The Rich Roll Podcast - Adam Skolnick’s One Breath: The Spiritual Allure of Freediving Through the Life & Death of Nick Mevoli, America’s Greatest Talent

Episode Date: March 14, 2016

Imagine plunging headfirst hundreds of feet below the ocean surface — undulating ever further downward to a place where light cannot penetrate; and life hangs in the balance of a quickly diminishing singular breath. Competitive freediving—a sport built on diving as deep as possible on a single breath—tests the limits of human ability in the most hostile environment on earth. The unique and eclectic breed of individuals who freedive at the highest level regularly reach such depths that their organs compress; and one mistake could kill them. To freedive is to flirt with death, driven by an almost inexplicable spiritual quest to go further, deeper and beyond the imagined limits of human capability. But freediving is also an opportunity to be free. It's a search for the authentic. An opportunity to commune with the infinite. Today on the podcast I sit down with author and adventure journalist Adam Skolnick, who immersed himself in this extreme yet poetic subculture to tell the story of Nicholas Mevoli, America's greatest freediver and the protagonist of Adam's masterfully crafted new book, One Breath: Freediving, Death, and the Quest to Shatter Human Limits*. Even among freedivers, few have ever gone as deep as Mevoli. A handsome young American with an unmatched talent for the sport, Nick was among freediving’s brightest stars. He was also an extraordinary individual, one who rebelled against the vapid and commoditized society around him by relentlessly questing for something more meaningful and authentic, whatever the risks. So when Nick Mevoli arrived at Vertical Blue in 2013, the world’s premier freediving competition, he was widely expected to challenge records and continue his meteoric rise to stardom. Instead, before the end of that fateful competition Nick Mevoli had died, a victim of the sport that had made him a star. Traveling the world writing for The New York Times, Playboy, Outside, ESPN.com, BBC.com, Salon.com, Men’s Health, Wired, and Travel + Leisure, Adam was on site to cover Vertical Blue when he became a direct witness to Nick's passing. His first-hand account landed on the front page of The New York Times, quickly went viral and set the stage for One Breath — a remarkably engaging exploration of Nick's unforgettable story and the sport which shaped and ultimately destroyed him. In the vein of Into The Wild and Born To Run, One Breath is one of the best books I have read in a long time. And I read a lot of books. Today we unpack this mysterious subculture and the remarkable athleticism of its inhabitants. But at it's core, this is a quite compelling conversation about passion. An examination of obsession, escapism, and the spiritual yearning for authenticity. I really love this one. So sit back, inhale one deep breath, and submerge yourself in the world of Adam Skolnick. Peace + Plants, Rich

There will always be room for self-doubt. Self-doubt is, you cannot stop it. It is always going to arise no matter what, and there's always room for it. So the only thing you can do is not believe it when it arises. Let it rise and fall like a wave and go away, and don't give in to it. That's Adam Skolnick, and this is The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. How you guys doing?

What is going on? Welcome to the show. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Rich Roll. I am your host. This is the Rich Roll Podcast. Thanks so much to everybody out there who has shared the program with your friends, with your colleagues, with your co-workers, with your family members on social media. And big love, mad shout out to everybody who has made a

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Really excited about today's show. I got Adam Skolnick on. He's a great guy. He is a travel and adventure sports journalist who has traveled the world writing for the New York Times, Playboy, Outside, ESPN.com, BBC.com, Salon, Men's Health, Wired, and Travel and Leisure. In fact, he's authored or co-authored 25 Lonely Planet guidebooks. But the main reason he's on the show today is because he just came out with a new book. It's incredible. I really love this book.

It's called One Breath. And it's all about the extreme yet poetic sport of competitive freediving through the eyes of this guy called Nicholas Mavoli, who lived an amazing life and died quite tragically as America's greatest free diver. It's really a fascinating story. And I got a lot more I want to say about Adam, about Nick, about the new book in a second. But first. If you're a longtime listener of the show, then you may recall my conversation with a guy called Tank Sade. That was episode 49.

Tank is an Australian national record holder in a sport called freediving. And this is the sport where athletes compete to see just how deep down in the ocean or how much distance a human being is capable of covering underwater without breathing. That conversation was really a fascinating look into the sport, the art, and the subculture of this really beautiful, poetic, fascinating, and quickly growing sport. If you didn't check that one out yet, I highly recommend you do. If you did and you enjoyed it, then you're really going to love what's in store for you today because this conversation picks up where that one leaves off. Exploring this remarkable sport through the eyes of author Adam Skolnick, his new book, One Breath, and the endlessly fascinating life of the book's real-life protagonist, Nicholas Mavoli, who was America's fastest rising star in the sport. He set an American record for being the first U.S. athlete to dive to a depth of 100 meters. And he's a guy who perished right in front of Adam while attempting to set a second American record in 2013 at an event called Vertical Blue, which is the sport's most prestigious competition held annually

in the Bahamas. Adam was right there. He was covering the event as a journalist. And his gripping story ended up landing on the front page of the New York Times. It went crazy viral. And it set the stage for what would become this book, One Breath, which I have to say, in all honesty, is one of the best books I have read in quite some time. It really is incredible, and I think it's one of the best books I have read in quite some time. It really is incredible, and I think it's one for the ages. And today we get into all of it. This is a conversation not only about the ins and the outs of the sport of freediving and this amazing life led by

Nick Mavoli, but it's also about the writing process, and it's about obsession. It's about escapism and the remarkable athleticism of freediving, not to mention the elusive allure and the unique spiritual quest that defines so many freedivers, so many athletes in this sport. Adam was great. This is a really captivating, compelling conversation. I loved it and I think you will too. So let's dive in and go deep. It's good to be able to actually stare at somebody when you're talking. I've done so many of these where someone's just in your ear or you're not even seeing them. No, no, no. It's fundamentally a different experience doing it in person. And when I first started out, I would do Skype interviews occasionally.

I was living on Kauai at the time when I started the podcast, which is another thing I want to talk to you about. So my pool of potential interview candidates was very small. Right. So I was kind of compelled to do that but i i quickly realized that um you know it's the in-person exchange that that you know lays the foundation for something cool to happen yeah and also i like meeting the people i want to you know i'm only having people on the show that like i want to know you know like that's a big part of it for me as well and i also think and you've gone through this you know through the publicity of your book, and I have as well, where you do all these podcasts and you bang them out on Skype.

And then you don't even know who it was. You forget about it the minute it's over. And for me, I want to have like an experience that I can take with me. You know, that's sort of the nourishment that I get out of doing it. And then I get out of being on other people's podcasts where I get to have that experience. So yeah, we want the experience itself to be something. Yeah, rather than just the outcome of it. Right. And hopefully that resonates, you know, in the finished product as well. Yeah, I think so, man. I definitely I dig the podcast

and the energy and you know, you just feel the positivity and and the intelligence and it's super cool. Oh, thanks, man. Well, I appreciate you schlepping your way all the way out to West Lake where there is an actual lake. I never knew West Lake had a lake. I know. You can't swim in it, and they don't let you even do stand-up paddleboard on it. Which is weird, right? So it's sort of like you can look at it, or you can be in one of those little boats. Right.

It must be all the soylent green they're just pumping under the lawns. They don't want you to actually bathe in it. Yeah, I think so. I think so. And it's funny. We have so many points of common interest that we can begin to explore. We were connected through our mutual book agent, Bird Level, who's like mensch of the century. I love that guy.

Amazing guy. like mensch of the century yeah i love that guy amazing guy um and uh and as we were kind of exchanging emails leading up to this because it's been a long time in the making we had some scheduling stuff so thanks for being patient with it um i i remembered i was like oh wow i had tank sate on the podcast like you early days like back in the i don't know episode 30 something 40 something or something like that long time ago and i haven't gone back and listened to that episode but he's an australian national record holder in free diving in a different discipline of free diving he goes for i don't know what the what's the term where you go for he had the record in dynamic yeah which is the distance in the pool with a fin with a monofin does he still hold that record or no he doesn't anymore but um and he i think

there's part of him i've talked to him he kind of wants to get it back but um after nick died uh i think he lost that kind of that urge that urge to push you know just for pushing sake he just likes the zen of the spearfish these days yeah but he's also busy i mean he's a busy guy working after so yeah he booked his television series like a year ago or something like that zen of the spearfish these days yeah but he's also busy i mean he's a busy guy working actor so yeah he booked his television series like a year ago or something like that what is it with actors and free diving that's a good point i don't know man the free spirited aspect of it i suppose yeah i think you know this is something we can talk about i mean it's definitely something i want to start talking about more and more but you know you know, a friend of mine, I did a book reading in San Francisco.

And a friend of mine said to me, you know, you're always interested in these experiences, both for yourself and what you write about. These experiences that kind of, these singular cathartic experiences. And, you know, if you think about all the things I've done, whether it's writing these Lonely Planet guides to get someone out there independently traveling out there on the fringe, or, you know, following freedivers around who are doing something nobody else on Earth does. Or even what I do, which isn't super extreme, if you think about it, you know, I go a quarter mile, half mile offshore and swim for a mile or two miles at a time. But you know, we're out there with big animals all the time, and nobody else is out there. And so that to some people is an

extreme experience. For me, it's a cathartic experience almost every time. So, you know, when I think about that, like why, you know, why and who are the personalities attracted to that and myself included. And I think that on the fringe, you kind of feel it's strange, but on that lonely fringe, I'm sure you must feel this on your on your runs. but you feel a connection to the world, to nature, to other human beings. It's kind of inexplicable. You get to this state, you actually feel more connected, at least I do, in those kinds of

experiences than sometimes I can just walking down the street. And some people can take those experiences and it can become a big ego thing for them and be like, look at me, look what I do compared to what these people do. But I think what's special about Nick and what I hope is the example he set and that I like to think I try to aspire to is it makes you more compassionate. To have those experiences, to feel grateful for them, and it makes you more compassionate. So that's what I'm – anyway, not to get into too deep. Has that been your experience of open water swimming and your dabbling in free diving? Yeah, I think, I think, you know, certainly open water swimming, which is something I

do all the time, uh, has relaxed me, I think fundamentally in ways. Um, but I think I felt that same feeling when i'm traveling somewhere hazardous by myself or something like that too where you kind of feel that connection to everything and that's what i've always kind of that's what i like to search for you know the danger is you get addicted to that kind of other thing and you don't infuse that in your daily life right and i think that's the challenge you know for for me it certainly is yeah it's unquestionably been my experience uh this deep profound sense of connectedness and i think you get an objective perspective on your reality when you step outside your not just your comfort zone but your natural environment you know and whether you're compelling your body to do things maybe it's not innately wired to do or just experiencing something that's out of your sort of typical depth, I think compels you to connect with the world around you in a different way.

That's a great way of putting it. Yeah, yeah, that objective point of view. That's what you get from being out there. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that objective point of view. That's what you get from being out there. Yeah, yeah. And it's a weird thing, too, because on the one hand, people will say, in reference to free divers or ultra athletes or any of these other kind of fringe athletes that do weird stuff, oh, they're crazy.

What would make somebody want to do that? It's so unsafe. It's not responsible. responsible, and yet we laud them for taking on that mantle of pushing the envelope and showing what the human spirit is capable of. I agree. We need people doing that, you know? Otherwise, we wouldn't be so attracted to watching it. Right.

You know, we need it. We just don't know we need it. It's like, you know, we need to watch. That's why I love watching basketball, because I like watching the best people in the world do things that I've tried to do. But then when you see this other whole group of people surfing a 60-foot wave or doing an ultra triathlon or doing free diving to the absolute maximum, they show you what humans are capable of. And that's special. you what humans are capable of. And that's something that's special. You know, that's like a pie and certainly the earliest free divers, that's their that was absolutely their role and

not only showing what humans are capable of, but actually stretching the understanding of medical science. Yeah, you have this beautiful line in the book where you say you talk about the origins of free diving and how it's rooted in spearfishing really was the point of origin where human beings started to explore, you know, diving deep and probing the depths of the ocean. And you have this beautiful line. It goes, spearfishing remains the most popular form of freediving. It's also the bridge that links aboriginal hunter-gatherers to modern competitive freedivers, which is, you know, this beautiful kind of through line of, you know, the evolution of man, I suppose. And I have to say right up front and at the outset

it's an incredible book man it is an incredible book you did an unbelievable job with this and i think it really does uh it really does achieve that um that special sort of place amongst books like Into the Wild or The Wave is another one that I know was influential on you. And as well, Born to Run, you know, I it, but also trying to, you know, shine a lens on it objectively to relate how it actually functions to the average person who has no point of reference for it. And trying to get behind, you know, the personalities and the archetypes of people that are drawn to this and why they're drawn to it and what that means. And you should be super proud, man. I think this is like a book for the ages. And on this podcast, I have the pleasure of sitting down with all kinds of people, and it seems like everybody's got a book, and I'm always sitting, their book's coming out. And so I'm going through a book a week,

and they're all good. I wouldn't have them on if I didn't like their books. And some are always going to be better than others, but this really is a beautiful work of art, man. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, man. That means a lot, coming from you especially. Yeah, so let's step into it, man. Let's step into the world. There'll be a contingent

of listeners that heard the tank episode, but that was so long ago and the audience has grown. So explain the world of freed diving what it is and and what drew you into it well okay so um free diving like you had said there's this link to something we've been doing for millennia as human beings you know and what i like to say is we're all free divers anybody who's jumped into a pool and held your breath as long as you could and had your parents time it. Which every kid does. Which every kid does and even grown-ups still do. That's a discipline in competitive freediving called static apnea.

And the world record for that is 11 minutes and 54 seconds. So that kind of gives you the idea. Who holds that record? A guy named Branko Petrovic, a Serbian guy. And then there's the dynamic, which is what we talked about uh tanks record and that's swimming from one end of the pool the other and that is a uh that's something that we've all tried to do as well and anybody who has kicked down while they're snorkeling to get a closer look at something even if it's a couple of feet that's a free dive so technically

we've all done it and it stretches way back the. The Greeks and the Romans, they deployed kind of early Navy SEAL-type teams, and they would erect these underwater barricades. There's the pearl farmers and the sponge collectors and the spear fishermen. So it's something that's always been around us as long as we've evolved. Competitive freediving first kind of started to take shape in the 40s when a guy named Raimondo Butcher, who is an Italian Air Force captain, took a bet to go down to, you know, 30 meters on one breath. These things always start with a bet.

Yeah, a bet. He just wanted to take a bet. That's how Ironman started. Three guys betting, you know, who are the hardest athletes the cyclists the swimmers or the runners and so they conceived this event iron man to test that you know it's funny is that right i didn't know that yeah same idea so this bet happened and people would warn him because at the time medical science said hey you go down below 30 i think he was going to 40 the you get on below 30 meters your uh chest will collapse that you're you know you're not built for it your lungs because of um because of

barometric pressure and how it shifts um because of that your lungs will will get compressed and there will be nothing there to kind of make sure that your that your chest cavity doesn't collapse. And so this guy believed. He'd been, he claimed, deeper than that and knew that he could do it. So he kind of had inside information. But everyone was wagging their fingers saying, no, you can't do it. And so he did it, and he came up. And so then that kind of started this progression, this slow march towards better understanding.

It wasn't until the 60s when these guys really started to understand that they were tapping into something called the mammalian dive reflex. And that's how they were going deeper and deeper. But to answer your question, so those early guys, they were taking weights down and then dropping weights and then swinging back up on their own. That now is a discipline called variable weight. But what I focus on in this book is the six disciplines of competitive freediving today. And those six disciplines, three of them are in the pool

and three of them are on a line going to depth. And the three in the pool are like static apnea, then going back and forth in the pool with and without fins. And those records- Is that dynamic apnea? Dynamic and then dynamic no fins. And so dynamic is with a monofin, which I know you had some experience with fin swimming in the past.

Yes. How did you know that? Because I listened to the podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. So, yeah, I actually went to the world championships of fin swimming in Hungary in 19, I don't know, it was a super long time ago. It was a little upstart sport. It's huge overseas. It's huge in Eastern Europe and Russia and China, but nobody does it here. No, the deepest competitive free diver in the world, Alexey Molchanov, he has one of the three

depth records. He started as a fin swimmer in high school. That's how he started. Yeah, it's a trip. And I remember being at that event and learning about the sport and how youngsters would be divided early on. Are you going to be a regular competitive swimmer or a fin swimmer? And then for the rest of their athletic career, they're one or the other, which is just a foreign concept here. It got media attention. It was crazy. It's a big sport. And it's faster. You would never have heard of it. No, it's faster. We got trounced. And we had like three Olympic gold medalists on our team. But you've got to be able to work that fin.

They do these quick, quick pumps. Right. I still have. My daughters use it all the time. It's all cracked now. But this beautiful fiberglass. Somebody's at the door. Hello? Oh, can you just leave it at the door please all right hold on that's never happened before i like it yeah yeah sorry about that that's all

right oh no that usually when it's uh sorry guys no problem interrupted the podcast for delivery it happens um what was i talking about oh we were talking about fin swimming yes oh so i have a fin yeah i have a beautifully like handmade fin that i think was made by a craftsman in russia that's just you know extraordinary and there's it's really cool i mean it's cool like for listeners who haven't seen it generate they're like dolphin tails basically it's when your feet are in there super duper tight. Oh, yeah. And when you're doing it properly and you're in a really great streamlined position,

you just cut through the water like crazy. And the power is really generated from your back and your abdominal muscles, not really from your legs. And it's almost an imperceptible up and down motion. Like when you're doing it the way it's intended, it's just the most gradual undulation that creates a tremendous amount of force and power. And it's interesting because the more gentle you are in all of these disciplines, you know, it's this balance between being gentle and being powerful. And that's because you need to conserve your oxygen. And so these guys, as opposed to the fin swimmers that are on the surface

and going as hard as they can and breathing through often a snorkel that kind of comes over their face, these guys are actually a few feet under the surface. They're weighted. They have a neck weight. They're not allowed to break the surface or they're penalized. And so they stay, they stay underwater. And, and Goran Cholok is the greatest guy in the pool of all time.

And he has right now has the dynamic record at 281 meters. And then Mateusz Malina, who's a Polish guy. So, you know, Goran is from Croatia and then Mateusz is from Poland. So it's still, you know,

you see this Eastern European kind of pool. You see the roots there and fin swimming. And no fins, the record is 226 meters and it's a breaststroke. It's really just a breaststroke. I think that's more impressive because to do that breaststroke underwater creates so much negative water resistance.

It's a very different thing. Oh yeah, that's what a lot of freedivers think is the no fins disciplines are by far the the most difficult um but then in the in at depth there's also three disciplines one is called constant weight and that's the one with the monofin so it's really just a depth you're going down as deep as you can on one breath with a monofin they call it constant weight because any weight you bring down with you you have to bring up. You can't drop it. That would be the variable weight discipline.

And so that record is 128 meters. Alexey Molchanov has that record. Will Trubridge has the record for constant no fins, again, with weight but no fins, and that's a modified breaststroke down and back. And then there's free immersion, which Will Trubridge also, he's a Kiwi, and he has the record for 121 meters.

And they pull down to depth and then pull back up on a rope and no fins at all. So is there one where they have just long individual fins on each foot? No, those bi-fins, you wouldn't be able to, you know, it wasn't too long ago, ago actually when Eric Fata was kind of the first guy to use a monofin and prove that you can break

a record with a monofin and he is one of the innovators in this sport and so as soon as he broke a world record with a monofin everyone went to the monofin because it became clear that that was the way to do it but with bifins you're much more maneuverable.

You can get places quicker. You can help people. So the safety divers are in bi-fins. Spear fishermen should be in bi-fins. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And Will's a huge personality in the sport,

and he's the one who owns this big competition, right, where everything kind of went down. Yeah. He owns Vertical Blue, which is a competition, but it's also his kind of free diving school where he does advanced training and gets some of the best free divers in the world to come to the blue hole and and teach people right and you have a really interesting personal story that i do want to get into but you know we'll backtrack into that in a few minutes but

what what drew you into this world like how did you find yourself you know at this competition well i mean that that if you if you trace it it goes all the way into that personal story i mean it um i when i was there covering vertical blue 2013 with a photographer named leah barrett we were there for the new york. And we can hold off on how I ended up getting that gig if you want to wait and get into that. But we worked together in Kauai on a couple of stories. And through those stories, I got connected to a reporter at the Times.

And I pitched, and Leah had already shot a competition, a competition called the Caribbean Cup, which is held in Roatan each spring. And at that competition, Nick Mavoli, who's the center of the book, got to 100 meters and became the first American ever to hit 100 meters. That's still an American record in constant weight. And met a lot of the kind of top athletes, including William Trubridge. And when she was in Kauai, she said, you know, we have to start covering this sport.

This is going to be a bigger sport. And I knew, you know, I'm a tech diver and a scuba diver. And actually, one of the guys who taught me tech diving had since turned to freediving. And I knew that. And he'd opened a freediving center in the Gili Islands in Indonesia. So this is a guy who I was still friends with. So he was kind of my only real connection into that world. But I knew something about it.

But I didn't know too much about it. And I knew he'd be in the Bahamas, though, that fall. And so I, you know, I followed Leah's lead. You know, Leah's a very gifted underwater photographer, and we wanted to collaborate. And so I started pitching it around. And pitching stories to magazines is kind of hit or miss. You know, some stories you think are great stories don't sell. Some you think are iffy stories sell right away, and you just never know. And so I pitched it around. Nobody was really biting.

And then three weeks before the competition, I gave it one last go. I just contacted this guy at the New York Times and said, hey, do you think anyone at the paper would be into it? And I got connected to the sports desk, and next thing you know, I'm there. And I got there. It's so interesting because I would have thought that Men's Journal or Outside or something like that would be all over it.

I wouldn't have predicted the New York Times sports section. Well, if they've covered it at all in recent history, and Outside in particular had covered it. I guess it was in 2012 when the outside story came out and and that was about the world championships that had happened uh the individual i think it was the team or the individual world championships anyway so that had come out it might have been 2013 actually and uh the free divers hated that story and when i showed up there for the new york times there was and there was all sorts of

of tension and you know not everybody was happy to have you there and it was kind of interesting like you and i were talking before i can't remember if it's before the mics came on but um about these kind of niche sports and the fact that they aren't covered well i think that sometimes people get comfortable them not being covered and and you know especially what the free divers are doing they often saw a lot of sensationalistic reporting when people did come in uh written by people who they thought didn't understand the sport properly and so they saw another one of those happening you know that's what they were worried that's understandable you know they're protective of something that they love that they've seen you know portrayed uh in a way that misunderstands exactly what they're doing.

It's very similar to the ultra-running world, I think. That sport is further down the line in terms of development and mainstream awareness. But I think initially when people started to look at it through books like Dean Karnaz's, when his book came out, that shined a bright light on that world where there had never been a bright light shine before. And I think it, you know, sort of comparably, you know, concerned some people and ruffled some feathers. And so I can empathize with that, I suppose. Yeah, yeah.

So you had to earn that. But at least he was a runner, right? Yeah, he was one of them. Yeah, he was one of them. Right, yeah. And a very good one. You're just an interloper. Right. right? Yeah, he was one of them. Yeah, he was one of them. Right, yeah, and a very good one. You're just an interloper. Right, I was just...

But I like to swim. I like scuba diving. Well, you know, it's funny because since then, I don't think I've ever gotten the proper respect from the majority of freedivers that I really do feel that my... Before that, when we get into kind of my personal history, but my addiction to kind of open water swimming, if you want to use a word like that, which I'm compelled

to do it as often as I can. That does, I think it did make me understand what these guys were doing. I don't think they saw it that way. Certainly not at the beginning, because it's a different sport entirely. But you took it upon yourself to learn freediving. I mean, you went down pretty far, right? 30 meters. Yeah, I mean, so that was at that mark

that previously was thought to crush your... Right, that's the mark I hit. But, you know, when I first arrived there, though, I hadn't done that. So when I first arrived there, I'm just a freelancer on a job, and I'm interested. But to tell you the truth, I didn't know really what to expect. And so, you know, then Nick dies 10 feet in front of me.

And so, I've done stories. I've done like humanitarian kind of, I've done stories on humanitarian abuses in war zones. I've traveled to Angola and kind of toured the slums. I've been, you know, East Burma is kind of a place I've covered quite a bit. And so, I've been and kind of toured the slums. I've been, you know, East Burma is kind of a place I've covered quite a bit. And so I've been and kind of talked to people who've had horrific experiences and not too long before that. And when you have those experiences as a journalist, it's hard to click back into life, you know.

It's just hard. You get this, I haven't been at war, like a war reporter i've been kind of in these underreported areas and doing this type of work and so and when i when i come out of those kinds of kinds of stories it's it lingers with you you get like this low level ptsd where nothing else seems as important and that's partly true and partly an illusion uh but with nicks i had that exact same feeling because here was a guy who died right in front of me. And because I was there and because the New York Times reported on it, his family was getting just all sorts of calls from everybody, everywhere, all these media sources from all over the world.

So their experience already having lost someone they loved dearly and then having all of those calls, I just couldn't really shake it. And so I called his uncle about a month later, three or four weeks later. I wanted to give him a little space. And then I just offered my experience, asked them if I could help answer any unanswered questions for them, tell me about Nick. And I told them how I got there that day. And I went from his uncle to his sister and then gradually started putting together this picture of someone who very much is like Christopher McCandless in Into the Wild, this altruistic seeker who learned as he went along, didn't listen to authority, didn't trust authority, but achieved remarkable things even at every level as he went along you know nick uh wrote and starred in his own independent movie that was at the rotterdam film festival

nick was the prop man at the chapelle show you know he uh he has this bizarre zealot like life and path totally like mind you as you read you're like then he did that yeah what he's like he's this he's this modern day like modern American zealot in a weird way you can trace recent American history through what he did whether it's you know attending the GOP protests in 2000 in Philadelphia which is which was kind of a follow up to the battle in Seattle that big Seattle protest thing that happened in the late 90s uh to coming to williamsburg right after 9-11 and before it's williamsburg today in brooklyn it was it was proto hipster really proto hipster and then and and then you move it right along chapelle show all the way through and yeah when he joined chapelle show it wasn't anything and then it blew up while he was working yeah he was there for the whole run he has this capacity to show up right before the big thing happens. Yeah, and it's partly because he's always out there on the edge experiencing,

trying to find, you know, he was a DIYer before that was cool. I mean, he was, yeah, he was before all that. And so I think just like McCandless, he was seeking something. And he had this great job in New York film and television. He could have made a couple hundred thousand dollars a year for the rest of his life if he wanted to,

but he didn't care about that. Well, it all starts with a broken home in Florida. Yeah. Yeah. And a dad that basically hits the road. Yeah. Uh,

and, and disappears on him and him sort of discovering solace, uh, through BMX and, and kind of the straight edge punk movement. Yeah, that's exactly right. So he,

he got into BMX right away. That was his first sport. And he was just like he was, you know, immediately gifted in freediving. He was immediately gifted in BMX and fearless. And he'd build his own jumps with his buddies and like, you know, jump over the bayou and land in the swamp and

come up okay. And he was always the first guy to test the jumps and the first guy to do the new tricks. And he'd land them. And he was coming up in the bmx scene in the racing scene he'd win races i mean he wasn't just a casual guy why do you think he didn't continue to pursue that at some point it seems like you're not really explicit about it but like it just sort of like sort of fell off well he two things one is he he and his buddies were coming up right when free riding became cooler than the races so the race scene which was you know more when i was growing up that's what bmx was it was these races um they were that wasn't cool anymore the best guys were now free riding just like the

skaters were doing and so they'd find the best terrain and they would go do it and they'd video it that's that was kind of you know before youtube that's what became cool and they would get these videotapes they'd watch them and so then the x game started to rise and so he did you know before youtube that's what became cool and they would get these videotapes they'd watch them and so then the x games started to rise and so he did you know he he did try to get into he wanted to uh try out for the x games and he felt like he could get there but then he had injuries so he had two injuries that kind of knocked him out and one right before his big x games uh try out and it knocked him out he couldn't be in anymore. And he just felt like at that point, he went into acting and the acting kind of took over. Yeah. And meanwhile, he has this innate natural ability to hold his breath and dive deep into the

water that he knew that he had and people that knew him knew that he had, but just was sort of under the surface, pardon the pun, just there waiting to be expressed. Yeah, he was pushed in the family pool by the dog when he was a year and a half old, and his grandmother was like, where is he, where is he? And there he was down there at the bottom of the pool with a big smile on his face, just happy as he could be. And she said, you know, that's when I knew you were going to be a fish. That's what she told him later on.

And so from then on, like he was two years old, there's pictures of him with fake tanks and fins. And by the time he's 12 years old, he has his own tanks and fins. He's got the weights. He's got everything. When he was even building the jumps, he went in with a scuba gear to get all the junk out of there so they could land safely.

But mainly what he was doing was diving in the Florida Keys for lobster with his uncle Paul. Who kind of was, when his dad, his dad didn't fully hit the road. His dad was around. But if his dad was supposed to pick him up and take him for the day, he might come four hours late. Or he might not come at all. And so his grandmother, his father's mother, called Nick's uncle, because they were brothers, right? And Nick's uncle kind of decided to step in. And, you know, because the Mavoli side, the Mavoli fatherhood wasn't happening.

So a Mavoli had to get in there with Nick. They considered him a Mavoli, and they wanted him to stay a Mavoli. You know, something that's not explicitly said in the book, his wife had remarried, and they were kind of worried that maybe the stepfather would adopt him. And so, I know that's the grandparents were concerned about that. And so, that was one motivation. But also, Paul just loved Nick. He was like a son to Paul. And over the course of time, he taught him how to equalize. He took him on his first lobster dives. But right away, Nick could hold his breath better than Paul could, even as a 10-year-old. Yeah, and beyond the natural proficiency, I think the more important aspect of this, and this is certainly a big thing in the book, is this idea that water is his safe place.

This is where he can go to escape his pain. Well, and that certainly happened. When he was four years old, whenever his parents were fighting or when their marriage was about to end, Nick would jump in the pool, and he would grip the ladder, and he'd hide under there

and hold his breath as long as he could. And then he'd come up for air and see if it was over yet. And then later, when his dad was gone and his mother was pissed at him or wanted him to do something he would do the same thing to escape his mother i listen i relate to that profoundly i wrote my college essay my college application essay about that very subject of like being underwater and what that meant to me so i i think it's a

very real thing it's like returning to the womb yeah where everything is going to be okay it's funny you know like there's just as that's primordial then there's the people who have the you've met the people who are like totally afraid of the ocean or like you see them swimming they might be great athletes on land but then you see them swimming and they can do it but like they're not comfortable at all and there's that primord fear. It's interesting how the ocean can attract us and repel us and nourish us and hurt us. I don't think there's anything else quite like it. Yeah, it's fascinating, right? I mean, I think if you can, that fear is easily overcome though, with just a little bit of teaching and skill. I think our natural disposition is to be comfortable in that environment once we can conquer that sort of –

Yeah, it's like a socialized fear, you think? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think so. You know, but I got to hand it to you going out and swimming off point doom like that because i don't even do that do you swim alone or do you always go with someone else because i don't end up swimming in the ocean that much because i'm yeah i'm not because i usually go by myself like if i was with somebody i'd be fine but when you're out there all by yourself there is a sense of of vulnerability

you're always by yourself you know that's the one thing you learn in in the vulnerability. You're always by yourself. That's the one thing you learn in the ocean is you're always by yourself. You have to be able to look after yourself because even when you're with somebody, and I do often swim with friends, but if they can't swim, then I might alter the terrain a little bit, but I'll still go out there.

I mean, the lifeguards know us by now. The lifeguards are looking out for us. But we go, yeah, sometimes alone. I won't go to where the sea lions live. We might still see them, but I won't go there alone, kind of around the point, wrap around the point alone. That will always have a friend. But, you know, sometimes you get separated from your friends.

And so you're still alone out there. And, you know, everyone gets – it still pops in my mind to be a little nervous sometimes. When I first started, I'd get nervous a lot. Like I'd show up at the beach a little nervous. And now that doesn't happen. It's gone now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now it's your happy place.

Exactly. Now it is. It's just the same. And it's developed as this process going through the book writing, the research, everything. It's stayed and actually it's grown, you know, my need for it and what it's doing for me, I think. That's great, man. Yeah.

So Nick is slowly turning into this, you know, Jack Kerouac type character. You explain it as Kerouac meets Jackass. Exactly. Jack Kerouac meets Jackass. You know, explorer, you you know kid with wanderlust who's also reckless and very iconoclastic and anarchist and anti-authoritarian uh seems to just end up where the wind blows him like he's incredibly uh spontaneous in his decision making about where

he's going to live and where he's going to go. He kind of bounces around from place to place. He's in Florida, and then he's in Philadelphia, and he's showing up at all these protests. He's one of those squatter kids you see on the corner that you're like, what are those kids doing? And then finds himself in a movie and falls in love with the director. It's crazy what happens and then yes ends up you know taking that movie over essentially rewriting it and turning it into something that ends up at rotterdam which is amazing amazing yeah and and then chases her to williamsburg where he basically shows up unannounced on her doorstep and says i'm moving in and she says i love you that's it yeah yeah he's he you

know she was already in love with them and they had fallen in love in Philadelphia and kind of like that two week fever love that they, and she was, you know, she's older than him. She's 10 years older. And so she felt kind of like, wait, is this right? And, you know, she was feeling a little guilt about it. And she's still a little bit. Sometimes she talks to me about it.

But, but Nick was always, Nick had never had a doubt, you know. And after they shot this movie that kind of fell apart on him in Philly, that they ended up resurrecting together in New York, he went to Cuba for the first time with one of his high school buddies. Or not high, I guess right after high school, one of his buddies from Tallahassee. And Aaron Succo is his name. And they kind of traveled. And they were like dirtbags, you know, vagab in cuba before it was legal to go to cuba um and then when they were flying back 9-11

happened and uh esther got a phone call and she's on a rooftop and she's watching it all go down and two days later nicks at her doorstep basically and packed all this stuff and didn't tell her he was moving just right i'm moving in here yeah so like what i get out of that is a guy who must be must have been incredibly charismatic in a very unique way but probably also a gigantic pain in the ass to like live with and be around too much you know what i mean like in small doses awesome and probably you know good for a lot of great stories yeah yeah but on a day-to-day like life basis maybe not the easiest person he was also pretty young then you know and i don't think he saw it they didn't say he was he's so willing to have people come stay with him he was so generous he just

didn't see the boundaries that most people see you know he didn't experience them and i you know and that's like the mccandless kind of yeah they didn't mean anything to him it's like you know and he was a go with the flow guy if you said no don't you know you can't come you can't stay he wouldn't even have held it against you so it wasn't like he had this weird yeah no it was he just uh and i think with her he was following an instinct and you know they were in love so i i think with her it was the right decision later he makes tries to make a similar power play not quite to that dramatic extent um and it doesn't go so well for him uh but with her i think he was following the right lead and they certainly created some good work together right and another interesting thing

happened in cuba right because he did that dive there which was something he hadn't done in quite some time well yeah so he you know he won that just kind of shows the type of guy he was not every not all his friends knew how good an athlete he was like and he wouldn't talk about it when he won bmx races when he was a kid he wouldn't keep the trophies i mean i used to keep my participation trophies and baseball let alone like the ones where we won titles i kept them probably too long and i think most kids do and uh nick would mail it away like the next day he'd mail it to his grandparents because he didn't care about it right it's like mccandless giving that money away to oxfam exactly he exactly heads he heads out. Exactly. It's like the symbolic, I don't need it. I'm happy.

You know, he's happy he had it. It's an accomplishment for him and him alone. And so he was with his buddy, Aaron, who'd seen him in the water, knew he was pretty good, but had no idea that he could outdo a lifeguard in one of these sinkholes called the Cenotes in Cuba. And he went down and he was challenged for you know let's see you can go deeper and he just trashed he just trashed the local lifeguard but he's like what are you like how did i not know that you could do this right right right you know

yeah next thing you know they're driving like they get drunk together with the lifeguard and they end up driving the lifeguards russian jalopy back to havana with him taking turns at the wheel well what's interesting about that you know when you're talking about giving away the trophies and all of that is that there's a weird dissonance because he obviously cared deeply about what people thought of him he was later as we begin to see how much he cared about how well he could do in the sport and how he defined himself by his obsession with these numbers these depths that he was striving to hit and he really relied upon that for a sense of self-worth yes yes and i think that's a distinguishing factor from somebody like mccandless who truly is disconnected and really doesn't care

what the world's opinion of him was. Yeah. I mean, I think that the difference is that at his core, Nick is an athlete. And at his core, he's a competitive state and a really developed appreciation for patience that he didn't really have. So it is this Icarus in reverse situation icarus going down yeah totally it's icarus of the deep uh yeah i think um the best guys in the world and we say the best divers in the world i think including alexi's mother natalia mulchanova who i talked about all the male records she has literally every female record there is.

And she's no longer with us. She passed away last year. And she passed away free diving in a much different way. But they are more analytical than Nick was. Nick was a learn-as-you-go guy. And I think for Nick to have truly challenged, he had the capacity physiologically to challenge world records. He had the mentality, he had the talent.

Um, but the guys that have the records, they're, they're engineering like minds, you know, and he was not like that. Uh, and so I think it would have been a challenge for him to get to that level.

Um, but, and so he was frustrated by things. He wasn't, he wasn't willing to analyze all the data. He was more willing to just push ahead, push ahead, push ahead, and have the data analyze him kind of in a way where it'll streamline him. Eventually, he'll get it.

Eventually, he'll hit on the formula by just sheer will, whereas some of these guys really take the time to analyze every little thing. And I think that's kind of a separation there between him and some of the other elite divers. Yeah, my sense was that early on, his frustration stemmed with people not recognizing that he was as talented as he was innately. Yes. He hadn't done anything yet,

but he knew in his heart of hearts what he was capable of. But I think later on, his refusal to listen and adhere to the counsel that he was being given like hey man you gotta like chill you know for a couple weeks or whatever you can't just do this you know with the level of frequency that you're doing it the danger signs were all over the place that he just couldn't he just couldn't help himself he couldn't help himself he'd get fixated i think there's a couple reasons why kind of how this sets up for him. And I do think they go back to his childhood.

One is the self-worth idea that, you know, I don't think he, I think he was always underestimated in school, even though he was a smart kid and got good grades. I think, you know, his father not being there and having that big vacuum, even though he had his stepfather, who was a good guy, and he had his uncle come in. It's not the same. There's still going to be that void there. I think his mother, who was kind of the opposite of him, who would rather him be extra careful versus be as daring as he was, always telling him, no, you can't do that. You can't do that. Well, as a kid, if you keep being told you can't do something, then you go ahead and do it. Then who are you going to start listening to? You're not going to listen to, you can't do that. Then you go ahead and do it. Then who are you going to start listening to? You're not going to listen to I can't. You can't do that anymore.

Now you start to think, well, she just doesn't know that I can do it or that people can do it. She's just afraid. And so he keeps hearing I can't do that. You can't do that. You shouldn't do that. But then he does it and he's fine. That, I think, becomes part of his programming. And so all those things, the self-worth, this idea that he he might know better um kind of

comes together and then he's part of a free diving culture that is immature that doesn't realize themselves how dangerous things can be yeah they're warning him you're going to get injured but they don't think he's in mortal danger um and so all of those things like kind of conspired to to to bring him down i think right and you know the backdrop here just for context is this is a guy who once he once he finds this sort of group in pennsylvania that he can connect with he starts to progress incredibly rapidly like faster than anybody well yeah and that's the one thing i left out there is that also he discovers the sport when he's 30 okay and he's smart enough to know that you're in your athletic prime at 30 and he knows that alexi is was 26 at the time and he knows that will was 32 at the time

and so you know he knows he's behind already right And so for him, he didn't have patience, but he also didn't have time in his head. It's all a construct in your head, though, because on the flip side, the women's record holder, she started freediving at 40 and continued to just kick everyone's ass, even people 20 years younger than her or 30 years younger than her. But he wasn't willing to wait and try. Right. Yeah. than her or 30 years younger than her so um but he wasn't willing to wait and try right yeah and he progresses from 30 to 60 to 90 meters in like blinding speed right yeah nobody nobody had ever gotten to 90 so fast nobody had ever gotten to 100 so fast he was the fastest of both and so that's cool because it shows what an incredible talent he is, but it's alarming because of what we find out later as he continues to dive. Right, so set the stage for the fateful day.

So his first competitive free dive, his first event is called Deja Blue. It happens in March, April 2012. He discovers the sport the previous fall. He goes and dives with this crew in the quarry he ends up being told if you want to dive with us you got to take a class and he needs to he said you know in his mind he reads what he's going to do which is what i did which is dive to 100 feet and hold your breath for three minutes and he's like i can already do those things man what why

do i take this class and meanwhile in the quarry he's not like adhering to any of the protocols he's screwing around no but he's also clearly like already is good if not better than anybody he's the best guy in the quarry yeah already and uh but he takes this he takes this course and he learns a lot he learns and he listens and because he's had a near shallow water he had a near shallow water blackout when he was diving by himself once in florida and so he learns that um the danger of shallow water blackouts which kill 100 spear fishermen a year so he learns about not diving alone he learns kind of the mechanics how you can be more relaxed on a dive how you can get better more oxygen efficient he has got a really good teacher in ted hardy who remains one of the best teachers in america um and uh so he he takes the course and he does really well and then he decides to take ted on as his personal coach and he pays

him a little bit and he gets skype coaching and next thing you know he's you know he's doing uh breath hold lunges on the streets of williamsburg or like you know running on breath hold around drunks on bedford avenue it's such a you know, like sort of mashup of environments because that's the last. I remember, I mean, when your article came out in the New York Times, and I remember when that happened, I'm like, this guy, he lives in Brooklyn? Like, what? Like, how does that work? You know, how do you even, how does an athlete even live there and do anything?

You know, especially where he lived, which was when he moved in there, the bar underneath him, and it was called the Levee when he died. But when he moved in there, it was called Cokie's. And like all the people knew to go there to buy Coke at the bar. I mean, that's literally where he lived, like three, two floors below him. That's where he lived. So, yeah, it's not what you think. But, you know, then again, there's plenty of athletes that can do it.

So he had to find time and he had to find a pool that would allow him to do breath hold swimming so he found that with one of his buddies from the quarry a guy who was kind of initially the the the nish nish don't do that kind of need dive our way became his friend and start and his name is mayor taub and he was instrumental in nick's training all the way along and became and was a close friend of his all the way through his free diving career. Anyway, so he goes to the Cayman Islands and he ends up having to compete against his coach, which was kind of another, don't listen to people telling you what to do because they might have ulterior motives or they might not know. So again, that, that reinforces something he grew up with and he, and he ends up beating his coach and getting that 91 meter record

in his second competitive dive in history yeah it's this weird thing where he he's starting to sense that the coach is holding him back unnecessarily and perhaps the coach is looking to you know break the record himself and there's no doubt the coach his coach was looking to break the record himself but i truly believe that he was functioning his dual roles kind of in equal measure i think he was also legitimately concerned about nick going too fast to depth and he was right and he wasn't alone in that concern and he was right yeah yeah because later in that same competition nick decides to go to 88 meters and free immersion that's a discipline he'd never really trained

beyond going to 30 meters like just for hold downs just to prepare to dive because when you free dive we should get into this like the lure of the free dive and the setup of the free dive but when you free dive um you have to start super relaxed because that last breath you take with you on the dive that's your oxygen tank. And you only have so much oxygen depending on how many liters you've got of lung capacity, but also depending on how fast you use it. And as you go down, so you start really relaxed, you take your deep inhalation, and then you start swimming down. And the first 20 meters, first 10 meters, especially you're super buoyant, even though they have a weight, you're still fighting buoyancy. And so you have to kick pretty hard to get to 10 meters where you're neutrally

buoyant. And you kick a little softer and you get to about 20 meters. And then they maybe kick one or two more times. But at that point, negative buoyancy takes over and you start to sink like a stone. And then you're not kicking, you're not pulling, you're just letting the sea take you. And so you don't even want to think because even thoughts take oxygen. And so they close their eyes and the sea seems to squeeze them and they become this kind of speck of consciousness in this like vast fabric, which is just the blue water. And it becomes a really spiritual experience for them. And they get to depth, they grab a tag, and now they have to kick against that negative buoyancy, which is kind of like kicking against a swift current.

And then they get to the surface and now now they've done this amazing athletic thing. It's taken maybe three minutes on one breath to do this incredible thing. Maybe they've swam the distance of 150 or more meters. In his case, it would be 200 meters in his best dive. You take your deep breath, and now you have this endorphin rush combined with this spiritual experience, And now you have this endorphin rush combined with this spiritual experience, which, you know, when you go down and the sea is squeezing, physiological responses happen autonomically in your body. Your blood from your arms and legs shunts to the core. That's the reason the chest never concaves in, because all those blood vessels are engorged.

Your heart rate drops to half your resting heart rate, so like 20 to 30 beats per minute because these are athletes. And so that's something like Tibetan monks experience in the Himalayas when they're in deep meditation. And they're getting it on this dive. Then they kick against that negative pressure. They get to the surface. They have the endorphin rush. So you have this spiritual athletic cocktail that is quite a euphoric experience. And I think that's – and I know that's the pull. That's what gets people to do it over and over again.

That's what Nick loved. Nick didn't mind smoking a joint or having a good time. And so Nick, there is a certain addictive quality to that euphoria that he loved. And so that's the draw. And so he thought, once he discovered it and saw how beautiful, how it made him feel and how good he was at it, he just felt he was born for it. And, you know, his uncle used to tell him, you know, you were born for this shit when they would go diving for lobster and he was 10 years old.

And he just kept hearing that. And so then after his record-breaking dive, he tries to get to 88 meters in free immersion, even though he's never really practiced that discipline. And he's warned by Ted, who still regrets not jumping up and down and stopping it. But he's warned by the organizers, but there's no rule saying you can't do it. Now there is, but there isn't then. And so he starts pulling down to depth

and he gets to the depth and he starts to panic because he's never been that far below the surface without a fin and it's with fins that he was so gifted and not without fins and so now he starts pulling really fast and hard and the panic is swirling so the oxygen is burning and he ends up blacking out at 30 meters which is very deep it's very uncommon to black out that deep but the safety divers can get there. And these safety divers don't have oxygen, don't have air tanks either. And they're kicked down and they bring them to the surface. And he comes up, comes to after one rescue breath, you know, within a few

seconds, and he starts to vomit plasma and blood. And because what happened is he had a lung squeeze. And that's the first lung squeeze he has. has so now the rest of his career is kind of like that great successes and and chronic lung squeezes and that defines his career although he becomes the fastest guy in the history of the sport a year later to get to 100 meters he also has injuries he has a pressure injury in his ear he has pressure injuries in his lungs that that limit what he can do as well so it's this kind of balance he never quite struck in the sport. And you talk about these lung squeezes as the dirty, not-so-secret aspect of this sport set against a backdrop where there just isn't that much science on what is actually going on

because they're breaking new ground and nobody's really studied what the impact of these lung squeezes or the other kind of physiological things that are occurring when people are holding their breath for so long and going so deep. Right. And to that point, we don't actually even know 100% what causes it, although we think two things cause the lung squeeze. One is when your lungs compress, your air sacs stick together like a balloon does without air. And then when they peel apart, if you're not perfectly relaxed, you might have some rupture of the tissue. That's what causes the blood to start to fill the lungs.

That could be one thing that does it. Another thing could just be that your blood vessels aren't elastic enough. It's like if you go up to Everest without spending time at base camp, you could get edema the same way. You can get pulmonary edema climbing to altitude if you're not fully adjusted to that because it's again a pressure change. And so that's really the way that we think with him. He just wasn't acclimatized yet.

That's why most people took more time to get to depth. I mean, originally, and it's explained better and more thoroughly, originally, because there wasn't as much an understanding how to equalize at depth, it just naturally took some athletes longer to get to depth. And so they were kind of naturally acclimatized. By the time Nick came in, it was like this perfect storm of everything that could go wrong. He came in later in 2011, when there were more freediving schools, newer freediving schools, newer freediving teachers who were taking these technologies that were developed for elite divers and disseminating them to new students. And so you get a guy like Nick who has natural talent and ability and fearlessness. You give him that tool.

Well, it's hard to then put the brakes on him. And so he had the tool. And if he could equalize, he'd keep going. But that didn't mean his body was ready. It didn't mean his diaphragm was as relaxed as it could be. It didn't mean his intercostal muscles were as relaxed. And as you go down and that barometric pressure cranks up, you have to stay super chill, super relaxed, because that pressure is like a vice grip, and it can tear your tissue. super relaxed because that pressure is like a vice grip and it can tear your tissue and if anything that's not the simple cruise down to depth and the simple swim back with with maximum

relaxation any little contraction when you're when you want to breathe and your body's trying to make you breathe and you've been underwater for three minutes and wants you to breathe or two minutes that contraction alone couldn't couldn could give you a lung squeeze. And there's so much more going on than meets the eye. Like from somebody who doesn't know anything looking at it, it's like, okay, you oxygenate yourself and you swim down as calmly and as deeply as you can go and then you surface. But all of the crazy breathing techniques in preparation leading up to the moment of submerging yourself are insane,

right? Like all this weird stuff to like fill every, you know, tiny hidden nook and corner, you know, cranny of your diaphragm, like these bizarre techniques and then how you have to fill your cheeks with air because your lungs are being compressed and how that works as you get into these deeper depths. And then the crazy protocol that they have to undergo once they surface in order to not be disqualified. Yeah, yeah. I talked about that with Tank, I remember. Right, right, right. Yeah.

So when they're doing their peak inhalation, they'll sit and they'll just relax. They'll just lay back. they'll still sit and they'll just relax. They'll just lay back. Some will be upright holding a line and just relax and some will be on their back with like in one of those kind of noodles that you might take in the pool. But I would imagine even the day leading up to it,

like it's about- That morning, that morning. The whole day, just being as chill as possible. Certainly if you go, I mean, you can go way deeper into it just like you guys as elite ultra triathletes and ultra runners will be super on top of their nutrition these guys are too so no caffeine although nick

would like his coffee but certainly not before the dive and nothing to speed up that heart rate no sugar keeping that sugar really low very few carbs keeping your keeping your body trim because uh because you know if you're if you've got flab that can be buoyancy that can be a you know a buoyancy issue and then you have to put on more weight and then everything's off um so yeah so you know there's that whole athletic engineering which nick was on top of and quite good at and then you get to the dive itself and they lay flat on the water for the surface for about six minutes but even that, they're laying down on the beach or on a boat or wherever the competition is for 30 minutes to keep that heart rate really low. And then when they take their peak inhalation, like you're saying, they're filling the air sacs between and behind the shoulder blades.

These air sacs kind of poke up above the shoulders kind of right here. They're filling every last corner like they can with air to give them maximum oxygen and then they'll start stuffing air in their lungs packing air like each gulp with using their tongue to stuff it down so they take these 40 sips of air it looks like sips they're like like that and stuffing it down so they could get 20 over over their traditional natural lung capacity. Some of them can get. And so that's like their last breath.

And then they kick down. And then when they come back, they have to do a protocol at the surface. They have 15 seconds to do all six disciplines. They have 15 seconds to do these three things. Clear their face of all equipment. So if they're wearing goggles, fluid goggles, so they don't,

their eyes don't pop up and a nose clip, which they'll all wear. They'll clear all that. Maybe some of them just wear the nose clip, but clear all the face equipment and they say, I'm okay. And they make the okay sign. Actually the okay sign first,

then I am okay. And in that order, you have to do it in that order within 15 seconds of getting to the surface or it's a disqualified dive. And that exists because the point isn't just to dive. The point is to dive and come back clean. Because you can get to the plate and then black out, but that's not a clean dive. So you need to be able to come back clean. And so that's where that protocol comes in.

Yeah, and I think that's an important point because these athletes have to know when to turn around. Like they can always go, they can go further, but they know they're going to black out, right? So it's like, what's that point at which they can still surface and go through the protocol? Right. Well, that's the key. So, yes, they can go further and then they'll black out. But often the limiting factor isn't that as much as it is, uh, is equalization. So equalization seems to be, well, it can be either, it can be both those things.

So it could be that you black out after a dive and you can equalize fine, but you keep blacking out after this certain depth. Okay. So you better dial back your depth, master a depth that you can get to without blacking out and then build it. Maybe you're having, maybe you're having, you're burning your oxygen too quickly. Maybe there's some things you're doing that you could do better for a lot of guys. It's a lot of people. It's, it's equalization because as you die, as you're diving down, head down, it's different than scuba divers who have this big reservoir of air on their

back and our head up or, or horizontal. That's a much easier proposition to continue to equalize. But these guys, as their lungs start to compress, right, at 10 meters, you're already at two atmospheres, which means your lungs are half your normal size. At 20 meters, they're a third of the normal size and so on. And so as you get your lungs start to compress, which is why those air sacs might stick together, as your lungs start to compress, you have to take that air that will otherwise just be gone and no use to you and move it into your mouth where you store it like a chipmunk for the rest of the dive and then you also have to block off your throat because if you swallow that air it's gone and you can't equalize so that's a really delicate technique that these guys have mastered

and that's that technique that nick learned very early on and that enabled him to go deep and then there's the mammal what is it called the mammalian so the mammalian dive reflex is all of the things that we talked about which is the shunting of blood from your extremities to your core it's the it's the heart rate that biocardia that heart rate dropping to half your resting heart rate the spleen will release more red blood cells to transport oxygen more efficiently. The brain receptors will open up to better distribute oxygen in the brain. And then as you go down, you're not going to black out because there's another law of physics, Dalton's law, which basically means that your partial pressure of

oxygen, that percentage in your blood, it's because your lungs are compressed and they're smaller, your brain thinks, hey, we have plenty of air left because we only have so much volume anyway. And it's taken up with this much oxygen. So it's like this computer formula. But as you start to come back and your lungs reinflate, you know, all of a sudden you have very little ratio of oxygen per lung volume. And your brain starts to be, wait, that's not quite right. And that biggest change in lung volume and pressure happens in the last 10 meters when they go from half their size to the full size of lung. And all of a sudden the brain's like, wait, wait, wait, we are way low on oxygen. And it shuts you down.

That's why you blackout. So that's why a lot of people will blackout after their first breath at the surface or the second breath at the surface or even in that last 10 meters. That's where 99% of blackouts happen. Less than one percent happens below 10 meters interesting yeah and there's that weird thing that happens where you have that instinct when you're starting to run out of air to take a breath like this inbred you know instinct i must breathe but then you push past that and that goes away and that's on the way down so on the way down you feel you know you can have an early urge to breathe myself when i was learning to free dive i had an early urge to breathe it was really it was really you know heavy anytime i got to 10 meters

i'd want to turn right around and bolt to the surface you know and i'm comfortable in the water and i felt that way um but yeah if you keep going, you can get past it. It doesn't always disappear. But the more dives you do each day, that mammalian reflex kicks in stronger and stronger. And so I'll go out swimming. When we're doing our open water swims and we're diving down to our little house reef with a 40-foot depth, maximum depth, even then you'll have dives towards the end where you'll be like, wow, I could stay down here.

I mean, I don't actually have to breathe um but on a free dive where they're a competitive free dive uh those guys they're so well oiled and finely tuned even if they have an early urge to breathe which might happen because it's a competition day and it's not supposed to be a dreamy you know spiritual dive it's supposed to be a competition dive they might have like a really shitty experience on the dive but they still could have a clean dive so it's different than yeah yeah you have a uh this comes across loud and clear in the book a deep appreciation for what extraordinary athletes these people are you know and i think that's something that most people don't really understand yeah um just how

amazing they are uh so maybe you know elaborate on that a little bit and also i think it would be interesting for people to hear a little bit about how nick trained in brooklyn like what are the kind of things that he did to get ready for deep blue in 2013 yeah so uh well the athletes there's kind of like a stratified range of athletes you have the weekend warrior types just like you would any 10K run or triathlon. And then you have the elite national record holders, which are like what Nick was. And then you have the world record holders. And I think the world record holders, I would say, are on the level of an Olympic athlete.

They are phenomenal athletes. You look at them, they walk in a room, and you know that's a professional athlete. And Nick was right there he was gonna he was getting there um and then you have the then you have nick's level which are kind of national record holder level and again these guys are to me they look like olympic swimmers i mean they look that way some of them weight train some of them are more about yoga they're all cut they're all built uh They are absolutely incredible athletes. In terms of what Nick did, Nick was, he had to find a pool deep in Brooklyn that would allow him to do the breath hold swimming. And so he went to a Jewish community center in deep Brooklyn.

And that was the only place where he was allowed to do it. Because all the community pools were, no, you're not allowed to do it. Because they were afraid. The liability of this guy holding his breath you know he'd go underwater and just hold his breath there for minutes at a time and so he would practice uh doing dynamic and dynamic no fins the pool being the treadmill for this for the for the cross-country runner type thing you have to train in the pool to be good at depth um And then he would, like I said before, he would take one of his early on, one of his training tools was he would take a gash tennis ball and he would hold his breath. And then he'd walk that gash tennis ball as far as he could and drop it and then walk back all on one breath. And then he'd do it and he'd take that ball and he'd keep stretching it out and get it longer and longer distance.

As people walking by. As people walking people walking by as people staring at it it's like and he would do it late at night because he was working on sets right so he could he was working 14 hour days and so he would do it late at night when people were out partying um and then he he would climb the stairs and his three floor walk up up and down the stairs on breath hold that's where he had his brown out okay occasionally you can get a brown out which means you lose control of your bowels uh because because you're on plenty of uh free divers know what it's like to soil the uh and he was one of them um and then he wasn't you know for him it wasn't some big sacrifice because he wasn't he wasn't interested in the typical social scene you know he wasn't out partying.

If he was going out, even before he was a freediver, if he wanted a night out drinking, he'd get on the Staten Island Ferry with a six-pack. And that was his idea. So for him, it wasn't this huge sacrifice. For him, life was very much about being, it was an experiential experience. It was about living in that moment and pursuing something.

And that's when he was, I think, his happiest. Yeah, pursuing something real and something authentic in contrast to this world that he couldn't quite understand or appreciate in all its kind of trappings. Yeah, experience over consumption is kind of probably the easiest way to say it. Right, right. trappings yeah experience over consumption is kind of probably the easiest way to say it right yeah all right so he shows up at deep blue in 2013 and there's a confluence of events that transpire to kind of set the stage for yeah so went awry vertical blue is the competition yeah and then he he's there so back up to the summer um he had he he endured a heartbreak that summer, and then he ends up in Kalamata Individual Depth Championships, which is in 2013. It still remains the biggest freediving competition ever in terms of the amount of people that were there. It also is arguably the worst in terms of how many people were getting lung squeezes and how many people were spitting blood because of it and how little was done.

many people were getting lung squeezes and how many people were spitting blood because of it and how little was done and the best example of that is alexei mulchanov who is a tremendously gifted athlete one of the best athletes the sport's ever seen and the deepest man ever but he had a bad lung squeeze six days prior before his record attempt during the championships and he went for it was it was like a pre-compet competition that happens and he was going for his record then. And he had a bad blackout. And yet he still recovered enough in his mind to try it again with with the gold medal on the line. And he surprised everybody by by announcing the depth the night before these dives, the athletes have to announce their depth and he surprised everybody by announcing a world record depth the same depth he failed on and had such a bad blackout on um and some people were concerned but nobody stopped him because there was no rule that you had to stop him and the judges weren't going to stop him and his mother wanted to stop his mother this great athlete wanted him to stop but he didn't listen to her either and he did it he nailed it he got the dive. And Nick was there. And a lot of people were there.

And so that's what I meant when I say it's kind of this dirty, open secret of competitive freediving where people were getting squeezes and they were still diving and nobody was getting hurt beyond just a little blood in the saliva. And so Nick was there for that. So that sets up the kind of the culture that he was there for. When he gets to Vertical Blue, he's had two really intense seasons in a row, sandwiched between incredibly fast-paced work and production. He worked on the Chris Rock movie that summer

because he needed to keep his hours to stay in the union and keep his health care. So he had this incredibly intense season, early season, came home, worked 80-hour weeks nonstop, and on his day off would go do his grandmother's gardening. And next thing you know, he has this heartbreak. He ends up in the world championships, and he's getting injured,

periodically squeezing during training and during competition. While he was in Kalamata, he was spitting blood all over the city. He wrote a blog about it. And then he ends up in vertical blue after winning a competition right before that. The same one, the Cayman Islands competition that he was his first competition. That year, in 2013, it was held in Curaçao in October. And he won that, Deja Blue. And then he shows up in vertical blue.

And nothing's going right. He's not feeling right. Everything's hurting. Nothing's working. But he has huge aspirations for what he wants to accomplish. But he still, his goal is to break every American record that year and he's only broken the one.

And he wants two more American records and he wants to get third place. And so even though his body is telling him to stop and all his friends are saying, slow down and there's another year in his mind, he spent $30,000 that year traveling around the world. He'd spent all his life savings. He needs something out of it. Or to him, it's a failure. Even though he'd become the only American to 100 meters that year, he couldn't back off. Like where I think where he was fixated, where a lot of us would be like okay you know what let's say we got progress this year

and we'll we'll take it to next year not not him and so uh there's a level of impetuousness and lack of patience and this incredible drive you know this obsession to hit these numbers yeah and and it's i think fixated is it's almost like a computer glitch you know it's it's less that he because he doesn't want to gloat over it he just he can't he can't not go for it and and one thing that happened the first dive i ever saw him do and i only saw two was the friday dive before he died on sunday the 17th of november and he dove and he thought he'd hurt his ear when he'd actually squeezed again and he had blood coming from his mouth and after everything he threw kind of his typical tantrum when things didn't go well as great and

sweet a guy as he was and and um when he things didn't go right in the water or even on set he'd kind of he would throw a little bit of a tantrum. When that calmed down, I went and saw him by his car. And I asked him what went wrong. And he said, you know, I lost air, meaning he swallowed some of his mouth fill, what I talked about with the chipmunks. And he couldn't equalize anymore. But he still went for the tag because he thought, you know, I'll push it. My ear can handle another couple meters.

He was only two meters away. And he thought he busted his eardrum. He thought his competition was over. And he said to me, you know, I was fucking stupid. You know, I knew I shouldn't have done it is what he's saying. And he did it anyway.

And then two days later he had a very similar experience. And, um, again, he couldn't stop himself. So it was, I think like a glitch in the system. You know, he just got fixated.

I don't know if it's so much as an obsession or it's just a glitch. But after that ear situation, he didn't think that he would get cleared to do the... He thought he'd broken his eardrum, perforated eardrum. And you can't dive with a perforated eardrum because you can't equalize. And so you couldn't dive. And it sounds like he wasn't completely candorous with the doctor about the blood that he was spitting up like he just wanted so badly to get approved so that he could dive the next day that's right he wasn't he didn't tell the doctor and then also the doctor didn't check him for that and it wasn't common for the doctor to be checking for lung squeezes and one way to check would have been if she'd put a stethoscope

on his back and listen to him inhale and exhale she might have heard a gurgling of fluid and which would have indicated a lung squeeze but at that time there was no rule allowing a doctor or a judge to disqualify an athlete based on a lung squeeze so it's still debatable even if she had noticed it what would have happened um it's hard to know what would have happened uh but certainly more people would have been made aware of it and maybe you know will one of his mentors could have stepped in and convinced him not to dive as it was nobody really got no there are plenty of people gave him advice nobody just stood in his way and said no you're not diving nobody did and then ultimately he knew he wasn't feeling well he knew he wasn't feeling well. He knew he wasn't at peak

form. He knew that it was going to be a challenge for him to get to what he wanted, and he still dove. So I think that Nick's death is kind of like how Malcolm Gladwell talks about plane crashes. I think in Tipping Point, it's Outliers or Tipping Point, where he's like, it's never one thing. It's like eight or nine things. All these dominoes keep falling and it's easy to get off the track after one or two dominoes. But as the dominoes fall,

it's just harder to change the course and things just happen together. And I think there are like eight, nine things that could have gone differently. Some of them were under Nick's control. Some of them were under the doctor's control who made some errors. Some was the culture of the sport itself.

Right. So that dive. Let's walk through what the goal was and where it started to go. So he was going for a 72-meter dive in constant no fins. It would have been an American record. He had done 70 meters in training. So even now as he got to vertical blue and he was diving in the blue hole and things were not going well for him about a few days before the competition,

actually he started to progress again. He started to feel good and progress again. And he got to 70 meters with no fins and he was perfectly fine. Like lips weren't blue, no hypoxia whatsoever, no squeeze. And so it gave him hope that he could get to 72 and 72 was his goal and he failed on 72 twice before that dive and he went forward a third time

and on that dive itself he he looked good going down but then he got to 68 meters and he all of a sudden you can follow these divers on a sonar track like a fish finder type track and they were following nick's trail sometimes they fade in and out but nicks was still visible and you couldn't see him move his dot was there and he stayed there for about 30 seconds at 68 meters not coming up and that is very very unusual um very few free divers would stay at that depth but what he was doing was he was going upright head up trying to equalize because he was almost out of air and so he goes head up and when he gets and then he starts sinking again so he accomplished it and he gets to the he gets to the plate and he has to use his arms in kind of a tread water motion to get to the plate which he wouldn't have had to do if he was

still head down and so at pressure all these kinds of little movements could cause a lung, or just the fact that he went head up and was trying to force equalization, that could cause a lung squeeze. He gets the tag, he starts swimming to the surface, and it looks, on tape, it looks like maybe he's about to black out, but he doesn't. He doesn't need safety divers help. He gets to the surface by himself, grabs the line, tries to do the protocol, but he can't get through the protocol. He just can't get through the protocol he just can't get through it he just didn't have quite enough and then he's at the surface and he looks to be breathing on his own for almost a minute before he blacks out so that's again unusual if a diver's going to black out after a dive from hypoxia like i said it's usually the first couple breaths or

right away that they'll have a samba meaning they lose motor motor control and start to shake and then black out with him he was gripping that line trying to re-oxygenate but his color wasn't coming back nothing was coming back and nobody really saw it no because he wasn't blacking out or shaking nobody saw that he was still having respiratory distress and so then when he finally does fall back and they get him on the platform, there's several mistakes. I won't go through it all, but there were several mistakes in the emergency response that cost him. Ed, to just be clear, this is the first death in the 21-year history of the sport. It's not like this is going on all the time.

First death in the history of competitive freediving. First death in over 35,000 competitive freedives. And you just happened to be there covering it for the sports page. You write about it. And overnight, this turns into a headline story across the world. It becomes a viral thing. And suddenly, the world spotlight is all focused on free diving yeah it happens right away and it was as when i got there there was already some skepticism and then when this happened uh it was you know it was tense because i had to be there and i had to talk with the doctors and i had to talk with the the uh police the bahamian police who showed up and you know some of them wanted to joke with me about the yankees. And so there was all these uncomfortable moments where everyone's, everyone's

eyes are on us. And, um, and so we were just there, but you know, when I first showed up there, see, I don't, I think there's many journalists that show up and they don't hide their skepticism maybe, or cynicism. I'm not like that. Like I'm, I'm not going to jump to a skeptical conclusion. I'll be skeptical of certain things, but I'm not going to show up there with some agenda. I try not to, I try to show up blank to a story. So in my opinion, when I showed up there, my goal was to tell it like it was not to tell it like I thought it should be, or like to shame anybody for doing what they liked. And I think part of that is this, I was already a water person. I already needed the water. So

I didn't look at someone doing something extreme in the water and wonder why, you know what I mean? I didn't wonder why, because you don't have to explain it to me. Cause like, why does someone try to surf a 60 foot wave? That's, that's insane too. But we don't wonder why. Cause we see the thrill And this one, it's an invisible thrill. We don't see it. We can't see it happen. So we don't understand it. But I didn't wonder why.

I was interested in why. But I didn't wonder why these crazy people do this thing. But they didn't know that. And the only way I could demonstrate that is by writing the story. And so when this dark thing happened, the worst moment in the history of the sport happened, I had a few hours to file the story. And then the story came out. I'm still right there with everybody.

And the story came out and everyone's reading it like on their phones. And that shifted everything. Because once they saw that, I didn't sensationalize it, that I treated the sport and Nick with respect. Because here I was, I still was only a few days into the assignment. I still didn't really have a handle on the sport, to be honest with you. I, I had, I didn't have full notebooks of stuff.

I had what happened that day. And so there were a lot of things I couldn't get into because I didn't have the full picture. So I just stuck really clearly to what happened that day. And I think for those reasons, um, it was easier for me to get access and go deeper. Right. I would imagine it was, you wouldn't have expected that it would have been as big get access and go deeper. Right. I would imagine it was, you wouldn't have expected that it would have been as big a story as it became. No, it was supposed to be this, it wasn't even due that right after the, nobody knew what this competition was.

And so like- Don't worry, whenever you get to it, no one's gonna care. When I went, I showed up in the Bahamas, I'm like, hey, by the way, the competition ends on X day. When do you guys want copy? And I find out my editor's out of town.

I've switched to another editor. And then they're like, oh, you know, whenever, a few days later, whenever you could do it. Basically, they were going to run it midweek. College football was kind of dormant until the bowl games were coming up. This was November 17th. This is filler. It's filler for midweek when there's only only professional football kind of dog days of the season and then

he dies and I'm told we want 500 words just keep it real clean and the more I wrote then they just said you know what keep writing and then I think they ended up putting it on the front page for a couple of days and it ended up

just yeah who knew that that there was this huge audience for this niche sport i could never have predicted that nobody knew uh but it's true and then when and you're down there experiencing this in real time and these people are reading your article yeah i would imagine you know immediately there's a shift in how people are perceiving you and interacting with you. And yeah. And also everyone is so exhausted from the experience and so sad. And then, um, there,

everyone watched it unfold and it wasn't pretty. Uh, you know, there was, it was, I didn't get into the mistakes made in those early times articles because I didn't understand what had happened quite yet. Uh,

and it needed distance, but we all understood that it could have gone better and um so i think for all those reasons then kind of everyone exhaled a little bit and would talk to me a bit more um and then i just did those two stories though and and then there was a long period of time before i showed up at a competition again until may the following year and when did you sense that perhaps this could be the makings of a book i think when i talked to his uncle a month after the incident i talked to his uncle and and uh i had this instinct that okay this this is a mccandless character you know i i didn't know i had this feeling like what is this what is this? Is this just a longer form magazine piece maybe, follow up?

Or is this a book thing? What is it? You know, I didn't know. But as soon as I got to, I heard kind of how he started diving and there was that family element. And then I heard a bit more about his life story. Then I just saw it happen. You know, I just saw it right there. Right.

And did you immediately just start working on it did that become your number one thing or are you i mean i would imagine you're writing all kinds of stuff for all different kinds of people well you know prior to this kind of my i never had i mean i've been freelance since 2000 a freelance writer since 2000 but since 2007 the gravy train has really been and it's it's not that lucrative a gravy train but it was the gravy train lonely lonely planet guidebook so i was in the midst of i had an la lonely planet to do and so i was coming back at the time i had just i'd been in kawaii for the the 2013 that was my new base of operations i'd moved out of la but i was coming back to la to do this one job i was going to buy a car for the island and then go back. And while I was in LA, I was writing this book proposal

because I don't know how many listeners know, but a lot of nonfiction books that you'll see, even big nonfiction books often, not all, but often start as kind of these annotated outline book proposals so they can get funded to become books. And so that's what I did. So I did that kind of traditional route. All right.

I want to get into that, but my bladder is about to explode. I'm going to take a bathroom break. I'll do it with you. You need to go? Yeah, you go first. All right. Yes. All right, cool.

So, yeah, I want to unpack the personal story. It's super interesting, and I think there's a lot of parallels with your protagonist right you share this uh this thirst for adventure this wanderlust and this quest for you know the authentic and you know how you arrived at this place of being you know an adventure travel writer i think it's pretty cool okay cool yeah so uh oh it's my turn yeah go for it i guess we should ask a question, right? That was a statement. I'll start. Well, I think the easy way to do it is if you pull back kind of the thread to how I ended up in the Bahamas that day, you end up back to me in Kauai in October 2012.

And I was there doing a Lonely guidebook which i'd done i've done man i was living in now we moved to kawaii in november of 2012 okay right were you still there oh yeah yeah really oh yeah i was there where on the island where you live in i the in october i was in the north shore and then i was south shore in november and then I came back and ended up living in Honepepe. Ah. Yeah. I was living, we were on the North Shore. Do you know Common Ground?

Sure, of course. Yeah, we were living in yurts on the farm. What? Common Ground. You know Jeff Curzon? Ah, I don't know him. You must. He was living like not too far from there. Do you know Chris from Common Ground, the proprietor?

No, I never met him. Okay, so he was why we came out there yeah so we we lived there for three months that's amazing yeah i love that that bridge that's insane that's like it's incredible yeah yeah that rainbows all day every day kind of i mean it's it's beyond you know i mean it's like what are we doing near west lake i know oh it's the, it's the lake. It's the lake. You know, so Kauai, right. So I ended up, my marriage unravels while I'm there. I'm there. I don't really know anybody there.

I had a few contacts, but I don't really know. I don't have no real close friends there at the time. Were you there specifically to cover the GMO story? No, no, no. I was there for. As a result of. So basically, I'm there doing... Unfold as a result of... So basically, I'm there doing this Lonely Planet guidebook.

And I'm there for whatever, six weeks. I can't even remember the... So I show up there. This whole thing happens. I mean, it was kind of on its way, but it happened while I was there. And at this time, I had had...

Kind of our marriage problems started this previous summer when I was in Indonesia. And I'd had this horrible back. You know, I'd sprained my back really badly. And then I had to go to Indonesia for three months for an assignment. And I was in a horse cart crash, a car crash. I was in incredible monsoon conditions and ferries where it rained like for 20 straight days and 10-foot seas and these rickety ferries where it rained like for 20 straight days and 10 foot seas and these rickety ferries and then when I finally flew back

oh yeah I was surrounded by villagers with spears 50 of them wanted to kill me because I thought I was a guy who was trying to bilk them out of their ancestral homeland just like you know a little mistaken identity so there was that too and so then when I flew back in I flew into Hong Kong on my way home to LA and I landed

in a class 9 typhoon and nobody could leave the fucking airport for like 36 hours go to the grocery store in west lake okay so then i end up back home and like my like everything's in shambles and so me the only thing that kind of made sense at that point i finally found this massage therapist that could help me with my back and you know i've been doing yoga for years. It's not like I've not been in wellness or in fitness. I just couldn't run anymore. And so I just needed to be normal again.

And so then she says, get in the pool. So I'm in the pool. And next thing you know, I feel much better. I'm enjoying swimming. And a friend of mine had been swimming Big Doom for so long. He said, you got to come out here. And I out for a swim and he tried to tell me i'd been once before but i think i'd been when it was like 55 degree water and i had no and my goggles were leaky and i had no wetsuit and it was like six foot seas miserable and it was horrible and i was

like i felt like i barely survived it and this time it was those perfect conditions, you know, maybe two foot swell, you know, visibility of 60 feet. And you can see, I saw like 50 rays on that. I didn't even know we had rays. And so that became what I would do. So like everything else sucked. I was cranking out this manuscript for Lonely Planet. My, my home life sucked and I was just swimming. That's all I cared about. And it was the only great thing. And so then fast forward to me in Kauai, and I was swimming Kauai. So I'm out there. I'm swimming secrets or wherever I could find good water. And I'm doing my work during the day.

And yes, this thing is unraveling. It finally happens. And while I'm out there, kind of in the rubble uh i take note of this story i start seeing like no gmo signs everywhere and i'm trying to figure out what's happening and what had happened as you know is that the big chemical companies had been years before that had shown up and taken over these sugar plantations that were now defunct so the big landowners always owned the sugar companies the sugar the sugar bottom fell out of the sugar industry, and none of them were growing sugar anymore.

And so the Department of Agriculture for Hawaii said, hey, we have a solution. Let's grow corn on these plantations. And of course, corn, 90-something percent of it is genetically modified corn, 95%. And so that's what they're growing there. And not only that, but they're growing the next generation of experimental kind of herbicide resistant pesticide resistant corn seed dish aspect of it that there it's this perfect uh environment for doing all their testing right

it's subtropical so you can have three growing seasons a year so you can accelerate a product to market quicker and not only that but you, you could also grow corn seed for market. So both those things were happening. And the corn seed they were growing primarily was Roundup Ready Corn, which is this pest herbicide, you know, resistant corn seed that's taken over the corn belt. And because so much of it is herbicide resistant, now there are these super weeds that are not responding to the spray that you can just, you know, the whole idea is you can spray an entire field with this one herbicide roundup and kill all the pests and you can grow this yield and we can get more corn and we can feed more people.

That's the idea and we can make more money. But, you know, if you keep spraying one field with the same herbicide, you're going to get these super weeds that come up that you can't kill. And so what are you going to spray next? Right. Is there another thing you can develop that can kill those things too and so they're growing they're trying out all these new products and there's this one small community in kawaii called lower wyomaya that was right below the pioneer dupont chemical i mean excuse me cornfields and they were getting hit by all the whenever the

trade winds blew it's windy it's windy all and they're in the west side which is exceptionally windy and so whenever the trade winds blew this this soil would blow and it would hit them and it didn't happen before because there was sugar cane uh you know sugar cane there's the big burning season but usually it's it's cultivated so there's not as much loose soil now you're tilling that soil this fine uh volcanic soil three times a year. And it's, you know, that red clay soil, you're tilling it three times a year and it's just inundating these homes, damaging their property. And, you know, some suspected

also causing health problems, asthma. There was even potential cancer cluster that has not yet been proven because there's not been an epidemiological study, but it's possible that that's there. And certainly there's a whole rash of health problems that you can associate with this kind of thing. And so this community had begun a lawsuit process,

something called Mass Tort Case, which is kind of on its way to being settled now. They won in court finally, but at the time they hadn't gone to court yet. And so they're going in this back and forth. And what had happened essentially is these chemical companies, especially Pioneer DuPont, have been operating without a conservation plan. And then they got to write and ratify their own conservation plan because of the way it works. And then they still didn't implement their conservation plan for years. And so there was tremendous liability there. And I don't think it was out of evil. I think it was out of just incompetence, really, more than anything, and just laziness, this one chemical company.

Not all of them operate the same way, I don't think, and I only really examined this one. But on the whole, the upshot is more pesticides and herbicides are being sprayed on the west side of Kauai than are being sprayed in the biggest corn producer in the United States over the course of one season, and they're getting it in a small part of Kauai. They're getting as much or more pesticides than the whole state of Kentucky.

So that's a lot. Yeah, it's very concentrated. And it's marshaled this community of people who are really taking a stand. And it really is the battleground now on GMO issues. Because they're organized in Hawaii because they're seeing it and they're impacted by it so directly yeah and they all started with a whistleblower in the lower waimea community a house painter named clayton kubo who was kind of the first guy to to circulate a petition not a political guy very much a west side kawaii guy which meant you know people who

grew up on the west side they were traditionally pro farm because that's how their parents made a living and that's how they grew up and they loved the farm and so they're not they weren't like you know they would look across the north shore kind of crowd as more suspicion with more suspicion than they would the farm hippies live on the north right the hippies the howleys that kind of thing and and um in the west side no and so clayton kubo was very much kind of a uh rootsy west side guy and he was the first to start it all so that's something to know and um gradually end up joining forces everyone come together so the people who the community members as well as this really uh really uh passionate activist base from the east and the north side of the island and the south side everyone came together and they passed a law to limit kind of the capacity for the these chemical

companies we're talking about dupont dow basf and syngenta right ironically not on or not on the island right and so basically i i i catch wind of this. And my life's kind of falling apart. And I come back to L.A. And the water's warm in Hawaii. And I've had these amazing swims. And the water's fucking cold in L.A. Which I've now grown to love, actually. But at the time, I certainly did not love it.

And there was a girl in Kauai as well that I kind of had to. There's always a girl. You know, ladies love a drowning man so there was a girl until there was nothing for like a vast sahara desert but at that point there was a girl so i come back and um i decided to get rid of my apartment you know here i'm in la and i'm like i don't make money when i'm here i make money away and i have this chance now. Lonely Planet at the time had just been sold. It was unclear what was going to happen to Lonely Planet and those jobs. And that had become 90% of my income. And so there's all these kind of variables that seem to be

pushing me to Kauai. And so I go to Kauai, rent a house in Hanepepe on the west side, and start investigating this story. And then next thing you know, and I think, to be honest with you, just to straight up i think i'm going to sell this story for ten thousand dollars to a major magazine and it's an aaron brockovich type story like nobody has this story but the previous year everybody and their mother had done monsanto stories so nobody really had the you know we talked about how hard sometimes you think you have a slam dunk and you can't find a home and so i couldn't find a home for this story and i'm in these people's faces these really uh people who are hurting people who've had illness they're

opening their doors to me they're sitting down with me i'm in their faces and they trust me and i need to break the story and so i end up selling it to the salon.com for 150 dollars and leah comes over and we did that story and did a stand-up paddle race story for ESPN. And she kind of got me in on this idea of doing the freediving at the same time. So we do these stories. I go away to Thailand for another Lonely Planet job. My story posts. And while I'm on my flight back, I get a message when I land from one of my main sources, who is an incredible activist named Andrea Brower,

and an academic, she lives in New Zealand now, but is born and raised Kauai, an incredible, incredible intellect. And she said, hey, the New York Times are here. And so I, of course, made the connection that maybe it's related to my story posting, it seemed that way. Of course, I'd pitched New York Times several times, and they didn't take it. But they had their science guy there. And so I reached out to him and said, hey, can I help you with contacts? You know, you've lived there. It's very difficult to parachute into Kauai and get anywhere, especially sometimes it's okay.

Very difficult. You know, you work in, like, I worked in Myanmar and, you know, East Burma and some of the tribal areas. And that's a place you can parachute into because people genuinely want to talk to you and there's not this distrust. But with Kauai, with its history, being part of America but not really, there's a lot of distrust for valid reasons. And so you can't really parachute in.

It took me a long time to get in. And so I gave him some names he didn't even end up quoting my people and i don't know how much they were helpful to him but he appreciated it and so then when you know three weeks before the event i hadn't sold the free dive story i called him so he was the guy he was the kind of guy well yeah i mean the salon piece was very balanced you know it wasn't too crazy on either side of the spectrum. I thought it was very objective reporting on what was going on there.

You weren't slamming industry and you weren't sort of rah-rah behind the corporate conglomerates either. No. You mean rah-rah? Yes, right. I wasn't slamming. It was funny because after that, because I think you read the piece, the facts are the facts. no uh you mean robert i wasn't yes right i wasn't slamming i wasn't slamming into you know it was

funny because after that because i think you read the piece the facts are the facts like it's the same thing with when i first told nick's story you know when he died you don't you don't have to have an agenda when the facts all lead you in one place you know with the GMO story the the industry's own paperwork make it very clear what's happening in Kauai in my opinion so all I have to do is is get it out there what we don't know and there's not sufficient proof is is eating GMO corn hurting us there's no study that you can't the study the one study that they've shown that said maybe it does hurt, you know, these rats that got tumors when they ate it,

that has been discredited many times. I don't know enough about that, but I'm willing to say that I'm willing to capitulate that there's no study that's proven it's, it's bad to eat GMO corn, but it's not safe to grow. So, you know,

if it's safe to eat, that's one thing say it is, I'm willing to you know if it's safe to eat that's one thing say it is i'm willing to concede that it's safe to eat i think i think we just don't know yet that's fair enough but but when if i'm if i'm in a debate i'm not even going to debate that because i don't have to debate that because from what i can tell on kawaii the way they're growing it there is not safe so if you have schools are closing twice and kids going to emergency is not safe. So if you have schools that are closing twice and kids going to emergency rooms, if you have whole communities with 10 times the cancer rate that it is statewide,

then to me, it demands an epidemiological study before you know if it's safe. And so it doesn't matter if it's safe to eat, if it's not safe to grow. And since Kauai is a very important cog in the whole gm kind of the corn manufacturing machine without kawaii everything else kind of has to take a step back then that means you can't grow it the way you've been growing it because that's like that's one of the main places where you do grow it so um that's where that's kind of

my head so like we don't know that it's safe to grow yet and so and what's going on now there have you stayed up on like uh well what happened is basically the county passed a law limiting where they can grow um demanding and demanding study into environmental impact statement epidemiological statement um and the industry basically sued and then the courts found that the state lawsuit precedes county law and the industry basically sued and then the courts found that the state law supersedes county law and the state law says they have the right to grow it and so we're in a stalemate basically it's it's um some public interest lawyers working on behalf of the county uh versus the big chemical lawyers wow and so that's what's happening in In the meantime, the community of Lower Waimea,

who've been taking a brunt on this, looks like they're getting less than 20K per family. It's a big thing about this is the proximity of schools and sort of public congregating places and homes to these fields yep yeah i mean the idea is it's right there i mean if you look where this is happening in lower wyomaya literally there's a big plateau above them there's the river there's the wyomaya river where captain cook at the mouth of river docked right and then there's this big bluff and on the plateau above it there is the cornfields the experimental cornfields and And they're right there. And so anytime the trade winds blow, they take the heat.

So that kind of was my thing, right? So I show up and I want to do that. And it just shows you, as a writer, especially in this climate, where you don't get paid as well as you once did. And certainly web publications pay next to nothing. There's two currencies for media people. So if you're a media person listening to this, there's two currencies. There's financial, and then there's visibility. And then there's the right thing to do.

And there I was. I kind of went into it, if I was to be completely honest with myself. I went into it. I did go into it with an agenda. An agenda to help these people, but an agenda to help myself i thought i honestly thought that i could it was a good financial move for me too so i can't say i didn't so there's something about that that's kind of distasteful if i was gonna be really honest with myself but it's it's there um but then i was given the opportunity to just do it because it was the right thing to do and to and i didn't

care anymore about the money. At that point, I cared about the people I'd met and kind of drew close to. And then look where it ended up. I ended up in this other scenario where I end up grieving with a family for the course of a year, kind of like really just kind of embedded in their own recovery. And then following the best athletes in the world in the year after as they try to make sense of what happened and as they continue to push limits and try to break records.

And it just shows you that literally you just never, you honestly never know. You just never know where life's going to go. You could have never, you know, scripted this. It's impossible. I could never have known. I could never have known I was going to write up, you know, if anything, if I thought either of those stories would have been a book,

I would have, would have bet against free diving. I would have ended up in the GMO camp. Yeah, I would think so, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, let's back it up to even how you even got to become a writer. Because I think part of the original question was this shared sense of adventure and wanderlust that you have with Nick. As a young person kind of looking at the world and trying to figure out what you wanted to

do. um you know as a young person kind of looking at the world and trying to figure out what you wanted to do i mean you kind of stumble into this idea of becoming a travel writer as a result of reading this islands magazine right you know yes like why is he doing it why can't i do that yeah yeah yeah and then really manifesting that yeah yeah so so how were you raised and what did you think you were going to be doing and how did you get to that point? So I grew up in L.A. I'm a third-generation L.A. kid. So my grandparents grew up here. Where'd you go to high school? I went to Santa Monica High School.

Oh, you did? Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I grew up in L.A. in Santa Monica. And really pretty traditional, kind of being raised pretty traditionally. So just this Jewish kid from the west side of la after school i went to uc san diego i wasn't alternative really in any way i didn't i didn't travel i mean i travel with my family in the summers and they were big travelers so my family

my parents whenever they could would get away somewhere cool but often when we were young they would take us on these long road trips and um you know i wouldn't say that anything exceptional we just had a nice we had a nice life nice neighborhood santa monica was very different than at the time we moved you know there wasn't like a hollywood production facility it wasn't hollywood at all there wasn't even that many uh people in the entertainment industry living there it was still kind of a beach town at that point when i moved in there in 79 how old are you now i'm 44 44 all right so a little bit younger than like the dog town oh yeah yeah too young for that yeah yeah and i wasn't like i played baseball you know and basketball like i wasn't i didn't skate i didn't

surf i i ended up getting into triathlons in high school um and i ride i rode road you know i did 100 mile century rides and ended up breaking my two front teeth in a in a uh in a bike race when someone crashed into me in the peloton um but so for the most part no i was just kind of a school kid went to uc san diego and then um my sister i think i was about to finish up school, and I'd gone to D.C. to work on the Clinton campaign in 92. It was kind of a big thing for me. My sister, meanwhile, was in India, cruising around India. I'm like, she's a badass. I was looking at my sister.

I was like, my baby sister. I'm like, she's a badass. That's cool. It took me a while to catch up to her, but a few years. Yeah, it's pretty conservative you know growing up childhood yeah true i mean on a campaign like yeah yeah just like i was thinking i would you know honestly like a seminal moment in dc i was i would i i thought about acting i was liked i liked i was i sang growing up i was like i was a choir boy i literally was a choir boy and then a jewish choir i was

literally a choir boy i like was in plays and camp you know like i was that kind of thing i was thinking what should i do with my life should i try to be in like the entertainment sphere and um then i went and saw the autobiography of malcolm x spike lee's movie in dc on the day it opened i was i i was on the way to becoming extremely politicized and um i was the only white guy in the theater and at that point i didn't want to be the guy making that movie i wanted to be the guy who helped start change because i felt like there was just too much uh i just felt like there was too many too many too many small amount of rich people too many poor people just too much uh stratification of income too much

injustice i wasn't comfortable with the way america was headed at that time i mean i can't even imagine growing up now but i would have had the same kind of feeling um so i wanted to get into it i want to get in the trenches so then after graduation i started working on um campaigns so i would basically running sierra club offices, sending young people out to knock on doors to get money from, you know, to support ancient forest preservation or clean water act or that kind of thing. So I ran campaigns for a couple of years. And one of the people I met when I moved to Seattle to run a campaign was a guy named Kelton Reed. And Kelton Reed and I kind of shared some passions. And one of them was the beat literature.

And at that time, I was starting to get into just journaling. I wasn't, I had never taken a writing class, but I got into like, I would just, sometimes I would just get high and write like stream of consciousness in a journal and see where it took me. And I just love the feeling of it more than anything, the feeling of it, I just felt like something set me free and so i was writing a lot of poetry and stream of consciousness kelton and i ended up writing letters to each other we kind of became pen pals and just stayed contact and we had um we just stayed in touch and then he started he went back to school he had he was a couple years younger than me and left school and he went back to school to study creative writing and through his passion for creative writing through a couple of friends who became screenwriters right away

out of college and did really well um i just saw that as a a possibility it was like finally this possibility that appeared before me it wasn't this passion i always had um it just appeared before me and so then uh you fast forward to me working for i at that time, I think I took, I quit my jobs. I quit campaigning and I backpacked from LA down to Ecuador and flew back. And something had changed at that point. And I got a job again at a nonprofit working for an organization called Tree People, planting trees with school kids. And you see that all over LA.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Watershed restoration, you know, like really important work. And it was great. trees with school kids and you see that all over la yeah yeah yeah spots watershed restoration you know like uh really important work and it was great it's probably if you ask me the most important work i've ever done it's probably planting trees with school kids um and uh and so it was great but it wasn't like i didn't it wasn't completely fulfilling it wasn't my project i hadn't imagined it uh and so then i i my dad asked me if i wanted to go to kilimanjaro climb kilimanjaro with him and my brother it was like he he was he'd saved up and wanted to take us and uh so we decided to do it and we'd gotten into kind of climbing at that point a little bit not

climbing but more backpacking and bagging peaks and uh so i decided i would do it but i wasn't just gonna go and just do that like i'm to take some time off and do it right. And so I picked up an islands magazine on the way to the airport. I was going for three weeks by myself and Zanzibar was the first stop. And I'm reading about Zanzibar on the way and I'm reading about it there in Zanzibar and Zanzibar is amazing. It's just this, this,

this, you know, it's a UNESCO heritage site of Swahili culture. Right. And beautiful white sand beaches. The first time I ever scuba dived was there. And I just fell in love with the place. And I kind of scrambled back to the magazine. I was like enjoying a beautiful sunset. The villagers kind of on the beach having a great time.

And I stramble back and I look at the contributor page. I'm like, who the hell is this guy? Like, why does he get to do that? Yeah, somebody had to write that article. Yeah, somebody got paid to do that and so that's a job you know and so i came home with a goal of wanting to write my way around the world um and i came home and i ended up walking wilshire santa monica and sunset boulevards from beginning to end with a friend of mine named glenn bauman who uh who now lives in tachiby. He was moving out of LA and he wanted to do this seminal walk kind of as his farewell to LA. And I tagged along and wrote a little short

story about it. And that ended up getting me in with a local publication where I did an East LA walk, similar kind of observational walk. I love that. What I love about that is that you didn't just start trying to get hired somewhere. You created your own story. And that adventure around the world started with an adventure around your city. Let's just walk Wilshire Boulevard and see what we see and write about that. And that's the first step. That's something that you could control. Yeah.

Yeah. That's what you can do. What's the first step you can do? Plus, I mean, to be honest, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. But it didn't matter. You took a step and you acted on it. Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, and it was something that I wanted to do.

I mean, who would ever thought about doing that? Wilshire is 16 miles. Santa Monica is 14 miles. Sunset from Union Station to Gladstones is 26 miles. Like, I've always thought, why isn't that the marathon? I know, right? Wouldn't that be isn't that the marathon? I know, right? Wouldn't that be a hell of a marathon?

Just be a civic disaster. Shut down sunset Boulevard the entire way. Well, now imagine the whole East side of LA is cool again. So all those people up in the bird streets would not have, no, no, no,

but it would be, but you know, at that time, uh, sunset Boulevard was still where people went out and partied. So like at that point it was like very much part now people don't even go there so much so um would be less so but anyway so i i um that's kind of what got me started and so then it became kind of piecemeal of me trying to find

stories that underreported because at the time i'm i'm i think i was 28 then so that's a little old for you know i'm not i didn't take journalism classes. So it's going to be hard for me to get those early jobs in newspapers, which still were existing. I couldn't get a staff job. It was hard to get any job at all. So I ended up writing grants for different environmental projects. That was kind of how I started paying the bills. And little by little, I found one story, then the next. Started writing movies with Kelton, who came to LA. I went to Colorado to write a movie with him.

And then he came back to LA, and we started pursuing that. And I'd pick up a story here or there. I ended up covering yoga and wellness quite a bit. Right, you wrote for LA Yoga, right? Yeah, I started LA Yoga. So the publisher was Julie Difey, and she brought me in as she was about to start it and we we launched it so that was a startup that i helped launch and and um still in print now and that kind of gave me every month i had a bunch of stories to write so finally you know it's all reps free diving is reps uh getting opportunity that's why that's why

when people talk about like i mean not to get too political but when we talk about access or you know it's often called affirmative action but just giving equal access to opportunity for kids that are low income or uh different ethnicities that's it because life is reps that's why it matters so much because life is reps and if you don't get the reps you never get anywhere you need the reps um and so you know yes sometimes you have to create your own reps and i was lucky enough to kind of get tapped and uh we i was able to get the reps and you know because it's it's all that 10 000 hour thing you know you write enough you start to get out of your own way it becomes it's a muscle it's a craft it's not there's talent but but there it's also much more a muscle. It's a craft. It's not – there's talent, but it's also much more a muscle.

Yeah. How many articles did you write before you write One Breath? I mean, yeah. It's the hidden journey towards creating this masterwork that so often goes underappreciated. Everyone wants to think like you just burst onto the scene with this book, but you've a lot of reps yeah you've earned your right to be here you know yeah and you've put yourself out there so that when that magical opportunity arises and i don't mean to be glib or cavalier because there's you know there was a life that was taken uh you know that was required for this story to actually happen but um you But you had done the work to be prepared to take advantage of that.

Yeah. I mean, I say this a lot. It happened in 2013. I'd been a professional. I got my first check in 2000, like maybe 99, actually. And it wasn't until after that new york times story where i actually thought it was pretty good so that's my own neuroses more than anything because i certainly got affirmative you know i was getting affirmation from the lonely planet folks but this is different

because this was a story and um you know guidebook writing is fulfilling in many ways but it's not storytelling right and um so that's when i kind of realized I was pretty good and opportunity to be really good. And I just needed to write stories full time. And so, you know, you, but,

but writing is a team sport. You know, I've been talking about this a lot and you need to have a community that nourish you and friends and family. You need to have a opportunity for the reps. You need to have sources that are open to you that you can access you need to have editors that are in place and agents like bird um opportunities like this to talk about it but those come in time with the reps they come they come but you know it's like it's like it's a team sport and you know really being able to

this family being so open to me and uh allowing me to be a part of their journey as they're trying to heal. And the family still has a hard time. It's not easy. You know, they've lost the heart and soul. And that was Nick, who's an amazing guy. And so, but at the same time, what you learn is maybe there's a purpose for that, too. You know, in some ways, when something bad happens in your life, right, your friends will listen to you for like a month or two months. You know, they'll give you all the time. And some friends are awesome and they'll listen to you forever.

But for the most part, the average friend doesn't want to hear the same thing 75 times. But me, as someone, I was kind of like this. I was a go-to. If you want to talk about nick i said this to his friends and his family at any time you call me and so i don't know how much that helped but i think it helped certainly some people um just to be able to have someone to talk to to download to right a reservoir of empathy and i just yes a reservoir of empathy someone who wanted to talk about it you glossed over the fact that you, look, you did have to suffer for this. I mean, you've gone through difficult times in addition to the divorce.

I mean, this is not like, you know, becoming a lawyer and banking a paycheck. Oh, no, yeah. You mean the eviction notice period? Yeah. I mean, in your bio, you're kind of like, listen, here's what happened along the way, just so we're clear. Just so we're clear. There was an eviction notice period. It did happen.

I would come home to eviction notices on a monthly basis. There was somebody who worked, when I first moved into this apartment I had for nine years in Santa Monica, which was at the time cheap compared to things are now, but it was still kind of out of my range and at the top of my range. And I moved in there and the grant writing work kind of dried up and magazine work pays when they pay you. Like even if you, even if you line up perfectly all the work,

you might not get paid for four months till four months later. And by the time it comes in, it's gone. It's very hard to make a living doing this. And, um, what, but when I first moved in there,

the person who handled the accounts for that leasing company just happened to be cool. And if I was 10 days late, 15, as long as I wasn't 30 days late, she'd just call me and check in. She never hassled me. But then at some point, they sold the building. And that shit changed. And then it was the eviction notice period. And yeah, I for many for over in probably two years that's when i lost most of this hair uh i would have eviction notices

almost every month on my door yeah but the payoff is that you get to lead this bohemian adventure pact right so there was you know there was this period when i was 32 years old and where my dad said you know maybe i should get a job at job at McDonald's, that would cure my financial ills. You know, maybe that would be the solution. And that's when I knew things didn't look good from the outside. Like, okay, because that is not a good program. So I didn't do that. But, yeah, that was happening.

But, yes, I had this two funny stories. One was I got a job. I got invited to go to Burma to, to cover just a travel story in Burma. And, uh, I had about two weeks before I was going to go and I needed a thousand dollars to pay rent.

And so I went into this temp agency and I said, you know, they gave me the little application. I filled it out. They put me in front of a computer to do these secretarial tests like excel spreadsheets and typing and i type like two fingers i feel like a hunt and peck typer and so i'm just banging out my typing tests and i'm i'm blitzing everybody all these people coming off maternity leave or like first year out of college you know mostly women mostly secretarial type field and um i'm banging away in my i look like i can't i can't

even imagine what i look like to the poor people there and they're thinking where are we going to put him and so then they take me into this conference room and they say what kind of career are you interested in and i said i don't want a career i need a thousand dollars in two weeks i got a career and that's so of course i didn't get that you know i didn't get that job and then um and then i think another time i had to go to jordan for a job and i'm in jordan i'm in amman jordan and i didn't know if my bank card would work because i at this i wasn't really internet banking just yet and i was i was petrified of looking at my accounts because i knew how bad off they were right and i was just hoping that even though i was broke they would still work

and i otherwise i'd have to eat everything from the hotel and explain it to someone right how bad off they were. Right. And I was just hoping that even though I was broke, it would still work. And I, otherwise I'd have to eat everything from the hotel and explain it to someone that I ate everything. So I ended up going to this ATM machine, starving, looking, you know, really wanting a shawarma.

No, that looked amazing. That was like $3. I didn't have a dollar in my pocket. And I went to the ATM machine and I remember there being this weird delay. And then the money came and I was like big exhale and those were the kind of funny i know that feeling of not when it says do you want to view your balance and you say no even though you know you should because you

don't want to know how low it is no but then you're playing roulette every time you use your card because you don't know if it's actually going to give you any money yes but your mind is free i know right it? So terrible. But listen, would you rather pay your rent on time or would you rather go to Burma and Jordan and collect these amazing experiences? That's right. I had Dan Buettner on the podcast who's great guy. Do you know him? Yeah, I met him recently. Incredible, right? He's an incredible guy. And he told this amazing story, which you probably heard about, you know, working for George Plimpton when he was younger. No.

You know this? No. Podcast listeners are going to have to endure me telling this story again. I'm going to go find that podcast. So, you know, he's young and he lands this cool position where he gets to basically do menial work for george it's not like he was editing the paris review or anything he just was got this job where he was helping him put on these fundraisers and he would have the opportunity to go to these highfalutin uh you know parties where you know sort of the the higher-ups of new york city were congregating

all the bankers and all these super rich people. And he noticed early and often how no matter what environment he was in, that everyone would gravitate towards George, no matter what. And that's because George decided to live this life of adventure. And, you know, George is a waspy guy and all that, but he certainly wasn't wealthy by the standards of the company that he was keeping. But all of these people were just so thirsty to be around George because he had lived this incredible life where he had this richness of experience that he could then share and enrich other people's lives through the telling. You know, sort of like Peter Beard, you know, the artist or somebody like that. Yeah.

And so what I see in you is this very conscious choice to live your life along those lines. And it may mean that you don't get your rent paid on time or you don't know where your next story is going to happen and you have to get comfortable with that uncertainty. But the reward is this journey that you get to embark on where you're not quite sure where it's going to lead you. Yeah, thanks, man. And I think that bringing it back around,

that's what I love about getting in the ocean is that it's a break from all that and you don't think about it and you never, and the ocean's always different and it's always a mystery and you'll never understand it completely. And it's, you know, there's something about it that massages expectation out of you. about it that massages expectation out of you. Because I think expectation, for me, gets in my way more than anything. Expectation and desire to control certain outcomes gets in my way more than anything. I take a very Taoist approach.

The manifesting and all that's very cool. I don't really take that kind of super, more controlled approach to things. Maybe I should, but. No, it's more of a surrender. Yeah. When you go into the ocean, you are surrendering yourself completely

because it's so all powerful that it, I think it instills in you a sense of humility. Yeah. Right. And I think with that comes also a sense and appreciation for faith, right? Like you're, you know, you'll find your next story i'm sure you're probably you're probably halfway in your next book and we can talk about that but

but uh you know yeah but but to know you've been doing this long enough and you've done enough reps and you've swum enough miles in the ocean to know that somehow some way if you keep doing the reps and showing up for the page that the rest will sort itself out. Yeah. I mean, whatever happens, you know, I, I can't, part of me can't forget that Herman Melville ended up a customs officer. Let us not forget.

We don't need to talk about that. Keep it positive. No, but I think you're right, you know, and, and it'll, it'll work itself out.

And I think the, the big lesson is, you know, and it'll work itself out. And I think the big lesson is, you know, I believe kind of in two approaches in life. There's chaos theory, which is a fact, right? Chaos can descend and there's nothing you can do about it. But then there's your, what you can do afterwards. How do you deal with it?

So some people think you can control every outcome. It's all about your positive attitude and doing this and that. And you set your goals and you go achieve them. Some people like me think that's partly true, but there's also chaos theory. But I think the best thing that we can control is how do we react to the events that occur in our lives? And how do we go from there in a positive, kind, expansive direction? And so it's a practice. I fail at it all the time.

I think it's the lesson. I think there's a lesson in the way Nick lived to kind of live for others and yourself simultaneously. That's something I see in what you do. Live for yourself. Live for your own goals. But you're living for others, too. You're generous um you have a family all those kinds of things so i think that there's that dichotomy dichotomy that we need to kind of that there's a line we need to straddle we need to be fulfilled as as humans we need to be actualized as human

beings and we also need to be connected and uh and so that's kind of the dance, I guess. Well, as a writer, if you don't have those things, then you don't have anything to write about. You don't have anything to write about. You got to be, yeah. What is the advice that you give young upstart writers who are probably asking you all the time for advice? Other than the reps, because we talked about that.

I say follow the thread you know follow i tell the stories that come to me because i because i wasn't able to get a job like a cool staff job anywhere ever um i didn't have that aside from the yoga thing which kind of fell in my lap i didn't have a place to write the cool stories i wanted to tell so i'd have to tell the underreported stories the stories that came to me so i'd say the thing is tell the stories I wanted to tell. So I'd have to tell the underreported stories, the stories that came to me. So I'd say, the thing is, tell the stories that came to you, follow the thread,

and whatever the project, whether you're developing an app or writing a movie or starting a podcast or writing a book, there will always be room for self-doubt. Self-doubt is, you cannot stop it. It is always going to arise no matter what, and there's always room for it. So the only thing you can do is not believe it when it arises. Let it rise and fall like a wave and go away and don't give into it.

Because if you continue- How do you do that, though? Well, I think that you just have to recognize doubt as doubt. You just say, that's self-doubt. That's not a real problem. That's self-doubt. Bifurcating that from your sort of higher consciousness yeah yeah you don't have to associate with that you don't have to believe everything you feel you know in life you don't have to believe everything you feel you know you you can

choose not to uh i think that's in terms of self-actualization uh i don't think there's any better lesson than that. Too many of us, and myself included, get spun out when some emotion rises up, whether it's jealousy or greed or doubt. And so you don't have to believe everything you feel. We're all going to feel it, man. Every wonderful and shitty emotion out there is within us feelings are just feelings man you know is that is that where this is gone yeah no i know right we're gonna go way on the weeds on this but just because you feel something and it feels like it's gonna kill you

it's not going to man the one thing you can be sure of is that it will pass and that's like you know the the zen paradox of freediving is like, which is the thought to tune out? You know, like, that's the key. That's like the big mind over matter. Like, you know, just because you feel like you need to breathe doesn't mean intellectually you need to breathe. You have plenty of oxygen. But at some point, that feeling is reality. At some point, that switches.

Right? Yeah, that's what life's like. And knowing where that point lies. I think you and I, we're in this different stage now, right? Where we're like, I don't know how old you are, but it seems like around the same.

And we've been through enough kind of wars. Yeah, it's easy for me to say, yeah, I know another story's gonna come. I have confidence now. But I also have a team behind me I didn't have before. I have people behind me now that I didn't have before. So it'll be easier to withstand what's coming next, at least for a little while.

That comes through weathering the storm and having those experiences. Yeah, it's becoming the vet. You're becoming the vet. So we can sit here and talk about it, and somebody can intellectualize it on the other end. But maybe it's just something that has to be experienced i think so and there were many times when i was on the road to this point and and uh where i thought well i thought i deserved it sooner or i wish it would come sooner or what you know there was many times where i just thought all i want to be able to do is pay my bills

without stressing out. During the eviction notice period, that's what I wanted. All I wanted was, I'll do it. Just give me something. And eventually Lonely Planet became that something. It became a life raft. I would have gone out.

I would have been, I don't know what I'd be doing. Flamed out. Yeah, I would have flamed out if not for them. So this is the point in the conversation where I ask you how you deal with writer's block. Oh, God. I like this undercover literary podcast you have. I thought it was a sports podcast.

This is my own. No, it's not. Well, it's what interests me. Well, I know. It's cool. It's cool. No, the more I've listened to your podcast, I realized coming in, this is a literary podcast.

Yeah, in many ways. Yeah, yeah. No, so I don't believe in writer's block as much. Thank God. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. I don't believe in it. I think if you don't know what to write, you don't know what you want to say.

And so I think it's really hard to confront a blank page. So what I try to do is reduce them into blank bricks. And so just outline as detailed outline as you can. And so, you know what, at least you want to say for the next page or two, and then I'll give myself. So that's kind of how I do it.

So I just try to, if I don't know what I want to say, what I want to write, it's because I haven't fully outlined. I haven't fully, I haven't taken the time to prepare. So then I prepare more. And then when it comes down to writing,

I give myself a word quota per day. So with this book, it was really easy because I researched it from May to December 2014. And then I had two months to write it for the first draft. Wow. So if I didn't do 3,000 words a day. 3,000 a day. 3,000 a day.

Wow. And that comes from- That's like a book in a month. 3,000 a day. 3,000 a day. Wow. Yeah. And that comes from. It's like a book in a month. That's a Lonely Planet acceleration program. Well, that's the reps. Yeah, that's the reps. And because of the Lonely Planet, because you'll have a month to do a 50,000 word manuscript.

And because you have that, then that's why I was able to turn out a newspaper story as if I was a veteran newspaper story, like in less than three hours. It's because I was able to turn out a newspaper story as if I was a veteran newspaper story in less than three hours. It's because I had that behind me. So it's all – you can always look back now and see where it all kind of made sense. Yeah, it's the practice. I think writer's block is an illusion, a very convenient illusion that we've decided to attach meaning to and pretend that it's real.

But imagine an athlete saying, I have training block. Right. Like I can't train. No, you go to practice and you train or you're sick and you sleep in or whatever. You're either doing it or you're not, but you're not blocked from training.

You're just deciding you're not doing it. Elizabeth Gilbert would say, I'm paraphrasing her, from training you're just deciding you're not doing it elizabeth gilbert elizabeth gilbert would say i'm paraphrasing her but she would be like really nobody gives a shit if you write or don't write so nobody's blocking you there's not some great obstacle by the way how amazing is she amazing and how how how unbelievably um what what an incredible fan you have in her. I mean, the words that she conveyed in support of your book are amazing. And I remember when she posted on her Facebook page about it. I mean, just incredible, man.

Yeah, man. Do you go back with her? Are you guys friends? We met in Bali when she was researching Eat, Pray, Love. So I was there i uh one thing i did so after the la yoga stuff happened um i packaged like three stories together and went to indonesia on my own dime it was not long after the bali bombing because i wanted to get doing more travel stuff and get out of the wellness stuff and so i went to indonesia to do these stories and she happened to be in Ubud, Bali.

And she'd met her now husband, and she was writing every day and still researching. But she'd done the whole year already. She'd been doing it. And so we became friends. I started hanging out with them, and then we stayed in touch. And she's just one of those people that is even better. You get to know her. She's just so generous and expansive and also, by the way, a phenomenal writer

and the best writer I know personally. So she's got it all going on. I think she's underappreciated. I didn't know that much about her beyond E Pray Love. And we both spoke at a conference last winter and I got a chance to meet her and spend a little bit of time with her and hear her speak. And I was blown away.

I did not expect it to be as amazing and as powerful as it was. Then I just went all in on Elizabeth Gilbert. And I was like, she's amazing. I didn't realize how incredible she is. Amazing. She can write it all. She can write literary fiction. She can write it all. She can write literary fiction. She can write nonfiction.

And she's so generous with her time, not just me and people she knows, but other people, and generous with time and energy and just an incredible talent. What else can we say? Read as much as you can of her. Yeah, very cool.

Yeah. All right, so let's bring it back around to One Breath and the world of freediving. In the wake of the book coming out and this tragic passing, what has changed in the sport and what's going on now? So there were some rule changes that went into effect. Three of them in particular. One limits the announcement so before the the night before the dive when you announce your depth because you have to announce your depth and how long you think

it'll take you to do it that's how the safety divers can plan to plan for you and that's how they organize the schedule of the day and so now you cannot announce anything that's more than three meters beyond what your personal best in that discipline is so that alone would have eliminated nick from doing the 88 meter free immersion dive in his first competition. And it would have eliminated him doing his 72 meter dive because his 70 meter dive was not in a competition. So technically not a personal best.

So, and certainly would have eliminated his 95 meter free immersion dive, which squeezed him the dive before the one he died on. So it would have basically kept him healthier um the next is you can no longer recommence descent so when i described how he went head up and paused there trying to equalize before he continued down that would be if he did that now would be a red card disqualified anyway so there'd be no incentive to do that and then thirdly the doctors and judges and and competition organizers

now have explicit powers to ground an athlete for as long as they see fit so those are all positive changes those are all positive rational and all positive rational changes we still don't have a grip on what how to diagnose a lung squeeze though so that's something um real quickly that's still an issue um now people are trying to use oxygen saturation tests where you kind of put your finger a little blood and it measures how much oxygen is in in your bloodstream um right out if you if you if you bounce back to 95 or above within 20 minutes of your dive then you're fine probably not squeezed um but i but but people have passed that test and spat spat blood all afternoon in the in some of the competitions i saw so um it's not really an objective measure so how do you and and back in the old days when the

pioneers were in the water if one of them came up spitting blood they were out of the out of the water for a month period that was it and somewhere along the line that became a couple of days and so hopefully that understanding grows hopefully this uh you know me talking about this and the book being out there will help that understanding grow a bit more well there is there needs to be more research clearly right i mean the only reason we know what we know now is because we had nick's lung tissue to work with and what did that tell you i mean a big part of the book is you know sort of getting to the bottom of of why he died not only what went wrong but like what what physiologically happened and and what the autopsy revealed right so the secondary autopsy conducted in north carolina revealed that he had a chronic

history of lung squeezes and he had scar tissue and his alveoli, which are the air sacs of the lungs. And so it's as if he had a scab that kept reopening. And then it got to the point where it's scar tissue, which made it harder to reoxygenate. And so because he was, when he did his dive and he spent extra time at depth and he came up a minute longer than he should have come up and then he couldn't reoxygenate, most likely it was related to the fact that his air sacs at the very extreme points, he couldn't oxygenate as efficiently. So that could have been a contributing factor.

We can't know for sure that that was the contributing factor, but based on what was seen in his lung tissue, you could make the leap that possibly that was part of it. Also, he had right ventricular hypertrophy, which is basically hypertension. He had pulmonary hypertension, and that was most likely caused by this scar tissue in his lungs. So he had these systemic changes. And so that's something I think divers need to keep an eye out.

If they continue to spit blood, they should get a cardiogram and find out what's happening in their heart. The doctors I talked to said based on what they saw, there's no reason he couldn't have lived a completely normal life. So it didn't impact him in any sort of normal way of living. It wasn't like it was emphysema or something crazy. Right, only if he was going to push it to the extreme. But if you're pushing to your extremes, then this is going to hurt you as you go forward. So it's not quite like concussions in the NFL in the sense that it's going to impact. Well, also, who knows what it's like 20 years later?

We don't know. We don't know. We don't know that. There's still a lot we don't know. But most likely, it's not like CTE or something like that. Right. Yeah. Well, it's cool that you've shined a light on this world.

And it's a fascinating, fascinating subculture. You know, all sport, I guess on some level, is about sort of transcendence, but there's something very specific about this particular sport that really is kind of about that in a really unique and beautiful way, really. You know, it is such a beautiful zen-like um and cinematic you know is there going to be a movie out of this like what's going well we hope so you know that's always our goal have you optioned the rights to that no no no no we were still in the we're still getting it out there to production companies and we have there's a someone who's working on that for us hopefully hopefully that goes somewhere yeah that's very cool yeah i mean i think it deserves it you know i think it is poetic and and you know that it was it's it's fun to write about because it's so interesting and so beautiful

and um you know to be 20 meters underwater 30 meters underwater and not have to breathe i mean that's not something you forget i I remember, I remember when I was first learning to free dive, it was I would have these early urges to breathe, then I'd have a dive, where I just was underwater, and I didn't have to breathe. And it was like, I'd been told about those moments by many free divers, but I never experienced it. And it was getting frustrating. And I remember this one dive, I think was was a 15 meter dive and I only came out out of habit. Like I could have stayed down and the rest of the day I'm in the shower, wherever I am, I closed my eyes. I see that blue world. And I think that's what it's like, you know,

when these guys are doing it for themselves over and over again, that's all they want. You know, like that's what makes sense because it's so visceral, it's so peaceful. Um, and you know, having spent time with them, I think it does make people gentler and softer and kind of there's a camaraderie that they have together. So it's a cool sport, cool community, and really an honor to tell the story. Thanks for talking to me, man.

Thanks, brother. It was very cool. It was fun. Are we going to go open water swimming sometime? Come on, man. I'd love to. Yeah, you're more than welcome. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, cool. It was fun. Are we going to go open water swimming sometime? Come on, man. I'd love to. Yeah. You're more than welcome.

Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, cool. All right. If you're digging on Adam, he's easy to find on the internet. You're just at Adam Skolnick on Twitter and Facebook and all those places. Adamskolnick.com is the website. The book is One Breath.

You guys know that by now. Pick it up. You will not be disappointed. It's beautiful. Again, it really is a beautiful, wonderfully told story. You know, it's tragic, of course, but the exploration of this subculture is just fascinating. And you have an incredible acuity for explaining it in layperson's terms because it does get so technical. And it's just highly, highly engaging. I just love the chapters about Nick's life unfolding in Brooklyn and Philadelphia

and all of that. It's just, it's really, you should be very, very proud. Thanks, man. So check it out, you guys. All right, peace. Plants. Dude, we went two and a half hours. What? guys. All right. Peace. Plants. That was cool, right? I thought it was super cool. Don't forget to check out Adam's new book, One Breath. Use the Amazon banner ad to pick it up. You will not

regret it. It's really a page turner and I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. And if you dug on Adam, then you can stalk him on social media. But don't forget to check out this week's show notes. I got all kinds of links and resources to take your infotainment beyond the earbuds. For all your plant power and RRP schwag and merch needs, visit richroll.com. Keep sending in your questions for future Q&A podcasts to info at richroll.com. And shout out to Sean Patterson for help on the graphics, Chris Swan for production assistance on this show, theme music by Anna Lemma, and this week's interstitial music was done by Tinoosh. Thanks for all the support, you guys. I love you. I will see you back here next week.

Big love, peace, plants, be well. Thank you.