The Rich Roll Podcast - The 5 Pillars of Fulfilling Aging: Outdoor Adventurer Caroline Paul On Chasing Risk After 60, & Why Age Is Just A Mindset

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

Caroline Paul, a bestselling author, ex-firefighter, and adventurer, is here with her latest book “Tough Broad,” which explores how nature redefines aging. This conversation explores the insidious cultural messaging about aging, especially for women, and how nature supports the five pillars of healthy longevity: community, novelty, purpose, health, and a positive mindset about aging itself.   Caroline shares exhilarating stories of women defying expectations—from septuagenarian boogie boarders to a BASE-jumping grandmother—and recounts her wing-walking experience, demonstrating the transformative power of awe in later life. This exchange is a call to adventure and awe to anyone interested in embracing age with wonder and purpose. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  AG1: Get a FREE 1-year supply of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll LMNT: Get a FREE Sample Pack with any drink mix purchase 👉drinkLMNT.com/RICHROLL On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll Waking Up: Get a FREE month, plus $30 OFF  👉wakingup.com/RICHROLL Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

Matthew McConaughey, in his book and on my podcast, talks about green lights, seeking them out and following their lead. One green light I greet first thing every morning comes in the form of a green powder called AG1, a morning routine non-negotiable that gives my body the green light to tackle the day. AG1 is a foundational nutrition supplement that delivers daily nutrients and gut health support. What's unique is that the entire formula, not just the ingredients, is backed by rigorous research, the safety and efficacy of which has been validated by third-party,

double-blind, placebo-controlled studies, the gold standard in research, with results impressive. After 30 days, 97% of participants felt more energized. At 60 days, 91% needed less coffee. And by 90 days, 97% had improved digestion and fewer cravings. I have experienced similar benefits in energy and focus and digestion. If there's one product I trust for whole body health, it's AG1. That's why I've partnered with them for so long. So start your AG1 journey today. Get a free one-year supply of vitamin E3K2 and five free AG1 travel packs with your first purchase at drinkag1.com. That's drinkag1.com slash richroll. That's drinkag1.com slash richroll.

Check it out. It's hot out there, people. Your workouts are ramping up, and we all know what that means. It means more sweat, which means more hydration, which means more elements. You've heard me rave about Elements electrolyte powder travel packs, but now there's even more to love. Element Sparkling. The same zero-sugar electrolyte-fueled hydration

you know and that you trust, but now in a bold, fizzy 16-ounce can, now officially also available to everyone. Element Sparkling packs a precise blend of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you firing on all cylinders. Again, no junk, no caffeine, no BS. It's incredibly refreshing, and it comes in all these great, delicious flavors like citrus salt, watermelon salt, grapefruit salt, that's my favorite, and the sparkling exclusive black cherry lime. When I'm on the go, I throw a packet of Element Drink Mix in my bottle, but when I'm at home, I stock the

mini fridge in my home gym with Element Sparkling. It's the perfect combo for staying hydrated. Also, you can now get a free Element sample pack with any purchase, whether it's the classic Drink Mix or the new sparkling cans. Get your free sample pack with any element purchase at drinklmnt.com slash richroll. There's nothing like being outside. We get terribly toxic messaging about our aging. The outdoors is too dangerous for us, but we can't be with all that societal messaging about our aging is telling us. And that's powerful. Caroline Paul has spent her entire life defying expectations and pushing the boundaries of what's possible. She was one of San Francisco's first female firefighters.

She's a woman who's mountain biked the Bolivian Andes and written best-selling books. She pilots everything from planes to gyrocopters and is somebody who doesn't just surf, snowboard, skate, and skydive. This is somebody who hang glides, bungee jumps, and also wing walks. And on top of that, Edith pursued Olympic luge.

Awe is when you can't quite grasp what's going on. All the patterns that you know don't make sense. And it certainly didn't make sense to be doing loops in midair at 3,000 feet, attached by this one skinny little belt. When this unrepentant adrenaline junkie started contending with age, a new adventure emerged. How to embrace her later decades with grace and a novel, more gentle kind of bravery.

One that's more about awe than thrills and prioritizes community, mindset, purpose, and of course, the outdoors. It turns out awe is really good for us. It's a reinvention of sorts, this journey of Caroline's, all of which is thoroughly laid forth in her latest book, Tough Broad, which forms the basis of today's exploration into longevity, well-being, and meaning. There's really nothing between you and everything. Just get outside any way you can. Get outside further. Great to meet you. Thanks for doing this. Thank you. Really, really excited. Thanks, Rich.

Did you fly down from San Francisco today in your gyrocopter? I did not. I did not. Thank you. What is the range on those things? I mean, as far as your heart will take you. I mean, you have to stop for gas. Yeah. So, but you know, the thing about the United States is there's all these tiny airports everywhere.

It's and taxpayer funded. It's kind of amazing. I think left over from the postal service days when they started doing mail by plane. Yeah. I don't know. It's amazing. What's the longest distance flight that you've made in one of those things? Well, I recently did.

Thank you for asking. I recently did a cross-country trip from the Bay Area in San Francisco to Sedona, Arizona. And it took four days. to Sedona, Arizona. And it took four days. So it was over the Sierras, over Death Valley, and over the Grand Canyon.

Wow. It has to be scary flying over the Sierras in a gyrocopter. I mean, there's no like hood, right? Like is it open air or do you pull the, can you pull a hood down over you? No, no, it was open cockpit. Open cockpit. And at what altitude are you flying?

I was flying at 10,000. Wow. Yeah, I had seven layers of clothes on. I mean, it's like a lawnmower. It is. Don't tell my mom that. It is. That's crazy.

Yeah, for me, the most nerve wracking before I did it was the Grand Canyon because of all the wind, the different wind. The crosswinds. Yeah. I had no idea, but like fear usually is, as soon as I was doing it, I wasn't scared anymore. Usually just kind of scared of the next thing. Are there close calls that you've had? It just feels so unstable because it's so tiny. Yeah. I mean, I've been flying since I was 20. And so, yeah, I've had close calls and I've flown Cessnas and paragliders. So paragliding is sort of like hang gliding, but it's not as cool. It's like a wing shaped bed sheet as I like to describe it. And then I went to flying hang gliders with motors. And now I fly gyrocopters. Right.

How does that work? Do you buy one? Do you lease it? Do you find some instructor to teach you how to do it? Or because you have a pilot's license already, it was a quick study? No, I'm not a quick study for much, sadly. That's hard to believe. I did have some flying background when I picked up paragliding, but it's completely different because it's foot-launched and there's really nothing between

you and everything. Not like a Cessna, which is sort of like being in a car, which is why I didn't really love them. And most of the aircraft that I was flying were not sort of under the purview of the FAA at the time. So there were lots of my peers who were just sort of figure it out, but that's not really my way. I'd find somebody to teach me. Well, the gyrocopter is just sort of one box checked on a very long list of adventures and disciplines that you've explored over the course of an extremely interesting and colorful life. And as I sit across from you, you know, it's hard for me to see anyone else other than your identical twin sister, who I know a little bit. Who's awesome. Yeah, who's amazing and initially put us in touch.

And I guess there's some similarities in the career paths that you guys have chosen, but you're also like very different people. She's this activist, actor, for people who don't know, she co-hosts the Switch for Good podcast with Dotsie Bausch, who's a friend of the podcast and a personal friend. And your brother is also an animal rights activist. So you grew up in Connecticut with two activist siblings.

That's interesting in and of itself. Like- The Connecticut part? It's unlikely. Well, just, you know, like knowing what little I know about like where you grew up and, you know, what that kind of time was like, it's unlikely that there would be two ardent activists

coming out of that environment. Well, three, because me. But actually my father, who was a very conservative banker, Republican, sort of thought Nixon should still be president and ardent Reaganite, he was an animal lover. And one of the stories in our family is how he saved a whole brood of tiny little ducklings by just scooping them from his pool filter.

You know, he's a sort of buttoned up Midwestern guy. And he knelt down on the concrete there and gave mouth to beak resuscitation to seven ducklings. So I come from a family of animal rescuers. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, here you are today on the other side of putting your latest of a handful of books out into the world, Tough Broad. We're going to get into all of your adventures, the firefighting and all of that, all of those experiences that have kind of led you to this point. But this book is qualitatively different in that it is kind of trying to understand and make sense of a new phase of life. And I think a reductive take would be something like, what happens when an unrepentant, you know, adrenaline junkie has to start contending with aging and how do I embrace

this period of life with a little bit of grace. But I think the more accurate way to capture it is that it is kind of a call to action, you know, to bravery, to reinvention, to, you know, rethink the cultural mores and social tropes that prevent people from living a more fully actualized, authentic experience in our later decades, especially with a particular lens on women and how those cultural mores unfortunately don't kind of encourage that way of thinking or being. It's actually also a quest. Like when I started this book, I really didn't know that much about fulfilling aging. And I, after looking at all the science and research, the book changed a lot from when I had originally proposed it. So walk me through the original idea

to write this book. Like what, what motivated you to kind of explore this terrain? You know, after The Gutsy Girl, which I wrote for girls, which was sort of an exhortation for girls to learn bravery, to practice bravery and do that through the outdoors. And that seemed to strike a nerve with people. My publisher really wanted me to write The Gutsy Girl for my peers, for women. And I just didn't think I had anything to say to my peers because, I mean, I was different from a lot of them. I'm, you know, privileged and don't have kids. I'm not going through sort of that phase of life. I'm queer. I'm white. There was just a lot that was very different. So I didn't think I had anything to say so I really said no I'm not writing that book I'm not right I said that for years and then when I was 55

I was on my surfboard and I looked around and there were no women out there on the surf and it was sort of burly winter surf but it was totally doable for someone who was a better surfer than me there were men out there my age and. And I started to realize I was seeing this over and over again, that women, when I was on my electric skateboard, when I was flying my experimental planes, there was just men my age and older, but no women. So as 60 was sort of beckoning on the horizon, I wondered like, what is my own future going to look like? And so really I went to ask women older than me what the outdoors was doing for their aging journey.

And what did you find? You found a lot. Yeah. Well, I got more than you bargained for. Well, I wanted to keep the outdoors in my life, but when I saw no one around sort of my age, and I say no one, there were some, but very, very few. And I thought that I was my best self in the outdoors, present and thoughtful, a good teammate. And I wanted to keep it in my life.

So I had a hypothesis. So I was that scientist going out with the hypothesis that outdoor adventure was important for us. And I had just a vague idea. And I, again, yeah, you're right. I found so much more. The reason though, let's start with what you discovered around the why there aren't as many women in their older decades in the outdoors? I mean, I had a feeling I knew why. And this book is full of science, but I did not delve into the science of this. I didn't set out to prove what I'm about to say, which is that we get terribly toxic messaging about our aging as women in this country. And I could have sort of cited all these studies, but every time I say that, all the women start nodding. So, and the messages are basically that we're, you know, on the road to physical decline, definitely cognitively, you know, on our way to being pretty shaky. shaky. And we should probably narrow our lives, watch our bones. And certainly the uncertainty of the outdoors is too dangerous for us. And I knew that men weren't getting that messaging

because they were out there with me in the outdoors. That's sort of what I already knew. And just as I was about to go sort of interview women and talk to them about this psychology that was probably keeping them outside, the pandemic hit and nobody wanted to talk to me about this psychology that was probably keeping them outside the pandemic hit, and nobody wanted to talk to me. So I had to do a lot of research, just stay inside and be on the computer. And if nobody remembers anything about what I say, they should remember this, because I think it applies to everybody. And that is that the studies show that the way we look at our own aging predicts how well we age. houses, one of which was adorned or draped in all of the nostalgic kind of knickknacks of their youth and aired on television, like the baseball game that played in 1950, whatever. And then the other group going into the same house where the same, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, the same

drapings were there, but one group was told you're to have this experience as if you are, you know, of that age. And the other group was told like, have the experience as you are now looking in the rear view mirror and like reflecting upon that, like with a nostalgic eye. And the group that was sort of instructed to channel their inner adolescent or whatever, translated into a mindset shift that, you know, produced physiological longevity benefits. Did I say that right? I can't remember. It's been like a year since she came on and explained that. You know, honestly, I don't, the control group I thought was just in a house together, eight men in a house together who were in their 70s. I think they still had the same,

there were still all the same stuff in the house that it was just that they were told to approach it from a different point of view from a nostalgia yeah yeah they were encouraged to wax nostalgic about their past but they were very clearly felt like they're 70 whereas the other house was completely submerged in themselves as 20 years younger they they couldn't talk about any event past that date of 1959, because this took place in 1979. And all the newspapers were of that date. And there were no mirrors, so they couldn't see themselves, only photos of themselves at that age or younger. So I think what Langer was very interested in is this sort of immersion of your mind. And she predicted that the body would follow. And sure enough, when those men left that house,

they were measured and all their metrics had improved. You know, their hearing, their grip strength, they were playing football. One guy like left his cane behind. She said it was like lords. Yeah, it's really powerful. It's powerful. But it sounds woo-woo, you know, it does. It sounds like, and I think at the time, well, first of all, it was too few people. It was only 16 total subjects. But that I think began her reckoning with the mind-body connection.

And I did a lot of research for this book on Becca Levy, who is sort of an acolyte of Dr. Langer. And she wrote a book called Breaking the Age Code. And she's the one where I came upon the studies, though they've been replicated by a lot of people that say, you know, the way we look at our own aging predicts how well we age. So, I mean, if you have a negative view of your own aging, you have a statistically higher chance of a cardiac event earlier and cognitive decline earlier. This is all exacerbated, of course, if you're a woman, because the bar for a man to kind of overcome that and have that mindset shift or a change in perspective is one that doesn't meet the cultural resistance that a woman does. So, when you talk about this idea that, you know, women as they age are kind of channeling a lifetime of programming that they're too frail or that it's

unsafe or scary or too risky, that's just the latest chapter in a lifetime of, you know, being inculcated with messaging that the world is a scary place and you're better off staying inside and making sure that you're, you know, taking care of yourself. All of this, some of it is overt, some of it is subtle, but when, by the time you're 60, like it's been 60 years of that kind of seeping into your consciousness. So, overcoming that and reframing your relationship with the world as one of possibility and adventure as opposed to one of, you know, a scary one that's filled with risks that you should be very afraid of is a leap. It's a harder leap, I guess is what I'm saying, than it would be for a 60-year-old man. And I don't know that they're getting those

messages as they age, but I know they're getting something that's negative that the men are. I just didn't feel like I was competent enough to actually write a book for men on this. And yeah, I mean, I think it's such a leap that it's, and even when we know it, you know, I think every woman knows that the messages that they get feel unfair, but part of us believes it too. I really felt like just having a positive mantra and saying, you know, I am strong, I am brave, that's not gonna, that's not, that's not enough. What I began to realize as I went on my interviews is that it was going outside that in itself was such a direct rebuke to this messaging that we get that your sort of whole body, maybe in a Langer-esque way, begins to believe otherwise. Because when you go outside, you know, you, there's so much uncertainty outside. So one of the, um, people that I went to interview was this group of boogie boarders in San Diego. I don't know if you've heard of them called the wave chasers. And they're made up of women who are between 60 and 80 and they go in the Pacific ocean three

times a week. And frankly, I went down there because I was interested in how boogie boarding could just be like a gateway to just getting outside because it's such a simple sport. Right. And in fact, like I'll have to say that as a surfer, I was kind of looked down on it. Yeah. And I'm not, I'm a bad surfer.

So I was a bad surfer who looked down on boogie boarding. But I wanted to include it because I could see that it would be getting in the water would be fun as we age. And even the wave chasers told me, they said, you know, you don't have to know anything to boogie board. You don't even have to be fit. By the way, boogie boarding, I think most people know, but I will say what it is. Go ahead. Yeah. I mean, I imagine everyone knows it, but maybe there's a few that don't. Well, it's just like you get on like a flotation kind of tray, like looks like a cafeteria tray on your stomach. It's so condescending. Oh, yeah, I know, right?

It's a sport for kids, man. You sort of ride the wave to shore. And the wave chasers didn't even ride waves. They rode the whitewater to shore. Oh, my God, right. Wave chasers didn't even ride waves. They rode the whitewater to shore. It was after the wave had broken. And so I go to interview them. And one of the women tells me, boogie boarding changed my life. And I was inside like, what? How can such a simple sport change your life? And basically what she told me is, you know, look at the Pacific Ocean.

It's cold. It's windy out. I have to make all these decisions about waves. I'm helping my friends have fun. I'm committed three times a week. I'm part of something bigger than myself. And here I am, I'm 62. And what I saw is that what she was doing was upending her own expectations of herself. Because just by boogie boarding, or as I found, really any outdoor activity, again, like what it asks of us makes us realize we can't be what all that sort of societal messaging about our aging is telling us. And that's powerful. Yeah. I'm thinking of the fact that it was only in 2021 that the Olympics made the 1500 meter freestyle a women's event.

Originally, it was just considered, well, that's too rigorous, too long. The female form, you know, is not going to be able to handle that. You know, like, why did it take until 2021 to make what has always been an Olympic event for men in swimming a female event? Why? Well, I'm asking you. It's like, it's obvious, right? It's an artifact. It's a relic of a time that, you know, I think we've progressed past, but the fact that it wasn't until 2021 tells you that there's still something very indelible about this and insidious and, you know, probably subtle more often than not,

but nonetheless there. And it starts with young girls. Like this is something you talk a lot about, like young girls, I don't know what it's like now for young girls getting into sport, but, you know, when you and I were growing up, it wasn't always exactly encouraged. It was sort of like, well, that's for the boys and, you know, you guys go over there. And so fast forward from, you know, 1970 to now, if that's the messaging you got when you were a young girl, and now you're in your later years when the culture is constantly reinforcing this idea that when women reach a certain age, they're kind of dismissed as beauty fades and they're less relevant.

Of course, that's going to lead to isolation and, you know, a lack of self-esteem and, you know, more challenges around trying to find purpose and meaning in your life. steam and more challenges around trying to find purpose and meaning in your life. But it is the outdoors that kind of fires on all cylinders and hits all of these pillars that you talk about in the book around staying young as we biologically mature. Yeah, I never use that term staying young because I want to make it clear that I am 60, almost 61 right now, and I really, I want to be in this stage fully. I think a lot of people, it's confusing and it was really hard to transmit that I want us to have, to look at this stage as exhilarating and adventurous, and in fact, sort of claim a lot of the attributes that youth claims for themselves, you know, a little bit of recklessness, uncertainty, fun, play, all that. So,

but I don't mistake that for wanting to be younger. Mm-hmm. Yeah, there's a difference between, a big difference between kind of embracing this phase versus trying to pretend that it's not happening and kind of cosplaying a young person. Going out and having adventures in a healthy way is fantastic, but if you're doing it to like prove to yourself that you're not getting older, like that could be maybe a not so healthy version of doing the same thing. That's what I did when I was young. I was proving to somebody when I did all these crazy adventures, like I'm, yeah, the cool thing about being where I am now, you're younger than me, but is that it is this intersection of sort of a lot of experience

and just sort of a changing mindset and a changing hormonal system. Like my hormones have changed in a way that's really kind of cool too too and is really allowing me to enjoy this. And in fact, of all the women that I interviewed who are older than me, they all told me that the 60s was their favorite decade, which is definitely not what the culture tells us. Sure. Yeah. The science proves that out too. I mean, Arthur Brooks talks about this all the time. Arthur Brooks talks about this all the time. I think he, maybe he uses the 50s, but either way, like these are the stages of life in which people seem to be,

and the science bears out, are the most happy. But that's not what we believe or what we think or what the culture is telling us. I know, it's odd. It's very odd. Yeah. Yeah. I think it would be good to kind of go back a little bit

and kind of canvas your journey that led to this place. So you grew up in Connecticut. You ended up at Stanford. You were a couple of years ahead of me. And there you were on the rowing team. Yeah. But you also got into, like afterwards, you got into luge. Yeah.

Yeah. I want to hear the luge story. Does everyone know luge? Could I explain that sport luge? Yeah. Yeah. I want to hear the luge story. Does everyone know luge? Could I explain that sport too? Yeah. Yeah. So when I was at Stanford, I actually did it while I was at Stanford and I took some time off. Yeah. Oh, you stopped out? To pursue this. You know, it turns out when I was at Stanford, first of all, luge at the time in the eighties was a very obscure sport. I mean, hardly anyone had heard of it, luge at the time in the 80s was a very obscure sport. I mean, hardly anyone had heard of it, but there turned out that the number, the top American in the sport was a woman named Bonnie Warner. And she went to Stanford and she wanted to sort of expand the sport of luge. So she held

these trials at Stanford. And I went with my friend Blaze. He was a fellow friend of mine, a fellow rower. We were pilots together. So we flew together. And so we both decided we'd go to these tryouts. And basically it, so luge is that sport. It's a sledding sport where you lie on your back and you sort of control the sled with your legs and you go at high speeds around a track to sort of see who could do this or who would be primed for this. She put us on, Bonnie put us on these sleds, but they had wheels and we went down Alpine road. Oh, wow. Yeah. That seems more dangerous. Yeah. And I know it's like cars coming. Yeah. There's trees, there's things you can hit. Like if you're on the loose track, like maybe you wipe out, but you're just going to slide on your butt to the bottom, right? That seems really scary. Yeah, I don't-

For people that don't know, Alpine Road is a preferred cycling route in Palo Alto that's very steep and windy. to train also. So I made this sort of, I think because I could do a lot of pushups. Bonnie was awesome, but she just wanted to see like who had sort of the spine to do it, I think more. So Blaze and I both made it. So we went and then I just stayed. School had started again for another quarter and I decided I wanted to sort of pursue this Olympic dream. Though, I mean, the truth is, Rich, is that I was terrible at it. I was really a bad loser. But it's okay to be a bad loser when there's only like... There were only like 12 women doing it, right? Yeah. So you moved to Lake Placid. I did. Right, to pursue this. And they gave you a nickname. Yes, they did. I'm sorry that you do such good research. Yeah, my nickname was Crash. And people would actually gather at this one corner.

A lot of times, and they would tell me this, a friend of mine told me, you know, it was freezing, it was below freezing, we wanted to go to the warming hut. And then we heard your name called. So instead of going to the warming hut, we went to, you know, corner 14, which is where I would always have these spectacular crashes. And people just wanted to see if I would survive them. The thing about lugeing is you just have to cross the finish line with your fingertips touching your sled. So inevitably, I would be sliding across.

You could just be hanging onto it as you're sliding down on your butt. I didn't realize that. Wow. Is it the same track as the bobsled track or does Luge have its own track? Now I have to remember. We had our own track and then a bobsled. I think we had our own track at the time, but often they do share tracks. Yeah. And then how is it different from Skeleton? Because that looks very similar to luge. Skeleton is amazing. And at the time, they were this really ragtag team who they were using the bobsled track. They were part of the bobsled association. And basically Skeleton is face first instead of feet first. So,

and of course, like I was doing luge, but crashing constantly and trying to make the national team. And I saw this sport that was made up of people who basically wore jeans and hiking boots and motorcycle helmets, and they were going down this track. And I said, I'd like to try that. And the guy said, great, but we don't have any women. And I said, great. Yeah, that's awesome. Now I'll be number one. The ice is, you know, millimeters from your eyes, basically. And you're going very fast. And nobody knew what they were doing. So it was almost like being a kid and being on a sled. You just sort of put your feet down when you think you should.

And there was a lot of crashing and scraping. So with luge, you're steering and controlling with your feet. But skeleton, you're just like using your body weight? Yeah, body weight. You're using your shoulders. But I remember very clearly like you would put your toes down into the ice to try to make yourself turn. I mean, I think now they've really perfected the sport, but back then it wasn't, it wasn't an official Olympic sport and it wasn't, it was kind of, I don't know if it was new, but it was certainly new to the United States. No one

knew what they were doing. So you were like 11th out of 12th or, but you made the national, you were like on the national team. Well, so I did do nationals and, um, and I crashed, but I did cross the finish line holding onto my sled. And I was a really new loser at the time. I was 11th out of 12 women. And I think that honestly, like somebody dropped out. I think I, I, at any rate, I, um, did not make the national team until a couple of months later when someone dropped out. And by then I was training on my own in Germany, trying to keep up with everybody. And I got a call that said, you've made the national team. Where are you?

And I said, I'm in Germany. And so. Training for what in Germany? Luge. For Luge. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. So.

With the German team. Oh, with the German team. Oh, my God. But at some point, you go back to Stanford then. And you mentioned that you were doing this with a friend who was a pilot buddy of yours. So, just for clarity, like, did you already have your pilot license when you were in college? Yeah, I did. Wow.

Yeah. So, what happened was, you know, it was an amazing experience to be among all these Olympic athletes from all around the world when I was training at Lake Placid, because all these teams from everywhere would come and train at Lake Placid. And, and I saw and became friends with people of very high caliber with amazing grit and discipline. But what I realized is that I didn't think that I didn't want my life to be that myopic. And so by the time I was training in Germany, I realized I don't think I want this Olympic dream anymore. It was hard to give up. I mean, eventually, who knows whether I would have made the Olympic team, but I then decided to go back to school. And I became really honestly,

Rich, I'm a jack of all trades now. And I became really honestly rich. I'm a jack of all trades now. I don't really specialize in anything. Yeah, but the thing that comes to mind for me is this tension between, if you wanna be like the absolute best in a specific thing, you do have to have a myopic kind of perspective in life

that's focused on that one thing. And the adventurous life, which is the life that you have led, is a sort of jack of all trades thing where you're kind of, you know, traipsing from one thing to the next and, you know, where novelty is just as important as anything else. It's not about being the best. It's about having the experience. Yeah. I mean, I think those metrics aren't in the outdoors. I mean, I was, so I was part of a all women's whitewater team that was doing first descents at the time. So that means we were going down rivers that had never been explored before by anybody. So that's a metric.

I mean, we were trying to be the best in that way, but in general, my outdoor exploits, there is no gauge like that. You just, I got on my mountain bike and went through the Bolivian Andes and no one had gone through the Bolivian Andes, not because I was a great mountain biker, but because mountain bikes were newly, it was 1986 or seven. So they were newly invented really. And so in general, you know, you're, it's kind of you against the weather and, you know, your own sense of whether you can do something. But you do have one instance that predates all of this in which you were trying to be the best when you were 13. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I guess I kind of want to forget this, but then I did write about it and talk about it. Yes, you've talked about it a lot. I have. But it's a great story. Yeah, I was very obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records like we all were, right? And I did write about it and talk about it. Yes, you've talked about it a lot. I have. But it's a great story. Yeah. I was very obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records, like we all were, right? Sure. I remember having that book when I was a kid and paging through it.

And yeah, tallest man in the world. Longest fingernails. Yeah, all of that. With those black and white photos. Yeah. This is what we did before the internet. I know. It's like, it was sort of huge and thick.

And yeah, So I wanted to set a world record, but I realized that I had no skill at all at anything. So I decided to set a world record in something that was so primal and sort of intuitive to, for us all. And that was crawling. So I, the record at the time, according to the book, was 12 and a half miles, I think. I think that's right. And I enlisted a friend and we decided we would go around the high school track. And back then, you know, it was a feat to sort of get all the information. They had to write to the Guinness Book of World Records. They told us what we needed to do. We had to get media. So there is a photo of us. And then you had to get witnesses. And so we had people who would, you know,

and then we didn't even train. We didn't even, we just, we were young and we thought that 12 and a half miles, that's easy. And you did it on a high school track. Yeah. So it could be measured. Right. Maybe it would have been Yeah, so it could be measured. Right. Maybe it would have been better to do it in the grass. Oh, totally. There were so many things. I mean, we got furniture pads because we're like, what's big and fluffy? Oh, furniture pads. And we tied them around our knees with bandanas and we wore jeans.

And jeans, it's like denim is the worst thing right against your skin. Yeah. And we just set off. And how far did you get? Well, my friend dropped out at five miles and I kept going and it got dark and then it started to rain. And at eight and a half miles, I was pulled off the track actually, because my minders were like, you're kind of hallucinating. And I was, I think I was a off the track, actually, because my minders were like, you're kind of hallucinating. And I was, I think I was a little hypothermic. But really, Rich, inside, I was glad. Like, I could not remember why I was there. Like, why am I doing something this dumb? But I'll tell you, it taught me this amazing lesson, which is that, you know, when you're,

and you know this from what you do, when you're doing these arduous things, you can't, in the middle of it, you're like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever done. I want to stop right now. But even in my young, uh, callow mind, part of me was like, yeah, you want to stop, but there was a reason you wanted to do this and you don't know what it is now, but at one point it made sense. And that person is, you know, has her wits about her way more than you do right now. So just keep at it. And so I did end up going like eight and a half miles, which, but sadly, didn't break the world. All chafed and bloodied. Oh, yeah.

I had scars on my knees for a very long time. We're brought to you today by Onn. Being a gearhead, I'm all about testing the latest sports tech. But you know what often gets overlooked? Apparel. Apparel is crucial to performance, and that's why I was blown away by the folks at Ahn's Swiss Labs. Their cutting-edge approach from sustainability to precision testing for performance enhancement is next level. It is truly Swiss innovation at its best.

Visit ahn.com slash richroll. That's ahn.com slash richroll. That's on.com. of resources and apps available. I have experience with many of them, but my mainstay, I have to say, the one that I have found most useful is waking up. It's this unique treasure trove of wisdom that has become so important to my daily routine that the app finds itself right in the dock of my phone for immediate fingertip access. Beyond its robust catalog of daily meditations,

it's also this extraordinary library of mindfulness resources that go well beyond the strictures of meditation with courses on stoicism, cognitive behavioral therapy, time management, procrastination, as well as thoughtful conversations with leading scholars on everything

from psychedelics to happiness. It really is one of the most worthy investments you can make in yourself. And listeners of the show can get 30 days to try Waking Up for free. Plus, you'll save $30 on the in-app price. If price is a concern, Waking Up offers the app for free, astonishingly for anyone who can't afford it. You can find the links on their website to get a full scholarship right now. Just go to wakingup.com slash richroll to start your free month today. That's wakingup.com slash richroll.

Well, what's interesting to me about this story is you say, like, I realized I wasn't good at anything. Like, clearly you are good at many things, but maybe what you're best at is, you know, a certain sense of self, like, that borders on audacity. like that borders on audacity, like for a young person to say, I'm gonna break a Guinness Book of World Records, you know, that takes a belief in oneself, especially at such a young age to say like, I have this dream and I'm gonna make it happen, even though I'm young and I'm not gonna train for it or whatever.

Like, I think that's really cool. And there's a tenacity to it because I also know in the wake of missing the mark and not breaking this record, that you petitioned the Guinness Book of Records to establish a woman's record, right? Which there wasn't one. And when they denied you,

you decided that you were going to sue them and tried to get your dad's lawyer friends involved in this. I feel like he talked to my mom. This is publicly available information, by the way. I'm embarrassed about that because I don't think there should be a gender difference between... But I like that. I'm not backing down from this confidence. I think, honestly, Rich, I think I'm an identical twin. And being an identical twin has shaped me more than anything,

because I think that really the person in the world that I want to impress is my own twin sister. First of all, we've always been compared, which is really hard. And we don't like that. That's the world doing it to us. But also, we just want to live up to the other person. So, we actually were swimmers as well when we grew up. And one of the things that we used to do is work out extra after. We had a sense that we were not necessarily really skilled, but we were very, very dogged. And so, we would do these extra workouts in our lake. And invariably, there'd be this huge fight in the middle of the lake because we thought that the other one was doing serpentines, like not in a straight line, more than we were, which meant that they were getting

more of a workout than we were. And that was not allowed. We had to be exactly the same. than we were. And that was not allowed. We had to be exactly the same. So I think most everything I do is like in the hopes that my twin sister will be like. That's interesting. Do you think there's also like something else, like this need to prove to maybe not just yourself, but to the world or, you know, what else was going on in your childhood home that you can credit with giving you this kind of drive? Well, I think I wanted to differentiate myself also from my twin as well. So, it was that weird balance between not wanting to be competitive with her, like we had different swim strokes, for instance, and not wanting to be compared, but wanting to also be my own self maybe. And here's the irony.

So I really, both of us were obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records. And so there I was trying to break in and I failed. Well, years and years later, my twin sister made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. Oh, she did? I didn't know that. For what? What did she do? She was on the most watched she was one of the cast members on the most watched show in the whole world which is baywatch baywatch is in the guinness book of world records it was at the yes at one point maybe it's been surpassed by something but yeah for for many years it was in and so she did she let you know no she's not really like that. But in the moment, like at the time after you did that,

she didn't then go into the book and try to find some other record that she was gonna attempt as a response to, yeah. Wow. In any event, back to Stanford. So you study communications with this idea of becoming a journalist or a documentary filmmaker, and then you kind of go into journalism with public, it was a public radio in Berkeley.

I was doing odd jobs and then I volunteered at this radio station just to sort of, and I was doing some documentary film as well. I was about to go to grad school actually. And so, yeah, I was volunteering at KPFA in Berkeley. It was at a great volunteer situation where they, you didn't push paper, they threw you right away into basically reading the news on air, which is what I did for a couple days a week for a couple years. And you have this idea that you're going to infiltrate a certain institution and pull the covers on wrongdoings. Well, at the time, it was 1986, 87, I think somewhere around there. And all these stories were coming across my desk about the San Francisco Fire Department, about how sexist and racist they were. And there was a test coming up. And I thought,

oh, why don't I do an undercover story? Like, I'll go pretend I'm interested in being a firefighter and take the test. And so that's what I did. Yeah. What happened instead? Well, I kept passing each, you know, gate. And finally, they called me and said, you're in the next class. And it was very ironic, Rich, because honestly, first of all, I was shocked. And I thought, well, I can't be a firefighter because I'm a graduate from Stanford.

And what would my dad say? You know, he paid for Stanford. But here I was investigating an institution for their racism and sexism. And I can't think of a more classist response. It was really embarrassing, but I was too young to really realize. But basically, I think, you know, I had some isms I had to deal with myself. But the upshot was I said, no, I said, I defer. I defer. Can I defer? Which meant I was just put off the decision. And I went on this mountain bike expedition with my with one friend through the Bolivian Andes and came back and still hadn't sorted it out. And then the earthquake hit, 1989 earthquake. And I began to read these stories in the newspaper of such brave,

honorable acts by these firefighters who I had simply boxed as like racist and sexist. And I realized, oh, there's so much more to this than I know. And by then also the job had kind of seemed perfect for me. I mean, I got into journalism wanting to be paid to go out and have adventures in some way. And here I was suddenly being asked to be a firefighter. Right. And to have adventures in the context of service, really. Yeah. And I realized it's just how narrow-minded I was being. And you were a firefighter for 14 years? Yeah. I'm so grateful for that experience.

It was full of, made me such a better person. So what happened when you broke this news to your investment banker dad that you were going to embrace this firefighting career? How did that go down? Honestly, I think my dad wanted me to be happy. I had a little less pressure on me because I was a girl in some ways underestimated. I think, you know, for the career that I picked wasn't necessarily as important as my brother's. But I think he thought it was a phase and he was worried. I mean, everyone knows what firefighters do, but there was a part of him that really liked that I was breaking out of a box. what firefighters do, but there was a part of him that really liked that I was breaking out of a box.

You have amazing stories from this period of your life. In your mind, kind of looking back on that experience, what do people not understand about the firefighter experience? I mean, I think that, first of all, firefighters definitely get their due. We are seen as sort of heroic and the work we do is important. But for me personally, I will say that running into a fire was not the difficult part of that job. The difficult part of that job actually was the sort of compassion that you need when you are going on medical calls. Those were never the sexy calls. You know, they're not the big fires never the sexy calls. They're not the big fires, the big adventures. We're not rappelling off a bridge. We were doing very small things like being there at a moment that's maybe that person's worst moment of their whole life. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't the majority of the calls that you get medical emergency related?

No, you are right. And back then it was a little bit, when I got in 1989, doing medical calls was kind of new-ish. And then it became, yeah, the bulk of what we do. But there was still a lot of fires when I came in. One of those fires, there was an explosion. Yeah. What was that called? What's that called when the gases are released and it gets very quiet and then... Oh, yeah. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. What's that word? Yeah, flash. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've been in a couple explosions, but that was... I went to a fire and they couldn't find

the seat of the fire. And by then I was a member of what's called the rescue squad. And the rescue squad, we were sort of the Batman of the fire department. We do all the technical rescues. We repel off bridges and we do the surf rescues and we do hazmat and we do rescues and fires. Our job is simply to go in there and look for people. And I also look for animals, actually. I pulled out a lot of animals, too. We didn't go in with a hose. We went in with an axe. And sort of just your, you know, kind of a prayer.

And at this one fire, they just couldn't find the seat of it. So they asked the squad to take a hose in and see what we could do. So we were crawling down a hallway. And ahead of me was my friend Frank and Andy. And I was in a separate crew with Victor. It was like any fire. It felt initially like any fire, very dark, can't see anything, very hot. But there was something off about it.

And it was, I think that it was very quiet, got very quiet. And then all of a sudden there was a huge explosion and we were blown out of the hallway. And what we later realized is that there had been a flashover, which is when a room gets so hot that everything reaches its combustion temperature at the same time, including the particles in the air. So basically the air explodes. Wow. It kills a lot of firefighters. It's a really dangerous situation. And we'd been lucky that it wasn't in the hallway because we would have, but we were Wow. brave person per se. I think I just was more afraid of not being a good firefighter than I was of a fire. But I have to say that that day, that was a very frightening moment. And in that, there was a moment where Frank looked around and said, is everyone here? Is everyone

here? And we realized that Victor wasn't, my partner was not in the room with us. And I remember very clearly thinking, oh, I am not going back in there. And meanwhile, Frank is incredibly brave, competent firefighter. He immediately is turned and he's going back where we came to look for Victor. And I remember that moment of like, whoa, is this my limit? This might be my limit. And then the next second- Limit with fear, you mean? Yeah. And I'd never experienced that. And that scared me more than anything. Next second, I'm right on Frank's heels and I'm in the hallway and we find Victor. He had gotten blown in the other direction. He was fine. But that was a a really eyeopening experience because I had met myself basically. And so what do you make of that? Like kind of meeting your, your outer edge

of your fear tolerance? I didn't like it. Yeah. And I, I luckily I got to, I mean, have you been there? I mean, not in an extreme, you know, kind of example that you just shared. I would have to think about that. I'm not sure, but I guess I'm asking because I'm curious about like the level of intention you had about trying to find that edge. Like what part of your desire to be a firefighter had to do with pushing the outer edges of your fear tolerance or, you know, basically, you know, flirting with the adrenaline rush of being in such a dangerous job that puts you in these high stakes environments? Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. A big part of me wanted that constant sort of test. I think, you know, I have failed to tell you that I was actually a pretty fearful child.

You know, when I grew up, I was pretty shy and I was scared of a lot of things. So I think like a lot of people who are sort of do these sort of hyper brave things, they doth protest a little much. And I put myself in this category. So I think we're fear fear we're just constantly trying to prove to ourselves and i'm also intrigued by fear um because i think that well first of all that we're often as scared of something that's about to happen so not that's happened that hallway situation is a great example the flashover had happened it was actually very safe right now it had you know cleared it had ventilated in some way. But nevertheless, you know, that our emotions are not keeping up with our brain.

So prior to that moment where you had that experience where you're like, okay, that's too much or I'm at my limit. But I mean, can I just say, I then went, I managed to push past that limit. Okay. So the level, the ceiling got raised on that. Nonetheless, prior to that, was there some sense of youthful invincibility? Like, did you have that, like, you know, nothing can touch me kind of sense of yourself? I'm sure. I mean, yes.

And I'm sure, and I don't even know if it was that conscious. I think that's what we just carry with us as young people. All right. So what is your relationship with fear today? but it's just one emotion to assess a situation. So I think my relationship with fear is the same. I think that I am pretty dogmatic about it and I simply look at it, use it as a way to decide whether to go forward.

And usually I go forward because I feel like there are other emotions that I have that I want in that situation. Such as? Exhilaration, exploration, curiosity. You know, fear, it's also often not, it's not just the timing is wrong with fear that we're always about what's about to happen and then when it happens. So you're scared when you go walking of that you might see a bear. Then you see a bear. Now you're not scared of seeing a bear. You're scared the bear is going to attack you. Then it does. It's attacking you. And now you're scared that you're going to get mortally wounded. And then you get

mortally wounded. Now you're scared you're going to die. Like you're never scared of what's actually happening. And similarly, I think, especially women, they don't have a matched fear to the situation. So in the book, I talk about this game that I play called what's the worst that can happen. That's what I, when I go out with my friend, Sophia, we go on these mini adventures and she tends to be a little bit more anxious about things than I do. So we're going paddleboarding at night with no moon and pretty high winds because we want to see bioluminescence. And so we start playing this what's the worst that could happen game, which is basically when we ask each other what's the worst that could happen. And usually people go immediately to we could die.

But once you say it, you're like, well, maybe I won't die. I mean, dying is, but we could fall in the water and get hypothermia. Well, not really, because you have a wetsuit on and you're also attached to your board. So you get right back on or we could get lost. Well, the wind is pushing us inland. We're not going to go out to sea. So what's the worst that could happen? OK, we'll be on our board for eight hours. It's going to be uncomfortable.

You know, so we keep just sort of whittling it down. And by the end, we go out on our boards because there's nothing bad is going to happen that's worth the cool thing that we're going to see, which is bioluminescence. How have you avoided the trap of always chasing like the next thrill? Like as somebody who has a relationship with adrenaline, I've seen this happen with a lot of people, like they'll do something extraordinary. It gives them a heightened experience. And then it just always has to be topped and more extreme and more extreme and more extreme.

And it gets to the point where it becomes very unhealthy or rationality gives way to an irrational kind of relationship with risk. That's a really good question. That just never happened to me, I don't think. Did it? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think, I guess, I'm thinking about, like, the healthy pursuit of adventure versus the unhealthy one. Like, adventure versus the unhealthy one. Like if your identity or your ego is too wrapped up in some accomplishment or how you'll be perceived if you climb this mountain, etc., then once you've done it and you realize you're still the same person, then you end up having to climb a higher one, you know, to kind of get that same feeling or, you know, sense of self because there's something

inside you, some emotional need that's not getting met, I suppose. Honestly, I think a lot of people, I didn't really talk about a lot of the things that I did. So, for instance, when I was a firefighter, nobody knew I was a whitewater rafter. They didn't know I'd done first descents in like, you know, Australia or Borneo or they didn't, no one knew because I didn't really talk about it. I mean, before social media, it was different. And so I don't know that I got that sort of, maybe I do now because I've certainly written about it now, but now I'm older. So whatever I get, the accolades I might get for being brave, I don't know. I'm sort of embarrassed about who I was when I was younger. I don't, I like that

person. Okay. Why? I don't know. She, she had a lot to prove and she was nice. She was nice, but she was, I say this in the book too, she wasn't having fun a lot of the time. I was trying to prove maybe to my sister, I don't know, or to myself, but I don't really don't think it was to other people. I don't remember ever talking a lot about it. And I think my friends would back that up. And in each circle, I had people that I admired. So for instance, when I was a paraglider, I had my friend Lars Holbeck, who was an incredible outdoorsman of people from the 80s would have heard of him. And we sort of learned to paraglide together and we went paragliding on paragliding trips.

definitely respected him and wanted him to be impressed by me. And so we went to Brazil and I was going to learn how to mountain fly or fly thermals, thermal fly. And before then, all I'd done was sort of this boating along ridge lines, which is just a lift from the cliff itself. And it's pretty predictable. You can see, you can figure out what the lift band is, and it's not super gnarly. And so Lars wanted to go to Brazil and I was like, I'll go with you. And he wanted to do thermal flying there. So it's pretty epic. So thermal flying is just simply the hot air that comes off the planes of Brazil and rises. And that's the way you fly. You basically fly from one thermal to another like a bird does. It keeps you at a certain elevation because the heat is rising. Right. And you can't see it. It's columns of air and they can be very robust, but you can

deduce where they are. So it's kind of cool as an outdoors person, you're sort of, you're reading nature. So you can deduce where they are based on the birds and on the clouds. Cause when hot air rises, it cools and condenses into clouds. Wow. So I went with Lars and I'd never mountain flown before. And so he gave me this primer and he's one of those people who's really good at everything. The exact opposite of me. He's just really good at things, which means that he sometimes like doesn't really give you the full lesson on how to do it. And I'm sure I also postured like, I know what I'm doing. And I didn't ask any questions either because I didn't want to look like I didn't really know or I was trepidatious. I didn't want that to be obvious. And so I, and I find a thermal, and I'm super happy with myself, and I start rising,

and I found a thermal because I saw a little cumulus cloud, a little puffy cloud and birds, so you go, I went after that, and then I got kicked out of that thermal because you eventually, either you rise to the top or you I found another one and this one was really robust I knew it because we have this you can't really tell that you're rising except we had this auditory machine and an altimeter sort of thing that told you not only that you were rising but how fast you were rising and I was rising fast And what I had mistakenly done, what I didn't really know was I'd picked a thermal that was rising under a cumulonimbus cloud, not a cumulus cloud. And that meant I was being pulled into a building thundercloud. Whoa. cloud. Whoa. Yeah. And this was all because I had done what you're kind of talking about. I was like, I didn't want to, I wanted to be admired for my future thermal flying abilities, which were

nil. The thermal flying guru. You wanted him to smile upon you. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was, basically what was happening is I was being what we call cloud sucked. And I knew about it because it had happened to two champion paragliders not that much earlier. And one had died immediately. He'd gotten pulled up into the thundercloud and there's a storm going on in there. So his clothes were ripped off. His paraglider was ripped to shreds and he fell to his death. shreds and he fell to his death. And then during the same competition, another paraglider also got pulled out, I think into the same cloud and she was pulled up and lost consciousness. But her equipment stayed intact by some miracle. And she was spit out of the cloud at 32,000 feet. Whoa. Yeah. Do you have a chute on you? We have an emergency chute. Yeah. But for the guy that, you know, he lost consciousness and then everything's ripped to shreds, I don't, there was nothing that he could do.

For her, she was unconscious. I think her main chute was still intact for some reason. And there is just a big storm going on inside that cloud when this happens. But her ground crew could see all this and they could see how high she was based on her instrumentation. And she gained consciousness at about 10,000 feet, I think, and she managed to land. But I knew all this, so I knew what was happening. As soon as I look up and it starts to gray out and I see, oh my God, I can't, I'm not stopping like I should be. There's something that you can do, which is called

stalling your wing, which is basically making it not fly anymore, which is basically pulling it and it becomes nothing and you drop like a stone. And I had done this maneuver, but it's really scary. And back then the equipment was in, it's really in nascent stages. It was a very new sport for at least here in America. And I didn't want to do a stall. I was more scared of the stall than I was of being pulled into a thundercloud, which was not a smart move. Again, fear was not my friend at that time. It was making me think the wrong things. But when you reinflate it after a stall back then, you could never, first of all, everything could be tangled. You could fall into your wing. It was just, it was a move that was pretty pretty risky but so was getting pulled into a thundercloud yeah but

there's something unique about just falling right that's going to override your nervous system yeah it just was like no don't do that so i basically did uh i made my wing very tiny because that usually works. Tiny wing, you can just, but it didn't work. And I kept, now I was completely whited out. And I really had only milliseconds before, like, I don't know, I was going to reach whatever storm was in the cloud. And then I did what we call a spiral dive, which is in big ears, that tiny. I did this sort of radical diving maneuver and it got me out. Wow. What was the highest altitude that you were at?

I have no idea. You don't even know. No. Is that the kind of scariest thing that's happened in all your death-defying adventures? I felt so dumb after that. I felt so embarrassed that I had been so dumb. I should have seen that it was a building cumulonimbus. Yeah, I would say that was scariest in so many ways. Like I was scared of my own judgment. I was scared of the decisions I'd made. But, you know, ultimately I lived. So I guess I ultimately made the right decision, though I asked an instructor later, like I told him what had happened. And I said, this is these are the two moves I did together because I didn't want to do a stall. And he said, yeah, you could have

ripped your paraglider to shreds doing that kind of putting that kind of pressure on it. So you were just lucky. So that was all to say that I was trying to impress somebody. Yeah, I get it. From there, it doesn't seem like that big of a leap to get into the wingsuit flying, wingsuit jumping. Have you ever thought about doing that? Oh, have I thought about it? I'm obsessed with it. It's pretty cool. Oh, it's so cool. And no, I will never do it because I am, I, I'm just accident prone. I just, it's passed me by. I mean, I'm just accident prone. I just, it's passed me by.

I mean, if it had come into being when I was just a little younger, I would have picked it up. And it's kind of, thank God, thank God. It's so cool to watch those videos when they pop up like on my Instagram or whatever. And you see these guys, it's so just like elegant and graceful. And I'm sure it's unbelievably difficult

to master that discipline, but it's so fun to watch. It's, too. I mean, they're flying, they're going so fast. It's really interesting how we as humans want to keep just pushing edges because I think flying is kind of amazing. And now people in wingsuits, they want to fly as close to a hard object as possible. I know, they're going right, yeah, they're going through like ravines and coming very close to little, you know, kind of jutting promontories and things. What is that about us that we have to like keep making it, you know, supposedly everyone's like AI is going to make your life easier. Well, obviously that's not what we want. going to make your life easier. Well, obviously that's not what we want. We're going to start doing some weird, risky thing in order to make our life more difficult or scary or something.

I guess the conundrum of the human condition. But these days you're flying gyrocopters, you're riding your one wheel around San Francisco, you're surfing, and you're approaching your life a little bit differently as a result of this exploration that you've gone on, where it feels like adrenaline is being replaced with this pursuit of awe. Is that accurate? Yeah, I mean, it kind of snuck up on me. It really wasn't until I was writing this book that I realized how much I had changed from that sort of, I guess, daredevil youth. I flew. I didn't love the fact when I hit rough air or I was more about like seeing coyotes below me or coming upon a really cool beach as I was flying. And I have to say that part of me thought I was getting old, soft, boring, and it bothered me. It did bother me. But it wasn't until I was writing this book that I realized that it wasn't that I was getting old or soft. It was that I was getting more present in my life and I was searching for awe.

Thank you. Soul Boom a listen. I sit down with big thinkers, artists, philosophers, entertainers, and more exploring the existential questions we all grapple with. It's inspiring, soul nourishing, and we have a lot of laughs along the way. So subscribe to Soul Boom on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm going to interrupt Rich for a second and introduce myself. I'm Alexi Pappas, and I'm so excited to tell you about my new podcast, Mentor Buffet. The central question of Mentor Buffet is who influenced the people who influence us? I sit down with writers, athletes, musicians, and so many other influential people

to learn about the mentors who shaped their lives and the wisdom they've shared along the way. Mentors can change our lives if we let them. Let's all learn from each other. Tune into Mentor Buffet on YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts. It also feels like part of the discovery is realizing that it was awe all along

and you were under the misapprehension that it was adrenaline. And this is something that dawns upon you as a result of this wing walking experience that you have. Yeah, I was interested. So the book covers a lot of different outdoor adventures. It can be boogie boarding or bird watching, but it also entailed scuba diving with an 80 year old and wing walking. So it went sort of in terms of adrenaline, I guess it ran the spectrum. So someone sent me a video of this biplane flying and this gray-haired woman was in the front seat. And all of a sudden in the middle of the flight,

she gets up from the cockpit and climbs up on the wing. And I realized I had to talk to this woman. What she was doing, this thing called wing walking, which comes, it's not a thing we do these days, I'm just going to say, but it is from the barnstorming days in the 1920s. Didn't the FAA ban it recently? Yeah. Oh, yes.

And that was actually the place where I learned. But it's not low level flight. Like barnstorming was low level flight where they had wing walkers transferring from one plane to another in midair or going from a moving car to a moving plane. So when Cynthia Hicks was 71 when she did this, and she went to a place called Mason Wing Walking, the only place in the country that teaches this. And yes, they did recently, recently ban it, but not when I was writing this book. And I wanted to talk to Cynthia because I was interested in what a one-time sort of exciting adventure would do for our sense of self and our neural situation. Like, you know, when people go skydiving

and it sort of changes their perspective on things. So I wanted to talk to her and she said, yeah, I mean, you wouldn't believe the courage you get when you climb up on that wing. And I thought, oh, well, I guess I have to go do it. So I went to Mason Wing Walking to do a wing walking class. And what I expected, well, first of all, I was not happy about it because I'm a pilot. So I don't want to get out of a perfectly good cockpit onto the wing of a flying plane. But we practiced all morning, these sort of five moves. And I asked like, well, what's it like at 3,000 feet when you do it? And Marilyn Mason, who was our instructor and also 55 years old, which was, or yeah, she was about 50 something years old,

which was cool. She said, oh, don't worry. Like it's your muscle memory will take over when you're up there. You don't have to worry about it being 3,000 feet in the air. I was like, okay. So you're just being afraid of something that hasn't happened yet. Exactly. Thank you. So, um, yeah, so my turn came to go wing walking and the Michael Mason, who's the Maryland's husband takes us to 3000 feet000 feet and I'm not happy and I'm kind of nervous. What's the airspeed at that? Because I'm imagining the wind, like you step out onto the wing, you're not in a harness initially, right? No, you're just attached by a lanyard, by a rope. We are wearing a harness, but it's attached by this. In fact, this is a funny thing. They never told us what would happen. There was a rope that we were attached to the plane,

but they never said what would happen if we fell. You're just going to be dangling from this plane? Yeah, there was no... How are you supposed to land? I know. Oh, my God. None of us asked. We were too scared to ask.

Oh, my God. I know. But you're replaying the same mistake you made with the paragliding guy. Like, I would think with the firefight, like to be a pilot, to do all these things that you've done, like you have to be very rigorous with your checklist and things that you, you know, have to make sure that you're taking care of. Like, it's sort of shocking that you're not asking all the questions. Is it though? Is it?

I don't know. We're all sort of 10 years old inside. Yeah. So yeah, the wind is something they, they also failed to mention the wind and it makes a difference. I mean, you can stand up and suddenly the pilot's going about 60. He's, he's going, it's a biplane. He's flying pretty slow and he's in a gentle climb so that it can be balanced. She was right about the fact that you're you're sort of your mind is too um clogged with the your neural system is just trying to make you move do the next hand hold and the next leg move so fear really didn't come into it that much it was just a weird muscle memory and you're just sort of

and so i walk along the wing the way we were taught and then tie myself into the king post, which is his post in the middle of the wing. And yeah, there it is on the cover of the book. I'm just like, you have to, you climb up onto the top. That's just terrifying. I don't know how that works. Anyway, I interrupted you. Keep going. No, that's okay. I don't know how it works either. Just suddenly, I find myself there and we snap the seatbelt to the king post and the pilot starts to do loops, hammerheads, and barrel rolls. And I got to tell you, Rich, I went from the most surly wing walker to ecstatic. And after we landed, I knew adrenaline had been part of it, but there was something else.

And I didn't know what it was. And it turned out that what it was was awe. I had been jettisoned into awe. So awe is the feeling that we get in the face of something that's sort of bigger than us, mysterious. It's a feeling of wonder and fear and dread, a little dread. And it's really been associated with religious experiences. But it turns out that nature is also an awe trigger. And what had happened to me, basically basically is that, you know, awe is when you can't quite grasp what's going on. So it's like your neural system, all the patterns that you know

don't make sense. And it certainly didn't make sense to be doing loops in midair at 3,000 feet attached by this one skinny little belt. I mean, and I think just your brain is blown. And they call awe a reset button for the brain because it forces you to sort of update the templates that you have so far. And it makes us more open-minded and curious. It turns out awe is really good for us. Awe is so tricky for me to wrap my arms around. It's like this elusive concept that I only have brief flirtations with.

And I want more of it, but it's not something I can just go outside and spontaneously experience. and spontaneously experience. And I've always sort of thought of it as an antidote to self-obsession. You know, there is a humility to it, right? I think what is so salving about the awe experience is that it connects you with a sense of oneness and also really is telling you, like, you're not the center of the universe.

Like you may be, we were talking about this earlier, like we all want to be, you know, the hero and the hero's journey of our life. But there's sort of a self-focus to that that I think is also unhealthy. And what is healthy is a deeper appreciation and humility that we're not at the center of the universe and that there are many things at play here that allows you to kind of relax into your life and not take yourself so seriously. And then there's a transcendent piece to it. Like Arthur Brooks talks about this, like a big pillar of happiness is having a relationship with something transcendent for that same reason, that there's a humility to it. And when you can inhabit that, you can experience awe. But for me, awe occurs when I'm out in nature,

as you talk about in the book, like when I'm running or riding my bike, I have an elevated heart rate and I just have a deeper appreciation for what I'm experiencing in the moment because I'm more present with myself. But I still don't know that I fully could like define it. They did a study at UCSF where they took people between the ages of 60 and 80 and their goal was to cultivate awe.

was to cultivate awe. So the way they defined it is the feeling you get when you look at something with childlike wonder or fresh childlike eyes, I think was the instruction that they asked each of these volunteers

to do when they went on these 15 minute walks. It was for an eight week period. So they were to amble with fresh childlike eyes. And then they sent a control group out that goes out, walks like most of us, you know, worrying about our day, looking at our phones. And after that eight-week period, first of all, the all-walkers began to

self-report that they had less depression, less anxiety, and also other studies have shown that you have more compassion. So that's the interconnectedness part. The other thing they did, which really blew my mind, is that almost as an afterthought, they said to the all-walkers, hey, could you take a selfie during the walk? And initially, those selfies look like selfies usually do, the face right in the middle. But as the walks progressed, those selfies changed and the person got smaller and the background got bigger, which suggested to the scientists that the all walkers were becoming, without even themselves knowing, more curious about the world around them and sort of had a more healthier understanding of their place in the world, in the wider world. They call this the

small self perspective, where you understand yourself in relation to basically the universe. Yeah, it turns out that we live in a world of anti-odd devices. So our phone, our computer, all of it is narrowing our focus, making us the center of it and making us feel powerful and in control. And it turns out that's bad for us. Yeah. Well, I'm trying to get my head around this. trying to get my head around this. We all sort of lament, you know, if you spend time with young children and you're seeing, you know, awe in real time because everything is amazing because everything is brand new. And we lament like, wasn't it great when like everything was so exciting and just, you know, going down the street was like an amazing adventure that just made your life fantastic. And you're saying just simply by trying to kind of channel that you can reconnect with it. Like I'm trying to understand how I would actually

practice that. Yeah. Be amazed, like look closely, be present. It was funny because I did not understand this concept of all. I didn't really know that it was a word that would apply to me. And by the time I got to it, I was halfway through the book. But when I looked back on my adventures and I had been birdwatching, I mean, hang out with birdwatchers because they look at the same small brown bird with awe each time. And I also went on a walk with a woman who was 93 because I was just interested in movement. And she stopped at every leaf and she would stop and point and say, that's where a heron's nest used to be. And we would cut across people's yards so she could see whatever flowers they had. And what I realized is that we had been on an awe walk.

She was just more present and prepared to be amazed, like a birdwatcher. And I think that's, we're perfectly suited for awe now at this time in our lives. I don't think I could have embraced awe as a young person. I was going too fast. I was looking outward. I was looking at what other people were thinking of me too much. And I wasn't simply present to, you know, what was around me in a real way. You meditate. That's a sense of... Yeah. I mean, listen, you know, the adage is if you're completely present, like everything is awe-inspiring and amazing, right? The challenge is always like, can I get present enough to have those experiences? The modern world makes that difficult. It does. I mean, you definitely have to ditch the phone. And it's interesting the way also in this country, we're very much taught to go inside ourselves to make ourselves better,

you know, like meditation, I think, therapy, or at least to have things sort of done to us like massage and a spa. And awe is kind of the opposite of that. It's about being outward focused in a way, yeah, that we're not good at. And then in retrospect, like looking back over all the experiences that you've had, like looking back over all the experiences that you've had, is it that you realize you thought you were chasing some kind of adrenaline rush, but now you realize actually you were lured by what was behind that, which was this, you know, ability to connect with awe that those experiences provided.

I think so. I hope, I don't know. I mean, I have to look back, it's hard to know. Virtuous, you know, revisionist history, right? I will say that in the past, I'm happy to have a turbulence-free flight. I don't have to have an engine out that I tell everyone how I almost, because I've had those and had to make emergency landings. I can really find beauty in a very, what I would have considered sort of a fairly quotidian flight before. And I'm glad for that because that means everything has possibility. about the pillars, the five pillars around embracing our later decades that you've kind of divined through the journey you went on to write this book. Yeah. So, this book really is a quest about fulfilling aging. And I was sort of hoping outdoor adventure would be a key to that. That would be it. Yeah. and it is. I mean, now I think I've proved-

It does serve all of the five pillars. Yeah, and those are, we need them throughout our life, but they tend to fall away as we age. So we have to be really, really watchful that we keep them. And they are community, novelty, purpose, health. And then those came up a lot in various papers that I read. But then I added Becca you will be getting health but you also missing a key part of

what the outdoors offers in terms of that health the well-being aspect and you know because nature we can like talk a little bit about that too that yeah the physiological impact of being in a world where there's fractals and rounded corners everywhere. Totally. Turns out outdoor adventure covers all those pillars. And outdoor activity covers all those pillars. And you make an adventure by the way you approach it. That's another thing I learned is that I really had to get schooled through the writing of this book because I did change my definition of an outdoor adventure. Right. As much as it's fun to spend time with the base jumpers and the wing walkers, it was the bird watchers that really got you.

Yeah, it was the outdoor activities that I thought sort of didn't really qualify as adventure, but I was going to go do it. But I need to make this book for everybody. I realized like, you know, my firefighting thing isn't for every 65 year old woman who's going to read this book. Or flying a gyrocopter. Did you sort of explore that begrudgingly? Like, you know, like, well, I guess I'll go do this, but this is probably not going to make its way into the book. Well, no, I kind of knew, for instance, so walking outdoors. I wanted movement in the book. I wanted to talk about how important just mare movement was and walking is something we could do as we aged. And of course, when I went on this walk with Dot Fisher Smith, who was 93, I began to realize there's just so much more than just movement to this. And it wasn't an adventure, I thought, but it had to be in the book because we could all do it. Well, it turns out that it was an adventure. I mean, walking with Dot Fisher Smith, who basically, like I said, first of all, she cuts across everybody's yard, so you're totally in danger of being shot. She wanted grass under her feet the whole time.

You're totally in danger of being shot. She wanted like grass under her feet the whole time. But she also, you know, again, as I said, stops and looks at everything. She quotes poetry. I didn't know where we were going. I thought we were going to go in a straight line to this pond. And we ended up going in this very vertiginous way because she wanted, she just went where the universe seemed to tell her to go, basically. Adventure is up to you to define.

It doesn't have to be some peak experience. It's a peak experience for you. So as long as it's tapping your inner explorer and you're feeling exhilaration and there's some physical vitality and maybe a little pushing your comfort zone, it's an adventure for you. So we're gonna have different,

so it's not about the activity itself, I guess is what I'm saying. It's about the way you approach and absorb that activity. The novelty piece is interesting. Obviously, when you're engaging your mind in something new, you're creating new neural pathways. It's good for cognition, brain health, all these sorts of things. But as we get older, like I'm just thinking about dating, for example, like the older I can't imagine dating now, like the older I get, the more set in my ways I am and the kind of less tolerance I have for doing things that I don't want to do. You know, it's like, no, I just don't have time to do anything that like, at my age, like, I'm only going to choose to invest in things that, you know, I like doing basically, I guess out of your comfort zone and putting yourself in situations that you wouldn't otherwise.

And they don't have to be huge leaps, but they do have to be new kind of challenges is maybe the wrong word, but experiences that are fresh. I actually think, I mean, while we know the science says our brains are plastic and they keep growing, we still use that excuse, I'm too old. So there's part of us that believes that we are, our brain is too hardened. But that's not true. And we can learn. When I was doing this book, I asked people, when was the last time you learned something new?

And my friends were all like not really not recently and part of it is because we we think we know who we are and we do and that's good but embracing something new can be can open up your life in ways so i i interviewed vijaya srivastava who learned to swim at 68 you know that's that's a feat right yeah it's hard it's hard to learn how to swim at 68. You know, that's a feat, right? Yeah. It's hard. It's hard to learn how to swim. And she didn't do it because she wanted to be a better person and she wanted her brain to have laid out new neural pathways. She basically did it because her doctor said, hey, you need to get some exercise. I don't think I've ever met anybody who had

less experience in the outdoors. She didn't even have a walking practice, not even a tiny one. She grew up in India and she told me that she played badminton like three times and that was it. And when she moved to the United States, she still didn't. But somehow, and again, this happened a lot with women who picked up an outdoor activity later in life. It often happened at an inflection point. So a time in their life where they were sort of open to this idea of doing something that they didn't think fit their identity. When a doctor says you need, you know, to get some exercise, often older people do that. And so she had a pool at her condominium complex and she had seen people, kids in there having fun. She just didn't think it was for her. And so she started taking swim

lessons. It's a cool story. But my favorite story or chapter in the book is the one around your mom. Yeah, mine too. Not only does she decide to go skydiving at 54. 52, I think. 52, which is a crazy story because she decided she didn't want to do a tandem jump like she wanted to go full bore and this is like she's not exactly you right like this was no not in her comfort zone at all no no she had no she was not an outdoors person at all but i think more striking is when she takes up cycling later on and how that changes her life. Yeah, she moved to a new town at 62 and she had broken up with her boyfriend of 20 years. So this again was an inflection point. And she didn't know anyone in the town and she had a bicycle and there was a group and she thought maybe this is a this is more of a distraction for her so that she could sort of settle in and she surprised herself by

loving biking cycling and we saw the change in her through this as her kids I don't think we were prepared to give her the the acclaim that she deserved for such a big undertaking, like starting a whole new physical thing. She was someone who thought of herself as someone who was not brave. She actually thought she was not brave, a very timid person. And yet here she was taking up bicycling at 62. And she began to plan rides. She became an integral part of this group, healthier, stronger, more confident. There was this virtuous feedback loop when everyone heard about her trips that, again, she was upending her own expectations of herself. And that's really powerful. and that's really powerful.

I love that after she did the skydive jump, she got the sticker from the school or whatever and put it on the car, and then wouldn't cop to the fact that she just wanted to flex a little bit while she drove around town. We teased her too, and that was very nice of us. We're like, oh, mom, so you want to tell everyone you're... She's like, no, I just want to know that I can, it makes it easier to find my car in a parking lot.

But then she tells you later that the plane that she jumped out of, like some weeks later crashed and people died. The whole Danish skydiving team, who she had been in the plane with when she did her her jump they had been in there with her and they died a couple weeks later when that plane crashed yeah i think it just cemented i mean it was a terrible thing and she told it to me in such a matter of fact way i mean she is british it kind of cemented that what she had done was very brave and i asked her if that, that's again, one thing. And how does that change you? Well, she had, she sort of had not just jumped out of a plane, but she sort of jumped a chasm of her own understanding of herself. Like suddenly it wasn't that she was a brave person.

She didn't think that, but she had now done a brave thing. And that I do draw a through line from that moment to when she picked up a bicycle, because I feel like anytime you do those things, they just keep... They build on each other, right? Would she have picked up cycling had she not jumped out of a plane? Who knows, but maybe less likely. But the other piece, well, two thoughts. First of all, the other piece well two thoughts first of all the other piece with cycling is the community piece like that that's the other pillar because she's not riding alone she's with this group right she's part of this this club and she's getting to know all these people her age in a town where she didn't know anybody and what she loves about it is that unlike a cocktail party

like if she doesn't like anybody she can just like the person she's talking to you right away and it's it's true like you can have a conversation but then you can be like then you can just like stop talking it's not all the etiquette around like heightened social situations parties and stuff like that is not present in that and it just makes it kind of easier to be with people in a more natural way. And then of course you have nature. So it's like serving all of these masters at once. But together, like the skydiving and the cycling, to your point, is fueling the mindset piece, which, you know, is that not the most important one, right?

How we think about ourselves and what is our relationship with our aging bodies? Yeah, I think our beliefs can be really hidden. And so they can start working on us in ways we don't know. So when you step outside, you don't have to be like, I'm about to change my belief. It just kind of, just by doing it. And it turns out what I realized is when I began writing this book, I was talking to friends and I could see that they were very disheartened about their own aging. And actually, I wasn't. And it wasn't until I started interviewing my mom again that I realized, oh, she's been my own Dr. Ellen Langer prime. Like she's been that prism through which I've seen aging and that filter,

and it's good. I mean, I saw my mom blossom at a later age and really embrace life and have a community and feel a part of something and become more social than she ever had, become more expressive of emotions than she ever had. And so she herself was my own positive, subliminal aging message. Now she has Parkinson's. She does, yeah. I mean, but she rode until what, she was 80? Almost 80, yeah. And really fun trips. We were like, wow, this is aging? They'd go and do these weekend trips at these cool places. And yeah, it was really inspiring.

Not that I would have told her that at the time. Let's spend a minute on purpose. Sure. Because I think that becomes an increasingly acute crisis with people as they get older, when they start to lose a sense of what their purpose is. Yeah, it's one of the big things, I think. I mean, you know, you've retired, kids are out of the house, and certainly as women we're dropped in a very gray area of what we're supposed to do. I was interested in purpose when I interviewed Louise Holey, who was a scuba diver, because she did a lot of her scuba diving, she did for

nonprofits. So she would count kelp stipe, because kelp is actually endangered now. It's under a lot of pressure now because of climate change. And she would count fish at, areas. And she picked up trash in Lake Tahoe. And Lake Tahoe is like 41 degrees or 47 degrees. It's incredibly cold and difficult to dive. And so she said that that, you know, gave her a sense of purpose and belonging. So if somebody's listening to this and they're of that age or nearing that age and starting to wonder, you know, what purpose might look like, how does one explore that? It looked different with every activity that I went to explore, but there was always an element of purpose. So when I was boogie boarding, this one woman I spoke to

had had cancer. And when she recovered, she told herself that what she wanted to do was make sure that she lived life fully and that she helped others live life fully. And then incidentally, she joined the wave chasers. And she told me, in fact, boogie boarding, it completely fulfills that purpose. Because here I am in the water with people, and we're completely present to the elements and each other, and we're having so much fun. And so her purpose was being played out right there. So I suppose it's a reflection on how you can marry some kind of outdoor activity that fulfills that need to feel purposeful in your day. Like I'm just trying to get a sense of like how one might define that for themselves. And let's say, like your mom, never done anything. This is all very scary. But, you know, I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my time. The kids are gone. How do I even get off the couch here and take that first step? Well, I mean, with my mom, she was head biking, so she

knew that the purpose that she was fulfilling actually was, it sounds kind of banal, but it's actually really important. She was part of this group and she would help plan the rides and she's like part of the experience for everybody. And that's actually what life's about. Like those small, very powerful interactions you have with others who you like or love. But I would say that when you sort of try to go out and find purpose, it can be kind of difficult. Yeah, it's daunting. Yeah. I am looking for my purpose.

Right. I think it's like developing a reflex towards action, you know, like just doing things. And purpose kind of evolves as a product of exploring novelty and adventure and all of the other things that you talk about. Well, yeah, like for instance, Virginia Rose, who I interviewed, who was a bird watcher. And I was interested in bird watching because it wasn't an adventure, at least so I thought. But it was something that most of us could do as we aged because it's bird watching. most of us could do as we aged, because it's birdwatching. And Virginia Rose actually had been in a wheelchair since she was 14. And she found birdwatching quite late and completely head over heels in love with it. She was a firecracker of a woman and people were surprised

that she would like birdwatching, but she really found herself in birdwatching. And then she found her purpose, which was to introduce birdwatching to other people with disabilities. So she has her own nonprofit called Birdability, where she takes people outside. But she wasn't looking for purpose. I mean, she was already an English teacher. She probably had a lot of purpose in her life too. But now at 65, I think she has a lot of purpose in her life too but now at 65 i think she is she has a lot of purpose i mean she introduces people she opens up people's lives in ways that i mean none of us do yeah that's beautiful yeah let's talk about nature and the benefits of you know immersing ourselves in the outdoors yeah i mean i knew I felt good after I came

in from the outdoors, but again, like there's, I knew so little when I started this book. And when I started to do research, one of my first interviews was with Sean Brokman, who's a base jumper. And she is 52. She's not what you think a base jumper should be. She's a kindergarten teacher. She's a grandmother. She's African-American. She's female. She's 52. And I was really interested in talking to her. I actually didn't think I would include in the book, frankly, because it was too adventurous. Right, too extreme. It was the one thing I didn't do. Unrelatable. But it happened to coincide with when we were having the fires. Well, okay. That could be any time now, but there was a series of

really bad fires in California that was completely blanket in the air and the visibility would drop to very little. And we were in the pandemic and I was depressed. And I went to accompany Sean. I was her ground crew on a base jump with her and her husband and a friend. And after two days in a national park, I felt so much better. And that's really when I started to do research on the medicinal aspects of getting outside. So it's great to work out in a gym, but there's nothing like being outside when you work out or for well-being. So the science is pretty unequivocal. I mean, from the tree chemicals that are emitted that lower our cortisol and our blood pressure to birds song that improves our memory and improves our mood. And they think that that's because if birds are singing, our sort of reptilian brain knows that

there's no predators about, so we relax. Oh, that's wild. There's so much busyness that our brain has to do, so much filtering of noise it has to do in a more urban environment or indoors or when you're on your computer, that we're constantly at this sort of low level anxiety. It takes up a lot of space. And it turns out that people who take a walk outside in green space, when they come back, they test better on memory and cognitive tests because your brain isn't working that hard. We need rest. A workout is useless unless you're resting at some point and rebuilding, and that's what our brain needs.

The other thing is that I found really interesting is that the soft shapes of nature, like horizon lines and hills, and the fractal elements of nature match well with our retinal structure. And that means that there's a lot of ease in processing when we're outside. So again, a lot of rest for the brain. So on all these different levels, going outside is really important for our physiology and our well-being. On the one hand, it's very affirming to hear all that. And on the other hand, I'm thinking human beings are insane. Like we have to do science on this to figure out whether being outdoors is good. You know? for this well-being experiment because they realize their citizens are completely stressed.

So not only that, do they put aside green space, but there's signs to tell us what to do on this trail. Like maybe now you should like look at this incredible lake and do some stretches and some breathing. Like we're ridiculous. Identify the fractals. Yeah, exactly. Stare at the fractal nature of that.

But it's cool that science can actually verify this with like metrics saying look it lowers your blood pressure or you know the bird song thing is wild and you know it is allowing rushing water the yeah it's relaxing you know the frenetic brain waves and allowing your brain to kind of heal and reset and reboot yeah it's really important and sadly I mean, this is the kind of science we need to tell people because they've done a lot of studies on what happens when nature begins to recede to people and it's our health just diminishes very, very quickly. I mean, the deaths rise in that area when you start logging trees. And part of it is that, yes, you know, the CO2 exchange is different,

but it's a lot of different things interacting, including our depression. You've said that this book is your version of a climate change book. It's sort of betwixt in between the lines, though. Yeah, because there's people who can do the climate change stuff better than me and with more authority and credibility. But I guess my exhortation is to get outside. But also, we won't save something unless we love it and we think we need it. And so that's where Tough Broad falls. Carrying on the family tradition of activism.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Can we talk a little bit about writing process? Yeah, I'd love to. When do you know that you have an idea that's worthy of a book? So when I wrote, I wrote Lost Cat, which is this tiny, tiny book illustrated by my lovely, lovely ex-wife, Wendy McNaughton. And I love that book so much. But initially, that book was actually a proposal that I sent out about, it was a book I wanted to write after I had a really bad accident in one of my experimental aircraft. after I had a really bad accident in one of my experimental aircraft. I was on the couch for like three months, but I was immobile and very restricted for about a year. And I was really interested in injury and depression and illness. Sounds exciting, right? So I would tell this story of my being on the couch and being depressed and the interplay of painkillers with people's eyes,

which is glaze over. Yeah, exactly. And then I would come to this moment in my story where my cat disappears and how my cat disappeared for five weeks. And I went, I was really depressed and sad. And then he came back and then I went crazy. And I went on this series of where did my cat go? And I put a GPS camera on him and I put a video camera and I went to an animal communicator to find out where he went when he was gone. And I was telling the story to these people because I wanted to show how crazy I was. And again, depression, illness, and their eyes just lit up at the cat part, nothing else but the cat part. And I was like, oh, that's the book I should write. So partly it's, you know, you got to sort of claw your way out of your own stuff and write the book that other people are interested. Like, I'm not that artist who just writes for herself.

I am actually trying to communicate. With Tough Broad, I knew that this was not going to be a book of biopics of, you know, cool women. It is that, too. It is individual stories of women. Was that part of the initial idea? Like, I'm going to just find all these badass women? Never. Never.

I never wanted to write that book, but I had to be really careful, and I could not find my way into that. It took me a long time to make sure I was writing a book that was actually about fulfilling aging and the outdoors and all those themes, and then the women would just bring that to life. bring that to life. So, it's sort of a process of understanding what would speak to people. It's that spark in their eye. Part of your process is participating in this writer's group, right? The Writer's Grotto. So, I'm really curious, like what what need does that fulfill? Is it accountability, feedback? Is it just community like being with other people who are, you know, fighting the fight and in that struggle? I'd written Fighting Fire, but I had known no writers really before that. And then suddenly I'm around writers and it's partly that we just want to get out of our pajamas during the day and go to an office space. So the Writer's Grotto was definitely an office space that I went to. After the pandemic, that's kind of changed, but it's also knowing what's possible, seeing it in another person. So the Grotto is kind of amazing in how many New York Times bestsellers, how many Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award people it's actually had in its halls.

And I don't think that's because when I started, there was just nine of us and nobody was a writer of any note. And now it's like Poe Bronson, Mary Roach, Noah Hawley. These were all grotto people who were nobodies initially. Of course, we're all at one point nobodies, but there's something about people in a group that can be really bad if it's really homogenous and it can be scary because I think we can become very insulated. But there's also some really powerful things that can come out of people together in a group. It's this energy of seeing what's possible, again, when somebody else does it. they'll start being friends with somebody who's a nonfiction writer and then they become an incredible nonfiction writer. I mean, yeah, it's partly energetic. It's partly, maybe it's mindset that suddenly you have a positive view about. Right. All these other people seem to be doing

it. Like, why can't I? Like it raises the floor on and the ceiling on what you, what might be possible for you. And we trade knowledge. Like we trade numbers. Are there like meetings? Is it like a, are there formal like sessions where you're sitting down and sharing stuff? Or is it just people in a kind of co-working space where informally like you're talking to each other? It's a little, I mean, you know, we have to have chores and sort of make the place run, but the co-creativity happens more informally. Like you start, you meet people at lunch and you realize, oh, wow, that's cool what they're doing. I mean, one of the things that keeps writers down is that we don't talk plainly about our advances and the way, you know, people are rejecting our work. The business part. Yeah, because, and I think the publishing industry can keep us down by, you know, not, we don't know what the bar should be for our advance.

And people accept advances that are way too low for who they are. So I think the grotto is really, first of all, it has a motto of all boats. What is it? That dumb thing that we all know. Yeah, that I'm supposed to know raises all boats and that is even though i don't know the quote that is what we believe who knows who said that yeah we try not to be competitive at all and be and we all show up for each other's readings and there's just a sense like we're here for you because otherwise writing is a lonely business you

know sure you know it's like you're in that- Yeah, that's cool. I'm jealous. I would love to be part of something like that. It's inspiring. And it's always tricky, like who are the people that I'm gonna reach out to for feedback? Who are the people that I should avoid for that reason? Like you have to be careful about these things and choose your allies judiciously.

And when you work with them, you start to know, you know, who's who and, you know, what they can offer. So, Bonnie is one of my... I was going to ask, is Bonnie part of the group? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's how I met her. And we surf together. She's an amazing surfer, much better than me. But she's also one of my first readers and I am hers. That's cool. We're talking about bonnie soy who wrote uh why we swim who was on the podcast a couple years ago yeah she's she's lovely beautiful yeah yeah cool final thing about writing so on a day-to-day process

like what does it look like how much of it is out? How much of it is outlining? How much of it is free form? How much of it is putting on the editor's brain? Like, how do you break that down into like a schedule? I'm pretty disciplined, so I don't worry about getting a book done. I probably shouldn't say that because I often don't worry about getting a book done. But in order to crack a book, I need to understand its structure. So that's what I work on first. And in order to do that, I just start writing and I'm okay if it's terrible because I'll start understanding the structure of it. So the structure of Tough Broad, for instance, is based on parts of the mind, body, spirit, you know, so it's sort of the body, the human. That's how I structured it, even though it's dealing with community, purpose,

health, novelty, but it's situated in things like the brain, you know, the brain section has memory, but it also has novelty in it. So once I have the structure and then I have to have the voice. So finding the voice. And again, that just means I'm writing and it's just a rough draft. And I'm not afraid to write badly because I don't really have high expectations of myself. Luckily, again, like that thing that I'm not necessarily good at everything, but I'm just dogged. So, and then I, they have a deadline. So I'm very much somebody who, I don't do words by day, because sometimes that means that I can't fly or I can't one wheel or, but I have a deadline and that deadline, I meet that deadline because I'm very much somebody who's goal oriented. I know you are too. Like I need to write it down. I need to see it.

It's a how many by when. So I need to have, you know, this book needs to be done by, you know, August 5th. Right, right. Pilots don't miss deadlines. No. By nature, right? Exactly, exactly. Exactly. Are you already at work on the next one? Do you know what the next one is?

Yes, I can. Yeah, of course we want to go what is the we were talking about this at the outset but i still i'm not sure like how far can you fly before you have to refuel well you kind of only want to fly about an hour and a half in the air because it's open cockpit and you're constantly, you know, your brain is working hard and so is your body from all the wind and the sun. So every hour and a half, I find a little airport to land in and refuel. So getting to Salt Lake is, that's Salt Lake, that's a big trip. I think so.

You're stopping every hour, hour and a half, right? Yeah, in a trip, when I went to Sedona, I probably stopped at 20 airports. Yeah, very cool. All right, well, final thoughts on the book and this notion of, you know, embracing the beauty and the possibilities that abound as we enter into our 50s and 60s and beyond. Again, for the person who's new to these ideas or is entertaining the possibility of welcoming some novelty and some nature into their lives? Like, again, like, what

is the first impulse? Is it taking a walk? Is it calling a friend and saying like, hey, let's go on a hike? So, it's a small step, whatever it is. Don't suddenly go wing walking. But Shawn Brokman, the base jumper, is also a personal trainer. And she trains women who are often older women over 40, 50, 60. And she often asks them, what did you do when you were a kid? What did you like when you were a kid? And sometimes that can hold the key to what maybe you will like now. But it might just be as simple as, oh, I have a friend who does X. She has a little sit-on-top kayak, and I could go with her in trying that. Bring a friend, because that really helps to be accountable. But just get outside any way you can, and get outside further the next time.

Excellent. Beautifully put. The book is tough broad. It's a real act of service. I think it's a vital book that is very much of the moment. And I appreciate you writing it. Thanks. I really appreciate you. As I reflect on my own

with 60 in my near horizon. Everyone's going to say this is the best decade. Yeah, I feel, I'm happy. Like, I'm as happy as I've ever been. See? Yeah. Like, I'm-

I can't wait for that book, Rich. Can you write the book that I couldn't write? Because, you know, I was like, well, I think I'm just going to, I mean, men get a lot out of this book, but maybe they're waiting for you to write a version. Yeah. I'm working on one. It's a little bit different than that, but we can talk about it. If you, can I make a guest appearance

at the Writer's Grotto? They let you in? Or is it like, is it like the Bohemian Grove or something like that? It's like shrouded in secrecy. Anyway, we can chat about that later. But anyway, thank you for coming today.

I just want to, you know, acknowledge like the work that you're doing on behalf of not just women, but everybody. And it's really a beautiful accomplishment. So thank you. I really appreciate you, Rich. Thanks.

Thank you. Cheers. Cheers. Peace. This episode was brought to you by ag1 try ag1 and get a free one-year supply of vitamin d3 plus k2 and five free ag1 travel packs with your first subscription at drinkag1.com slash rich roll that's drink for today. Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free.

To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com slash sponsors. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our

creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davey Greenberg. Graphic and social media assets, courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love. Love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Thank you.