The Perilous Fight: Colin Kaepernick On The True Costs Of Conviction

Rich Roll (0:00)

There is a big difference between a wellness trend and a program with over 40 clinical trials behind it. Studied at Stanford, Yale, the Mayo Clinic, Prolon is the second thing. What if you could put the body into a fasting state while still eating food? And the answer that they arrived at is the five day fasting mimicking diet. Five days of pre-portioned plant-based food labeled by day, zero guesswork. And the only nutrition program clinically shown to trigger autophagy in humans. That's your body's Nobel Prize winning cellular cleanup process, clearing out damaged cells and driving renewal, while also targeting fat and protecting muscle.

Run it three months in a row, and it's clinically shown to reduce biological age by an average of two and a half years. Two and a half years.

For me, Prolon is the closest thing to a longevity intervention with real clinical research behind it. It's the tool I trust for this kind of work. So if you're ready for your own reset, and you should be, for a limited time, Prolon is offering all of you guys 15% off site-wide, plus a $40 bonus gift when you subscribe to their five-day program. Just visit prolonlife.com/richroll.

Colin Kaepernick (1:20)

Surprising amount of people have come up and been like, I hated you. I've seen what you've done over the years. And you were right.

SPEAKER_3 (1:29)

Colin Kaepernick, he's the San Francisco 49ers quarterback.

Colin Kaepernick (1:32)

Nelth, instead of standing during the national anthem.

SPEAKER_3 (1:34)

A gesture to protest discrimination against minorities in the US.

Rich Roll (1:38)

Sparked both unity and outrage.

Colin Kaepernick (1:40)

The experiences navigating police, the experiences navigating racism, ultimately led up to that moment of protesting in 2016

Protesting to say police shouldn't kill black people was controversial. There were death threats, people trying to send bombs to the house.

Rich Roll (1:59)

You're sharing these experiences that you haven't talked about before about what it was like to be you in a predominantly white neighborhood, racial slurs, etc. Like you had white parents who loved you but just couldn't understand this.

Colin Kaepernick (2:13)

I don't want people to ever have to go through that, but I also think those moments of struggle, it built an internal resilience around that, and also how you come out the other side. To me, you come out stronger.

Rich Roll (2:28)

Is there still an aspiration or a possibility that you could return to the NFL as a quarterback?

This is so cool, man. I'm so happy to meet you. I'm delighted to spend this time with you. Congratulations on the new book. It's just exciting for me to meet you.

Colin Kaepernick (2:51)

Thank you. I'm excited as well. This is a pleasure to be here.

Rich Roll (2:57)

The book is equal parts memoir and manifesto, and it's also a primer on resilience. You see all these experiences that you have that have made you this resilient human being who is preparing himself to weather like what you've had to weather.

There are those two near-death experiences that you talk about. Like you spun out on black ice and almost went off a cliff.

You were at gunpoint on the precipice of a double homicide, I guess, in college, right? Triple. Yeah. Which left you with this sense of life being precious, but also maybe a fearlessness as well, and an additional degree of courage to do the things that you've done. But what I really didn't know about you and learned a lot about was the dynamic that you grew up in as a child. I knew that you grew up in Wisconsin and had white parents, etc. But the book just blasts you right from the get-go with like, here's what it was like when I was a kid and I was in fourth grade, and these white kids like tied me to a rose tree and racial slurs, etc. Right out of the gate, you're sharing these experiences that you haven't talked about before about what it was like to be you in a predominantly white neighborhood. Not only on the receiving end of this kind of treatment, consistently throughout your life, you share all of these stories. But I think the real important piece here is that you had parents who loved you, but just couldn't understand this and really didn't want to have the conversation and couldn't create a safe place for you. So you learned early and often that it wasn't safe to open up to these people who were charged with taking care of you, what you were experiencing. And so you had to develop this dual identity of who you were. And I interpret that as a unhealed childhood wound that I think explains so much about who you are and why you've made the decisions that you've made.