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

From global disruptions to individual life changes, transformation—both good and bad—is happening constantly. Here to offer us a path for embracing life’s inherent instability is Brad Stulberg—a sustainable excellence expert, human performance coach, and bestselling author returning for his fourth appearance on the pod. Today we talk about how to embrace transformation, cultivate resilience, and adapt to an ever-changing world. We also explore rugged flexibility, tragic optimism, adopting a flexible identity over time, how to navigate big life changes successfully, the perils of biohacking, and many other fascinating topics. Amidst the chaos and confusion of self-help, I find Brad to be a principled voice of reason. This conversation is overflowing with evidence-based, practical, and actionable life counsel. My hope is that some of the tactics shared help you not only navigate difficult circumstances but help facilitate the emergence of meaning and growth. Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Seed: seed.com/RICHROLL Momentous: LiveMomentous.com/RICHROLL Athletic Brewing: athleticbrewing.com On: on.com/RICHROLL BetterHelp: betterhelp.com/RICHROLL Plant Power Meal Planner: https://meals.richroll.com Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:13Rich Roll?

  The Rich Roll Podcast.

• 1:18Brad Stulberg?

  We stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing.

• 1:21Rich Roll?

  How do you adapt? How do you grow? How do you evolve?

• 1:23Brad Stulberg?

  We are just always in conversation with change.

• 1:27Rich Roll?

  You have this paradigm around having versus being, so explain that.

• 1:32Brad Stulberg?

  The more that we can define ourselves in our pursuits and ways of being, then the less fragile we are to change.

• 1:39Rich Roll?

  And this is really where the rubber meets the road, where the work actually lives and breathes.

• 1:45Rich Roll?

  If there is one truism out there, I'm pretty sure it's that every single person would like their lives to be just a little bit better, to be happier, to be more resilient. And yet, for too many, positive change is just elusive. But the truth is, every moment presents us with the opportunity to make different choices and to produce better results. In our lives, but this choice often seems too difficult to make. So what is the deal with this? What gives? Well, here to help us better understand this paradox and offer a path for embracing life's constant instability is my friend Brad Stulberg. Brad is a sustainable excellence expert.

• 2:30Rich Roll?

  He's a human performance coach and he's also a bestselling author, returning for his fourth appearance on the show. If you're new to Brad, he is a fellow at the University of Michigan's Graduate School of Public Health. He's the co-founder of the Growth Equation newsletter and podcast alongside Steve Magnus, the elite track and field coach. Brad's impressive fleet of books that you should check out if you haven't already include Peak Performance, The Passion Paradox, and The Practice of Groundedness. But the occasion for today's exchange is Brad's latest book, which is entitled Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything is Changing, Including You, which is this really

• 3:11Rich Roll?

  effective primer on how to embrace change, how to cultivate resilience, how to effectively adapt to an ever-changing world, which are all topics, of course, we discuss in detail today. We also explore the topic of rugged flexibility. What does that mean? We talk about tragic optimism. We discuss adopting a flexible identity over time, why this is important. We talk about how to navigate big life changes successfully, how to find stability within change, and just tons more. I've got a couple more things I want to say about Brad before we get into it, but first, let's acknowledge the awesome organizations that make this show possible.

• 4:03Rich Roll?

  Okay, Brad Stulberg. Amidst the chaos and the confusion of the self-help world, I find Brad to be a really principled and welcome voice of reason. And this conversation is just overflowing with evidence and experience-based practice.

• 4:20Rich Roll?

  Actionable Life Council. So my hope is that some of the tactics shared today are going to help you not only navigate difficult circumstances, but actually help facilitate the emergence of more meaning and more growth in your life. So without further ado, this is me and Brad Stulberg. Great to see you, Brad. Thank you for coming out and doing this. It's always a pleasure to probe your brain. And the occasion for this, which is very exciting, is this new book you've got, Master of Change, which you did a great job on. I really enjoyed it. Looking forward to unpacking it with you. But going into the book, I went in kind of

• 5:05Rich Roll?

  blind. I didn't read anything on Amazon or your publisher's website. And I guess I just presumed that this was going to be some kind of primer on habit change, more in the vein of atomic habits or something like that. Like, how do you actually change yourself? And I guess that's part of it, but that's more of subtext, because what it's really about is how you grow in the face of change beyond your control, correct? So maybe tell us a little bit about the thesis of the book, and then I want to get into kind of what motivated you to explore this specific topic.

• 5:44Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. So the thesis of the book is that we tend to think of change as something that happens to us, or these singular events, when in reality, we are just always in conversation with change. And because we think of it as these singular events, we often relate to change as something that happens to us, instead of something that we're in conversation with. And the kernel of the idea, I know you said you want to get into it, so I'm sure we will in more detail. Early COVID, just article after article with the headline, when are things going to get back to normal? And it struck me that back to normal is probably never going to happen.

• 6:30Brad Stulberg?

  And then I did what I do, which is I got really curious and I started looking at the literature on how we think about change and realized these two competing models of homeostasis and allostasis. And we spend a lot of time thinking about homeostasis and that's kind of the conventional prevailing model, but it's not necessarily the best fit one.

• 6:50Rich Roll?

  So, explain that difference between homeostasis and allostasis. What is that concept?

• 6:57Brad Stulberg?

  So, homeostasis is this notion that living systems crave stability and any time that they are confronted with change or disruption, they try to get back to that stability as swiftly as possible. So, it describes a pattern of order or stability and some sort of disorder or change and then back to order.

• 7:18Rich Roll?

  Right. And that was sort of the prevailing, I don't know if theology is the right word, but kind of operating system for how things work, how biological systems operate, how ecosystems operate for a long time.

• 7:33Brad Stulberg?

  That's right. Since the mid 1800s, a scientist named Walter Cannon coined it. And science was very different in the mid 1800s. I mean, we're talking like pre-vaccines, germ theory of disease. Yeah, it stuck with us for a very long time and it's really encroached upon not just scientific or biological change, but how we think about so many different changes, including habit change. I mean, if you Google "homeostasis and change," you'll see like, "This is why losing weight is hard, this is why starting a habit is hard, this is why stopping a bad habit is hard." But then, about 20 years ago, researchers reevaluated this model of homeostasis and

• 8:13Brad Stulberg?

  they said, "Actually, when you look at really vital, thriving systems, they don't follow this path of order-disorder-order."

• 8:22Brad Stulberg?

  Yes, systems want to be stable, but that stability is achieved somewhere new by changing. And allostasis is a process of order, disorder, reorder. And what's fascinating is if you look at the etymology of these words, homo means same, and stasis means standing. So it's having the same standing by being the same. And allo means variable. So allostasis is literally translated into stability through change. And I think that it's this beautiful double meaning where the way that we're stable is by being able to change to some extent. So we stay stable not by resisting change, but by changing.

• 9:00Rich Roll?

  Extrapolating on that idea, you can't help but think about evolution. Like, if it was order, disorder, order, there would be no evolution. It is only through the reordering that you see the adaptation, really. So what you're saying, basically, is there's a status quo, there's an intervening set of circumstances, and then there's an adaptation to those circumstances that hopefully creates a new version of that impermanent homeostasis.

• 9:31Brad Stulberg?

  That's it. Yeah. And evolution is, I think, change on the grandest scale that we know of. And you see allostasis playing out at the species level, but then you zoom in on a given individual, and you think about personal evolution, or how we grow over the course of our life, and it's very much the same. Like, we're constantly somewhere in that cycle of order, disorder, reorder. Even if you lived in, like, a container that was completely shielded from the elements, you're still aging. So, like, there's no escaping this cycle for any of us.

• 10:02Rich Roll?

  Right. And this is my whole thing. You know, obviously, I'm somebody who thinks about change a lot. How do we transform ourselves? How do we grow? And how do we evolve? And part of that mental equation for me is internal. How are we responding to our environment? And that's something that you go into in depth in the book. But, of course, it's also about how we're interfacing with our environment. And I think, you know, this is certainly my whole thing. Not that I invented this, this dates back millennia, particularly in eastern strains of thought. But this idea that we operate on a sort of twofold delusion. The first thing being that we convince ourselves that most things are static, that we are who

• 10:45Rich Roll?

  we are, the world is the way that it is. And this presumption that things not only are going to stay that way, but that they should stay that way, and if they don't, there's something wrong, right? And then the second thing is this delusion or illusion that we have any kind of control over this, right? We do have some level of control over how we respond to these things, and how we behave, and what comes out of our mouth, and the thoughts that we entertain, et cetera. But we really don't have any control over the external world and what's happening to us. So if we want to be adaptable, and we want to be able to go from order, navigating through disorder, to reorder, we have to disabuse ourselves of this illusion that the world

• 11:30Rich Roll?

  is static on some level. Because not only is change the natural state of everything, nothing is static, ever, from the subatomic, you know, particles to the universe, right? Like, every single thing is constantly in motion. And it's really our job to kind of cultivate that awareness, and then direct the few aspects of ourselves that we do have domain over, to the best of our abilities, to evolve, you know, in lockstep with this. And I guess you've given a term to this notion, which is the inescapability trigger. So talk a little bit about what that means.

• 12:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so that's not my term. This is a term from the behavioral scientist Dan Gilbert. And the inescapability trigger is when there is an event that happens in our life, or a change that happens in our life, and instead of trying to problem-solve, or make it go away, or wonder if maybe in the future, things will shift... We just accept it is completely inescapable. And then when we do that, it allows us to start thinking about reorder instead of just being stuck in disorder or even the old order. So a really prime example is somebody that is in a job that they just don't like.

• 12:48Brad Stulberg?

  And instead of shifting to a new line of work or really putting themselves out there and trying to, they wonder, well, maybe I can do this job crafting thing where I stay in the same job, but I try to make it better. Or maybe I can report to a different boss. Maybe I can work with different people. And at some point, you have to ultimately say like, this job just sucks. I don't want to do this. I don't want to show up and do this every day. And once you, once you accept that as inescapable, then it actually allows you to have the potential to change. I think another example that you know as well as anyone is this notion of hitting rock bottom when you're suffering with a substance use disorder or many mental illness before you seek help.

• 13:30Brad Stulberg?

  And I think that among many other things, that bottoming out is sort of the inescapability trigger at play. It's just like, this is it. There is no escaping this. What I am doing to try to fix this or make it better isn't working, so I need to change. I need to do something else.

• 13:47Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I think of that as this equation where change occurs when the pain of your current condition or situation, the suffering that you're experiencing as a result of that outweighs the fear of change. And that fear of change is also a form of suffering. And these two things are, it's another conversation that's happening or a tension between these two things. We've talked about this many times. I mean, I'm, I'm a very stubborn person. I need to kind of be in that, in that tension where change only happens when the pain of my situation outweighs, I go, you know, I'm just kicking and screaming into any kind of adaptability or change.

• 14:29Rich Roll?

  What's interesting about that, I mean, this is obviously, we're talking about changes within ourselves. Those, those are mostly, or maybe you have a different view on this, situations in which we're trying to alter our own behavior. And that may or may not be related directly to some externality that we don't have control over. But The irony being, of course, that a better choice is always available to us, that we need not suffer in that regard in order to make that change. We can always adapt our behavior, but for some reason, we're kind of hardwired not to.

• 15:10Brad Stulberg?

  I think it's because the disorder period, or disorientation, undoing, whatever you want to call it, it's really scary and it can be quite discombobulating. So before you get to reorder, you've got to go through the disorder.

• 15:24Rich Roll?

  You're very attached to the way that you do things. So that is a kind of resistance to change, or just a kind of refusal to review things objectively. And it's an emotional thing, too. Like, a lot of the tools that you go through in this journey that you go on in this book is about tools and tactics and practices and ways of thinking about, you know, how you interface with the world and how to respond rather than react, et cetera. But in my own lived experience, and in the many people that I've talked to and that I know, it's harder because emotions are messy.

• 16:07Rich Roll?

  And we come with a lifetime of experiences and traumas and, you know, kind of neurological grooving that is the predicate for how we behave. And unraveling all of that to create a healthier, new pathway is not only confusing, but sometimes just every fiber in your being is telling you that that's the wrong thing to do, that levels up that level of resistance and makes all of this a lot harder.

• 16:35Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, it's not easy. I mean, what you're describing is like voluntary, personal growth and transformation.

• 16:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 16:43Brad Stulberg?

  And that's really a hard process.

• 16:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Brad Stulberg?

  And especially if you try to do it alone, or you try to do it and you don't really want to, and you think you should. I mean, this is something that you really have to want to do. And yet, aging, like, there is no escaping it. So it is coming for all of us. Like I said, even if you lived in like a plastic bubble, completely protected from the elements.

• 17:05Rich Roll?

  You're Brian Johnson.

• 17:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, you're still...

• 17:06Rich Roll?

  Trying to control every aspect of your life.

• 17:08Brad Stulberg?

  But you're still aging. So I do think, like, we have to be comfortable with impermanence and transformation, or at least get comfortable with this idea of it. But I think it's also important... To note that we need not give up all sense of agency or stability. And I think that a common trap that people fall into is they think of it as these two extremes. So one extreme is stubbornness, rigidity, resistance to change for all the reasons that you just mentioned, and whether this is internal or external change. And then the other extreme is the very Buddhist or Taoist, let go, be one with the universe, go with the flow. And there's a wide chasm between those two extremes.

• 17:53Brad Stulberg?

  And I think that we can still have agency and control. And if part of our temperament is to be someone that is stubborn, or even a little bit rigid, like you can take that with you as you change. There's no need to necessarily surrender all of it. It's just about how do you take those core traits and then apply them flexibly instead of like, apply rigidity rigidly?

• 18:13Rich Roll?

  Right. To have a bit of a non-dualistic view of these different ways of being, that is another conversation that you can be in with yourself.

• 18:27Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, that's right. We talked about this a lot the last time that we spoke. And it's just been such an important tenet in my thinking and writing is when I catch myself in this or that's, which I do, because I grew up in the West and I'm a linear thinker, studied economics, I often ask myself like, is it really this or that? Or is it this and that? And sometimes it's really this or that. But when it's this and that, then there's all kinds of degrees of freedom to have a big toolkit and apply certain tools when they're helpful and not when they're not.

• 18:58Rich Roll?

  Right. Well, I would imagine that the balance of that equation, if you grew up in the West, and particularly in the United States, is going to weigh heavily on the side of individualism, you know, your own kind of self destiny and your own personal liberty and all of that, this sense of tremendous agency and a empowered sense, or maybe an outside sense of how much you can control not only yourself, but the world around you. Whereas Eastern, obviously very different. But that's a whole new way of thinking and being that's foreign to most people who were raised in this part of the world.

• 19:35Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, that's right. When I was doing the research on cross-cultural differences with how we relate to change, this fascinating occurrence, which is, I guess, not at all surprising, given what you just said, but still, when I heard it, it was really surprising. So in the West, particularly in America, we identify with things like our Enneagram, our Big Five personality traits, our Myers-Briggs score, and there's validity. These are like useful tools. By no means are they not. But in the East, you talk about those things and people laugh at you because they're like, "My Enneagram number is going to be completely different if I'm with rich versus my mother-in-law, if I'm hungry, depending on how well I slept, age 30 versus age 20." And I think that it's back to this non-dual thinking.

• 20:20Brad Stulberg?

  I mean, I do think that there are parts of us that are persistent and that sometimes we wish weren't so, but oftentimes, it's what makes us who we are, too, and like learning how to be kind to ourselves and work with those parts. But I think, yeah, in the West, we over-index on those and not pay enough attention to everything that's happening around us.

• 20:37Rich Roll?

  Static identity versus this multiplicity of identities or multiplicity of personalities. It reminds me of IFS, Internal Family Systems, and Richard Schwartz, this idea that we are the amalgam of many different people, and those different strains of ourselves show up in different circumstances, depending upon what is demanded of us.

• 21:01Brad Stulberg?

  I think that when it comes to identity in particular, change is really challenging. And the extreme examples are, you look at an athlete that is forced to retire because of injury or illness, or even an athlete that's not forced to retire, that just aging takes them out of their sport. You look at individuals and the struggles that they often face upon retirement, or a founder, if their company doesn't work out, really high rates of depression, anxiety, substance use disorders, addictive behaviors as well.

• 21:34Brad Stulberg?

  And I think that it is such a risk for everyone, but particularly people that like what they do, to have your identity become too closely fused with what you do, particularly if that is the driving force of your identity and if there's not much else around it.

• 21:55Rich Roll?

  Well, that's what most of us do.

• 21:56Brad Stulberg?

  So, the example that I like to use, or the metaphor that I like to use, is I think it is really helpful to think of your identity like a house. And within that house, you want to have some different rooms. And you might have the room of parent, of partner, of creative, of athlete, of employee, you name it. It's okay to go spend all your time in one room for a season of your life, maybe even a few, right? I mean, a couple of books ago, right? I co-wrote The Passion Paradox. It's literally in the subtitle, like a guide to going all in. So, it's okay. You don't have to balance your time across all five of those rooms

• 22:38Brad Stulberg?

  or six of those rooms. But I think it is just so important to make sure that those other rooms are available to you, so that when shit hits the fan in the room that you're in, you can go step into another room. And this isn't just my hypothesis. In the literature, it's called self-complexity. And individuals that have higher levels of self-complexity tend to be more resilient to change.

• 23:00Rich Roll?

  Right. If you're so all-in on one thing, and there's an endpoint to it, or there's an intervening event that suddenly makes it no longer possible for you to be that person or do that thing, it can be not only very destabilizing, but, you know, actually just cataclysmic. You see this with all manner of, you know, athletes who don't make the Olympics, or they do make the Olympics, and then afterwards, they've never thought about who they are.

• 23:26Brad Stulberg?

  Yep.

• 23:26Rich Roll?

  And they have to go through this difficult reimagination or disorder reorder process, as you would phrase it. And that can be very difficult. And I've often thought, well...

• 23:39Rich Roll?

  What is the, and the passion paradox, you know, obviously explores this, but you know, what aspect of, of that is disposable if you're trying to pursue mastery at the highest level of elitism, whether it's athletics or, or anything else, like you do need a certain singular, all encompassing focus in order to maximize your potential at the cost of everything else in your life?

• 24:08Brad Stulberg?

  Sometimes.

• 24:09Rich Roll?

  What say you, Brad?

• 24:10Brad Stulberg?

  So I, I say Niels Van der Poel.

• 24:12Rich Roll?

  Okay, let's get into this because I got a lot to say about this.

• 24:16Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Rich Roll?

  I know you, you go into this, but lay it out.

• 24:18Brad Stulberg?

  So Niels Van der Poel is a phenomenal speed skater. He's the best in the world. He won the gold medal at the 5K and the 10K, the most recent Winter Olympics. He also set a world record. And Niels Van der Poel, following his Olympics, he released this 67 page, maybe it's 69, I don't want to split hairs.

• 24:42Rich Roll?

  62 pages, Brad.

• 24:43Brad Stulberg?

  62 page PDF. And it was, in theory, a guide to how he trained. And it was a lot of specific workouts and how he trained, but it was also this just wonderful individual philosophy of approaching mastery and excellence in sport at the highest level. And Niels wrote about how, when he was a little bit younger, he did just what you said. He completely identified with the sport, with speed skating. His entire social life, his, even like spiritual life, it was all just in the oval, in the speed skating ring. And in the buildup to this Olympics, he shifted and he took two full days off a week.

• 25:24Brad Stulberg?

  And during those two days, he was as normal of a person as he could tolerate being. So he mentions that he went out for beer with his friends, he ate pizza. If someone wanted to go on a hike, he didn't say, oh, I'm not going to hike because I'm supposed to be in my norma tech boots all day, I'm going to go hike. And for a speed skater at this level to take two days a week completely away from the sport was relatively unheard of. Now, I'm sure we'll get into it. He had this 5-2 training program. So the five days he was training, all he was doing was training.

• 25:55Rich Roll?

  So let me just interject a little bit here. This 62-page PDF, how to skate a 10K and also a 5K, which is kind of like the subtitle of the whole thing, on its face is this training manual, but on another level, it's also sort of a manifesto. And it has this very Thoreau-esque, kind of Walden Pond philosophical flair to the way that he writes. And when he published this thing, the whole endurance community went bananas. And I know in your book, you say like, everybody's like texting you or emailing you. You got to read this. Everyone's chatting about this. And this is something that's been discussed on this podcast before. And when I did my podcast with Gordo Byrne, we went deep on it. And

• 26:39Rich Roll?

  he adopted the 5-2 method.

• 26:41Brad Stulberg?

  I love Gordo, by the way.

• 26:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, he's great. He's great. And so there's a certain kind of philosophy around the 5-2 where you're getting a little bit extra rest so that you can bounce back and train harder. But just for context, so we're on the same page here in terms of like, this guy's training output, because it is absolutely insane. This is a guy who is, who is like during those five day periods, he's on his bike, like he just created the world's largest aerobic base. He's on his bike for like six or seven hours a day. And not just going, like it's his zone two, but everyone thinks of zone two as kind of like your easy, I mean, he's going zone two at 250 watts, like for seven hours, which for him probably isn't that hard. But this is still like quite a bit of output. So he's putting in like 33

• 27:28Rich Roll?

  hours of training in five days. And then he gets those two days of rest. But he also would do like five straight threshold workouts. And, you know, he would set these intermediate goals for motivation, like running 100K ultra marathon in the middle of his training. Like his output is Bananas, and 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, 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

• 28:08Rich Roll?

  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, you know, 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? So what does that mean? And who are you if you get sick that day?

• 28:35Brad Stulberg?

  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 Van der Poel was, even in the buildup to the Olympics. And 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.

• 29:20Brad Stulberg?

  So while I'm in the process of writing the book, and I'm already like, you know, honed in on Van der Poel 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. So I have no doubt that Niels Van der Poel was hyper-focused on speed skating. Like, you have to be to train 33 hours a week.

• 30:02Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 30:12Rich Roll?

  Right. 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 Dene, 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. Or, 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.

• 30:53Brad Stulberg?

  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 Kopacki, who's a chef and dietitian, and like, 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. So, 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

• 31:38Brad Stulberg?

  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'll 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 gonna be really rough. And you don't just see this with work. I mean, think about how many people just get destroyed when their kids live at 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.

• 32:23Brad Stulberg?

  So I think anytime we really care deeply about something... That's a good cue or a good trigger to make sure that there's other parts of our identity.

• 32:32Rich Roll?

  Diversify, just like your financial portfolio.

• 32:36Brad Stulberg?

  That's it. Like, we need to diversify our identity.

• 32:38Rich Roll?

  I mean, more broadly, it's really a conversation around attachment and non-attachment. How 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 can be a total Jedi about that, then you don't even really need to diversify. Because to diversify really is just to apportion

• 33:23Rich Roll?

  your potential disappointment across a number of buckets and kind of, you know, play the odds with that. But 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.

• 33:48Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 33:58Rich Roll?

  Right. I mean, I have, 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 what I, I don't have to pick anyone up or any of that. And of course, I'm gonna miss them and I'm gonna, you know, 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, like you are on an insane roller coaster for years and years and years, and that will never end.

• 34:36Brad Stulberg?

  That's right.

• 34:37Rich Roll?

  And it really puts you in deep connection with your inability to kind of control the external environment.

• 34:45Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 34:53Rich Roll?

  I understand the parenting thing. Sorry to interrupt, but I'm talking more about, like, you set a goal, like you have your book, right?

• 34:58Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Rich Roll?

  And it's like, you know, how it does on some level is a function of how hard you're going to work to push it out there.

• 35:05Brad Stulberg?

  Sure.

• 35:05Rich Roll?

  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.

• 35:19Brad Stulberg?

  Topco's.

• 35:19Rich Roll?

  It's all what it is. How are you, you know, anticipating how you're going to show up for that experience?

• 35:26Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, 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.

• 35:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Brad Stulberg?

  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

• 35:50Rich Roll?

  I understand.

• 35:50Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 36:15Rich Roll?

  A 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, you know, area of topic that we're talking about. And I had a few questions about how you think about that because that's a, that's a, this

• 37:00Rich Roll?

  is a guy who's excelled across a variety of disciplines and different seasons across his life. So explain your thinking when it comes to a guy like that.

• 37:10Brad Stulberg?

  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 Interlock and 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. But in the locker room, he would like draw portraits of the other players, like he never left the art room.

• 37:55Brad Stulberg?

  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, he was basically way underemployed and really like sweep in 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.

• 38:21Rich Roll?

  He's a furniture designer.

• 38:23Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, he'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. So 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.

• 39:08Brad Stulberg?

  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. And 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 gonna listen to this, and then they're gonna 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

• 39:53Brad Stulberg?

  it relates to identity, is we cling on tight. So 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.

• 40:13Rich Roll?

  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?

• 40:46Brad Stulberg?

  I mean, that's every book that I've...

• 40:48Rich Roll?

  This is everything.

• 40:49Brad Stulberg?

  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...

• 41:03Brad Stulberg?

  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. Because 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.

• 41:47Brad Stulberg?

  But if you're going to exist in the world, in the modern world, at least, you also need tools to deal with the fact that we're not always going to be present. And that's okay.

• 41:59Rich Roll?

  I'm thinking about the extent to which, in 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. It strikes me that it's crucial, if you're going to navigate this journey as consciously as possible, that you have to do an adequate amount of internal excavation to kind of understand yourself.

• 42:40Rich Roll?

  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.

• 43:21Brad Stulberg?

  That's right. I do think that a trap...

• 43:26Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 44:11Brad Stulberg?

  And 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 like fairly concrete definitions of what they mean to us, right? This is like who we want to be, how we want to act ourself, you know? In your words, mood follows action. Well, 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,

• 44:53Brad Stulberg?

  we can use those core values as a map to guide our actions and guide our behaviors. The 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. Like, 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. Here's how I'm going to act on them. This is going to be the bank of my identity.

• 45:38Brad Stulberg?

  And this is going to be the part of me that's really rugged over time. That's going to help channel and direct the process of becoming.

• 45:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah, this idea of rugged and flexible boundaries. Another conversation that's happening, another non-dual, you know, 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, you know?

• 46:11Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 46:11Rich Roll?

  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.

• 46:35Brad Stulberg?

  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. And if those things changed, it would be unrecognizable. It wouldn't be the same species.

• 47:01Rich Roll?

  So that's the stability part?

• 47:02Brad Stulberg?

  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 want to 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. Like, 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.

• 47:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:42Brad Stulberg?

  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. And that's not a spot that you want to be.

• 48:07Rich Roll?

  Well, unless you're Sam Harris.

• 48:08Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, but Sam Harris does have...

• 48:10Rich Roll?

  There is no self, really.

• 48:12Brad Stulberg?

  But there is, but Sam Harris has...

• 48:15Rich Roll?

  There is no locus of consciousness.

• 48:18Brad Stulberg?

  But Sam Harris still can get through an intersection.

• 48:20Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 48:21Brad Stulberg?

  So like, he does have a historical self. Like, there is someone there that says, like, "Up, 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, 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.

• 48:49Rich Roll?

  To 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.

• 49:11Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I'm going to explain that, and then I want to 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. Eric Fromm, one of my favorite intellectuals ever, late 1900s. He wrote this masterful book called To Have or To Be. And in it, Fromm defines having as 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. Being is a verb. It is being in conversation with that thing.

• 49:56Brad Stulberg?

  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. And I think this notion of having versus being is beyond just relationships.

• 50:41Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 50:48Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 50:49Brad Stulberg?

  Because anytime you have something, that thing is going to change or be taken away. And 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, like, 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

• 51:34Brad Stulberg?

  a child, that mindset shift has already been very helpful for me.

• 51:38Rich Roll?

  Well, having also implies attachment.

• 51:41Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Rich Roll?

  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.

• 52:08Brad Stulberg?

  Pick the right thing.

• 52:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and that could be a motivator for personal change that could turn you into a better person. Again, this is a Western paradigm, being 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 of that journey. When 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...

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  It's not that they're unimportant, but they're not defining, I guess.

• 52:58Brad Stulberg?

  That's right.

• 52:59Rich Roll?

  Is that an accurate way of how you think about that?

• 53:01Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, in things for sure, but also even our attributes. So like, having a skill versus being an athlete.

• 53:10Rich Roll?

  That's interesting, yeah.

• 53:12Brad Stulberg?

  Because like, you have a skill, well, that skill is going to change as you age. Whereas being an athlete, you can define so much more broadly. I think of Amby Burford, the Boston Marathon runner, that is like shuffling, but still out there running because, you know, 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.

• 53:57Brad Stulberg?

  It'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.

• 54:07Rich Roll?

  And to understand, Light Watkins was on the show recently and he said something along the lines of, you know, the happiness that you'll experience when you summit mountain X, Everest, whatever it is, is the happiness that you bring with you.

• 54:22Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 54:22Rich Roll?

  So there's the anticipation or the expectation that you will be altered through the achievement of something or the, you know, the accumulation of some possession or job or what have you. But you are who you are.

• 54:38Brad Stulberg?

  Yep.

• 54:38Rich Roll?

  And the more you can inhabit that notion of being, you will sidestep the disappointment of that, you know, sort of revelation.

• 54:47Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. Robert Persig, Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writes that there's no zen on mountain tops. The only zen up there is the zen that you bring up there.

• 54:57Rich Roll?

  Right, yeah, I guess that maybe that's where Light got it from.

• 55:00Brad Stulberg?

  It's such a beautiful way to put it. So back to values and evolution because I think this is really important in personal evolution and we're talking about it in a fairly conceptual way and I want to make it real. And I want to give you like a very public moment of thanks.

• 55:15Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna get uncomfortable.

• 55:17Brad Stulberg?

  So that's fine.

• 55:18Rich Roll?

  By the way, you still haven't answered my first question.

• 55:21Brad Stulberg?

  What was your first question?

• 55:22Rich Roll?

  Why did you write this book?

• 55:23Brad Stulberg?

  Oh, we'll get to that.

• 55:24Rich Roll?

  Okay.

• 55:25Brad Stulberg?

  So, um, 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. I 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.

• 56:11Brad Stulberg?

  People see me as the author of Peak Performance and like this, you know, national, international expert on performance. And internally, I'm suffering and there was 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. And 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.

• 56:56Brad Stulberg?

  So 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. And 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've come a long way. But I was just scared that like I wasn't even on the other side of it.

• 57:38Brad Stulberg?

  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. And 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

• 58:21Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 58:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, beautiful. I 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, 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, you're the peak performance guy, you can stay in that lane

• 59:19Rich Roll?

  forever. But ultimately, growth and maturity is demanding more of you. And 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 want to 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 going to 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

• 1:00:04Rich Roll?

  grew up with, or what have you. And I've reflected a lot. On that in my own life as somebody who's going through a number of transitions, you know, swimmer, lawyer, you know, 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 going to be and how am I going to 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.

• 1:00:49Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Rich Roll?

  Like this is not.

• 1:00:49Brad Stulberg?

  Has an expiration date.

• 1:00:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah. So how do you adapt? How do you grow? How do you evolve? And 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, you know, kind of a narrower perspective of like endurance athletes, nutrition, being very fitness focused. And now it's, it's, 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

• 1:01:34Rich Roll?

  to people that scare me or intimidate me. And then to begin, you know, writing about other things that aren't related to whatever was going on in finding ultra. And that's, that's what growing up is too.

• 1:01:46Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Rich Roll?

  That's what like being an adult is.

• 1:01:48Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:02:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I like, I know. Like even when I do the podcast, like when I have certain doctors on, I know those are going to be, they're, they're, it's just, those are the ones that are going to work. Right?

• 1:02:13Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Rich Roll?

  So I can just do that all day long, but. That's boring. 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 going to have conversations and do episodes with people that I know like these aren't going to 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.

• 1:02:53Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I think that's right. Well, they're ill-fated decisions against an external metric of downloads or people talking about it.

• 1:03:00Rich Roll?

  Not in accordance with my own internal barometer.

• 1:03:03Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:03:25Rich Roll?

  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. But I was wondering, like, if I hired you as my coach, like, what are you going to tell me to do? Like, what's going to happen, Brad? Where are my blind spots?

• 1:03:44Brad Stulberg?

  It depends. We'd have to flip the script. Maybe we should do an episode where I just have a coaching session with you.

• 1:03:53Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that would be fun.

• 1:03:55Brad Stulberg?

  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 is 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, like, we've peeled enough. And now it's time to do the work. I was talking to my colleague Chris this morning about coaching. And it's really interesting that

• 1:04:34Brad Stulberg?

  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 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 know, what, why am I feeling imposter syndrome? Why can't I relate to my teammates like I want to? Why is nothing ever enough? And the breakthrough happens.

• 1:05:18Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:05:34Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:05:35Brad Stulberg?

  So the breakthrough session is like the intellectual, you know, like, this is awesome.

• 1:05:40Rich Roll?

  But the illusion is that that is, that that is the work. So in 12-step, they say, self-awareness will avail you nothing. It's like, oh, now I know I'm this. And you think that you've solved the problem. No, you've just identified it.

• 1:05:54Brad Stulberg?

  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 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.

• 1:06:18Rich Roll?

  It's sucky and boring and it's not sexy.

• 1:06:20Brad Stulberg?

  Not a good social media post to brush your teeth.

• 1:06:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it doesn't really track on.

• 1:06:23Brad Stulberg?

  Right. But if you want to 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? Cause I don't want to completely evade you.

• 1:06:33Brad Stulberg?

  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

• 1:07:17Brad Stulberg?

  I was once very close with that was quite painful. Did I mention we moved across the country? I think I mentioned that. So just all kinds, published my first solo book, 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? And that's when I'm like, no, no, no, like, I'm thinking about this all wrong.

• 1:07:59Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:08:23Rich Roll?

  I think these periods of disorder that visit all of us, it doesn't matter how rich or healthy or, you know, how successful somebody is, you don't get out of life alive. And, and, and everybody has to deal with difficulties and loss and death and pain. And, you know, 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

• 1:09:03Rich Roll?

  Process taught me so much about how to be flexible, how to be neutral, how to cultivate a different level of elite non-attachment. And 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.

• 1:09:45Rich Roll?

  And it's fucking hard, you know, and it's gonna be different for everybody. But to the extent that you can flip the script and look at it as 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, you know, enter into that reordering phase. I 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.

• 1:10:27Brad Stulberg?

  Well, you have to, like you said, there's no getting out alive.

• 1:10:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Brad Stulberg?

  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 gonna 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. And 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.

• 1:11:12Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:11:12Brad Stulberg?

  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. And 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 going to suffer.

• 1:11:50Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:12:05Brad Stulberg?

  For sure.

• 1:12:06Rich Roll?

  To be or to have in your life.

• 1:12:08Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so there's, there's these two relatively like polarizing extremes between the Pollyanna toxically positive person and then the nihilist despair porn person. And 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, you know, 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 like 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

• 1:12:51Brad Stulberg?

  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. Everything's perfect. Your life is perfect.

• 1:13:06Rich Roll?

  That also might be the most afraid person.

• 1:13:09Brad Stulberg?

  Right, maybe, because you can't even see it. Yeah.

• 1:13:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:12Brad Stulberg?

  Or like you're truly just like checked out because like, you know, everything's fine. So I'm not going to 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.

• 1:13:30Rich Roll?

  If you were as smart as me, you would understand.

• 1:13:31Brad Stulberg?

  Right, and everything's hopeless anyways. So like, I don't have to do anything.

• 1:13:35Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:13:35Brad Stulberg?

  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. In his time, it was the Holocaust, one of the most broken, maybe the most broken

• 1:14:19Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:14:41Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. 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... You know, tackling very difficult issues and nonetheless maintaining a level of hope and optimism. I'm thinking about Jane Goodall and her Book of Hope and talked about that on the podcast.

• 1:15:01Brad Stulberg?

  Which is hard, like it takes work.

• 1:15:04Rich Roll?

  It's 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, as, you know, examples of, 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, everything is like, it's in the middle.

• 1:15:41Brad Stulberg?

  Well, isn't it? I 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. They're useful insofar as like they're, they're, they're rudders that we can bounce between. But things really rarely are on extremes. I mean, every once in a while, they are.

• 1:16:02Rich Roll?

  It's a hard pill for me to swallow, Brad.

• 1:16:04Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I know. I hear you. And, and, and that's just my approach. And like, there are other approach. 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. And 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 got to 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.

• 1:16:44Rich Roll?

  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 than at some point, just embracing this aspect of me and trying to channel it in, in healthier ways than I have in the past. But there is something You know, 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

• 1:17:27Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:17:34Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, but I'm, 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. In my language, I call it excellence, like pursuing excellence. That is my peak, peak value. Excellence and love. And you could argue that they're the same thing. So there, I have no moderation. I think the, 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, is there somewhere for me to land? And

• 1:18:18Rich Roll?

  I understand.

• 1:18:19Brad Stulberg?

  I think having that place to land frees you up to do better because you are not scared. Most people.

• 1:18:23Rich Roll?

  Right. And, and, 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, you know, today I'm going, you know, I'm rowing my boat towards this. I 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.

• 1:19:06Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And in my own life, I guess, because I wanna, maybe I'm walking myself back from being the, the middle guy. Maybe it's just like with these big concepts. But 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. Cause it's quasi in the south now.

• 1:19:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:41Brad Stulberg?

  But so I don't-

• 1:19:41Rich Roll?

  You and Ryan Holiday are gonna get along great in rural Texas next week, or tomorrow, or whenever it is you go see him.

• 1:19:47Brad Stulberg?

  So I don't have, like, I don't have a lot of balance. I only have a couple of big rooms in my house. But I've seen enough people that only have one room. And that's where they get, that's where they get dangerous. I 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, you know, happy or sad, all these extremes. I think a lot of that is just bullshit. Like, we know of it, 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.

• 1:20:31Rich Roll?

  It wants the hot take, it wants the contrarian perspective, it wants the new idea, or, you know, everything you ever thought about this is wrong. And this is what you need to do. And 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. 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?

• 1:21:10Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, and I think that with, with performance and excellence and health and wellbeing and the topics that I think about the most, I like to think about it more as like tools in a toolkit. And you want to have a lot of tools and 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 crafts person, right? Like with actual tools or metaphorical tools? Like a good crafts person, they 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.

• 1:21:45Rich Roll?

  I want to put a pin 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 want to get too derailed right now. I want to stay on the book and take it back a little bit to this idea of, you know, 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.

• 1:22:28Brad Stulberg?

  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. And 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...

• 1:23:12Brad Stulberg?

  Or when the world changes around us insofar that what we expect it 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. And 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.

• 1:23:55Brad Stulberg?

  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. We 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.

• 1:24:39Brad Stulberg?

  And every time there's a change, those predictions are proven wrong. And 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.

• 1:25:08Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:25:28Rich Roll?

  To a significant extent that would allow you to then mindfully respond as opposed to just impulsively react.

• 1:25:36Brad Stulberg?

  That's right.

• 1:25:37Rich Roll?

  And 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.

• 1:25:44Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:26:09Rich Roll?

  This is the amygdala.

• 1:26:11Brad Stulberg?

  This is the amygdala, when our expectations are not met. The 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 Ponskeip is the neuroscientist that identified these pathways. There are seven in total, but the two we're 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 in working to solve a problem at the same time. Like it down-regulates the level of being pissed off.

• 1:26:55Brad Stulberg?

  So to me, responding instead of reacting is really about activating our seeking pathway so that our rage pathway diminishes. And then we can, we can hopefully make productive steps towards dealing with whatever it is that we're confronting.

• 1:27:08Rich Roll?

  And when we make that better choice and repeat it, we're activating that

• 1:27:14Brad Stulberg?

  It's a muscle.

• 1:27:15Rich Roll?

  Dopamin, what is it? The dopaminergic?

• 1:27:17Brad Stulberg?

  Dopaminergic, that's it.

• 1:27:19Rich Roll?

  You know, pathways that reinforce over time those better behaviors.

• 1:27:24Brad Stulberg?

  Yep. And this is like, 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. And 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.

• 1:27:50Rich Roll?

  What is this concept of zan shen? And how is that related to what you just talked about?

• 1:27:58Brad Stulberg?

  Zan shen is a term that comes out of Aikido. And zan shen 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 zan shen 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.

• 1:28:38Rich Roll?

  The broader context.

• 1:28:39Brad Stulberg?

  And with target fixation, we awful 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, you know, use a poetic metaphor, this also happens throughout our life.

• 1:29:24Brad Stulberg?

  Like, we can get so focused on these things that we don't, 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.

• 1:29:41Rich Roll?

  Or if you're, you're just feeding a certain fear that something is gonna happen, you're gonna, you're gonna manifest that.

• 1:29:48Brad Stulberg?

  For sure.

• 1:29:49Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:29:57Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:58Rich Roll?

  If you can't transcend that fixation.

• 1:29:59Brad Stulberg?

  And 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 want to 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 summoning a mountain that they make reckless decisions to get there. And they get to the summit, but they never make it off the mountain. They die because they go when the weather conditions are aggravated or when their climbing window has passed.

• 1:30:44Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:30:58Rich Roll?

  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, you're going to go talk to Ryan, I'm sure he's going to 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 interpret navigating change?

• 1:31:38Brad Stulberg?

  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. I also think that Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, certain aspects of Judeo-Christianity and Islam, the Western religions, they all intersect.

• 1:32:22Brad Stulberg?

  The Serenity Prayer in Christianity is basically Epictetus's dichotomy of control. In Buddhism, it's the 10,000 joys and the 10,000 sorrows, shitty things happen and good things happen. 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. There's not as much room for holding on to two competing ideas at the same time in Stoicism. And 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.

• 1:33:04Rich Roll?

  You also think of it in the context of these four Ps, right?

• 1:33:11Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. Want me to go into those?

• 1:33:13Rich Roll?

  What is all that about? Of course, every book's gotta have the four things that start with the same letter. I'm just giving you shit.

• 1:33:20Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. 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 contrive. So the two Ps are the rage pathway, and when there's a change that happens, we panic and then we pummel ahead. We don't want to 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 OODA loop from flight schools. And when we pause, we create space to update our expectations, to see the situation clearly

• 1:34:03Brad Stulberg?

  for what it is, to process it. And once we do that, then 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. How 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 affective 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,

• 1:34:47Brad Stulberg?

  and then that's your space. Like, that's the freedom to then process what's happening, make a plan, and proceed.

• 1:34:54Rich Roll?

  Is it important to say, "I am feeling emotion X," as opposed to, "I am afraid"?

• 1:35:00Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. I'm experiencing fear. No one would say that they are rain, right? You're getting rained on. It's not going to be permanent. It's something that's happening. So, "I'm experiencing fear. I'm experiencing pain. I'm experiencing panic."

• 1:35:14Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:35:22Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, but then you could say, "I'm fearing," right? It's not, you wouldn't say, "I'm swat."

• 1:35:27Rich Roll?

  No, you'd say, "I'm sweating. I'm experiencing a state of sweat."

• 1:35:30Brad Stulberg?

  No, "I'm sweating." Like, "I'm sweating" is fine, like, "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.

• 1:36:12Brad Stulberg?

  This notion that once we have a name for something, it loses its power over us 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 Rumpelstiltskin, 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 doesn't lose all of its power over you, but then it's no longer you. Like, it's concrete. It's tangible. It's something separate from you. It's something that you can then, as I said,

• 1:36:56Brad Stulberg?

  use the higher parts of our evolved brain to deal with.

• 1:36:59Rich Roll?

  Right. I was talking earlier about these periods of being dismantled or disordered as teachable moments or opportunities that are ripe 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 temporality of engaging with that process of trying to find meaning.

• 1:37:39Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so 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 and 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," works like 95% of the time.

• 1:38:19Brad Stulberg?

  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?"

• 1:39:02Brad Stulberg?

  So 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.

• 1:39:45Brad Stulberg?

  And I remember telling her, like, I, 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 and your brain is cruel and random. And what if you don't have to grow from this? And 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,

• 1:40:28Brad Stulberg?

  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. Now, 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 mind. Because, you know, the, 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,

• 1:41:12Brad Stulberg?

  I don't want them to think like, I gotta do my four Ps. So 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,

• 1:41:54Brad Stulberg?

  do we find growth. I'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.

• 1:42:30Rich Roll?

  So what is the differentiator between the person who persists in their depression after a trauma and the person who grows?

• 1:42:37Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, I thought you might ask this and I want to be real careful about how I answer it because I'm not a psychiatrist 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. It'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 and 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."

• 1:43:21Brad Stulberg?

  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. It is just something that is truly senseless and cruel and harmful.

• 1:43:50Rich Roll?

  Although there are circumstances in which experiences such as that can catalyze...

• 1:43:59Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:44:26Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, and that is, that's the pathway out, for sure. But I just want to be careful to mention, or to be really explicit, that I think that not everybody can do that, and 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.

• 1:45:06Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:45:18Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Rich Roll?

  Like, that's not gonna work.

• 1:45:19Brad Stulberg?

  Right.

• 1:45:20Rich Roll?

  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.

• 1:45:32Brad Stulberg?

  Right.

• 1:45:33Rich Roll?

  You know, your therapist sounds a little bit like, "We are nihilists."

• 1:45:36Brad Stulberg?

  No, but I think she-

• 1:45:37Rich Roll?

  Like the Big Lebowski, but she's trying to prompt you a different-

• 1:45:40Brad Stulberg?

  She paints me as an optimist.

• 1:45:41Rich Roll?

  A different lens for, yeah, I get it. Like, you needed that, right?

• 1:45:45Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Rich Roll?

  But I think-

• 1:45:46Brad Stulberg?

  Because you can spiral into depression by being a nihilist.

• 1:45:49Rich Roll?

  Yes.

• 1:45:49Brad Stulberg?

  So maybe, maybe the real solution here is to remind yourself, like, "Hey, I might grow from this." She 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 thing.

• 1:46:30Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:30Brad Stulberg?

  But you gotta be able to put it down when it doesn't work.

• 1:46:32Rich Roll?

  If 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, I can't extract meaning out of what you... Then you're gonna beat yourself up. You're gonna get into this deeper shame spiral. Yeah, you can't, 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.

• 1:47:16Brad Stulberg?

  That'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.

• 1:47:25Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:26Brad Stulberg?

  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. Like, 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.

• 1:48:08Brad Stulberg?

  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. And 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,

• 1:48:52Brad Stulberg?

  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. They 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 this 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 years.

• 1:49:37Brad Stulberg?

  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, 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 going to feel so long. Holding on to that little bit of hope can go such a long way.

• 1:50:02Rich Roll?

  And thinking about the concepts that recurs throughout this book, rugged flexibility, and embracing transience, and tragic optimism, and having this fluid sense of self, and these, you know, non-dualistic ideas around, you know, who we are and how we interface with the world. Where is... Tell me, Brad.

• 1:50:26Rich Roll?

  Where's the spirituality? Where's the... Where does faith enter this? Where is there some level of, you know, appreciation for devotion? Like, is there space for God in all of this? Like, how do you think about that?

• 1:50:41Brad Stulberg?

  I think so. My interpretation is going to be based on my own kind of spiritual philosophy or system. So that's for readers to decide if there's space for God or spirituality in this for them. 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 gonna 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

• 1:51:24Brad Stulberg?

  or that is a first-grade teacher for 20 years. And 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 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, you know, either spiritual or. I think that, like, physics is pretty spiritual discipline.

• 1:52:05Rich Roll?

  Hmm. In what way? Like, where is the spirituality in physics? And then, in the sort of nondual nature of it?

• 1:52:13Brad Stulberg?

  The nondual nature of it, for sure. And just in the, the, 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.

• 1:52:54Brad Stulberg?

  Then 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. Like, your ego doesn't want to die, so keep going.

• 1:53:38Brad Stulberg?

  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 just remembering that that existed, like, in that moment, there was no life or death, there was no anything, it just was. And then, because I'm a mortal, you know how that moment ended? Because I'm like, fuck, this is awesome! And then, like, then it's over.

• 1:54:14Rich Roll?

  Right out of it, yeah.

• 1:54:15Brad Stulberg?

  So whether, whether it was a-

• 1:54:16Rich Roll?

  And then you stopped meditating.

• 1:54:17Brad Stulberg?

  Whether it was a millisecond, or two minutes, or, you know, I don't know how long it lasted, I truly can't tell you. But I'm fortunate, I had a good meditation teacher. You know, you say that jokingly, but my meditation teacher said like, great, now forget that that ever happened.

• 1:54:30Rich Roll?

  Hmm.

• 1:54:31Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:54:50Rich Roll?

  But 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 our self, 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, you know, from whence, you know, comes your idea of that, you know, ultimate self? And what are the choices that you're making towards that? And what is driving you towards that?

• 1:55:30Rich Roll?

  And this perspective that, you know, unforeseen events, you know, the allostatic nature of the universe is such that things are going to get thrown in your path and you have a choice to, you know, 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 want to be sensitive to, you know, it's like, bad things happen. I'm not saying that everything is, you know, is there for you to grow. You know, 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?

• 1:56:15Rich Roll?

  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 going to find answers in physics or necessarily in psychology, at least not ones that are going to be satisfying and reductive enough to help you kind of have a very tactile sense of how everything operates, you know, beyond.

• 1:56:50Rich Roll?

  Our five senses.

• 1:56:51Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:57:11Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:57:11Brad Stulberg?

  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 is 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, imagine 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.

• 1:57:52Rich Roll?

  I'm gonna resist the temptation to turn this into a UFO podcast. I could like, bite on that.

• 1:57:59Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 1:58:05Rich Roll?

  It's nuts that there was that, you know, hearing in front of Congress. It's like, this is, this is Fox Mulder actually happening. It's wild.

• 1:58:13Brad Stulberg?

  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 you mentioned, like, the internet's set up to do that, too. But, um-

• 1:58:41Rich Roll?

  Your blind spot being that-

• 1:58:43Brad Stulberg?

  From skepticism to cynicism.

• 1:58:45Rich Roll?

  Interview, the, sorry, not the interview, the internet makes you, makes you-

• 1:58:49Brad Stulberg?

  It can make, it can make me cynical. And I never want to be cynical. I want to be skeptical of a lot of things, but I never want to be cynical.

• 1:58:56Rich Roll?

  Well, talking about skepticism, um-

• 1:58:59Rich Roll?

  Let's, let's round this out with a topic that I really want to get into with you. We talked about you being kind of like this middle path guy. You're the grounded guy, et cetera.

• 1:59:11Brad Stulberg?

  I don't know how grounded.

• 1:59:12Rich Roll?

  Well, you know, you're, 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.

• 1:59:27Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. You wrote the original Go article.

• 1:59:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And being like, you know, sort of anti hack.

• 1:59:33Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33Rich Roll?

  In our approach to life and appreciating the journey and, you know, 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, in the vein or the realm of biohacking. You've got like, you know, I'm wearing a whoop or, you know, sleep trackers and, you know, mattresses that can cool at night and, and, you know, help regulate your body temperature. And, you know, what else we have, you know, there's lots of things that I use like Newcom or Binaural Beats. And I just bought this Happy thing. It's like a magnetic thing. It goes under my pillow. It's supposed to help induce like a deeper state of sleep.

• 2:00:16Rich Roll?

  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, and thought about. I, I sort of see you as a guy who, who's out there kind of like railing against all of this, just go for a walk and, you know, 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.

• 2:00:46Brad Stulberg?

  So I'm trying not to be like, that's back to the cynicism. I don't want to be cynical. So I want to say, I want to say three things and I'm going to try to remember them all. Okay. I 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. Um, 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?

• 2:01:28Brad Stulberg?

  Or has it actually become the thing that's getting in my way? And 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

• 2:02:13Brad Stulberg?

  not going to be able to function that day. Or 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 be in 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, then that becomes the problem. Then the third thing, putting my public health hat on, is that we know from years and years

• 2:02:51Brad Stulberg?

  and years of data, that really only five big things have a measurable impact on health and longevity and what we'll call wellbeing. And 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.

• 2:03:36Brad Stulberg?

  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 going to say, because I know this is a topic that is obviously important to you. I 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

• 2:04:21Brad Stulberg?

  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, in 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 like, purification. That 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.

• 2:05:05Brad Stulberg?

  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.

• 2:05:12Rich Roll?

  Super interesting to hear you share that. I feel, I'm feeling lots of feels with what you just shared. I think it's, it's, uh, it's interesting, there's a weird...

• 2:05:25Rich Roll?

  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?

• 2:05:51Brad Stulberg?

  Well, I want to push back.

• 2:05:53Rich Roll?

  I think it's interesting. If it's like virtue signaling or something.

• 2:05:55Brad Stulberg?

  Bingo. It's not the change.

• 2:05:57Rich Roll?

  But it is, it's a cool, like, in the world of challenges, this is not the Tide Pod challenge.

• 2:06:04Brad Stulberg?

  No, 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.

• 2:06:14Rich Roll?

  I understand that.

• 2:06:15Brad Stulberg?

  And I'm also, no, but you, you said something and I want to 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. Now, 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,

• 2:07:00Brad Stulberg?

  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...

• 2:07:17Brad Stulberg?

  Not become cynical.

• 2:07:19Rich Roll?

  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. The only argument being that it's a social lubricant that puts you in a position to be around friends and share some kind of, you know, community-based experience. But if you can't have that without alcohol, then that's something you really need to look into.

• 2:07:43Brad Stulberg?

  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 want to 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.

• 2:07:58Rich Roll?

  And I like the idea, particularly with younger people, that there's a pushback against this just acceptance of alcohol being part of the culture, and I think that's a really cool shift, so I, it's something I definitely celebrate. But when I look at these devices, you know, saunas, cold plunges.

• 2:08:17Brad Stulberg?

  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 stats. 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. However, 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.

• 2:08:57Rich Roll?

  Right. That's not me.

• 2:08:58Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, but we're different, but of course that's not, we have different experiences.

• 2:09:02Rich Roll?

  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.

• 2:09:19Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:20Rich Roll?

  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, or like, what do you, 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

• 2:10:02Rich Roll?

  that time in terms of my sleep quality. And when you talked about the pillars, like, it's sleep, it's fitness, movement, right? It'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

• 2:10:47Rich Roll?

  person, I wouldn't know when I was coming in, what the time, what the pace clock would say. But 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,

• 2:11:31Rich Roll?

  I didn't realize that was happening. Like, 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.

• 2:11:39Brad Stulberg?

  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?

• 2:11:53Rich Roll?

  Uh, no.

• 2:11:54Brad Stulberg?

  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 going to help you. You need to like read some books and get some coaching. Then the next level is conscious incompetence. So this is when you know that you don't know what you're doing. And 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 effortlessly 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.

• 2:12:38Brad Stulberg?

  So the tools help you, as you said, get to that point. And I think that's the most help. 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 the 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.

• 2:13:08Rich Roll?

  All right. You're on the record.

• 2:13:10Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. Yeah. And 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 ago. But I also think the claims have kind of moderated with what some of these tools can and can't do.

• 2:13:23Rich Roll?

  Well, nothing's a panacea. Again, they're tools. They're helpful, right?

• 2:13:27Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:27Rich Roll?

  And 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 going to remember that.

• 2:13:42Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:42Rich Roll?

  And then, you know, it just, they're just little kind of like bricks along the path, I think.

• 2:13:48Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah. And I mean, and I I use tools in my own life. Maybe not to the same, the same number as you.

• 2:13:57Rich Roll?

  I mean, I'm not like, you know me. Like, you know, I'm not like a biohacker guy.

• 2:14:01Brad Stulberg?

  Right.

• 2:14:02Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm not like Mr., you know.

• 2:14:03Brad Stulberg?

  You're not using it as like a performative thing. You're, 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. Uh, 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. Um, when 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. Um, do I use any other tools? I think those are the two that I use.

• 2:14:35Rich Roll?

  So to kind of bring this to a conclusion, Brad, I want to 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.

• 2:14:59Brad Stulberg?

  So 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 with 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, remembering that our brain is a prediction machine and

• 2:15:42Brad Stulberg?

  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 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 as 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, just never leave the other rooms behind. You don't want to be living in a one-room house because when that room changes, it makes you fragile.

• 2:16:26Brad Stulberg?

  And then thinking of our identity as non-dualy. 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. And 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

• 2:17:08Brad Stulberg?

  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 going to find out until I'm on the other side of this, so right now my work is just getting to the other side.

• 2:17:31Rich Roll?

  I love you, buddy, and you did a great job with this book. Master of Change, available everywhere.

• 2:17:36Brad Stulberg?

  That's right.

• 2:17:37Rich Roll?

  Hopefully at your favorite independent bookstore. Brad's going to be out talking about it and pick it up.

• 2:17:44Brad Stulberg?

  Thank you.

• 2:17:45Rich Roll?

  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? So...

• 2:18:00Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, that's been a change. Never let a crisis go to waste.

• 2:18:05Brad Stulberg?

  I didn't love the direction that Twitter was heading about seven months ago. So I said, like, I'm gonna, 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, @BradStalberg. 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.

• 2:18:28Rich Roll?

  I told you a long time ago, I was like, what are you doing? You were like so attached to just being a Twitter guy.

• 2:18:33Brad Stulberg?

  Yeah, so you were right.

• 2:18:35Rich Roll?

  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. That's it, man. We did it.

• 2:18:44Brad Stulberg?

  Thanks. It's always a pleasure.

• 2:18:46Rich Roll?

  Peace.

• 2:19:00Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as The Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a

• 2:19:42Rich Roll?

  review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, The Meal Planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo with additional audio engineering by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg. Graphic and social media

• 2:20:26Rich Roll?

  assets courtesy of Daniel Solis, as well as Dan Drake. Thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.