The Rich Roll Podcast - Roll On: Meditations On The Moderation Wars

Episode Date: October 15, 2020

Welcome to another edition of Roll On—my bi-monthly deep dive into (semi) current events, topics of audience interest, and of course answers to your questions. Commanding co-host duties as always is my hype man Adam Skolnick, an activist and veteran journalist perhaps best known as David Goggins' Can't Hurt Me co-author. Adam has written about adventure sports, environmental issues and civil rights for outlets such as The New York Times, Outside, ESPN, BBC, and Men’s Health. He is the author of One Breath and is currently hard at work on a novel. Some of the many topics explored in today's conversation include: Ag-gag laws, animal agriculture surveillance, and media weaponization; the documentary 'A Life On Our Planet' — the legacy of David Attenborough; The problem of moderating social media content veracity & the impending election impact; thoughts on climate consciousness and social entrepreneurship. In addition, we answer the following listener questions: How do you set healthy boundaries with alcohol? How do you navigate your social life alcohol-free? How do you break into endurance sports and create a more adventurous lifestyle? Thank you to Cameron from Oahu, John from London, and Greg from Colorado for your questions. If you want your query discussed, drop it on our Facebook Page, or better yet leave a voicemail at [phone].   The visually inclined can watch our exchange on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Enjoy! Peace + Plants, Rich

The Rich Roll Podcast. 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. 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 resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem. the people at recovery.com who created 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 in 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 and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. 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. 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 resources adhere to ethical practices. It's a real problem, a problem I'm now happy and proud to share has been solved by the people at recovery.com, who created 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 in 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. find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. All right, let's do it. Another edition of Roll On, Adam Skolnick and myself back in the house. Enjoy. Greetings, internet. It is I, Rich Roll, your friendly podcast host, back for another edition of Roll On alongside my hype man, my co-host, Adam Skolnick, environmentalist, journalist at large, author, writer, David Goggins can't hurt me, co-author, all kinds of things. Good to see you, my friend. Baby diaper changer. That's right. A lot of that these days. A lot of diaper changing. How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. You know, I've been hearing from the Rich Roll fan base about my diaper

choices. There has been some chatter. There's been some chatter about my piss poor diaper choices. I want to say this. Thank you for the messages. They're always very kind. And I just wanted to address it straight off the bat. I live in an apartment and we have a laundry room that is communal. And at the moment, I'm not prepared to put soiled cloth diapers in the communal wash. But I hear you. I want to be that brazen or at least move into a place with my own laundry. If you were committed, you would figure out a workaround. Oh, right.

Well, no, I think we are going to look into a service. Okay. Is the long. All right, we'll just leave it there. For those that are new to this special edition format of the podcast, we typically canvas a couple new stories, things of interest.

We call it the big story. We have a teachable moment. We do some show and tell. And after a break, we do some listener questions. If you'd like your question addressed and answered, you can leave it on our Facebook group or preferably leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. And we thank you. What have you been up to lately? Well, last week I was working on a story for Outside Magazine,

kind of about this moment, this political moment and adventure athletes and how they're handling it. So it's kind of like how the NBA players, NFL players, Major League Baseball players were dealing with Black Lives Matter

and voter suppression and police brutality in a very public way, which was kind of, for some athletes, it was a new setting, new form for them. Others had been doing it. But adventure athletes have been kind of also doing that in their own way on social media. So this is about a group of adventure athletes who were kind of brought

together to work on a voter campaign, get out the vote campaign in the name of public lands, preservation, and climate change policy. And what's unique about it, it's not just a, hey, these are problems. It's an attempt to take back patriotism from the right. Because for a long time since Vietnam War and the protesters were burning the flag, the left has kind of left the flag alone. Even though some of the greatest advancements in America have been civil rights movement, where Martin Luther King, John Lewis, many others kind of use the constitution to embarrass and destroy Southern segregationists. And Barack Obama obviously mines American history and philosophy to great effect and obviously to

the presidency. But for the most part, especially now, you don't see the kind of hug in the flag. Right. That's just not happening. Yeah, the flag has sort of been co-opted by the right as a symbol of a political point of view as opposed to this thing that should be uniting us all. Right, and we were just talking to Blake here

who's operating the cameras and audio here. And he was talking about in Simi Valley, you know, these convoys with big Trump flags and big American flags in the back of the trucks kind of rolling through town. And that has happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin and in Portland, Oregon, and has caused skirmishes and problems. And those people are linked to far-right organizations, including some white supremacist organizations, people who are doing that. And so it is dangerous. In 2020, can you embrace the flag? So Tommy Caldwell, legendary climber, you've seen him in Don Wall. You've seen him in Free Solo. He was one of those athletes wrestling with, is it all right to embrace the flag? And so

I spoke with him. I spoke with Claire Gallagher, who won Western States 100 last year. I spoke with a number of athletes, Connor Ryan, a Lakota skier, and talked about these issues. Because really at the crux of it is this tension that we all feel, especially people who get out in nature, run on trails, swim in the ocean, surf, whatever this tension that we all feel, especially people who get out in nature, run on trails, swim in the ocean, whatever it may, surf, whatever your sport is. Adventure athletes, people who are enthusiasts of adventure sports,

we care about the land because we love it. You know, like it fuels us in a level beyond athletics. It fuels us in a soul way. So is it possible to love our country when we love the places that are our country? Of course it is. Right, right, right. Of course it is, but there's this bizarre perversion.

Like if I was to hang an American flag like out in front of my house, people would make an assumption about what my political perspective is. So that's what it starts with. So on September 8th, Tommy posted on Instagram, and you can see it. And I'm not sure when our story will drop,

but in that post, he's like, I just bought a house and it had a big American flag and I took it down. And I understand that because I would also take it down because of the assumption, but also because I'm just not that into the flags. I'm not into the American flag. I'm just not that into the whole rah, rah, rah. We're Gen X, man. Coming up as Gen X, it was kooky. It was kooky to be rah, man. Coming up as Gen X. Yeah, we're supposed to be blasé and detached. It was kooky to be rah-rah. So there's also that. But now what I think is so interesting,

Jeremy Jones, I spoke with him. He's the head of Protect Our Winters. He's a famous backcountry snowboarder, a punk rock guy in his own right. And he is the one who started this organization basically all about, we have to protect our winters if we want to protect our sport. And obviously to protect human life on earth, which we'll get into in a little bit. And preserve the natural land and

resources that provide the backdrop, the landscape for us to enjoy those sports. So he did some, he and Protect Our Winters did some market research and found out there's 50 million Americans who do adventure sports. And they're all outside. And he calls it the outdoor state. And so he put together these athletes as an attempt to let's take back. We're the people that love our land. Let's show people we love our country. So Jimmy Chin.

Happy birthday, Jimmy. It's his birthday today. Happy birthday. He narrates this great video. And so that was kind of the departure point of the story. Happy birthday, Jimmy. It's his birthday today. Happy birthday. He narrates this great video. And so that was kind of the departure point of the story, but it was also kind of inward looking of this tension of, you know, what does it feel like to love the land in this moment?

What's it feel like to try to, is it the right time to embrace the flag? Does it work? That kind of stuff. So I don't know. I hope the story works. You know, it's one of those things you do your very best. You talk to a lot of people and you hope it drops and it lands right. Never lands exactly as you'd imagine, but you hope it lands right.

For outside though. Yeah, for outside. For outside. That's going to come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're like insecure. Are they going to publish this? No. I mean, you know, we were talking earlier on the phone. It's like, you know, you get scarred as independent journalists coming up when you have stories killed and stuff like that. And so part of me, until I've heard

and I've gotten my notes and I know the plan, I always keep, I always like prepare for the worst. Yeah, do you feel like you're jinxing it by talking about it now? Yeah, yeah. It's gonna be fine. It is a weird thing though. A very interesting thing.

Like I love America. I love our country. I love the freedom that I have and the liberty that I have to pursue the things that I love. I love being out in nature and exploring and everything that's great about this country. And how do you reconcile that with not being nationalistic in a jingoistic kind of way? There are two different relationships. But we have to find our way back to some place of unity where we can celebrate our collective humanity

and this place that we all share as a home. Yeah, and I don't say that explicitly, but that's the point is unity is where we need to get to. It's hard in this climate for a lot of reasons because mostly people are getting screamed at from the polls, not from the center. We don't have a uniter, we have a divider. Barack Obama was very much an attempt at a uniter.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of people who just weren't gonna listen to him. So this is an attempt for environmentalists, kind of this new era, this new wave of environmentalists who are trying to take back the flag and say, listen, if you love this country like you say you do, you better love the land because that's what the country is.

So it's like that aspect. And then of course, from an indigenous perspective, it's Indigenous People's Day today. I spoke to a couple native athletes and they had some really interesting takes on things from their cultural perspective. And I really valued that too. What's also interesting is that environmental preservation was originally the purview of the Republican Party. Right. Well, just like they were the abolitionists too. Lincoln was a Republican.

So it all flipped somewhere along the line. Somewhere along the line. I know. I know. So it all flipped. But environmentalism, it shouldn't be seen as a party issue. It really is. It's one of those issues like healthcare, like gun control, that the reason it's skewed the way it is along party lines tends to be around corporate contributions to the political process. Right, and that gets conflated with jobs.

Exactly. But those are arguments. Cool. So we have that to look forward to. Yeah. Coming to outside online at some point soon, man. Yeah, exactly. Thanks.

Meanwhile, I'm getting ready. It's a heavy week this week. I've got three podcast interviews and I did two over the last couple of days. So I'm kind of ramping up my schedule. The shark man. Michael Muller just went up. That's great. Can't wait to get into that. Such a good one, man. Yeah. You got to check it out. And he was kind enough to provide some footage of him swimming with sharks. Some of that footage,

I think is from his VR experience that we were able to edit and weave that into the YouTube version of the podcast. So people should definitely check that out and you can get a taste of like where he's coming from. Like he's such an incredible character. It's a super fun one. Incredible. And you have his book, right? I do.

You've never met him though, have you? I haven't met him. I, you know, Tashin who does these great art books and photography books, you remember they had the pop-up store like on Beverly or something like that for a while. And I used to go, whenever they put up a new exhibit, I'd go in there. They had a great Hockney exhibit once.

And then I was in there for some exhibit. And then I looked in the back, I'd missed the shark one. They might've done a book with him, but maybe not a big exhibit. I can't remember, but I saw that shark book in the back and I bought it. You did, yeah. It's so good.

It's an incredible book. I got Matthew McConaughey coming on the podcast tomorrow. Via Zoom. All right, all right, all right. Obviously I would have preferred to do it in person, but we're in a pandemic and I'm gonna take what I can get when it comes to Wooderson. So I'm looking forward to that.

Trying to wrap my head around like what it is that I wanna talk to him about and ask him. You know, typically I have people on the podcast who, you know, clearly are not as well-known as someone like him. Right. And the trick is like, how do you approach an individual like that

who's so well-known and try to get something unique and interesting out of them that, you know that is not Google-able. Right, well, it's interesting about him is, well, you're gonna talk to him about his book, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the occasion for this. He's got this book, Greenlights, coming out. I got an early copy of it.

It's an incredible book. He's an unbelievable writer. It's so well-considered and thoughtful and interesting. And I mean, he's a very compelling figure. Yeah, I mean, how often a very compelling figure. Yeah. I mean, how often do you see an A-list actor trying to give you life advice in a way that's not kind of talking down to? Right.

Yeah. We talked about this on an earlier edition of this podcast, right? The advent of the actor become like lifestyle guru. Well, you got it. You got Will Smith, Kevin Hart. Right, but with him, it's different. Like there's, because of his kind of hang dog,

laconic, laid back vibe, it doesn't feel calculated in the way that it might with somebody else who's making like a bold move into social media. Like it's all very natural and organic, I think. And I think it's genuine. And I think it began when he started stepping out and doing keynotes and college graduation speeches

and people cottoned on to like the wisdom. He was able to impart in a way. He's kind of like a Zen figure. Yeah, exactly. So anyway, I'm looking forward to it. It's amazing. I mean, you'll get into it with him, the origins, but I read a little bit about it.

Like his journals were this wellspring for this book, right? It's a very organic process. He's been journaling for like 32 years. Yeah. And he decided during the, I think in the early phases of the pandemic, like now's the time to do something with this. And he went off to the desert for 52 days

and huddled up somewhere without electricity and just banged this thing out. Amazing. So- On what, a typewriter? I don't know. No electricity? Yeah, I don't know how that worked.

More will be revealed. Yes. All right, what are we gonna- There's a whole section you can talk to him about. Yeah. What are we talking about today? What's the first thing we wanna get into? Well, you sent me this morning this Glenn Greenwald animal agriculture story, The Intercept did, about new documents revealing how animal agriculture, the industry is surveilling and punishing its critics.

Right. So Glenn Greenwald did some investigative journalism, came out with this article on The Intercept as well as a video interview. It's called New Documents Reveal How the Animal Agriculture Industry Surveils and Punishes Critics. Glenn Greenwald is a polarizing figure. I know that well. But one thing he's always been on top of is holding the animal agriculture industry to account for some of its sins. And that's essentially what he's doing here. And basically what he did was he got all these documents by virtue of a freedom of information request. And it revealed the extent to which this industry really is surveilling and also retaliating against industry critics and animal rights activists. And in the crosshairs of this particular controversy is this veterinarian in the Bay Area,

her name is Dr. Crystal Heath, who basically practices shelter medicine. She's affiliated with the Berkeley Humane Society and has been somewhat outspoken against certain practices that the industry has been engaged in over the course of the pandemic to reduce particularly pig populations. Like they're doing this horrible thing where it's called, what is it called? It's called- Ventilation shutdown. Yeah, ventilation shutdown. Ventilation shutdown, where essentially they, I mean, for all intents and purposes,

they kind of turn the air conditioner off and they let these animals die a slow, painful death. Yeah, shut the windows down. In order to depopulate, you know, in the face of like the pandemic and declining demand. And as a result of that, they're monitoring her social media. They're engaged in these retaliatory Facebook campaigns to make her look like a crazy person.

And this is all very concerning, but I think a glimpse or a window into the extent to which this industry is willing to go to protect its market share and marginalize anybody who speaks out against it. It's sort of another layer of what we see with the laws that prevent any kind of investigative journalism to transpire whatsoever, the ag-gag laws. Yeah. I mean, it's nothing new, really. I mean, the ag-gag laws have been around for a while. I was harassed. I did the story on CAFOs for Sierra Magazine in East North Carolina, which we've talked about. And we were kind of – I was with Waterkeeper, and we were kind of driving around the perimeter of some of these CAFO operations and checking them out, looking at the, you know, the lagoons and their pig operations. the lagoons and their pig operations. And all of a sudden we got, you know, harassed, like farmers came out with two trucks and started tailing us and through the, these narrow roads in North Carolina. I mean, it was, it was crazy. It was like, they were on our tailgate and harassing because, you know, Waterkeeper comes around and monitors their stuff. And so this is nothing new,

you know, to be fair, animal rights activists have been infiltrating farm operations for a long time and taking these pictures and publicizing this stuff. This is not new. At some point, ag-gag laws came as a way to discourage that. And so they could criminally prosecute people who did that, which seems like a violation of free speech and is a violation of free speech, but that has happened. But now on the other end, you have people like Crystal Heath who are being harassed and she seems to be strong. He mentioned she's strong and she's got her career

to a place where it's not going to impact her. But it could. Someone had put images of the ventilation shutdown and that's how the FOIA request, and they started prosecuting those people. on the one hand people are getting prosecuted and the department of agriculture is involved in that on the other hand um the these farmers and industry types are able to like unleash holy hell on people like dr heath and it's fair play so yeah i think the the distinguishing factor here is the weaponization of social media

to perpetrate what are essentially like ad hominem attacks on these individuals. It's one thing to prosecute them, and we could talk about that. It's another thing to do a character assassination funded by a lobbying group that is shrouding those social media campaigns behind anonymous accounts, et cetera, to try to create viral moments that make people look bad for basically speaking up against something that is wrong and should be addressed. Right. You know, you're like, you're tagged as an elitist because you think torturing pigs is wrong. You know what I mean? Yeah, like that's basically what's happening, right?

Like people like her, you know, you're an elitist and you're, and worse, I think they were, there was some misinformation about her that got into kind of fellow veterinarians were shouting her down or something like that saying. Right, well, that's where the confusion comes in because if these attack campaigns, you know, are cast in a certain light,

even a well-meaning or intelligent colleague isn't gonna understand the context of what's actually going on, which is a broader issue addressed in the social dilemma about how social media is used for nefarious purposes. It's true. I would just, not to criticize Intercept, I think Intercept does

some really good stories, but they don't even pretend to be even-handed. And I'm not suggesting you should be even-handed, but there's like words like torture and things in his story, which you wouldn't really write if you were writing it for, say, the New York Times. Right, but he makes no bones about his perspective on this. Yeah, yeah, he's that guy that likes to kind of be the pot stirrer, which is fine. But sometimes I have a problem with left-wing journalists doing that because you have a winning argument.

And when you add that extra spice, you overplay a hand and it doesn't help you. Like, listen, for us to solve some of these bigger problems, sometimes less is more because you don't have to outrage and inflame. You can also just present a winning argument, and sometimes that's more effective. And when you say things like torture, you're implying motive, like these farmers love torturing their animals. They probably don't look at it that way. And so in that case, and I'm not making excuses for terrible practices.

I'm against CAFOs and all of that. But as soon as you start using words like that, you are othering this whole group of people that you actually need to solve this problem. Yeah, that was something that I spoke to Leah Garces about who runs Mercy for Animals, like finding a way to communicate with the people that you perceive as your adversary so that you can work together for change.

And there's a very bold and strong argument for that. And she's made a lot of progress doing just that. But I think activism takes many forms. And you need the Lea Garces, but you also need the Glenn Greenwald. It's like, he's sounding a certain alarm and he's gonna write it up in a way that the New York Times is not going to,

but maybe the New York Times picks up the story and does their version of it. Maybe. So I think everybody has their place and I don't think anybody goes to the intercept thinking that they're getting an objective perspective on anything. They're getting Glenn Greenwald's perspective

or his staff's perspective. I don't know, man. I think you know that, getting Glenn Greenwald's perspective or his staff's perspective on these issues. I don't know, man. I think you know that, but I think when this stuff is distributed along Twitter and Facebook and it just is, it's flattened, that landscape is flattened and now it's all just news stories. And it could be like, you open yourself up to, if you're sensationalistic, you do open yourself up to arguments of fake news. Right. You're paving the ground for the counterattack.

That's right. Basically. Right. Right. Well, everybody check that out in the meantime. Yeah, for sure. It's worth reading. Ventilation shutdown, they call it VSD to depopulate pigs. It sounds horrific. I can't believe that this is legal. And this is the first that I've heard of it. Well, all CAFOs have kill boxes. And on bad days, you can drive by, like if there's a

virus that comes through a CAFO, they'll kill all the piglets. And then they'll be stuffed in these kill boxes out front like it's a mailbox. So horrible. It's horrible. What was the reporting that you were doing on CAFOs? What was that about specifically? It was kind of a two-tiered. It was about how these CAFOs, how this one part of Eastern North Carolina turned into the CAFO hotspot

where China is outsourcing its pork production through Smithfield, which is the big slaughterhouse and how these CAFO operations don't really benefit the farmer. But not only that, there's no sewage treatment and they spray the fields with the poop and they put it in lagoons. And then when it's during rains,

those lagoons flood and destroy rivers and basically the ocean. And even when there's not rain, when they're just spraying these fields, the people that live around there, largely black, largely low income, get their houses sprayed with shit. And they can't even go outside even on hot summer days. And so I would talk to people in that community.

Yeah, it becomes aerosolized and you're breathing it wherever you go. And these farms tend to be in lower income areas where there's minority populations and populations of color that are economically deprived and these people get sick. So mostly black residents that get sick and then the people working in the slaughterhouses

are mostly immigrants and migrant workers from Central America. And then the farmers, the people that in the slaughterhouses are mostly immigrants and migrant workers from Central America. And then the farmers, the people that own the CAFO operations, tend to be white. And kind of the people that have been there for years running these farming operations. But they switch to CAFO. And the difference is they don't own the pigs. They're just paid to raise them for the three to six months it takes to raise a pig. And if they lose a pig, that counts against them.

And so they don't actually get the big payout of the slaughter of the pig. They get basically room and board payments. And it becomes very tight margins for them. Yeah, we've talked about this a lot on the podcast. I mean, they essentially become almost indentured- Sharecroppers. Yeah, indentured servants that are,

they're servicing debt. Yeah, most of them. And they're not really in control of their destiny and they're suffering as well. And the state laws were basically hollowed out by a guy who was like the king of pig. You know, he was like the, he became industry muscle man

and he passed these laws that basically made it legal to not treat this raw sewage. And there's a lot more pigs than people in this area. So it's like, you know, the humans have their sewage treated, but not the pigs. Yeah, this was explored in the documentary, What the Health.

And also in the upcoming documentary, they're trying to kill us. So John Lewis is behind, he's been on the show. It's just, you know, if you think about it, like they're literally spraying refuse into the air and you're breathing it and he has interviews with people and they're in their house and they're like, our whole house smells like all the time.

You can't get it out and it's obviously it's in their lungs. Yep, can't have cookouts, can't go outside in hot summer days. It's horrible. These are happening, this stuff's happening every day. And when you're driving by on the road, you're none the wiser because it's all underneath these hooded, what essentially look like-

These massive huts. They look like greenhouses. They're just massive warehouses. Yeah, big warehouses. And the food comes in one slot and the poop goes out the other. And these animals live very short. You know, I think it's only like three months or something for the pig to get to wait.

Yeah. All right, let's switch gears. Yes. Because this- It's kind of the same gear though. It is, it is. This podcast is sort of becoming a documentary review podcast.

Two thumbs up. Every two weeks, we've got to find a new documentary to talk about, but we haven't had any problems because there's been so many amazing ones lately. And this week, it is David Attenborough's new documentary, A Life on Our Planet,

which we both watched the other day, it's on Netflix. What a brilliant, beautiful man this guy is. Amazing. What a life that he has lived. At 94 years old, in many ways, the original naturalist, who's been documenting the Earth's beauty and bounty and all these hidden natural environments for decades upon decades.

And he creates this documentary that he calls his witness statement, which I think is so powerful. And the idea is that here he is at 94, nearing the end of his life. And it's almost like, here's what I want you to know about everything that I've learned about the planet from the beginning of my career to now,

where we've gone awry and where we're headed if we don't course correct. Yeah, it's interesting how like our climate consciousness or climate conscious, conscience has gone from like Al Gore to Greta and David Attenborough, you know, like the youngest to the oldest. Yeah. It's, it's kind of cool in a way. It's sad in a way. I mean, he, you see him, I didn't, I didn't realize the kind of the breadth of his career. Cause my interactions with David Attenborough is like through blue planet and planet earth and all that.

And his, you know, silky tones tend to put me to sleep to be quite honest with you. They're that good. And like- How is he not, has he been knighted? He has been knighted. He's Sir David. Yeah. But he's been at this, what, since like the fifties?

Going to like, kind of going to, you know, New Guinea and Papua and places like that for decades. Yeah, maybe the early 50s. I mean, one of the things that's so striking about the documentary is he says he begins his career when air travel was brand new. That's right. travel to these places and show people what's actually going on in these hidden pockets of the world that were previously, you know, unexplored or never before seen by most people. I mean, he's hanging out with gorillas, like arm and arm with gorillas or something. It's very Jane Goodall-esque, you know, in that regard. And I love the parts where,

you know, you see him as a young man doing all of this stuff and it just, it makes your heart swell and- Great photography. It gives the cinematography and the sweeping landscapes and everything that kind of unfurls as you watch the documentary is very profound and moving. But just the gravitas because of the life that he lived, he has this grandfatherly like energy

and he's able to now, in the place that he's at in his life, look down on all of this, like literally look down on the planet from 10,000 feet, this 10,000-foot view of the problem, the history behind it, with a sense of scale and proportionality that is rare and is informed only because of everything that he's done prior to that. And it reminded me a little bit of Yuval Noah Harari's books, the way that Yuval is able to put distance between himself and these things that we're too close to, to provide what seems like common sense perspective, but is ultimately articulated in a way that allows it to land with the profundity that it deserves. Yeah. Well, part of that is because he's studying at a distance, but what's

cool about this is that Attenborough lived it. It's very personal for him because he's seen this and he's seen the bounty of biodiversity and wild biodiversity, which we got into last time. But he kind of expresses that. Like the big alarm bell he's ringing is that we're on the verge of the sixth extinction and biodiversity is kind of slipping through our fingers. And if we don't make some big changes, part of it's driven by climate and it's also driven by industrialization and more people on the planet and the way that we're developing the planet, the way we use it. And because of that, systems collapse that are happening in rainforests and in the ocean. And I think the witness statement comes from, I've lived this amazing blessed life, which he says, but I realized that I didn't blow this whistle soon enough. I didn't see this coming.

And now you're on the verge of seeing it happen. And it really is happening. And whether it's glacial melt, coral bleaching, palm oil plantations. The palm plantations. The bleaching of the coral was amazing to watch that, him explain that. And on some level, we're kind of acclimated to these, you know, alarmist environmentalist documentaries at this point. But I felt like this one went to an even darker, more dire place at the bottom of the second act. And I think it was buffered only because he's such a, you know, kind of loving, beautiful, compassionate person. Anybody else who would have been hosting a movie like that, who took it to such a place like that would have almost cast themselves as uncredible

or like some kind of crazy villain. Because I found myself thinking, this is utterly hopeless. And then he kind of revives it and is able to stick the landing in a more hopeful place. But I don't know that I've seen another documentary, and is able to stick the landing in a more hopeful place. But I don't know that I've seen another documentary, maybe Al Gore's, it's been so long since I've seen that.

But I mean, he doesn't mince words about how dire the situation is. Right, well, so I think, I don't have the percentages right in front of me. I have one of them, but not the other. But I think when he was born in the 30s, or I guess it would be the late 20s when he's born. No, yeah, because he's 94 now. So like when he's born,

it's something like 65% of the wild is still intact. And now it's 35%. The ticker that goes down, the graphic ticker. So now it's 35%. So the UN has launched, it was supposed to launch this year, a big campaign to protect up biodiversity called 30 by 30. Protect 30% of the land and 30% of the ocean

as protected areas, no human activity, no extractive activity, no oil and gas, no palm plantations, no commercial fishing, all of that. Because there's been studies done, protected areas and specifically marine protected areas actually make an area more climate resilient. And so these are both an opportunity to draw down more carbon.

Like you said, I think you're gonna get into the drawdown aspect of this. But so it's an effort to do that. Also an effort to protect biodiversity because biodiversity is what makes these things resilient. So you need to keep that biodiversity, otherwise the system collapses. So we don't want to get to systems collapse. That's what he's basically saying. So 30 by 30, if we can, by 2030, create enough political will to protect more land,

protect more areas of coastal areas, we have a chance to stave off the very worst of climate change. Right. And the solution that he articulates is really lifted right out of Drawdown, Paul Hawkins' book. He basically canvases the big things that we can do and that we're working to do to solve this problem. And what I liked is he was very plant-based diet favorable, much more so than Kiss the Ground. He's like, we need to adopt a plant-based diet favorable, much more so than Kiss the Ground. He's like, we need to adopt a plant-based diet,

basically is what he says for the most part. He's basically, he wants wild biodiversity, not like tame or cultivated biodiversity. Right, right. I mean, reforesting, rewilding, these are of the utmost priority to enhance the biodiversity of these dying ecosystems all over the world.

Right, and rewilding is happening. That's what adding wolves to Yosemite was all about. That's what, you know, there's people trying to put bison back in the Great Plains from Canada to Mexico. There's jaguar rewilding initiatives in South America and in Mexico. I mean, this stuff is happening. So that's the,

rewilding is kind of really starting to hit right now. So that's a good thing. Another thing that he talks about, and this is also from Drawdown, is that we need to raise the ceiling on the economic viability of impoverished nations and communities, because when communities are doing economically better, economic viability of impoverished nations and communities

because when communities are doing economically better, they're less likely to have as many children, right? So it's not really population control. It's just a fact that when nations are prosperous, they tend to not procreate as much. Right, because they want more leisure time or whatever it is. And also educating women

and girls is a big part of it too, which is also out of drawdown. What I did not realize until we talked earlier is that in certain pockets of the internet, this has caused controversy. Yes. David Attenborough has been called an eco-fascist because- I have a hard time trying to understand that. Yeah. I mean, who understands it? What does that mean? The accusation is that his take on overpopulation is the driver of climate change, which is what everything's reduced. The internet being reductionist, that's the argument they're making is that David Attenborough is saying it's overpopulation that's driving climate

change and driving systems collapse in nature, not industrialization or colonialism, which is, you know. So by saying it's overpopulation, then the burden and the guilt goes to poor people and developing nations that aren't consuming as many resources. Of course, that's not at all what he's saying. That's a total mischaracterization of what he said.

And that's what I was saying with The Intercept. I've seen this because I am progressive and I write and report on these issues that are important to me as often as I can. It's not the only thing I do, but I try to do it as often as I can. And every time I do a story like this, I see activists or other journalists

or whoever it is making arguments that are overreaches. And when you overreach on an argument, you don't help. You actually cause an opening for people to doubt you. And so to mischaracterize David Attenborough and to try to trash him when he's like one of the more unifying figures you could ever come up with, right? Like everyone loves David Ambrose. Right, I mean, he was, he like created an Instagram page and in 48 hours, he had a million people. I'm sure it's way more than that now.

You ride that horse. Everybody loves this guy. You ride that all the way. You know what I mean? It's like, we need unifying. So, and I think that's a crackpot theory. I don't want to give it too much fuel, but it's out there. And it just shows you how you can be offended by anything, including a fact that if you raise the standard of living and more people come out of poverty, they have less kids.

It's a fact. You can examine any country that's ever had a growing middle class and you'll find it. In America, you'll find it. In Japan, which is what he used, you'll find it anywhere you look. Right. I mean, certainly, if we're being intellectually honest, there's too many people on the planet and overpopulation is an issue. He never said that we need to mandate population control. He's just saying if people are more prosperous, they're not going to have as many kids. If every nuclear family has two kids, we stabilize the population.

And it's also the way that like, you know, he goes after CAFOs, he goes after the meat, you know, like you said, plant-based is the way to go. It's a very, you know, so it's not just too many people, but that is a problem, but it's also how we're feeding everybody, how we're getting our energy, you know, like I thought one solution, the fact that Morocco is getting 40% of their

energy from solar. Right, I didn't realize that. That was... They have the biggest solar farm, right? Right, right. Why can't we do that? Well, part of the problem is we actually subsidize oil and gas companies. And, you know, until Obama, we didn't do that for, you know, renewable energy companies. And we're starting to do that. We, you know, Obama did do that, took some heat because he had a project that didn't do well in his early, early part of his presidency. But now, then there was this incentive from states and localities and sometimes from the federal government to do that. So we need to have the incentives in the right

place, but we also have to disincentivize things like oil and gas. We have to be prepared to pay a little bit more at the pump. Europe pays a lot more for gas than we do typically, and because we're subsidizing petrol. We need a Manhattan project around renewable energy. It seems preposterous to me that with the technology that's available to us that we haven't scaled solar. Solar scaling, it's some, I've been, because I know people involved in the solar industry, my understanding is it's a battery issue. You can't store it. So it's also janky. Like we've tried to figure out how to do it at our house and have made multiple attempts with multiple companies and have continually run into issues and roadblocks that have made it not cost effective for us to do it.

I think the thing is to have, you know, there's a great project. My friend, Jason Cottle kind of launched up in Lancaster where they basically saw he's a, he's a city manager up there and they were managing the energy up there. And the Republican, he's a Republican, the mayor up there at the time, I think it was Rex Tillerson, the Republican. And they said, what if we turned city properties into solar farms? And they started doing it. They started selling energy and were competing

with these big energy companies up there. I think it was Southern California Edison, which didn't like that. But pretty soon people started buying their renewable energy from the city at a lower price. And now they're basically a renewable energy broker. And that's what they've become. They've become their own utility.

And so like, and that's a really smart solution, a very local solution. Yeah, more of that. As opposed to just putting solar panels on your house or whatever and running it kind of an ice, you know, when it's systemic, you have a bigger chance. Yeah, it can't be reliant upon the consumer figuring this out.

You need these solutions to be addressed at the top so that the origin of the energy is coming from a renewable source. All upstream, you gotta go upstream as far as you can. Yeah. But, you go on. Oh, anyway, I was just gonna wrap it up by saying everybody should see this documentary on Netflix.

Yeah, two things I wanna flag. One is like, they talk about commercial whaling. One thing I like to think of when we talk about, can we fix it in the ocean, especially, you can really regenerate very quickly with marine protected areas and with laws. And whale numbers is a great example of what can happen when you stop doing a specific commercial activity.

Humpback populations in many parts of the world have really rebounded. Sperm whale populations the same, blue whales as well. We can fix it. And the ocean is really powerful regenerative machine. And when you can enact these marine protected areas, they can really start to get the biodiversity back swirling in the ocean. And so that's very exciting. And so- Yeah, but we really need some strident regulatory protection there. And we need a global unified approach to it because right now, fishing is by definition overfishing. Now, fishing is by definition overfishing. Well, not necessarily, but there's a lot of overfished areas.

You know, commercial fisheries, I think 35% are fished to their limit is the number. Because I've done a story on this as well we can link to if you want to about overfishing. It was around poke and it was around tuna, basically. And I think the number was 35%, he quoted as, as fish to the maximum capacity. Um, but when it comes to tuna, it's something like 80% or something like that. I mean, even Hawaii imports tuna in, in, um, when, when it's not in season around the islands never used to be that way. Um, tuna and salmon are kind of the big fin fish that are, that are, uh, either overfished or they're farmed in ways that are harmful. But there are people fixing those problems and there is fair trade.

So like, I know we're plant-based, we don't wanna get into that, but there is a way of doing that. But looking at this documentary, plant-based people are not necessarily out of the woods because like, if you look at butter alternatives, a lot of palm oil. Yeah, palm oil is a huge problem.

And I think that that's, you know, it's an important point to make that just by eating plant-based, that's a huge step in the right direction. Big deal, yes. But we also need to be more mindful about what particular plant foods we're eating, how they're being harvested, where they're coming from.

Because if we're doubling down on the palm oil, we're perpetuating, exacerbating a huge problem. And not just here, you know, like Indonesia, I've spent a lot of time there. And way back in the day, it was all coconut oil. It was, you know, you can buy it locally. And now it's bimoli, this palm oil that everyone is eating and obesity rates have gone up.

And, you know, it's because palm oil is being made cheap in Borneo. And Borneo is the case study that he uses in this film. Right, and in order to cultivate these products, you have to basically shellac the rainforest and monocrop it. And that's the core of what Attenborough is getting at, which is the lack of biodiversity.

When you do that, you just lose the ability to support thousands, if not millions of species. Absolutely. And the downstream impact of that is catastrophic and leads us to this system collapse that he's speaking about. How about a little shout out to these lions of conservation and fire, David Attenborough,

Jane Goodall, and Sylvia Earle. Goodall and Ear Sylvia Earle. Goodall and Earle are in their 80s. It's like, there's a longevity lesson in having this purpose coupled with nature, right? Like something I think our friend Dan Buettner might speak to probably there. It's true, like how old is Jane Goodall now? She's in her 80s, mid 80s, I think.

Yeah, she has a documentary out. I know, I haven't seen that one yet. Soon to be reviewed on a future rollout. Wait, I have to watch that again? Depending upon the Netflix release schedule, I suppose. I know. Yes, we watch a lot of television, folks. Yeah, it is interesting.

I mean, it's striking how vibrant and present and with it Attenborough is at 94. Yeah. What do you mean when you see our two presidential candidates going head to head, it's striking to see? He looks younger than those guys do. I know. Well, yeah, but Joe does look good in aviators.

Come on. He does. Did you see Jim Carrey impersonating him on Saturday Night Live? I did, but he does rock aviators. I've never seen a guy like ever since Tom Cruise. Corvette, you know, the whole thing. Yes. Right.

Well, with that, I guess we can pivot to a little bit of election-related news. We're about 20 days away right now. 20 days out. 20 days out, man. Unbelievable. Oh, God. It's crazy, right?

I want it to be over. It's not gonna be over. Even when it's over, it's not gonna be over. No, go on. I don't wanna even get into that guy's name. But the specific thing that I think would be interesting to talk about here is the content moderation wars

that are going on right now as we enter this very last phase before everybody casts their ballot. And it's relevant to the discourse that we had about the social dilemma and the weaponization of social media. And we're seeing these platforms that we all know now are extremely powerful in shifting the tide of public opinion, struggling with how to deal with everything from campaign ads to outright misinformation. Twitter's sort of leading the cause, I think. New York Times has an article that came out the other day, Twitter turning off some features. Maybe you can speak about that a

little bit. I feel like Jack Dorsey of all of the, you know, kind of tech billionaires has been endeavoring to try to solve what I think is really an almost impossible problem to solve. It seemed like he was the most laissez-faire for a period of time. And now he's like actually the most proactive and involved in trying to help. And I think, if I remember correctly, the warning, basically they're talking about warning labels.

Basically before you retweet something, if it's not from a vetted news source and it's potentially kind of getting into the misinformation realm, you'll get a warning label and you'll have to click twice before you retweet it. Right, but how do you calibrate that? So that's being calibrated. If I wanted to retweet that Glenn Greenwald article

that is very much of a certain mind, would that be flagged as potentially misinformation because he has a strong point of view on that issue? Or is that kosher? Like how do we distinguish between misinformation, problematic and vetted? Like it's an impossible rubric. It's the algorithm, bro.

That'll save us. Like, it's an impossible rubric. It's the algorithm, bro. That'll save us. Yeah, right. We've completely divested our critical thinking skills to the social media algorithms who are going to decide for us what's misinformation and what is not. I think it's supposed to be a team effort. Like, the algorithm kind of flags what it flags, and then human monitors go in and look. But obviously, there's so much information flooding these networks. How can they possibly have human monitors look at everything? It's impossible. Millions of hours of content every single day. It's impossible. It is impossible. Yeah. But I think Twitter also banned political ads a year ago. And I think Facebook and Google are banning them starting on election day, which seems late. It's ridiculous.

It seems late. Right. Unless you're Ken Bone, you have decided at this point who you're voting for. I mean, I'm not that big a calendar guy, but it does seem late to ban them after the election. I thought it was, at least with Facebook, I thought it was originally like 30 days before the election or something like that. October 20th, they're going to start deplatforming or something clamped

down and like flag misinformation as well. On campaign, like specific campaign advertising, which is so ridiculous because when you look at the balance sheet of Facebook, the amount of revenue that they're generating from paid campaign advertising is pretty de minimis in the grand scheme of things. And it would not have taken much for Zuckerberg to just say, we're out of this business. We're not going to take money for campaign ads, period. It wouldn't really have affected their bottom line. So it's baffling to me why they're taking such a hard stand on this. Well, I think that they look at all content as the same. And they don't want to be arbiters of what's true and what's not, what's fair game, what is not.

But that ship has sailed and they've already been compelled to do that. They're doing it. They've deleted all of these QAnon Facebook groups. They're trying to address that, which gets back into the whack-a-mole issue that we're gonna get into a little bit. Right, well, what you had flagged with Twitter, it's the same thing. It's like maybe Zuckerberg realizes it's whack-a-mole. I'm being generous

because I think they failed in a big way. Obviously from 2016 with the whole Cambridge Analytica where they were really micro-targeting with fake news stories and misinformation. Those are the ads, by the way. We're thinking of ads like Trump saying, vote Trump, this is paid for, blah, blah, blah. No, in Facebook, an ad can be a bullshit story

targeted to you and you click on it thinking that it's a story, like an article, but really it's an ad. So that's the kind of stuff they're attempting basically to not be a part of any sort of campaign to subvert the results of the election. That's why they're banning it starting on election day. Google's the same way. But these campaigns have been going on for years at this point. They're already saying, you know, Donald Trump Jr. on Facebook wrote saying, you know,

we need armies of people monitoring these elections, like self-appointed election monitors. Well, and there was that thing with Charlie Kirk also, where he was behind like a bot farm of young people who were supposed to be, you know, behind, you know, pushing out all kinds of campaign-related stuff around Trump. Even today, their story broke that like the state Republican Party in California is putting bullshit ballot collecting places to deposit your ballot. Stuff that's not sanctioned with the election board. Oh, my God. That's happening right now in California. I didn't know that.

Yeah. So you think you're submitting your ballot and it's like a fake thing? Who knows? They're trying to say, hey, if you trust that's the turn of your ballot, fine, put it here. But yes, they could very easily look at the ballot and throw out half of them or whatever. That's straight up weird third world coup type stuff. That is. But in this article about Facebook in the New York Times, Facebook widens ban on political ads as alarm rises over election. There's some interesting phraseology in here.

I mean, it says, for years, Facebook has been striving to avoid another 2016 election fiasco. Like, has it? Has it really? I don't think it has. No. Yeah.

When it was used by Russian operatives to spread disinformation and to destabilize the American electorate. Zuckerberg has since spent billions of dollars to hire new employees for the company's, quote unquote, integrity and security. Like they're spending more now in this, whatever this is,

than the money they're probably raking in from the campaign ads themselves. So it's two different things. So it's the campaign ads and then it's also all the other kind of shenanigans that go on on social media. And it's not just campaign ads. They've taken down what?

150,000 QAnon accounts or some crazy thing, or posts or something like that. They're trying to get a handle on QAnon, but that ship has sailed. Right. Well, Wire just came out with an article also on this, a Facebook ban won't stop QAnon. I mean, Kevin Roos was reporting on this and he was seemingly striking a kind of optimistic tone, at least as of like a week ago or so, thinking this was actually progress because all those groups disappeared and the level of like chatter, which he pays attention to closely, around the kind of QAnon type stuff

had seemed to diminish somewhat. So he's in favor of the Facebook taking him down? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's heralding it as a step in the right direction. I don't know that it's ultimately gonna solve. The Wired story looks at like the fact

that these people just go underground. They metastasize. They just, they figure out different emojis and hashtags and then they resurface. They come up with different hand signals. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see.

But Matt Taibbi has an interesting take on all of this that he wrote about on his Substack. That's kind of a counterpoint. So let's talk about that. Yeah, so he's saying what you're saying, basically, that it's a game of whack-a-mole. Matt Taibbi, for those who don't know, is a great journalist with Rolling Stone,

or he used to be with Rolling Stone. I don't know if he still writes for them, but he's now got his own thing through Substack. It's an email you can sign up for. You should start a Substack. Me? Yeah. I'm not sure I have the Taibbi following, but maybe after a few more of these episodes.

It's a pretty cool platform and you're seeing all these journalists now who are leaving traditional media and basically starting their own little fife dumps. They are. So they tend to have big followings. I think I'd need to flex out, maybe buy some followers. Casey Newton just did it. He's like a tech reporter. More and more people are doing it. This could be your thing. This could be my thing. I thought coming on the ritual podcast was my thing. This is part of your thing. This is how you're building the tribe. That's all going to migrate to your sub stack. You didn't hear that I was going to buy followers. No. Who was I talking to the other

day who was saying they were, Oh, I had, oh, I had, this is a tangent, but I had Ravi Patel on the podcast the other day. Obviously I haven't published that conversation yet, but he's got a TV show on HBO Max called The Pursuit of Happiness. Okay. And he's super funny and interesting. And he did that documentary, Meet the Patels,

like back in 2014 or whatever? I don't remember that. He's very charming and very funny. Was he a former daily show? No, you're thinking of, he's worked with that guy. What's his name? I'm thinking Aziz, but it's not Aziz. I'll think of it in a minute. But anyway, it's a pretty cool, you know,

sort of travel show in the vein of Bourdain, where he goes to kind of answer these questions. And it's super interesting. But he's never been a social media person and his social media was always kind of private. But then with the show coming out, he was like, oh, I should open these accounts up and make them public facing,

but he doesn't have a huge following. So he told me he was gonna buy followers. And I was like, that's a bad idea, man. Don't do that. Maybe I can go in with him on followers. Yeah, you guys can pool your resources. By the way, I would never buy followers. Come on. I wouldn't do that. I can't afford that. All right. But back to Taibbi here. Yes. Taibbi doesn't need to buy followers. He's got a lot of them. And he has done some really important reporting. The best stuff I think he got his biggest name was he reported on the

financial crisis in 2007, 2008, linked it to Goldman Sachs and really came after Goldman. Did he write a book about that? He did. Yeah. It's great. It's like the man-eating squid, you know, whatever. It's very Gonzo. He's a Gonzo kind of guy.

Right. And he's very much pro-First Amendment. So you can read this stuff. And he— He doesn't fall into any particular political— No, he was very much against the Russia Mueller investigation. He thinks that's bullshit. But at the same time, and he's very much into free speech.

He wrote a scathing review of white fragility. So he's, but he is progressive. And he's done a lot of investigative. He did an Eric Garner book that is supposed to be amazing. And the death of Eric Garner. So he's been on the right side of a lot of this stuff He did an Eric Garner book that is supposed to be amazing on the death of Eric Garner. So he's been on the right side of a lot of this stuff, but you can't pin him down. And so he is talking about exactly what you say. The sheer scale of logistical task involved with sorting through billions of pieces of content a day makes any hope at even-handed moderation a fantasy.

And he's talking about, like, do we really want private companies engaged in trying to tell us what's right and wrong, what's true and not true? That's the whole point of having free speech. It's the best way to manage this bullshit. It only works in the clearest of cases. But if there was ever a slippery slope, this is it. I mean, how do you even begin to approach managing this problem? Look, if there's a clear

case of just sheer insanity, okay, you could label this as misinformation, but almost everything in between has shades of nuance to it. There might be aspects to certain reporting that's true, other aspects that aren't. You just can't possibly police this on an internet where, as we said earlier, like millions of hours of content and thousands of journalistic pieces are getting uploaded every single day. If you took it in how do we regulate big tech direction, what if one solution is if you're going to allow someone to post New York Times on Facebook, then Facebook has to pay the New York Times. Therefore in the, in the financial transition of paying the New York times, they are incentivized to uplift the New York times or, or any sort of like actual media company. Like that's

the way that it should be. That's the way it should be. Cause if someone posts a blog post and it doesn't cost anything for Facebook to use that piece of content, then maybe that's just, that's how you know. Right. You know, one is a professional media company and one is not. And if you have to pay for that blog post, then fine. Right. But like, you know, maybe what we need to do is stop allowing Google and Facebook and

Twitter to be these distribution systems of real stories. Twitter to be these distribution systems of real stories. Where the publishers are paying the platforms to amplify their stories and their content. So it's actually backwards right now. It's backwards right now. This is something that Scott Galloway talks about a lot. Scott Galloway is a professor of business at NYU. He does a podcast with Kara Swisher called Pivot, and he's got his own new podcast called Prof G. But he's out way out ahead on a lot of these issues

and has been talking about this quite a bit lately. Yeah, he's saying, this is what Taibbi is saying. The current system is the worst of all worlds. It's invisible to the public, clearly invites government recommendations on speech, allows a gameable system of anonymous complaints to influence content, and gives power to an unelected, unaccountable body of private media regulators. And the problem isn't that those people right now might be – they might be on our side when we're talking about our side, when we're talking about Trump misinformation and stuff that benefits bad actors. That's what I mean by our side.

Right now, the algorithm might be tuned in to be looking at calls for election, like bad faith election monitoring. But like 20 years from now, it might not be the right thing that they're after. You know what I mean? So like, that's the problem when you start to pick and choose censorship,

that's the problem with it. Yeah. It creeps. Yeah. I don't purport to have a solution to it other than to know that this is a huge problem right now. And it's not in service to our humanity or our unity as a population or as a country.

And these things have huge real world ramifications on behavior. Do you feel like we're living in a Petri dish right now? Yeah, we've been foisted, you know, foisted upon us are these incredibly powerful social media platforms. And without any experimentation or research, we're just consuming them and using them

in this grand experiment that we're already realizing is really not healthy for any of us. No. And again, back to the social dilemma. I mean, this is the dilemma that these tech creators are ruminating over right now. This idea that they set out to make the world better or to solve problems and have also created problems they couldn't have foreseen. That's it. It's like the unintended consequences of good intentions. That's the story of-

I think it's also important to remember that there's some ridiculously low percentage of the population on Twitter. We tend to think of Twitter as a proxy for kind of taking the pulse of where people are at on certain issues. But I think it's something like 2% of Americans are on Twitter. But Facebook, it's like a billion people are on Facebook or more. That's true. Yeah, Facebook is like a big one. it's like a billion people are on Facebook or more, right? Yeah, Facebook is like a big one.

But how many people are the outspoken, you know, loud voices on issues? And how many people are just sharing photos of their family? No, I think what Kevin Roos' stuff is showing us is that the people that you think are just sharing photos of their family, they're sharing QAnon posts. I'm not even kidding.

I'm not even kidding. Can we just talk about QAnon just for one more second? There was a good story. I'm always available to talk about QAnon. Germany is becoming the next QAnon hotbed. I don't know if you saw this story. No. And basically that means that right-wing Germans

are having a fantasy right now that Donald Trump will send the American military – I'm not fucking with you – into Germany and depose Merkel and thereby elevating their interests, the average right-wing German's interests because Merkel is bad for Germany. So that means people who like Hitler are rooting for the allies to take over Germany in 2020. Oh my God. So as a Jew, I can make a Hitler joke. So this is real. This was inferred from some Q drop, some cryptic Q drop. Yes, it's a great story.

They've been, the same reporter who's been kind of reporting on East German extremism and just German extremism who broke the story about how special forces and police departments have been infiltrated by right-wing neo-Nazi types in Germany, that same reporter does this story. And I'm sorry, I spaced on her name, but I'll get you for the show notes.

We can make sure that's in there. Right. But it's great reporting. And one of the main guys is this- What publication? New York Times. Oh, New York, okay. And this one of the big outspoken pro-Q,

or he said he doesn't fully believe in it, but he's a right wing, all right guy, is German but adopted. He's a right wing, all right guy, is German, but adopted. He's actually Turkish descent, adopted. And he's a huge celebrity vegan chef. Oh, I think you did send me something about this. Somebody did. I did.

I didn't read it yet. Isn't that crazy? That is really crazy. How do you square that with the America first, make America great, non-interventionist ideology? That's kind of the premise of the administration. The point is they're doing nationalism wrong. Don't these nationalists know what they're doing?

I don't even know, man. It's so crazy. I can't even- Yeah, it's mental. Begin to wrap my head around it. I know. It's like we are living- The point is how do you wrap your head around it. I know. It's like we are living. The point is, how do you wrap your head around it but just to exist, right?

Because all this stuff, if you peek your head under the curtain or under the hood and you see what's happening, which you have to do because it's so critical these next three weeks, especially in this country. You have to stay in touch with it and know what's coming. But at the same time, it's like, how do you then pull back and just get on with your own business and your own life? Like, you know, cause it is crazy making. Yeah. Where is the boundary between just minding your business, living your life, trying to take care of your family versus speaking up or participating in what has become just a very confusing morass of misinformation and emotions run wild. Yeah.

It's very disorienting. And it's hard to find your ballast in all of that. It's very weird. But I have to believe that most Americans are level-headed, rational actors. The majority are, but is it enough to get a big... Most Americans voted for Hillary Clinton. Well, we will soon find out in 20 days from now. We'll be here to break it down for you.

If we can land this on a teachable moment, it's just a please vote. And to make sure that you cast that ballot and make sure that it gets into the hands that it's supposed to get in so that it's just to please vote and to make sure that you cast that ballot and make sure that it gets into the hands that it's supposed to get in so that it's properly counted. You know, early voting or go drop it, drop it in, you know, there are election sites, there are state and government run election sites. That's where you want to look. Don't look at a Republican or Democratic party site. Look at the actual election.gov sites. That'll tell you where to vote. Right. Yeah.

All right, let's take a quick break and we'll be back with a little show and tell and listener questions. All right. And we're back. How was that? How was that break? It was good.

Was it good for you? So let's talk about social entrepreneurship. Okay. With a little light dusting of conscious capitalism. Oh, I like my conscious capitalism lightly dusted. This is the show and tell segment. There's actually nothing to show. We're just gonna tell.

You didn't bring in a roll of toilet paper? I didn't, I didn't. Well, let's do that one first. Yeah. So that was the plan. I was gonna bring in this roll of toilet paper by a company called Who Gives a Crap. Yeah.

We've been using this brand for a while and you have as well, right? Yeah, we use it. April brought it into my life and it's a great brand. Like when everyone was scouring the shelves for toilet paper, we had a big box of it in a closet and we are not even toilet paper hoarders, but we felt like it because we had so much of it.

Did you order it online? Yeah. Yeah. We just had already gotten delivered. I think this company blew up when nobody could find their toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic because that's how we started ordering it.

And we get these massive boxes in the mail with like more toilet paper than we could possibly ever use. I don't know if it started. We got six people in our house so we go through it quickly. How many bidets do you have? We have no bidets.

We have two bidets. Do you? Three people now, two bidets. Did you install those or did the apartment come with bidets? No, no, it's one of those Tushy, it's called. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I self-installed.

I think that company is sponsoring podcasts. I've heard spots for them. To get your Tushy now. It's like Regeneron. Well, if you don't have a bidet, then you need toilet paper. You need it anyway. First of all, like this company

does not sponsor the podcast. Although I'd be happy if they did because I think it's really cool what they're doing. Basically, it's a direct-to-consumer toilet paper brand. It ships right to your house and they donate 50% of their profits to build toilets. Yeah. And I think that's really cool. And I think that that is significant. It's not 5%. It's not 1%. It's 50%. Right. Like that's real. It's the Tom's shoes model, but like 5X, right?

Or 10X or something like that. Right, well, the Tom's shoes model, I think for every pair of shoes you bought, they would donate one pair of shoes. Right, so that's not- But at their cost. At their cost. So it's a little bit different.

Like this is even more significant. Much more, yeah. But I think it brings up a broader conversation about social entrepreneurship in general and the effectiveness of conscious capitalism. You have some thoughts on this. Let me preface it by just saying that I think these are movements to be celebrated. Like when I have a choice of what toilet paper I'm going to buy, I can buy the one I've always bought at the store, or I can buy one that's donating 50% of its profits to do something good. So that's inherently a good thing, right? And that's going to inform

my consumer choices. But I think it's also important for the conscious consumer to be able to discern the difference between something that is real, and in the case of Who Gives a Crap, I think it is real, versus this growing trend of kind of greenwashing, where all these brands feel like they need to be part of this conversation and this movement. So they step into it, but they do it in a very kind of tokenism kind of way.

Yeah, co-opting. That's not a meaningful way. Like the investment banker who's taking a knee in favor of Black Lives Matter, but really, you know, is- It's more like under social pressure because you kind of have to do that now if you want to be, you know, in the marketplace.

Yeah, I mean, I think my thoughts came in after this thank you brand thing that is coming up, right? Like they're another Australian company that you sent me that information. Right, so my friend Steve Barr forwarded me this thing about this company, thank you, which I thought was really interesting. I sent it to you.

It's also of this ilk. I'm still not quite sure what it is that they do. They do like a more affordable ASAP kind of product, like beauty products or hygiene, healthy kind of health and beauty products, like lotions and things. And I think they made 10 million, according to this video I saw,

they had a $10 million windfall from hand sanitizer during the pandemic. But their whole thing is, thank you, you give us money, we're going to pay it forward and we're going to fund hunger projects in developing nations. And so if you watch the video, it's Africa, Southeast Asia, they're doing these. developing nations. And so if you watch the video, it's Africa, Southeast Asia, they're doing these, you know, it's, it's, it, there's a, it, it, it reeks a little bit of white saviorism, which is an issue. But my problem with the social entrepreneurship stuff is, does it work? Right? Is it, is conscious capitalism, it, does it work on its own? Is it just another sales pitch? You know, that's what I wonder. I always like, I always, I'm always skeptical of anyone who says they're gonna change the world.

Because I mean, I don't mean to be an asshole. How dare you? I don't mean to be an asshole. That's the only way anybody does change the world. No, no, if you tell me you're changing the world, it is not the same thing as showing me you changed the world. And the reason I came to that conclusion is

I've done some stories where I went into, I mean, I've tried to report on issues a lot. And the biggest impact I've done some stories where I went into, I mean, I've tried to report on issues a lot. And the biggest impact I've ever made isn't from some issue story, like the CAFO story we talked about or an overfishing story or a story about displaced people's camps in Burma. It's like when I did a Lonely Planet book in Thailand

and reported on this small families pad Thai stand that nobody really knew about except for the Thai people in the area and put it in Lonely Planet. And then when I came back three years later, it's like a huge restaurant and they're killing it. And there's something about like the most effective change has to work.

You know, it can't just be, we're doing this thing. The reason Who Gives a Crap works isn't because of the latrines at all. It's because they deliver the toilet paper to you. There's no plastic wrapped around it. It works on so many levels. One level is the consciousness level. Well, that has to come first.

The product has to be good and it has to function. And it can't be in plastic. It's gotta be better in a lot of ways. It's gotta solve multiple problems, not just one. And so it has to work. So I don't have a problem with social entrepreneurship. I just don't think because you tell me you're doing X, Y, Z, I believe you.

Yeah, but I do think that in this age that we find ourselves in, that if you're starting a company, there has to be a social entrepreneurship aspect to it in order to be competitive, particularly if you're trying to appeal to anyone who's millennial or younger. And I think that's a good thing.

It is good, but then- I just think not all of it is gonna be effective, but to the extent that companies are thinking about this and at least endeavoring in good faith to try to make some kind of impact that isn't that something that we should be celebrating? It is, but Google used to say, don't be evil was their motto. And look what happened. I mean, like, you know, like, like, like when you do that, basically you're absolving the government from putting into a social safety net that actually

works. You're absolving, you're absolving the public institutions from doing their job. Can't we do both though? We live in a capitalist society. So can we not marshal the levers of capitalism to do what capitalism does best, which is to move consumer habits and markets into a position where they can make a positive impact. I would love that.

But like, what's Mrs. Jobs, Steve Jobs' wife's- Oh, I forget her first name. I know who you mean. She bought The Atlantic. She bought, you know, her foundation bought California Sunday, some other really good niche publications. And just this week, she, you know, they had to fire people because at some point, the angel business, the angel wealthy entrepreneur or benefactor, that kind of stuff doesn't always work. And so then what happens when it doesn't work or people lose interest?

You prevent the government from performing the function that it should be performing. I mean, a perfect example would be PPE, right? Like at the beginning of the pandemic and we didn't have that, it was the billionaires that came in and had to like fill in that gap. Which is good.

You know, in wartime to marshal, to have the government come in and say, look, we need this and this from you. I'm all for that. Like I'm not saying business doesn't play a role and I'm not saying it's bad to, you know, be keen on social entrepreneurship. I think it's great. I just think that you don't want to get to the point where we're relying on businesses

to do that because it's the same problem with relying on big tech to regulate itself. It's like you're asking private companies to do these things when in reality, there should be latrines where, and we love who gives a crap, but there should be latrines in these places because there are people there. Right. But there's, but the should be latrines in these places because there are people there. Right, but the thing is there aren't. I know. Right? So- You know, there is this argument that-

Either an NGO is gonna go in and solve that problem or the government in that particular locale is gonna take care of it. And in the event that that's not happening, let's buy a little Who Gives a Crap. I love Who Gives, believe me, I used you earlier. Do you, are you a believer in the idea of conscious capitalism at all?

Or do you find that to be? I am, I think what we need really to, I'm kind of just going off the cuff here. I have not looked into it. I'm sure there is some really good research into the benefits of social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism. I think there is because there definitely is

a lot of academic studies on does foreign aid work and it doesn't always come back positive on foreign aid. And so this is kind of a neighbor to foreign aid. It's like foreign aid adjacent. It's not big foundations or foreign governments bringing in boatloads of money, but it is a smaller scale version of that. And what does that do to the places

that you're helping long-term? And these are situations where we're not gonna be able to audit where the money's going, how effectively it's being used. I mean, I can tell you, I'm no expert on conscious capitalism, but I've got a little bit of experience with it.

And I was a speaker at John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism Conference. capitalism, but I've got a little bit of experience with it. And I was a speaker at John Mackey's Conscious Capitalism Conference and John Mackey, the CEO, founder of Whole Foods, he wrote the book on this. He's a big believer in it. He's got some interesting political ideas as well. But I was able to spend a weekend at this conference and meet a lot of these business owners, CEOs, et cetera, who are involved in this movement. And I left that experience feeling better than when I arrived, that people are thinking about this and trying to use capitalist forces to solve problems that are currently not being addressed or are underserved

or not adequately being solved. Yeah. And I'm all for this idea. I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we have a market capitalistic structure, which incentivizes big companies that own lots of smaller companies to bleed every last dollar of profit out of a product. So we're spending $150 on shoes that cost $20 to make and ship. I would like a much kinder economy that makes it easier to live. I would love that. We don't have that. And it's nice when social entrepreneurship comes up. It would be great if every company thought about what's better for what's better for society? Like, should we maximize our profit here? Can we afford to not to here?

I would love that. There's just no way to make it uniform, but I am in favor of it. Yeah. Yeah. Effective altruism is probably better. Like if you're looking to be part of solving a problem that's not being solved right now.

Yeah. Effective altruism is basically the study of how to best use resources to solve problems the most economically. I had a guy on the podcast a while back who's one of the big movers in this world. His name is William McCaskill. And basically he's like,

he's part of this community where they pledge a certain amount of their income every year. I think 30% of his annual income, something very significant, maybe even more. Like he's capped his salary at some, you know, quite low sum that allows him to live. And then everything else he gives away.

And the manner in which he decides where to donate his money is dictated not by his emotional attachment to certain causes, but to what is most effective. And that means that he ends up like buying a lot of malaria nets. Like that's the cheapest thing that you can do to solve the most number of lives. And it's not as sexy as like, I wanna start a music school in downtown LA or something like that, where you feel emotionally invested in it or some kind of connection to it that isn't necessarily logical

in the calculus of money versus lives saved. Yeah, well, there was that story years ago about the guy who runs his company and decided to cap his pay at like $100,000. The CEO that capped his pay at $100,000. Oh, yeah, yeah. Dan, I met that guy at a conference. And it's great.

These are great stories. But I don't see them catching fire. I don't see it. So it's great in the small scale. We can only affect our locality. I love it. That's good. And I'm in favor of it.

I mean, I would like this all to work. And I think to solve our really complex problems, we need so many different solutions. So I'm in favor of these small solutions. I just don't think you can depend on a hand sanitizer salesman to solve them. How dare you? All right. One more thing I want to share before we move on from show and tell, I guess this is a show and tell, back to reviewing content on Netflix,

I suppose. We are Netflix. We are Netflix. I watched Song Exploder on Netflix the other day. For people that don't know, Song Exploder is a podcast where the host basically takes a band or a song and over the course of the podcast, like deconstructs how that song was made with interviews from the musicians. It's super interesting if you are curious about the creative process in general,

like how do these things come together? And he does it in a very engaging and fascinating way. That podcast was developed into a limited television series on Netflix. And I think what's interesting about it and significant is that we're in this moment right now where the entertainment industry is looking at podcasts as a means to develop them for television shows. And a lot of big podcasts have been translated into television shows, but it's primarily been in the true crime kind of genre, Dirty John and shows like that, that turn into like episodic television. And some of these shows translate well, others don't. But I think Song Exploder is probably the best example

of a podcast turned into a TV show. It's wonderfully, beautifully, exquisitely executed with amazing cinematography and really compelling interviews. So I only watched two episodes. I watched the one with REM and I'm biased because REM is my favorite band. But they deconstruct the song,

Losing My Religion with interviews with all the band members. I just thought it was really cool. And then Lin-Manuel Miranda, I watched that episode, deconstructing the Aaron Burr song from Hamilton. Yeah, I watched those episodes too. I thought the coolest thing about that one is the fact that George Washington

was meeting with his cabinet in Washington Heights. Right, in Washington Heights, which is in Lynn's neighborhood. I just never knew that. I know. And so that's kind of cool. And it brings it all home. Yeah.

And he used to sit in that house and write. And rap to himself. I guess it was open, it's open as a museum and he would just sit in the corner of a chair and work all day and people would come in and wander around while he was sitting there. Like who's that guy? Trying to channel the energy of that era.

I didn't realize it took him five years. And when he first was speaking about this project at the White House, because Into Heights was out. So he had a little name and cachet. And obviously from the group that he was in, he was Freestyle Love Supreme. But people were laughing at his idea at first. Yeah.

And look at what it became. I thought that was a really good episode. I think REM, I mean, I didn't realize to the extent, I guess looking back, it makes perfect sense how losing my religion took them from like this kind of quirky alt band to like U2 level superstar. Yeah, it was a huge lever in that gear that took them to,

and how that song became like an anthem to different communities of people for different reasons. Out of Athens, Georgia. Athens, Georgia at that time, remember they had REM, B-52s, Indigo Girls. Athens, Georgia was a little hotbed. It's a great town. I love Athens, Georgia. I do too, Indigo Girls. Athens, Georgia was a little hotbed. It's a great town. I love Athens, Georgia.

I do too, I love it. I did a talk there a couple of years ago. I'd never been there before. And I just basically just put the earbuds in and had REM on the whole time I was there. I was like, I wonder where he grew up. Where's Michael Stipe's house? Where's that church?

Where was their headquarters, their little recording studio? They lived in a reclaimed church that had become like an art, like Peter Buck and Michael Stipe. I should have asked somebody where that is. I would have liked to have visited that. But what I like is it's really creative

how they use the tracks. Like they get the demos, they get the- They isolate out all the different parts and then they play them to the band members and then you're able to watch their facial expressions in real time, like listening to that. And something about the fact that REM,

this happened so much longer ago and they're just older dudes, makes like the gravitas hit me a little bit more than having just watched Hamilton and Lynn's been getting so much play lately. Although I did like that one too, but like the REM just kind of looking back at this song you know and they have perspective yeah now because they're in a different place in their

lives yeah um all right win of the week first up we got to talk about sarah hall this the i think win of the week with respect to rafa nadal who is amazing and that's true lakers are you gonna put on the he's putting on his lakers face mask yes big ups for the lakers last night and lebron james and fourth title and fourth finals mvp i mean amazing and if there was a great story that lindsey kraus did for the times on uh on the dao of rafa and like lebron is kind of somebody I actually, I think when he speaks, you can actually take pieces and apply them. That's what's so great about sports is you could take pieces of, you know, answers that they might give you to questions and use that as fodder for how you live your own life. Like I remember when I was writing One Breath, he had, he was talking about how, you know, you,

you leave it all on the floor and live with the results. And I had never written a book before, a narrative book like that before. And I felt like I was in over my head and I knew the only thing I could do is give it my very best and live with the results. If it got rejected, if it never made it anywhere, I would be able to live with that.

And this week, I think the theme is sometimes you don't have to win to win. You don't have to be first place to win the event. Like, and we can talk about these two people. Just to put a pin on LeBron, what is most amazing about that guy is like, here's a guy who from the time he was a young teenager,

was given the imprimatur of like being the next hugest thing ever. Like he was going to inherit the reins of Michael Jordan and he fucking lived up to it. Amazing. Amazing. He lived up to it. He exceeded expectations actually. Like he, it's hard to actually be given that expectation and to exceed it. 99 times out of a hundred that would have crushed that person. People fail. Yeah. 99 times out of 100, that would have crushed that person. People fail. Yeah.

Yeah. And to do it at his level, and now he's like turning, helping to turn stadiums into voting areas. Yeah, his activity off the court is equally impressive, if not maybe more impressive. He's unbelievable. In terms of the impact and the legacy that that guy's leaving. And it's so weird to be so good and so dominant and to accumulate haters like he has. And a lot of that, I think, came from a racial place when he decided to take control of his own career and put people that he was close to, his friends, as kind of his agent and the person who he was working on movies with. And those people are now like ballers. And he did it, and they're all huge successes.

And you don't hear any negative, like there's just no, there's no scandal with LeBron. It's amazing. Right. All right, but onto Sarah Hall. But yes. So yes, winning the race without winning the race.

Yeah. I mean, she's definitely the story of the London Marathon. Absolutely. Even though she got second. It's just such a magnificent performance on her part. So in the midst of this stacked field in which she's competing against the current marathon world record holder

and the 2019 marathon world champion, she runs her personal best like 222, six fastest of all time for US women. But what really captured everybody's amazement was how she was just passing people like crazy at the end with this unbelievable kick, including in the last mile passing Ruth Chep, I don't know how you say her last name, Chepnagich.

Yeah, Chepnagich. She's 26, she was the 2019 world champion, owner of the fourth fastest marathon time ever. And it was this redemptive moment because Sarah had to drop out of the Olympic trials. And she's in the later stages of her career. She's 37, right? Yeah, it's like she's 37 years old.

Not only that, she adopted her and Ryan, her husband, Ryan Hall, legendary marathoner, adopted four girls, sisters from Ethiopia. So she's like this mom to these four girls. I know she was a mom of four. Who are all running now too. I think the older, one of them at least is like doing really well in running.

It's just a beautiful story. And to have Ryan, you know, her husband as her coach, Ryan shared some footage of him screaming at her like the last mile when she's running by, he's like losing his mind, that's really cool. And on a fitness tip, have you seen what Ryan Hall looks like these days? No, no.

So you probably have an image of your mind of him winning like the New York marathon, typical marathoner build, like super skinny, tall guy. When he retired from running, he just went into the gym like a beast. And now he's just gargantuan. Really? It's crazy.

Yeah, I mean, he put on, it took him two years, but he is an absolute monster now. It's unbelievable. He's rich for all in two years. He like doesn't run really at all. I think he was gonna, I think I saw Sarah sharing something about how he was gonna run an ultra marathon,

like a 50 miler on no training. I don't know whether he did that or not. I should look into that. But anyway, he's just built like a Mack truck now. It's kind of amazing. That is amazing. I didn't know that. But hats off to Sarah.

What an incredible performance to run that fast late in your career while juggling everything that you're doing in the midst of a pandemic while being a mom, like all of that. It's just such a cool story. Incredible. Really hats off. And then my win of the week is David Goggins. How could it not be? How could it not be? He finished second at the Moab 240 running what he thinks is the race of his life so far. And this is a guy who's done very well and won some big ultra races. 197 entrants in this Moab 240. And for the backstory on this, there's a couple of things. One is he ran this race last year and was in second place, I think, or in the top three and went off course. There was like a sign misplacement or something,

or some sort of like controversy there. And he went off course like There was like a sign misplacement or something or some sort of like controversy there. And he went off course like by 10 miles or something. I think it was even more than that. Was it more than that? So he had to run back. And then coming up to the biggest peak on it, he started having fluid in his lungs, like having some altitude problems.

Right, it was like a pulmonary edema. And they basically forced him to go like, well, they didn't force him, but I think the doctors were like, maybe you gotta get down to altitude. And so he left the race, went to his hotel room and started feeling better and then went back out on the course by himself.

And they didn't let him finish at the finish line, but he finished. Because right now there's still only five runners that have finished and you can finish like tomorrow, I think. I forget exactly. And so most people are still not even in yet. And there's several DNFs already.

So that was one backstory. So he's coming back this year. But this year, at some point, he's going to reveal how fucked up his knees were. He's kind of hinted at it. He's shown some therapy stuff. He's shown himself in doctor's offices. He just, this week before the race, showed himself having his knee drained where it said half a baseball's worth of fluid was coming out of one of his knees. But when he finally reveals this story in its fullest and how fucked up his knees are,

that's what makes this, to me me one of the most amazing uh athletic accomplishments i've ever heard of like like that and you will agree with me when you finally when he finally tells the story i agree with you now because the guy he lost to and lost i mean he finished 10 miles i think he finished a couple of hours behind this guy i forget exactly but let me tell you what uh this guy this guy has like set the record for running across the Atacama Desert. He'd set the record for this, Michel Graglia, the Italian,

set the record for running across the Gobi. He wins, he's won Badwater. He wins almost every ultra race he enters and David was gaining on him at the end. The guy had like a pretty good gap on him though. I mean like- 10, 12 miles, 10 mile gap? I checked maybe when they had like 40 miles to go on it.

I thought it was, he had like 20 miles on him. Yeah, but he only finished like eight miles ahead. Wow. Yeah, like that's what I'm saying. So- He was gaining. So yeah, that guy had, he had a pretty solid lead that David was gaining on.

And then there was David, and then there was a huge gap. Yeah. And then it was a cluster. So it was like, basically those two guys were way out ahead of everybody else. Yeah. And then there was kind of a pack behind those guys that were pretty closely packed together. Three guys together. Yeah. But let's count the ways that this guy is a savage because like, I don't know if we even have time. I mean, it's crazy because what happened to him last year was like the most epic story ever. And I remember when he rejoined the course

and he's running along and he did a little Instagram video. I was like, you know, quit. If I sign up for something, I don't stop. You know, just because the race is over doesn't mean that I finish and I finished what I started or, you know, whatever he said. But he was saying like he had so much respect for the slower runners that were still out there suffering

and he wanted to be out there with them. That's what his point was, you know, like- But they'd all finished by the time he went back to the course. No, there were still people out there. That's why he went back out there. Oh, I didn't know that. He's like, there's some people out there still grinding.

He was in the hospital for how long? Just for like a few hours. Oh, I thought he was like overnight. No, no, no, then he went to the hotel room. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So this year, when did he have knee surgery?

I don't think he had knee surgery. I just remember a video maybe a couple of months ago where his knee was like the size of a watermelon. Yeah, never had knee surgery. They were draining it. He dealt with therapy and he kind of did some stuff and he put some of that on Instagram. But I'm not gonna get into what I've seen

in terms of like the medical on him, the report on him. You got the inside track. But I'm not gonna get into it. It's not going to get into what I've seen in terms of like the medical on him, the report on him. You got the inside. But I'm not going to get into it. It's not me to say, but it's, but trust me when you hear the whole story, even Graglia will be like, the guy that beat him will be like, what the fuck Goggins? Right. What the fuck? The other thing that's so prototypically Goggins about it is that any other athlete who has like a profile on social media would have been sharing the lead up to this race. Like I'm getting ready to do this race.

Here's my strategy. This is what my training looks like. None of that, not a peep. Nobody even knew that he was doing this race, at least publicly facing, right? So suddenly it was like, oh, Goggins is in Moab and he's in second place. Like, wait, what?

Like he didn't announce that he was doing, cause he doesn't do that. Cause his thing is that's for me. Like I'll do these little videos once in a while because I have to, even though I hate social media and I'll like put you on blast with some crazy inspirational message. But it's not incumbent upon me to share anything else

I don't feel like sharing. And I do this racing and this training for myself. That's right. It's the same thing with his fire training. He doesn't put that on his social media either. He does that for himself. But then there's always a message. There's always something that he can use

to inspire people out of it, whether it's through a talk or an Instagram post or the book. And another thing that was prototypical to Goggins is when he crossed the finish line, he banged out, I don't know how many, like 20 pushups or more and just banged him out. Right when he crossed the finish line.

Like most people, 240 miles. Is there video of that? Yeah, there's video. It's on his Instagram. I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to check that out. Well, good for you, that? Yeah, there's a video. It's on his Instagram. I haven't seen it yet. I'll have to check that out. Well, good for you, David. Yeah, congrats, man.

It's unbelievable. And the world needs that story. Yeah, for sure. So thank you for that. Yeah, and then that's the kind of stuff like, that's why people connect to him and his legend. It's like, because he's the proof that we can push through our own smaller problems. It's like, because he's the proof that we can push through our own smaller

problems. Yeah. It's intense, man. I love it. All right. Let's do some listener questions. Okay. Ready? Hi, Rich. Hi, Adam. My name is Cameron. I live in the beautiful Oahu, Hawaii, and I'm probably one of your younger listeners. I'm 22 years old, and I have become immersed in the world of health and wellness. I've come a long way on my betterment journey, but one habit I can't seem to shake is overdoing it with alcohol. I've tried cutting it out completely, but then I end up feeling isolated from my peers. I've tried having a limit on how many drinks I will have but often end up disrespecting that boundary and then feeling anxious and shameful for it. I haven't given up alcohol completely because I enjoy having one or two drinks and I use drinking

as a means to network and socialize. Do you think it's possible to set healthy boundaries with alcohol and stick to them or do you think it's safer to set healthy boundaries with alcohol and stick to them, or do you think it's safer to just stop drinking altogether, considering this relationship I have with it? Thinking of being a sober 22-year-old is quite daunting to me, and the more habits I change, the further I feel from relating to the people around me. As someone I look to for health and personal growth wisdom, as well as being a recovered alcoholic, I would love to hear your advice on possible ways I can resolve this. Thanks, guys. I hope I hear this on the air. Thank you, Cameron. How cool would it be to be

22 and living in Oahu, first of all? I want to be 48 and living in a while. I know. It sounds good. And it sounds like you've got a cool life. And thank you for the question. I mean, the first thing I would say to you is, to your specific question, is it possible to set healthy boundaries around alcohol and stick to them? Only you can answer that question. Baked into what I just heard, it sounds like you've tried to do that and have failed. So I would encourage you to kind of think about that. Alcoholism is a self-diagnosed disease. And I can't say whether you're an alcoholic or not, only you can make that judgment call for yourself. But to the extent that your alcohol use is starting to interfere with your well-being, which it sounds like it is, I think it's worth spending a little time looking into that,

particularly as somebody who's immersed and interested in the world of health and wellness. If you're interested in those things, I'm not sure what role alcohol plays in furthering whatever goals that you set for yourself. In my opinion, it's only going to be an impediment. And I think these experiments like, hey, let me go out and cap my drinks. Maybe, you know, I'm going to go out and see if I can be with my friends and only have two drinks, or maybe I'll only drink beer, or I'll only go out on these nights. These are all experiments that I've played around with myself only to find out that they never work.

Maybe they'll work for you, I don't know. But it sounds like your relationship with alcohol is making you unhappy and it's moving you further away from what it is that you most aspire to. So my suggestion to you is to, why not try to go sober for 30 days? It sounds like you've done that in the past. You've had stints where you've given it up completely, but that's impaired your ability to network and socialize with your friends. So what is that about? Why is it that you feel like you can't

go out and network or socialize unless you're drinking about? Why is it that you feel like you can't go out and network or socialize unless you're drinking? Is it because it makes you uncomfortable? Is it because it's no longer fun? And I think that's where the work is. Invest in what it is that is leading you to be uncomfortable around that specific dynamic. And I think that will be a means of connecting with what exactly alcohol is doing for you and is not doing for you. On top of that, how can you be in health and wellness if you can't control your drinking? That's the hard truth here. And I think this might come across as daunting and scary, the idea of giving up alcohol. But in truth, you won't know unless you try. And I think if you just try to do it one day at a time, like they say in 12 Step,

and not worry about whether you're ever going to drink again, you might find yourself enjoying it in a way that you haven't previously. But I think when you give up alcohol completely and then you find yourself isolating, that's because alcohol is yourself. That alcohol is the grease that allows you to interact socially. And when you remove that, you're lacking in the tools to be able to do that sober.

And the kind of idea behind recovery is developing your emotional aptitude and your social skills so that you're not reliant upon a substance in order to kind of gracefully, you know, navigate your friends and these social situations. So again, it's not for me to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. It's not for me to diagnose you, but it sounds like if you're thinking about this, that perhaps it's a problem because people who have a healthy relationship with alcohol are not the people that leave voicemails like this, right?

So clearly there's something about this that is unhealthy or dysfunctional for you. And I can only speak from my own experience, which is when I stopped playing these games about, well, maybe I'll have two drinks or maybe I'll do it at these nights but not these other nights. When I just let go of all of that and accepted help and started to live sober, that's when my life improved and got better in unimaginable ways. And I just want everybody to have their version of the experience that I had. So I would encourage you to explore 12-step in your area. I don't know what it's like in Hawaii, but I think if you're in Hawaii, they're kind of

functioning normally because they've kept the island pretty protected from COVID. So I suspect there are probably Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that are in person. And perhaps you can go on the internet, find out where those are and attend. Set aside your preconceived ideas about what it might or might not be and just show up with an open mind.

Listen, try to find somebody that you can talk to. Try to look for the similarities rather than differences. And if you can find that person can talk to. Try to look for the similarities rather than differences. And if you can find that person to talk to, sit down with that person, tell them the truth of what you're really going through. And I think that will be revealing in what you want to do going forward. Beautiful. Well said. Thanks, Cameron. Did I miss anything? DK is here. DK could have dropped a better sober bomb than that. No, I think it was perfect. Yeah.

I think it's normal for a 22-year-old to feel that. Right. Yeah. Because you're probably used to running with a bunch of people that drink. Right, right. Because most 22-year-olds drink. Exactly.

But I would say that, you know, be careful. Sometimes, like, the people who we're closest to are mirrors, right? That's what the yogis like to say. And so you might getting, think you're getting a reflection. You might be thinking you're getting some, like you want, you need to connect with this person. And the only way to do that is to be on their level. But that might just be a story you're telling yourself. You might be able to go out and hang out and be completely welcome and connected with people without drinking. Well, you can. Yeah.

You can. But with your group of friends, I mean. It might not isolate you from your friends like you think. Yeah. It might not be as isolating as you think. Probably won't be. But you have to experiment with that. Like 30-day experiment seems like a good way to go.

Why not? Yeah. All right. Let's go to the next one. This is a related question and you'll see. Hi, Rich. Hi, Adam. My name's John. I'm from London, England. I am seven years sober. I'm also five years plant-based. And Rich has been a real inspiration for me. As somebody who I guess is a type A male it's rare to find role models in sobriety and in plant-based eating so thank you so much um my question is around sobriety um Rich I've listened to your story and I've read your book

five um and one thing that I'm not sure you go into is how your social relationships suffered when you became sober. That's a challenge I've had ever since I became sober, and I'm still wrestling with it now. I'll often find myself not invited to gatherings with really close friends. to gatherings with really close friends. Some of my friends see me suitable maybe for a country walk, but not a bachelor party or any other gathering, really. And, you know, it can be quite hurtful. It does knock me back a bit.

And, you know, I see it time and time again. I get judged as a non-drinker and not included. And I'm just wondering, Rich, if you've had any experience in your story of that and how have you dealt with it? And I'd be really grateful for any response you have. Thanks both for a wonderful show. Take care. Bye. Thanks, John. It's a great question.

I definitely have had similar experiences, although I think there is a little bit of a difference with you being from London, because culturally it's distinct in that, you know, London tends to be a very drinking-centric culture in general. So I suspect that the challenges might be a little bit more intense where you live than where I live. The first thing I would say is that disinclusion, the idea that you have these, you know, quote unquote, really close friends. First of all, I would wonder how close are they

really if they're disinviting you or not inviting you to do fun stuff? Are they really your close friends? Maybe they are. And maybe they feel like they're sparing you from putting you in an uncomfortable situation. But either way, that lack of invitation or disinclusion says more about them than it does about you. And often, and I've experienced this, it's worth considering that you act as a mirror to their own behavior. So if you're sober and you're at a bachelor party and you've got these friends and they're letting loose and they're going crazy, you being sober in their orbit is perhaps an indication that they might have a problem that they don't want to look at. So when they see you, they're reminded of their relationship with alcohol and the extent to which it might be

unhealthy for them. So that's one thing to consider. And it helps with, you know, empathizing from where they're coming from, I think on some level. In my own personal case, I just made a ton of new friends. Like I needed to develop a brand new community of people who were living more in alignment with this new value system that I was developing. And so I would encourage you to do just that. It sounds like you've been sober for a while, but that, you know, you feel cut off or lonely from your friends. So perhaps try to find a way to tap into a different community, whether it's through 12 Step or even Andy Romage's One Year No Beer community, which is London-centric.

I would encourage you to reach out to Andy or to figure out how you can participate in that movement because that is just packed with people who are experiencing life alcohol-free. And then to find new activities and new things to do. I mean, personally for me, when I got sober initially, I didn't want to go to a bachelor party because that was scary and I thought I might drink. Today, I have no interest in going to a bachelor party because it's just not something, like that kind of behavior and activity

is just not something I wanna be around. They're very douchey, these bachelor parties. Hi, I'm a douche meter. I don't go to bars, not because I'm scared if I go to a bar, I'm gonna drink, but going to a bar when you're sober just isn't that fun. And what you learn over time, and I suspect you already know this,

is that what is meaningful is having meaningful interactions with those friends that you care about. And when there's a lot of booze around, those interactions are very surface level at best and not meaningful. So maybe shoulder the responsibility of inviting your friends to do things with you that interest you that don't involve alcohol rather than waiting for them to invite you to do things with you that interest you that don't involve alcohol, rather than waiting for them to invite you to do other stuff or developing a resentment around not being invited to do something.

And doing an inventory around that resentment, I think would be super helpful. Work a program around these emotions that you're having around the relationships with these friends. I like it. I think, you know, having spent quite a lot of time in London and seeing how alcohol is really like ingrained in the culture there, I think there's an element, like we talked about Goggins earlier, of the only. You're kind of, it's a little different than being sober here in Southern California. You do feel like-

Everybody goes to bed at 10. Yeah, yeah. They're up for their mountain bike ride. Exactly. Like you really are kind of the only, and Goggins has embraced that, being the only. He talked about being in his book, talks about being in the seals.

And the seals are like train hard and then party hard. And like when they were based in Thailand and he would go to the, he didn't wanna go to party. He wanted to study and then party hard and like when they were based in thailand and he would go to the he didn't want to go to party he wanted to study and then get up and and beat their ass and whatever training they were doing the next day and it rubbed some people wrong and he was disinvited or was suspect and it impacted his he suspects impacted his which he writes about impacted his um his you know advancement to some of the teens. So, you know, but he embraced being the only, and that's what he had to do for his own kind of wellbeing,

but also it's how he kind of excelled. He embraced it. Right, but he's a very unique individual. And, you know, he had to accept some level of loneliness that he's comfortable with. And what I'm gathering from John is that he doesn't wanna, he wants to be connected to his friend.

This is qualitatively different in that regard. I just think there's a way to do it that can be accomplished without the kind of stigma of alcohol kind of hovering over the dynamic itself. No question. So if these friends are really good friends of yours, they're going to be more than happy to connect with you in a meaningful way in an environment that doesn't involve alcohol, whether that's a dinner party at your house or some athletic

activity or some other thing that you can mutually enjoy with this person. And if they're not interested in that, then I think it's worth considering just how good a friend this person really is. And again, it all goes back to working your inventory around this. Why are you resentful? What is your part in this? How are you contributing to this? And how can you change the dynamic with certain things that you can do in terms of your perspective of these friends and the activities that you can, or the actions that you can undertake to, you know, mend what appears to be, you know, fractures in these relationships. Yeah. And like any tough thing, it could end up being a benefit to you, however it plays out. Going through the hard thing can become what helps you become, get you to an even better place.

And also, why don't you call them up and tell them how you feel and have that conversation because maybe they're not even aware of how this is impacting you. And if they are good friends, they'll be able to hear that. Beautiful. Thank you, John. Thanks, they'll be able to hear that. Beautiful. Thank you, John. Thanks, John.

Let's go to Colorado. Hi, Adam and Rich. My name is Greg Johnston. I'm from Colorado. I've already adopted a plant-based nutrition plan. I eat all plants all the time. As much whole food as I can. I'm losing a ton of weight.

Got my blood work back. Everything's good. My blood pressure is down in the great numbers. Not on any meds. Just take my B12 supplement. My question is, I'm 52. I've read, you know, Finding Ultra. i've become a great fan of the ritual podcast i watched uh you know the world's toughest race with you know bear grills and i live in colorado this is the perfect place to start doing some adventure sports some endurance sports what do you see as the way to break into this for somebody who's 50 plus, you know, former college athlete, but really let himself get out of shape and is now getting back into shape.

I would just love to hear some ideas of how you would take it. If you were there, have a great day guys. And thanks for all you do on the podcast. It's really been helping me a lot. Thank you, Greg. Great question.

The first thing I would say is I can't shake this sense that you're waiting for somebody to give you permission to do this thing. And the truth is you don't need permission. You already have everything that you require in order to go outside and begin this process of moving towards this goal or this dream you have of doing adventure sports or endurance sports. So maybe look at what's behind that. Like, why do you feel like you can't start until somebody says it's okay or provides a roadmap for you to do so? The truth is it's in the doing that the path is revealed. So you have to just begin. So whatever pair of shoes you happen to have in your closet,

pull those out, go outside and go for a jog. And if you can't jog, start with a walk and then show up the next day and try to walk a little bit longer. And one day you'll find yourself jogging a little bit and just slowly over time expand that. And if you're patient and you're consistent, I think the answers that you seek

will start to unfurl before you. You don't have to have this whole plan completely conceptualized before you start. And in truth, that's the wrong way to think about it and to go about it to begin with. I think it's great to set a goal for yourself. If you're like, I want to one day do this crazy race, so I'm going to start with a 10K or whatever it is to put something on the calendar that holds you accountable. Maybe you can find a friend to do this with so you have an accountability partner to make sure that you get up out of bed in the morning and get after it.

But ultimately, this is about falling in love with a lifestyle shift that's going to lead you over time into a very different place. What that looks like for you is going to be different than what it might look like for me or for Adam or for somebody else. But find something that you really enjoy, fall in love with the process and the lifestyle, and everything else ends up taking care of itself, whether it's gear, whether it's which race to do, whether it's what GPS watch to buy or what race to sign up for. All of those questions get answered, but if you're stuck in the starting gate trying to figure it out in your head, you're never gonna get to first base.

Yeah, just go for a run. Just go for a hike. This is not rocket science. No, just hit the trails. And there is no secret. Well, I like the idea of being in Colorado. You can just like, look, where's the beautiful place you haven't walked yet

or run yet and go check it out. Yeah, turn it into a fun adventure. Congratulations on a lifestyle change. Those are some really important big markers. I think the other thing that might be worth commenting on is it's interesting that you open the question saying you're 52. And from that, I infer that there's some sense

that maybe the ship has sailed or it's too late or you're too old to do that. And let me disabuse you of that notion. As somebody who's turning 54 in a week, 52 is not a barrier to this. In fact, I'm jealous of you being at the beginning of what could quite possibly be the most enriching experience of your life if you lean into it. So get out of your comfort zone, put the fear aside, put one foot in front of the other and start with tiny steps. Make it about the atomic habits that you build over time.

That way it's not daunting. You're eating little bites every single day and with that you build momentum. That way it's not daunting. You know, you're eating little bites every single day. And with that, you build momentum. And these things then develop their own momentum and they become a lot, it has a life of its own that will, you know, put wind in your sails and guide you where you're supposed to go. Absolutely.

And I do understand though, being in Colorado, seeing those incredible, I mean, I get it. Like if being 52 seems like a problem when you're in Colorado, surrounded by endurance athletes that are just whizzing by. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, because everybody's crazy fit. Yeah. And they all look like they're lining up for the Kona World Championships like every single day at the coffee shop. I get it. I get it. Forget about that. Yeah, don't. It has nothing to do with that.

No, yeah, it's not you. This is about your relationship with yourself and the person that you wanna become. Boom. All right. Rich, that's some good shit right there. Dropping wisdom. How do you feel?

Me? Yeah. I feel great. I feel like this is a good place to vent my concerns for the wellbeing of humanity and in a safe space. I'm glad to provide that venue for you. So you can go home. I can go home.

Be the best husband and dad and swim run aficionado that you can. You know what? I appreciate that about you. Right on, right on, right on. Just getting in the McConaughey headspace for tomorrow. I can't wait to hear about it. Cool on, right on, right on. Just getting in the Makani head space for tomorrow. I can't wait to hear about it. Cool, we'll be back in two weeks.

In the meantime, follow Adam at Adam Skolnick on all the socials. If you'd like your message considered, leave us a voicemail at 424-235-4626. You can find me at Rich Roll pretty much everywhere. Please take a moment to hit that subscribe button on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify. Check the show notes on the episode page at richroll.com.

We'll put links up to everything that we discussed today as always. And that's it. I think we did it today. I wanna 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 and Davey Greenberg for portraits. Georgia Whaley for copywriting. DK, my man, David Kahn for advertiser relationships. DK? D-Music, as always, by Tyler, Trapper, and Harry. Appreciate you guys. Thanks for the love.

See you back here in a couple days with another amazing episode. TBD, who knows what it's gonna be? Who knows what the world is gonna look like? We'll still be here. In a couple of days. It'll still be. Well, that's the funny thing with this show.

We always think we're gonna talk about something and then the world spins off its access and it seems no longer relevant. You know what? It's gonna cycle back to normal. It is going to at some stage. All right, Nostradamus. We're gonna get there together.

Peace. Plants. Namaste. Thank you.