The Rich Roll Podcast - John Moffet On The Power of Olympic Aspirations

Episode Date: November 9, 2020

This is the story of an athletic prodigy. It’s also the story of heartbreak. And a hero that became a friend. Meet John Moffet. His journey begins at 11. To keep him out of trouble, John’s parents enroll him in swim lessons. Mere weeks later, it was clear he was special. Within a year, John was obliterating national age group records. By 16 he made his first Olympic Team, becoming the youngest male athlete on the entire U.S.A. squad. But America would boycott the 1980 Moscow Games, robbing John and so many athletes of the opportunity to share their gifts on the world’s largest stage. Four years later, John ascended the starting blocks at 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games as the world record holder and gold medal favorite in his specialty — the 100m breastroke. But a severe groin injury suffered in a preliminary heat would once again crush his dreams of Olympic glory.  It’s a story well told in Bud Greenspan’s Olympic documentary 16 Days of Glory — a legendary filmmaker who would later become John’s mentor in his subsequent career as a storyteller. It’s a career that began humbly in the pioneering days of reality television and would ultimately lead to John taking home three 3 Emmys as an executive producer of The Amazing Race. John’s latest creative pursuit is Sports, Life, Balance —  a new podcast about the many timeless lessons learned through sport and their transformative application to all areas of life. Launching around Thanksgiving, be sure to check it out and subscribe — this one’s worth it. As a daydreaming adolescent swimmer, god-like photos of John ripped from the pages of Swimming World magazine adorned my bedroom wall. So it was utterly surreal when my path delivered me to Stanford. The opportunity for this bright-eyed, 17-year old freshman to call John my teammate was a dream come true. And such began a friendship we have maintained for the last thirty-five years. This is a conversation about what happens when desire meets deeds. It’s about determination and perseverance. The power of storytelling. The importance of reinvention. And the courage to blaze your own unique path. It’s also a rundown of Olympic trials and tribulations — and the conglomerate of raw and historic athleticism that was the hallmark of Stanford in the mid-1980s. Packed with life lessons acquired by dint of John’s extraordinary athletic and professional career, it’s a master class on how to keep pushing when it matters most. When it’s okay to let go. And why aspiration is the master of destination. To read more and listen click here. You can also watch our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.  One of my oldest and dearest friends, I love John and everything he is about. So it’s a long-overdue honor to share his story with you today. May you see in him what I always have. Peace + Plants, Rich

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

And that's where the magic happens, is realizing that if you dedicate yourself towards something, that you can begin writing your own tickets. That's John Moffitt. And this is episode 558 of The Rich Roll Podcast. The Rich Roll Podcast. What's up, everybody?

How goes it? Is anything going on out there? How are you guys feeling? Are you okay? I think it's going to be fine. I do have plenty of election week thoughts, but I'm going to reserve them for this week's roll call, which Adam and I are going to be recording on Monday and we'll post Thursday. Other than to say for the moment that I do think our democratic experiment lives and our institutions are indeed intact. So that right in and of itself is good news.

I did share some thoughts with Esquire Magazine a couple of days ago, some ideas on how to navigate the week that we just weathered and the weeks to come. So in the event that you miss that, you can check the show note links or you can visit the Esquire website. Also, I wanted to thank everybody who has pre-ordered Voicing Change, my new book. The early response has truly been overwhelming. So thank you for that.

I spent five hours the other evening signing copies, all of which will soon be shipped out. The on-sale date is November 10th. It's almost upon us. So to learn more and purchase your copy, visit richroll.com slash VC. We are selling it exclusively through our website and we are shipping globally. And while you're there, take a moment to also check out our Plant Power Meal Planner, thousands of customized plant-based recipes at your fingertips, access to nutrition coaches and more, all available to you for just $1.90 a week. To learn more and to sign up, go to meals.richroll.com. So today's episode. Today's episode holds a very special place in my heart. One of my oldest, dearest friends, John Moffitt, is on the show today. And John is

an incredible human. He's a two-time Olympian. He was the youngest member of the 1980 Olympic swimming team. He's a two-time world record holder and NCAA champion. A Stanford teammate of mine who, upon retirement, matured into a storyteller, a filmmaker, and a three-time Emmy-winning television producer. This exchange is long in the making. It took seven years, in fact, one of the many stories we dig into today. But first... We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety.

hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life. And in the many years since, I've in turn helped many suffering addicts and their loved ones find treatment. And with that, I know all too well just how confusing and how overwhelming and how challenging it can be to find the right place and the right level of care, especially because unfortunately, not all treatment Thank you. an online support portal designed to guide, to support, and empower you to find the ideal level of care tailored to your personal needs. They've partnered with the best global behavioral health providers to cover the full spectrum of behavioral health disorders, including substance use disorders, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, gambling addictions, and more. Navigating their site is simple. Search by insurance coverage, location, treatment type, you name it. Plus, you can read reviews

from former patients to help you decide. Whether you're a busy exec, a parent of a struggling teen, or battling addiction yourself, I feel you. I empathize with you. I really do. And they have treatment options for you. Life and recovery is wonderful, and recovery.com is your partner in starting that journey. When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, John Moffitt. So this is the story of a swimming prodigy. It's also the story of heartbreak. It's about a kid who started obliterating national records at 12, who would go on to make his first Olympic team before

he even entered his junior year of high school, only to have that dream pulled out from underneath him when the U.S. boycotted the 1980 Moscow Games. Four years later, John entered the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games as the world record holder and gold medal favorite in his specialty, the 100-meter breaststroke, only to severely injure his groin in the preliminary heat, which became this insurmountable setback that, once again, crushed his dreams. It's a story that was told in Bud Greenspan's amazing Olympic documentary, 16 Days of Glory. And Bud was this legendary filmmaker that would later become John's mentor in the career that he pursued after retirement, a career that began in the pioneering days of reality television and would ultimately lead John to winning three Emmys as an executive producer of The Amazing

Race. An athlete I revered, absolutely revered as a young swimmer. I had pictures of John on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. I first met him when I arrived at Stanford as a bright-eyed 17-year-old freshman. And I just couldn't believe that I had this opportunity to train and compete with him on the Stanford swim team. It really was a dream come true for me. And John and I have been really good friends ever since. So this exchange is first and foremost about John's life and epic accomplishments. It's a rundown of his legendary swimming career, the Olympic trials and tribulations, and the conglomerate of raw athleticism that was Stanford in the mid-1980s. It's also about his work in television and journalism, and it's packed with lessons he's acquired

throughout his time as an athlete to push and persevere when it matters most. John is now taking this timeless wisdom that he and others have amassed throughout epic athletic adventures and careers, and is funneling it into a new highly anticipated podcast called Sports Life Balance. It's gonna be a good one, you guys.

It's launching around Thanksgiving, so stay on the lookout for that. As a heads up, this exchange was recorded pre-election in mid-September, so it holds no discussion about the next presidency, but you can expect a solid discussion on the matters of the day in the forthcoming roll-on segment of the show

that's gonna air again on Thursday. Nonetheless, I suspect you will find our discourse applicable to our current moment, packed with keys to mastering transformation, honing aspiration, and unlocking potential and perseverance. I absolutely love John. I love what he's about. He is one of my oldest and dearest friends, and I'm super excited to share his words with all you guys today. So,

let's get into it. This is me and my brother, John Moffitt. John Moffitt. So we sat down and did a two-hour podcast. It must have been 2013. I think it was right after you started. If I remember correctly, I think you might've even been in like the 20s or something like that as far as the number goes. What are you up to now?

545 or something like that at this point. So yeah, that was over seven years ago. And one of my very few complete mishaps where I believe like it didn't record at all or something happened, the audio got corrupted, it was unusable, or I just didn't have the audio file. And I remember calling you and going, it didn't work. And you can't just repeat it. It's like, we just had this experience. And I always thought, like in the back of my mind, well, we'll do it. Let's let some time pass. Right. And we'll revisit it. And then seven years went by and we never did it.

Well, which is kind of the way our lives have been. I mean, we've certainly been living them in parallel, but Rich, we do disappear from each other's lives for various reasons, whether it be family or other circumstances. It's true. Just as a prefatory note, John is one of my oldest, oldest friends. I've known you since I was 17 or 18 years old. And we've shared a lot of life experiences over the years. But in adulthood, it's kind of been a pick and roll thing. Like I'll see you once year, or I'll see you and we'll make plans to see each other. And then life intervenes. And I take responsibility. I'm terrible at maintaining my friendships. And a lot of time has passed and time lost spent with you. But I always enjoy seeing you, man.

And I'm glad to have you in my life. Well, one of the strengths of our friendships is that we're able to pick up right where we left off. I mean, it's uncanny how we won't see each other for a year or two and somehow we don't miss a beat. And within a few minutes, we're cracking jokes and just picking up where we left off. So there's room in life for friends like that. And life is complex and we get busy. And you just have to be able to pick and choose. It's like if it's worth seeing somebody, maybe you can only see them once a year or once every two years. Or maybe you see them a whole bunch of times in one year, then you don't see them for a few more. And that's kind of been the pattern.

Yeah. Well, hopefully we can rectify that a little bit. But I'm reluctant to make broad promises that I can't keep because I've done that in the past. What's really cool about having you here today, you know, in reflecting, I was reflecting on the history of our relationship and trying to wrap my head around this podcast today is that you've played like this sort of important, but kind of shadowy role in my life, like behind the scenes, like a puppeteer. Yeah. It's crazy. Like I wrote a little bit, anybody who's read Finding Ultra, you pop up a couple of times in the book. So people might be familiar with who you are. But in many ways, I'm not sure I would have ever even moved to Los Angeles if it wasn't for you in certain ways, like almost, you know, unbeknownst to you. Like I was a lawyer in San Francisco. We'll go back over the history

of our relationships, but our relationship, but I was a lawyer in San Francisco. I was unhappy in my professional situation. I really wanted to move down to Los Angeles and get involved in entertainment. And I'd given you my resume at the time you were working at, not extra, but- It was hard copy. Hard copy, yeah. It was a hard copy, yeah. Reality TV 1.0, which we're going to get into. Indeed.

Yeah, your career. And then I just forgot about it. And then suddenly, I don't know, maybe four or six weeks later, I get a call from a law firm in Los Angeles saying they wanted to interview me, but it was a law firm that I'd never sent my resume to. And I was like, how do they even know? But it was a really good firm. And I called in sick at my law firm and booked a Southwest flight down from San Francisco to LA to do this interview. I board the plane and you're on my flight. And we're sitting next to each other. Yeah, we're sitting next to each other on the plane.

And these are assigned seats back then. Did we do the math at that point and realize that you had given my resume to Adam Bram and that's how it ended up at Christensen? I think that was later. Not that I recall. I do remember actually giving my resume, your resume to Adam. Yeah, because- Who was kind of general counsel for hard copy at the time. He was, and he was an incredibly dynamic, amazingly talented and intelligent person. Just would pick up on things so quickly and the subtlety of things were not lost on him. And so I thought that he would be

a good person to pass your resume to. And I remember him being impressed immediately, but I didn't know that subsequently he had passed it on. Right. Yeah. There was no awareness at that time. That our lives would meet up once again because of that little thing. And then I ended up getting that job. I moved to Los Angeles. I work at that law firm. And then subsequent to that, I ended up leaving that law firm and going to work for a client. That client ended up hiring Adam Bram as his sort of personal Michael Cohen type situation. And I ended up working with Adam, who was the original reason

that I got that first job in the first place, which all tracks back to you. Adam has since passed away, unfortunately. He was a good friend to both of us, and there's a whole story there. But yeah, man, I've now been living in LA for many years, but it all started with you slipping my resume to Adam Bram. That was probably what, circa 1995? 94. 94. Yeah, 94 what, circa 1995? 94. 94. Yeah, 94. No, 96, sorry.

96. I graduated from law school in 94. Okay, got it. Yeah. But let's take it back, man. Well, first of all, to speak to the seven-year window in between when we first did a podcast and doing it now, I've learned to trust that these things happen when they're supposed to, that there's a reason for them. And what's great about us doing this

today is that you're launching your own podcast, right? So we could talk a little bit about that. And hopefully I can blow a little wind in your sails to get people interested in what you're about to launch. So maybe talk about that for a second. Oh, yeah, that would be great. Well, first of all, I have always been immensely impressed with your podcast and the scope and breadth of the topics that you are able to tackle and just your overall ability just to be personable and to elicit really authentic responses. just to be personable and to elicit really authentic responses. And my life, I was working on a project that you actually were involved in a long time ago, which was a film about the boycott of 1980 Olympic Games by the United States. And I was working with LeBron James' people. And we said at the outset, this was at the end of, must have been the end of 2018 when he embarked on the partnership, that if we can't get it made with LeBron James, we can't get it made.

It's not going to get made. Because you know, you and I tried to get it made. Right. We thought it was looking good. And it subsequently sort of disappeared from the radar. And that happened many times through the years. And it was somewhere around 10, 12 years later that I was able to finally partner with LeBron's companies. And Spring Hill was involved as well, but it was mostly an uninterrupted project. Unbelievably intelligent people over there. They're just masters. They were really, really great to work with. But the bottom line is that after thinking that we were going to get it made last summer for a release this summer, everything blew up once again.

And we had a few opportunities for Hail Marys right toward the end. And that last kind of Hail Mary was at the beginning of this year, really before COVID hit. And so I was basically faced with a situation because they passed. It was like our last Hail Mary. They passed and I was faced with, what am I going to do now? Yeah. Because I didn't have a stomach for really continuing on with one foot in the entertainment business and one foot out. This documentary has been your passion project forever. I mean, my heart goes out to you, man,

not being able to set it up. It's such a great story too. Well, yeah, I mean, the bottom line is that people don't wanna hear it. And that's the key toward doing anything that can be sold and that people have to wanna hear it. So for whatever reason, there's something in that story that made people not wanna tell the story with me.

Do you think it's because it just happened so long ago? It's ancient history. It's not relevant to what's happening today. I mean, there's so many themes and threads to pull in that story that are completely pertinent to the geopolitical slash sports landscape that we're mired in at the moment. Well, I think, yeah, that is certainly the case. And with the postponement of the 2020 games in Tokyo, I think that suddenly, okay, we have another US Olympic team that has to put their dreams on hold, not for four years like we had to do in 1980, and our next chance was 1984, but for at least a year, provided that the 2021 games go on. And as you know, as an athlete,

and as you know, as the razor thin margin for error that you have to have in order to perform at that level, a year is a long time. Super long. Yeah. Super long. I mean, it will play into the favor of the younger athletes that still could benefit from another year of training, but a lot of the training resources are unavailable at the moment. And for people that are in the twilight of their career, it's devastating. Can you really hang on for another year? And on top of that, there's this misguided idea that these athletes are well-funded enough to support themselves and train. And that's just not the case with

the exception of a very few. It really never has been. I mean, with the exception of a select few. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's rough. So- Yeah. So I felt as though, okay, you get these times in your life where you're like, okay, I need to reinvent myself. I need to figure out what I'm going to do. And I love storytelling. And I love athletes. I love their struggles and the whole endeavor of striving to do something bigger than yourself for, who knows, just to be human, right? To celebrate being human. And so I was trying to figure out, okay, what am I going to do that I can leverage my experience as a storyteller, but something that I can do myself and not carry with me the burden of

huge financial implications of actual production where you have cameras and lots and lots of employees, et cetera. So I thought, well, let's make a crack at doing a podcast. So that's what I'm in the process of doing. I love it, man. When you told me this on the phone the other day, I couldn't be more enthusiastic. I think we're in this golden moment where podcasting has now become a really mainstream media outlet. There's lots of people starting podcasts, so it's much more competitive than it used to be. But nobody is better suited to shepherd these athlete stories than yourself, not only because you are an athlete yourself and you have this extraordinary Olympic pedigree that we're gonna unpack,

but also you have an entire career in storytelling. And I don't know anybody else who is as qualified or well-suited to embark upon this project. Who else is an Olympic athlete who also has this amount of experience in sharing stories and understanding what makes a story work

and why it's worthwhile? Well, I appreciate the vote of confidence, but as you know, whenever you embark on anything new, there is doubt. And we all, look, I'm fully aware that the market

is pretty much completely saturated and that you did it right starting your podcast in 2012. That was just luck. Well, luck is a big factor in success for a lot of things in life. So I really appreciate you sitting down as well because you carry with you a great amount of respect and insight. And you wouldn't have the respect and the popularity if you didn't take that insight with you. But I will be the least accomplished athlete to ever be on your podcast, probably.

Well, I've already interviewed somebody who is a ballerina and didn't have any experience in athletics beyond that. That's an art form. Yeah, but this person is amazing. Cool. Do you have a name for it? Because when we talked on the phone the other day, you weren't sure what you were going to call it. Well, it's a working title right now. So I wish that I had something completely in concrete.

Come on, man. Help me help you. now. So I wish that I had something completely in concrete. The title that we are working with right now is Sports Life Balance. So it's a riff on work-life balance that anybody who knows with a family and had to also work, especially for mothers, that it's tough. And so it's the lessons from sports that can be reapplied for life. And that's the whole premise behind it, that these people who were at one point in their life's great athletes, they have also been able to parlay that success somehow into having successful, thriving, happy lives. And what are those ingredients? What is the secret sauce in the pixie dust that goes into somebody leading a happy and balanced life? Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. And it's more complicated than meets the eye. This is something that I explored with Apollo Ono on the podcast recently. You would think that any athlete that ascends to the apex of performance understands what it takes

to be successful in the world. They know how to apply themselves. They know how to set goals and achieve them. They know how to focus and they know how to show up in those specific moments and perform, all of these things that are life skills. And yet it's the exception to the rule when you see somebody retire from their athletic career and then become equally or significantly successful in civilian pursuits. Why is that? It's interesting. You would think anybody who knows how to do this should be able to just kill it in the real world, and it doesn't happen as often as you would suspect. No, I think it certainly doesn't. And I know with Apollo, you were talking about The Weight of Gold, which he is featured in. And The Weight of Gold is, I think, an amazing hour of television or almost HBO.

So it's kind of a short film. But what it does is it kind of lifts the veil. This is what when groups of Olympians and Paralympians get together, this is a topic of conversation. Like, how do you move on from your time in sport, a time when you are at the pinnacle at a very young age, you have immense respect from your peers and from those in positions of authority around you. And suddenly you retire and you land in nowheresville. Yeah, the Cleveland lights just shut off overnight.

Yeah. So there isn't any one particular method that works for everybody. Everybody is different as you well know. The way I went about doing it is I just decided that I needed to completely reinvent myself and I turned my back on the sport of swimming because I was determined to prove that I'm worthy of something other than just being a really good swimmer. I did not want to just be known as that swimmer when I was in my teens and twenties. I wanted to do something else. Well, you developed a passion for storytelling and film while you were still competing and we'll get into that. But you had that kind of working in parallel behind the scenes so that when you retired, you already kind of knew what you wanted to do.

Yeah. Yeah, I kind of did. I had no idea how it was going to go about it. But what you're referring to is that I was featured in Bud Greenspan's film about the 1984 Olympic Games because they didn't go very well for me. I just watched that clip. It's on YouTube. Yeah. Your little segment. You can watch it. It's all grainy and stuff like me. I just watched that clip. It's on YouTube. Your little segment, you can watch it. It's all grainy and stuff like that. But I watched it this morning and it pulls on my heartstrings still to this day. Yeah, it wasn't a very good day. No, it wasn't.

But I spoke that luck has a great deal to do with success and where your life ultimately ends up leading. And one of those things was Bud Greenspan deciding that he wanted to use me as one of the feature stories with Rowdy Gaines. Right. It's kind of like parallel stories of the agony of defeat and the – Ecstasy of victory. Yeah. Yeah. For those that don't know, Bud Greenspan was a legendary documentarian who was immersed in the Olympic movement and would make these extraordinary documentaries about each Olympic Games. And probably his finest work was 16 Days of Glory, which was his documentary on the 1984 Olympic Games in which you featured in that segment that you just described. Is that fair to say? Yeah.

He made a lot of stuff. I mean, the guy was a legend. He did. I mean, he made, I do not know exactly how many official Olympic films, but 16 Days of Glory, which chronicled the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, was certainly one that had quite a bit of fanfare at the time. And him featuring me in that film, it wasn't actually being featured in the film

that made a difference in my life, but it was him and I really hitting it off. And him kind of, or the way I thought about it in my mind was that he was my mentor. Yeah, he became a mentor to you. He really did. And we kept in touch through the years. And I certainly kept in touch with all of the updates of what I was up to.

And that's what changed me. It's the fact that he was willing to take me under his wing. And he was supportive when, let's face it, people aren't always supportive of you going into a career in the entertainment business. My family was indifferent to, you know, completely non-supportive at all, you know. So, I mean, I'm sure you understand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In your life. It's such a scary thing and so unpredictable.

Who wants their kid to go into a thing where the future is... The likelihood of success is so rare. True. And it is a tough business. Yeah. And you grew up in LA, but LA is a big place. You grew up not... It's not like you grew up in Hollywood around all of this. No, I grew up in Claremont. Yeah. Which it's a little different than Hollywood. Yeah. I went to high school in Newport Beach, which is altogether polar opposites in many ways than Hollywood. Who is the guy who does the voiceovers in those movies? That serious tone with this? It's his brother. Is it? Because we used to make fun of that guy in college.

You remember, you, me, and Kurt would be like, Wyoming and Titus. Everyone did that. Everyone did that because it's like, that's what rung in your head, like when you would fall asleep dreaming of standing on the blocks and you picture that voice coming out of the ether. There was something just so epic about it. It was timeless. There was, there was.

And it lended a seriousness to it. Like this matters. Like this is a big deal. Yeah, I think much like John Williams and his music and his music score, especially the scores that he made for the 84 games. There's a signature there. You know exactly what you're getting yourself into when you hear a John Williams fanfare or you hear the voice from those films. Yeah, you're being psychologically teed up for something big, right?

Yeah, exactly. All right. So I'm a kid growing up in the suburbs of Washington, DC, starting to fall in love with the sport of swimming. And the corkboard above my bed started to become a collage of tear sheets from Swimming World magazine. I'm having dreams of my own career. And I had some level of acumen and skill. I certainly wasn't the most talented swimmer on my club team, but I learned early that I could bridge that talent deficit gap by working really hard. And so by the time I was 16, I was starting to kind of make a few waves in my local area. And there was one image on my cork board of you. I don't know if you remember

this. You couldn't have been older than maybe you were 15 or 16 years old. And it was like a mid-dive. You were bursting off the blocks and you were just shredded and ripped. And I just thought like, this guy, man like he's got it going on. I can't remember. That must've been after it was probably taken around 80, maybe 83 or something like that in the lead up to the 84 games. This is a long way of saying like you were one of my original inspirations and original heroes in the sport of swimming, just to kind of bring people up to speed, you burst onto the scene relatively quickly in the sport of swimming, distinguished yourself,

and made your first Olympic team in 1980 at the age of 16. 16, yeah. You were 16 years old. Yeah. You were the youngest kid on the team, right? I was the youngest male on the entire US squad of all sports.

All sports. The youngest athlete to make the 1980 team. I have been told that the person that became the youngest after me was Michael Phelps. So that would have been 2000. Was it 2000 maybe? 2000. What was his first? I thought he was 15.

Was he 16? I think he was 15. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So what 15. Was he 16? I think he was 15, yeah. Wow. Yeah. So what was that like, man? You know, do you even like, were you able to even process that like that is also what makes you understand the gravity and the

largeness of scale of what you're trying to do. So yeah, I certainly was aware. I think it was overshadowed, which is a nice term, because of the boycott, because we had found out that Carter's boycott succeeded and that we were in fact boycotting a few months before the trials. It was April that we actually found out about that. So we knew. We knew. And I think that no matter what, there was some luster taken off of it, but we also knew that the United States was still going to pick an Olympic team. Yeah. I will tell you that you are, when you're that age, you don't quite know what you're doing. In other words, you don't have as many scars and wounds,

painful reminders of what it's like to really get your butt kicked when you're really young. And of course, as we get older butt kicked when you're really young. And of course, as we get older, we start experiencing more of that. And as we climb up through the ranks. So by the time 84 rolled around, I'd been around the block as far as swimming against the best in the world and really getting, you get buffeted about. And so it's a very different thing in 84 because I just had more experience under my belt. And I understood how rare it was to actually make it there. And so many of my friends who were with me on the 1980 team didn't make it in 84, which was a whole other level.

Like Craig Beardsley. Yeah, Craig Beardsley and Glenn Mills and Sue Walsh and Mary Beth Linsmeyer. There are a number of them. Right. Or then you take a Sippy Woodhead or a Tracy Calkins, who in essence missed their prime. You know what I mean? So there was a fair amount of heartbreak associated with both those games and my peers, because we did get to know each other very well. Because you know what it's like when you're in the trenches with a group of people,

like let's say at Stanford, you really get to know each other. Right, I don't know what it's like at that level, but yes, I know what you're saying. The dynamics are not altogether different. You're still just swimmers. You're still dealing with pain. You're still dealing with pain. You're still dealing with injuries. You're still dealing with doubt. There's the inevitable politics, the coach giving you a stupid set. I mean, there's all that stuff. It still is not that different. You've just been lucky enough to have been selected to take it to that next level. And in 84, you're only 20. Yeah. You know, at the time that was like, okay, you're at the peak. Now it's a whole different ball game.

You're right. You know, you could have been still gunning for it at, you know, 32. It was a very different time back then. And I think what people need to realize is that for the most part, unless you were independently wealthy and your family was willing to support you, you didn't have any support after college.

Well, it wasn't even part of the mental calculus. No. Who was continuing to do it? It's so different now. But at the time, it was like, yeah, you're done. Well, in case in point, myself and Pablo Morales decided to take a year to train for 88. We had both graduated at that point, and it didn't work out. So, yeah, it's fraught with peril.

And like I said earlier, alluded to earlier, the older you get, the more battle scars and painful reminders you have of what it's like to come up short. Because shooting high means you land really hard if you miss. In 80, you still went to the White House though, right? Yeah. What was that like? That is a blur. I remember distinctly being filed into a room. And at one point I knew which room it was within the White House, but it was a room.

And we were all lined up and we were in our little red parade uniforms and our hats. Right. And our scarves. Were they like cowboy hats that year? It was cowboy hats. We had boots on and everything. Like Levi's did the uniform that year. Levi's did the uniform.

Yeah. Both for 80 and 84. In fact, the uniforms were exactly the same in 84 as they were in 80s. They just had a whole bunch of leftover, I guess. But yeah, I remember lining up and then in walks the president, politically protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979. And we were used for his political gains. So it was very mixed. All of us were upset, upset. Some people actually said they supported it, but everyone was quite upset. So it was very bittersweet.

And I don't remember the exact sequence of things, but at some point we got these medals. And it wasn't Carter that gave us the medals, but we had the medals around our neck is my recollection when he came in. when he came in. And I remember like thinking, you know, picking up and looking at it and kind of like thinking to myself, great, a fake Olympic gold medal. Right. This is your consolation prize. Yeah. I mean, you don't get to that level in sports by getting a participation trophy. And it really felt like that. And I've heard people say that was really kind of the feeling overall. But then he came in and he went down the line. I believe he went in reverse alphabetical order.

So Moffitt, I was about in the middle. In the middle. Yeah. Was there anyone who didn't shake his hand? No, not that I recall. Yeah. I remember hearing Jesse Visayo. He asked Jesse Visayo, oh, how many medals would you have won?

And Jesse said, I would have won two golds and a silver. And he didn't ask anybody else that question. Yeah. That just sucks the oxygen out of the room. Yeah. It's rough. Especially Jesse Visayo was one of those amazing talents. His window was 1980.

Yeah. And even though he made it 84, he just was a, he wasn't what he once was. Yeah. He was at Mission Viejo at its peak when they were dominating. And he was the dominant swimmer. Yeah, yeah, wild. Yeah. So you continue on.

Over the next couple of years, you start to develop this rivalry with Steve Lundquist. He's like your arch nemesis in the 100 breaststroke. Well, and 200 breaststroke. But he- He would take a crack at me and he beat me, I remember, in 83 and I was not pleased. You guys would go mano a mano all the time, but he set the world record and reset it

a bunch of times over the next couple of years, right? He did. He did. I mean, a mano a mano, he was dominant. Right. He was the one that- He was a mountain of a man too. He was, and he was just immensely talented. He was also a really, he is a very generous competitor, somebody who was always collegial and friendly, despite both of us knowing that we were going for each other's jugular

when it came to swimming next to each other in the pool. Right. Well, that gets played out in 16 Days of Glory. I mean, that was a very heartfelt moment after the final. But working up to that, you go to Olympic trials in 1984, and you're the one who sets the world record. Right. For the first time, you beat this guy. Yeah.

And you go into the Olympics as the favorite in the 100 breast. The spotlight's on you. You get up on the blocks for your qualifying heat. Right. Heat seven, what happens? Well, it was the night before was the opening ceremonies. And those of us who were competing the next morning at 9 a.m., because that's when the preliminaries started, we opted not to go to the opening ceremonies because standing for six, eight hours in a day the night before you compete, you just don't do that. You can't do that. So we were shaving down actually. Lundquist was your roommate, right?

He was my roommate, yeah. That's so weird that they would put you guys in the same room. It didn't seem weird at the time. Really? No, it really didn't. I didn't have any problem with it. As far as I know, he didn't either. But it wasn't just the two of us. It was several people in the same room. Oh, okay. Yeah. But yeah, so we were shaving down the night before and this was one of the very first events

of the 84 games. And you just, you kind of don't know what to expect. But some of the things that I remember were getting into warm-up and the stadium, which I think it had a capacity of about 15,000 people, probably two-thirds were already there by the time we were warming up. And I was introduced as I was getting ready to dive in. And it was just such a surreal experience. And then the crowd reacts and I'm like, ooh, this is weird. I've never experienced anything like this before. To say that I was psyched and ready to go is definitely an understatement. It's a very strange thing that I was never swimming faster in my entire life in the month. It was a little over a month, I believe, between me breaking the world record at the trials and then competing at the games and the training, I was crushing it. I was on fire. And I knew I was on fire. And I had just, I knew I was on fire.

My body was just working. I felt good. And you don't really allow yourself to think, oh, okay, I've got this. Because you don't. You never do. But I was feeling really, really good. Like I was kind of pinching myself. I was feeling so good in the water.

So I was ready for the prelims. so good in the water. So I was ready for the prelims and I usually don't remember my races, but for whatever reason, I remember thinking to myself, okay, on that first 50, take it easy. Whoa, horsey. And I just felt great. But I knew that I had needed to just really have that easy speed. Yeah, you don't want to blow your wad in the qualifying heat. And as you know, that easy speed is elusive, but I had it. And so I touched the 50 wall, and I did my underwater pull. And keep in mind, there are 15,000 people. And I don't think I'd ever competed in front of that many people before. And I came up from my underwater pull and the crowd erupted because I guess I was either at or just below world record pace. And I wasn't

below world record pace. And I wasn't going nearly as hard. Yeah. So it was like that kind of magic. And then I remember thinking, okay, get off my 50 wall and breaststroke. And I would think you do with butterfly that you build off the wall. You don't just crank out a hard stroke right off the wall, you build. So I built, usually it was three strokes for me, one, two, three. And then on four, I'm like, okay, let's bring it home. I just wanted to just kind of bring it home. And it was that fourth or fifth stroke, boom, my leg just went, I felt it go. And it was a muscle called the adductor magnus, which is the big muscle that basically closes your legs in your upper thigh on the inside. I just felt it go. You just tore it. Yeah. You can see it when you watch the video. There's a moment. It's sort of subtle, but if you're looking for it, you can see it. And then suddenly it's a whole different picture. And you still, you end up pulling your way, the rest of it to finish.

And you still won, not only won the heat, but you set the Olympic record. I did, I did. Basically dragging your legs. Well, those of us who've had like sudden injuries, and I've had too many of them, that there's adrenaline that kicks in. And when you first injure yourself, you can kind of walk it off. And so even though I felt it go, I didn't feel any diminishing strength or quickness at that point. It was that afternoon between preliminaries and finals where the inflammation

kicked in and where the blood started bubbling up to the surface and the bruising began, that the pain really started. But I was... I mean, you've seen my reaction at the end of the race. I knew something was terribly wrong. But the pain didn't really start until probably two or three hours later. That's when everything collapsed. And I was like, oh no, this is a nightmare. So you show up for finals six hours later. You got a cortisone shot and your leg is completely wrapped in gauze. Well, the way it happened is once again, I was in hell, absolutely in hell.

And I hadn't been able to talk to my parents. You know, there weren't cell phones. My whole family was there. And I remember showing up to warm up and I couldn't imagine kicking breaststroke. Like it was hard enough just to... I couldn't even... So devastating. And I remember standing on the edge of the pool and again, they announced me. Number one seed, Olympic record holder. He broke the Olympic record this morning. And world record holder, John Moffitt is getting in lane four,

whatever lane it was. And like the difference between in the morning and that just incredible bursting confidence that I had in the morning was completely deflated and non-existent. And I got in and I swam and I did a 50 freestyle. I'm like, okay. I stopped at the other end of the pool and I could actually see all the doctors and the coaches. There were several of them, four or five at the end of my lane. And I remember pushing off the wall and I'm like, okay, here it goes. Let's see if I can kick breaststroke. And I couldn't, just couldn't kick breaststroke. I just couldn't do it. So I got out after a hundred and my coaches and doctors pulled me aside and said, listen, there's some things that you can do that we can do, but you know, the risk is high. You will

certainly be injuring the muscle more, But what they did is they said, we can give you injections. And it wasn't cortisone. It was actually a local anesthetic called xylocaine. I believe that's the name of it. And this doctor took out like these big syringes and just started shooting xylocaine into this big muscle in a very sensitive area so that I could, you know, it was basically numb from my belly button to my knee within like 10 minutes. So I had missed warmup and I mean, I had to warm up. So the Women's 100 Free just happened. And before the medal ceremony, they said, you can get in the diving well. And once again, so they wrapped it very tightly with basically adhesive tape.

They put some sort of sticky stuff on. They sprayed it on and then basically wrapped it in an adhesive tape to hold the muscle together as much as possible. And I got into the diving well, which is also within the stadium. Right, it's right there. And you're the only one, right? Oh yeah. There's nobody else on deck. There might be like an usher or something. There were probably half a dozen people even on deck. And so I knew every eye was on me, including my parents, and they didn't know what was going on. But the thing I remember is like, But the thing I remember is like, okay, this is a moment where I just doned up every ounce of strength that I could muster.

And I kicked as hard as I could. And I screamed underwater because it just hurt like hell. But every kick thereafter hurt a little less. And I just, I don't know how far I went. It probably wasn't very far. I just kicked and kicked and kicked and kicked. And it felt like a noodle. Like, you know what it's like to have a, I mean, to have your lip numb, let alone have a limb numb. Yeah. Wow.

So I was able to kick enough where, okay, let's go. And 15 minutes later, I was on the blocks for the finals of the 100 breaststroke. And was there anything that you did to kind of compose yourself mentally and emotionally to try to approach that mindset? Or you're just in the moment, like taking it one second at a time? When you're a competitor, you get good at masking the way you're, if you're feeling not confident.

I was panicking. It was completely panicking. I was like, it's over. It was embarrassing. All the people that put so much into helping me throughout my career, and it was just all came crashing down. And I also knew there were, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people are watching it on TV. So my most horrible personal defeat was unfolding on worldwide television. Yeah. You know, in retrospect, obviously there's nothing to be embarrassed about. You got injured. It's not like you screwed up. I would get embarrassed when I

wouldn't win. Yeah. It's just, I think that's part of my makeup, but I don't remember actually doing any sort of calming. I just, I was, I don't know what I looked like walking out, but I would think I had pretty much of a poker face. Yeah, you did. And I was one of those hundred some odd million people who watched it live as it happened. And I remember vividly, I think it was Mark Spitz, who when you took your sweatpants off and everybody could see the bandaged leg, he said something like, oh, this is some kind of psychological ploy, like you're trying to play mind games with Lundquist or something. And I was just thinking, nobody would do that. That's insane. Clearly there's something very wrong here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, thankfully I couldn't hear

his commentary. You get up on the blocks, Steve Lundquist is like in lane two, right? Something like that, yeah. You're in the middle of the pool, lane four. You end up still pulling out like a fifth place finish in this whole thing, which is insane to me that you weren't like 20 meters behind everybody. Yeah, I remember I was clearly last at the turn. Because when

underwater pull, you can see a fair amount and you take a glance where you are. And it was just not a custom. It wasn't something I was familiar. You're not used to that. I was used to. I wasn't used to looking at the person beside me and seeing their feet. So I knew I was in last. And again, what creeped in, it's like, I don't want to regret this. I don't want to regret this. I want to be able to look back and know that I tried as hard as I could, that I welled up every possible fiber of strength and willfulness in order to get through this. And I remember my arms felt great. Like it still had that halo of my body feeling great. And I just said, okay, legs are, one's a noodle,

just bring it home, bring it home. All those pulling sets I did for years and years and years, now it's time that they come in handy. And I just used my arms and I, yeah, I ended up getting fifth, but- But people who aren't familiar with swimming, you gotta understand that of all strokes, breaststroke, the vast majority of your power is coming from the legs.

Yeah, it was probably about 70% of my stroke came from my kick, yeah. Yeah. It's hard to even think about it now, but you can look back on that and know that you gave it everything. And that image of Lundquist winning, he breaks a world record, wins the gold, and then he comes over to your lane and leans down and gives you a hug. Well, that's a relationship that we had. He was never anything but a gentleman about everything and humbled by the situation. And he made that very clear to me.

But that wasn't the end of your career. So how do you pick the pieces back up and try to rebuild after that? Well, I was on this fantastic team called Stanford Swimming. I've heard of it. Yeah. And we were on a roll. So this was... 84 games were the summer between my sophomore and junior year, between my second and third year. So I had two more years of eligibility. And through various flukes and disappointments and bad luck, we didn't win. Although we were favored my freshman and sophomore year to win the national championships. We didn't. Florida ended up winning. So I had not only the goal ahead of me to win that team national championship, but also a group of unbelievably tough, accomplished men that were on the team who cared about me and who wanted me to be part of their team.

And I desperately wanted to be part of their team. So I had this built-in support network. That's what people maybe don't understand about a college team is you have a support network. And I certainly had a great support network. So I wanted to get back. I wanted to get back and try for that national championship that eluded us my freshman and sophomore year. I recall that it was probably about the end of October, beginning of November before I got back in to swim because the injury of my leg was pretty bad. The tear was severe. And doctors really, really didn't want me to re-tear it.

They wanted to be sure that it's 100% healed before I did any breaststroke. So I really didn't get back into any sort of meaningful training, I think, until sometime before Thanksgiving. So there's like four or five months I took off. Right, right, right, right. And Stanford does end up winning NCAAs that following year. It was awesome.

I mean, that 85, 86, 87 run, I mean, it was, I mean, one of the greatest swimming franchises of all time. I mean, the talent on the Stanford team during that tenure was unbelievable. It really was unbelievable and it wasn't lost on any of us. I mean, I remember that objectively you could take world rankings and you can say there is no bigger concentration of world-ranked swimmers on the planet than at Stanford in the mid-80s. Right. I was admiring it from afar in the pages ofs. Right. Right. I was, you know, admiring it from afar in the pages of Swimming World magazine, which I would hotly anticipate, you know, it's a rival in my mailbox pre-internet. And that was the only way to get any kind of news

or information or inspiration about what was going on in the world of this sport, because short of Olympic years, there's no real media coverage happening. So that was the one source of trying to figure out what was happening in this world. And they would every year put on the cover the team photo of the team that had won. And I vividly remember that year that you guys won the first time

and the team photo and everybody there. I was just like, that is the coolest thing, man. Like, look at all of those guys. They're all like so extraordinary in their own respective ways. It was cool. Yeah. It was a once in a lifetime experience. So, so yeah, I mean, there was more to me as a swimmer and as an athlete than just winning the Olympic gold medal. I would, I would count the winning the national championship as just as elusive as winning a gold medal and just as difficult of an endeavor than Olympic gold medal. But it's not looked upon the same by the public, but it's something that all of us who are

part of those teams, we know we did something because there was a fantastic chemistry that existed and it wasn't just the talent. It was that we all cared about each other and we all had a good time and swimming's hard, especially, you know, at a place like, well, any college, but a place like Stanford where so much is expected you above and beyond your athletics. I mean, we, we were, we were were really close. And that's the thing that I will always carry with me. It's not the fact that we won the 1985 NCAA team championship and the 86 NCAA team championship. It's the guys who I had the honor of swimming with, my teammates. Right. Dave Bottom. Dave Bottom started it all. Yeah. I mean,

what a legend that guy is. I mean, he, when you look back and you try to deconstruct how that team became what it is, I mean, he really set the tone. I feel like he set in motion and kind of created the foundation and everything built upon the tone that he set as a leader on that squad. It definitely extended from him. zest for life is not aptly describing what he is like, but just incredibly passionate and talented and jovial and a good guy. So I remember arriving at the farm in the fall of 1985. Stanford just seemed like a fantasy land to me. It was so outside the realm of anything that I thought would be accessible to me.

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

you were a post-grad at that point. So you weren't swimming on the team, but you were sticking around to train. No, first time we met. Oh, the first year. Oh, yeah. I was, we overlapped. I was a, but you were sticking around to train? No, first time we met. Oh, the first year. Oh, yeah. We overlapped. I was a senior when you were a freshman. Yeah, the first year. That's correct. But I was coming out of the school where you just do what your coach tells you to do, and you're just training four or five hours a day and putting in massive volume and never questioning the protocol.

questioning the protocol. You were like a strange animal that I'd never met before who was actually taking responsibility for your own training. And there would be morning workouts that you wouldn't show up for, or you would say, I'm not doing stadiums. That's not good for me. I know what I need. And I remember being very struck by your confidence and self-assurance about what was going to work for you and what wasn't, which caused a lot of strain with Skip the coach. It always did, especially early on. There was a lot of like, where's Moffitt? Call him. But you knew what you needed and you always performed when you needed to. But I had never seen that before.

So walk me through a little bit about that because I think that was unique in that time. That was to kind of like be your own guy. Yeah. Certainly in hindsight with the way the swimmers train now versus the way we trained back then, that's the backdrop. Look, I would go 20,000 meters in a day

and I was a hundred breaststroker. My race was about a minute long or less. I mean, looking back on it, it's insane. It is absolutely insane how much I was expected to train and it tore me to shreds. It absolutely tore me up. I did not have one of those bodies that could withstand that kind of punishment day in and day out. Right. Like you read about Phelps and how he could recover so he could handle that kind of volume. I couldn't. And there were guys on that, a lot of guys on the team that could. I couldn't, and I knew that about me. And that part about me was really sort of solidified when I was in high school. I didn't do doubles until... Up in even 1980, I didn't do double workouts.

That's crazy to me. I didn't do double workouts until toward the end of my senior year in high school. And it was done because I had some coaches who actually had some vision and some parents, my parents, who were very supportive, but who clearly also had vision. And they didn't want to, A, burn me out because I have a personality type that, believe me, I can get burnt out. They didn't want to burn me out. And they didn't want to just tear me apart at like 14, 15 years old. Like so many of the kids were already having a problem with, I mean, what's the

attrition in swimming? It's like in the teens, early to mid teens. And so I also shared, like, I was like, you know, swimming can write me a ticket somewhere. I don't know exactly where, but it can write me a ticket somewhere. Because I was just kind of a normal kid, but I was really good at swimming. And so I didn't even start weights until college. I would do- Which is also crazy because you were always super jacked.

Well, that's the reason I didn't have to do weights. Yeah. The one guy who's got much bigger calves than me. Yeah, well, I wish they were a bit smaller, but I always, I mean, that's a whole nother topic of people walking up to you in grocery store and saying, what do you do to get such big calves? I don't mean to digress, but my heavens, I would, I really don't like them very much. They don't fit in jeans. You can't wear decent jeans. They're all show no go. Pants don't fit. They don't. They don't. Yeah. So, okay. So we digress. What were we talking about? You didn't touch

weights until college. Yeah. And even a little bit in high school, my senior year, I would do like speed circuit stuff. I would do like, one of the things I would do is I would do squat jumps, isokinetic squat jumps. That was the closest thing that I did to weights. And then Skip also realized that I did not need to do heavy weights, especially my freshman year. I didn't do heavy weights. Maybe my sophomore year, I began to do more heavy weights because I actually kept growing in my freshman year in college. because I actually kept growing in my freshman year in college. And so I would do plyometrics early before anybody knew what plyometrics were,

which is basically spending as little time on the ground as possible and jumping, using your pure fast twitch muscle fiber. And I would do reaction drills like Dave Bottoman. I would do reaction drills where we would have our eyes closed and somebody would say, go, and you'd open your eyes and you'd have to hit whatever it is. Just like really neurological, like teaching your body how to react in an explosive way. That was much more important to me than being physically strong because that was not my problem. And as I'm sure you're well aware, swimming in a world-class environment with really good swimmers, you realize what your weaknesses are very, very quickly. And you know what your strengths are. And so I always had the philosophy.

It's like I really needed to focus on my weaknesses, things that I really, really could improve because me getting incrementally stronger was not going to make me a better swimmer. Right. And thankfully I was surrounded by people who agreed with me on that topic. Yeah. Well, you were way ahead of the curve because now that's standard protocol for swim training. I mean, it's changed so much. I mean, you know, for people who are unfamiliar, it really was just get in the pool and churn out these sets up to 20,000 yards or meters every single day, four or five hours of pool time, couple of weight sessions a week and, you know, live your life as a zombie.

Like from 15 to 21, you know, it's like, it's all a fog. I couldn't do it. Because you're so exhausted all the time. And you're banking that when you finally back off and undertake that two week taper that you're gonna bounce back completely and be at your peak. And it's just crazy when you think about that

in the context of a race that lasts 49 seconds or 18 seconds, if you're swimming the 50 freestyle, that you would be doing that. The sport, I don't know how in touch you are now with kind of training modalities, but- Only a little bit. It's pretty crazy. I popped into the post-grad workout at USC a couple of times over the last couple of years. Connor Dwyer invited me to join them. I've only gone a couple of times, but this is where a bunch of, you know, very accomplished post-collegiate swimmers go to train for the next Olympics. Like Lochte used training there and stuff like that.

Or Banchak was coaching. He's like my favorite coach. Yeah, I was so lucky to have been able to be coached under him. How amazing and phenomenal is that guy? He was amazing back then. Still at it, you know, it's crazy. And the workout resembled nothing like

anything I was familiar with. You know, when you get in, you're putting like nets on your feet and you're just doing 12 and a halves and turning around and all this like short sprint, you know, learning how to explode off the walls. Like it was all bursts and power, which was completely different than the way that we trained. I wish I would have been able to train like that.

Yeah, you would have benefited tremendously. I would have. When you look at the times, you know, now and how much they've dropped, I mean, clearly they've figured out something that we didn't know. I'm convinced I was in a perpetual state, as I guarantee you were. Overtrained all the time. In a perpetual state of being overtrained. Yeah.

Unless you're that rare freak like that Michael Phelps who has that biology that allows them to flush the lactate acid out quickly and recover more rapidly. But I would venture to say that, you know, 85% of elite swimmers were over-trained during that era. For sure. Yeah. I was one of them. Yeah. Well, you still, I mean, by taking control, you were able to create your own trajectory

and your own success path. Don't go thinking I was in complete control. No. I mean, there were a lot of knockdown drag outs. Yeah. Yeah. I would say that I got a lot of resistance from my teammates who were able to withstand the punishment a little bit more readily than I was able to. And those were the ones... I knew Skip was going to give me grief no matter what, because that's his job. A job of a coach is to push you harder than you think you should go. And so I understood that tightrope, but having my peers and my teammates saying, we're questioning whether or not you're dedicated. I'm like, you're kidding me, right?

It's like that hurt. Right, right, right, right. dedicated. I'm like, you're kidding me, right? You know, it's like that hurt. Right, right, right, right. But I wasn't the only one. I mean, Dave Bottom was, he was the one that kind of- He was cut from that mold too, yeah. He was, for sure, yeah. Yeah. Well, that must have been giving you some comfort because, you know, he kind of established that you could do that. Yeah, I think for some reason, I don't think Skip got as mad at him as he got at me.

Yeah. I think where it started is my freshman year, you know, he would call me in the morning, morning workouts, and I'd wake up my roommates and they'd be all pissed off. And I just realized like, hey, I can pull the plug out of this thing.

And then of course, You wouldn't have bought your phone. That made him really mad. You didn't answer your phone. I was like, oh, sorry, Skip. Yeah. Let's just say Skip was prone to explosive moments over the years. He was amazing for me.

He was very, very good for me. And his drill sergeant mentality, really, that's what he's known for. But what he did for me was realize that the team was bigger than what I was doing, and that we couldn't achieve ourselves without the team thriving as well. And that was a mantra, right? I mean, from the Marines, I'm sure it's like, you've got to, you know, when you're in combat, you have to react as a team, you know, each other's backs. And, and I think that in that respect, certainly in those eras, era from, well, the mid, mid eighties and then the nineties to about 2000 is his last end. Yeah. Like that suited him very, very well because what he did was he created teams that were really, really close. And you don't win national championships unless you're really close.

That was his greatest talent. I mean, Skip is a flawed individual. I'm not sure he was the best coach for me or that the program wasn't suited for me. I wasn't going to be a point scorer, but he was incredibly talented at trying to create that alchemy that made everybody work in unison. And when you come from club swimming, it's like, it's an inherently individual sport. And then I go to Stanford and it's all about team. And I just fell in love with that. It all became about how can we cohere as a group of individuals to work together? And you could feel it. There was something very special about that. Yeah, I mean, I think it's illustrated.

I have two photographs from that era that are up in my house. The first photograph is kind of a ragtag group of us in 1985. We assembled in front of Memorial Church in the quad, and it was a blazingly hot day with President Kennedy, who was then the president of Stanford University. He just passed away within a year ago. Actually, I think a couple of months ago, pretty recently. He was amazing. He was amazing. He was incredibly supportive of his student athletes. And he was in a suit and tie. And like I said, and we were all in our Speedos. So we were fine. I mean, it was like 100 degrees. It was crazy hot. And so we took the picture. And I remember he said,

tell you what, if you win next year, you wear the suit and tie and I'll wear the Speedo. And we're like, all right, done. Well, a year later, we went again, which you're in that picture. Yeah, I'm in that photo. And we're all in our suits and ties. I don't remember it being especially hot that day, so he missed out. And President Kennedy, the president of Stanford University is there in the middle. With a red Speedo. With a Speedo.

Yeah. I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. But the thing about those photographs that I didn't notice it until years and years and years later. As you know who's missing in those photographs? I don't know. Skip. I never thought of that.

Skip's missing. And you know why? And I've never asked him about this. But I think this was our victory. This is his job to coach us to victory. This is our victory. And I would be really surprised if you were to ask him today whether or not that was a conscious decision. I think it was. And certainly, I believe the intentionality all symbolizes the way he looked upon his role on the team. It was his job. But it was our victory.

Yeah, I've never reflected on that before. That's a very good point. Yeah, he said to me one time, there was a moment of strife. I think it had to do with him and Dave Shraven going head to head with each other. was a moment of strife. I think it had to do with him and Dave Shraven going head to head with each other, him like screaming at Dave and Dave storming off the pool deck or something like that. And it was a crack in the armor, in the kind of unity of the team. You could feel it. And Skip said to me afterwards, you know, if, if, if it takes, uh, you guys hating me for us to win, I'm willing to do that. And I remember just feeling very conflicted about that.

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

And I think not liking him galvanized us in many ways. Right, as opposing forces. Right. The team unified in its antipathy towards the coach. Well, don't you think that that's- But that's like not, I don't know. When you look at like the way that Pete Carroll coaches the Seahawks or like this sort of,

you know, this more evolved kind of sensei, Zen master approach to coaching where you're trying to bring out the best in the individual. Yeah. there has to be, you know, a belief in, you know, that potential, right? Like there's a trust there. It's a very, that's a very different thing. Clearly, but it's all at the same, I mean, you're all trying to do the same thing and coaches have different styles. I guess the objective is different. I mean, the objective is the same, right? Yeah, you want to win. You want your athletes to be champions and to win. And I think the best coaches also want your athletes to be happy and also succeed in life, not just in the athletic endeavor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I guarantee you he feels that way. Yeah. And I guarantee you he feels that way. Yeah. So if you were to find yourself coaching the Stanford swimming team, what would be your ethos? I haven't even thought about it because there's no way in the world I would want to do that. Oh, gosh.

I don't know. I don't think I've even developed that part of my brain. I mean, the whole athlete side of me is such a stranger to me. It's so long ago. I have a hard time even picturing myself as doing that and being able to withstand how difficult it was and the pressures and all of that. So yeah, I don't want to cop out of your question, but I have no idea how I'd go about that. I remember after you graduated and you were still sticking around and doing some training, at some point you got recruited by USA Cycling to get on the bike and give it a try. Somebody saw your calves and your legs and thought, this guy might be good on a bike.

Yeah, yeah. They threw me on. You went out to like the Olympic Training Center, right? I did. I spent three months at the Olympic training center. Was that for, uh, was that for like velodrome racing or road cycling? It was, it was the national development team and it encompassed both, uh, road cycling and velodrome cycling. But back then the, uh, the velodromerome was outdoors. Now it's covered. It's in a big bubble. But back then it was outdoors and you couldn't ride a velodrome when there's ice everywhere. So I only had the opportunity to ride on that velodrome a few times, but we were training, like a lot of the people that I was training with, I was in a more sprint track oriented type of group. But several of those

guys made the 88 team that I was training with. Wow. So what was that like when you just suddenly decided to jump into a brand new sport and you're with some of the elites? I just don't know where I got the chutzpah. I really don't. I remember- Were you able to mix it up pretty good or was that humbling? Not at first. Not at first. I will remember that I ended up showing up in the middle of the night.

It was a really snowy night and it was just dumping. And so I think I got in somewhere around like 10 o'clock at night, 11 o'clock at night. And they dropped me off at the Olympic Training Center in front of these barracks like housing. Yeah. And they gave me, okay, this is your key. This is your room number. Bye. And I have all my bikes.

And I kind of walk in and I can hear down the hall there's a TV. And it's really quiet. And I walk in and there's this big giant dude and I've got all my bike gear and everything. And I was like, hey, I'm wondering where I could put my bikes. And it was this guy named Ken Carpenter. Ken Carpenter was a match sprinter of, he was a world-class match sprinter. I can't recall whether or not he actually won a medal, but he went to the 1988 Olympic Games in match sprinting. And he immediately took me under his wing. And I realized that athletes, they want to have each other's backs. But I remember falling asleep that night and my roommate was already asleep.

And I'm like, this is the weirdest thing I've ever done. I have no idea what I'm in for. But kind of badass. I don't know. Seriously, what gave me the hubris? Well, I mean, Eric Heiden had kind of set that precedent, right? And Eric was at Stanford Medical School at the time, right? Did you ever meet him or talk to him about it? Yeah, yeah, I did. I rode with him a few times. And the thing is, he had a lot more saddle time than me. At this point, I'd been actively riding and training for maybe six months. And I remember getting up the next morning and it was like a clear day in Colorado Springs, but there's about hip deep snow. And I meet my roommate awkwardly.

I mean, here's this guy sleeping next to me. I've never met him. I'm going to have to live with him for the next three months. And it was run back then by a group of Polish guys. And the main guy is a guy named Eddie B. Eddie Borosiewicz, I think was his last name, but we all called him Eddie B. and Volter. And they ran it like an Eastern Bloc country. And I remember him getting in front. There was about 80 or 90 of us, and I didn't know anybody. And I remember very clearly Eddie B. getting in front of everybody. He goes, okay, guys, today it's snow day.

And everyone's like, yeah, thanks. And today we play snow soccer, no rules. It was just a disaster. What does that mean? Well, we went out on the field, which was in the middle of the Olympic Training Center back then. And like I said, it was hip deep snow. And he gave us a soccer ball.

And he divided us up into teams. And we're supposed to score a goal somehow. And it was such a great way for me to get my bearings because I realized that these people are not supreme soccer players. They were great athletes on the bike. And we just laughed. And I'm still lifelong friends with one of the guys I was there with. And we recall, we'd kick the ball and you couldn't see the ball. Well, then some smart aleck got the idea, well, I'm just going to pick it up and run with it because there's no rules, right?

smart aleck got the idea well i'm just gonna pick it up and run with it because there's no rules right so eddie b blows his whistle he goes guys guys come on one rule you know and obviously the goal is we need to kick the ball but that was i remember that kind of eased me into things but i got i got dropped on my first real ride um it was like a 90 or 100 mile ride and I got dropped. Like, I mean, I had never, it was humiliating where one of the coaches had to actually take the back of my saddle and grab onto the back of my saddle and catch me up to the group. And I remember getting up to 65 miles an hour and I'm like, I'm terrified. And that's the other thing about cycling, as you know, because you and I both have had our fair amount of tumbles, that there's a fear doesn't exist in swimming like it does in cycling. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, you have to have complete balls and be totally unafraid on these descents. Like, it's death defying. I was afraid. Yeah. Yeah. And if you have any fear at all, like that's the edge that's gonna prevent you

from moving forward. But how long did you do that before? Did you reach it? I mean, you got to a certain point, right? And then you had to make a decision. Am I gonna continue with this or not? Well, that post-grad, I had a series of crashes. I realized that, you know,

the bike handling was definitely an issue for me. And I remember in spring, I had a series of crashes. I realized that the bike handling was definitely an issue for me. And I remember in spring, I had a Lulu of a crash. But I did end up making the national time cut for the kilo. And I kind of was at one of those junctures. It's like, okay, do I keep training? of those junctures. It's like, okay, do I keep training? I still had it in me, something, a fire still burned. And I thought, well, can I make 88 and cycling? No way. Maybe 92, if I dedicated myself to it, but I didn't want to wait five years. I didn't want to. Time to call Bud Greenspan. Start working on a new path. Well, and what I ended up doing is I ended up training for 88 and that didn't work out well either. Lived with Pablo and trained with some really, really good athletes and it just didn't

work out. Yeah. I mean, that was probably a study in overtraining, right? In that little cohort. That was the hardest I'd ever trained in my entire life. And I'm thinking to myself, I was like 20, what was I, 24 years old. And I remember thinking to myself, why am I training harder now than when I was 16? But I just wanted it so badly. And you just get caught up in the whole thing. Pablo Morales, who was the world record holder, he was trained. I mean, he was, he'd gone undefeated basically. I mean, he was the most winningest NCAA swimmer of all time. All time still is. It was just a foregone conclusion that he was going to make the team in multiple events and be the team captain.

I kind of got swept up in it, you know, where I had this sort of inner John barometer. It's like, okay, I'm way over-trained right now, or I'm, I need to recover. Or I didn't, I ignored that this time because I got swept up in the whole thing. It's like, I want this so bad. I want this so bad. You know, and that was a really, really bad thing to do. Like mistake wanting something so bad for doing something that you know is bad for you. Because I knew, I just felt, I just, I was getting sucked down the drain. And I could feel it. It actually started in the fall. And I just never, I never recovered. And unfortunately, there was a whole bunch of us who ended up getting sucked down the

drain as well. And we just, it was a disaster of a year for so many of us that were training. I actually quit the program and went back and trained with Skip and Stanford. That's right. I remember that. Yeah. Well, I think what's instructive about that is, is this idea that, okay, well it's game on. We're going to put all our chips on the table. We're going to live like monks. We're going to cloud out everything and we're just going to push ourselves beyond anything that we've ever experienced before. And that will reap the result that we seek.

And it doesn't work that way. No, it doesn't. It doesn't. But it's easy to talk yourself into that, especially when you've got a groupthink mentality like you do in certain teams. This team wasn't – we weren't bonded like we were like the Stanford, where you felt comfortable enough going against the coach or something like that. And it was, you know, led to my ruin as far as that 1988 goes, as far as my swim career in 88. So when you reflect back on your career now, I mean, you said in 84, you didn't want to have any regrets. I mean, do you have regrets or what is your relationship to your career?

Thankfully, I don't. Yeah. I don't. I think the closest thing that I have to any sort of what if, but it's not a regret, was in 1992. I believe it was late 1991. And I did the Stanford alumni meet. And I was – I don't know what got into me, but I started swimming and I got, I was swimming so fast.

And I remember this. I was, I was like, I couldn't believe it. You thought, I thought 84, I was swimming fast. I was swimming way faster. And there was a rule change in breaststroke. So I started playing with that stroke and I was- Right, Barrowman had kind of revolutionized the rhythm and the technique.

Right, so I kind of studied that and it started to click. And I mean, I was just absolutely hauling. And that, like I said, I think it was 1991, would have been like October of 1991. And Pablo was there and I ended up like basically going about the fastest 50 I'd ever gone, including in college. And just, I mean, just was hauling ass. Off how much training? Not very much. Like 3,000 yards three times a week. That's nothing. Yeah. But it just goes to show you how overtrained we were.

Right. And how we weren't really using our brains. I mean, you're such a racehorse too. Like you're a guy who can walk away and then come back and just dip your toe in it a little bit. And then suddenly you're at a razor's edge. And I know this from seeing you kind of, you go through these spurts where you're into master swimming and then you'll disappear for a while. And then you come back and it's like, you come back and you're kind of like, you know, not looking so great. And then like a week later, you're like doing world record splits in like a master's workout. Look, those days are long over, Rich. I mean, please come on. But I'll go back to my regret

there. The only, the closest thing to, it was, I would call it a what if not a regret was at that meet, Pablo unbeknownst to me at that point, had already started training for 1992. Because, you know, like I said earlier, Pablo Morales, the world record holder, the favorite, no one thought he could lose, didn't make the team in 1998 or 1988. Yeah. And he said, what do you think about training for 1992? what do you think about training for 1992? And I remember in the back of my mind, I was swimming so fast.

I kind of like, I let that fantasy kind of sink in. Like, so that's one of the reasons that I think I actually trained a little bit so that I could see what I could do at that alumni meet. So obviously that was kind of in the back of my mind, but I had this overwhelming dread of the thought of getting back into the pool and being as dedicated as I needed to be in order to make that 1992 team. And I remember when he asked me, come on, train. And he asked me several times. And I remember each time I got more and more resolute that I don't have it in me.

I just don't have it in me. So part of me is physically, I think perhaps it could have been something that could have happened in 1992 games. And just to remind your listeners that Pablo Morales ended up winning two gold medals in the 1992 Olympics. Right. And it was redemption for him. It was one of the greatest moments in Olympic 1992 Olympics. Right. And it was redemption for him. It was one of the greatest moments in Olympic swimming history. I mean, he doesn't make it in 88.

He's like, all right, I'm done. Goes to law school, does two years at Cornell Law School, goes home for family reasons and decides to stick around at home, which is right nearby the Stanford campus. Right. Starts kind of dipping his toe in the pool and is right nearby the Stanford campus. Right. Starts kind of dipping his toe in the pool and showing up at the noon master's workout.

And before you know it, kind of under wraps, he starts training again. Yeah. Makes the Olympic team, goes and beats, was it Anthony Nesty that he beat in Barcelona for the hundredth fly that year? I don't remember. I do remember it was Barcelona. Yeah, it was Barcelona. Just one of the greatest comebacks ever.

For sure, for sure. And his mother had just passed away the previous year. So there was a lot to it. He had a lot invested personally. And he pulled it off, which is, I mean, cojones, like serious, serious stuff that he was able to do that because that's difficult. And I just was not convinced that I had it in me. Yeah. And if you have that doubt, I mean, you got to be all in, right?

Right. And it was one of those things, you know, you ask about regret and it's like, and I think about it from time to time, do I regret not doing that? No, because I felt very confident that I just didn't have it in me. I didn't want to. I had already decided I wanted to reinvent myself at that point. True. Which you did. You go on to win three Emmys. How many Emmys have you won? Three. It was many years later. Yeah. Yeah. How many Olympic athletes have Emmys? I don't know.

Probably not very many. Yeah. I couldn't tell you. But this begins somewhat humbly in the early days of reality TV when reality TV wasn't quite what it is now. I mean, now we live in a reality TV world, of course. But you start out at Hard Copy, which was kind of like an extra type investigative slash entertainment new show that would air like every night. And then you end up working as an executive producer at The Amazing Race. I wasn't an executive producer, and that was also many, many years later. Many years later.

I was at The Amazing Race. But I started out, I was a Stanford alum, rolled the dice in letting me write a series for Discovery Channel way in the early days. This was around 1992 that I got to write this series. And then that's what led me ultimately to realizing that I love telling stories. I never in a million years thought that I would make my living being a writer. I don't like writing. I really, I just don't like the process of writing, but people kept hiring me to write. And then that ultimately led me to land the position in hard copy, which back then was,

nobody knew quite what it was. They called it tabloid TV, but it was part news, but they also broke many, many, many of the biggest stories of that era, Michael Jackson being one of them. They were there on the forefront of O.J. Simpson. And that was the era that I was in. It was this very strange place to be, but I'll tell you that we mentioned Adam Ram. He was just one of them. It was, of all the crews that I've ever been part of, collectively, that was the most intelligent group. Just whip smart.

That's so interesting. I wouldn't have thought that. So smart. Like you never doubted the intellectual capacity of any of these people. It was crazy. Wow. Yeah. So how long were you at Hard Copy? I was there for about three and a half years. Yeah. And I got into the Director's Guild because they started having me direct shows or direct episodes. And I found my niche. My niche really wasn't... I actually worked on the Tonya Harding story. Oh, you did?

Yeah. And in what way? I was the... I believe my title back then, I don't know if I was in the director's guild at it, but maybe I was, it was maybe directed by, I directed the episodes. So in I, Tonya, the movie, you know, they have the hard copy guy. I remember that. They didn't do the research because it was actually me. It was you? Yeah. I mean, I was the point person. Oh, wow. I was the point person. I mean, there were people out in the field, but I was the one responsible for staying up all night

and cutting the stories together and making sure that it hit the satellite the next day for air. Wow, that's wild. Yeah, and I kind of found my niche. My niche was not necessarily OJ or Michael Jackson, although I did lend a hand if they needed to do some shooting or writing or whatever. My niche was kind of like a funny little niche

that I thoroughly enjoyed, which was the paranormal. I love the paranormal stories. Love the paranormal stories. UFO stuff? UFO, ghosts, all that stuff. Bigfoot? I just love Bigfoot. Probably the most infamous and one of my favorite Bigfoot or paranormal stories I ever did was a Bigfoot story about a playboy playmate who was on a shoot and she was in her motorhome and Bigfoot walked in front of her and it was all on camera. And I remember we called it Playmate and the Primate.

Oh, my. So it was just – it was like tongue firmly in cheek. Yeah. And a more innocent time. It was more innocent of a time. And I also approached it. I realized that I had a knack for kind of like figuring out what stories were all about. And the way I looked at these, it's like a campfire story.

You don't want it too long. And you want it to go someplace and you want it to deliver. And these paranormal stories are like that. I also, they would send me on all the extreme stuff. Like every spring they would send me out all the extreme stuff. Like I would, every spring they would send me out to chase tornadoes. Uh-huh. So there were-

That's fun. There was a lot of, I mean, I did get a lot of gratification. I ultimately, it wasn't for me. There was kind of a self-selection. I wasn't happy there. Yeah. And so I ended up doing network specials after that.

I remember though, so I got that job at the law firm and I quickly was miserable and suffering. And occasionally I'd go to the Paramount lot and go see you and it just looked like so much fun compared to my day-to-day experience. It was like a big rumpus room. We encompassed like a huge portion of the soundstage. It was just, we called it the bullpen and it was like you know there's the assignment desk and then there were the segment directors and then there were the the you know there and it was

everybody was all in one place so it was it was always just this like fever pitch of activity um just in in the energy you know in fact i you know, I had to put headphones on so I could concentrate because it was so loud. And there's so many distracting things happening all at once. When you look at news today and the kind of reality TV nature, the performance aspect of what the news cycle has become,

do you reflect back upon those hard copy days and see, you know, how A ends up at Z? I do. And I feel bad about that, that I do believe that, that this was the very beginning of, of kind of like really taking, not being completely objective and taking a perspective because a lot of the stories had perspective. But a lot of the stories had a lot of newsworthiness as well. But fundamentally, it was this news entertainment hybrid where it was about how can we get people engaged. As my time going on, it went from pretty much a news magazine show, a daily news strip magazine show to at the end. And I think this is one of the things that made me realize that it's not for me.

It became more and more and more like Entertainment Tonight. It was more entertainment-based, celebrity-based. And I just knew that wasn't for me. Right. And I just, I was, I just wasn't, I knew that wasn't for me. Right. You just, you just become like a publicity adjunct of the studios at that point, feeding up whatever narrative they want about the next movie or TV show. Yeah.

I mean, I, it was an amazing life experience, but it's not necessarily a chapter that I would like hold up and, you know, oh, this is one of the highlights, something I'm very, you know, just super proud of accomplishing. It's not like that. So how do you end up at The Amazing Race? Well, I saw the show, the promos for the show, it was 2001. I called The Amazing Race and I'm like, I love that show. I love that show. I want to work on that show. So quick short history, I believe they aired one episode and then 9-11. And so the show was basically, it was put on the shelf because nobody wanted to see a race around the world for a million dollars after what happened in New York City on 9-11. But I also figured out out it's almost like all roads lead to hard copy.

One of my coworkers at hard copy was the executive in charge of production at The Amazing Race. And I got in touch with him and he ended up returning my phone call saying, you just missed it. You would be perfect here. But basically we've just hired everybody for season two, but I'll remember you for season three. So it was that guy who remembered me when they were coming around for season three and hiring for season three. And I got hired on season three. Season three, me, if it's a little bit fuzzy, it was almost 20 years ago. It's crazy.

Um, but you know, season, season three was a fantastic season. And what they did is they immediately picked up a season four. Um, and so I was, I finished up, I think in like November or something. And then I had to be back boots on the ground, first week in January. And so then we did season four. And they didn't air it. They didn't air season three. And we're all thinking to ourselves, oh, gosh, it's doomed.

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

But a strange thing happened is that people started watching Survivor, which was the sister show. and programmers and networks started realizing that much they much they underestimated how much pent-up demand there was in the summer for new programming burnett wasn't behind amazing race no right he's it was what's the bertram band monster yeah yeah yeah i was like i knew he had a crazy name yeah i've met that guy a couple i mean he's a character yeah yeah yeah yeah there's yeah i worked with him quite a bit. I worked with him on subsequent projects as well. But so we were like doing season four, and actually the morale was pretty bad because we knew that they weren't airing season three in the fall. Because, no, I guess that would have been the winter.

They weren't going to air it in the – no, in the spring. I'm sorry. The cycle. They didn't air it in the spring, season three, even though it was all in the can. So you're working on four and you're like, why are we doing this? It's dead.

And so sure enough, they put it out to pasture. And then they aired that summer in the summer of – it must have been 2003. They aired it that summer and it was just, it just crushed it. Not only did the viewers love it and it got great ratings, but the critics just raved. And that's the first year it won the Emmy.

And let me tell you, it was just a furious pace after that. And I didn't win for season three or I wasn't, even though I was technically called a show producer, I was responsible for two episodes in the entire season. That's just the way it all worked out because you had to put it together so quickly. So I wasn't eligible because it said show in front of producer.

So then the next season that I did, I was supervising producer. And then that's what led to that freight train of being able to, or gravy train, whatever you want to call it, of being able to be swept up in this whole Emmy craze world. Yeah. I mean, it was a phenomenon. And it's like this perfect confluence of your talents. Like you have the storytelling thing. You had cut your teeth in television. You understood what makes for a good narrative. But you also have the athlete and the competitor mindset that allows you to kind of cut to like what's going to work here

and what's not. It was hard. Yeah. I'll tell you the main thing. It had to be exciting though. You know, as you know, I mean, I'm sure people look at your life and go, oh man, it must've been so exciting to do all these first time feats and things like that. As you know, it's gnarly, you know, and there's a lot of moments where you're left alone inside your head. And what people don't always necessarily realize is that you have these accomplishments and people like to celebrate accomplishments and others. But what you don't necessarily realize is that there are no photographs or videos or mementos of those hard times, those inevitable hard times

that it takes of that relentless work that it takes to get there. Because without exception, in order to do things that are big like that, it takes an enormous personal sacrifice and an enormous amount of personal dedication and hard work in order to get there. And then where luck plays into it is bad luck in my case in 1984 and good luck in my case for The Amazing Race.

Yeah, but the concurrent like through line is you keep showing up, right? And you approach it with that mindset. Like all those tools that you learned as a competitor, as a swimmer come into play in the professional world. I can't imagine. You must be sitting on thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of footage and tasked with trying to figure out how to, you know, create something special out of what's just raw footage of people cruising around. Yeah. Season four, I was responsible for the premiere episode. And the premiere episode has the most teams, has the most moving parts. It also has, just by nature of being the first episode, it's got a lot of things that tend to go sideways. And you need to do a lot of workarounds. headways. And you need to do a lot of workarounds. But I remember that of just raw footage that went into that, I believe we would cut that to be 90 minutes. So the clock, it would be somewhere

around an hour and four minutes, I think. So to make that 90 minute airtime, we had over 100 hours of raw footage. And you just couldn't do this show. There was no – they didn't – the digitizing process was completely different back then. We watched on VHS. Wow. Like you got really good at shuttling VHS. And you were responsible for everything that was on those tapes. You needed to know it inside and out, and just the log books after log books, just the amount of resource that it took just to absorb what happened. Because these cameras and sound people would go out with

these teams and it would be a void. It'd be like radio silence. You wouldn't know what was happening. You don't know what's going on, right? And yeah, you had interviews at the end of the day, but you truly don't know what's going on, right? Yeah, you had interviews at the end of the day, but you truly don't know what's going on with each team until you watch everything unfold moment by moment. And that was, I think, probably just so daunting to put these things together. And you're right. It's like, how do you take 100 hours of raw footage and make it into something that tens of millions of people will tune in and celebrate? It was rewarding, but it was so hard. Right. I remember moments over the years where you were completely burned out on it.

Oh, yeah. I definitely, burnout was probably my biggest enemy. I think ultimately I couldn't withstand just the unpleasant, the inherent unpleasantness of the entertainment business that you just have to deal with on a day-to-day basis to varying degrees. It doesn't mean I wasn't on shows that were just, that were absolute joys. There were certainly those. But, yeah, it just wore me down. but yeah it just wore me down in the way that hard copy was very much a progenitor of

what news looks like now how do you think about you know what the reality TV reality kind of lifestyle that we all live on like you know now it's YouTube and vlogging and like everything is reality TV I mean you were you know early on

like that was the first wave of this kind of programming, finding its way to network. And now it's just, you know, atmospheric everywhere you turn. It's ubiquitous, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And it's certainly continuum. I mean, you can trace back that continuum to those days

when, you know, when reality TV was ultimately really sort of embraced by a guy named Mike Darnell. Right. Yeah, that's right. He was the guy who really ushered it in, right? Genius. Absolute genius, too. Don't think it's only blind luck that got him to where it was. He's absolutely brilliant. Do you watch reality TV now? No, I don't. I've really never been interested in it.

Yeah. And that was- That's great. That was maybe- Uh-huh. I need to throw out a caveat to that. I'm interested in real stories. Mm-hmm.

And reality TV is basically highly produced storytelling. Yeah, to say the least. Yeah. Although I do, I would agree with that, but during quarantine, I mentioned this on an earlier podcast, but our family, we would have, after dinner, we would watch Queer Eye,

which is fantastic. I know, I know it is. It's so fun. Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. Come on, you had to do Tiger King. Oh, well, yeah, we did that. Of course, everybody did Tiger King. Yeah, well, yeah, we did that. I mean, of course, everybody did Tiger King.

Yeah, but that was a docu-series. Well, still reality TV. Yeah, okay. All right. You know, those stories. From a guy who's been behind the curtain. So when you see something like that, you're like, oh, I see what they're doing here. No, not always, but sometimes they do.

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

40 seconds of a YouTube. Right. So it's all compressed, exaggerated. Of course. Yeah. Of course. All right, well, let's pivot. The last thing I wanna explore with you is All right, well, let's pivot. The last thing I want to explore with you is the work that you do with respect to the Olympic movement. I know you're really involved in the Paralympic movement and the Olympic movement and LA24 and all that kind of stuff. So what does that look like? Well, it was 2007. And like I said earlier, I kind of consciously turned my back on all things Olympic athletics.

I wouldn't consider myself necessarily a sports aficionado. However, I love athletes. I love the stories of athletes. And it doesn't mean I don't watch sports, but I'm not like an avid football, basketball. You know what I mean? No, you're like me. I love the Olympics, and I like watching the Tour de France avid like football, basketball. You know what I mean? That's- No, you're like me. I love the Olympics and I like watching the Tour de France. Yeah, oh gosh, is that the greatest thing?

You know, weird. I know you're in the Formula One too, right? Like the weird sports. Yeah, except in the rest of the world. They're weird sports. Right, yeah, exactly. The rest of the world is not weird. Yeah.

So how I got, I kind of reluctantly got sucked into being – serving on the board of the Southern California Olympians and Paralympians Association, which is in essence the alumni group for Olympians and Paralympians in Southern California. It's the biggest and oldest chapter in the country. And the president then asked me to be on the board. And I was kind of like, I was definitely reluctant. I was kind of like, oh, I don't know about this. And so I started doing some work and I kind of enjoyed it. And there was a familiarity and a joy that, and a source, like it was like getting back to my roots.

joy that in a source, like it was, it was like getting back to my roots. Like when I would hang out with these people, these people who we might not have been on this exact same teams, but we have a shared, we have this shared parallel experience, oftentimes very separate, but we all know what we, there's, there's a, there's a real bond. There's a real bond in that. And it's, it's really fun. And it's, it's also a kind of an exclusive club that I found that I shunned it on purpose. It was part of, like, who I was. It's like, oh, I don't need – I'm not the Olympian. I'm something else. But it's kind of – I got fun to embrace it.

And I got involved in more and more and more things. I started doing some, being asked to do events with LA24, which is now LA28, but back then it was LA2024, the LA bid for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. And I just started having more and more and more fun. And as with most paths that you initially resist taking, oftentimes you start realizing, well, maybe there's a reason that I started down this juncture. And the then president of the Southern California Olympians and Paralympians was moving. And she asked me if I would like to assume the presidency. And again, I was reluctant, but I did it. And it's just been

kind of a snowball effect. And I've gotten incredible joy out of working with children. Like I work a lot with Ready, Set, Gold, which is an organization that sends Olympians and Paralympians into schools all over Southern California to teach the importance of health and fitness to elementary school and junior high kids. Not so unlike the message that you, I'm sure, talk about all the time throughout your career. And then various foundations that raise money, the Trident Swim Foundation, who we are raising money for swim programs in underserved neighborhoods where they don't have access to pools and they don't have access to college counseling. And so it's a hybrid of swim team, college counseling to really show kids that aren't necessarily

exposed like we were to what the world is outside of high school and as far as undergraduate. Yeah, yeah. And so just exposing them to that. And I've just been really, really enjoying it. All the while kind of keeping one foot in the entertainment business. I created a series, a game show actually. Was that the one with the stock cars? Yeah, yeah, it's where- Yeah, you showed me the trailer.

Yeah, where you strap contestants into the passenger seat of a race car, being driven by a race car driver, and they have to answer trivia questions like on Jeopardy. Well, they're like pulling Gs on Daytona. Yeah, yeah, just having the absolute daylight scared out of them. Like that clip in, what was the movie,

the Ford versus Ferrari? Yeah, right. Like the- Where they put the- Deuce, Ford the second. Right, right, right. Yes, indeed, it was like that, except we were trying to stump them with questions.

That seems like a no-brainer. It is a no-brainer as far as concept goes. But you learn something in production along the way, and sometimes there's too many working parts. There's too many volatile links in the chain that if one breaks, the whole thing falls apart. And we just had one too many of those things happen. So for that reason, primarily, it just didn't take off. There was a lot of people super excited about that. And I actually joined forces with Bertram Van Munster to do that. And we always shared our gearhead... We love cars. Right. Yeah. You're a car guy.

Yeah. You have a Shelby, right? I used to. I sold it. You sold it? I sold it. Yeah. I sold it to my college roommate. Oh, you're a car guy. Yeah. You have a Shelby, right? I used to. You sold it? I sold it. Yeah, I sold it to my college roommate. Oh, you did? Yeah.

Yeah. He sends me pictures every once in a while when he takes her out. So you must have loved Ford versus Ferrari. I did. Well, I know the book is fantastic. It's called Go Like Hell. And the book is like very much unfiltered. The movie, of course, is much more filtered and not as authentic.

But the story, they stuck to the story. That story is absolutely what happened. But yeah, yeah. Well, I totally enjoyed it. I mean, the book is just anybody that wants to, is a gearhead and likes that era of racing, read the book, go like hell. Right. Back to the Paralympic thing. You know, that's a world that I don't know that much about. Yeah. Like, help me to understand. Like, what is it that we don't understand about these extraordinary athletes that you have a glimpse into? Well, you are in a unique position where if you chose to, you could work with these athletes. And I know that you've worked with people with impairments. In fact, one of – I'm sorry, I'm blanking on his name, who did the five for five, the epic five.

Oh, Jason Lester. Yeah. He's got an arm, right? Yeah, he doesn't have the functional use of his right arm. Although he doesn't like to identify. He would prefer to just do his own thing. But he did win the ESPY for being like the, the, I can't remember the category, like best, you know, disabled athlete of the year or something like that. Yeah. I guess I, I, I sort of like went off, off track of what

your question is, but you work with the these aspiring para athletes wholetes who have to use varying degrees of adaption in order to function athletically. And you realize that every single one of them is a puzzle. And it's a puzzle for them, too, because their body doesn't work right. And, you know, there's so many different ways. And you and I, we know the basics, the foundations of swimming. But when you work, for example, with a Paralympic swimmer or an aspiring Paralympic swimmer, there's like a code that you need to crack. And you need to help them crack it as well because-

And that code's different for every athlete, right? Every athlete. Because they all have a different situation. And here's the thing. I've worked with a lot of very good swimmers through the years. I just, I haven't really been, I haven't really aspired to coach, but I've also seen that oftentimes swimmers specifically, and I'm sure it's like this with most athletes, who have achieved a certain amount of success, they have a very lazy, fair attitude toward getting told something new. In fact, there's some resistance.

But these para-athletes, they're just... I mean, put yourself in their shoes. Many of them, they were completely functional before an accident. Some of them were born that way. But just think of the level of frustration and aspiration and bravery that it takes in order to say, I want to be an athlete. I want to do this, even though my arm doesn't work right or my legs are paralyzed. These people are like enthusiasm turned up to 11. And they're collectively just an incredibly passionate group. And that's what originally sunk the hooks in me. I worked with a organization called Angel City Sports. me. I worked with a organization called Angel City Sports. And the first time I worked with them was, I believe it was 2017. And it was formed specifically to provide a Paralympic style competition and development platform for athletes from all over the world, but specifically

in the United States to compete in one place. And it's held over the course of a certain amount of days at UCLA. Oh, cool. Like a national sports festival kind of thing. Exactly. And it's called Angel City Games. And so I've been part of that. And as president of Southern California Olympians and Paralympians, we take part in not only doing clinics and helping various athletes, but also like in the opening ceremonies. And, and this year was only different in that everything was by remote. Like how, how the heck do you do a remote swimming clinic? But we pulled it off and I, I, I enlisted the, the, the expertise of a very good friend of mine who was on the 1980 Olympic team with me, a guy named Glenn Mills, who specializes in stroke technique

and has probably the greatest repository of swimming technique videos. Yeah, it's unbelievable. And they're all available online. And he- Is it like Swim TV or something like that? It's goswim.tv. Oh, goswim.tv, yeah.

Yeah, and so thankfully, I thought to bring him in because he just made it magic. And there's just a lot of magic that is involved with the Paralympic movement that is very, very different while being the same as the Olympic movement. There's a purity to it too, right? Yeah. It feels uncorrupted by the corporate know, the corporate forces that, you know, grind us all down. Like there's just something more innocent about it and real. Yeah. I think, I mean, maybe that I don't know

why that is. Maybe it's just their collective perspective is so much different than an able-bodied athlete. But I think it's also, you know, you talk about the corruption of of all things commercial. At some point, those athletes are going to really start getting some commercial exposure. And it's curious whether or not things will change. The atmosphere and the movement will change when these athletes become celebrated for what they are, which is amazing athletes with incredible hearts, which is what the whole Olympic movement is all about. Yeah. Yeah. Inevitable, I suppose. What do you think is going to happen with Tokyo? I don't know. I have no idea. You ask anybody high up in the Olympic and Paralympic world,

and that's the answer I get. Nobody really knows. At some point, a decision is going to have to be made though, because there's so many moving pieces here. Well, there's so much riding on it. There's so much riding on it. I mean, if they don't do it this summer, what does that mean for the Olympic movement at large? I don't know.

I don't know. It makes me shudder to think the damage. I mean, we're in a time, COVID has created a world where we're looking at so much of what we've known and taken for granted is being pulled apart and deflated piece by piece. piece by piece. And I'm terrified that if somehow the 2021 games don't happen, that Tokyo will be fine. Tokyo is a big city with lots and lots of money. They will make a rebound. But the Olympic movement, man, it won't be since like 1980 that the U.S. Olympic movement was almost ruined by the 1980 boycott. And I just hope it doesn't get to that point. I just pray that these athletes can go and compete and that the Olympic movement can do what they set out to do, which is send athletes to go compete at the Olympic and Paralympic Games and pursue their dreams. Yeah. That's a good place to land this plane. But before I let you go,

words of wisdom from the life experience of an Olympian, when you talk to young people or young athletes, like what is it that you want to impart to that person about personal potential and the path towards connecting with the best version of who you can be. Yeah. I was just a normal kid growing up. I never had Olympic aspirations, nor did I ever dream that I could achieve such heights. nor did I ever dream that I could achieve such heights. Like if my teachers and my fellow students were to look at me in fifth or sixth grade and say, okay, one of you is going to compete in the Olympic games and eventually go study at Stanford, it wouldn't have been me. And it was not on my radar either. And my point is that my life was transformed not by going to the Olympic Games, but by the desire and aspirations to go to the Olympic Games and the hard work and dedication that it took to get to that point where I could even fathom going to the Olympic Games. And in that respect, that aspect of life is accessible to anyone. And you don't have to aspire to be an Olympic athlete or a Paralympic athlete actor or a guru of podcasts such as yourself.

Please, no. No, no. But I mean, my point is that you can do it with applying yourself. And that's where the magic happens, is realizing that if you dedicate yourself towards something, that you can begin writing your own tickets. Beautifully put, my friend. Thanks, Rich. I love you, John Moffitt. Thank you for sharing with me today. I'm so happy that we are able to hang out and share stories and commune because it is few and far between, unfortunately, just because of our lives being busy. Yeah. Super grateful to have you in my life and to have this experience with you today, man. I love you so much. And that was very meaningful to me. And I think people are going to get a lot

out of it. So thanks, man. Thanks. It means a lot for you to want me to be on your podcast. Of course, man. It took seven years from the last time we got it done. Although I look at the folks that you have been able to interview with through the years, and it's just an unbelievable array, the distance that you have come from those, you know, from 1990 or 2007, when you were first starting embarking upon your journey, which I remember very clearly to now, it's a testament to what I was talking about that, you know, hard work and dedication and a vision and realizing that you might be able to write your ticket if you work

hard and do it. It's never guaranteed. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that, man. Thank you. Yeah. Like I said, I used to visit you at the Paramount lot and I was like, is there any job here? Could you, you were like, well, you could be coming to sit. You're like, I was like trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And it, you know, it took a very long time, but I'm grateful to be where I am, man. Cool. So if you're digging on John, the new podcast might be called Sports Life Balance. Coming towards a podcast platform. Do you have a release date for it? We're looking toward releasing it during the holidays at some point around Thanksgiving into the holidays. Cool. I'll be sure to share that out. And anywhere else you want to point

people? Well, look for Rich Roll as one of my guests. That's right. We're going to take a break, and then we're going to just keep rolling right into your podcast. So, yeah, honored to be a guest on your show. And when, of course, that goes up, I'll let all you guys know. So thanks, man. Love you. Really appreciate it.

Peace. Bye. Can you feel the love? So good. I love John. Hope you guys enjoyed that. John is not much of a social media guy. You can find him on Instagram at john underscore moffitt27.

But the best way to support him is by checking out his most worthy new podcast, Sports Life Balance, Lessons from Sports for Life. It launches in a few weeks. It's gonna be a good one, my friends. I'll keep you posted with links and all of that as it becomes available. Reminder that my new book, Voicing Change,

is available exclusively through my website, richroll.com slash VC. We're shipping globally November 10th, so pick up your copy today. We also have another Roll On AMA coming up this week, so give me and Adam a call at 424-235-4626. Leave me a message with your question, and we just might get to it. If you'd like to support the work we do here on the show, subscribe, rate, and comment on it on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and Spotify.

Share the show or your favorite episodes with friends or on social media. And you can support us on Patreon at richroll.com slash donate. I want to thank everybody who helped put on today's show. Jason Camiolo for audio engineering, production, show notes, and interstitial music. Blake Curtis for videoing today's show. Jessica Miranda for graphics. Allie Rogers for portraits. DK for advertiser relationships and theme music by Tyler Trapper and Harry. Thanks for the love, you guys. See you back here in a couple of days. We're going to talk about the election. We're going to answer questions. We're going to have a good time. It's going to be amazing. Until then, peace. Namaste. Thank you.