EP. 1: "What Is Love?" with Rick Ringbakk, TV director, producer and 2-time primetime Emmy-winner of "The Amazing Race!”

On this episode, we explore life's pivotal question "What Is Love?" with Rick Ringbakk – an accomplished television director and producer who received two primetime Emmys for his work on "The Amazing Race."  Rick explains how he sees love, and how all of us can create love in our own lives, as he shares about his past and present family and career. Rick’s expertise spans from wildlife documentaries to reality competitions and game shows, having produced over 1,000 hours of programming for major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, Discovery, MTV, TNT, and TBS. An only child from a small, tight-knit family, Rick has been married for more than 20 years to, as he says, “the only girl I’ve ever loved.” Learn more about love – how to create it and live it – in this special episode of “We’re Not Blowing Hot Air.” 

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About Rick Ringbakk:

Rick Ringbakk is a highly respected, creative and accomplished television developer, director and producer, having filmed in more than 80 countries across six continents. His expertise spans from wildlife documentaries to reality competitions and game shows, having produced over 1,000 hours of programming for major networks like NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, Discovery, MTV, TNT, and TBS. Notably, he received two primetime Emmys for his work on "The Amazing Race." An only child from a small, tight-knit family, Rick has been married for more than 20 years to, as he says, “the only girl I’ve ever loved.” Together with his wife, Promise LaMarco Ringbakk, they adopted their daughter, Music, at birth. Music has Down Syndrome, autism, is legally blind and “is the greatest thing ever!” A Florida native, Rick recently returned to the Sunshine State after a long stint in Los Angeles. Regardless of his location, Rick lives for his family, friends, laughter, and his passions—creative endeavors, travel, the ocean and live music!

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Transcript

Lauren Carlstrom: 0:00

Welcome to the "We're Not Blowing Hot Air podcast powered by Oxygen Plus. This season we're zoned in on mental wellness as we explore some of life's biggest, most important questions with fascinating guests. Get ready for a colorful, curious exploration of this thing called life with today's remarkable guest. My BFF used to text the song "What Is Love To Me Whenever she was struggling with the concept of love. The lyrics express longing and confusion over the definition of love. While the song's majestic crescendo and expression of love as a raw, surging chemical and biological experience is captivating, the song misses out on how we can see and feel love in a bigger way.

Lauren Carlstrom: 0:45

For me, love is very identifiable. It is patient and kind. It respects and honors. It shows up and works through Love laughs, hugs, holds and stays. Love is action, not just words. But it also has to be words and, as we'll hear more about on this episode, it is a never-ending, all-around-us, ever-building magical energy. When reflecting on love, it's usually the unsung heroes of the inner circle that takes center stage a grade school teacher, a friend or, in my case, my mom. I also find a profound example of love in my cousin, rick Ringback. Strikingly, rick is also an accomplished television producer and director and creator, having produced over 1,000 hours of programming for major networks like NBC, cbs, abc, fox, discovery, mtv, tnt and TBS. He also won two prime-time Emmys for his work on "he Amazing Race. Anyone who is lucky enough to know him would agree Rick consistently and authentically lives a life that can be described only as love. Let's welcome the amazing Rick Ringbakk as we explore life's pivotal question what is love?

Rick Ringbakk: 2:12

Well, it's one of my favorite subjects, for sure. It's something that obviously is one of the most important things in our lives in terms of giving meaning to our lives, but it's also something that I think about a lot. I think of love like the fuel for our souls. So we have to have nutrition to drive our bodies, but our bodies are just one part of us. They're really not actually us right, like our bodies are just kind of what we're in, and the real us needs fuel as well to survive, to thrive, to grow, and I personally believe that that fuel is love. I think of us as energy, right. I think of people as energy, and I feel like everybody's got their own frequency that they vibrate at, and I think love is like the ultimate tuning fork to help you find that perfect frequency for yourself in different parts of your life. So when you can feel like you're not yourself and you kind of know that you're just not in the right headspace, I think that a lot of that whether it's stress or whatever, like on an almost physiological level we're kind of vibrating at the wrong frequency for ourselves, we're out of tune, right, and so that easiest, best, most dependable tuning fork to get ourselves back into being able to be our kind of best, fully expressed selves is love. So it's something that we need and it's something that we seek out. I think it's kind of magical. I think it may have been Newton who originally had the law of thermo, thermo first, law of thermodynamics, but then Einstein sort of expressed it slightly differently, and Kelvin actually really, whether it was about heat. But Einstein ultimately ended up saying, giving us the famous quote, that matter can either be created. Energy can either be created or destroyed, just transferred from one form to another. And I think that's true. But I would posit the potential argument that the one thing that flies in the face of that theory is love, because I do think that love is an energy and I think that we grow it out of thin air like magic, and so it's this very, very. There's a reason that we look at love and we think about love in such sort of sacred kind of, with such a sacred vibe around it, because we recognize that like, ok, almost every one of our other emotions get triggered by little things and it's a very kind of up and down kind of chart. Love becomes this kind of bedrock, it's this foundational thing that you can build all the other things in your life on top of, and we find it in so many places right, we find it in, obviously, like there's the most. I think.

Rick Ringbakk: 5:10

A lot of times, when people just think of love, they think of, oh, true love, finding my true love and falling in love. And yes, that is a very powerful kind of love, but it's far from the only kind. Just like we have thousands of foods that we eat that give us our nutrition to drive our bodies, we have thousands of ways of feeling love and expressing love and getting love and giving love, and some of it revolves around that finding that special someone. But that's not a requirement. No one of them is a requirement. It's just a requirement, just like nutrition, that you find it somewhere right, and so we often find it through our personal relationships, but we also can find it in completely solitary contemplation and total, total isolation, right, if you have a passion for a creativity or a passion for like.

Rick Ringbakk: 6:06

For me, the ocean has always been a great, great love.

Rick Ringbakk: 6:10

Music and live music have always been a great, great love.

Rick Ringbakk: 6:13

You could take all the people out of my life and it would be awful, but there are still these kind of pillars that I could derive love from, that I could receive love from, because we're so good at creating it.

Rick Ringbakk: 6:29

I mean, I think it's actually we're social creatures, naturally right, so we want to come together, we want to be bonded to each other. It's just part of our hardwiring and within that we're far more prone to want to like and ultimately love somebody or something than we are to want to dislike or hate somebody or something. It actually takes a super concerted effort by major forces to kind of create the divides that we have in this country right now, if you set aside bigotry and things like that. We're hardwired to want to find the things about us that we can relate to each other and ultimately we keep wanting to find a way to love things right, like it's what we do. I think one of the things that's really special about people it's why I love people is that our natural inclination is towards that and it really takes a lot of exterior factors to kind of take us out of that default mode of looking for love, trying to make love, give love, receive love. It's like, again, it's the gas. It's the gas that our engines run on.

Lauren Carlstrom: 7:37

Yeah, so interesting. So a couple of things. I just got from you, rick, in this and I'm so excited too for our listeners to know you, because I know you, you are family, you are someone that I, over the years, I've had the privilege of getting to see emblematically what love looks like through you and how you relate with people and your world, and I'm excited for our listeners to get to see this today. And what I just heard from you is that it's sort of our responsibility to have love and to make love and to find love. That really. And then secondly, just like for me, I also heard, when you're already in the groove of love, it's easier to stay there, like for I Object in motion.

Rick Ringbakk: 8:21

If we're going to go back into science, I think that object in motion tends to stay in motion right.

Lauren Carlstrom: 8:25

Yes.

Rick Ringbakk: 8:27

I wouldn't say that it's a responsibility. I would say it's a necessity. It's like it's not our responsibility to eat food. It's a necessity, right Like we have to have it or our bodies will die. I think that love and finding things that fill our souls and that fuel our souls is a necessity. Or you know, or we wither. So it's more than a responsibility.

Lauren Carlstrom: 8:51

It's just like we need it, we have to have it, but I can't say I don't have love. So it's someone else's fault or it's like you know I'm not.

Rick Ringbakk: 8:59

I don't live by the ocean.

Lauren Carlstrom: 9:00

I don't get to hear live music. I can't, I can't have that be. I'm just saying it's like the onus.

Rick Ringbakk: 9:07

No, I don't think so. I think that we find it literally everywhere. It's what's so magical about it. You know what I mean. Like, think about, like I'm not into gardening, but I know people who really are and they love those flowers and they talk to their flowers, and so they are creating a love affair with plants, right, because they need it. It's a way to you know, it's a way to create that we do it with our pets, right. Like you know, almost anybody can figure out a way to at least have a gerbil and love their gerbil, or a goldfish and love their goldfish.

Rick Ringbakk: 9:38

Like there's all these different sort of you know levels of it. But I think that you know we do seek it out. Some people everybody does it in a different way, right, like everybody loves kind of uniquely. That's where I think that sort of true love, that romantic love is sort of does sit in its own category. That requires it's like the love of what makes a great friendship. And the love of what makes a great friendship is that sort of chemistry of bond of like you know, when you're doing something with somebody it's just better because you're doing it with them. You know what I mean.

Rick Ringbakk: 10:14

Like we're here at the beach. But if I was here at the beach with a bunch of people, I didn't know it'd be one thing. But if I'm here with these people that I love, it's just this completely different experience. You know, like I'll go see a band that I love by myself, because I do love the band and I love the music, but it's I'll really think about it if it's gonna be effort to do it by myself, whereas the moment that I can go with my wife or my friends or you know, then that's, you know, that changes the equation for me and it becomes a more powerful draw.

Rick Ringbakk: 10:48

Like those experiences, you know, like certain experiences kind of almost aren't real unless you're sharing them with somebody that you love. You know what I mean. But then, on the other hand, like you can that same thing, the fact that you have a love of music. So let's say I didn't have a wife and I didn't have friends, right? Well, the reality is, if I go to this band that I love or this football game to see this football team that I love, that I'm passionate about, I care about my emotions rise and fall with the ups and downs of the season, that sort of thing right? Well, guess what? Like, if I'm open to it, I'm probably going to be able to make a friend there. Like, even if I didn't have a single friend, I am entering a world where we have a shared love and that, if you just give it a chance, you'll find somebody that you love.

Lauren Carlstrom: 11:41

Maybe not fall in love, that's so beautiful. But if you love as a friend, that's so beautiful and that's been like. That's been my experience as well and I've seen that in you. I think I'm curious how did you get to it? Took me a while to get there, you I. As soon as I met you years ago back in LA, you had that where in your childhood. What was something from your childhood where you really grew up learning this?

Rick Ringbakk: 12:05

So I was really fortunate Not that I was an only child, because there are certain kinds of love that you may want but you can't create If you don't have a brother or sister. You may wish you could have that kind of love, but you're not. You're just not going to be able to do it. It required two other people to make that happen Right, or if?

Rick Ringbakk: 12:24

they don't. They don't. My parents did, but my parents my mom passed a year and a half ago, but they were together for 55 years and they had this like truly fairy tale, like incredible relationship. So they were they got engaged two weeks after they met. They were married one month after they met and they worked together for 55 years like the most awesome partners in crime I've ever seen. And so I think that it started in a really young age, as almost everything in our learning process does, through the observation of my parents and seeing how they were, of course, receiving the love that, you know, a parent gives a child. But seeing how they were with each other shaped a lot of my desire to have that, not necessarily even romantically, but to have that, that, that kind of a support network of some. You know a person or people around me that made me feel the way I could see the two of them made each other feel. So I think it started long before I can remember. That definitely shaped my, my view of what a romantic relationship could and should look like and like.

Rick Ringbakk: 13:49

I guess you know one of the things we have talked about, talking about love, is like obviously you've got to love yourself right Like you got to.

Rick Ringbakk: 13:55

You know you, there are going to be days that you don't like yourself right Like we all have days where it's just like we know we are not operating at like the level we should be or want to be, or we are making choices that we know we are going to look back to, you know, with not regret, because I never liked to have regrets, but with chagrin.

Rick Ringbakk: 14:20

But we have to always love ourselves. We have to always love ourselves, and so you know my my mom especially was was so good at making me feel special and making me feel like you know, gosh, ricky, you know you've got the sunshine in you and you're just this light and you'll never and you'll never, you're never. You honestly like you're always going to attract people to you but you'd be fine, just just shining on your own right and so with that and then and then seeing what their relationship looked like, I didn't have a lot of serious romantic relationships. I dated a lot, I flinged a lot, but I never really got settled down a lot because I knew in my mind I had this sort of gold standard of what it was supposed to look like.

Lauren Carlstrom: 15:07

Yes, I'm so with you.

Rick Ringbakk: 15:09

It was my mom and dad and it was this incredible kind of like perfect shining example. And what's interesting is that you know, my, my, my amazing wife promised she sort of came to me having had almost the opposite, you know, sort of example, which is that you know her dad had been through multiple marriages, was on his third marriage when we met, is on his fourth you know, marriage now. So she had kind of come to it through a bunch of examples of what she didn't want it to look like. Right, but I had. I think that I was lucky in that it's you know like, as opposed to process of elimination. I was just shown the answer, right.

Lauren Carlstrom: 15:50

Well, it's interesting because it both of you were tuned into the vibe perspective that you were espousing earlier of like it's just, it's this sort of energy, and I actually remember the day. Do you remember how you guys? Of course you remember how you and Promise met? Yeah, yeah, I was staying with her at her place I don't know if you remember that part, but you guys were had the music was bumping too loud and you were her neighbor and she was like, oh, these guys, they're just had the loudest music, like you know. And then, and then I think like she went over and ask you to politely turn it down, and it ended up, you guys, slightly different, got married, got married. How did it go?

Rick Ringbakk: 16:33

I love this story. So I was doing wildlife documentaries and I would go on the road for like 12 to 14 weeks and then I would come back and I would only have two weeks at home and I had this unbelievable friend network that, like you know, I I mean, I loved that part of my life creatively. I loved that I was, you know, what I got to do was be in nature and following humpback, whale, mark migrations and, like my other loves, like my loves for nature, my love for the ocean, my love for creative expression, all like feeding, feeding, feeding, feeding. But you know, and I would have my cameraman, my sound man, etc.

Rick Ringbakk: 17:11

When I, you know, while I was out there, it was, you know, I later moved on to do kind of much bigger shows with big crews, but this was usually like three or four of us on the road in the middle of the jungle or on a boat, you know, going out to the great white sharks or whatever. And so when I would get home, what I needed to feed was that friend glove I needed, I needed that, you know, I needed that, and so I would typically throw kind of a two week long nobody needs to leave my apartment, gathering right when kind of an open door policy, you know, like you know, sleeping whatever bedroom that you want, and etc.

Rick Ringbakk: 17:54

Kind of policy. And it was just me living there when Promise and I met. I had, I had, I had gotten rid of my roommates and I it was just me and I had a three bedroom place and so I just, it was this you know, all my friends would be over and we would, we would, we would, we would have a great time for a couple of weeks. So I think Promise knew me as this loud guy next door.

Lauren Carlstrom: 18:14

Yeah, right.

Rick Ringbakk: 18:16

So and then one of my oldest friends from from college, tiffany, when I was away, was talking to Met Promise and was talking to Promise and was like oh my God, my friend Ricky Ringback is going to love you and. And then I came back and, as I was want to do, I immediately threw a party and Promise's mom came to the party. Promise's mom came over to the party and she stayed at my apartment until like four o'clock in the morning and then went back and you know thank God, you know, like I didn't know that she was the mother of the pretty girl next door went back and championed to me a little bit and said actually, you know, this guy's pretty cool, you maybe, you know, I know it's loud, but give him a chance. So that was kind of how, how, how that started, but yeah, like.

Lauren Carlstrom: 19:07

I knew that was an awesome moment for me. I have to. I was at Pepperdine and I was in college at the time, crashing with the cousin and and and seeing you guys. How I saw you guys, how you first met. I saw you how you treat each other. You know, at your wedding in Baja and I've seen you like many times throughout the years up until last Christmas how you have always loved each other and treated each other so well and that you I've told you this before, rick you, your marriage, is the one I want to have as well and why I'm also have this gold standard. I'm more. You know, my, my, my mom is awesome as well, but you know I didn't see that same marriage that that you had. I was more for different reasons, more like promise, my, my cousin, right.

Lauren Carlstrom: 19:56

So, it was just, it's just been like. You truly are one of the guys that I'm like.

Lauren Carlstrom: 20:01

I need a guy like that, like in my life to make my life with no, and that's how important love is and that's why, like this is leading the the season, opening it up, because I think people really need to know what what love can look like in a relationship. It's so important to me that no one lets their you know or or in their world, no one like misses out on this magic Right, so I didn't want me to cut you off but I just wanted to make sure I got that in there.

Rick Ringbakk: 20:30

I appreciate that as somebody that's always kind of told my parents that you know you y'all's was the relationship that I always wanted to have to hear, that, that promise and I are after 20, gosh almighty 24 years together and 22 years married in 2002. Yeah, it'll be 20, it'll be 22 years in May and we got together in April of 2020. So, yeah, 24 years, almost a quarter century. To hear that we're, you know, have become an example is the highest, highest compliment. But yeah, I like, I feel, like you know, that that partnership relationship, that romantic love that you know person that's going to truly be you can have best friends. But let's be honest, that, should that becomes your real best friend, is is kind of the one relationship that that you just don't want to settle on Right, like it's because it requires so much energy, because it requires so much compromise. You know, really like. You know, like, like it does require it because it is two people kind of becoming one life. It requires both people to have such a level of investment into. Oh, my God, I'm so grateful and and and and blessed to have this person and this relationship that it allows you, in the difficult times, to be able to make the compromises or get through the tight squeeze, whether it's financial or, you know, losing someone that you love, all the stuff that life is going to throw at you. Like Life will try and throw a relationship that isn't really grounded and really really strong off course. With all sorts of things it will try and shake you out. You know what I mean, and it's not like life is trying to do that, but it's like there are too many variables, there are too many unforeseen, there are too many. It's not always going to look exactly like it looks on day one in terms of where you are in life and where you live and what the job is. There's just things evolve and the relationship has to be strong enough to go through the evolution together and that, I think, is why we don't have the.

Rick Ringbakk: 22:58

I think back in the day there was maybe this just sort of divorce was anathema and you were just like, because it was frowned upon, there was a social stigma around it, so people didn't get divorced, but then people ended up kind of staying together miserably for their entire lives and I think that now you see lots of people who are finding their love in so many different ways.

Rick Ringbakk: 23:24

You know what I mean Through their in personal endeavors, through their passions around nature, their passions around the arts, their passions around you know, whatever it may be something again as silly as a football team there are so many different ways that a person can find a have a full kind of enriched lives, and we're living these dual lives, right, our real world life and our digital life, and so that creates all these additional kind of levels of connection in this network that you know, the divorce rate has gone down a lot because the young marriage rate has gone down a lot, right, people aren't feeling like they have to race into getting married and promise and I didn't.

Rick Ringbakk: 24:05

I was 30, right, I was like now that would be probably considered like the normal time, right, but when I was getting married 24 years ago, that was still considered like ah. My mom was probably like, ah, is he ever going to do it? Yeah, oh, geez, what's he waiting for? She's great and I didn't wait long. Yeah, that's what I found promise. But I think that you can't make. You can't make it happen, just like you either jump into the ocean and go oh my God, I love this or you jump into the ocean and go oh my God, I'm really nervous about maybe around the water, you know, with me and like I have a friend by a good buddy.

Lauren Carlstrom: 24:44

Well, is the water warmer Cool? Is that not a factor? It's warmer where you are. It's warm yeah.

Rick Ringbakk: 24:50

Almost, unless it's so freezing, like, if you really love it, it almost shouldn't matter, right?

Rick Ringbakk: 24:55

Like I remember being in Norway.

Rick Ringbakk: 24:58

I mean, I remember being in Norway, you know, when I was like four years old, five years old, with my parents and going out with my dad on his uncle's little fishing boat in the summertime and a few are jumping in the water and like it was cold, but like in the ocean. I just loved it, right. So, like you know, like most people love the beach, right, but I got a buddy, greg Good, who feels like sand is dirty. He's like I don't like the feel of it, I don't like to go to the beach, I don't like being on the beach, right. So that's the thing. Like you know, we're drawn to different things and we can always find plenty of things that we naturally want to have, make a connection with and naturally want to love. That's why we don't choose to spend our free time doing things that we're not that drawn to, and that's why, when you choose to create a relationship with somebody that you're not that drawn to, it's probably not going to get through the gauntlet that life's going to hurl at it, you know.

Lauren Carlstrom: 26:01

Wow, very well said and insightful and wise. And it's not a requirement.

Rick Ringbakk: 26:07

I have so many friends. Like I have so many friends I mean, look at, you have so many friends are like, yes, it would be great, but also like it's fine if it doesn't. If that doesn't happen, for me it's the same Like we're evolving, right. Like the number of friends that I have that don't have kids today is more than the number of friends that I have that do have kids today. And I saw it especially living in Los Angeles this weird trend break where suddenly, like people were just not having kids right.

Rick Ringbakk: 26:35

I have my own theory on that that like the earth is sort of sending out a signal that we need to slow down on the making more people in the making more people department because it's not sustainable.

Rick Ringbakk: 26:46

But there is some sort of signal that we're picking up because it was a real, it's a real overnight kind of thing from my parents generation to boomers, to my generation, Gen X, where suddenly it just stopped being and I think, especially in bigger cities and things like that, it's stopped being this like pre-wreck that you gotta, you gotta have kids right and when that stopped kids and that sort of does that procreation kind of hardwiring.

Rick Ringbakk: 27:15

I think that was a big part of the thing that kind of drove the like, well, I have to get married thing right. And so like I really separate the idea of love and what love is and how it's going to get, why and how we need love and all the ways we can find love from things like marriage and children and things like that, because I see people living these fully expressed, amazing lives that are filled with love and filled with real deep meaning and deep connection that aren't married and they don't have kids, and so when I see enough examples of that, that says that's not a pre-wreck to love, it's just not.

Lauren Carlstrom: 27:52

Yeah.

Rick Ringbakk: 27:52

Yeah.

Lauren Carlstrom: 27:54

I mean because I think that that actually might hopefully will free people to learn that. I know it did me as I, like, saw it.

Rick Ringbakk: 28:00

I just said that's not a drive through a relationship that they're miserable in.

Lauren Carlstrom: 28:05

You'd be amazed, though, how many people still are.

Rick Ringbakk: 28:09

I was in a relationship where, literally I came home. It was the only long kind of long term relationship I had before promise, and I was with a golfer about three years and about a year and a half into it I realized it was just no way this was going to work. But I didn't want to break her heart and I didn't want to like, so I just stayed in it and it was like I'm going to see if I can make this. I think this is what happens to so many people. Right, I'm going to see if I can make this work. And it wasn't until like I started realizing that. Like I was driving home in the car by myself, day after day, verbally, like talking through and rehearsing the breakup, like fantasizing like tonight, I'm going to do it tonight, and then like God, I can't do it tonight, she had a hard day, et cetera, and I let it go for like over a year.

Rick Ringbakk: 28:59

Over a year to where you know, my friends and the people who knew me best are like what's going on? Like you don't seem like yourself, like I think sometimes, like we want something like that more than something like that might want us, or especially when it's not the right person, right Like. You're trying to make it happen and you can't. You can't make it happen.

Rick Ringbakk: 29:20

It's like the oldest cliche in the book, but it's like you'll, you know you'll know it when you feel it. You know you'll know it when you feel it and it's, and the first five years are the tell. If it's stronger five years in than it was on day one, you've probably punched your ticket for an awesome lifelong relationship. You cannot, I don't believe. I think my parents are the absolute like exception case where you meet somebody, get engaged after two weeks, get married after four weeks and live and are together like really happy, for 55 years. The odds are astronomically stacked against that because, again, like romantic loves in its own category, that it requires so many other elements to be in place properly because of the level of commitment and because of the life journey you're now going to go on tied to the hip right.

Lauren Carlstrom: 30:17

Like you give up.

Rick Ringbakk: 30:18

You give up. I don't want to, I don't want this to come across negatively but, like you, give up a lot of your own ability to kind of be, live life completely freely and make decisions. I'm not talking about, like you know, like one night stands, and now I'm not talking about sex. I'm just talking about like life decisions that will chart the course.

Lauren Carlstrom: 30:38

Now you've got where you can live right.

Rick Ringbakk: 30:41

Yeah To each other, right? So, you know, is there a job that's trying saying let's go like we moved? You know, promise is amazing. My mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer's six years ago and we've been in LA you know both of us since 1992. And we had started dating in 2000 and this was now 2017.

Rick Ringbakk: 31:07

My mom got diagnosed and by 2019, it was like eating me alive that I was not here in Florida, very close to my mom, like she was still together at that point, but like you were starting to see the little chinks in the armor. And there was suddenly a clock on it. Right, there was a clock on this incredibly important relationship, the person that had taught me what love looks like. Right, there was a clock on it. I was going to lose my mind if I didn't move back here and wasn't close to her for however many good days and amazing moments and however much more love we could share left before she was either just gone in terms of from the Alzheimer's, or gone completely right, and both those things ended up happening. So promise now, right, this is what I'm talking about. Like life curveballs, we have this insane friend network, right, like promises and actress and auditioning and all this stuff. And all of a sudden I look at her literally kind of out of the blue.

Rick Ringbakk: 32:12

When it hit me like a revelation that I didn't know what I was having anxiety about. I actually thought it was about we had just adopted our beautiful little daughter, music. I thought maybe it was about being a dad and our daughter has special needs. And when I was having anxiety about that and then I began having these dreams about my mother and I realized it was about my mom. So this is all going leading somewhere.

Rick Ringbakk: 32:35

So there was a day when I said to promise, I'm like maybe I don't know how to tell you this, but I have to be close to mom. I don't know how much time there is left and we got to go quick. Like it was almost like there's a fire, we have to get out right. So, like I have this revelation in May and we moved to Florida, uproot after 20 plus 30 years each of us in LA, we uproot in 18 years together. In our 20 years together in LA, we uproot in three months and move to Florida. That only works If the relationship is strong enough that promise can go. He needs this. I can put him in front of literally everything and make this Massive, massive life change in order for it to go and help his family.

Lauren Carlstrom: 33:29

Yeah, I mean I could, I had promise on today.

Rick Ringbakk: 33:33

Yes, I can tell you not only she have been much better to look at than me, but she is a far more deeply spiritual person than me and her takes on love would probably be More interesting than mine.

Lauren Carlstrom: 33:51

I wonder, next year we have a bigger audience.

Rick Ringbakk: 33:55

You may have blown it on this one.

Lauren Carlstrom: 33:58

No, I'm gonna have our next year to talk about something else, when we have a bigger audience.

Rick Ringbakk: 34:02

Rick, I can already see, the podcast is gonna start like this so high promise.

Lauren Carlstrom: 34:07

So, as you know, we were gonna have your husband on, but we went back and looked at it and decided no, I don't have that kind of time, but uh, no, but no, this she is amazing and I agree like what a phenomenal couple I was. I do want to get into your, your work. I think that that our listeners would love to hear about how your passions fueled your time as a producer, on Shows like the amazing race, which she, which promise, actually traveled with you to do all the things, like bungee jumping, and Maybe like if you could regalus with a few stories of how love has Ignited and fueled your, your work with their friends, family.

Lauren Carlstrom: 34:51

That would be, I think, really cool. I could give us an inside peek at that.

Rick Ringbakk: 34:55

So so, as I said, like I have a love of the ocean from a really, really, really young age. It's fascinated by it. I can, you know, learn to scuba dive when I was, when I was 12, the moment I could get, was old enough to get my paddy divers like dry, you know diversized. I got that and then I became a dive master by the time I was 17, the moment that I could do that. And when I was in college, I worked as a dive master in the Florida Keys.

Rick Ringbakk: 35:21

I went to, I literally chose my colleges based on where would I be able to be close to the ocean.

Rick Ringbakk: 35:28

That Forced me to choose an initial major around, because my dad wanted me to go to like an Ivy League school or Stanford, neither of which I was getting into.

Rick Ringbakk: 35:38

But but so I had to come up with a reason that the places I wanted to Apply were the University of Miami, the University of Hawaii and the University of California, san Diego. Now, truth be told, I just wanted to be somewhere where I could go diving and where I would be near the ocean, and that's that's what I wanted, right, because I love, love, love the ocean. And so I kind of backed into this almost scheme where I said, you know, I've decided I want to be a marine scientist and that's what I want to do with my life. And I actually ended up getting a scholarship to the University of Miami, miami, which has one of the best marine science schools in the country, those three schools like the best three marine science schools. So that sort of satisfied my dad's, my dad's Conditions. And then I actually got a scholarship to go to the University of Miami and, as it turned out, as I probably could have suspected, I Was very good at the marine part and very bad at the science part.

Lauren Carlstrom: 36:43

I.

Rick Ringbakk: 36:45

Unfortunately there was no just.

Lauren Carlstrom: 36:50

You were coding Einstein earlier. Are you sure you didn't do alright?

Rick Ringbakk: 36:54

I was very bad at the science part and so I decided like, well, how, what else can? And it was. I mean, I really was fascinated with the idea of being a scientist. I just thought like, if this is a Career where that could have me be in the ocean all the time, you know, and traveling to these amazing places and being underwater and exploring this incredible world, like you know, that would be incredible. And Then when I, when I was gonna lose my scholarship because the science part was really hard for me, I switched gears into the film school with the idea of, well, I will make wildlife documentaries, I will become somebody who shoots wildlife documentaries and, you know, focus on the ocean, and and that's that even better. Now I don't worry about science at all, now I just have to figure out how to use a camera. And so let's, let's do that.

Rick Ringbakk: 37:43

And I actually, by the time I was like a junior in college, I was leading dives in the Florida Keys as a dive master and making my beer money by filming, you know, my, the tourists who I was taking out and then slapping together the tapes of, like all the good b-roll that I had shot, like you know, over months of diving there, slapping that together with the dive that I just shot of them and selling them to them for like 20 bucks a piece and it's like, do you want it to like you choose beautiful day, or this song or that song.

Rick Ringbakk: 38:10

I was kind of, you know like, and I was feeling like, okay, this is really what you know I want to do and so so the love of the ocean kind of. I discovered my love for, for, for filmmaking, for television, through my love of the ocean. I actually, you know, started out thing, I'm just gonna be able to get right into wildlife documentaries and then, as it's so often the case with career paths like, the doors don't just open. So I had to bounce around and doing a couple of different types of shows and different types of jobs. I moved to Los Angeles as soon as I got out, thinking that's where I'll be able to you know all the networks are, etc. And and eventually I did First did a show called Sea Tech. That was all underwater for the learning channel back when TLC was not. Here comes honey, boo, boo. Back when TLC was actually like the learning channel.

Rick Ringbakk: 39:08

It was all about underwater technologies and then I got onto this show called wild things and wild things. I was doing underwater camera work and then I began producing and directing on wild things and that was where I really kind of, you know, fell in love. When it fell in love with, you know, I've been coming back and and and watching the tapes in my tent at night after we've been following orangutans through the jungle in In Borneo, you know, and and you know, say you, putting together the paper cup for whenever we got down river to a town where I could get to a Place to send the tapes that I would have all the notes and stuff back, and I really kind of fell in love with it. So it was like one love begat, another love. Right, like I was a person I thought it was more science but I hated the science but I still love the marine, and then that, let me kind of led me into this and I did that for for five years. That's all I did.

Rick Ringbakk: 39:58

Was you know was wildlife stuff. I did a couple of other things. I did the like eco challenges, which were a big adventure race that was on Discovery Channel. I did the Olympics in in Nagano, japan, in 1998. I produced all the first snowboarding events At the know that.

Rick Ringbakk: 40:16

Yeah, for CBS. And and so slowly I was kind of like like the Long ago aquatic animals before us that you know, that had flippers and grew feet as they dragged themselves out of the water. I was sort of doing the same creatively, like like the ocean had taken me to this creative endeavor that I loved, and then I began to realize that there were other things that that I loved as well, and so I was like you know, I'm beginning to explore that more. And then after that, like the that was right when reality TV was taking off, so survivor had just launched, a big brother had just launched, and my boss from this wildlife show that I've been doing, this guy, amazing guy Bertram, called me up one day and said hey, my wife has this crazy idea for people racing around the world. Do you want to come to India with us? And we'll go and try and figure it out.

Rick Ringbakk: 41:12

And we went to India for three weeks and that was kind of how the amazing race got born and that show, of course you know, blew up and and was where I was able to, you know, win a bunch of Emmys. But as that was going on, so right before the amazing race, like I met promise. The show Wild Things has was finished. I Was in this little lull where I didn't have, you know, a gig. I like a full-time kind of gig.

Lauren Carlstrom: 41:38

So you're having parties back?

Rick Ringbakk: 41:40

I mean yeah right, I continue to do wildlife, like you know 42, 43 weeks a year on the road, which is what I was doing. I was home Maybe eight or ten weeks to ten weeks a year and only in like ten day to two week Pocket. So it probably been pretty hard and some other lucky dude was snatched her up, but there just happened to be, you know. You know, stars aligned and and and promise, and I met and then amazing race. We sold amazing race and that show started and and the first season of amazing race. I Knew that I was gonna be finishing in Thailand. Promise, and I had been dating for a couple of months. We had just started dating. I knew that, that I was gonna be finishing in Thailand, and so I invited promise to come over and join me in Thailand. I wasn't gonna be. Can go in with the race from Thailand back to America to finish line, so I could presumably was already there. I had all this wrap-out stuff I do. I had, you know, paid for hotel room and hey, want to come to Thailand for a couple of weeks, and etc. And I and she came over a little bit early Before the race actually came in where I was gonna be in that, really in the thick of it, and there was an incident with a Chinese jet and an American jet in Chinese airspace.

Rick Ringbakk: 42:59

There was this really close call. This is back in 2000. And it created this instant sudden like, oh my God, there's going to be potentially a war between America and China. It was this very tense moment. It was right as the race was coming out of China and into Thailand and the contestants all got out. But then Americans that were in China got held and that included my production designer and art department who were supposed to be coming down and building a big pit stop for me. Oh wow, now I was short that and there was nobody there that I could hire, and my sort of girlfriend that I had just started dating had literally just arrived. It was waiting for me to get through these last, you know this last week and then we were going to spend a couple of weeks getting to just hang out and we were in Southern Thailand, down in the amazing island area and I needed this pit stop built and I basically had to look at her and say, I know we essentially still don't even know each other very well, but and I can't pay you and you're not allowed to be here because I'm not allowed to have a girlfriend on the shoot. It's one of my bosses like hard, fast rules. But here are 30 Thai workers. I need this beach that's been being used as a party palace for locals to be completely cleaned up and I need like a Shangri-La built for the end of an episode of the amazing race. And I left her with a bunch of Thai workers who spoke no English and I flew up to Bangkok because the race was coming into Bangkok.

Rick Ringbakk: 44:27

First, I had no idea what I was going to find when I got back down there. And I got back down there and it was this unbelievable. She had fired answers that she'd hired on the beach. She'd found 300 pound massive giant clam shells that she would had created like a seafood buffet on the beach. What Fast pit stop. She had masseuses for not only the contestants but for the cameramen and sound men there on the beach.

Rick Ringbakk: 44:55

And you know, bert, my boss of course knew that. You know we didn't have our art department and we were both kind of expecting. I'm like I was telling her like I don't know, like you know, I found an American and I just kind of put her to work. She seemed like maybe we should be capable what I have no idea. And it was this unbelievable thing. And he's like, okay, who did this? You know, I want to meet this person. Wow, I'm not going to lie to my boss that this person's kind of you know my girlfriend and so I promise out, and then he was Bert, was just like this is amazing. You know, if you ever want a job on show, you know, then just let us know what you want to do and you can come and work on the show. And so that started this incredible journey for the two of us.

Rick Ringbakk: 45:40

My job when we weren't shooting the amazing race was to go and plan all of the stops and routes. And what are the things we're going to do? From bungee jumping in New Zealand to rolling wheels of cheese down a hillside in Switzerland to, you know, hang gliding in Rio de Janeiro, just like all this amazing stuff had to get figured out and tried. And the thing we had realized after season one was like we needed, like a regular citizen, just like a non-adrenaline junkie, person who had not been to these places, to film we were kind of filming ourselves, you know, like it could be this or that to show the network, but wouldn't it be great if we could find so the original plan had been. Where does find somebody in each place to be like? Go to a hostel and find you know a kid who's like hey, do you want to go roll a wheel of cheese down a hillside today?

Lauren Carlstrom: 46:27

Or do you want to go?

Rick Ringbakk: 46:28

bungee jumping. But what we were able to do was promise and I ended up being able to go out and do that together. So she and I would get to do travel all over the world, with her trying out all this crazy stuff and me shooting her doing it, and then we would go back and pitch it to the network Like this is what a regular person going on bungee jump that you know, this is what that looks like, this is the kind of reaction we can expect, et cetera.

Lauren Carlstrom: 46:52

So we got to have this unbelievable experience for several years and actually you know that gig lasted several years for you, to both for the body.

Rick Ringbakk: 47:04

It was honestly. It was honestly you know there is such thing as too much of a good thing we realized that after about four or five years of doing it together, that when we weren't on the amazing race, we did not want to travel Like we did not. We just wanted to lay on our couch and like Netflix and chill, you know, and and I think this was back when you still had to order DVDs from Netflix yeah, yeah, like Netflix and chill. And we kind of looked at each other one day we're like this show could go forever, like we could just keep doing this, like running around the world like crazy, and it's awesome, but like, is this? Is this what we want our life to be? And both of us were like I love travel and I'm starting but I'm starting to not like travel.

Lauren Carlstrom: 47:53

There you go. You went back to you, both tapped back into the vibration. You're like you know like owning your love and what that looks like. Yeah.

Rick Ringbakk: 48:02

But it was so. That was, you know like. So, in a roundabout way, I can thank the ocean. I can thank the ocean for the journey that took me all the way to my wife, because even an interesting story once we had initially started dating, I went and did a, produced and directed a music documentary around a band that I liked down in Costa Rica and promise and I just started dating this band string cheese incident and promise wanted to come and I was nervous, I was going to be distracted and so I told her I didn't want her to come.

Rick Ringbakk: 48:35

And while I was gone, a suitor, this guy, dave Boyles, that we know is a really good musician, better looking guy than me and certainly have a lot better guitar player than me showed up with roses out, promises apartment and I'm in Costa Rica and he is there to court her.

Rick Ringbakk: 48:54

You know she has a gentleman caller and while he was there he gets a phone call from a buddy of his that says turn on the TV, turn on the TV. Rick's on TV right now and it was a rerun from my wildlife days of this show called Wild Things and it was a thing where I was filming sea snakes in Indonesia and this crazy, the most venomous snake in the world by like a long shot, like a bite, can kill 300 people. It was this crazy story where I was being chased by literally being chased by them and kind of swimming for my, for my life, from these sea snakes and promise, you know, watches this with him and she's like thanks for the roses. But I think I'm going to have to give Rick a chance so we really can go all the way back to the ocean and like thank it for everything.

Rick Ringbakk: 49:43

You know what I mean, like all that first love of a thing that wasn't a person that I can remember, the first thing that I was just like, so drawn to, has been. You know that one love has given back in so many ways and through the cycles of my own life.

Lauren Carlstrom: 50:02

That's so beautiful I'm going to think that we all even come from the ocean Like that's where like and the water and the you know what's.

Rick Ringbakk: 50:10

what's the water in our bodies is the exact same sailing content as the ocean. Like, we are made up primarily of ocean. We think it's blood, but it's actually sailing ocean water, Crazy.

Lauren Carlstrom: 50:24

It definitely makes me want to come visit you again. Speaking of just if you could share, you balance a lot you have. You still have an awesome career, even if it's not TV production a little bit. So TV production, or what are you doing right now?

Rick Ringbakk: 50:40

Yeah, no, so I so Promise. And I, six years ago, adopted this amazing, amazing little girl. At birth, her name is music, and so we get live music in the house every night now, and music is just the coolest thing on earth. Music has a lot of challenges. Music has Down syndrome, music has severe autism.

Rick Ringbakk: 51:08

Music was born legally blind. She had cataracts that were so thick that one of her eyes, the lens of her eyes, was completely cracked because the cataract was so thick very rare so she had to have surgery and have the lenses of her eyes removed within the first six weeks of her life. So we, you know, that obviously is a big, is a big change. We weren't, and we weren't when we were trying to adopt, we weren't thinking special needs Like. We learned that she was special needs. The mother gave birth prematurely. We flew to Illinois and we didn't learn that she had Down syndrome until after we had taken her from the hospital and we were in Chicago with her. She spent the first couple of weeks of her life in the NICU when we were in Chicago waiting to for a judge to say it's cool for us to fly back to California with this baby that we're adopting, and so Do you know by the way, do you know how I heard you guys decided to move forward with the adoption?

Lauren Carlstrom: 52:06

I heard the story. I think it was from Promise. She said we looked, we heard the news, we cried a little bit with each other and we said absolutely, we're going forward. Is that correct? Yeah?

Rick Ringbakk: 52:18

Yeah, and we actually had already decided, no matter what the news was, we were going forward. But we, we, we did. We got the news and then we had this kind of moment where we it's amazing, like you know we just kind of let go of the image that we'd had in our heads of what this was going to look like and kind of instantaneously looked at this amazing tiny. She was four pounds Like. She was so, so tiny. It was like put her in your pocket cabbage patch, yeah Right, and we went out, we put her in the stroller and we went out and we went through, walked around Chicago and we ended up in this amazing beautiful empty church and we prayed for all the love and joy and happiness and success, for a little music that we could have, and by the end of the day we were like thrilled with whatever this was going to be, whatever this was going to mean. But it was challenging.

Rick Ringbakk: 53:22

Those first couple of years in LA where I was still working like 60, 70 hours a week. I worked crazy hours. My company was being funded by a company in Germany and so I would be up in the middle of the night with phone calls, you know, to them, and then you know how pitching and you know, et cetera, and then when we have shows, shooting. So I began was already realizing that after 25 years of doing a lot of physical production right, a lot of like building the crew and getting out there in the field and either producing and directing or just producing and going on the road for weeks of time, like that needed to shift. And so I began it was already in my brain starting to kind of shift myself towards. I want to be more just on the development side. I just want to ideate, I want to come up with show ideas, I want to help companies that might have an idea flush that idea out, and so that, combined with my mom's diagnosis, and like we need to move to Florida, we moved to Florida and like we got here in in September, october of 2019.

Rick Ringbakk: 54:23

And then, like four months later, the pandemic hits right, the world shuts down, and then we come out of it and everything is this right, what we're doing right now, like there are no more in person meetings, there are no more in person pitches and they're still up. And so, for four years later, and the industry is still running completely virtually, like, like this, because it's just more efficient. So so I ultimately was, you know, weirdly, the pandemic kind of like like smoothed over the fact that, like if it had still been like, where's Rick? Why is he in the room, why are we having to? People are going to pitch and then they're having to like, zoom me in. That would have really changed the dynamics and I'm not sure if it would have worked right. But the pandemic created it. Where you know, I don't think a lot of people even realize that I'm not in California, I don't know. So I was lucky that way, yeah that's phenomenal.

Lauren Carlstrom: 55:19

So you are still doing TV production. Is there anything you can talk about now? A lot, less hours.

Rick Ringbakk: 55:23

Like, look, I don't want to miss a moment of music's life and the experience with music. And so I've sort of changed, switch gears a lot. I've cut my workload down by 60%. I work more like 20 or 25 hours a week as opposed to 60 to 70 hours a week, and I do it kind of create a scenario where almost all of the work that I do is like me sitting on my dock with a laptop on my lap, you know, just brainstorming ideas for, like what do we? How do we fix this one part of a show or what's the twist that could happen? And it's a very writer based, you know, kind of job.

Rick Ringbakk: 56:11

Now. So I miss the, I miss the juice and like of kind of the making and I miss, you know, in LA, like if you're in the entertainment industry and that's what you want to do, you're like you're right, you're right next to the campfire, you're getting all the heat that's coming off of the campfire. You can really feel it, right, it's driving the whole city Move across the country, and it's now it's like I'm still getting my heat from the campfire, but like I'd have to make an effort to get burned, you know, and I have to make an effort to go to get that far back into it. So it still scratches the itch for me. But like we, again we evolve right. You know I had 30 amazing years of you know pouring every you know ounce of energy that I had in that wasn't being poured into my, to my wife and my friends into that kind of work, and so being able to pull back a little is a huge blessing.

Lauren Carlstrom: 57:05

That's so cool. It's just you, just always. It's a constant retuning of that love fork. Then isn't it To like?

Rick Ringbakk: 57:13

it is and it's allowing you know, at different times, different aspects of love to become the thing right.

Rick Ringbakk: 57:22

You know, like now, now music's the thing, right, Like music's the thing. And so it doesn't mean that you can't kind of, you know, embrace and feed and be fed from all the same avenues of that you've derived love from throughout your life. But you know that for us, especially with all you know, her unique situation is very much the like the time and energy kind of part of it. But fortunately we've also put ourselves in a situation where the ocean is right outside the door and we've got a little boat that can take us out on it and we can be out with dolphins in an hour or on the beach in 30 minutes, and so we're super, super, you know, lucky that way and still feed that part of our soul, you know.

Lauren Carlstrom: 58:11

Rick, the way you love, the way you live. It's inspirational to me. I hope I believe to our listeners too, that we're really lucky to get to know you. Anyone who knows you is lucky to know you.

Rick Ringbakk: 58:23

And I think that.

Lauren Carlstrom: 58:25

I think our listeners will agree. Thank you for everything you shared today and all the color that you bring to your world.

Rick Ringbakk: 58:35

Thank you. Thank you for having me and getting a chance to talk about, like the best subjects on earth, the thing that makes our lives have meaning and makes the whole merry go around. Keep spinning, you know it's. We can never give up on love.

Lauren Carlstrom: 58:50

Never Any last word on love you want to share with our listeners.

Rick Ringbakk: 58:55

You know, just let let it happen. And there's many places in your life as you can. It wants to happen, it naturally wants to occur. It is a naturally occurring phenomenon that we are a part of and we can, you know, we can allow. I think the only thing that kind of gets in the way from having you know a hundred different called revenue streams of love is us, is us putting up barriers and sort of not being open to. You never know where the next person, place thing that you are going to fall in love with is going to come from. You just got to be open to.

Lauren Carlstrom: 59:37

All right, amen, I like it All right.

Rick Ringbakk: 59:39

Thanks, so much Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening.

Lauren Carlstrom: 59:42

Do us a solid and smash that subscribe, share and five star rating button or link for the show. That way more people can elevate their mental wellness as they explore some of life's biggest, most important questions with remarkable and fascinating guests. Oxygen Plus powers this episode of "e're Not Blowing Hot Air. Nice guy. Creative services is our producer. Leslie Blenner has it as designer. I'm Lauren Carlstrom. I'm a producer. I'm a producer. I'm a producer, I'm a producer. I'm Lauren Carlstrom, concepting and host. Arlene Applebaum is editor. Thank you, valued listener. Keep breathing easy so together we can color our world.