day i'll write a book but it wasn't like i had set this goal that i was going to write write a memoir right what happened was um somebody who i didn't know read about me in um a magazine article reached out to me by email and asked if i would be willing to talk to him because he had just gotten out of treatment and was having a hard time and it was somebody that i didn't know but was somebody that was friends with other friends of mine so i struck up a friendship with this guy and we would talk from time to time on the phone and i was trying to kind of help him acclimate to to being newly sober and at one point he said hey you've got this amazing story have you ever thought about writing a book and i was like well not really i mean kind of maybe but like it wasn't a top of the mind thing and he was like i know this book agent you know this book agent worked with dean carnaz's and it helped him with his books and you know you should would you like me to introduce you like it was like that right and that led from one that led to me being introduced to this book agent and this book agent being like well if you want to write a proposal i'm happy to read it you know this is a tough thing you could thread the needle here i wrote i worked really hard on a proposal and she was still very you know like grounded in her you know tried to you know basically prevent me from having high expectations and we ended up selling the book and that's how the book got made and when i reflect on that story what i take from it is that the good thing whether you can qualify it is good or not like the fact that i wrote a book all started from basically being of service to somebody else like taking somebody's phone call and talking to them about recovery that was it i didn't have an agenda and that process led to something that i could have never anticipated that has changed my life in unbelievable ways and in the writing of that book i had plenty of moments of personal terror thinking like do i want to be this open do i want to be this vulnerable is this a good idea and i would become paralyzed because i was thinking about the audience reception and the only way that i could get through it was to completely block that out and just pretend that i was writing in a private journal and that no one would ever read it and every moment every you know once in a while i'd have this flash of like the book being on a shelf in a bookstore and i would panic because i would get caught up in that reception and that ultimately is the enemy of creativity so just pretend you're writing in your personal journey and maybe you don't share it with anybody and maybe you do and maybe it impacts one person or maybe it impacts a million people you don't know but the point of the exercise is to engage with your creative voice and to try to you know basically um be authentic to who you are i love that so well said and it echoes something that our friend elizabeth gilbert has talked about um which is kind of in her book big magic she gets into that a lot is is um the point is the creative output it's not the you have to divorce yourself from expectation you can't expect something out of it um especially when you're first starting um because you don't know about that it's about you don't know where this one act will take you uh you know i've never written a memoir like you but i wrote my the way i got an agent was i wrote an uh a fictional novel kind of loosely based on my life and i did put a lot of stuff in in there that was very personal and um ended up getting me an agent which helped my you know got me into into the publishing houses so right so uh that's how it started for me too by doing that didn't sell the book didn't didn't make a dollar off of middle of somewhere it's still in it's still somewhere it's still in my computer though but you know what i mean but i never you know obviously i had ambitions for it but yeah um but it led me somewhere else and and so that's the point is is if you wanted if you're feeling the passion you're feeling the urge to create you gotta you gotta give it some energy right yeah right so clearly i could feel there's something inside of him yearning to be expressed and that's really the only important thing awesome cool cool all right one last one this is the personal uh more of a personal question for you this is henry from los angeles california from what i've gathered you rich and julie srimati have a relationship that is pretty similar to me and my wife and by that i mean you're both clearly spiritual and empowered in your own ways but you rich seem to be more practical rational and grounded whereas julie is the more esoteric receptive intuitive one in my experience that relationship balance has been really beneficial for personal growth for me and my partner but my question is about working together when you collaborate on projects how do you balance each other's energy without getting dragged down by differences in work styles and priorities what rules or guidelines whether they're unspoken or formal have you set up to bring out the best in each other and not let disagreements grind projects to a halt that's a great question adam you can play this question on the air thank you that's a great question henry thank you for that uh this has been an evolving you know journey for julie and i to figure this out and definitely a tricky equation to solve but i think we've done a good job and figured it out and i think the key for me has been um not needing her to do things the way that i would do them and respecting that difference right so julie and i are incredibly different we have our own respective projects but then we come together to collaborate on on things from time to time and early on in that adventure i would say you have you know it's like i this is how you do these things you have to do it like and she would not do that you know like and i would get frustrated and angry and i'm sure she was angry with me because you know she has her perspective on how you would do project x and i'm not meeting that expectation so we had to go through it in order to figure out a language around communicating and also guide posts and boundaries about how to work together so we did he have it right the way that did he did he handicap it right in terms of you're the rational grounded and she's the esoteric kind of intuitive yeah but i think i think that that what what's missing in that is that julie is incredibly smart and competent and she gets [ __ ] done like she's a doer so it's not like she's all airy fairy and up in the clouds and like can't you know make any practical progress like she gets [ __ ] done and she knows how to get [ __ ] done and she's better at a lot of things that i am so a lot of it has been figuring out where she excels and where my handicaps are and where i excel and where there are areas that she doesn't care about and then we try to meet each other so that she's doing the things that she's best at and i'm filling in the gaps where you know she is you know less competent in so julie for example is very good at the global picture and i'm a very i get mired in the details so you need both of those right you need a detail-oriented person and you need somebody who's thinking more broadly about what it is that you're actually doing and that functions when you understand that those are your roles julie's a much better team person she's a leader she knows how to get a lot of people around her who are excited about what she's doing and i'm a like a solo guy like i'm very good when i'm just by myself so those are different those have you know positives and negatives so it's where do those where do all when you look at a certain project like how are we going to fit together and let's allocate the tasks so that we're focused on the things that we're best at and most interested in and i think when you do that and this doesn't happen overnight like it this happened over time for us then you can become like like a superpower because you're meeting each other like you're you're filling in each other's gaps right and then the product of that collaboration tends to be um exponential rather than than um just additive i suppose but i think it has to do with self-understanding and also really understanding your partner and then developing really effective communication between you guys because these things especially when you're working together emotions can run hot and things can get heated and things can get misunderstood and it's really critical that you have a way of communicating in a balanced and objective way because otherwise these things can be combustible and they blow apart a lot of relationships so the communication has to be strong the self-understanding and the understanding of your partner has to be intact before you even launch into one of these projects but if you're if you have that sorted out then i think you're in a good position to collaborate together and it's beautiful to do that um i've had amazing creative professional experiences working with my wife but it's also important that at the same time we have our own respective things that we do outside of our collaborations so they're that we're not sort of solely resting on you know our co our sort of co-collaborations for our kind of you know um professional well-being well you just need to have those silos that you go into on your own so you can be your own whole human being outside of raising kids and having a life and having a romantic life and also having a business you got to have your own so it sounded like communication skills um a solid understanding of your own strengths and weaknesses and and shared understanding of both of your collective strengths and weaknesses together right and how those fit right and then making sure that yes you collaboration can be awesome but you also have to have some room to do your own projects too which will feed the collaboration right right the communication i can't i can't overstate how important that is because if you're in the heat of the moment and you can't figure out a way to get balanced and give each other objective feedback that isn't then completely emotionalized yeah you're going to be doomed so really what you should do is just get a lot of ikea furniture and both try to put it together and then by the end of confederations yeah yeah exactly you'll be divorced or [Laughter] uh that's great anything to add uh i think that's it that's what i would say for now good rock thank you henry i think we did it we're done we took a one and a half hour podcast and made it three hours i know that's hard to do we were gonna try to do this in an hour i don't know what we're doing are we getting better at this or worse i don't know it depends who you ask yeah don't ask chad wolfe but listen you know it's a podcast you can listen to half of it you can listen half of it later you can abandon it i don't know but i like what we did today i did too man thank you my friend we'll be back here in two weeks uh you can follow adam on all the socials at adam skolnik i'm at rich roll if you want your question answered on the show you can leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626 don't forget to hit that subscribe button on youtube that notification little bell subscribe on apple podcast on spotify uh check the show notes on the episode page at richworld.com we'll link up everything that we discussed here today you can also submit your questions on the facebook group and uh i think that's it thank you for taking this journey with adam and i and we'll see you back here in a couple days with another awesome episode any closing thoughts no it's just uh thanks for listening it's your moment to be profound this is it um no i appreciate everybody who listens and cares about getting better and being better it's uh it's really cool to be a part of this journey i really uh appreciate it don't take it lightly and and i thank you rich and for all who listen thank you man appreciate it yeah see you guys soon peace [Music] you

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 33,783

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, spirituality podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, vegan podcasts, plant-based nutrition, rich roll adam skolnick, roll on podcast, cancel culture, endurance training principles, running gear show and tell, trail runner tommy rivs, freedom of speech and expression, harpers letter cancel culture, harpers letter, bari weiss free speech

Id: FFSUcXCMDF0

Length: 143min 57sec (8637 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020