The Rich Roll Podcast - The Extended Bravey Universe of Alexi Pappas: Reinvention, Joy & Glitter

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

How do you ignite evolution? How do you find your purpose? And how do you have the confidence to pursue it? Here to imbue our lives with more joy, glitter, and play is the highly inspiring and energetic Alexi Pappas, back for round two on the podcast. If you missed her standout first appearance back in early 2021, Alexi is a former Olympic track and field athlete and Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters. She’s also a poet, a performer, an award-winning filmmaker, and author of the critically acclaimed bestselling memoir Bravey. Her feature film resume includes some variation of writing, co-writing, directing, and/or starring in Not an Artist with RZA, Olympic Dreams with Nick Kroll, and Tracktown with Rachel Dratch. Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, Outside Magazine, and Sports Illustrated. And she’s recently penned a new version of Bravey (Adapted for Young Readers). My first exchange with Alexi centered on what it takes to execute at the highest level of sport and art simultaneously and the challenges she faced pursuing two very different dreams. Today we go further, exploring her new relationship with running as a former pro, her goals as a professional in the creative arts, and her soon-to-be-released new podcast, Mentor Buffet. We also discuss how she’s inspiring women and girls to fall in love with movement, mental health in sport, and how mentorship has informed her life and career. Alexi also drops some wisdom gold—sharing actionable tools for growth like her ‘blank whiteboard rule’, something she calls ‘glop’, and many more mindset gems. Alexi is a delightful and wise role model—and this conversation is more than time well spent. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: seed.com/RICHROLL Athletic Brewing: athleticbrewing.com/RICHROLL Roka: Roka.com/RICHROLL Inside Tracker: InsideTracker.com/RICHROLL Momentous: Momentous.com/RICHROLL Squarespace: Squarespace.com/RICHROLL Peace + Plants, Rich

What overtook me was the sheer excitement of a wide open road in New York City. And I was like, I don't want to run in a straight line. Over the course of 100 miles, you need to make a bajillion decisions. You need to make them quickly and you need to not overthink them. And you need to just keep moving. How do you figure out what your evolution is? And how do you have the confidence to do it? I think I know how to do that. Do you want to know? Alexi Pappas. This is a person who knows a thing or two about what it takes to

execute at the highest level with a light dusting of glitter on top. And today she's back for a dive into her, what I call the extended Bravey universe. Alexi is a former Olympic track and field athlete, Greek national record holder in the 10,000 meters, but she's also a poet, a performer, a writer, and also an award-winning filmmaker. Her critically acclaimed memoir, Bravey, was a smash bestseller. Her feature film resume includes some variation of writing,

co-writing, directing, and or starring in films such as Olympic Dreams with Nick Kroll and a film called Trackdown with Rachel Dratch. And she's working on a soon-to-be-released new podcast that I'm very excited about called Mentor Buffet. We discuss her interest in inspiring women and girls to fall in love with sport, plus a few cool growth tools that she shares, like something that she calls GLOP. Alexi is a delight. She's just a breath of fresh air with the right amount of bubbles and one of my favorite people. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great amount of bubbles and one of my favorite people. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with the great Alexi Pappas.

And ready sight. It's so good to see you. Thank you for coming back. I'm so happy to see you. And I think the first time we met here, I didn't live so close to you. So it felt like a more of a journey, but now it feels like you're a neighbor. Yeah. Yeah. And we've become friends ever since then, which has really been fun. I was reflecting back on, on your first appearance here. A lot has changed since then. In that conversation, we talked extensively about not just your athletic career, but also your creative career as a filmmaker, as an author, as a writer, as a poet, et cetera, and how you balance those two worlds and devote appropriate amounts of attention to achieve your goals and, you know, two kind of really ambitious pursuits that have sort of defined your public-facing life.

But it was also a really interesting moment of transition for you uh you came in you were on crutches oh yeah remember that and nobody knew and nobody knew you were like i don't want to talk about the fact that i'm injured because at that moment you were still technically a professional athlete yeah as far as you know the broader world was concerned. And you were trying in real time to figure out where you were going to head, right? Like, were you going to hang on to being a professional? Were you going to let go of that and have a looser relationship with running and go full bore more into the filmmaking, et cetera? And that was kind of gestating, I think, in your mind at that time.

And, you know, now it's pretty clear the decisions you've made and the kind of path that you've been blazing, but it wasn't so clear then. it was a full hamstring reconstruction surgery that I wasn't ready to share about yet and I remember feeling very safe with you because I knew that you understood like the athletic side of life and also the like kind of public facing side but I was scared I was a little, you know, I don't know if scared was the right word, but I was very thoughtful about to talk about it. And I think that's something that we're allowed to have in privacy. We're allowed to like take the time to figure out what story we want to tell about ourselves before we tell it. And that privacy can be like a superpower if you let yourself have it sometimes. Sure. But I think it's also a reflection of what goes on in your brain when you're a professional athlete versus just, you know, somebody else, right?

Like how are the sponsors going to, you know, react to me saying I'm injured right now? What does that mean in terms of contracts and how the professional running world is going to perceive me, et cetera? Now with your relationship with running, it's like, who gives a shit, right? Like, you're doing it for very different reasons, right? So, those factors don't, I mean, you still work with brands, et cetera, but they don't come into play in the

same kind of way that they would have had you been, you know, kind of trying to go back to the Olympics, for example. Yes. Well, it's funny because, like, when you're a kid and you break your arm, the cast is like a sign of achievement in a way, right? Like everyone signs your cast. But if you're an athlete, it's a little... You're kryptonite. Yeah, it's like bad. Somebody might catch a break if they stand too close to you. athletes don't share about that stuff is because we're so often playing defense as athletes. Like, you're defending whatever you've done for most of the present. You're, like, defending what you did and you're defending, like, maintaining a narrative that people, that you want to have

about yourself. And so I think the shift that I made was, it actually happened after, I don't know when we recorded that, but sometime after that, I had a conversation with Richard Linklater. And he said very firmly but lovingly that I was playing defense about my athletic career. And what he meant was that I was carrying on a narrative of like, maybe I'll compete in the Olympics, like maybe I'll compete again. And he was like, it's time for you to start playing offense and put out into the world what you really want to be doing, whatever it is, and then see who will go with you. athlete and then he transitioned into the arts and he was right that we need to play offense in our life in general and not be defending a narrative that like might be antiquated for us. That's so interesting. I didn't know Richard Linklater was an athlete. I mean, we should point out for people that don't know Richard Linklater, acclaimed legendary filmmaker, boyhood, slackers. I mean, he's made a million movies, right? And kind of a mentor to you, right? Was he a runner? I didn't know that he was an athlete. He wasn't a runner. He was a

baseball player. That's reflected in some of his movies. And there were health reasons why he didn't pursue baseball at like a MLB level, for example, because he's an amazing athlete. And when he realized, when he decided to make the shift into the arts, he, you know, and he can certainly share this somewhere himself, but he went and worked in the oil industry and saved money where a lot of people I think can stay there forever, which is fine. And he saved money to transition into the arts. And when he felt like he was stable enough, he went and made his first movie. And that might be a really simplified version of it, but essentially he was playing offense, right?

He was creating a space for himself to make that transition. And then he made a leap. And I really admire it because it's like, it's hard to do two things at the highest level in your life, but it's fun to try. I think you're doing it.

You're doing a pretty good job. Yeah. I think when you're an athlete or a professional athlete, there's a certain machinery and institutionalization at play that ends up defining that narrative for you. Like you have to really be extremely proactive to construct a narrative that is somewhat askew to whatever narrative is appropriate for the times that you're clocking and the podiums that you're on or not on, right? Amidst like a circuit of races that kind of dictate like who you are in the pecking order of your particular sport. And you as a writer and a poet and all the stuff and all the fun, creative stuff that you do, like shouldering that responsibility to be proactive

about creating a different narrative somewhat inside that system, but also outside of it is a creative challenge, but also it's kind of scary too, because then it's on you. And then you have to be, like I just did a podcast with Arnold Schwarzenegger and he has this whole thing about sell, sell, sell. Like you have to be in charge of your own story. You can't expect people to see

your story the way that you do or care about whatever it is that you're trying to get them to care about unless you're out in front of people telling them about it. So that's very similar to what Linklater is saying. Like, how can you be in control of that story? Well, I was just thinking about how people see us, right? Because people, I think when they see us, they see, it's almost like they are making paintings of a photograph of us. Like, they're creating a more, their own impression of what they saw or see.

So people won't grow us up for us, except sometimes like a mentor or a coach, right? There are people in our lives who see beyond this moment for us, but that's not most people. Most people, I think, see you where you are and they see that repeating infinitely like when a mirror looks at itself

and it's repeating infinitely. And so when we wanna get out of that repeating mirror, we're lucky to have a coach or a mentor to help us see what the next thing might be or a best friend or a partner. But we are also capable of breaking out of that mirror image ourselves by simply taking steps in a different direction and doing it with full commitment. And that's like the main thing I

think is not doing it as if the ground is made of ice. You have to do it as if- Deliberately. Yeah. Yeah. It's harder to do without a coach though. And when you're an athlete and you're used to having somebody right at your shoulder all the time giving you the hard feedback as conscious as it could be because you're trying to solve that, you know, whatever dilemma you find yourself in with the same mind that created it in the first place without that outside input. Yes. So the question is, how do you figure out what the next thing is? How do you figure out what your evolution is? And how do you have the confidence to do it? And how do you have the confidence to do it?

And how do you know what to do in order to get it? Right? There's those three things. And so how do you do that? I think I know how to do that. Do you want to know? Please explain. What I think. This is why you're here. I think, first of all, all change happens a lot slower than we think. And that's why when people see people they admire or they read books about transformation, I think they can often be misleading and make people think that change is like a right turn when like the right turn is usually happening in a series of very, very, very, very tiny steps. happening in a series of very very very very tiny steps and you know you you and I are close enough friends I think you've seen smaller steps of mine like for you to even see the leg brace

means you saw a small step that people just won't see they won't see the step where I wasn't sure about sharing it I think big changes happen very, very slowly. And accepting that is super important because when I see people whip their life around when they think they want a big change, it usually either spirals them into depression or it's not an effective way to actually make the change. Or it leaves them with like a tangible change, but not the time to like emotionally change with it so to evolve as a person um so that i think is the first thing then as far as what are you doing so let's say you feel like you need to change then it's like what is the change where am i headed what do i do or what is the identity i want to shift or whatever it is there's been two things that have been

helpful to me that i'll share one was an exercise that Deepak Chopra took me through in like this small seminar that I did. And I'm sure he's shared it elsewhere. But basically, we were in this room and he was asking us to ask ourselves questions without reaching for the answer. without reaching for the answer. So in order to figure out answers, basically you simply keep asking the question without reaching for the answer. So the question might be, what is my purpose? Right? And the goal was just to simply keep saying, what is my purpose? What is my purpose? What is my purpose? Without trying to reach for the purpose. Because when we reach, we're often reaching for something like an occupation or something in the tangible world and it's too like contextualized in the world but when we just ask and like wait it was so cool because for me what came to mind was like

hugging 21 year old girls and saying this is gonna sound weird and saying everything's gonna be going to be okay. And like, everything's going to be okay. And everything's going to be okay. And like, that's not a job, but it felt like a purpose to help people feel okay. And it did feel accurate. And that felt like the first step was to pull our evolution out of the material world or the world as we know it, and to make it more of an idea first. I love that. I mean, I think that speaks to trying to identify the emotional experience, to extend your example, of what it feels like when your life feels like it has purpose, right? If you were living a life of purpose, what would come to mind as a behavior or an activity or an emotion that would evoke that in you?

And then you can kind of build on that almost or reverse engineer. How do I get to the experience where I'm hugging 21-year-old girls and telling them that it's going to be okay, right? And it's interesting because that's what you do now, like in this extended bravey universe that we find ourselves in that I wanna talk about. But I also think it is athletics and sport that teaches you the importance of patience and iteration in terms of making a change because you show up for practice every single day and some days don't go so well,

back to the rule of thirds, some days go great and a lot of them are just kind of in the middle. And you learn to just show up and do the thing and do your best, but detach from the larger kind of outcomes of what that might mean and the trajectory of your career. And you just do it and you do it and you do it and you do it. And then that right-hand turn is a result of all of those, you know, bazillion actions compounded that starts to arc a little bit more severely than the kind of slow growth, right? And that's what you learn for a career of being an athlete, but it's so applicable to every other aspect of your life, whether you want to make a

change or, you know, alter your career or, you know, step back and entertain the possibility of finding a more purposeful way of living. Like, that's really a potent and powerful way to approach it. Yeah. I always like put myself in the shoes or the chair of someone who's like, okay, cool. I've asked myself this question. I have this abstract idea. Now, what do I do with it? Because as an athlete, I prefer instruction and I prefer like steps and actions. And so I feel like I can't leave people with just laying there asking questions and receiving abstract answers. Like that feels like that doesn't satisfy my need, but it's a good first step. And I think that the next step is to figure out what you actually do.

That is something that I've drastically shifted how I approach since being an Olympian. Because leading up to the Olympics, the steps there were very clear, and they were outlined by coaches, right, as you said, and they were tiered based on what was most productive toward that goal. And now that the goal is less of a tangible, like, I don't want to be an Olympian anymore. I want to have those certain feelings that I shared with you or I want to share with the world and they're not as rooted in a job or tangible results. So how do I pick my actions now and how do I evolve that? And I think the way I do it now is really different and I can share that too. Yeah, I'm interested in that because as an athlete, there's a certain number of variables that you can control.

But there aren't as many when compared to a creative career path, right? Like track and field, you train as hard as you can. You treat your body as well as you possibly can. You do all the things. And then you show up on race day. The track is always the same distance. It's basically the same material, give or take a little bit. You can't control your competitors or the weather. There's a number of things you can't control,

but there's a lot that you can control. In a creative trajectory, it's less a meritocracy. There's a lot of luck and happenstance that comes into play. It's less of a grit equation. You can't grit your way to success in a creative path in the way that you can as an athlete. Grit will reward you, like just keep writing or just keep auditioning or whatever it is, but the outcomes are far less predictable. Yeah. And it's not just the outcomes that are far less predictable, but the opportunities. Because in athletics, there's a pretty clear path to your goal. And there is variance in terms of like weather conditions and those things that you talked about. But the

opportunity to qualify is very clear for you, right? As you said, and in the creative world, and in many, many other worlds, in relationship world, in all these things, there's the whiteboard or blackboard, whatever you prefer. What did you have growing up? It was pre-whiteboard. That's how old I am. So it was a blackboard. Yeah, like chalkboards. Okay, chalkboard. Just coaches yelling. And coaches yelling. So on your chalkboard would be the goals that you set for yourself, which like in an athletic world, it's much more like chalkboard driven as far as what you want. But there's also a blank chalkboard. And in the creative worlds, the blank chalkboard represents what opportunities

the world brings to you and where is there momentum in the world or where could you fit in in a collaborative way. And to stick to the way of thinking that the athlete has would be to— The gold whiteboard. You only pay attention to one of those and you ignore the entire blank chalkboard that might bring you opportunities. And this was something that I started thinking about. There's a mentor who was on Saturday Night Live and he said that that opportunity came because somebody asked him if he would ever think about auditioning for that. He never thought about it. And that represents that kind of blank black chalkboard of stuff.

And so I think the shift is knowing that like in evolving, we can have like our goals that we think we want. And we can also be like more open to like what is the world? Who are these people? What's going on? How can I like participate? And Monica, who is our shared physio, shared with me some really valuable way of thinking that helped me like embrace both of these chalkboards. And that was when I was recovering from that same surgery, I was competing less because I couldn't compete super hard for a while. And I was finding myself here in LA having a lot more

fun. So I was roller skating a lot, like at the Moonlight Rollerway. Is that like in Glendale or something? Yeah. Yeah. And it's awesome because they have these like skate nights and they're like, you just feel like you're entering another world. And I started going like every week and inviting all these people that didn't know each other and people would come or they wouldn't. It didn't really matter because I was going and I was going to have fun. And I talked to Monica because I remember I was confused because I was like, what am I doing? I never used to go roller skating or do fun things like this because they didn't feel productive to my goals. And I was asking her if I was having a midlife crisis or if I was practicing escapism from some bigger thing

that I was meant to be pursuing. Just because you're doing a normal human being thing? Correct. I mean, I never, I didn't eat a s'more for like 10 years when I chased the Olympic dream, right? I didn't do certain things because they just weren't productive because they weren't useful to that goal. And I don't really regret that. I'll be honest with you. I really, really committed to that goal and I'm really happy that I did. But once I got it, I guess I started having fun. Right. But what's interesting about that is how weirdly indulgent it felt,

like uncomfortable for you to just go out and do something for no other reason than enjoyment. It's so uncomfortable. I just went on my first vacation. I mean, I think I've been on vacation before, but it felt like my first vacation because I truly didn't do work. And it was terrifying because I couldn't even get myself to do work. And then I thought I would never be able to do work again. The edge is gone. need the edge to get there in the first place? I know that's the real question. But so I asked Monica and I was like, what is this? And she was like, Alexi, I think you've only ever been thinking about your life in terms of good for me, bad for me, productive, unproductive. And she said, every cell in our body, when it's happy or safe, it expands and moves toward. And that's like the feeling of having a crush on someone or when

someone's like let's go out to sushi and you're like yes like that's a really it's a known feeling that we have and she said it's cellular and it was the feeling i was having roller skating and she said every cell when it's unsafe it contracts and moves away. And that's what you feel when somebody puts food in front of you that you're allergic to or have had food poisoning or something. You know that feeling of like, I just won't eat that. And she said, I want you to start thinking about your life in terms of are these decisions expansive or contractive to me? Or now I think about it as do I have a crush on this decision? And once I started doing that, it made decisions a lot easier for me. And I started to actually evolve without overthinking the decisions I was making and doing things that like were surprising to me, which has been very, very useful. I think that's a really great frame to also grapple with the question around like purpose and meaning. Like when you cultivate that intuition around the hell yes, and you

develop a reflex to go towards those opportunities, there's something inside of you, you know, you're saying yes to something deep inside of you that is perhaps underexpressed, right? And by moving towards that and finding a way to give greater expression to whatever that is, I think is also creating a greater alignment in your life between the authentic version of you and however you kind of show up for the world to perceive you. And I think the more you hone in on that alignment, the better position you're in to not only, to your point, take advantage of opportunities when they arise

as a result of putting yourself in those different situations, but also there's a deeper connection with the self that starts to make space for that purpose revealing itself, right? Like if you're just saying yes to the things that your intuition is saying, you know, I want that or, you know, I need this in my life, you're moving towards that purpose that perhaps historically has eluded you. And it will reveal itself in time. But I think what happens is people sit around in paralysis because they don't have an answer to the question of,

I have no purpose. I'm just going to wait until I get struck with a lightning bolt of purpose before I make any decisions. But the purpose is revealed in the actions. Yeah, or they get paralyzed by not understanding why. Because sometimes you have a crush on something and you don't know why. And sometimes something is contractive to you or someone and you don't know why. And I think that the getting away from good for me, bad for me, productive, unproductive is really healthy because it eliminates you obsessing over why.

You know, there could be a person that is contractive to you that's a perfectly good person. They're wonderful, whatever. They make you feel contracted. That's just information that your body is giving you, and you can choose to pay attention to it or ignore it. And it really matters how you pay attention to that information. And I think the why has been something that has really tormented me. It's so terrible to not understand why. An unexamined instinct can perhaps lead you astray and compel you to make decisions

that are not in fact your interest, but masquerade as being hell yes, because you haven't done enough kind of internal work to understand how you're impulsed. And I think the more, you know, internal investigation that you do, the more knowledgeable you become about how and why you make those decisions that lead you in the wrong direction and the more connected you get with the better version of yourself that wants to make the healthier decision. And that healthier decision often begins with discomfort. with discomfort. It's not a function of a hell yeah intuitive impulse as much as it is a contrary action that requires repetition, just like at the track, until you develop muscle memory and new neural pathways. So it is more complicated than that, than just, you know, the hell yeah, I think. So that's my only kind of note of caution on that. But I do think there's a lot to be said

for the blank whiteboard. Like you want your goals and you want a path and you wanna know why you're doing what you're doing every day and how that's moving you in the direction of the person you wanna be or the things that you wanna achieve or the dreams that you wanna realize,

but you also have to hold them loosely enough so that you make space for that blank page and what might show up that could completely change your course, but ultimately lead you more quickly, like shortcut you towards that dream or perhaps create a new dream that you weren't even aware of that's better.

That's probably most often what happens, right? You think? Yeah, I think usually we end up somewhere surprising. Yeah. Like sitting here talking to you right now. This was not on my whiteboard. No, you know. It wasn't on my chalkboard either. We didn't even know each other existed. We're brought to you today by recovery.com. I've been in recovery for a long time. It's not hyperbolic to say that I owe everything good in my life to sobriety. And it all began with treatment and experience that I had that quite literally saved my life.

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I want to talk about the extended Bravey universe that you've created. It's so interesting to kind of watch at arm's length and kind of see what's evolved since the last time we talked. Not for nothing, that podcast was really popular. I mean, that clip of like the rule of thirds, where you just laid out that rule, I think on my Instagram, it has like 10 million views. Like people love that shit. Went like crazy viral. You came out with this book, Bravey, that did phenomenally well and was just universally embraced. And now you have this new book,

it's Bravey for Young People, right? Which is another move towards this sort of cult-like status that you've developed for yourself. And I say that half jokingly, but I'm not alone in saying that. Like multiple media outlets have said you've become this like cult figure for the young 21-year-old girl who needs a hug and needs to be told that it's going to be okay. So how do you like think about all of that?

I think I'm very lucky to have the bravies, and they're very lucky to have me. Because I think that there are vibrations in the world. Like, there are people who just vibrate certain ways, right? And I've always, from the start, been like someone who vibrates at a very try-hard level, like curious, try-hard, succeed well, fall equally as hard. And there are people who feel like that. They feel curious. They are lost, just like I am, meaning there's a vague ambition. There aren't always answers. And so that's the vibration generally. It's like try harders, enough of a sense of humor, but also taking your goals seriously types. And I didn't exactly have a person who felt like that to me growing up. I just genuinely didn't. And so I'm trying to just do it so committedly because it is so clearly who I am that there's a bigger space for that kind of energy. space for that kind of energy. And the word I'm grateful resonates. But I think more than anything,

I'm just so happy to be in the game. Like, I'm so happy to be playing my game, which is just being myself, and that that's allowed in the world and that it has allowed other people to play the game similarly. And that's like what it feels like. And so there's books, there's a company, which was very much an act of trying to be more independent as a businesswoman and work with other women that I really admire. But I just want to be allowed to exist in the world and have community and not hurt anybody and see if that's allowed. And it seems like it has so far been allowed. Yeah, I think it is allowed. I think what I see is this evolution from somebody who was perhaps perceived as inspirational, like an Olympian, Greek, 10,000 meter record holder, and then goes on to write, direct, star in movies. Like that's

so audacious. It's difficult for a lot of people to kind of access their own possibility on any kind of trajectory that would look like that. But in the wake of moving away from professional running into what's more kind of fairly characterized as a running ambassador. You're still running and you're doing all these events, but you're doing it not for the purpose of PRs or podiums, but to be this person who is demonstrating the joy and the camaraderie and the community and the possibility that comes with this sport that you love. So instead of being at the front of the pack, you're now behind that pack with glitter on

and you're running around and you're high-fiving people and you're smiling and you're laughing and you're giving hugs to people. And there's something really potent and powerful about that that resonates with a lot of people. It is aspirational to run a marathon and do resonates with a lot of people. It is aspirational to run a marathon and do it with a smile on your face the entire time and look like you're enjoying yourself and like giving back as you're doing it. That's a very different relationship

to sport. Look, running is a wonderful sport because it can grow with you. Hopefully all sports can grow with you in some way, but running specifically can obviously grow with you if you let it, if you let yourself lead the pack of your own running journey instead of, you know, staying behind yourself. you know, reason why this has all happened is simply because there's only so much time in our lives and only so much time in the day. When I was chasing the Rio Olympic dream, the time that it took to train at that level was everything, right? And it was the North Star. And I simply decided that I wanted to reshuffle my cards in terms of priorities, but that running was still important to me. And I wondered, could it be possible to not retire in the way that I saw my predecessors retiring? Because there was this like thing where people would retire and then they would come out of retirement actually. But people like retire. And I was like, I don't want to retire. Like, I'm like not even at my peak age. I don't know what the future is. And I was like, I don't want to retire. Like, I'm like, not even at my peak age. I don't know what the future is. And I actually think that what is very freeing is deciding that you actually don't know your future and to not have to tell everybody something that's so written in permanent marker. Retirement is a pretty bold thing to say about something you can do until you die. And so I didn't, I chose not to retire, but I chose to

just keep trying to engage with the sport in a way that felt expansive. And it was a little scary. Like when I danced in the New York City Marathon for the first time, I actually thought they were going to pull me off the course, like the race directors, because they didn't know I was going to do it. I didn't know I was going to do it. And they didn't. They were thrilled and very, very supportive. Did you still, was that the year that you still lined up with like all the pros and everything? Because they, no, because Rich, I called the, I love the New York Roadrunners team because I called them. And I was like, look, I know my, because my peers don't all do this. People don't always say, hey, I might not be able to race my best because there are appearance fees.

There's money on the line. hey, I might not be able to race my best because there are appearance fees, there's money on the line. But I called them and I was like, listen, I'm healthy, but I'm not in shape to like be competitive in this race. It would be dangerous to me because I'm only eight to 10 months out from my surgery. And they were like, we still want you on that start line with the elites, which is 30 minutes ahead of the regular pack. How many are in that crew? It's like 20 something people. It's very small, relatively speaking. And they were like, just run whatever pace you want. And I was like, that's crazy. I'm going to be running like, you know, alone because there's a gap. I'm not going to be with these women. And they were like, we just want you out there, which was so nice,

but so scary. And so the glitter was actually a decision I made. I hired a makeup artist. He was so sweet. And I put glitter on my face to indicate to people that I was okay. That was literally it. Because if you see someone jogging behind the pack, you think they are having a bad day. Right, because what's interesting about that is the elites all take off, but there's still a long time before the next flight of people begin. So you're behind them and you're just in this no man's zone alone. New York City.

These streets are wide. With no one in view in either direction, right? It's terrifying. So you just decide to put on a show. Well, so I put the stars, the glitter on first to indicate that I wasn't injured, to show a playfulness, right? That was like a thing to remind myself and to just show everyone clearly she's doing, clearly something else is going on, right? As opposed to, oh no, what's wrong? What happened? Why is she so far behind? Exactly. So the glitter was a communication device, right, at first. And then during the race, what overtook me was the sheer excitement of a wide open road in New York City with all these people around and nothing but space.

And I was like, I don't want to run in a straight line. And I was like, I don't want to run in a straight line. And so I just remember seeing this intersection and I was just like, I just want to dance. And like just started like veering around because it felt so like it felt like a Broadway stage. It felt like what Broadway stars must feel like to have a whole stage and all these people watching. And nobody's going to jump up there and stop them from you know it's like the school talent show it's just like those like ourselves only feel feeling so like what I felt was like theater talent show vibes birthday party school dance 2 a.m with your best friends I just felt so many things that were not roller skating in Glendale

all those things and then I was like I gotta do it I did it. And I think what was so cool was I felt like really connected to my mom, who I lost when I was very young, but I know my mom was theatrical and I know my dad is not. And I was like, man, I feel like I can't know her, but I, man, I feel like I can't know her, but something inside of me is like from that side of me. You could channel her and the performer, Alexi, comes out. So I did it and it was not illegal. They didn't pull you off the course. No, they didn't pull me off the course. And what was the crowd reaction and the aftermath of doing that?

was the crowd reaction and the aftermath of doing that? People cried because like what I started to do was just make a lot of eye contact with people and blow a lot of kisses and like say, I love you, I love you, I love you to all these people. And in a way that wasn't, it was earnest. So it wasn't like cute, you know, like you can be cute and wave to people or you can do it like, you know, my business partner, Christina, about a week before the marathon took me to this rave in LA called Fleet Mac Wood. And it's a Fleetwood Mac kind of DJ duo. And there was this woman in the front. They have these dancers and she was who I was inspired by because her whole role was to like wear this gown and basically blow kisses to people and tell everyone she loved them and it felt so good when she made eye contact with

me at the show and I remember with Christina because I was expanded we stayed out all night we danced we I remember I had a sleepover with her and it was like such a fun thing because she's one of my first like adult non-athletic best friends. And making a best friend in adulthood is really unique. So it was really special to me. And I remember channeling this woman and trying to make people feel a connection like I felt at that show. And so people were emotional about it. And you're right that they're used to seeing people in pain and supporting them.

But what it felt like was like a genuine, like disarming connection that was entirely a product of everything that it was. Was that like a lightning bolt moment for you? Like, oh, this is how I can inhabit this world of running and make my kind of imprint on it in a new and interesting way that's really about connection and not performance. Yeah, it was a light bulb moment. It also made me feel like the world is not done deciding what all the occupations in the world are, because I have long felt really strange about having such an athletic body and not knowing what to do with it after being an Olympian, but knowing that it is so capable. It is so capable. And even though anybody can dance through the streets of New York City, I know that it is also an athletic feat to be able to dance through the streets of a marathon for that long. And so it felt like an outermost expression of my capabilities in a way that was deeply satisfying to me as an athlete also. Right. Yeah.

athlete also. Right. Yeah. It's not easy to run a marathon, even if you're going slow, but to dance and do what you did the entire way is its own form of athleticism. Yes, it is. It's hard, but it's fun. Yeah. And it's kind of inspired, you know, a generation of people who now run races with glitter on and like, there's a whole thing around this now. There's a whole thing. And my company is designing a glitter and that's been really fun. It's our first, our first product is like, we have these wonderful, like makeup scientists designing a glitter. Cosmetologists. Cosmetologists, I think, because the, the, I've been having a challenge and everyone's trying to figure out like, what glitter do I use? And like, how do we get it to stay and not like burn through our skin? Because the glue. You need like, yeah, like get it to stay and not like burn through our skin because the glue.

You need like, yeah, like sort of run approved glitter, a glitter product. Yeah. And something that's. Bravy glitter. Bravy glitter, wear it to your, you know, you can wear it to a rave as well, if that's what you do. And you got Shalane Flanagan to put a little glitter on. She asked. Shalane deserves a lot of credit from me for and gratitude for everything she has done for me. Because she has always been so supportive of me, even though she knows we are so different. And that day, I remember I had a sweatband made for her with little rhinestones on it.

And she was like so excited to wear them. And she was like, where's my glitter? And it was so nice because like she didn't have to wear the glitter and she didn't have to ask. And that she did was like an act of someone, you know, a generation before me and running, saying, without saying that she supports me. And that meant like a lot to me.

We need more of that in every industry. Yeah, that's so cool. I read somewhere about some other advice that she gave you around pushing through pain by using the crowd or even looking at the birds that are flying overhead when you're having a moment. So Dina Castor said that. Oh, Dina did, okay.

But it's okay. Apologies to Dina. But it speaks to the mentor thing But it speaks to the mentor thing. It speaks to the mentor thing. What Shalane told me was, I think you and I have talked about this either on the podcast, but probably on one of our bike runs, was just how good Shalane is at knowing what her goal is and what she specifically needs to get to her goal and to not let all the noise of what she could do or could have get in the way of her true North Star. And she's been really good with helping

me stay on track with that. Because with any goal you have, there's like a million ways to get to it and not every opportunity will actually get you there. I think we always play chutes and ladders when we're chasing a goal and we have to make sure we're continuing to choose ladder decisions and not ones that are like shortcuts that eventually take us down a slide backwards. That gets more and more difficult.

The closer you get to the goal and the more successful you become because the opportunities that are shoots always come beautifully wrapped in very attractive packaging. Yes, they're so pretty. And so you want to say yes to it. And there's sort of opportunities that are celebratory of what got you to where you're

at. But ultimately, they're sort of indulgent distractions that are in the way of achieving the next thing that you're trying to get to. What do we do there? Well, it's the hell yeah thing. But also, I think it's okay once in a while to do them, but you have to do them with self-awareness and you have to learn how to flex your no muscle.

And who was it? I think it was Robin Arzon who says, you have to protect your yeses. She has some great phrase around like, saying no to protect your yeses. Yeah, we have to slow down, right? Like we, cause the crush happens immediately. some great phrase around like saying no to protect your yeses. Yeah. We have to slow down, right? Like we, because the crush happens immediately.

Maybe really what we have to do is you have your crush, you have your like hell yeah moment. And then you have to like, sometimes when I'm talking to people, I stick my tongue behind my teeth so I don't speak because I talk too quickly and I say too much and it slows me down. And so sometimes maybe when I have a crush, the reality is that I have the crush and then I have a pause where I have a small conference with myself in my head about what you are talking about before making the decision. And you metaphorically stick your tongue to the back of your mouth? No, I really stick my tongue. You literally do that. If you stick your tongue behind the back of your mouth? No, I really stick my tongue. You literally do that.

If you stick your tongue behind your teeth, you can't talk. Yeah, okay. So it helps me, like, not— Slows you down. Yeah, because I can— From being reactive. Well, and it's so weird because I was just thinking about decisions. And, you know, I ran 100 miles, right, in this race.

I know. We were going to get to that. But go ahead. Well, because it's about decision-making, because this will contradict what we just said. And this is, I got to figure this out, because this is like two different ways to think about things. There's like life decisions,

which you need to take pause on. But the advice I got before the 100 miler from my amazing friend and pacer, Mikey Mitchell, was that over the course of 100 miles, which I was not prepared to run at all, you need to make a bajillion decisions. And the advice I got was that you need to make them quickly and you need to not overthink them and you need to just keep moving

and you need to keep making decisions. And it was the best advice because over the course of 100 miles, you're making decision after decision after decision. Do I walk? Do I run? Mashed potatoes? Water? Shirt? Sports bra shirt sports bra headlamp music pass the girl touch the rock crawl stand sing cry and it was so helpful to just keep making decisions and know that you could just keep making decisions and there weren't mistakes because i I can get really scared about, is this decision a mistake?

And he basically freed me up to say, I don't care if it's a mistake, just make the decision. And so I think something I'm trying to figure out in my life is what are the instances where you should just keep making decisions and not overthink them? And what are the moments when you're meant to pause and put your tongue behind your teeth and decide if that's smart or not? That's the ultimate question, isn't it?

If you can master that, I think you're in pretty good shape. We'll talk about that one next time when I figure that out. Yeah, that's not easy. Well, let's talk about the 100 miler. I mean, you didn't just do 100 miles, you did Leadville, right? So we're talking 100 miles at like, what is it, like 9,000 feet or some insane altitude? Starts at 10.5. 10.5. No air and a very long distance to go and very little training leading up to it. I mean, you did do, how long before did you do the 100K that was supposed to be a 50K until the night before and you decided without having trained for it that you were going to run 100K? January. And Leadville was in how many months later? It was September. Okay. Mid-September. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You were running,

but you didn't train to run 100 miles at 10,000 feet. No. I actually took like at least five weeks off because I went to my cousin's wedding and I wore these platform shoes and my calf got irritated because you shouldn't do that. But I think what was so cool was I was genuinely curious what it would be like to run a race where I was, you know, 40, 30% fit and 100% recovered and healthy. So during that time off when my calf was just like being a brat, I really buckled down on like sleep, bone broth, just the things that make me feel whole again. And I was so recovered. I had like so much like, I don't know, I felt like the tin man full of oil or like just totally, totally recovered and totally unfit. And I was curious about that because you don't get to do that when you're chasing an Olympic dream. You must ride the edge of fitness and injury at all times in a way that is like carefully governed by your coach and hopefully executed perfectly.

It was really cool to rely on emotional maturity, years of mileage, and optimism from every cell that it had like lots and lots of reserve inside. And my friends, my friends were my crew. So it was like super fun. So walk me through it. There must have been some hard moments though. So I went in like believing I could finish and deciding I would finish it and not knowing exactly what it would feel like or look like. And I think I started out, I just didn't want to get pulled off the course. So what happens in Leadville, and it's very known for this, is that at every aid station, you will get pulled if you don't hit a certain time. So I was just like, I hope I'm not under the time or over the time. And I thought I like was close because like there was a girl near me

that was like, I don't want to get pulled. And I was like, are we close? Are they going to like hook us? And we weren't close because I came into mile 40 and I was in fifth place, I think. And then a thing inside me that I cannot control came. But yeah, careful. So I, I think I, this is just a nerdy athletic thing, but I just, I took way too many salt pills. I don't know. I thought they were electrolytes, I think. And I just way dehydrated myself. So I wasn't prepared. I wasn't having like proper fueling. I was like eating whatever I felt like. So I was very, very dehydrated to the point where I was like drinking out of creeks and like just sitting on the side trying to get water. And I needed to walk the last 40 miles. That felt shameful at first because I think, you know, when you come from a background of not walking, you don't think you should walk. But I guess to finish a race like that is an accomplishment.

So my first half was like much faster than my second half. And it was a really beautiful experience to be given the opportunity to just be in nature. I mean, I'm curious about how you feel about this, but I feel like you and I are so busy. And so what ultra running provides is like a space to be in nature for a really long time, feeling like this is exactly where you belong. There's space to explore within it. You can do it however you want. And this is where you belong. And I think I felt most happy in life when I'm like exactly where I belong, which happens in ultra running because you're there for long enough that you get to really relax into it. And it happens for me on movie sets because you're definitely where

you belong when you're on a movie set. And it's really hard to like get that anywhere else in life for me. Even running day to day, you know, you get an hour and a half. You don't get like 24 hours to be in nature. So really it felt like a gift. That's really beautiful. And I think on top of that, you know, it's a different type of athlete and competitive environment from what you're used to as somebody who's been running around tracks forever and running on roads to go to the trail and tap into that subculture, which has a certain kind of esprit de corps and community

kind of vibe to it that, not that road races and track don't have that, but it's a different kind of texture. People are not competitive like moment to moment in ultras. Like you see someone on the side of the road, you will help them. You will give them snacks. People are taping each other up. It's like, I've said this, but you feel like you're in another time period

because it's just survival and moving. And it's so awesome. It's like, I hope everybody experiences it if they can. What else was different about it coming from your version of running, your background? What was different about it? You're not supposed to redline. Like, you're really supposed to, okay, what's really different about it is you are not supposed to run in packs, or it doesn't serve you to run in a pack in ultra running for me you have to listen to your body and answer to what it needs moment to moment and not question it so you might run up a hill but walk down and that's what you genuinely need

so it's much more answering to what you need instead of ignoring what you need which in in track running you ignore pain because it is only temporary and you can push through that. And I think in ultra running, you familiarize yourself with it and you either befriend it and walk with it or you heed to it and give it what it needs. Did it leave you wanting to do more in that world? It did. Look, I'm curious as to what I could do in ultra running if I trained. Yeah. I don't know if I will, but I think if I trained, like, I would rip. I think I could do quite well. It's another decision tree of thinking about protecting your

yeses and what you say no to, right? When you have the opportunity, like, should you make that decision to invest yourself in that? That opens up a whole life of training and et cetera. And then you have this creative life over here that seems to be taking precedent in terms of where your heart really is at the moment. And you can't go full bore into both at the same time, right? So you have to make these compromises. And an investment in your athleticism comes perhaps as a debit to your creative aspirations. Probably, but I think there's a world where they can coexist. I think we'll see.

But in the creative world, something that has been helpful is just embracing that I'm an athlete and not being so demure and not saying that I don't do it anymore. I think I used to have a narrative that I don't do it anymore. And now I've realized I actually don't have to do that. I can run every day and be in Hollywood. People do it. I understand training at that level, it might take trade-offs, but I'm curious. I don't know. I don't know how possible what you just said, what that balance.

I don't know. It would be cool if you were like, all right, there's a race, you know, maybe it's a year and a half from now. I'm going to set a long-term goal to like approach that from a performance perspective while also chasing all these other creative dreams at the same time because the creative world is it's not a nine-to-five job

I mean if you're making a movie it's all consuming but in the kind of day-to-day aspect of you know writing and taking meetings etc there's plenty of room for you to train as much as you want I think there is and living here we live in a place that has the trails we need and the access to the creative stuff we need. So I'm curious and navigating it. We'll see. I don't know. The other thing you've been doing with your running, I want to get to the creative stuff, but while we're on the running is working with Paralympians. So talk a little bit about how you got interested in that and what that whole world is like.

I know very little about all of that. It's super, super cool because, so I've been guiding for visually impaired athletes. And one in particular, Lisa, who I met because she, she hadn't had many female guides. I think one other. It's hard for a fast, blind female to find a female guide because the guide needs to be faster than them in a way and needs to be in a place to give that time. And I was curious because I'd always wanted to like run the Boston Marathon, but I did not want to compete in it. And she wanted to win. And guiding her has been a really nice expression of like a competitive team oriented person inside of me that didn't know where to like express that because I love teams and I love competing.

that because I love teams and I love competing. And so guiding, you are like, first of all, it's very technical. Like you have to learn how this person works and how to get them what they need, get them where they need. And that's a joy. And it's also a challenge. So you learn this technical stuff. And then when the race happens, you are kind of like their loving team captain because you're not their coach and you're not passive. You will have an impact. I think that's the thing that people need to realize if they want a guide is that you will never have a neutral effect on the athlete. You will either help them or you will limit them. You will either help them or you will limit them. And so you need to like learn how to be helpful rather than limiting. But it's been fun. And like I have a whole community of friends. I think that I know a thing or two about competing and I like applying it to somebody else's success. It's so interesting. I mean, just the idea of being visually impaired and like running as hard as you can is like wild when you think about it.

Yeah. So their life really is in your hands. Totally. You have a lot of responsibility when you're doing that, which I would imagine is kind of stressful, especially when they're trying to win or be competitive. Yeah, and they can be, they can have their moments. Yeah.

Like Lisa, I love her. She would not deny that she has her moments during races, but every teammate has their moment, right? Like I was on the Oregon team, we were winning national titles. I had teammates getting snappy with me. But like as a team captain, you just know exactly how to find that balance and how to get them to their goal. Because only you know what the watch says.

Only you know what hill is ahead. And it's kind of like a game of like how to get them to perform their best. And you're an audio book, right? of like how to get them to perform their best. And you're an audio book, right? Like, so to get her to, you know, you mentioned the birds overhead, the crowds, she can't see any of that.

So I get to be an audio book and kind of filter the world through what I think will be interesting to her and make her feel less pain. Wow. And that's fun. You're like, hot guy running by. And she's like, hot guy, like hot guy for me, hot guy for you. And I'm like, that one's for you. You know, and it's like, it's super fun to like have that relationship with somebody. So you're going to continue doing

this. I mean, where does that, where can that take you? I mean, it can take you to guiding in the Paralympics, which is like a thing that I would love to do someday. It can take you to just continuing to like do these circuits and help other people. I did a camp at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs right before Leadville. So you trained a little. I trained a little. At altitude. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I acclimated a bit.

That was helpful. I'm still, you know, I'm still smart, right? You gotta acclimate a little. You're like, I didn't train. And then you're like, well, when I was at the Olympic Training Center before Leadville. Yeah. Oh, I acclimated. Okay.

To be clear. But what was interesting was it was a guide camp. So there were not visually impaired athletes for most of the camp. And we had to play the role of being blind often. And so we, you know, I was blindfolded. And that was really interesting too, because you can't always understand what somebody needs until you understand what you would need in that situation. So communication, especially. The level of trust.

I can't imagine. It's gotta be scary. It's scary. Put a blindfold on and just run as hard as you can. It's all about trust. Like it is all about trust and communication and confidence. Even if you don't, you aren't sure, you must be confident as a guide. I think the thing that people don't always understand is like para-athletes are super competitive.

Like and they are normal people. And that's what's been fun also is like people need to spend more time in that community. People need to understand that these people are competitive, hilarious, smart, multifaceted people that have a disability, but they also have goals, needs, fears, desires. Of course, right? What an interesting, cool thing. It's super fun.

The more I think about it, the more like wild it is. But of course, visually impaired people are not the only people that you pace. What were the highs and lows of pacing Diplo at the LA Marathon? How did that happen? That was fun. Well, the way it happened was he was running the race. He was going to be running the race. I was going to be running the race with a partner, Koros, who is a sponsor of the race. You know, I'll be honest with you. I've always tried to like find an orientation with races that makes me feel like I understand what I'm doing. And so there was an opportunity to like run with him because he didn't have somebody necessarily to run the whole race with. He'd never run a marathon. And he's very athletic. And I was so impressed by his ability to stay on his own team. Like the guy had never run more than a half marathon, I think. And he was just so positive. He was so positive. And I was like, oh, this is a human who may have very

little experience in marathoning, but who surely has had certain things that he has either learned or was born with to do what he has done in his career. And it was fascinating to spend time with somebody, you know, in an unfamiliar territory for them, but see qualities of them come out that must serve them in the rest of their life. Well, certainly he's athletic. I think he just did the Malibu Triathlon the other weekend, but most famously, he's the guy who made it out of Burning Man. I know, I know, I know.

Right? So that marathon, all that training, and that mental resilience clearly came into play with him trudging through the mud and getting out of there. Yeah. When everyone else was stuck, right? Okay. So one thing that happened during the race that I think that speaks to this is that I noticed he wasn't taking in like a lot of food or fuel, right? And I was like, he probably doesn't

train with gels and things like that. And I, as his like person who wanted to help him get through, I was like, he should probably eat something, right? I wasn't going to grab a goo and be like, eat this mysterious food that you don't know. Because that can also get in someone's head. So part of being a good teammate to someone— It might upset his stomach if he's not used to that. Exactly. And so part of being a good teammate to someone is understanding how to help them without making them feel like they're missing something or self-conscious,

right? And so I asked him if he could imagine eating something and he was like, yeah, I think I could eat something. And I was like, okay, what looks good? And he gravitated towards orange slices and that was great. So we just ate orange. And so I ate oranges. And I think that that points to one of those specific things about like guiding or pacing that is helpful is just to like read the room and try to get them to the goal of like nourishment without trying to force it on them in the way that you think is best, but in the way that might work for them. Right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I like that.

Encouraging rather than kind of inferring that they're doing it wrong. Yeah, like adapt to them. Because then that becomes like a mind virus. Yeah. You want to like, it's all positive. It's all good. And as long as they're eating something, you know, it's like, who cares if it's an orange or something, you know, like, as long as they're eating something and they feel, they believe in it, it's all about the mental stuff, right? So he was on his own team. I wasn't going to, I wanted to keep him on his own team. And we had fun. Like he has a sense of humor. You get to know someone over the course of a marathon. And we've run since and he really likes running. That's cool. That's cool. I also read that you have a race named after you now in San Francisco. Is that true? That's true. It's a 10K.

How did that happen? Is it like the Bravey 10K or is it the Alexi Pappas 10K? We have both. You do? Yes. There are two different ones? Yes. You have two races named after you.

There are two, and one of them is the Alexi Pappas. Well, it's the San Francisco Marathon Alexi Pappas 10K. So it's with the San Francisco Marathon in the summer, which is very fun because there are so few marathons that you can run in the summer. So I like that that exists. And then the Berkeley half marathon has the Bravey 10K and that's around Thanksgiving. So it's coming up. And that one I'm really excited about because I was born in Berkeley and there's an alliteration with Bravey that naturally lends itself to fun, whatever. Have you, that's very, that's very cool. Have you ever done, you must have, have you done the Beta Breakers race?

Because that's like, that has like Bravey written. That's like the original Bravey race. Costumes are mandatory. I think I did do it. And there's like floats, people carrying floats, and it's just a parade like no other. I did do it. I did do it. Yeah. Because it ends at the beach. Right. And you go over the big hill. Yes, I went over the big hill. I jogged it. That was a race before I figured out how to like jog in with my own, it was like-

Like normal people? No, like how to like orient in the run like I think I just I remember feeling very lost in that race because I was like running it but I wasn't competing it was in this in-between time but before I had figured out like who I was in the after competitive life so that's probably why I probably blacked it out I feel like you could be a flag bearer in that race though you know it's like right up here I don'ted it out. I feel like you could be a flag bearer in that race, though. You know, it's like right up your, I don't know. It's basically like your ethos writ large where everybody is like flamboyantly dressed and like it's a whole, it's a parade basically. Yeah. Yeah.

You should definitely do that. I'll do it again and then this time I'll remember. All right. What is going on with you creatively? You directed a movie with RZA? I can say that premiered. Because it premieres in like a week or two. Oh, it does?

Yeah. So the movie premieres in Austin, but it was- At South by Southwest? No, it's the Austin Film Festival, which is like a fun, like well-attended festival. And it has distribution with Utopia, who did like Shiva Baby and that sort of. That's legit. Yeah. Yeah.

So that'll come out in 2024. That's next year. Theatrical release. Probably. Yeah. I think it'll do its thing. And that's, you know, what's fun is like you, I don't know if you feel this way. I'm trying to think about your life, maybe books, but like sometimes you make things

and then you kind of have to, you kind of put them on dormant in your mind when they're like finding their way and then they come to life again like a flower and it's fun it's like a wildflower that you forgot about right because there's so much time that takes place in between when you've completed it and when the world actually gets introduced to it and when you can do anything about it like it's kind of like it had there's like times when you can't you know creative arts Like, it's kind of like there's, like, times when you can't, you know. Creative arts are like playing tennis. You just, like, keep hitting the ball into the other court, and sometimes it's on the other side of the court for a long time. But my real sights creatively are set on navigating my way

into the television world. So I have, before the writer's strike, I was pitching big television shows that were either like we just didn't hear back from certain places or we were about to pitch and then we couldn't. And so now we are back in it and it is like super exciting

because television feels much more like an athletic career translated into the arts in that movies are so like, and I love movies. I want to keep making movies, but television feels more like it takes a long time to put together, but there's like a team, there are seasons, there are episodes, which are like sports games. So that's a goal. That is cool. And are these projects that you're all, you're co-writing with somebody or you're writing yourself? So I'm being more independent in my creative life.

And I have collaborators for all these projects. They're all different. But they all came to me because of my athletic career. And I'm really grateful that I seem to be like the runner, the athlete in Hollywood. And it's fun because I can speak to it. But no project has the same collaborators. And that's new for me to not be working with Jeremy on everything or anything. It's scary, but it's like empowering.

So interesting. We move so quickly past the movie. You didn't even say what the movie is or what it's about. It was a while ago. It was a while ago, and it was a summer. We shot it at a summer camp for diabetic children, and it was really awesome because they didn't have, they weren't able to, like, do anything with this camp, and it, like, helped.

I think it helped keep the camp going, but we also got to shoot at a summer camp, and it's about an artist-in-residency program that the RZA's character started for artists who have claimed that they're artists but have yet to create any meaningful work and they get one month to create the project they apply with or they have vowed to quit the arts forever so it's a comedy but it's really just like kind of calling people out a little bit playfully for when people say they're an artist or they say

they're an athlete or they say that it's like then go chase and do the thing like go make something if you say you want to be doing that thing and it's a fun movie that's cool and it's also the first project that isn't about athletics that's right you've done yeah which is so that's a like a maturation to kind of depart from the world that you know so well and do something different. Yeah, it's very different. And I learned a lot doing it. I learned that I want to wear fewer hats moving forward. Because like to be everything for an artistic project isn't as effective as like doing one thing well.

artistic project isn't as effective as like doing one thing well. And I want that to be an artistic evolution too, is to be more focused and have better teammates who do what they do very well so that I can do something better. One of the challenges that I always have is when I wake up in the morning, I'm a morning person. I do my best work in the morning. It's my best time to train, but it's also the best time for me to write where I'm freshest. And I'm always feeling the tension between these two things.

Like I could go out and run and move towards my fitness goals, or I can write and hopefully move towards creative goals that have more permanence to them. Like, cause once you've written it, it's like, it's there forever. Whereas your fitness, you know, kind of is fleeting and these things always seem to be at odds with each other or, or fighting with each other for attention. And, and I'm never sure that I've been able to strike the appropriate kind of balance that I can adhere to over long periods of time. Is that something that you contend with? Yes.

Like the exact same thing. probably important to defer to the arts first because with running like if you're okay with the like 10 to 15 percent margin of error with like training not being perfect your training is always like a reflection of effort right so if at the end of the day, you don't feel your best, but you've like scheduled your run, your cells are going to still like get the effort in. Whereas I feel like with the writing and the creative work, you might not generate like, do you know what I mean? It's okay if you push the run and do it later

and it's not as good and you don't feel as good or whatever, that's fine because you really need to protect the writing because it's fleeting and less predictable. Well, and I think you're running, you can still get better even if it doesn't feel as good. It just will be a different set of challenges, right? Like running fitness is just stress on the body. So if the stress is that you're more tired, I don't think you get—not you're more tired, but you're like your willpower is lower. I don't know. So for you, the creativity is first.

Like in the day in the life of Alexi, how does it play out? How it really plays out is I will try and schedule my runs with people because that is the most likely thing to get me to do the run. And sometimes that means they're in the morning. Sometimes it means they're in the afternoon. But a scheduled like meeting time with somebody gets me so much farther than I will call it practice with myself. So there's like a scheduled time. And then I do my best writing in the morning as well. Like I'm definitely not a late night person. So that's it. I mean, I just, I use my Google calendar. I feel like this isn't a very interesting answer because it's just like a scheduling discipline thing.

Yeah, but people are obsessed with morning routines. Okay, well. Somebody who has big goals and has achieved a lot of things, I think it's interesting to kind of learn about how you structure your day so that you're making sure that you're taking care of the things that you need to take care of and you're moving in the direction that you want to be moving in. Well, I'll tell you, in the last few days, I've been very jet lagged and waking up really, really early, like against my will. And it's been amazing. So, like, first I was waking up at like 2.30 and I know there's like the 5 a.m. book and I'm starting to think I should read it because I feel so much less stressed. Honestly, when I go abroad, I feel so much less stressed

because I know that during my waking hours, everyone in most of my life is asleep. And so I feel calmer. And I think when I wake up way earlier, I feel way less stressed. So you can wake up, get your stuff set up without feeling like you're already behind. And that's probably more important than like, when am I going to write? When am I going to run? It's like, how am I going to get my head straight before the world is like bombarding me? Yeah. When nothing else is competing for your time and attention. Yeah. And you feel like it's the same thing with the ultra running. It's like, how do you create more time in your life when you feel like you are where you belong and you don't have the anxiety of being pulled everywhere? I think time management in Los Angeles, particularly with the things that you're doing,

becomes really important because of the distances. You know, like if you're going to have a meeting or a lunch with someone, there's so much driving involved. It's not like, hey, let's meet for coffee. That could be a four-hour affair depending upon where you live and where the other person lives and where you decide to meet. So, you have to be really judicious. And again,

it goes back to, you know, being careful about what you say yes to. And this is a town of meetings, right, where everybody wants to have lots of meetings. But I know where you live, and those meetings typically take place about an hour drive from here. So you're looking at, you know, three hours minimum just to meet with someone. I meet with people a lot less than I used to and it's actually been okay. And I also am not perfect about getting back to people and that's also been okay. Because if someone really needs something from you, they will tell you that. And I think I've become less like the first email respondent immediate than I used to be. And that's also helped a lot. Like just to be like 85% excellent at everything is honestly like, okay. I don't mean your work. I mean, you're like functioning. Right. Was that difficult for you as an Olympian who's used to striving for perfection

and all things to acclimate to? It was difficult as a person who thought that if I messed anything up or one thing fell through the cracks, that my whole life would end. And that you're a bad person. Yeah, or that I wouldn't get that chance again. I don't know if that comes from, like, the Olympian. I've really, like, struggled with thinking that I can, like, make any mistake and that it will be okay. Talk more about that. Well, it's something I noticed in college when I like wouldn't get something. Like if I applied for some thing and I didn't get it, I would think that I would never get an opportunity like that again.

And I started noticing that I was very like thinking that life was a connect the dots, but if you missed a rung on the ladder, you would fall and not that there was another rock to grab instead of just one knob. And sports should have taught me otherwise, actually, because you lose a lot of games, and that doesn't mean you're going to lose the season. But I'm always like, is this some childhood? Like, who knows? I don't know why. But the only way to grow out of it

is to see yourself mess up or miss an email response or not get something and keep going and see if it turns out okay. And then to pause and say, hey, look, this turned out okay. So now I'm someone who can not get everything and still be okay. And so I'm trying to take more moments in my life where I question the rules I've made for myself and recalibrate and have a proper update on my system to reflect what is true and not what is scary. Yeah. I think that's an interesting reflection of maturity. Like, I think it speaks to kind of where you're at in your, you know, mental health

evolution, which has been such a big part of everything that you do and who you are and what you write about and talk about that feels very grown up in a good way. So, I guess I'm curious, like, where are you now as somebody who is, you know, kind of a public-facing voice around mental health issues. Like, where are you right now with your mental health and what are the challenges that you're still facing or that come up? I am always monitoring my nervous system because I think that my depression started with depletion

is my understanding of it now. And looking back, there were signs, like physical signs on my body that I was like depleted and ignored those. Physically and otherwise? Well, definitely mentally. But as an athlete, I'm always looking for something very specific. As an athlete, I'm always looking for something very specific. And so I was told that we have the most nerves on our, like in our face, hands, stomach. And so I was told by physio, first I was told to think back to when I was depressed, like really bad. What happened like in the weeks before?

And he said, did you remember anything on your face? And I remember I had canker sores in my mouth and that's not normal for me. And he told me that you have the most nerves in your face, your hands, and your gut and your stomach. And that if I notice something off about that, I should pause because your nervous system is your first line of depletion and that that will then compound and that can lead to a depression like I had a situational depression so to pause and so now like if I have like an eye twitch or a pimple because that is not always normal for me or like a splotch on my face I'll slow down and it's nice to have a physical sign to be like I got to take a day off because I have this thing so that's like specific

but then on a bigger level I'm I'm in like a really intense like therapy thing with my like I found a care in LA that's different than who I worked with on my post-Olympic depression because you need to work with someone in person, and that was someone in Oregon. And I'm doing ISTDP, which is intensive short-term psychodynamic therapy. Wow. Yeah, it's intense. Explain. sessions and I think the core of it is like helping people. Maybe this is reductive, but I think it helps people access like their anger essentially. And it's long sessions because oftentimes what is masking anger is confusion. And what I have been learning about myself is that I have a lot of confusing thoughts or I'll have thoughts and feelings that confuse me.

And they cause me, as you talked about earlier, to make decisions that aren't good for me or to think I should make a decision that I don't make that wouldn't have been good for me. And so the therapy is like, I mean, the therapist is kind of like hard on me. It's not that she's like provoking me, but I think she is trying to like de-layer impulses of mine. And it takes a while because usually there's like your feeling and then there's what you think the feeling is. And then there's actually the real feeling. And then there's what, you know, there. And then there's actually the real feeling. And then there's like all those layers. And I've needed to do that work because I've put myself in really compromising situations in my personal life. And I need to understand how to make my intellect and my feelings align because they often are at odds.

Where I know something intellectually, but I don't feel it. And so I have in my life like borrowed other people's feelings to help me. For example, like I'll know intellectually I'm in a situation that isn't healthy and I'll express it to a friend and they'll have the anger or the feelings, but I won't feel anything. I will understand I should feel this, but I won't feel it. So that's kind of like what this work is helping with. And one interesting exercise I've had to do, which I can tell you because it's so cool. Well, like, so one of the confusing thoughts, just to give you an example, is like, she discovered that when I cry, I cry when I'm mad, not when I'm sad.

And that was something that was confusing me because I was going through a period of time where I was crying a lot. And I didn't know why I was crying. And I thought it meant I was not doing good things with my life and I should go backwards. But it was from anger. And that was because as a child, it was not safe to be angry around my mom so I cried and that was safe to do the exercise I was going to tell you about was I basically was diagnosed I always laugh because I'm uncomfortable but with like um PTSD that's a big word to use but in my instance it was about not being able to feel pain. So I was just telling my friend about this

this morning, but when you like hear a lot of loud music, sometimes you can't hear as well afterwards because your body adapts and you don't have as great of hearing. And I think for me, I saw a lot of like unseeable things as a kid. So I probably cannot feel pain like normal people can or couldn't because it was not useful for me to feel pain. So that might explain why I ran so well. Or like when people are like mad at me historically, I don't react like I perceive normal people would. I can just handle it. So the exercise I was given was so simple and so cool, which was just to, I'm not a great artist, like a fine artist. So this works for people who are not fine artists, to draw my feelings with the opposite hand. So I'm left-handed. So I drew with my right hand, my emotions. So sadness, happiness, anything, anger. And it's not about

what you're drawing. It's the act of drawing opens up your feelings channels. It doesn't matter what you draw. And because I'm not a great artist, it's not an intellectual side of my brain. It's a feeling side. And it really worked. And I started to feel. So when you're drawing that emotion, it conjures the emotion, the act of trying to characterize it? It's more like lifting weights where it opens up pathways to be able to feel the emotions. It might conjure the emotion, but it also like will open the pathways more permanently so that you can feel again. I think it's like lifting weights. Like it's an exercise that you don't have to like think about it while you're doing it. Just by doing it, you will create that. And so I started

to feel, and that was really hard because then I was feeling things from the past that I never felt. And that was really uncomfortable because then you're like feeling all this stuff that you didn't feel, which maybe helped you in some ways and limited you in others. And so my mental health journey is like something that I'm definitely not like sharing a ton about because I don't, I'm just like, I'm in it. And the newest thing that I'm trying to do is be more okay, like with myself. So like just trying to like spend more time alone weirdly and there's just so much so I go I see her a lot and she's trying to help me be less confused is that exercise part of how you discovered that tears were associated with anger and not sadness? No, she noticed that.

So she's a very good doctor, and in our sessions, she would talk to me about things, and I would cry, and she would ask me, like, what are you feeling right now? And she would help me get to the point where it was like, no, I'm actually angry. And she would help me get to the point where it was like, no, I'm actually angry. And what's heartbreaking sometimes for people or for me, I should just speak for myself, about anger is that you can be really angry at something and still understand it at the same time. So, like, my dad not telling me how my mom died and how he raised us. I love him, but there were things he left out emotionally that I understand so much now. I wrote a whole book as like almost a love letter to him, but there's also some anger about like, that would have helped. Like it would have helped to talk about that stuff then. So that's the kind of anger where it's like they coexist with understanding.

But if you don't ever feel it, I guess maybe it just stays inside of you. She talks about like anxiety and it helps me because she says like when we feel anxiety because we all feel it and it's supposed to actually like save our life if like a car is coming or something. We're supposed to ask two questions. is this a real threat or not so a real threat is is there a bear about to eat me and if it's not a real threat then she says that it's an unfelt feeling and that those are the feelings that you work on in therapy and the more unfelt feelings you have the more debilitating your anxiety might be

when there's not an actual real threat. That's so cool. It's not surprising that you, as a young person being exposed to certain things that were traumatic, that you would develop this defense mechanism of compartmentalizing, you know, your anger or your whatever other emotions come up in association with that,

but then to realize much older how much you've repressed those and how you've used it as a tool to excel and then rely upon it almost, you know, to make your way in the world, only to discover that it has diminishing returns, right? Like ultimately you will be a more whole capable person if you can heal all of this and broaden your kind of emotional spectrum to manage stuff, right? But to let go of this thing, like,

well, it's great that I don't feel pain because I can just like power forward and crush, right? But to let go of this thing, like, well, it's great that I don't feel pain because I can just like power forward and crush, right? And very frightening to say, well, what happens if I decompartmentalize this and let it out? That might debilitate me, right? Without having the right tools to manage it and find healthier strategies for how to process all of those confusing emotions. Yeah. And it might kind of break your heart because you might realize that some circumstance you were in that made you angry was unacceptable. And I think why people repeat patterns that, for example, expressions of love that maybe are not really loving. Why to accept that they're not acceptable or you're angry about them is to say that it may not have been love in the first place.

But to repeat it is to live under the guise that it was always love. it is to live under the guise that it was always love. And that is more comfortable for us to think it was love then, it's love now. And the harder growth is to say, that wasn't how I wanted to be loved then, for example. And to take a different path is to feel heartbroken that that might not have been what you really thought it was. Yeah. So it's like a, it's wild to be like, because you functioned in like a reality, maybe, that wasn't the truth or something or wasn't good enough. I don't know how to describe it, but it's like, whoa. It's like, whoa. If you were to go full bore back into running with everything,

you know, way more down the line and on the other side of like this mental health experience that you've been having for many years, do you feel like you would be much better equipped to like be like a champion athlete, knowing what you know about yourself and the parts that you've addressed and healed? Yes, like 100%. Like I have just such a little curiosity of like, if I had fitness, which is just something you go out and you earn,

what I could do is like, it is really fun to think about because your emotional maturity is very, very meaningful. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you were interested in channeling that in the ultra trail world, like you can compete well beyond your years right now, right? Like there's a lot of potential there should you choose to accept it. Even in the marathon. I mean, like people peak in the marathon at like mid thirties or right. It's like, so I'm not there yet. There's a time thing, but I do think in ultra there could be a window of, you know, there could be something to explore there. And it's, it's wild when you compete. I don't know if you feel this way, but like you can sense maturity and immaturity in other people. I mean, okay, my favorite thing about

competing is when you're so fit that you can play, you can compete on like a mental level because the body is not the limiting factor. It's like the mind and it's playing with people and like in a perfectly wholesome athletic way. That is the most fun thing. What are your mental warfare tactics? Well, when you're really fit and you're competing against people, what you do is you assess their strengths and their weaknesses in the beginning of the race.

And you have your plan that you come up with your coach or whatever, but you also are assessing your competitors and understanding like, what are their strengths and their weaknesses? So I'll just say there's a girl who's really good at uphill, another girl's really good at downhill. Classic. You can sense confidence because you're a smart, emotional being. Then later in the race, like so you hang back because you're assessing, you're figuring it out, and you don't want them to know how strong you are.

And then later in the race, you start to play with them where, like, and you study the course, so you know it. There was this one race where there was an uphill, a downhill, and an uphill and a downhill finish. And there were two girls. It was this. One was good at uphill, one was good at downhill. And I let them bicker with each other the entire race. We weeded out everybody else. There was a whole pack. Everyone else is gone. It's just us three. And I knew there's an uphill girl and a downhill girl. And on the second to last uphill, I press from behind, but let the girl who's good at uphill ultimately win that uphill. So she thinks she is the dominant uphill runner. Okay. And then on the penultimate downhill, I press the downhill girl.

So I'm on her and I let her feel that she's won that downhill. And then on the final uphill, just pass that uphill girl and just break her. She's out the back. And then the final downhill, just jump the downhill girl because she thinks she's got it. Right, you give them a false sense of confidence. Yeah, but you can't play like that unless you're fit.

Right. And then once you're fit, you can play like, and that's really fun. And that's where like, I kind of get sad about the Olympic standards because they're so fast now that like racing, it's just a time trial. It's like all these scared people who want to run these times, but like real running is like racing. And maybe that's why ultra running is so attractive to me because if I were fit enough to do it, it's not about time. And there's a lot of ability to

play like that. Sure. But the other thing, yeah, it has nothing to do with time It's not about time. And there's a lot of ability to play like that. Sure. But the other thing, yeah, it has nothing to do with time, but it also has much less to do with what other people are doing. True. If you're running 100 miles, it's really not about who's strong on the uphills and who's strong on the downhills. It's really just between you and you. That's true. I mean, I assume at the highest level, there's more. Right. If you're in the top 0.01%, maybe that's different, but for everybody else. Well, you're not spending as much time with

people, right? Like in these track races and these road races, you can hear people's thoughts. You are so close to them. You can just hear everything. And so you're reading, you're playing, and it's so fun. But you don't deploy that verbally. Like you're not saying anything to them. Well, and this is where like acting and running are not that different because you really are like there's a lot of theater in running when you're at that level. And it's like so fun. Like it is really, really fun when your body, and I wish it for everybody, that everybody has a time in their life where they feel their body is super capable and you're not fighting your own body. You're like able to like use it as this like tool. And I know that that's a very rare place to get to.

Yeah. And the cost of that comes at, you know, the price of some of the other goals that you're pursuing. Yeah. You have to weigh, like, how much do you really want to feel like that again in a race? I felt it. Yeah, I felt it. Yeah, you have, but to feel it again. Well, but there's the curiosity of what would the mental maturity, like, what would your, what else could you bring to it?

I'm curious. It's not a need. And it never felt like too desperate. And I think that's really, really important for people to never need the goals that they want more than they want to keep playing. Curiosity is better than need. That's all. Oh, that's interesting. Explain that a little bit more. I think to be driven by curiosity is like to be running toward and not running away from. And it's buoyant and it has dynamicism. You think about a kid chasing an ice cream truck, right? Whereas to be driven by need is defense. It's scared, right? Yeah, it's like fear-based. It's fear-based. You're not as capable, actually. So, when people set themselves up to chase a goal,

it's important to have your basic needs met so that the goal chasing isn't your livelihood. It's really, I mean, that's a privilege to create that. I know some people do quite well with needing something, but I think it's nice when you can do it out of a place of curiosity. Right. There's a purity to it that way. Yeah. Well, and you can have a sense of humor about, I don't know, like think about when you like play on the playground, like if someone like trips you, but you're like chasing a boy, like you're still going to go after the boy. You can kind of like, I think you have more ability to handle hurdles when you're coming from a curious place because it's all good. It's not result oriented. It's you're looking at like a whole horizon instead of like a pin point or something.

Yeah. Well, I also think to the point of separating your goals and aspirations from your financial needs keeps you on track from a decision-making perspective with respect to those goals. Because if your finances are dependent upon them, then you're going to end up making decisions that maybe are positive in the short run, but ultimately sacrifice the larger thing that you're trying to achieve. Yeah. But sports are a good example of things that like feel life or death, but we know they aren't, right? Yeah. No, I'm just thinking of, again, I'm like going back to Arnold Schwarzenegger because it's just top of my mind. But one of the things that he did when he decided that his goal was to become this big movie star, action star, was to not have his livelihood dependent upon his acting career.

So he had all this real estate. He developed like a real estate business and owned all these properties so that he had plenty of money and he didn't have to make decisions about auditions or shitty projects because he needed the money, right? And he could just say, no, I'm going for this thing over here. So I'm not going to do what all these other working actors have to do because their livelihood is dependent upon booking roles. Okay. How that really would play into it is when your livelihood does not depend on it, then when you need to make like a risky decision or a brave decision or whatever. It's not as risky.

It's not as risky. It's not as risky. And I've been thinking a lot about this thing, which I call like the infinite unknown, which is like just that we fixate on the things we know because it's the only thing we can actually visualize. And how this plays out is like, let's just say you're a little, your hip is a little banged up

and you're going into a race and maybe you're deciding whether you race or not. The thing you know is you've run, maybe you've run this race before, you know what it feels like to win or run a personal best. That's all you're thinking about. But what you're not thinking about is the bad infinite unknown in this example of how bad that hip could be if you do run. Like most people don't fixate on that. They think about the loss of the race that they can visualize because they've run before. The proper decision would be to respect that you infinitely do not know how bad your hip could get and you should not race. But the positive infinite unknown would be like, let's just say you're making a decision between

two career choices or whatever, or maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger had a conservative decision or a risky one, but the conservative one is more something he can visualize, like staying the course because he knows where he's at. The infinite unknown in the positive way would be like the infinite wonderful opportunities that he can't visualize because he's never been there. It's taking a risk. When you're not feeling financially dependent on these decisions, you can make infinitely unknown decisions without knowing where it's going to lead more safely. You can do scarier things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I get it. I get it. I like that. It's hard though. It's like a privileged thing to be able to untether like your dreams and your ambitions from your financial needs.

You have to have your basics covered. Yeah. Which is like, you have to know what your basics are. Right. I wanna change subjects and talk a little bit about mentorship. And we alluded to it a little bit earlier. Mentorship is a huge thing with you.

You talk about it all the time and you have lots of mentors for all different areas of your life, which I think is beautiful and something I would advise everybody to do and seek out in their own life. But it's so meaningful to you that you, like, are going to do a podcast on this subject matter. Is this correct? This is correct. So there's a chapter in Bravy called the Mentor Buffet. And it's just that we are allowed and privileged to have as many mentors as we want, whether in real life or the imagined type from podcasts or books or whatever. You can invent them, I guess. And the podcast is just talking to people that influence us about people who influenced them. And I think it will mostly be people who positively mentored people that we love and want to hear from, but it can also be challenging mentorship examples.

And I'm so excited to be doing this with your team. And we have one episode that we've recorded with Matthew McConaughey, but we have many, many more to explore together. It's super exciting. And I love the conceit because it allows you to connect with well-known people and not force them to answer questions about their life per se, but to talk about the people that influence them the most, which I think is really fresh and interesting. And I would suspect intriguing for the people that you're trying to get on the show. Yeah, because I feel like we might not know who influenced everybody, right? Because it could be like a teacher in their elementary school. It could be someone we know was a big figure in their life, but we haven't heard much about. And I'm interested in it because I just want more information.

It's not that useful to follow what people do. It's more helpful to understand how they think and like how they make decisions. And so I think probably this will lend itself to learning more about, the third grade teacher or the high school volleyball teacher, the drama teacher in junior high or whatever it is. Those people that, you know, influence us in ways beyond what they probably could ever have imagined, you know, that becomes an indelible part about how that person thinks about their life and possibility. Yeah. Influence is like what people say to you. Like there's influence in the way of like advice. And there's also like influence in the way of presence. Like some people are your mentors because you get to watch them move through the world. They may say nothing. It may be someone you've only ever seen always do some action that, you know, always turn left very sharply. Like, I don't know. Just the way they are in the world, the way that they comport themselves and, you know,

as an example that they're not even aware that they're influencing either, but they are just by their being. Yeah. So hopefully it's not just like these— Here's what you're going to do. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like we can't choose what influences us either, right? Like it either does or it doesn't.

Someone could say something to you that's super profound and it means nothing to you, but something else might resonate for reasons— An offhanded comment by somebody else stays with you your whole life. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm really, really excited. And it feels very true to my interest and to a gap in the world that like this buffet should be for everybody. And what's it called? Mentor Buffet.

Of course it is. Mentor Buffet. I love it. Cool. Well, I gotta let you go. But the last thing I wanna ask you about is the new Bravey for young people. Why did you decide to create a new different version of your wonderful book for a younger audience?

So the Bravey adapted for young readers, which is a long time. It was a fun project to try to not just truncate a book, but try to make it tailored towards an audience that I think can use some of this like wisdom in a simplified version in a way that I would have liked. That's an answer that I think is obvious, but it's still true. And it's much more instructional and much less memoir. So less of my life, more of the like the goods that you might keep in your pocket for advice. And Maya Hawk wrote the foreword, which I'm really excited about.

Yeah, she speaks about, you know, like her dyslexia and things I can't speak to, but still like challenges growing up. Well, first of all, let's just like highlight the fact that like you got both of the Mayas to write for. You got Maya Rudolph, or Maya Rudolph wrote the foreword to Bravey, right? And now you have Maya Hawk or the other one. I'm obsessed with her dad, by the way, but that's a

different thing. Very cool. I would imagine part of it is motivated by the fact that, you know, young girls drop out of sports at a young age at like, you know, a pretty high rate when compared to young teenage boys. Twice the rate of boys by the age of 14. Is it that high? Mm-hmm. Wow. Hopefully it'll change.

But probably the reason why, one of the reasons why girls drop out of sports younger is because like being a female, an adult female athlete, it felt to me as a kid, at least, as like a very polarizing decision. Like you either were or you were not. Whereas with men, I felt like growing up, I saw more adult men playing sports, pick up, whatever. I just saw it more. female adult athletes playing will hopefully make it seem less like you're deciding to either be an athlete or not at such a young age and make it less of like a practical decision and more of like a possible life you could have in conjunction with whatever dream you have, you know? Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. I want you to close with the chapter or the section in the book about glop. Oh, glop.

Can you talk about glop? Yeah. So, glop is my favorite chapter in the book, and it represents knowledge that I gained since writing Bravey, which was aars become butterflies, they go into a chrysalis and they don't just sprout wings, but they are actually reduced down to a liquid form, complete and total liquid, called unscientifically GLOP. And then they become a butterfly. unscientifically glop. And then they become a butterfly. And what I identified with so strongly is that when I'm going through change, when any of us are going through change, we might be reduced down to our lowest glop state. We might not feel great. And that's not a bad thing. And anytime I felt like I was glop, I usually tried to revert back and become a caterpillar again and put myself back together. But to look at science as inspiration, I think is really empowering

because you can celebrate glop and decide to move forward and become a butterfly. And humans are unlike caterpillars in that we can choose to stay caterpillar forever. And we do feel the pain of glophood. So caterpillars are unconscious in their chrysalis, but we are not. So I think the metaphor and the chapter is important to me because we should feel that glop is good. And if you're feeling like glop, you can celebrate it as a non-negotiable stage that you have to go through to become something else. Yeah. Yeah. And you can print it on a shirt and say, I'm glop and wear it around like a prideful label. Which if you haven't done already, you probably are doing. I put it on a sweatshirt when I was glop. But no, it's fun because kids, people should tell kids you can't predict your life.

It will always surprise you. And that change is hard in a way that is actually, like, normal. You know? Yeah, that's really important. I mean, and that goes to your reflex towards, like, actionable tools to use as opposed to feel better or it'll be fine. But like, no, what can I actually do? I can shake my arms out or I can like, what is behavioral? Well, and also there's so much dialogue now that says like, it's okay if you don't feel great today if you do nothing. And like, I understand that. I think it's important to

allow people their like recovery days and mental health days but like when you are feeling like glop the thing that will move you forward is not just patience and time but also action to become a butterfly yeah not just wallowing in the glow yeah exactly trying to usher the glop into the butterfly. Right. Yeah, yeah. We're active in our glop states. We're actively engaged in our own glop-like states with our glop.

Yeah, I'm imagining you as like a green blob in there. It's your face, but you're just a blob. I've been there. Well, it doesn't get better than that. I think that's where we have to end it today. I love you. That was fantastic. Such a champion of who you are and everything that you're doing.

And I just love talking to you. So thank you. I'm very grateful for you. I have called you when I've been very confused and you've been very succinct and direct. And that I'm really grateful for too. That's sweet. I appreciate that. Bravey for the young reader.

Is that the, for young readers? Is that how you say it properly? Great. Yeah. And the movie is coming out not for another year, right? Winter, spring 2024. Yeah. Like next, soon.

All right. Well, in the meantime, lots of glitter and glamour on the road and on the trail for you, my friend. Yes? All right. I'll see you out there. To be continued. To be continued. All right. Mentor Buffet coming soon, too. Mentor Buffet coming soon.

All right. Peace. Peace. That's it 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, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and 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,

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