Master of Change: Brad Stulberg On Rugged Flexibility & The Neuroscience Of Expectations

28:12And that's why he's the world's best. So I think a lot of people read that and were just astonished at the amount that this guy was training and they were curious about the five tube method. But what you're getting at is kind of the between the lines subtext of this whole thing, which is that it was motivated out of a desire to expand his concept of who he was and his identity so that he could embrace his training from a more holistic point of view and enjoy his life and take life as life comes as opposed to being so overly invested in the results, especially when you're going for the Olympics because it's literally like one day if you have an off day and he talks about that, like you're fucked, right?

28:58So what does that mean? And who are you if you get sick that day? Yeah, and it's not like my reading between the subtext, I guess it is a little, but he says as much. He says that having a life outside of speed skating allowed me to skate without fear. Because if shit hit the fan, then he still has this other life outside of speed skating. So I'm not here to say like his training was well balanced or anything like that. I can't comment on it. He's clearly a freak. He's the best in the world. Genetically, training wise, phenomenal. But what is fascinating to me is how intentional he was about ensuring that there were other elements to who Niels Vanderpool was, even in the buildup to the Olympics.

29:39and then sometimes as a writer, you just get lucky and like these stories have the most poetic endings that you didn't even know was gonna happen. So while I'm in the process of writing the book and I'm already like, you know, honed in on Vanderpool to explore this concept of self-complexity and diversifying your identity, he decides that he wants to give away his gold medal to the daughter of someone that has been jailed for writing a book that the Chinese regime felt was not kosher. So like the ultimate shedding of identity as an Olympian is like, you work so hard, you win this medal and then you give this medal away for a cause that is human rights that now he says he wants to do human rights work.

30:21So I have no doubt that Niels Vanderpoel was hyper-focused on speed skating. Like you have to be to train 33 hours a week. And he did diversify his sense of self and have these other rooms that he could go into, which made him that much less fragile. and I think it makes you better at your primary craft. Right, it, there is an argument that that is what made him better. And I think there's a certain, well, I mean, he's not the only example of that. Like I'm thinking of Francois Den, who's somebody I interviewed who has a similar kind of life philosophy. There's something European about that. Like we enjoy our life, you know, I'm gonna have a glass of wine and I, you know, do other things and I have kids and all of that, that allow you to go into your racing with a level of kind of perspective on what it means.

31:07Or, you know, maybe even Courtney Dewalter, who has a very happy-go-lucky, you know, it's like she's killing it. But I get the sense that if she didn't win these races, that she'd be fine. Yeah, and we look at these extremes. So like another great extreme example is Shalane Flanagan, who's a close friend, who like very intentionally saw that her career was winding down, loves cooking. so partners with Elise Kopecky, who's a chef and dietician, and gets really into cooking so that she has an off-ramp from running professionally, which is writing cookbooks and being in the food scene. But I also think that just for mortals, it's really important.

31:50So the book I'm looking at that we're talking about, I obviously want to do really well. I want it to hit all the lists. I want it to sell all the copies. And yeah, if it doesn't, it'll suck, but I still have the dad room. I still have the husband room. I still have the athlete room. I still have the neighborhood community room and I'm okay. Like I will be okay. You know, maybe the sucky period will be being really upset for a couple of days instead of a couple of years. And I think that like that is the primary risk regardless of your level at your craft and your pursuit. But if that thing is the thing and there aren't other things available, then when things change, it's going to be really rough.

32:33And you don't just see this with work. I mean, think about how many people just get destroyed when their kids live the house and they become empty nesters. I mean, QAnon is like a high proportion of empty nesters because like your life is full, you have kids, now there's emptiness. Oh my God, I need belonging. I need a hole to fill it with. So I think anytime we really care deeply about something, that's a a good cue or a good trigger to make sure that there's other parts of our identity. Diversify, just like your financial portfolio. That's it, we need to diversify our identity. I mean, more broadly, it's really a conversation around attachment and non-attachment.

33:09How attached are you to the results of your labor? In 12-step, it would be kind of referred to as surrender, which a lot of people misinterpret as sort of giving up or being laissez-faire about your life, which it isn't, it's just a more Eastern notion of holding on more loosely to the externalities. In other words, the results of the things that you care about because you don't have control over them. And if you can be right-sized about that, you don't even need, like if you're, if you can be a total Jedi about that, then you don't even really need to diversify because to diversify really is just to apportion your potential disappointment across a number of buckets and kind of, you know, play the odds with that.

33:56But if you're truly not attached, which doesn't mean you're not working hard, you can still be totally devoted and hold a vision for yourself of achieving these things, but be so grounded that when it doesn't pan out, like you're still cool, right? Like that's the real kind of elite level. I don't, but I push back against that notion because I don't think you can non-attach from your kids. At least I can't. When my kids move out, it's gonna break my heart. Right, I mean, I have two kids that are leaving, you know, shortly. There's part of me where I think this is awesome. Like I can like do it, I don't have to pick anyone up or any of that.

34:36And of course I'm gonna miss them and I'm gonna mourn what used to be, but that disorder is allowing my wife and I to reorder in a new and interesting way that is bringing us closer together. It's just a new season. It's inevitable. But as a parent who has kids that are older than yours, you are on an insane roller coaster for years and years and years, and that will never end. That's right. And it really puts you in deep connection with your inability to kind of control the external environment. Yeah, but I think that notion of non-attachment, I think is just such a lofty goal that is very hard for most people to genuinely achieve.

35:20I understand the parenting thing, sorry to interrupt, but I'm talking more about like you set a goal, like you have your book, right? Like, and it's like, you know, how it does on some level is a function of how hard you're gonna work to push it out there. But ultimately there's a lot of things that are out of your control. And when it's all said and done and the dust settles, you're still you and it's a New York Times bestseller or nobody buys it or, you know, more likely somewhere in, you know, in the middle of all of that, it's all what it is. how are you anticipating how you're gonna show up for that experience?

35:52Yeah, and I think that what I argue, and maybe we're saying the same thing, is that it's easier to be less attached to the result if you've got other rooms of your identity. Yeah. Because if I really just pushed here and there was no athlete Brad, there was no neighbor Brad because I was just working all the time, dad Brad was minimized because I was working all the time, and then this didn't get the result I wanted, I'd have a lot harder of a time not being - not being non-attached. So I think that maybe non-attachment allows you to diversify your sense of self easier. I think that for my Western brain that does like to hold things tight, diversifying your sense of self is like the more pragmatic path to allow for some of that non-attachment in personal pursuits.

36:42A close cousin of all of this is our friend David Epstein's idea of range, right? When you are kind of pursuing many different curiosities, you become robust as a result. And even elite performers who have been reared across a multiplicity of many disciplines end up becoming elite in their particular field as a result of, and not despite spreading themselves across many things, as opposed to being entirely focused on one thing. But I'm curious about you also, you have Terry Crews as an example in this same kind of area of topic that we're talking about. And I had a few questions about how you think about that because this is a guy who's excelled across a variety of disciplines in different seasons across his life.

37:33So explain your thinking when it comes to a guy like that. Yeah, I think that Terry Crews is another one of these just phenomenal individuals. And also just like strikes me as a really good person. I really like Terry. And Terry Crews had these parallel paths running really from the time he was a child of art and sport. And most people knew Terry Crews is like the linebacker, but he got a scholarship to Interlochen Art School. I grew up in Michigan. This was like the place that all the artsy kids went. And ultimately chose football and pursued football and played in the NFL and had a hell of a career.

38:15But in the locker room, he would like draw portraits of the other players. Like he never left the art room. And then when football career ended, because these careers are very short for pro athletes, he went through a period of disorder, right? Like he was basically way underemployed and really like sweeping floors, you know, didn't know what he was going to do next. and now we know Terry Crews not as a football player but is an actor which is in the arts so he held on to both these parts of his identity he's a furniture designer yeah it's artistic he's a creative yeah so I think that I think that Terry Crews is a great example and you know Walt Whitman said it best we all contain multitudes and I think it's so easy to forget about that and to get caught up in one element of ourselves and then our world gets more narrow and more narrow and more narrow and then when that thing changes, we're completely thrown off kilter.

39:13So there's all kinds of different ways to think of your identity as fluid or diverse. There's what we're talking about, which is having different rooms to your house. There's this notion that we touched on a little bit earlier, which is like you have an independent self, which is your agency, your ability to control things, your ability to problem solve. And then you have an interdependent self, which is yourself in systems. So how you are with your family, how you are with your community, how you are with your organization. And we also have what Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls our conventional or historical selves and our ultimate selves.

39:47And our conventional self, it's the self that's having this conversation with you. It's inside my skin and my skull. But my ultimate self, like people are going to listen to this and then they're going to hopefully change something. Someone might read the book and then pass it on to a friend. And like that is the self that kind of is just one with the universe and not in a spiritual woo-woo sense, although it can be, but like in a very pragmatic sense of physics, you know, everything that we do is connected to other people. And I think that in the West, where we run into problem with change, particularly as it relates to identity, is we cling on tight.

40:22So we think of ourselves as one room, unifocused. We think of ourselves as independent, not interdependent. And we completely forget about our ultimate self. And we just think about our historical self. and as a result, like a lot of suffering when things change because it's like our small ego self. Also, Brad, there is no past and there is no future. There is only this moment right now and whatever potential it holds in terms of how you choose to act in the subsequent moment, right? So how much of this or how much of what you're advocating and speaking about can be consolidated or really condensed down to how mindful and present we are in every single moment as it arrives.

41:13I mean, that's every book that has everything. I was just gonna say, every book I've written, maybe every book I've read could probably all be condensed to just like be in the present moment as much as you can. knowing that unless you have achieved next level enlightenment or you're in an environment where that's possible, you are going to be influenced by past experiences and you are also going to be often influenced by thoughts of potential futures. There is a reason that most people that reach enlightenment, do it in caves or in monasteries where there is no real communication with other people for extended periods of time.

41:59Because out in this world, we adapted to use our past to learn from and to inform our present. And we also adapted to be able to look forward. So living in the present moment is a really powerful tool. But if you're going to exist in the world, in the modern at least you also need tools to deal with the fact that we're not always going to be present and that's okay. I'm thinking about the extent to which and thinking about past, present, future, et cetera, and how we can have this non-dualistic perspective or hold these two ideas lightly between the conventional self and the ultimate self or what the future may hold and what the past is impulsing us to do.

42:51It strikes me that it's crucial if you're gonna navigate this journey as consciously as possible, that you have to do an adequate amount of internal excavation to kind of understand yourself. Like what is the narrative that you're walking around with that's dictating your behaviors? And is that true? Let's really stress test that, or let's get into your past traumas and how they're triggering unhelpful behavior patterns time and time again, because there's an unconscious kind of operating system here that will persist without that kind of work. And so you can read your book and you can do all these tools, but if you're not actually reckoning with all of that, you're unlikely to kind of claw out of whatever paradigm you're in and start reorganizing your life around a better trajectory.

43:47That's right. I do think that trap is getting caught up in excavating and digging and just peeling back that onion more and more. And at some point, like it is what it is, back to the present moment. And like, however you got here, here you are. And understanding how you got here and having narratives around that and stress testing your narratives and choosing a narrative that is most helpful, all really important. But then at some point, you've got to meet the world where you are and where the world is and act yourself into who you want to be or how you want to change. So the way that I have come to think about this is we've all got, whether we know it or not, we've all got these core values.

44:37And core values are guiding principles that we really aspire toward. Examples could be things like creativity, health, authenticity, family, community, so on. And for each of our core values, we want to have fairly concrete definitions of what they mean to us. This is who we want to be, how we want to act ourselves. In your words, mood follows action. What are the actions that we want to take? and I think that they should align to these core values that really make us who we are. And then our work is to take those core values and apply them really flexibly so that when everything around us changes or when we're going through internal change, we can use those core values as a map to guide our actions and guide our behaviors.

45:25The metaphor that I like to use is that of a river. So on the one hand, you can think of ourself as flowing like a river. There's the famous Heraclitus quote, you can't step into the same river twice. That's me and you, man. That's identity. We are always changing. We're in this process of becoming. But a river without its bank is just random water. So the bank to our identity, we've got to have some kind of bank and it can be past narratives or habitual ways of acting, which it often is for people, or we can be more intentional about that bank and say, these are the values I really want to aspire towards.

46:01Here's how I'm going to act on them, this is going to be the bank of my identity. And this is gonna be the part of me that's really rugged over time, that's gonna help channel and direct the process of becoming. Yeah, this idea of rugged and flexible boundaries, another conversation that's happening, another non-dual kind of way of approaching your life, that fucks with us as Westerners. Like we like our dualism, you know what I mean? It's hard to like hold two ideas that are in conflict with each other at the same time and understand that they both have value. It's sort of like waves and particles.

46:37You know, I just saw Oppenheimer. So, you know what I mean? Like these two things are true and they are happening and it's hard for us to understand it. But the more that we can kind of get on board with that, the better and more resilient we are when it comes to navigating these kind of unforeseen circumstances that get thrown in all of our directions all the time. That's right. And we know this from the greatest teacher of change there ever has been and probably ever will be, which is back to evolution. So what makes a species survive for a long time? Two things. The first is it has to have these core elements or components that make it what it is.

47:23And if those things changed, it would be unrecognizable. It wouldn't be the same species. So that's the stability part. That's the ruggedness, the stability. But then it also has to adapt and evolve and be super flexible on how those core things manifest. And that's the flexibility. And evolutionary scientists, they call this having, again, back to this word complexity, high levels of complexity. So you wanna have differentiation, these different parts, but also integration, like these core values that make you who you are. And if you lose the core values, then yeah, you might live forever, but you're no longer you.

47:57Like the species is, it's unrecognizable. It is completely a different species. It has evolved itself out of what it was. But if you're way too rigid about who you are, then when environmental change comes, you get selected out. Right. And I think that, again, taking evolution, this like change on a massive scale, and then zooming into ourselves as individuals, I think a lot of those same things hold true. Because to go to someone and just say, you're completely fluid, you're a process, that can be really scary. I mean, you think about having truly no confines of identity, at least in the West, they would define that as psychosis.

48:31And that's not a spot that you wanna be. Well, unless you're Sam Harris. Yeah, but Sam Harris does have. There is no self, really. But there is, but Sam Harris has. There is no locus of consciousness. But Sam Harris still can get through an intersection. Right. So like he does have a historical self. Like there is someone there that says like, oh, the light's red, I gotta stop. And now it's green. I have to go. So I think there's degrees of letting go of like that more that locus of self. But I think for most people, certainly for me, like the goal isn't to let go of that. The goal is to know when it's a useful tool to lean into, but know when I'm clenching it a little bit too tight.

49:16To drill down a little bit more on this idea of values and trying to kind of create a situation in which your life and your decisions that you're making cohere along a core set of values that are important to you, you have this paradigm around having versus being. So explain that. Yeah, I'm gonna explain that. And then I wanna take a moment to go back to values and thank you for something that I think I've thanked you for before, but I don't know if I've ever thanked you in front of an audience of hopefully tons of people. So, but having versus being first. um eric from one of my favorite intellectuals uh ever uh late 1900s he wrote this masterful book called to have or to be and in it from defines having is owning something and having a relationship with it which is an i it relationship so like i am the subject it is the object and then being is very different.

50:19Being is a verb. It is being in conversation with that thing. It is more of an essential relationship to it. And what Fromm argues, and he's right, is that when you have, you suffer a lot because all the things that you have will inevitably change. But when you're in a being relationship with those things, you suffer less because you're fluid, you're changing with them, and you're more accepting that they're going to change because it's a process. And I think this happens all the time in relationships. like the worst way to go into a relationship is to say like i have this person i have my soulmate and like they're not going to change they're going to be the same and you have a having relationship and then they change and you completely freak out instead of being in love with someone um and i think this notion of having versus being is is is beyond just relationships it's so important because the more that we can define ourselves in our pursuits in ways of being then the less fragile we are to change right because anytime you have something that thing is going to change or be taken away.

51:20And then it's going to be brutal. Back to the parenting example, because I'm shocked at how soft having kids that are slightly older is making me. Like I'm not a baby person, but Theo, my oldest, is now almost six. And I'm just madly in love with him. It's crazy. And I have to constantly remind myself, I don't have a kid. Like I'm being his dad and being his partner in life and a friend. And it'll still be terrible when he leaves. I mean, I hope he leaves, it'll be good for him. But thinking about it in this context of being in relation with him instead of having a child, that mindset shift has already been very helpful for me.

52:05Well, having also implies attachment. Yeah. Right? And I'm trying to think of a caveat to this. And the only one that I can really come up with is a situation in which somebody has a desire for some material thing. And because of that attachment, that person is driven to make changes in their life in order to accumulate that thing, whether it's a car or a job or a house or what have you. Pick the right thing. Yeah, and that could be a motivator for personal change that could turn you into a better person. And again, this is a Western paradigm being the Eastern paradigm. Obviously, it's the hard work leading up to that and the anticipation of getting the thing that is the real driver and teacher, that journey.

52:55When you actually get it, then you are disappointed because you realize you're the same person, whatever, and then you're in for a bit of a reckoning. And a being way of being is a completely different way of interfacing with the material world in which those externalities, those material things are not, it's not that they're unimportant, but they're not defining, I guess. That's right. Is that an accurate way of how you think about that? Yeah, in things for sure, but also even our attributes. So like having a skill versus being an athlete. That's interesting, yeah. Because like you have a skill, well, that skill is going to change as you age.

53:42Whereas being an athlete, you can define so much more broadly. I think of Ambie Burfoot, the Boston Marathon runner that is like shuffling, but still out there running because he's a runner, like he's into being a runner. But if he had a having relationship with the sport where he had to go fast, he wouldn't be doing it anymore or he'd be doing it begrudgingly. So I think it's the clearest example and the simplest example is when it comes to things. But I think even how we relate to activities in our lives. Trying to be in being mode, not having mode goes a long way. And then to your point about sometimes wanting to have something can be the impetus or the catalyst for change.

54:23It's just about picking the right things. So there's nothing wrong with wanting to climb to the top of a mountain and get on the summit. It's just important to pick the right mountains. And to understand, Light Watkins was on the show recently and he said something along the lines of, the happiness that you'll experience when you summit mountain X, Everest, whatever it is, is the happiness that you bring with you. So there's the anticipation or the expectation that you will be altered through the achievement of something or the accumulation of some possession or job or what have you, but you are who you are.

55:04And the more you can inhabit that notion of being, you will sidestep the disappointment of that, you know, sort of revelation. Yeah, Robert Persig, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes that there's no Zen on mountaintops. The only Zen up there is the Zen that you bring up there. Right, yeah, I guess that, maybe that's where light got it from. It's such a beautiful way to put it. So back to values in evolution, because I think this is really important in personal evolution, and we're talking about it in a fairly conceptual way, and I wanna make it real. and I wanna give you like a very public moment of thanks.

55:42I'm gonna get uncomfortable. So that's fine. By the way, you still haven't answered my first question. What was your first question? Why did you write this book? But go ahead. Oh, we'll get to that. Okay. So. Let's see, this would have been like 2017, 2018. We talked about it quite a bit last time I was on the show, so we don't need to rehash it. But I got really sick with obsessive compulsive disorder and secondary depression. And Peak Performance, my first book, literally fucking called Peak Performance, is out in the world and it is crushing. That book is selling all the copies. And I am in a really deep, dark, debilitated hole.

56:20I start to get better because when I was in the hole, I couldn't think about doing anything other than just surviving. and about six or seven months into that process, I confront this huge cognitive dissonance and tension, which is out in the world, people see me as the author of Peak Performance and like this national, international expert on performance and internally I'm suffering and there's a six month period where like I really couldn't leave my house. Like it was really, really bad and I still wasn't on the other side of it. so I was like quite scared that I was never going to get to the other side, but I had enough capacity to like at least think about things other than survival.

57:02And the cognitive dissonance that I felt having that public view of me and what I was internally going through was just like way too much. And I asked myself, like, what are my values? And at the time, I didn't know. I was in full disorder mode. I like had completely come apart. I said, well, who do I really look up to? And I look up to you. And why do I look up to you? Authenticity. It's like, all right, like clearly I value authenticity and not the performative kind, but like real authenticity. So I have two options. I either stop writing because any writing that I do, I'm not being authentic to my experience and like what I want to share or fucking write about this.

57:50And that was so scary, not necessarily because I thought that people were going to think less of me. All this is still some years ago, like mental health was still somewhat more stigmatized. You know, every year it feels like we come a long way, but I was just scared that like, I wasn't even on the other side of it. I was like kind of writing about a really shitty experience from the shitter. but that's like that is the value of authenticity so I wrote the piece and that piece led me to sell the book that I wrote like that piece set my career on a completely different trajectory I'm no longer just interested in peak performance I still care about it but like at a time when my river felt like it was exploding I had to have some kind of guardrails like something that made me who I am.

58:35And it was searching for those values. So like, seriously, a sincere moment of thank you, because one way they teach in acceptance and commitment therapy, if you don't know what your values are, it's to look to people that you admire and then ask yourself, what do you admire about those people? And then that's probably a value for you to aspire towards. And then you just act on it. Even if it's scary, even if you don't really want to, you just, you act on it. And then that becomes your rudder that lets you cling on to some sense of identity of this is who I am. So thank you for that. Yeah, beautiful thing.

59:06I mean, thank you for saying that. I don't, you know, I just, again, I get really uncomfortable with this kind of stuff, but you know, I appreciate you saying that, that means a lot, man. And as you were sharing that, and this kind of evolution of who you are and what your identity is, you know, parent, athlete, author, podcaster, peak performance guy, coach, et cetera. And as you mature, being able to like loosen your grip on the reins of the subject matter that is speaking to you, right? Like, okay, you're the peak performance guy, you can stay in that lane forever, but ultimately growth and maturity is demanding more of you.

59:52And it's a question of whether you're going to kind of heed that or stay in that safe lane because you're like, well, this is what works and this is what people wanna hear from me. and everything else is really scary, but ultimately the value that you're able to provide comes with shouldering that responsibility, accepting it, and kind of walking through the fear of doing something a little bit different. It's no different than a band who, you know, basically is known for a certain sound and puts out a new album. If you're an artist, you're gonna be putting out new stuff and you have to be unattached to the audience's response to that when you know they're looking for the hits that, you know, they grew up with or what have you.

1:00:32And I've reflected a lot on that in my own life as somebody who's going through a number of transitions, swimmer, lawyer, then sort of ultra athlete and being very conscious like when I was doing those ultra endurance events and then ultimately writing about that and finding ultra and then thinking about like, what is my vocation gonna be and how am I gonna support my kids And where can I hang my hat where there's some degree of longevity that I can bake into whatever it is I'm doing, realizing like, well, being the vegan ultra endurance athlete, like I was already 45 at that point. Like this is not, you know, it's like, yeah.

1:01:17So how do you adapt? How do you grow? How do you evolve in the podcast? I think is a reflection of that. It started in one place. It's something very different now. and it's always been a show with a wide lens to have conversations with all different kinds of people about different things. But I think it did start from a view, kind of a narrower perspective of like endurance athletes, nutrition, being very fitness focused. And now it's much broader than that, right? And I've been able to kind of adapt and grow and mature alongside that and step outside of my comfort zone to talk to people that scare me or intimidate me.

1:02:03And then to begin, you know, writing about other things that aren't related to whatever was going on in Finding Ultra. And that's what growing up is too, you know? That's what like being an adult is. Yeah, and being okay with maybe changing your definition of success to be even more internal. because like, you know, maybe you are more successful if you're just the ultra vegan guy and you just hit that nail. Yeah, like I know, like even when I do the podcast, like when I have certain doctors on, I know those are gonna be, it's just, those are the ones that are gonna work, right? So I can just do that all day long, but that's boring.

1:02:44Okay, you know, like how much more can I say about that? I need to constantly be following my own curiosity in order to grow. And that means I'm gonna have conversations and do episodes with people that I know, like these aren't gonna be big hits, but this is important to me. And that is what's authentic to my own interior experience. And ultimately, I think it creates more long-term value for the library or the canon of what I'm trying to put out there. And as a reflection of who I am. In the short term though, they might seem like ill-fated decisions. Yeah, I think that's right. Well, they're ill-fated decisions against an external metric of downloads or people talking about it.

1:03:27Not in accordance with my own internal barometer. Exactly. And that's it. I mean, I think values are an internal dashboard. So we have all these external dashboards that we can pay a lot of attention to and we can let them make our decisions for us or we can have an internal dashboard and measure ourself up against that. And I think that true success and fulfillment is when you use your internal dashboard more than your external dashboard. Yeah, and I've gotten a lot better at that. Like I don't pay attention to metrics and all that kind of stuff nearly as much as I used to. I'm not perfect at that, but I'm happier when I'm detached from all of that.

1:04:02But I was wondering, like if I hired you as my coach, like what are you gonna tell me to do? Like what's gonna happen, Brad? Where are my blind spots? It depends. Yeah. Yeah. We'd have to flip the script. Maybe we should do an episode where I just like have a coaching session with you. Yeah, that would be fun. But yeah, I mean, the honest answer is, I don't know. You'd have to tell me a lot about where you're feeling pain points and where you're struggling to get into a conversation because there's no plug and play to excellence. It's like meeting someone where they are with what they're going through and then peeling back the onion, like we talked about, but eventually saying, all right, we've peeled enough and now it's time to do the work.

1:04:52I was talking to my colleague, Chris, this morning about coaching and it's really interesting that as a coach and as a client, the sessions that are really memorable are where you diagnose the problem. so someone comes in and they've got an issue and they're not really sure like where it's stemming from and then you finally find the problem you know so pretend that like someone's face hurts this this is not what a coach does this is what a physician does but same kind of thing so someone's face hurts and it's like global and they're tired all the time and they start having a fever and you don't know what's going on and then you finally locate like there's a little abscess under the molar and it's like breakthrough so those are the best coaching sessions like you Why am I feeling imposter syndrome?

1:05:39Why can't I relate to my teammates like I want to? Why is nothing ever enough? And the breakthrough happens. It was a way that you related to your parents or a prior job or even like a best friend that you're still constantly comparing yourself to. And that's like finding the little abscess under the molar. But then for the next six months, you gotta show up and brush your fucking teeth. And like, that's what the coaching is. So the breakthrough session is like the intellectual, you know, like this is awesome. But the illusion is that that is the work. No, the insight is not the work. So in 12 step, they say self-awareness will avail you nothing.

1:06:15It's like, oh, now I know I'm this. And you think that you've solved the problem. No, you've just identified it. Yeah, yeah. And the insight is again, like that's what's sexy and that's what's interesting. And that's what then you go home and you tell your partner about it or your friends, but then it's like, all right, we found the abscess, but like now you gotta brush your teeth. So what does brushing your teeth look like? And that is very much more in the realm of behavioral activation, just show up and like brush your teeth. And sometimes it's boring to brush your teeth. It's sucky and boring.

1:06:46It's not a good social media post to brush your teeth. Yeah, it doesn't really track on. Right, but if you wanna get rid of that abscess, you gotta brush your teeth. And I think the same thing applies to all changes. So why did I write the book? Because I don't wanna completely evade you. So I think the first reason and foremost is I try to write the books that I think I need because I want to go on this intellectual experience of trying to learn about something that will help me. And in the five years prior to the book, I had significant life changes in a pretty intensifying manner. Maybe it's just getting towards middle age, but became a father twice, moved across the country, stopped doing any contract work and truly just went on it as my own as a writer and a coach, had major orthopedic surgery that ended my endurance sports career, became estranged from family members that I was once very close with that was quite painful.

1:07:47Did I mention we moved across the country? I think I mentioned that. so just all kinds published my first solo book um all kinds of massive changes and like you i like stability and this was challenging for me and i didn't feel like i had a great model or mindset for how to approach all of this and then the pandemic happens which is change that we all faced on this like huge societal scale and as i mentioned earlier i keep seeing these articles about when are we going to go back to normal and i think it occurred to me that in my own life with some of these changes. I'm like, well, when are things just going to get back to normal?

1:08:22And that's when I'm like, no, no, no. Like I'm thinking about this all wrong. And I literally remember Googling, why do we think of getting back to normal with change? And then like, you know, six clicks later, this is before you could just ask AI and it would give you an answer. I found myself at Walter Cannon in homeostasis. And that was the exploration that led to the book.

1:08:49I think these periods of disorder that visit all of us, it doesn't matter how rich or healthy or how successful somebody is, you don't get out of life alive and everybody has to deal with difficulties and loss and death and pain. And it comes in different packages for everybody at different times. In our own case, my family, my wife and I, during our kind of dismantling financial and everything, it was a very confusing protracted period of years. It was like seven years of confusion and uncertainty. And yes, I like stability, but that process taught me so much about how to be flexible, how to be neutral, how to cultivate a different level of elite non-attachment.

1:09:42And it allows you to be present. And it also requires or demands of you a level of faith in order to reframe what is occurring and look at it as a lesson or an experience that is going to inform your life at some point when you get into that reordering phase, right? It is the ultimate teacher as painful as it is, if you choose to reflect upon it in that way. And it's fucking hard, and it's gonna be different for everybody, but to the extent that you can flip the script and look at it as an opportunity, I think that these are the richest experiences in terms of our own personal evolution, growth, development, that will transform one's life into something that is so much better than they could have imagined as they enter into that reordering phase.

1:10:46I mean, that's certainly been my experience and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I also want everybody to have their version of that. Well, you have to, like you said, there's no getting out alive. Yeah. I think two things when you shared that came to mind for me. The first is the importance of having some expectancy that this stuff's going to happen and having an expectation that like disorder and change and disorientation can feel really scary. I think that so often, especially in America, we have these rosy glasses and overly optimistic views of what life should be, even what change should be.

1:11:29And then when we get into the thick of it, we're completely thrown off guard. It's like running a marathon and expecting mile 20 to be not so bad. Well, you drop out of the race when you get to mile 20 because you are completely thrown off. Whereas if you expect mile 20 to suck, you get to mile 20, you're like, all right, I'm here. Having a proper expectancy of these disorder periods and how challenging they can be and how sometimes they do take not just days or months, but years can help us remain rugged and give us the fortitude to work our way through those periods. Because the brain is a prediction machine.

1:12:03And if the brain is just predicting stability, stability, stability, and then suddenly there's chaos and we don't update our model, we don't update our predictions, we don't update our expectations, then we're just gonna suffer. But that level of expectation has to be calibrated such that it's healthy because the other end of that spectrum is being a fear-based person who's walking around, you know, just waiting for everything to go to shit all the time. And that can be a very toxic person. For sure. To be or to have in your life. Yeah, so there's these two relatively like polarizing extremes between the Pollyanna toxically positive person and then the nihilist despair porn person.

1:12:49And you see both of these on social media all the time. Either everything is great always. I just went to the cafe, met my friends, had a great veggie burger for lunch and life is great. Or everything sucks. Look at the polarization in our country. This, that, everything's just terrible. And in between those two extremes, there is this enormous valley that we can all live in. And I've been thinking more about this and I write about this a little bit in the book that I think that why people fall into both of those extremes is because they're lazy. So if you are Pollyanna about everything and you bury your head in the sand, well, then you don't have to do anything.

1:13:31Everything's perfect. Your life is perfect. That also absolves you the need to do anything. That also might be the most afraid person. Right, maybe because you can't even see it. Because they so compartmentalized it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Or like you're truly just like checked out because like, you know, everything's fine. So I'm not gonna engage with the hard stuff. You don't have to do anything about it. Whereas the despair porn and everything sucks always people, It's like an intellectual version of toxic positivity because then you also don't have to do everything, do anything. If you were as smart as me, you would understand how everything is.

1:13:58Right, and everything's hopeless anyways. So like I don't have to do anything. Right. And I think the work of a mature adult is to be in the middle and to say, yeah, like parts of me are broken. Parts of this world are broken, but I have to show up. And even if it's pissing in the ocean, I need to piss my piss because like, otherwise, what's the point of any of this? So in between toxic positivity and despair is like the ability to have some hope and to take action and ideally to take meaningful action. Viktor Frankl called this tragic optimism, right? Like to accept there is suffering and tragedy that is inherent to this human existence and that the world that we live in is broken.

1:14:42In his time, it was the Holocaust. One of the most broken, maybe the most broken things that humanity has ever brought upon itself. And yet, even amidst all that suffering, we have to trudge forward with as much of a positive attitude as we can. So it's not delusional optimism, it's tragic optimism. Bruce Springsteen, you know, going from phenomenal quote to phenomenal quote, he talks about like meeting the world on its terms without giving up hope. The other example you have on that point in the book is Bryan Stevenson, you know, somebody who's just an extraordinary human who's devoted his life to tackling very difficult issues and nonetheless maintaining a level of hope and optimism.

1:15:22I'm thinking about Jane Goodall and her Book of Hope and talked about that on the podcast. Which is hard, like it takes work. It's remaining hopeful in the face of dire consequences and being mired in work that has no end, right? There's a certain regalness, I think, to that. There's something aspirational about people who are able to do that. And that's why, part of why we look up to them, I think as, you know, examples of, you know, the better human spirit that resides within all of us. But you said, you know, it's the middle, right? Like you're the middle guy, right? Like when I think of it, everything is like, it's in the middle with Brad.

1:16:08I mean, it's not necessarily always like smack in the middle, but yeah I think like oftentimes extremes just are not are not very useful or they're they're useful insofar as like they're they're they're rudders that we can bounce between um but things really rarely are on extremes I mean every once in a while there it's a hard pill for me to swallow Brad yeah I know I hear you and in in that's just my approach and like there are other approach um A recent guest that you had on who I've enjoyed watching his own change and evolution, I don't know him personally, is Tim Ferriss. And I think he said it in your episode multiple times, like he lives more on the extremes.

1:16:50And for his temperament and his approach, like that works out really well for him. Whereas for me and a lot of the people that I've worked with, I think like those extremes are helpful tools, but we gotta have other tools. And yeah, like, you know, maybe I am the ultimate moderate. Maybe that's why I don't have that many social media followers. You are, you're definitely like, you always, your default is always like in the middle, right? And it's just interesting, we're friends and we've had many conversations, you know, around this kind of topicality because I am an extreme person and I've always sort of been hard on myself for not being, you know, more balanced and at some point just embracing this aspect of me and trying to channel it in healthier ways than I have in the past.

1:17:38But there is something kind of inherent in how I'm wired where I feel most alive when I'm completely immersed in something and giving it my all. And it's difficult for me to take on a project or get involved in anything where I don't have that opportunity because I don't feel like, it's not as fulfilling to me. Yeah, but I agree with you, I think, on that. So I'm not, that I am completely in alignment with you on, is like, you know, going all in and finding things that really light you up and that help you achieve a flow state or mastery and then pursuing that all the way. I think that that is a huge part of what gives life meaning.

1:18:22In my language, I call it excellence, like pursuing excellence. That is my peak value, excellence and love. And you could argue that they're the same thing. So there I have no moderation. I think what you would argue, I guess, is it's just looking the other way and making sure like, well, if this doesn't work out, like is there somewhere for me to land? I understand. I think having that place to land frees you up to do better because you are not scared, most people. Right, and also calibrating that intensity with the other values in your life to make sure, like it's, I think of it as like a pendulum or today I'm going, I'm rowing my boat towards this.

1:19:08I can't row my boat towards everything every day, right? And I'm not somebody who can do lots of different things and kind of gear shift in between projects. I have to like do one thing, be completely immersed in it. And then I'm like, okay, I did that. And now I can go over here. My wife is very different. She's like, you know, there's like so many pans and so many burners going all the time. And I'm like, how do you function? I don't understand. Yeah, and in my own life, I guess, cause I wanna, maybe I'm walking myself back from being the middle guy. Maybe it's just like with these big concepts.

1:19:40But when I think about it, like people will often tell me that I'm pretty extreme because I just don't do that much. Like I spend all my time parenting, reading and writing or training. I don't really do anything else. And I'm also like very keen on building community where I live. But that often is just like sitting on the porch because it's quasi in the South now. But so I don't - You and Ryan Holiday are gonna get along great in rural Texas next week or tomorrow or whatever it is you go see him. So I don't have, like, I don't have a lot of balance. I only have a couple big rooms in my house, but I've seen enough people that only have one room and that's where they get dangerous.

1:20:26I think that where maybe I am more, you know, moderate or the middle guy is just in the discourse. So not in how I live my life and not how I encourage other people to live, but in the this or that, the discourse that we constantly hear, You're either happy or sad, all these extremes. I think a lot of that is just bullshit. Like we know that the algorithm, you've had countless wonderful guests on it. You've spoken about it yourself. The algorithm like serves up the polar extremes because that's what sells. It wants the hot take. It wants the contrarian perspective. It wants the new idea or everything you ever thought about this is wrong and this is what you need to do.

1:21:06And that's what gets rewarded. And so a lot of content is created with that in mind and the kind of more mature nuanced approach, it's in the middle or it's complicated. Or actually like most of what you previously thought is true and maybe here's a little bit of an improvement or a tweak on that. Yeah. That doesn't, you know, the internet doesn't traffic in that to the extent that it does when you're very direct and you're looking right into camera and you're saying, they've lied to you and here's the truth, right? Yeah, and I think that with performance and excellence and health and well-being and the topics that I think about the most, I like to think about it more as like tools in a toolkit.

1:21:48And you want to have a lot of tools in a really big toolkit, but then you need to know which tools to use when. And that to me is like the way to be a craftsperson, right? Like with actual tools or metaphorical tools, like a good craftsperson that have a lot of tools and they know how to use them. And I think bringing that to bear in whatever pursuits you have gives you the best chance of sustainable excellence. I wanna put a pit in that and come back to it to talk a little bit about some of these tools, technology tools that people are using now, fitness trackers, et cetera, sleep trackers. I think there's an interesting discussion that we could have about that, but I don't wanna get too derailed right now.

1:22:30I wanna stay on the book and take it back a little bit to this idea of, we were talking about attachments, close cousin of that is expectations. And you have some very interesting things to say in the book about the neuroscience of expectation. So walk me through what goes on in our brains and in our nervous systems when we create an expectation. This is my favorite science in the whole book. So I'm thrilled that you asked me about this. Our brains are prediction machines. It's the easiest way to think about it. So our brains are constantly forecasting what's going to happen next and shaping our reality based on that forecast.

1:23:14And if they didn't do this, getting through life would be impossible. So when you're walking down the tarmac to get to a plane, if your brain couldn't predict that you were about to step off into a plane, you'd be having 10 out of 10 panic because you'd be like, am I just going to step off and fall? So it's very useful to have our brains as prediction machines. However, when our predictions are off or when the world changes around us insofar that what we expected to happen no longer does, it can throw us for a real loop because our brain is expecting one thing, it has a prediction for one thing, and then something else happens.

1:23:54And the way to get through that is by very quickly updating your expectations. and the most interesting science around this, to me, happens in pain science. Imagine that you have two people, okay? One is a soldier going to fight in a hot war on the battlefield and the other is someone at a grocery store. And both people get shot in the leg, very different reasons. The soldier is in battle and sadly there is, fortunately all too often, there's a mass shooting that happens in the grocery store. So both these two people get shot in the leg. Same bullet, same level of fitness, same level of leg strength, same exact spot.

1:24:37We know that the soldier is going to experience significantly less pain, and they're going to have a different hormonal reaction to being shot. So their biology is going to be different, even though it's the same leg, same gunshot, than the person in the store. And that's because the soldier has an expectancy that they might be shot, whereas the person in the store doesn't. So that's an extreme example. But we go through life with our brains on our heads, our prediction machines, constantly making predictions for what's going to happen next. And every time there's a change, those predictions are proven wrong.

1:25:09And if we don't update as quickly as possible, we get cortisol. Maybe not to the same level as getting shot. Certainly not. But the bigger the change, the more cortisol we get. So being aware of it, this is how our brain operates. and being able to pause in those moments when our expectations are not met or when things change around us is really helpful to center us and then to bring us back into the moment so that we can confront the reality that it is, not as we thought it would. And confronting the reality as it is, is really a function of responding rather than reacting. And it goes back to mindfulness and meditation in order to be able to buy yourself that little sliver of time in which you can mentally process or emotionally process what's happening to a significant extent that would allow you to then mindfully respond as opposed to just impulsively react.

1:26:02That's right. This is really where the rubber meets the road. You were talking about like identifying the problem and then where the work is. Like this is where the work actually lives and breathes. That's right. And so continuing on the neuroscience theme, another area of neuroscience that is really important to how we think about change has to do with what researchers call the seeking pathway in our brain versus the rage pathway in our brain. And the rage pathway lights up when we're raging, when we're angry, when we're panicked. This is the amygdala. This is the amygdala, when our expectations are not met.

1:26:41The seeking pathway lights up when we are working on making the situation in front of us better, when we're taking action. It is a zero-sum game. Tons of functional MRIs have been done to show this. This is the work of Yak, if I mispronounce his name, I'm sorry, Yak Ponskip is the neuroscientist that identified these pathways. There are seven in total, but the two worth talking about here are rage and seeking. So the rage and seeking pathway cannot be turned on at the same time. And we know this in our day-to-day life because you can't be really pissed off and working to solve a problem at the same time.

1:27:19Like it downregulates the level of being pissed off. So to me, responding instead of reacting is really about activating our seeking pathway so that our rage pathway diminishes. And then we can hopefully make productive steps towards dealing with whatever it is that we're confronting. And when we make that better choice and repeat it, we're activating that - It's a muscle. What is it? The dopaminergic? Dopaminergic, that's it. Pathways that reinforce over time those better behaviors. And this is where psychology and neurobiology meet. So a psychologist would call this self-efficacy, having confidence that you can endure change and take productive action in challenging situations.

1:28:04And a neuroscientist would say it's the dopaminergic pathway. And that's it. The more that we practice this, the less likely we are to default to the rage pathway and we get into the seeking pathway. And it's just that, it's a practice. What is this concept of zan shin and how is that related to what you just talked about? Zan shin is a term that comes out of Aikido and zanshen is the continuing awareness that a good Aikido practitioner cultivates. So not just what's in front of them, but also what's around them, what's behind them, what happened in the past, what might happen in the future. And zanshen runs in complete opposite to something called target fixation, which is when we're just so focused on the thing in front of us that we completely lose sight and sense of anything that's happening around us.

1:29:05And with target fixation, we often just pummel into the thing because we're so fixated on it. And this actually happens. So the research here is with automobile accidents, as well as motorcycle accidents. And what we find is that when drivers are uber-focused on one thing, trying not to hit it, they often end up running into it. You hear about crashes on the shoulder. This is the phenomenon at play. You see a two-car crash on the shoulder and everyone's looking at it because they're like, oh my God, crash on the shoulder. And then they get so focused on it, they run into it. So yes, target fixation can happen when we're driving a car, but trying to use a poetic metaphor, this also happens throughout our life.

1:29:51We can get so focused on these things is that we lose sight of everything that's happening around us. And even if we achieve it, we just pummel right into it and we don't know how the hell we got there. And if you're so focused on targets, like you can just pummel into your death and kind of like have missed the whole freaking ride. Or if you're just feeding a certain fear that something is gonna happen, you're gonna manifest that - For sure. In some way in your life, right? If you're just fixated on like worrying about this one thing, like chances are that's probably gonna show up for you. Yeah, and the more - If you can't transcend that fixation.

1:30:26In the more that we can cultivate this kind of continuing awareness or this ability to see the whole field, not just the thing that we're looking toward, the better we feel and the better we do because like alternative paths might open up and those might be better paths to getting to where we wanna go. Another example, because I pride myself on really having these insights grounded in research is summit fever with mountain climbers. It's the ultimate target fixation. So summit fever is this colloquial term where climbers get so fixated on summiting a mountain that they make reckless decisions to get there and they get to the summit, but they never make it off the mountain.

1:31:04They die because they go when the weather conditions are aggravated or when their climbing window has passed, but they can't see any of that because they're so focused on getting there. So yeah, they get there, but then they don't get down. So this is with any goal. I mean, that's a dire one to have this happen to you, but it's an experience that the research shows is cross-disciplinary. Where does your notion of being adaptable to change, learning how to respond versus react, all of these themes that you're discussing in this book, where do these intersect with, overlap with, and depart from stoicism, for example?

1:31:45You're gonna go talk to Ryan. I'm sure he's gonna ask you this, right? Like, is this a Stoic approach or what is it about what you're talking about that perhaps is a little bit different than what a pure Stoic would, how a pure Stoic would interpret navigating change? Yeah, so the Stoic that I think wrote the most about this is Epictetus, who has the dichotomy of control. And this is at the root of Stoicism. Don't worry about the things that you can't control. focus on the things that you can. And that is great advice. There's not that much as to how to do that, I think, in Stoicism. I think that the Stoics spent a lot of time, I mean, they're philosophers, like intellectualizing, but not necessarily a lot of time where the rubber meets the road.

1:32:38I also think that Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, certain aspects of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, the Western religions, they all intersect. Like the serenity prayer in Christianity is basically Epictetus' dichotomy of control. In Buddhism, it's the 10 ,000 joys and the 10 ,000 sorrows, like shitty things happen and good things happen. Like these themes come up across traditions, both East and West. How does this approach differ from Stoicism? I think in the non-dual nature of it. Stoicism is a Western school of thought. It is very this or that. if there's not as much room for holding on to two competing ideas at the same time in stoicism.

1:33:20And I think the core of navigating change is being able to hold on to two ideas at the same time to be, as we talked about, both rugged and flexible, not either or. You also think of it in the context of these four Ps, right? Yeah. Want me to go into this? Yeah, what is all that about? Of course, every book's gotta have the four things that start with the same letter. Yeah. I'm just giving you shit. Go ahead. Yeah. You know, how many of those do I have in all of my books? I think this is the first time I did it and I did it by accident. Like I shit you not. The two Ps I then contrived. So the two Ps are the rage pathway.

1:34:00And when there's a change that happens, we panic and then we pummel ahead. We don't wanna do that. That's our default. The four Ps activates the seeking pathway. And here we pause, we process what's happening. we make a plan and then we proceed. Very similar to an OODA loop or ODA loop from like flight schools. And when we pause, we create space to update our expectations, to see the situation clearly for what it is, to process it. And once we do that, then like our rage pathway is turned off. Then we can make a plan. We can use our prefrontal cortex and only then proceed. So people, yourself included, might be like, all right, intellectually, that sounds great.

1:34:44How do I actually do this? And what the research shows really clearly is the number one way to create that space is to name what's happening. So psychologists call this effective labeling. So when there is a change and you feel fear, instead of merging with the fear, if you name it and you say, I'm feeling fear, or you say, I'm feeling panic, or I'm feeling scared, or I'm feeling overwhelmed, Just by naming it, you separate a part of yourself from the experience and then that's your space. Like that's the freedom to then process what's happening, make a plan and proceed. Is it important to say, I am feeling emotion X as opposed to I am afraid?

1:35:27Of course, yeah. Because you're self-identifying with it. I'm experiencing fear. No one would say that they are rain, right? You're getting rained on. It's not gonna be permanent. It's something that's happening. so I'm experiencing fear, I'm experiencing pain, I'm experiencing panic. But they would say, I'm sweating. Like if the rain is an external event, but it's not being produced by your own mind and body. Yeah, but then you could say, I'm fearing, right? It's not, you wouldn't say, I'm sweat. No, you'd say, I'm sweating. I'm experiencing a state of sweat. No, I'm sweating. Like I'm sweating is fine.

1:35:59Like I'm fearing, but not, but I think the difference, or even, I mean, we're splitting hairs. Even if you say, I'm scared, like but I think that what the research shows not I think this is what the research shows is that the more particular we can get the more space we create so I'm scared versus I'm feeling a pit in my stomach that is similar to what I have felt in past depressive episodes the degrees of freedom are a lot greater with the latter and what is also very fascinating to me is in another one of these mergers between ancient wisdom and modern science. The law of names goes back to folklore hundreds of years ago.

1:36:38This notion that once we have a name for something, it loses its power over us. It goes back to the myth of Rumpelstiltskin, where the protagonist's daughter is kidnapped and the villains say that you can't get the daughter back unless they know my name and it has to be my true name. And spoiler alert, the true name is Rumpelkjilsten and the problem goes away. So what in folklore is called like the law of names is now just effective labeling. And I think it's true. Like once you can name something, it loses its power over you. It doesn't lose, I shouldn't say it doesn't lose all of its power over you, but then it's no longer you.

1:37:16Like it's concrete, it's tangible. It's something separate from you. It's something that you can then, as I said, use the higher parts of our evolved brain to deal with. Right. I was talking earlier about these periods of being dismantled or disordered as teachable moments or opportunities that are rife for quite a bit of learning and growth. You sort of contextualize this as extracting meaning, right? Like how do you find meaning through this process of order, disorder, reorder? And maybe it would be illustrative for you to talk about that in the context of your OCD, because you have a lot to say around the kind of temporality of engaging with that process of trying to find meaning.

1:38:05Yeah, so I was gonna, I'm glad that you came back to this because I would have forgot, but earlier when you were talking about viewing disorder and change as an opportunity for transformation and growth, I wanted to make sure that we go to where we're going now. So I do firmly believe that viewing change in disorder as an opportunity for growth is the best mindset to have in most circumstances. Carol Dweck calls it a growth mindset. Kelly McGonigal, after her, calls it a challenge response to stress. So when we face challenges, when we face change, saying, all right, I'm going into disorder, it's going to be hard, but I'm going to grow from this.

1:38:43Works like 95 % of the time. but there's a 5 % of the time where having any expectation or any hopes for an experience just gets in the way and holds you back so the worst thing for a clinically depressed person to do is to say oh like I'm experiencing depression but this is going to make me more compassionate or when I get to the other side of this like I'm going to grow from this I'm growing You know, no, you're not. Like every moment of existence hurts. Loss, someone that's just lost a partner, God forbid, a child, maybe a parent. The worst thing to say to that person is, well, why don't you write down three things that you're grateful for today?

1:39:28So there are these capital T traumas or these periods of change where our only job ought to be getting through and getting to the other side of those. and when we tell ourselves that we need to grow from them or we need to view them as a challenge or an opportunity we often take a really shitty situation and make it worse because not only are we now in pain and suffering but now we're not even doing what all the self-help books tell us that we should do which is grow from that experience so in my own experience of OCD because that's what you asked me about I distinctly remember a session with my therapist Brooke and this is maybe like four months into things and I remember telling her like I maybe I'll grow from this maybe I'll learn from this and she said maybe but like maybe you won't what if this just sucks like sometimes the world in your brain is cruel and random and what if you don't have to growth from this.

1:40:35And that shook me up. I'm like, oh, well then like, then there's no point. Then it's purposeless. She's like, so what? What if there is no purpose to this? What if like this is just suffering and it just sucks? What if you released from any need for this to be meaningful and just get through it? And that was one of those like, you know, find the abscess behind the molar moments in a therapeutic process. A lot of what was holding me back in that moment was trying to contrive something out of this experience instead of just letting it suck and just being kind to myself and realizing that sometimes things just suck and they don't have to have any meaning.

1:41:11Now, fast forward a year later, and I derived all kinds of meaning and growth out of that experience. Like you, I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but it happened. So that was my own experience. This is long before I wrote the book. So I go into the research for writing the book, and that's in my minds because the first six chapters of the book are very growth oriented. And then I thought back and I'm like, but I don't want to set people up for a trap that they might walk into reading this book, which is like when the really shitty stuff happens, I don't want them to think like, I got to do my four Ps.

1:41:40So you can read the book and you can apply every single tool. And for 95 % of the changes, it's going to work. But for the 5 % where it doesn't, the actual work is just releasing from all of it and just focusing on getting through. And what researchers show is that when we find gratitude in meaning and growth after capital T traumas, big changes, it's never in the process. It's always on the other side. So when we try to force that kind of optimism on a shitty experience, we get in our own way. When we give ourselves permission to just let things suck, when we surrender to the experience, then we give ourselves a chance to get through and only on the other side, when we reflect back, do we find growth.

1:42:22I'll say one more thing because I'm a long-winded answer. There's a study I talk about from University of Wisconsin with trauma survivors. And it's really interesting. It looks at the rate of PTSD versus post-traumatic growth. And what it shows is that in the people that experience post-traumatic growth versus PTSD, they have the same exact trajectory for the first three months after their trauma. So they all look like they're headed towards post-traumatic stress. No one has the trauma and is like, I'm gonna grow from this. It's only at the three-month mark do people start being able to make any meaning out of a trauma.

1:42:56So what is the differentiator between the person who persists in their depression after a trauma and the person who grows? Yeah, I thought you might ask this and I wanna be real careful about how I answer it because I'm not a psychiatrist and And I think that we often blame people for their circumstances in these situations when the real answer might just be their inherited neurochemistry. So I think that that's the foremost thing. I know a lot of people that have been through trauma that suffer from PTSD that are strong motherfuckers and like could just be their neurochemistry. I think where it's not, it is perhaps people that do think that like they immediately need to have growth or meaning.

1:43:37It's like this trap. It's Chinese finger trap. Like you put it in and then you get stuck. and then they get stuck in this experience. I'm like, I can't even grow from it. I can't find meaning. This must mean everything just stinks, stinks, stinks and it gets tighter and tighter. So I think that that has something to do with it. And then it's also worth pointing out that in the literature on this, there are certain capital T traumas where you don't grow from them. So rape is an example. For many people, war is an example. Like there are certain things that should just not happen to a human and it's not the human's fault that they didn't grow from it.

1:44:12It is just something that is truly senseless and cruel and harmful. Although there are circumstances in which experiences such as that can catalyze growth in the form of finding purpose and making sense out of that. I'm thinking of somebody who becomes an activist as a way of reclaiming some level of agency out of that victimhood and becoming a voice for other people or endeavoring to change the laws or whatever, create greater awareness around the thing that happened to that person so it doesn't happen to more people. Yeah, and that's the pathway out for sure. But I just wanna be careful to mention or to be really explicit that I think that not everybody can do that.

1:45:04And sometimes it's situational, but sometimes it's just like purely the experience that they went through was so traumatizing or the combination of the experience and their own neurochemistry. But yeah, the flip side of that is people go through like the worst whores of whores. And then when they're in it, they give themselves permission to just be in the suck and get through it. And then they do get to the other side. And as you said, a way to reclaim agency is to try to do something productive about it. But certainly your point rings true in that when you're in the midst of an acute experience, your job is to have the experience, not try to extract meaning out of it.

1:45:45Like that's not gonna work. Like when you're suffering or something horrible is happening and you're just trying to survive it, your job is to survive it, right? And to let go of any, not to be nihilistic about things. Right. You know, your therapist sounds a little bit like, we are nihilists. No, but I think that she - Like the big Lebowski, but she's trying to prompt you a different - She pings me as an optimist. A different lens for, yeah, I get it. Like you needed that, right? Yeah. But I think - Because you can spiral into depression by being a nihilist. Yes. So maybe the real solution here is to remind yourself, like, hey, I might grow from this.

1:46:22She didn't say you're not gonna grow from this, right? She said, maybe you will, maybe you won't. Just who cares? Get through it. so maybe it's to say like I might grow from this I don't know but I don't have to and I don't have to do it right now I just need to get to the other side and again we're talking like bad clinical depression like these are things when a growth mindset by definition is not possible I do think for 95 % of changes it's really helpful to go into them and say like this is a period of disorder again let's like set our expectations but like I think I'm going to grow from this I think I'm going to extract meaning and if that works for you great like that should always be the default Right, but you gotta be able to put it down when it doesn't work.

1:46:58If you're in a very intense situation and you're like, why don't I have a growth mindset? And how come I'm not optimistic about that and about what's happening? And how come, you know, I can't extract meaning out of what, then you're gonna beat yourself up. You're gonna get into this deeper shame spiral. Yeah, you're firing extra arrows at yourself. Yeah, you can't do that. You have to let go of all of that. You allow yourself to feel whatever's happening. You do the best that you can. And then slowly over time, that meaning will reveal itself to you or you, because humans are good at this, pattern makers, whatever, you're gonna attach some, you're gonna end up attaching some kind of meaning to it that will be meaningful and instructive for you to help your brain and your body make sense of what occurred.

1:47:43That's right. Just like we have physical immune systems, we have psychological immune systems. And the job of a physical immune system is when there's something that's a threat to us, it goes and blasts that threat. Our psychological immune systems, when there's something that is threatening to our identity or to our trajectory, our expectations, it takes that and it integrates it and it makes it a part of our identity. But much like our physical immune system, the greater the harm, the longer it takes. So if you get a small cut, yeah, you can grow and make meaning from that really fast. You know, I missed my flight and I'm gonna miss the interview with you.

1:48:18Like that really sucks, I'm gonna be down, but like whatever, we'll get through it. whereas like something really terrible happens expecting the same quick turnaround to meaning and growth is a fool's errand you have to give your psychological immune system some time and you have to be really patient with yourself uh the research shows that when we are in the midst of extreme changes particularly when they're negative ones time slows down like our experience of time slows down and the reason for this is because we evolved when under threat to see things very, very discreetly. So instead of living our life as this continuous movie, we start seeing things frame by frame and things slow way down.

1:48:58And the reason that we know this is a fascinating experiment where individuals were hoisted up 150, 200 feet in the sky on this crazy ride called the SCAD that has since gone out of business, but during the time of the study it was operating. And then they're basically just dropped. And this researcher, David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, talk about a clever experimental design. He had people ride the SCAD and guess how long they were falling for. And then he had those same people watch others ride the SCAD and guess how long they were falling for. And what he found is that when they were watching, they made an accurate guess.

1:49:36They said, you know, they're falling for about one second. But when they were on the ride, they experienced their fall as being like three seconds. So when we're falling, you know, physically or metaphorically, time slows down. And this is the biggest trap for people in depression, which is depression is like the swamp and it becomes all consuming and it just feels like it is going to be forever. And that there is no way out and days truly can feel like yours. And that is just your brain changing its perception of time. And there's not much that you can do to speed it up. But if you know that, if you have just the littlest bit of consolation that, hey, like Like, even though this feels like forever now, when I look back on this period, five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, it's not gonna feel so long.

1:50:24Holding onto that little bit of hope can go such a long way. In thinking about the concepts that recurse throughout this book, rugged flexibility and embracing transience and tragic optimism and having this fluid sense of self and these non-dualistic ideas around who we are and how we interface with the world. Where is, tell me, Brad, where's the spirituality? Where does faith enter this? Where is there some level of appreciation for devotion? Like, is there a space for God in all of this? Like, how do you think about that? I think so. Um, my interpretation is going to be based on my own kind of spiritual philosophy or system.

1:51:15So that's for readers to decide if there's space for God or spirituality and this for them. Um, for me, it really comes back to that distinction between our historical or conventional selves and our ultimate selves. So there's the self that even Sam Harris has to decide if he's going to hit the gas at a green light and get through that intersection that is very confined and ego-driven, and that is not the spiritual self. But then there's the self that is constantly connected to everything, that has a conversation or puts a book out in the world or raises a child or that is a first grade teacher for 20 years.

1:51:54And if you're just locked in to your book sales or how your child's grades are or how many students you graduated, that gets really tiring, at least for me. Whereas if you can remind yourself that you are making an offering to the world and And whatever it is that you do, and that's going to have ripples that last forever, then to me, that is the spiritual component of all of this. And any good physicist would tell you that's also the laws of physics. So like, I'm back to your like middle, I don't think it's either spiritual or, I think that like physics is pretty spiritual discipline. In what way?

1:52:33Like, where is the spirituality in physics? and the sort of non-dual nature of it? The non-dual nature of it, for sure. And just in the, what we do has ripple effects that just go forever. So to me, that's it more than anything in physics. Like, you know, the butterfly effect. And when you think of it that esoterically, yeah, it might not feel very spiritual. But when you think of it as, hey, I have this inheritance, good and bad, from my ancestors. I'm going to pass this forward to my children, if you have them, but to other people in my life. And that is kind of like my position in the universe.

1:53:21Then to me, that is like a very, for me, that's like, that is a big part of my spirituality. I've only had one, what I'd call like one spiritual breakthrough moment. and it happened at a time when I'd been regularly meditating and I just distinctly remember like thoughts were truly just thoughts. Sounds were truly just sounds. Feelings were truly just feelings. They had nothing to do with me. They were just happening and that was really scary and then I call my meditation teacher and he's like, oh, like that fear, that's just your ego waiting to die or not, excuse me, that's just your ego being scared to die.

1:54:02Like your ego doesn't want to die. So keep going. So I keep sitting. Thoughts are just thoughts. Feelings are just feelings. And then I just pay attention to that fear. And then eventually that fear, that ego, it all just was gone and it was just groundless. And that moment happens maybe five years ago. I haven't had a moment like that again. I don't know if I ever will, but I remember that. And and just remembering that that existed, in that moment, there was no life or death. There was no anything. It just was. And then because I'm immortal, you know how that moment ended? Because I'm like, fuck, this is awesome.

1:54:39And then it's over. Right out of it, yeah. So whether it was a - And then you stopped meditating. Whether it was a millisecond or two minutes, or I don't know how long it lasted. I truly can't tell you. But unfortunately, I had a good meditation teacher. You say that jokingly, but my meditation teacher said like, great, not forget that that ever happened. And he didn't mean like actually forget, but he meant like don't cling to that because like if you try to get that, you're never gonna get that again. But it was that like, it was that deep knowing that I really am just like a part of this huge dance and that there is no I.

1:55:17But I still have to be able to get through an intersection. Sure, there's something really beautiful and mystical about that. And I think there is mysticism and plenty of space for appreciating the unknown when it comes to not just our relationship with ourself, but our relationship with the world and how we think about our own growth and evolution. I mean, you're talking about the conventional self and the ultimate self, what is the ultimate self? And what is, from whence comes your idea of that ultimate self and what are the choices that you're making towards that and what is driving you towards that.

1:55:56And this perspective that unforeseen events, the allostatic nature of the universe is such that things are gonna get thrown in your path and you have a choice to kind of look at them as opportunities for growth and tell yourself that that is happening for me rather than to me. And again, I wanna be sensitive to, it's like bad things happen. I'm not saying that everything is,

1:56:29is there for you to grow, like there's tragedy all over the place, but in the everyday experience of life, when you're kind of thrown off track, like if you can look at it and say, where's the opportunity here? How can I grow through this? How can I make a different choice that will move me towards that ultimate self or at least a little bit more in the direction of that aspirational version of who I'd like to be? I think that's all spiritual and magical and mystical. And you're not gonna find answers in physics or necessarily in psychology, at least not ones that are gonna be satisfying and reductive enough to help you kind of have a very tactile sense of how everything operates, you know, beyond our five senses.

1:57:17Yeah, that's right. I could not agree more. The Buddha was purported to say that my teachings aren't the moon, but I can point at the moon. And I think that all the science and psychology, like it's all pointing at the moon, but it's not the thing itself. And it's also, you know, an intellectual cut. And like, who knows? I'm open-minded. Maybe we're making all the wrong cuts. You know, the new telescope, like I'm so utterly convinced that there's other life out there that probably is significantly more knowledgeable and maybe makes better cuts and makes so much more sense out of things. We, you know, just the difference between East and West culture.

1:57:58Imagine like East and West galaxies. And I think like for me, part of spiritual practice is just being open and curious to all of that. I did just catch myself because like the reason I'm confident that there's other life is because of science, like just probability theory, like of course there's other life. But I don't think they have to necessarily be in opposition, science and spirituality. I'm gonna resist the temptation to turn this into a UFO podcast. I could like bite on that. But that is, so not UFOs. I don't know enough. I haven't like gone into that, but I know a lot of smart people have.

1:58:31It's nuts that there was that, you know, hearing in front of Congress, it's like, this is Fox Mulder actually happening. It's wild. Yeah. So what I will say is that in my own growth, and I just have to, it's an area for me, and particularly for the version of me that's on the internet, is I have to be really careful. I can be skeptical about things, but I never want to be cynical. And that to me is like my biggest blind spot right now on the internet. I think in real life, having conversations like like you mentioned, like the internet set up to do that too. But your blind spot being that - From skepticism to cynicism.

1:59:11The interview, sorry, not the interview, the internet makes you cynical. It can make me cynical and I never wanna be cynical. I wanna be skeptical of a lot of things, but I never wanna be cynical. Well, talking about skepticism, let's round this out with a topic that I really wanna get into with you. We talked about you being kind of like this middle path guy, you're the grounded guy, et cetera. I don't know how grounded I am. It's a title of a book. You're kind of like, well, some of this, some of that, not too much of anything. And I think maybe the first time that we ever talked, it was really over this shared sensibility around like the life hacking movement.

1:59:53Yeah, you wrote the original Go article. Yeah, and being like, sort of anti-hack in our approach to life and appreciating the journey and hard things are hard, et cetera, stop taking shortcuts. But I'm interested in your perspective on all of these tools that are now available that are sort of in the vein or the realm of biohacking. You've got like, I'm wearing a whoop or sleep trackers and mattresses that can cool at night and help regulate your body temperature. And what else we have? there's lots of things that I use like NuCalm or binaural beats. And I just bought this happy thing. It's like a magnetic thing, goes under my pillow.

2:00:38It's supposed to help induce like a deeper state of sleep. And I've extracted tremendous amount of value from these advances, but I also am conscious of my attachment to them or my relationship to them. And I know this is something you've talked about and thought about. I sort of see you as a guy who's out there kind of like railing against all of this, just go for a walk and have a glass of wine with your friends and forget about all this bullshit. But I'll let you explain your perspective on all of this. So I'm trying not to be like, that's back to the cynicism. I don't wanna be cynical. So I wanna say three things and I'm gonna try to remember them all, okay?

2:01:21I swear to God, they just pop into my brain. So it really is how the brain works. The first thing, and I'm going to forget them, so I'll probably say between two and seven. All right, the first thing is that the easiest way to determine whether or not to use these tools is are they helping you? So this is where I've softened up. Maybe they're bullshit for some people, but if they're helping someone else, great. You should use the tool. If you can afford it and it's helping you, use it. You also have to ask, if it was helping me six months ago, is it still helping me now? or has it actually become the thing that's getting in my way?

2:01:58And as long as you can try to honestly answer that question, great, that's the first big thing. The second big thing, a trap that people get into is talk about polarities for everything in our life, from sleep to fitness to longevity. We are constantly bouncing between these two poles of acceptance is the path to happiness and problem solving is the path to happiness. And the trap with these devices, is that we can get so uber focused on problem solving and optimizing that we never accept our mortality. We never accept feeling tired, or our life becomes diminished because when our recovery score is down, we have a self-fulfilling prophecy that we're not gonna be able to function that day.

2:02:42Or if our sleep isn't perfect, then we start beating ourselves up and we get really nervous and then we sleep worse the next day. There's a famous study that people that use sleep trackers sleep worse than people that don't. this is that at play. So that's the other trap, right? That like, we don't want to just accept everything that sucks. If you're not sleeping well, you shouldn't just accept like, hey, I'm going to sleep two hours a night for the rest of my life. That's not healthy, but we can get so caught up in trying to fix everything that then that becomes the problem. Then the third thing, putting my public health hat on, is that we know from years and years and years of data that really only five big things have a measurable impact on health and longevity in what we'll call well-being.

2:03:29And those things are really simple. The first and most important is not to use tobacco products or if you do get help quitting. The second is to move your body often to exercise. The third is to avoid ultra-processed foods. It used to be to maintain a healthy body weight. The thinking on that has changed. Now, again, I'm putting on my public health hat. What researchers look at is levels of body fatness. So you want to have good lean body mass. Next, you want to have lots of community. And then the last thing is that if you are going to drink at all, you want to drink in extreme moderation. And I was on Derek Thompson's podcast, Who Loves Wine, and people joke that like the last 20 minutes of that podcast was Derek trying to like have me tell him that it's okay to have wine with my friends and here's what I'm gonna say because I know this is a topic that is obviously important to you.

2:04:23I think that sobriety is a great choice and there is zero downside to sobriety. I think that if you are somebody that does not experience any substance use issues and you enjoy drinking, there is nothing wrong with having under five drinks a week, so long as they're not all at once. But that presupposes that one drink doesn't lead to two, doesn't lead to three, or you're drinking to run away from something. The research right now shows that at three to five drinks, you start to see the littlest dip in mortality rates and morbidity, so like health. In under three drinks, it's basically a wash. I think the people that like hold up, you know, I'm cutting alcohol, I'm cutting caffeine, I'm doing cold plunges, is like a moral system, almost like a Protestant religion of purification.

2:05:13That kind of annoys me and I think can be somewhat dangerous. But the flip side is, if you are someone that has all struggled with substance use, you look around at the world and you're like, why the fuck are we just selling poison and is poison such a part of the culture? And I'm equally empathetic to that argument. And me myself, I have like two drinks a month. I'm very fortunate that I don't have any sort of dependency, but I also don't drink because I feel like shit when I do. Super interesting to hear you share that. I feel, I'm feeling lots of feels with what you just shared. I think it's interesting.

2:05:49There's a weird semi-ironic sort of inconsistency between this thesis that you have of embracing change, while also this other aspect of your personality that's sort of stubbornly anti-change with respect to a lot of these things with these protocols and principles. Like the idea that there's people on social media who are doing like 30 day no drinking challenges, there's some peace inside of you that is irked by that. I think it's interesting. I wanna push back. If it's like virtue signaling or something. It's not the change. But it's a cool, like in the world of challenges, this is not the Tide Pod challenge.

2:06:30No, this is a great, this is a good challenge. And that's what I just said. I have no problem with it. I think my challenge is when it is wrapped up in this like performative virtue signaling. I understand that. And I'm also, no, but you said something and I wanna push back. No, I am. I am open to these things working. I really am. That's why I said like use any of these tools if they help you. What I'm not open to is pseudoscience junk, which is what so much of this is. Because so much of my coaching practice is me unwinding pseudoscience junk. Now, if there is a strong evidence base behind any of these things, so here's an example where I have a really open mind is with psychedelics.

2:07:12Now, I don't know what the outcome is going to be. My sense is that there will be a really effective tool in the toolkit to treat mental illness, and they'll have indications for certain people in certain situations with certain circumstances, and they'll work very well. That is very different, though, than some of these other things that like truly have no evidence base. But this is, to be fair, this is like where I need to be careful to remain skeptical and questioning, but not become cynical. Yeah, I think that, I mean, first of all, with respect to alcohol, it's pretty hard to make the case that there's anything healthy about drinking at all, even one drink.

2:07:54The only argument being that it's a social lubricant that puts you in a position to be around friends and share some kind of community-based experience. But if you can't have that without alcohol, then that's something you really need to look into. I completely agree. And that's what I said on this podcast with Derek Thompson, which is like the problem isn't that people don't wanna drink. The problem is that we feel that we need alcohol to be a part of gathering in community. Do it over coffee or tea. And I like the idea, particularly with younger people, that there is a pushback against this just acceptance of alcohol being part of the culture.

2:08:36And I think that's a really cool shift. So it's something I definitely celebrate. But when I look at these devices, you know, saunas, cold plunges. Can I say, sorry, one more thing before we move to alcohol because it's important. We talk a lot about the opioid epidemic, but there's, I think, I wish, man, I wish I could call my colleagues in Michigan to double check the stat. It's either one or two years, but there's only one or two years where more people have died from opioids than alcohol. So like I'm right there with you on alcohol. I think it's batshit crazy that it is such a, just an enormous part of the culture.

2:09:12However, I'm also not going to judge the person that doesn't have a substance use issue that can go to a brewery and have a beer and enjoy it and get on with their life and be totally fine. Right, that's not me. Yeah, but we're different. But of course that's not. We have different experiences. Yeah, I know, I know. When I think about these technological breakthroughs, these devices, whether it's a GPS watch or a whoop, sleep tracker, et cetera, I think about, and I see resistance to them out there because I've gotten a lot of value out of them. I think about like the pace clock on the deck when I was a swimmer and the guy who's saying, what do you need a pace clock for?

2:09:54Or like, why are you using a stopwatch? You know, like these are just tools, they're neutral. It's your relationship to them. Are they helping you? Are they not? And I could tell you that, you know, getting in anything that's connecting me to what my body is doing and giving me information helps me make better decisions. And I can tell you that my sleep has improved because I'm much more connected to what's happening with my HRV or what is my resting heart rate and what happens when I eat this food or that food or at this time versus that time in terms of my sleep quality. And when you talked about the pillars, like it's sleep, it's fitness movement, right?

2:10:35It's nutrition. These are like very basic things. And I look at these tools as just a way of giving you information about what your body is doing so that you can be more informed about making better decisions that will be beneficial. I do agree that you can get too caught up in scores and metrics and things like that, that become predictive of behavior in an unhealthy way. But I think what they do is like in a way, like here's the example I would give. As a swimmer, I would do, let's say I'm doing a set of 10 times 100 on a certain interval. As a young person, I wouldn't know when I was coming in, what the time, what the pace clock would say.

2:11:18But by the time I was 18 or 19 or 20, I was so in tune with my body, I could tell you what the pace clock said before I touched the wall and I could tell you what my heart rate was. Like you just, you have that level of deep integration with yourself, but that tool helped me make that connection. And I think these things are no different. And when I reflect upon where most people are, like I'm pretty in tune with my body, you are as well, but there's a lot of people who are walking around, they're just totally detached from their body. They don't even know what it's like to feel good. They don't know what their heart, you know, any, So these are really powerful tools to get people more engaged and emotionally connected to what their body's doing, where they go, wow, I didn't realize that was happening.

2:11:59Like, oh, I see that graph. Holy shit. Like, maybe I shouldn't drink a big gulp right before I go to bed or whatever it is. So I'm with you. That's what, I mean, that was my first principle, right? Like you ask yourself, is this tool helping me? And if it is, then use it. What you're describing in talent research, we call the four levels of competence. Have you heard of this framework or no? No. So the first level is unconscious incompetence. In here, you don't know that you don't know what you're doing and no tools are gonna help you. You need to like read some books and get some coaching. Then the next level is conscious incompetence.

2:12:35So this is when you know that you don't know what you're doing. In here, tools are really helpful because they can help you course correct. Like you know that I'm doing it wrong, so the tools can really help. Then the third level is conscious competence. so you know that you know what you're doing. You're effortly thinking about what you have to do. This is you looking at that pace clock and you're really competent, but you're very conscious of what you're doing. And then the fourth level is unconscious competence. And this is like excellence mastery flow where you don't need the pace clock, you don't need any of it.

2:13:05So the tools help you, as you said, get to that point. And I think that's the most, assuming that the tools are accurate and the feedback, if the pace clock is giving you the wrong numbers, then it's not very helpful. but assuming that the tools are accurate then they're extremely helpful on a journey to complete mastery and even if you never reach complete mastery who cares? Like if you're getting eight hours of sleep because whatever device you're using is supporting you in doing that so long as it's accurate then I can like incontestably get behind that tool. Alright, you're on the record. Yeah.

2:13:36I like it. Yeah but this is an area where I think I've opened my mind a little because I think I was like a little more quick I don't know, maybe a few years But I also think the claims have kind of moderated with what some of these tools can and can't do. Well, nothing's a panacea. Again, they're tools, they're helpful, right? Yeah. And I think, you know, it's sort of, when you make that connection, like, oh, when I feel like this, it's because of this. And then that gets lodged in your brain, right? And then the next thing, oh, that's telling me this is happening when I feel like that, I'm gonna remember that, you know?

2:14:09And then, you know, it just, they're just little kind of like bricks along the path, I think. Yeah, and I mean, and I use tools in my own life. Maybe not to the same number as you. I mean, I'm not like, you know me. Yeah. I'm not like a biohacker guy. Right. Like I'm not like Mr. No, you're not using it as like a freak or whatever. You're not using it as like a performative thing. It sounds like you are genuinely using it because they help you, which is the best way to be in relation to these. I use a pedometer because as I started strength training, I wanted to make sure that I'm like getting a lot of steps just to get aerobic work during the day.

2:14:46When I do aerobic training, I use a heart rate monitor because that's helpful feedback. I don't know my body, especially like my bigger strength training body well enough to necessarily stay where I need to be. Do I use any other tools? I think those are the two that I use. So to kind of bring this to a conclusion, Brad, I wanna give you the opportunity to share some of the tools, which will be a bit of a recap of what we've already talked about, but tools that you've arrived upon through the research and the writing of this book around developing rugged flexibility and being kind of adaptable to the changing world around us.

2:15:26So I'll break it down into mindset, identity, and actions, which is the structure of the book. So on mindset, it is shifting from a homeostatic approach to change to an allostatic approach to change. So there's no going back to order. We're constantly in the process of reordering ourselves and holding this notion of being rugged and flexible at the same time. So we're not sacrificing all agency in the midst of change and saying we're just going to go off the flow, but we're also not being so rigid that we're resisting change and suffering as a result. Having the right expectations and then updating those expectations accordingly.

2:16:06Remembering that our brain is a prediction machine. And when reality doesn't match predictions, we get thrown for a loop. So our work then is the four Ps. Pause, process, plan, proceed. Create space to update our expectations so that we can meet reality where it is. And then meeting reality where it is, accepting reality, accepting change, not resisting it. So that's what I would call a rugged and flexible mindset. Then when we talk about identity, what does it mean to have a rugged and flexible identity. I think this is about conceiving of yourself is having multiple rooms to your identity. And it's okay to go spend time in one room, spend a year, spend a decade in one room, really pursuing mastery.

2:16:44Just never leave the other rooms behind. You don't wanna be living in a one room house because when that room changes, it makes you fragile. And then thinking of our identity as non-dually. So we have a self that is right here that goes through the intersection that has this conversation. And then we have this ultimate, this more spiritual self that's connected to everything. And both of those things can be true at the same time. And then when it gets to actions, this is about really activating our seeking pathway, not our rage pathway, so that when we are dancing with change, when we're in conversation with change, we're taking skillful, productive actions that align with our core values.

2:17:23And finally, and when you need it, perhaps most important, is when you're doing all of this and things still just suck and you can't find any meaning. You can't find three things that you're grateful for. Seeking help, because it sounds like you're probably in a situation where you need it, and releasing from the idea that you need to do anything other than survive the experience. Not becoming nihilistic about it, but saying that, hey, maybe I'll grow, but maybe this is just senseless pain, but I'm not gonna find out until I'm on the other side of this. So right now my work is just getting to the other side.

2:17:58I love you, buddy. and you did a great job with this book, Master of Change, available everywhere. That's right. Hopefully at your favorite independent bookstore. Brad's gonna be out talking about it and pick it up. Thank you. Earliest opportunity. Easiest way to track down Brad and get to know him a little bit better. Where are you showing up these days? You're kind of a little bit off Twitter. You pivoted more to Instagram, but you kind of grew your audience on Twitter, right? Yeah, that's been a change. Never let a crisis go to waste. I didn't love the direction that Twitter was heading about seven months ago.

2:18:35So I said like, I'm gonna build an Instagram platform or at least try to start from scratch. So now that is the place that I'm most active and it's just my name at Brad Stahlberg. And that's something I changed my mind on. I thought Instagram was by far the worst of all the platforms and it is by far my favorite platform. I told you a long time ago. It is a creator and a consumer. I was like, what are you doing? You were like so attached to just being a Twitter guy. Yeah, so you were right. That's cool. And the Growth Equation and the Growth Equation podcast, I'll link up all the links to all that stuff in the show notes as usual.

2:19:09That's it, man, we did it. Thanks, it's always a pleasure. Peace.

2:19:26That'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 in the plant power way as well as the plant power meal planner at meals.richroll.com if you'd like to support the podcast the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on apple podcasts on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment.

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2:21:31Thank you.