Win The Inside Game: High Performance Psychology, Busting Fitness Myths, & Getting Unstuck With Elite Coach Steve Magness

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Win The Inside Game: High Performance Psychology, Busting Fitness Myths, & Getting Unstuck With Elite Coach Steve Magness"

Episode Release Date: January 30, 2025

Introduction

In this compelling episode of The Rich Roll Podcast, host Rich Roll engages in an in-depth conversation with elite coach and bestselling author Steve Magness. Together, they explore the intricate dynamics of high performance psychology, debunk prevalent fitness myths, and discuss strategies for overcoming personal and professional stagnation. Drawing from Steve's extensive experience coaching Olympians and his insightful book, Win the Inside Game, the episode offers valuable perspectives for individuals striving to unlock their authentic potential.

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1. Understanding the Inside Game and High Performance Psychology

Steve Magness opens the discussion by addressing the pervasive survival mode many individuals find themselves in today. He emphasizes that societal pressures often push people towards chasing external validation while grappling with internal conflicts between self-identity and perceived expectations. Steve asserts, “We are connected and compared to basically anybody in the world, and we haven't grappled with this environment that tells us the world is dangerous… we adopt that threat state” ([02:37]). He introduces the concept of the "inside game," highlighting the importance of mental resilience and self-awareness in achieving sustainable success.

2. The Influence of Social Media on Mental Health and Performance

A significant portion of the conversation delves into the detrimental effects of social media on mental health and performance. Steve explains how constant exposure to curated content fosters a sense of inadequacy and threat, leading individuals to adopt anxious states. He cites the "Mean World Syndrome," a phenomenon where excessive consumption of violent or negative media content exacerbates feelings of insecurity and fear. Steve shares, “The more people watched local News… the more anxiety they had and then the more they felt like in report that their neighborhood wasn't safe” ([20:53]). This segment underscores the necessity of managing one's media intake to maintain mental equilibrium.

3. The Role of Identity and Group Attachment in Achieving Goals

Identity plays a crucial role in personal development, as Steve discusses the pitfalls of tightly intertwining one's self-worth with specific achievements or group affiliations. He warns against the trap of defining oneself solely through external accomplishments, which can lead to defensiveness and a reluctance to embrace change. Steve states, “When you're in protect and defend mode, you essentially shut down listening and learning” ([30:18]). He advocates for a balanced approach where goals are pursued without compromising one's core identity, allowing for flexibility and growth.

4. Behavior Change and Overcoming Setbacks

Transitioning to behavior change, Steve emphasizes the importance of awareness and perspective in breaking free from unproductive patterns. He advises individuals to diversify their sources of fulfillment rather than relying on a single aspect of life, such as work or a specific hobby. Steve illustrates this with his personal journey, explaining how setbacks led him to explore writing as a means to fulfill his psychological needs when coaching became challenging. He encourages taking small, manageable steps to foster progress, aligning with the principles of habit formation.

5. Curiosity, Play, and Exploration as Engines for Growth

Curiosity is highlighted as a fundamental driver of personal growth and sustained performance. Steve connects boredom to the emergence of curiosity, arguing that modern life's constant stimulation often suppresses this natural impulse. He advocates for activities that promote mental wandering and play, such as running without digital distractions, to nurture creativity and exploration. Steve shares, “One of the biggest propellers of curiosity is boredom. And we've eliminated boredom” ([66:30]). This segment underscores the value of intentionally creating space for curiosity-driven pursuits.

6. Training Philosophies: Aerobic Base vs. High-Intensity Training

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to dissecting common fitness myths, particularly the balance between building an aerobic base and incorporating high-intensity training. Steve critiques the oversimplification of training methodologies, stressing that a strong aerobic foundation is essential for maximizing the benefits of high-intensity workouts. He explains, “Endurance performance is what's tied to longevity” ([92:15]), emphasizing that VO2 max should be viewed as a byproduct of comprehensive endurance training rather than an isolated metric.

7. VO2 Max and Fitness Myths

Steve addresses misunderstandings surrounding VO2 max and its relationship to longevity and overall fitness. He clarifies that while VO2 max is a valuable indicator, it should not be the sole focus. Instead, he recommends assessing endurance performance through practical measures, such as running speed over a set distance. Steve advises, “It doesn't have to be a mile. It can be anything moderately aerobic… the faster you are, the better your predicted longevity will be” ([89:32]). This perspective shifts the focus from numerical benchmarks to functional fitness improvements.

8. Practical Advice on Building Endurance and Sustainable Performance

Concluding the discussion on training, Steve offers actionable advice for individuals seeking to enhance their endurance and performance sustainably. He advocates for consistent, gradual mileage increases and incorporating varied intensity workouts to prevent plateaus and reduce the risk of overtraining. Steve emphasizes the importance of balancing endurance and speed, noting that an established aerobic foundation enables more effective and safer high-intensity training sessions.

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Conclusion: Key Takeaways on Winning the Inside Game

Steve Magness and Rich Roll wrap up the episode by reiterating the significance of addressing the internal psychological factors that influence performance and personal fulfillment. Steve's core message revolves around redefining success, cultivating curiosity, and maintaining a balanced identity detached from specific achievements. He encourages listeners to embark on introspective journeys, seek diverse sources of fulfillment, and adopt training philosophies that promote long-term well-being and resilience.

Notable Quotes:

• “We are connected and compared to basically anybody in the world… we adopt that threat state” - Steve Magness ([02:37])
• “The more people watched local News… the more anxiety they had” - Steve Magness ([20:53])
• “When you're in protect and defend mode, you essentially shut down listening and learning” - Steve Magness ([30:18])
• “One of the biggest propellers of curiosity is boredom. And we've eliminated boredom” - Steve Magness ([66:30])
• “Endurance performance is what's tied to longevity” - Steve Magness ([92:15])
• “It doesn't have to be a mile. It can be anything moderately aerobic… the faster you are, the better your predicted longevity will be” - Steve Magness ([89:32])

This episode serves as a profound exploration of the mental aspects underpinning high performance, offering listeners both theoretical insights and practical strategies to enhance their personal and professional lives.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

We are connected and compared to basically anybody in the world and we haven't grappled with this environment that we're in that tells us the world is dangerous, we don't belong, everyone is out to get us and what's the end result? We adopt that threat state.

[A]

Most of us live in what is essentially survival mode, chasing external validation while also battling between who we are and who we think we should be. Well, Steve Magness believes there's a better way. A former elite track and field coach to Olympians turned bestselling author and high performance authority, Steve has dedicated his career to understanding the nuances of high performance, which he furthers in his latest book, Win the Inside Game, in which he reveals why our pursuit of success often leads to self sabotage and how to transform this pattern into sustainable growth.

[B]

So much of whether we're talking sport, performance or creativity is figuring out these almost like mental games to convince our brain, your life isn't over. It's being able to say, okay, I'm going to strive for this, but I'm still going to have a little bit of space between this goal and my sense of self. And I think that's where the magic occurs.

[A]

Steve shows us how to embrace the journey from constant striving to lasting fulfillment. So today we explore what it takes to get unstuck, how to care deeply while letting go, and why winning the inner game is pretty much the key to basically everything.

[B]

The reality is none of us are that good until we try something for a long enough period of time.

[A]

We're not allowed to not be good.

[B]

Right. And I think when we have societally something that shifts and pushes us from stop exploring, then we're going to end up in bad places, whether as adults or kids.

[A]

So what's the solution, Steve? Like, how do we emerge out of it?

[B]

I think step one is.

[A]

Steve, great to have you back here.

[B]

Oh, thanks for having me.

[A]

Good to see you. Lots of stuff to talk about. We were just chatting before the podcast about how we all sort of study the things we most need to learn ourselves. And I think in many ways going back to kind of what we talked about last time, your experience at the Nike Oregon project and your own kind of athletic ambitions, slightly unrealized, creates this curiosity and this desire to understand what held you back and how you can kind of pay forward what you learned to help other people kind of avoid the things that you had to contend with as a young person.

[B]

That is the essence of my writing career.

[A]

And you're still doing it. How many books have you written at this point?

[B]

Oh, gosh, five.

[A]

Five. Yeah. Yeah, but like expanding the aperture, right? Starting very, you know, kind of specifically on the art and science of running and now kind of like blowing it wide into kind of principles that are applicable to everybody.

[B]

I mean, I think that's how I've evolved as a person, because I was very narrow. My first book, Science of Running, no idea what I was doing, just said I want to Write the be all, end all on the physiology of training. So it was like nerd out. Right. And that's all I cared about at that time. But as you can see, in my writing career, I've kind of expanded because the questions have expanded. At that time, in my early 20s, what mattered to me, how dare you.

[A]

Get outside your lane? Coming from the origin of that metaphor. Right. Like a sport in which it's literally about being in your lane, you know.

[B]

But I think that's like the human experience. If all I stuck to was running in the physiology and the training of it, A, I would go mind numbingly boring after all. Yeah.

[A]

Like, I don't know how people kind of do that. Like they're so into one thing and they stay there. I would get bored.

[B]

It blows my mind. I was talking to a good friend and author who's got a book coming out on this, Alex Hutchinson.

[A]

Sure. I'm trying to get him on. We're working on scheduling right now. He was a very early guest on the show when his book Endure came out, which I still think is like, that sets the bar for everybody else.

[B]

It is. I gotta tell you, his new one is on why we have this need to explore. And when reading it and discussing with him, that is the basis of, I think my entire career as well, is you can explore deep, right. You can go nerd out on the science of running and go deeper and deeper, but at some point the gain becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. Right.

[A]

And the return's more and more diminishing.

[B]

Exactly. It's why at certain period in my career, like, I actually started a PhD in exercise physiology, I did that for about a year and a half and said, holy crap, I'm going to go nuts. Because it was just going deeper and deeper and deeper on a narrowing subject. And I was losing the part that I loved, which was the applicability to people. How do we get people to improve both in running and then outside of that? And I was losing that. So I just called it quits on there because I realized at that point, my skill set and my. We'll call it a gift is being able to explore things deeply enough to understand them at a decently high technical level and then capture those nuggets and say, here's what actually matters. And I realized that if I narrow myself to this aperture of running, like, I'm not fulfilling my potential and I'm not, like, satisfying that need to explore that I want so, you know, I could stay in my lane. But I don't think the value comes from that. I think the value comes from taking what your knowledge base and expertise is and then going a lane over and then a lane over and a lane over and making sure you go deep enough to understand it. But keep that exploration going and then.

[A]

How to synthesize all of those ideas across a variety of disciplines and in turn translate them in a decipherable and applicable or practical way for other people.

[B]

That's the name of the game. Because nowadays, especially with AI, we can get answers to any sort of question we want, any sort of deep answers to a question we want. But what matters, and this is coaching 101. What matters isn't that you can recite the Krebs cycle. It's can you take that knowledge and apply it to an athlete sitting in front of you and help them physiologically or psychologically improve at the thing that they're trying to get at? And whether that's running, coaching, or helping people at life, it's the same. It's the applicability, it's the translation that really matters.

[A]

Yeah. God bless people who get super hyper focused on one thing and it excites them for a lifetime. I think you and I share that, you know, a sensibility that feels like an impossibility. But I think there's something within that idea that applies to your most recent last two books and as well as to something I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, which is these pursuits. Let's just use running as an example. Somebody who has a kind of transformative experience. They weren't a runner, they become a runner. They complete their first marathon, or they have, you know, they basically go on this journey, right? And there's a life transformation that takes place within that that elevates their sense of possibility and their own kind of relationship with their potential that spills out into other areas of life. And yet, because it was such a special kind of experience for them, and there's a community piece obviously as well, they become part of this community. What liberates them often also keeps them stuck. And their curiosity or their kind of reflex around exploration starts to become limited and they stay in that world. Rather than take everything they learn as a result of that experience and then translate it or apply it in other areas of life, I'm always curious around why that is or our own human facility for whether you call it like denial or some version of that. Right. You have this experience getting out of your comfort zone, but then your comfort zone, that becomes your comfort zone, right? But you're sort of lauded for what you've done within that world. And yet it becomes this trap.

[B]

The things that are superpowers are often the things that get in the way. Because we're comfortable there, we feel competent there, and it's easy to continually go back to that place. The simplest thing in the world for me would be to talk training 247 could do it all day with no prep. But there's no growth there. There's no, like, getting out of that comfort zone and saying, okay, like, how do I apply these ideas elsewhere? And I think the reason that it occurs is if you look at the psychology is essentially, it provides this degree of safety. And as we age, what research tells us is that we explore less and less and less because everything around us kind of cements to a degree. We found our breakthrough through running or exercise or reading or writing or whatever it is. And we say, great, this is the answer. But we forget, as you said, that lesson, that the only reason we found this thing is because we left something comfortable in the first place.

[A]

Right. But we become calcified a as a function of aging. And secondarily, just because we delude ourselves into thinking like, oh, we're still exploring the edges of our comfort zone while remaining within it all along.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, the best antidote to this is have a young kid.

[A]

Cause you're on the precipice of doubling down on. Right. You're about to have your second kid.

[B]

Exactly. But our one and a half year old, you watch her and she's in constant exploration mode all the time. Why? Because she doesn't know how the world works. And once she figures out how something works, like how a toy works, she'll go do it over and over and over again and it'll satisfy her a little bit. And then she'll go explore something else. We have this central tension and psychology calls it explore versus exploit, which essentially means we have to explore to understand how the world works and how everything functions and gain some expertise. But then we have to utilize that expertise. But if we stick on that exploit or utilizing that expertise too long, we get stuck in what I just call the rut of competence. Meaning we're really good at this thing. Our brain knows what's going to happen. Right. We can predict if I go on this run, this is how I'm going to feel. If I write this book, this is how I'm going to experience it. And there's security and safety in that. And I think it's not just aging it's also, we don't like to deal with uncertainty. And I would double down on. In a world that is chaotic, uncertainty feels like we might not belong or find our path because it's the social media of everything, then that just pushes us more and more to narrow.

[A]

So the more uncertain the world becomes, and we're certainly in a very uncertain moment, the more likely we are to kind of clutch to those things that make us feel safe. And that comes at the cost of that instinct to explore and be curious.

[B]

Yeah, there's like five or six different psychological theories that all say the same thing.

[A]

What is the difference in your experience? But also based upon all the kind of science and psychology that you're steeped in between the person who has the awareness to notice that within themselves and step outside of it, and the person who does kind of remain within the protective enclave of those patterns and ruts.

[B]

So a couple different things is one is the person who can step outside generally has things in their life that bring perspective, meaning they either travel to new places or experience new things regularly. It's just a part of their life. They have a diverse array of people in their lives that challenge them in different ways. So it's not just like, you know, here's my small social circle. I'm going to keep that for the next 20 years of my life. Right. And then the second part of it is it requires some sense of security. So again, I'm going to go back to the toddler example. It's on my mind. Sorry, you're going to get lots of examples here. But my daughter will explore more. So if she knows she's in a secure environment, meaning if, like, me or my wife or someone she knows is relatively near, she'll go run off at the park and just be gone, you know, and explore if.

[A]

Because that sense of security is already taken care of.

[B]

Bingo. You know, mom or dad or someone, you. Someone there is going to step in and save you if you got in real trouble. Right. If that's not the case, if we dropped her off with, like, a new babysitter, she doesn't have that security. She's not wandering off. Right. She's staying close to things that she knows and, like, identifies with, even in the environment. And the same is true for adults. So if we don't have that sense of security in kind of who we are or our environment or where we belong, then we're not going to be able to explore because we kind of get trapped in that kind of safety mode where it's Just like we're the toddler, we're saying, no, I'm not going to leave this couch or mom or dad, because this is the only place I feel safe.

[A]

It's interesting when you reflect upon our own relationship with our sense of security in the world. Like, yes, there are things right now that do kind of in fact make us feel perhaps a little bit more uncertain than we have in years past. But at the same time, the world has always been an uncertain place. And what is the relationship with our devices and the media landscape doing with respect to that relationship with security that is compelling us to withdraw a little bit more than we otherwise would? Because the incentive structure of media is to kind of feed us with stories that make us afraid and tell us that the world is very unsafe and uncertain.

[B]

The way I like to explain this is our brain is predictive. So I'll use another toddler example is a couple months ago, there was this trend on the Internet where you essentially take your baby or toddler, you go up near a wall, you hit your hand on the wall to make a loud noise, and then you clutch the B and the baby will scream as if they hit their head. And what's happening there is a great example of how the brain works is it takes our priors, so our experience, our expectations, and then what's the feedback going on now? So the experience and it says, hey, I'm going to judge based on these two things. In the toddler example, the feedback is saying, hey, you didn't hit your head. There's no pain. But the rest of it for me or whoever's holding there, you hear the noise, you see mom or dad clutch your head so the baby screams, right? That's how our brain works. It's predictive. Now think of it as adults in an information environment. If we're constantly inundated with things that tell us that the world is dangerous, threats and fear are at our neighborhood, you know, coming through our social media app and all that stuff. Then our predictive brain says, okay, what am I going to trust what I see in front of me? Which is like, not that dangerous. No one's trying to get me or what all this information tells me, you're going to be like the toddler who trusts that, hey, I hit the wall. And there's been decades of research on this going back to the 1970s and 80s. This. This pioneer called George Gerbner coined mean world syndrome. And he essentially found that the more people watched local News in the 70s and 80s when it was like the beginning of if it bleeds, it leads. The more anxiety they had and then the more they felt like in report that their neighborhood wasn't safe. And it's only gotten worse since then. There was again, years ago when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, they ran this fascinating study where they looked at people who were there on that day in Boston who essentially witnessed the bombing or were very nearby. And they compared their stress levels for the next days and weeks compared to people who just watched news or went on Reddit or went on social media. And what they found is that those who consume more than six hours a day of either social media, Reddit, you know, tv, they had higher stress levels than people who were actually there that day.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

And the point is, like, we haven't grappled with this environment that we're in that tells us, like, the world is dangerous, we don't belong, everyone is out to get us. And we just weren't meant to kind of grow up in this place. Like, I could go on for this in days, but we essentially evolved to handle, you know, a couple dozen tribemates and figure out our place in the world within that. And instead we got thrown into this world where we are connected and compared, which is the biggest thing compared to basically anybody in the world. So of course we're going to feel like the world is threatening, we're insignificant, there's no place to be. And what's the end result? We shut down, we get anxious, we adopt that threat state.

[A]

The brain is as predictive as it is addicted. Right. Like, you have this example in the book of the nail in the boot, the guy with the nail in the boot who thinks that he's been injured, and they discover, like, the nail went in between his toes, which is. That kind of like, captures the whole thing, right? Yeah, it's true. But the difference with respect to our media landscape is the addictive nature in which it's fed to us and. And our kind of brain's inability to see it for what it is and take a step back from it.

[B]

Exactly. In that example, you can take off the boot. You see the nail isn't in your foot, and you're okay. Right. Your brain goes, okay, I'm going to update. I'm not in pain. In the media example, the addiction is there, and the incentives all align to push us towards shallower and shallower and shallower content that gets the fear, outrage, anxiety driven. And it's there for a reason. Like, stress isn't bad, the anxiety isn't bad, but it's there for a specific short term point to alert us and then have us do something about it.

[A]

One of the things that I respect about you is your willingness to kind of mix it up on social media. There's a lot of discourse around training philosophies and what is in vogue at the moment and the kind of terms that people love to kind of throw around. And most of the people who are throwing them around are not necessarily fully qualified to speak to them. And you're willing to kind of go in there and be this tuning fork to separate kind of fact from fiction, which is something I really don't do, but had a sort of mild experience with recently. Usually to your point about how we kind of withdraw because it feels threatening, I don't have that practice that you have. But the other day I put up this podcast with Christian Blumenfeld and I don't know what came over me, but I kind of wrote this thing. I'm like, listen, this guy, according to what I've read, has the highest VO2 max ever recorded in history. And in a world in which there's a lot of people talking about fitness trends, et cetera, we've lost sight of who are the experts and who aren't, and there's a distrust in media. But experts are important and they're out there in the world and they deserve our attention. We should curate our feed to make sure that we're focusing our attention on the people who actually deserve it. And I copied. What did I do? I tagged you in it. And so I was like. Because this felt like a sort of Steve Magnus kind of thing. And I wanted to make sure that you saw it. And predictably, it resulted in all kinds of insanity. And I was like, okay, this is exactly why I don't do this. I'm not doing this again. This is not worth it. And was this productive? I don't really think so. And so my brain goes, yeah, take a step back and maybe not engage in this way, but your relationship with it is a little bit different. Like you move towards it.

[B]

I wish for my own mental health that I did what you did because it can be both addicting and, you know, lead you down a bad path if you do it over and over again. I think with me, what I try and do is have some guardrails and say, I'm gonna pick my spots. Because it's important that we have people with actual expertise. Correct. And put things out there. Because if we didn't, who wins? We get nonsense all the time. So I have this inner battle of myself on, like, okay, do I really want to go through this and put this out on social media? Because what's going to happen is exactly what happened to you is you're going to get all this nonsense and all these random people telling you that you're wrong on these things that are like fundamental truths to your sport or your understanding or science or something. And it can be maddening. But we have to have people who fight the good fight, because if we don't, we're just going to get swarmed with a bunch of nonsense. And people who don't know any better, you know, who don't have the expertise, are just gonna go with what's loudest.

[A]

But there is a countervailing incentive, which is when you do that, it does get, you know, it does gather attention. You know, I can't remember who. Where was I? I was somewhere and I was talking to somebody who's like, not part of the running world. And they were like, do you know Steve Magnus? I love. Oh, I love. I love, like, you know, all the stuff that he shares, you know. And so, you know, there is a value in it, I guess it's really about your relationship with that feedback, which goes to this issue of attachment, which is really at the core of. It's kind of like at the core of your thesis, of the new book. Like, what gets in the way of the goals that you aspire to accomplish or the trajectory that you want to be on. Very much has to do with your attachment to things that are at cross purposes with it. That is in Eastern philosophy, at the root of all suffering, of course, and has all of these roots in what I think we're only beginning to understand about the psychology of high performance.

[B]

Absolutely. And as I said with social media, I think this is the problem. It incentivizes attachment. Because if I wanted, if my goal in social media was growth or notoriety, I would just tweet out or send out into the world fact checks on controversial things. I would talk about cold plunges every day, all day. Right. I would talk about zone 2 and high intensity interval training in the most controversial way. But if I do that, what happens to me is I essentially cling and attach to these things. It's no different than if I was a diet influencer and I called myself the Carnivore Diet guy, and that was my name, my label, everything. Then if some study came out and said, hey, the Carnivore Diet might be good for some people, but not the.

[A]

Best for all I think those studies might exist.

[B]

They probably do. Almost certainly they do. I can't change because my identity is entirely intertwined with that. Because my social media identity and background is entirely intertwined with that. I think when we look at attachment, it's yes, we need to care deeply about things, we need to be passionate about things, but we have to be very careful about what we're married to. Because if I tie my entire identity around, in my case, correcting people on endurance training stuff and xyz, well, if all of a sudden research changes and says that this is great, or some world class athletes start experimenting with this and show it has, you know, potential, I've got to be able to change and adapt. And if I'm too attached, I'm not going to.

[A]

Yeah, hold your attachments loosely. And it goes to, you know, another kind of core aspect of the book and kind of everything that you share, which is things are complicated and there is nuance, you know, lingering everywhere. And to kind of hold yourself out as someone who says otherwise, you know, is not only a disservice to whoever you're talking to, it's a disservice to yourself and, and your ability to grow and evolve. And the problem sort of is rooted in this evolutionary kind of impulse or demand that we have, which is to be a member of a group, right? That is our core thing. We want to be part of a community. And the problem arises when that becomes a really calcified attachment, that then any idea that is at cross purposes with that is taken as an attack or an assault that you have to defend against.

[B]

When you're in protect and defend mode, you essentially shut down listening and learning. And what all sorts of research tells us is that the easiest way to get in protect and defend mode is attach yourself to some sort of group identity. And there's some fascinating work that essentially shows that while we think that we choose our groups based on our ethics and morals and values and all that stuff, it actually kind of works the opposite way is once we're in a group, our values, ethics, morals shift wherever that group goes to a large degree. And that's why it's really important to A, choose your groups wisely and then B, have some sort of like de centering or like not clinging attachment to that group where it's like, again, there's certain people you're married to, right? Your wife, your family, they're part of it. But everything else we get to choose. And I think that is the key is that for whatever reason in Modern society, because of some of the things that we've talked about. Living in this kind of threat survival mode is we tend to cling to those groups and attach because they fill a void. And when we do that, we stop listening, learning.

[A]

Yeah, there's group identity and then there's our own identity. And I think when you mistake those with each other and your relationship with your own identity is so kind of intrinsic or tied to, in an unhealthy way, the identity of a group that any kind of threat to the group is a threat on your own identity. And again, this goes to nuance and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations. We want to be intrinsically motivated, which means we need to have this connection and relationship with ourselves where, you know, we understand what our own identity is and what's important to us. But when we hold onto our identity too tightly, those extrinsic kind of ideas or impulses are then, are then kind of taken as a threat to that. There's ideas or opinions, but when those are too closely aligned with like how you, who you think you are and how you hold yourself out to the world, then it becomes problematic.

[B]

It's one of the central problems of our current world because think about it, whether we look at, I'm not going to go there, but politics, whether we look at diet, even fitness, health, there are certain topics that if you brought them up to certain people, to a large amount of people, what happens? We go straight into that protect, defend mode because there's that identity intertwinement where it's like, you can't even mention.

[A]

Well now it's so. I mean, it used to be like sort of growing up, you know, as a Gen Xer, it's like, okay, you know, politics and religion, those are the third rail. Like, you know, everybody has their opinions, kind of maybe steer clear of that. But now it's everything, it's dies. Everything is now kind of a political football in which identity is intertwined with, you know, whatever your philosophy is in a way that makes everybody like. It's creating the anxiety, but it's creating the defensiveness and all the aggression and everything. And this is the experiment that we're running on social media as a. As it continues to kind of become atomized and there's more and more subgroups that's only going to proliferate as far as I can tell.

[B]

Yeah, you're spot on. We've made everything politics and the result is like politics used to be until.

[A]

Every single person is their own little political right.

[B]

But that's separated. This is the thing.

[A]

Our desire to be part of a community then leaves us like completely alone on our own, like, you know, deserted island, bingo.

[B]

Because it's everyone is either with us or against us. We've created a zero sum game. And when we know when we have a zero sum mindset of like either win or lose, you're on my team or you're not, it pushes us towards living in threat mode. It pushes us towards reaching for those cheap extrinsic things to fulfill us and we're just miserable. And as I kind of outline my thesis in the book, is this, is that a large reason why we're there is because we're not fulfilling our basic psychological needs with good quality stuff. We're reaching for the candy. And we've known this for a long time. Going back to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone right in the 1980s, wrote a wonderful book, said, hey, all clubs, activities, hobbies are decreasing. This is going to impact us. And I think what we're seeing is the end result of that experiment on steroids with the Internet, social media. Because now the reason we have this politics of everything where we tie ourselves to these ideas is because we know that belonging is a fundamental need. And if there is nothing quality to fulfill it with, then what do we do? We reach our group identity. We say, hey, this is my tribe on social media, this is my tribe on blah blah blah. And I'm gonna just cling and attach to it as hard as I can to fulfill that need.

[A]

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[B]

I think the issue, and I think you're spot on the issue is this is it used to kind of did that development used to kind of take care of itself.

[A]

There wasn't an alignment problem. The environment kind of pushed you in the direction of happiness and fulfillment and meaning and connection and all of these things.

[B]

Exactly right. We had. Even if you look at kids, kids had time to explore. They weren't inundated with social media comparisons they explored locally. So me and running, how did I fall in love with running? I found out I was pretty good. Not globally, just within my class in middle school and beyond. If I had to compare myself to everyone when I was a middle schooler playing soccer and running the mile, I'd look and I'd be like, oh, my gosh, I'm so much slower than all these guys over here and so much slower than many of the girls of the same age. Why would I pursue this? But because the comparison was local, I said, hey, I'm pretty good compared to everybody. You know, the 50 other kids who are in my class or grade or whatever, I'll keep doing it.

[A]

Now it's global. Can you imagine young Steve? Like, he runs like a 5, 58 or whatever, a mile, and he decides to post it on social media and just gets shellacked with like, why, that's a terrible.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

And then what do you do? You're like, I'm not doing this anymore.

[B]

Bingo. That's it. We have cut off the role for finding and exploring in a secure environment where we get to dabble long enough to see, do I enjoy this? Am I good at it? Does it bring me significance and meaning? Because if we post about it, share about it, we're gonna get killed essentially right away, right? I'm gonna be like, no, no, I'm not that good. But the reality is none of us are that good until something for a long enough period of time, but we've kind of just kind of.

[A]

We're not allowed to not be good anymore.

[B]

And I even struggle this with myself, right? Because as adults, what happens, you stop trying to do things that, you know you're not good at because you're used to being competent at things. So we stop trying new things. And I think when we have societally something that shifts and pushes us from stop exploring, then we're going to end up in bad places, whether as adults or kids, because we don't get that natural cycle of exploring something until we figure out if we're good at it.

[A]

So what's the solution, Steve? What have you discovered going down the rabbit hole of this problem? How do we emerge out of it?

[B]

Just read my book and I'll give you all the answers. No, but here's the nuance of it is there's no great answers because there's societally things that we need to address. But what I try and do is tackle what we can actually do on the individual side. And I think if we simplify it to a degree, I think we have these fundamental psychological needs to belong we talked about. We need some sort of direction or purpose. We need to have some sort of coherence, meaning our individual and social self. We need to kind of make sense, right? And we need to feel some sort of significance, like we're doing something meaningful if we can have those things. Research tells us that we get to turn that threat alarm down a little bit. And that's all we're talking about here. Because if we can turn that threat alarm down a little bit, we feel secure, we can explore when we need to. We don't have to kind of shut down and get narrower and narrower. So I think it's on us, both as individuals and in the environments we have control over is how do we help people and help ourselves fulfill those needs in a productive way. How do we reach for the vegetables instead of the candy? That's just going to give us temporary fulfillment, but an hour later we're going to feel miserable and hungry again.

[A]

Breaking that down to its kind of elemental pieces. A lot of this stuff is sort of stuff we intuitively know. Like yes, we should choose the vegetable and not the candy and we need to do hard things and we need to feel like we're part of a community and we should do something that feels like it gives our lives meaning, all of these things. But it's in that gap that lives and breathes in between thought and action or idea and execution that we get hamstrung. So we could take a couple examples. Imagine maybe it's a middle aged man who is on a trajectory where he's starting to feel like, is this really what I'm supposed to be doing? Or I remember when I used to do these things and they were fun and Now I'm kind of out of shape and I'm in a job that doesn't feel like it's providing me meaning. And after a long day, it's just hard to not eat ice cream and the normal stuff. What is the first step or the kind of catalyst to trigger somebody out of that rut and get them into a new way of behaving?

[B]

Yeah, so this is the crux of the problem and it's the crux of coaching, which is behavior change. It's easy to talk about, hard to do. But I think step one is actually that awareness and perspective is identifying that like, hey, these things. Maybe I'm feeling something that I don't appreciate or that doesn't feel fulfilled in this manner. And that awareness is the thing that then can push you towards, okay, not necessarily action, but exploring and understanding. And what I mean by that is what research tells us. Again, lots of psychology tells us that our basic needs that we outlined are what we call substitutable, meaning I don't need them all from one place. And this is one of the fundamental mistakes we've made in society. We try and get it all from our work or all from our family life. And what we need to do is look at, okay, here's all the things I can do in life. Here's my work, my family life, my friends, my hobbies, et cetera. I want to diversify and dabble and see what's interesting and see what allows me to feel a little bit better or fulfilled in these ways. So if your work sucks, but you know, I need this paycheck, I can't just quit my job. Then you look for avenues elsewhere. You join your recreational softball team, you volunteer to coach your kids soccer team. You look for other avenues that kind of fulfill and give you this significance and meaning in small bite sized ways. I mean, I did it myself when I took up writing. I didn't see myself as a writer, but I was coaching and then going through that whole whistleblower experience we talked about before. And I said this coaching side kind of sucks in running. I enjoy it, but it kind of sucks because I have this whole whistleblowing experience just raining down on my parade. I need another outlet. So I just started writing. First for blogs, magazines, eventually books. But it was just, it wasn't, I'm going to become a writer. I'm going to use this to fund my future life. This was, I need another sense making outlet that gives me some sort of, you know, fulfills these things that running once did. But can't right now because of the situation I'm in.

[A]

I think the challenge for a lot of people is confronting their own perception of agency in their lives. Like, if you're in that state where things just don't feel like they're working there, is that that sense that you also lack the inability to change it? And that's where the brain is very good at coming up with excuses why you can't or shouldn't and why that's scary. And better to avoid and just stay in your lane. Like, overcoming that is a challenge. But I think what you're saying is essentially, like, lower the bar of expectations. Like, if you were to say, like, I don't like coaching, or coaching isn't really doing it for me. Like, I'm going to write books. Like, well, I can't write a book. I've never written a book. You know, people that write books are, you know, it's like, just like, you know, create a safe space in which it's okay to fail, you know, and just do the tiniest part of it. It's really kind of like a James Clear atomic habits thing. Like, what is like, the easiest lift that you can, you know, that you feel like you can accomplish and just start to, like, stack those.

[B]

And this is, again, a consequence of the environment we live in. Because what do we do? We don't think, oh, I'm just gonna write my journal or notebook or post some blog. We jump straight to the big thing. Because the comparison tells us that, oh, if I'm going to be a writer, I need to write books. That's what everybody else does. But they forget that young Steve, before he became a successful author, was writing all sorts of junk. I can send it to you with all sorts of grammatical mistakes that probably makes no sense. But I was allowed to do that because I didn't see it as. I didn't have this pressure of seeing it as succeed or fail. And it comes back to one of the things that prevents people is we've internalized failure. As if we fail at something. It's, I am a failure. Instead of the identity piece. Yeah, it's the identity piece. So lowering the bar is basically this. Lowering the bar. And doing anything that takes away that identity piece. It creates a little bit of space so that you can try and not be afraid of failing. So whether that's just, you know, in the writing example, writing for yourself, whether that's sharing with friends, whether that's taking the smallest step to just explore something else in a safe and secure manner. Those are the steps that we need to take in terms of running. I tell people this all the time who come up to me and are novices and are like, oh, Steve, you know so much about running. What would your advice be to get started? I'm like, don't run. Start walking. Because if I tell them to go run, that first run is going to be miserable because they're not in good enough shape. It's going to be hard no matter how slow they go. And if every day I walked out the door for myself as a person who loves running, if every day was a hard workout and running, I would hate it too. So we've got to have them give people manageable, bite sized chunks to allow them to make progress. Because we know going back to intrinsic motivation, what's the. One of the biggest things that fuels that fire is progress on something towards mastery. So if we can see ourselves getting better, even on the smallest bit, it's gonna stoke that fire. Stoke that fire. Stoke that fire.

[A]

Yeah. The trick of the mind is that we think being better or being really good at something is what nourishes us, when in fact it is the progression towards that is the real kind of nutrition here.

[B]

It's the quest. It is. And one of my favorite studies I talk about in the book, they looked at Olympic swimmers and these are like Olympic medalists, some of the biggest names. And they looked at, interviewed them and what they found is that the vast majority of these athletes at some time had a performance mindset which was like outcomes, achievements. I'm going to define myself by this. But at some point, relatively early on in their career, they faced an adversity that made them reevaluate things. And they called it an adversity that made them switch to a quest mindset, which is exactly what you're talking about there, which is, it's the progress, it's the exploration, it's the doing thing on the way to wherever we end up that makes us and is the important part. But we get distracted and think the important part is achieving that end goal when it's not.

[A]

Yeah. The best modern example of that with respect to Olympic swimmers, I think is Caleb Dressel, who anybody who saw him compete in Paris or knows a little bit about his story, this is a guy who was kind of poised to be the next Michael Phelps and was extremely successful and then struggled and had to contend with some mental health stuff that really derailed his career. And he had to find a way back. And in order to do that he had to confront these mental health challenges and begin to work through them, which he did. And that rejuvenated his love for the sport. But the relationship was different, right? It was no longer about performance and podiums necessarily, and more about this fulfilling quest that he was on. And I think when you saw him get very emotional on the deck, I think it was him like really kind of like recognizing that in himself. Like maybe he didn't achieve the goals that he had set for himself at the Olympics. But to me, I read that as like gratitude for even being able to be there and like really like seeing it for what it was and like honoring himself for having like taken that journey.

[B]

I love that moment and I think it's so great. And I think people discount those experiences and think that like, oh, that's not what got him there, right? But that is the be all. I think that is the crux of performance because it allows us to free ourselves up to not only perform at a high level, but also have the perspective to understand and embrace it. Because there's so many athletes that I've worked with who they get the performance and it's wholly unfulfilling. They thought it was going to be X, Y and Z, but then they achieve it and they're almost like empty.

[A]

Because there was this implied promise that this was going to fill whatever hole that they have, right?

[B]

Like bingo.

[A]

And then they realized like, well, you take yourself wherever you go, right? When you arrive, you're still the same person. Even Alex Honnold, who I wouldn't characterize as somebody who has a hole that he needed to fill. And that's why he goes on these climbing pursuits. He sat across from me and was like, yeah, I thought when I did all these things that I would be the man. And I didn't even know what the man was. But then I did it and I was like, well, I'm still like me. I don't know who that man is or whatever.

[B]

But it's another great example.

[A]

But it's identity. It goes back to this attachment to your identity being contingent upon these performance goals as opposed to being holding it a little bit at arm's distance and saying, I care about these goals, but if I don't achieve them, it's not a threat to the core of who I am as a human being. And I think this is at the very center of the existential crisis that I think a lot of people have, particularly men upon whom there's a lot of pressure. Their value is inextricably linked to their career traject and their bank account and all of these metrics. Right. And so to your point around, like the American dream and the sort of incentives of the world in which we live, if you can't measure up to that, then of course you're going to feel like you're less than. And that is really the definition of your identity.

[B]

That's the crux of it. And I think coming to the nuance is because it's not saying, hey, achievements don't matter or performance don't matter.

[A]

It's your relationship.

[B]

It's your relationship with them. Right. It's being able to say, okay, I'm going to strive for this, but I'm still going to have a little bit of space between this achievement or this goal and my sense of self. And I think that's where the magic occurs. And that's where if you look at elite athletes or elite performers in anything who find sustainable success over the long haul and aren't miserable, that's that sweet spot that they try and live in. But I think again, environmentally, societally, we forget this other part and we say, hey, just go achieve this and that will take care of everything. And it's just not how we were fundamentally developed or evolved. And I think to your point, it's a really high burden in our current world because again, I'm going to take us all the way back to the African savanna. If you looked at it, it's very easy to achieve significance, belonging, a sense of identity when it's you and a couple dozen tribe members, it's easy to find something where you can contribute. In our world today, it's really freaking hard. And to your point, if you look on the data on especially young men, they're suffering to a much higher degree than even a couple decades ago when we were younger. And one of the reasons, I think, is because we've set up this environment where it's really freaking hard to provide, be significant, et cetera, et cetera, because the end result is people feel kind of miserable and not motivated.

[A]

Yeah. What is the avenue where they can contribute and feel good about that contribution? And if that's not available and they're in an environment in which opportunities are scarce, that becomes a challenge. And it's unfair that that should all fall on the young individual to figure out we should live in environments that are kind of moving us towards that. Yeah, inevitably it is.

[B]

But what we've done is, again, societally, I mean, a lot of the book is back about narrowing or broadening but society, we've narrowed those paths. So if you're a young kid or young male especially, you're coming out, you see only a handful of paths. What we need to do is create a world where it's like, okay, there's many different paths. I mean, even you can see it in going to college versus trade schools and things like that. We've kind of minimized the non college route and push to everyone over here, but that minimizes potential paths for people. I know we're talking about young men, but it applies to everything. I mean, the role model effect is real. So my wife's a teacher and there's all sorts of wonderful data that shows us essentially one of the biggest impactors for young kids in school is being able to see a future in something. And there's data, for instance, on, we'll take teachers. If a black kid has a black teacher, it increases his chance of graduating, going to college and being successful by. I forget the exact number, but something like 15 to 20%. Okay. Why role model effect? You see a future and that future is a little bit more attainable because you have someone to relate to. Right. The same thing applies to whether we're talking about different jobs, avenues. Anything is we've got to be able to see future pasts. And instead what we've done is kind of narrowed them so that it's kind.

[A]

Of impossible at the same time. And this goes to the. It's not a black or white thing and it's kind of yes. And in both we're also, I think it needs to be said in an environment where we can find mentors and we can find inspiration and we can find role models in a way we never could before. Like any kid who goes on YouTube can find somebody who looks like them, who's doing something that they're interested in that 50 years ago would be impossible if you lived in a small town in Alabama or whatever. Right. So the exposure to that type of inspiration is like at full blast right now. And you can go on Spotify or Apple podcasts and find a podcast where somebody who does that thing that you're curious about is gonna tell you exactly how he figured out how to do it and create a career out of it. So that too is also at play. And yet amidst the narrowing that you spoke to, doesn't seem to necessarily be the full antidote that we need.

[B]

Well, what it is, is we've solved part of the problem with that is we have what I'd call like distanced awareness right I can go on YouTube, I can listen to many of the guests you've interviewed and say, hey, this is cool, I'm going to try and explore this. But then we don't have the, what I'd call like depth or local awareness because we've kind of given away those paths or understanding. And I think we need to have some way to connect both and avenues to connect both to be able to give people potential paths. I think the other aspect of it is again, if you come back to the idea of we evolved to grow up in local communities. In fact, archeologists and some scientists called it the transition from known to anonymous societies. So there's all sorts of data that show that again. And way back in the day tribes generally expanded to about 150 people and then they had infinding and split up and for millennia they couldn't get past the 150 people number until the solution was social institutions evolved. So we started to have religion, marriage, things that researchers called men's club, which were essentially things for men to do besides fight. And these social institutions allowed us to break through this 150 person barrier to go move to anonymous society where we didn't have to know or be connected to everyone. The argument I would make nowadays is we're at another transition. We went from a society that wasn't all interconnected but was global to now we've hit this like you're connected to everyone. There's potential paths almost everywhere, but is overwhelming and we need some sort of, I don't know what the answers are, but some sort of social institutions that say, okay, here's how we organize, here's how we do things, here's how we have paths that provide the ability to expand past that barrier.

[A]

At the same time that's beyond the individual's sort of agency or capacity to create and turning back to what we can do, what we do have control over. And perhaps our example of the middle aged person who's having this crisis of meaning to me and let me know what you think of this. I think the biggest piece obviously is your relationship to your own identity and not being willing to go on that kind of inward journey to understand who you are. But within that in terms of the way out or the spark to kind of snap you out of whatever situation you're in and move you towards a new one, begins and ends with your relationship with curiosity, which is kind of the generative force of every exploration. So rather than say, well, I don't feel like my life's so meaningful. So I guess I should run a marathon. Are you really curious about that, or is that just a reaction to an external stimuli? Because you've seen other people doing that and you don't know what else to do. Instead, I think that the better path is to really understand your own curiosity. The problem with that is that it goes back to our environmental kind of incentives like this. American capitalistic society is not conducive to everybody sort of investing in their own curiosity. In fact, our culture is an antagonist to curiosity because curiosity is a threat to security and kind of institutional kind of rules and regulations. If you have a job, you're not, like, directed to, like, be curious, try things. No, it's like, stay within your lane, right? To go back to what we said at the beginning. So we cut off our relationship with our own curiosity to the extent of, like, not even noticing it or paying attention to it. We've relegated it to some kind of dark place. So when you say, like, be curious or invest in your. It's like, I don't know what I'm curious about. Like, my whole life I've kind of, like, never even thought about my own curiosity, right? Like, how do I even can get back to that place where I can be curious and notice things, and then when I do notice them, say, oh, I do feel like maybe I'd be interested in that, and then follow that up with taking some kind of action to then go towards it.

[B]

You know what one of the biggest propellers of curiosity is? Boredom. And we've eliminated boredom. Because what do you do? If I'm standing in line at the airport, I pull out my phone, right? And then I scroll mindlessly and the.

[A]

Algorithm will say, I know what you're curious about, but are you or are you just impulsed in some kind of addictive way that's being directed by your lizard brain, Right?

[B]

That's it. And again, what psychology research tells us is that if you're bored for a little bit, your brain then pushes you to find some sort of solution, which is where curiosity comes from. Again, look at young kids, right? What do they do when they're bored? They often create games, right? They pick up a stick in the yard and start playing war or whatever it is, because they're filling that space. And what we need to do is get back to moments in our lives where we have more of that. This is why I love running and love exercise or love walking, whatever it is. Because I will leave my phone at home and I will go up.

[A]

I'll just Raw dog it.

[B]

And I'll just go right, what a.

[A]

Courageous man you are. But it's almost like you have to. You're cutting against the grain to even go running without your earbuds in. And the latest podcast or music, the album that dropped.

[B]

But that, and I'll tell you this 100%, if I didn't do that, I would not be writing back books. Because most of either my ideas or the solving of how in the hell am I going to make this connect and work in this book comes either on a walk or a run without a podcast or things. And I'm not. Look, I love podcasts, but I listen to them intentionally. When I go on a run, I use that as my curiosity time. Let's let my mind wander and whether yours is running, walking some sort of meditative experience, doing things without being plugged in all the time. I think we have to figure out ways in our environment to bring that back. The other thing I would say in terms of curiosity is we need more what I'll just call play. Because again, the kid example, what sparks curiosity. You're playing. And in fact some recent researchers came out and had this big statement that said, hey, one of the reasons why the youth health mental crisis is coming around is because we've over organized everything to death so that kids aren't playing. Because if you look at the role play fulfills with kids is it teaches them how to interact, it teaches them how to develop their own rules and constraints, etc. Teaches them how to solve problems and explore. And I think as adults you're probably saying, well I'm not going to go out in the yard and swing or what have you. But what's play for adults? Think about it. I mean, as a writer, play for me is reading and exploring ideas with no in game in sight, saying, you know what? And I'll do this, I'll go on, I call them down the rabbit hole where I get sparked by maybe a research paper or an interview or even a podcast. I listen to and I say, you know what, I don't know if this is going to go anywhere, but I'm just going to spend a couple hours and just go down the rabbit hole, one article to the next or one interview to the next and learn more about it. And most of the times nothing comes out of it. But every once in a while it sparks that curiosity and then it turns into a major chapter or part of a book or something else and it has that end result that is valuable. But I didn't Start down that path saying, oh, I'm going to use this to create my next book.

[A]

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Absolutely extraordinary in supporting you in achieving your health and fitness goals.

[A]

So to learn more and sign up, go to meals.richroll.com and use code POWER20 for $20 off your annual membership. I'm super proud to announce my next venture, Voicing Change Media. This beautiful consortium of thinkers, storytellers, artists and visionaries all committed to fostering meaningful exchanges and sharing thought provoking content. Voicing Change Media will feature shows like Soul Boom with Rainn Wilson, Mentor Buffet with Alexi Pappas. Feel better, live more with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and the Proof with Simon Hill. You can explore this network and all its offerings at VoicingChange Media. I do agree that running is like the ultimate kind of instigator for, you know, kind of creative thoughts and curiosity. I wonder, maybe, you know, this like, is there science around how being in a kind of elevated state of exertion, you know, in that kind of like comfortable zone 2 state where your blood is pumping and lends itself to your brain kind of being in that, you know, to inhabit that space?

[B]

Yep. There's lots of science and here's what it goes is there's a sweet spot in terms of what we just call physiological arousal. So think stress response, adrenaline, et cetera. If we get elevated enough, it enhances our cognition in our thinking. If we go too elevated, we stop being able to like think because that attention has to be directed towards the activity we're doing. So If I'm running VO2 max intervals or something, I can't Be creative, because all my resources are diverted towards surviving the interval. But if I'm running an easy run, what happens is we get elevated enough, we get blood flow, we get the adrenaline, we get the arousal going, but it's mindless enough where my brain is free to wander. So you have this nice interaction between. We'll just call it the thinking part of our brain, the executive function, and the default mode network, or the more creative side. In easy runs, they're at this peak where they both can interact together without getting in the way. If we go too hard, we essentially shut down part of that thinking and creativity.

[A]

The problem arises for me, though, because that's the place where I have all these ideas. I've learned that I often forget them. It's sort of like a dream. You're like, that's an amazing idea. And then you're done. And so I do bring my phone with me, but then I find myself stopping all the time because make a voice memo or to put it in my notes app or whatever. So I decided to forget it. And if you're really in that space, you got to stop a lot in order to do that or to pull it out, which is obviously every time you do that, you're interrupting that flow.

[B]

I need someone listening to make a device that doesn't interrupt where I can record ideas so rich. And I can just somehow record ideas without disrupting it because same deal. There have been so many times I figured out something or thought I have and then been like, oh, crap, I've got to make it like the three miles home without forgetting.

[A]

I know. So then if you are in that place where I don't know what I'm curious about, it doesn't have to be running, but if you can find some kind of activity where you can inhabit that elevated state, maybe that's a nice trigger.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. Think of it as, how do I put myself in these states? Just slightly more often, Again, lowering the bar, but slightly more often to get curious and then give myself the ability to dabble long enough to see if that curiosity turns into interest or passion. And you see this. Good companies do this. It's the old classic 3M example where they had 15% time, which basically meant 15% of the week. They got to just go do or explore whatever they wanted to during company time. Some great ideas came out of that. The sticky notes came out of that. Other companies have copied stuff like that. But you need to have this time and period where you just get to explore things and dabble long enough to see if they're interesting and some things won't and that's fine. But if we never go on that journey, then we never spark that curiosity. We never get that exploration kind of gene going. And instead we stick to narrow, comfortable, same old, same old. And then our identity tends to constrict around whatever it is. We get that kind of numbness of experience.

[A]

It's harder in the work context unless you have a management structure that is conducive to those sorts of activities. I mean, Ed Catmull comes to mind what he's done around the importance of cultivating creativity in the workplace and taking failure off the table. Because to, to do something different in that construct is a threat to job security, right? So it creates this constriction. But outside of that, to take failure off the table, you just have to shift your relationship to it, to not be a goal oriented thing, but rather like to your point earlier, like just an exercise in curiosity or an exploration. Right. So a lot of it is around like terminology because we have this weird, you know, kind of obsession with success and failure in a binary context. But to just use kind of different words to, you know, kind of convince yourself that this is not like that.

[B]

All you're trying to do is convince your brain that it's okay to try and fail. I mean, this like, you're not going.

[A]

To die or get kicked out of your tribe.

[B]

That's it. Like, because when we activate these things, like our brain goes, okay, I'm going to be alone and get kicked out of my tribe. I can't try this. And that's the circuitry that is there in so much of life, especially in a world as we've talked about, where failure is public. If we look at the number one thing that causes things like choking in sport or the yips or whatever have you, it is fear of public failure. Choking doesn't occur in private. Okay, why? Because as humans, if we fail publicly and we're trying at something that is central to our sense of self, that pushes us, our brain, to just freak out. And so much of whether we're talking in sport, performance or creativity is figuring out these almost like mental games to convince our brain or convince the people you're working with's brain to be like, okay, that's not gonna happen. Like, if you mess up on this cartoon creation or this writing assignment, like, your life isn't over, the lion isn't going to eat.

[A]

It's not an existential threat. And again, that goes back to your relationship with Identity. I mean, that's what you just said is like at the core of Michael Gervais book. Fear of other people's opinions. Yeah. And like how that. Short circuits. Mastery.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's one of those things that is simple to talk about, but really freaking hard to do.

[A]

Why is it so hard?

[B]

Because we're human. Because we have an inbuilt psychological immune system that wants to convince ourselves that we are the hero of the story, that we are a good person and that we're going to be okay. And it will do anything possible to defend anything that comes against us. So when failure or threat threatens us, our psychological immune system goes into a hyperactive state and says, no, no, we're going to like, shut that down. We're going to disconnect from that. We're going to make sure that that doesn't attack us.

[A]

What is your sense of how learnable, teachable these things are on some level? When you look at people or perhaps like athletes that you've coached, and you see people who kind of understand these principles naturally and are able to kind of be adaptable in their environments, that's often a function of the environments in which they were raised, when their brains were still kind of forming and those neural pathways were kind of being created in an environment where they did feel safe. And like the parenting and all of that was kind of like dialed in to create this individual who could, could be healthy in the world short of that, somebody else who maybe has an attachment disorder or didn't have certain emotional needs met, and they're in the world with completely different neural pathways that you then have to undo and kind of rewire. It's a situation in which that person is going to struggle a little bit more and is going to be more resistant in that kind of transition.

[B]

So the good news is this. Just about everything is trainable to a degree. Now, are you going to go from, like, am I going to go from maybe not that good to Zen master? Probably not, if my environment isn't conducive to that or my genetics or what have you. But everything is trainable to a degree. And we know this from some wonderful research in neuroscience that has looked at things especially along like mental health disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder, because what are you doing there except just retraining your pathways in your brain to stop seeing a threat everywhere? And although it is really hard, especially for, like, severe cases, there is improvement even among severe cases. Right. Where we see, if we follow this path, if we like retrain our brain and those pathways a little bit. We can stop getting our fear centers to think that like, hey, there's a threat around every corner and we're going to be okay. Now are we going to take that person and make them like OCD free? No, probably not. But we're going to get them to a state where they can be okay and perform and like live life. And I think that is true whether we look at that from a mental health standpoint or whether we look at this from a performance standpoint, because we can see it in other areas. Where we take athletes, for instance, who suffer the extreme versions of like the yip, there are successful cases of people getting rid of it and getting back to high performance. Why? Because all of these pathways are to a degree, trainable. If we again do the right things to convince our brain that this threat might be there, but it doesn't have to be at the level that it is right now. We can turn it down from a 9 to, to a 4. And if we're at a 4, we can function right? And that's the key.

[A]

In other words, you may not be able to ever surf a hundred foot wave like Garrett McNamara, but if surfing is something you're curious about, like go and you know first, like go out and paddle on a flat lake and then maybe get a little half foot wave and try to stand up. These things happen over time. By creating, by pushing, putting yourself in a situation that's just risky enough to manage and then developing the resilience that comes with every kind of notch up from there.

[B]

It's a long path. This is why we struggle with it, because it takes time to get that effect to have or that adaptation. It's a slow path, but if you stick at it on whether we're talking about physical pursuits or mental pursuits, the research is clear and the science is clear. Is that a long time spent slowly adapting our mind or body works?

[A]

Can we shift gears and bust a few fitness myths? I can't have you here and not have you kind of roll up your sleeves and get into the muck a little bit. You've been coaching athletes for a long time. You are well versed in the science of speed and endurance. And it must come with some frustration to pay witness to the discourse that you see online around concepts like zone 2 training, high intensity training, VO2 max terms that are getting thrown around quite a bit. Even more so than a couple years ago, due in no small part to everybody's fascination around emerging longevity science. Right? And so now we have these sort of longevity influencers out there who are using these terms. Some are using them appropriately, some not so much. But I think it's creating a lot of confusion for people who are interested in, like, should I be doing, like, you know, a lot of Zone two and when do I do my strength workout and when do I need that kind of higher intensity? And, like, what am I supposed to think about, like, VO2 Max and its relationship not only to my fitness to like, but also, like, in terms of, like, how long I'm going to live? Do you have, like a manifesto on this or, like, I don't even know where to start with all of this because there's so much here, we could go for hours.

[B]

Rich.

[A]

But let me just. Why don't I start with this one? I just had Rhonda Patrick in here the other day who I think is super smart, and I think she's, you know, highly integr. You know, somebody who operates with a lot of integrity and is deep into the science. And she has done a lot of work around the importance of high intensity training, which she would call vigorous exercise, and the relationship of that with this marker, VO2 max, and the importance of that marker in terms of longevity. And so for the time crunched individual, she's basically saying the 8020 rule, which is do most of your 80% should be your zone two or whatever, and 20%, the more high intensity stuff, that if you don't have very much time, that that should be something you should focus on more because it kind of moves the needle much more so than if you had just. If you only have used that short amount of time for Zone two. So I guess there's that piece and then there's also the kind of emphasis around all the energy around, like, VO2 max as this important mark.

[B]

All right, so let's break this down, and I agree. I think Rhonda Patrick is great at science communication. She's like the OG of it. So I have a lot of respect for her. VO2 max is a marker. Okay, let's start with this. If you look at all the research that does tie VO2 max to longevity, almost all of it does not measure VO2 max. What they do is they do a fitness test, sometimes an actual VO2 max test, but they use the peak speed and treadmill incline as the marker that gets tied to longevity. Or in other cases, what they do is they do a submax test that then they estimate VO2 max with to get tied to longevity. So what does that mean practically? Practically, it means that it's not necessarily VO2 max that is tied to longevity. It is endurance performance. Because if you set me up on a treadmill and say, hey, go run to exhaustion in 10 minutes, which is essentially a VO2 max test, how fast you get at the end of the treadmill. Yes, that spits out a VO2 max number if I'm on the equipment. But what matters more is how fast you got on the treadmill at the end of the session. If you reach 10 miles an hour, 11 miles an hour, or 12 miles an hour, what happens have you. That is what's tied to longevity. So to me, I love some VO2 max conversation. I like to simplify things. You don't need to go to a lab to understand your VO2 max to see if you're going to live longer based on the research or the longevity piece. All you need to do is go down the track and go run a mile or do the equivalent in cycling, swimming, anything moderately aerobic. And the faster you are, the better your predicted longevity will be. And I think that that message is a little bit more practical than telling someone like, hey, go figure out your VO2 max number. Because what do most people do? They go look at their watch, which gives you estimated VO2 max, which the research on that is. Some watches do it pretty well. Some are all over the freaking place. So, like, and it doesn't have to be a mile. It can be anything moderately aerobic, anything from a couple minutes to 10, 15, 20 minutes. Go sign up for your local 5K, do something pretty hard, see what it is, and then improve on that. And you're improving on your marker for longevity.

[A]

In other words, stop obsessing about this marker as an end game, but look at it rather as a byproduct of doing all these other things that will naturally. And it is interesting. Like when you, of course, elite athletes aren't really concerning themselves with longevity, and their VO2 max numbers are incredibly high, but not because they're focused on elevating them, only because they're focused on the training that the VO2 max of, which is a byproduct of that. So there was a lot of. There was a lot of energy around Tade Pagaccar going on Peter Attia's podcast. And Peter is someone who's very interested in VO2 max and curious about it and somebody who is a longevity expert. And it seemed to me that he was somewhat surprised that Tade was sort of dismissive of this or not all that interested in measuring it very often. And that's just because. And it's the same with Christian Blumenfeld, right? Like, these guys have incredibly high VO2 maxes, but that's not like what they're aiming towards.

[B]

You know, I've run many VO2 max tests. I've done them with other athletes as a physiologist. But the reason for that at the elite level especially, is because of all the components of endurance performance, it's the least training, meaning it will boost up, but at some point, your lactate threshold, your running economy, your anaerobic speed reserve, all of these, your fuel intake, all of these things are way more trainable than VO2 max. So in the coaching world, we generally say VO2 max is going to take care of itself if we don't train like an idiot, because it's going to reach a natural number and then kind of fluctuate a little bit.

[A]

But it stays, it stays. It's not something that. That's wildly vacillating, right?

[B]

Yeah, exactly. My lactate threshold, my speed at lactate threshold will vacillate more, right. Based on if I'm doing more of that work or if I'm not. And that's why in the endurance community, we measure the thing to get an idea, but we don't tie everything to it. And I think in the longevity community, they've missed that lesson a little bit it and that they tie too much to it because it's a nice round number that tells us something and is fancy and we tie something to it without realizing like, hey, holistic endurance performance. Holistic performance is probably the better thing to worry about, which includes all these other things. So let's just worry about getting people a little bit fitter, right?

[A]

But then you're opening up the Pandora box of like, well, how do we get there? Right? And, and, and is it, is it a function of endurance or this tempo threshold work? I think people really kind of like the idea of the hard threshold tempo, high intensity training sort of thing and, and aren't exactly all that enthusiastic about like, you know, all the zone 2 stuff. Although there is a lot of energy. Like people are fascinated by, in, in a way that I would have never. I can't believe how many people are like so into this notion, which is cool. My sense is that things are as they always have been, which is like, yes, you need threshold and you need speed and you need to kind of get that lactate going and all of that, whether you're an endurance athlete or a sprinter or an average human being. But all of these things are built upon a foundation without which you're never going to reach your potential. And that foundation fundamentally is building your aerobic engine and the resilience that comes with it. On top of which you then build all of these other things and you can't short circuit that.

[B]

We have 120 years of history of training to tell us exactly what you just said. And this is where I'm a science nerd, but I love going towards the history of training because it's essentially this natural evolution of training where coaches from the late 1800s to now have progressively figured out, okay, this works a little bit better, this works a little bit better. And what we've known for at least the past 60, 70 years, exactly what you outlined is that, that if we care about performance, yeah, the sexy stuff of high intensity stuff matters. But if we do that without a foundation, our improvement is capped.

[A]

Yeah, you will plateau.

[B]

You will plateau. And furthermore, I would argue your risk of overtraining, especially if you're a novice, is higher because you don't have as much gaps to make a mistake. Because if you have aerobic foundation, you can handle a little bit more and you can bounce back quicker from the intense stuff. If I don't have that and I'm running intervals every day or every couple days over training is going to happen at some point. And again, we know this as a college coach, I would look at this all the time because you'd get high school kids and some high school kids are really well trained and some had the assistant football coach as their cross country coach who just stood at the track and timed them every day and they did intervals. And you'd see, you'd be like, how come this kid ran really fast in the early season? Then performances got way worse. It's like, oh, you had a football coach telling him repeats on the track every day and his aerobic base was gone. So we know this now, time crunch for novice or recreational people is a real thing. You can't replace it all with high intensity stuff and expect to over the long haul get the benefits you need. You might not have the balance of the 8020 rule because you're not running that much or doing much endurance, but you have to have some sort of aerobic foundation or aerobic base in order to maximize or even get most of the benefits of the intense stuff. And if you don't, it's a recipe for disaster. I always comes back to this is elite performance, but I think it applies Generally to everyone. Frank Shorter, gold medalist legend in the marathon way back in the day, said when asked about his training, he essentially said two hard workouts, a long run and as much mileage as I can handle. Repeat for months and years on end.

[A]

And it's still the case.

[B]

It's still the case. Like we can argue over the nuance of, well, should this be at like lactate threshold or 10k base or 5k pace or repeat 4 hundreds or miles? And I get that I have those arguments all the time, but those are playing in the details. And those details mainly matter when you're at the upper echelon of like trying to maximize your performance. But for most people it is essentially, can you get one or two hard workouts a weekend where you go in something that makes you breathe kind of hard and then lots of easy stuff and do that consistently for months on end?

[A]

On some level, the arguments around the margins are from a psychological perspective, like a sort of masturbatory excuse making machine that gets in the way of just going out and doing the thing you feel like you're doing it if you're arguing about these things rather than actually executing on the thing that's going to move you forward. But I think to take that a little bit out of the abstract and into kind of a practical example that maybe people can understand who are less familiar with these ideas. And tell me if you agree with this. If you are somebody who's doing a lot of interval work, work, notice how quickly you're able to recover in those time periods in between the interval, like how much time do you need in order to go hit it hard again? Or if you're out riding your bike and you're kind of riding along and then you attack a hill, how long does it take for your heart rate to come back down to where it was when you were at the bottom of the hill? Right? And that is, is a pretty good marker of where you are in terms of your aerobic fitness. And if it takes you a while or you're doing an interval set and what felt easy on that first interval, by the sixth or the eighth interval you're like, you know, struggling to even complete it or you're really falling off a cliff in terms of like trying to, you know, keep these things even, that's because you don't have an aerobic fitness foundation.

[B]

I couldn't have said it better myself. I totally agree. It's a quick, easy marker that tells you, and I'll tell you this, as someone who runs 35 to 40 miles a week when I used to run 100. Even my recovery between intervals when I do them now is not anywhere close to what it used to be. Because I know I have a good aerobic band, but not the lead aerobic foundation that I used to. And even I can tell, you know what, on these 400 meter repeats, I used to be able to take 45 seconds. I'm digging 90 seconds. Why? Because my foundation isn't there. And that applies to the lay person as well. Is understand, like when you do something hard, are you instantly bending over, catching your breath, having a hard time or not? And if you are, that tells you that, like, hey, maybe you need to do a little aerobic stuff. Because at the end of the day, I like to simplify training as this is. If we see a seesaw, on one side, we have the endurance side, on the other, we have speed or intensity. And we want to build that up progressively so that it is balanced for the event we're taking on. So a balance for a mile will be different from a marathon, but it still needs to be balanced. And what we try and do is we realize, hey, we need to balance this. We need to build this aerobic side up a lot because the speed side is heavy. So when we start adding blocks to the speed, it's easy to get it unbalanced. But if we built that aerobic side a lot, we can add more speed and intensity and maintain that balance and be in a good spot.

[A]

You got in some heat on social media for responding to a tweet where somebody, he was comparing, I think it was around the time of the Paris Olympics, comparing the physiques of sprinters to that of marathoners, saying it's pretty obvious who's healthier based upon how they physically present. And you took a bite on that one, and that turned into a news cycle. Do you want to explain that?

[B]

I just think that. That we've fallen for what I'd call as performative health, meaning how health looks instead of what it really is. And I think if we look at, you know, often we see these memes where it's like, you know, sprinter versus endurance athlete. And people are like, oh, why would.

[A]

You want to look like the emaciated elite marathon runner and the completely jacked 100 meter runner.

[B]

Bingo. But if you look at the data, and I'm scientists, I go by the data, there's been tons of studies that have looked at former Olympians, elite athletes in a variety of sports, and what most of the data says Essentially is this, is that endurance or mixed event athletes have better longevity, sprint, speed, power, strength, pure strength. Athletes tend to have lower longevity. And it makes sense physiologically because, yes, we need to do strength. Don't get me wrong, if you're caring about longevity, you need to do strength. And I'd argue you need to do some sort of speed, power and sprint every once in a while as well. But our bodies evolve for efficiency and if we're jacked, we're not very efficient. We don't have many mitochondria and the mitochondria density isn't there to handle the energetic load of the force output that we have there. There. So again, I love sprinting, I love all that stuff. But if we're looking at purely from a health standpoint and longevity, the endurance athlete, there's a reason we used to be persistent hunters. It's for the efficiency of the thing.

[A]

You said, also back to the point of the aerobic base that, you know, there's sort of a narrative like, oh, the long run is dead. Like that contrarian, sort of like everything you thought you knew about running is wrong. Long run is dead. It's just, you know, junk miles, et cetera. And you're like the average collegiate 800 meter runner runs way more than the, you know, kind of amateur, average, you know, person who's training for a marathon.

[B]

It's true. Like, so I looked at some data that they looked at hundreds of thousands of Strava data points or runners, Strava runners for training for a marathon. And they broke it down. A study broke it down from basically sub 2:30 to sub 3 hours, et cetera, et cetera. And if you look at the 3 hour to 330 hour marathoner, who's pretty dang good, that's not bad. That takes some training. On average, they run about 40ish miles a week. 40ish? Now, I'm not trying to downplay that that's good, but you're training for a 26.2 mile race, right? And if you look at a college 800 runner, again, there's variation, but typically they'll run between 45 and up to 70 miles a week. And they're training for an event that takes a minute and 45 or 50 seconds. Okay. Versus one that takes three hours. And my point there is to say this, is that I Understand why your 3 hour and change marathoner doesn't train that much because probably life. But if we look at it as a coach and we say, okay, how does that person want to improve, I'm going to tell you it's not their interval training or their repeats that they're doing, it's figuring out how to accumulate more aerobic volume. Some of that could be running, some of that could be cross training because that's where it is. Because an elite marathoner or someone trying to maximize their performance is going to do two to three times that. And I'll tell you again, I'm a 40 year old guy who runs with my daughter in stroller and runs 40 miles a week. And if you ask me to do a marathon tomorrow, I could do it, but my performance is going to be nowhere close to what I'm capable of. And sometimes we complicate things and it comes back to something that I had to learn. When I was a freshman in high school, when I was running five days a week during practice and my coach came up to me and said, Steve, you want to get better? I said yeah. Said step one, run on the weekends when we're not practicing. Said, okay, guess what, I got better. And I think often we overcomplicate things.

[A]

So if you're a four hour marathoner, you're essentially running like nine minute plus miles, right? Like that's not very fast. So does that person need to go to the track and throw down, you know, max interval sets? Because if all, if all they need to do is go from like a 9 minute per mile to like an 8, 30 per mile, well, there's no fast running involved at all in that. The way to achieve that is just by building your aerobic base.

[B]

Yes, it's the exact thing that I did when I started coaching high school. And you'd get the freshman in who had never run before and has run in like 910 minute miles because they've never done anything. And you say, okay, what are we going to do? Do no intervals, no workouts with the varsity or JV kids. We're going to just do some running and increase our mileage. And some of that would be with brakes and walk jogs, et cetera. But we're just increasing our mileage. And I think that holds true when we look at, if you're looking at going from nine minute pace, most of the program, if I was writing a program for them, would be increasing volume in safe ways, gradual ways, and then throwing in like, hey, let's do some feel good strides every once in a while and that's it for a long time.

[A]

Yeah. To go from a 9 minute to an 8 minute, you're taking 26 minutes. Off your marathon time without ever running fast.

[B]

Speed isn't the limiting factor if you're talking about nine minute miles for most people. Right.

[A]

It only becomes a factor when you start to get up, you know, kind of below 7 minute per mile pace.

[B]

Yeah. The way we look at everything is simple, is you look at the gap between the race distance you're running and your kind of like speed component. So simple idea. If I'm running, if I'm coaching an elite marathoner and she's trying to run a 220, but she's only run 69 minutes for a half marathon, which is just faster than 70, you know, she need to run, run. I got to work on getting a little faster in the half marathon. I could do the same. Going from half marathon to 10k, 10k to 5k, we look at the gap between the distances between the speed and endurance. Right. And at the highest level, you're playing with that gap. Sometimes you're being like, okay, we got to get our 5k time down so we have a bigger gap, so then we can build our endurance. On top of that, when we look at novices, often what we're doing is the endurance just isn't there. So that the gap is huge in terms of if I took them down to the track and said, hey, go run 100 meters or 400 or what have you, there's enough speed there. It's just they're not fit enough to have the endurance to do the thing. So we've got to spend a lot of time. And it comes down to. I think one of the reasons it's not popular is this is. Yeah, there's the time component, but I'd argue this is that if you do an interval session well and include the warmup and cooldown, the time component kind of cancels itself out because you can't just go down to the track and say, hi, I'm going to go run some hard intervals. You got to warm up, right. And do some strides and maybe some drills or flexibility stuff. It takes time and then you're tired afterwards, so you wait around before you cool down. So the time component, I never really buy that unless you're doing your intervals.

[A]

Dangerously, meaning that same amount of time if you had just done a zone two run. I mean, the other piece to that also is that if you're executing on those intervals properly, you actually need a lot of time to recover from them, which impairs your ability to train consistently and regularly. So if you just do that zone two run instead of Those intervals, you can wake up the next day and do another zone two run. Whereas those intervals will prevent you from doing anything hard for a certain amount of time.

[B]

Exactly. So I think for most people it's like, how do I figure out again, like Frank Shorter said years ago, how do I figure out how to get consistent good enough of that easy stuff for a long period of time and then we worry about it. And I think the key is for most people is like take bite sized chunks. Like if all you can do is fit in 30 minutes, great, do 30 minutes. But then over time you want to go 40 minutes and 50 minutes and 60 minutes. And the great thing about running, I love cycling and swimming, but I'm biased towards running. The great thing about running is I don't have to go run for three, four hours like on the bike, because the pounding prevents me from doing it. Even if I was training at a high level when I was running a lot of mile, I. Yeah, so there's the cap. So my advice to everybody out there asking and yelling about zone two and hit and blah, blah, blah, is just keep it simple. Get a lot of endurance work in. At some point you're going to notice you're fit enough to train. I think we need to get fit enough to train before we train. Train. Once you're fit enough to train, then start having fun with, then you can.

[A]

Do all these sorts of things. I think that piece that you just said just then is the key thing to understand about someone like David Roesch. Are you familiar with David Roesch? So he's on the podcast this week and I think what he's doing is really interesting and cool. All of his high intensity work and having his, his treadmill at an insane grade and studying competitive eaters and experimenting with his ability to absorb carbohydrates and bicarbonate and all these things. But he's allowed to play in those margins because he has 18 years of doing exactly what you said. And I think what gets missed, or what we conveniently want to kind of dismiss about his story and his recent successes is the fact that he has this, this base that he built for like almost two decades before he began to play with all of these other things.

[B]

This is the number one, like, misunderstood thing. And I'll use myself as an example again. I run 35 to 40 miles a week. I could go out tomorrow and run a 420 mile off of like, which.

[A]

Is insane, off of very little.

[B]

But it's why, Because I've been running at a relatively high level for 25 years. Years in that aerobic volume, even though I'm not doing as much now, is still there as long as I'm maintaining it to a degree. And that is the key. If you look at the success. For instance, recently in the US We've had a lot of really successful older marathoners, especially on the female side, who are in their late 30s or early 40s. For instance, Sarah Hall.

[A]

Sarah hall just broke her record.

[B]

And one of the reasons is that is because they've been consistent for a really long time so that they can then play with some of these things like you're suggesting there. For example, for years I worked with Roberta Groener. Now she's coached by someone else. But she just broke the, I think 45/master's record, running 229 or so in the marathon. And if you look at her volume, it's nowhere compared to what she was doing seven, eight years ago. But she doesn't have to because she's had a lifetime of accumulating this. So you get to experiment with, like, how should I combine these threshold runs or this VO2 max work, or this intense interval stuff, or the fueling or whatever have you. That's when you get to play with the margins because you're fit enough where you know you can.

[A]

If you build it correctly, it persists like it's there kind of latent in the background. Your strength gains and your speed and your ability to be nimble and accelerate. Those things fall apart quickly as soon as you stop doing them. And you have to work really hard to get them back. But that reservoir of endurance just sort of lingers there, and you can tap back into it. And that doesn't mean it is what it was, but it doesn't kind of like completely go away.

[B]

Yeah, if I stop sprinting, I get slow. Right. Because those neural components kind of like to really, you know, get those fast twitch fibers going, they fade relatively quickly. But on the endurance side, the decay is so much slower, which is why.

[A]

We see so many endurance athletes, or ultra endurance athletes, like, excelling at, you know, in later. In later phases of life. Like, we. We can't do the hundred meters like we could when we were 21, but maybe we can go 100 miles in a way that we couldn't when we were that age because of those many decades of kind of being an explorer in that endurance world.

[B]

Exactly. And I would also argue that the longer endurance stuff, where you also benefit is coming back to our early conversation, is you have some of the mental skills that you didn't when you were younger. So you can navigate some of the pain, the fatigue, you can understand how to listen to your body better. You can let go of some. Sarah hall, who we talked about earlier, want to talk about her in the book, but I worked with her for a number of years. One of the things that led to her breakthrough later in life was she essentially said, I let go of this performance outcome achievement thing.

[A]

Yeah, it's not a threat to your identity anymore. Like it doesn't matter really. Yeah.

[B]

You're 40, you have kids to take care of, you have family, you have a life, you have perspective. And sometimes that perspective hits us too late to take advantage of it. I guarantee you now, if I could transport 40 year old Steve into 20 year old Steve's body, Body. Oh, it runs so much faster.

[A]

We all, you know. Yes, if only, all of us could.

[B]

Do that, Steve, that, you know, that's the longevity hack I need. But the point is like, it's from a physical standpoint and from a mental reservoir standpoint. It's like we have this accumulated wisdom that we can tap into that often is kind of like a neglected part of the experience and the journey. And why I think it's important to whether your thing is running, cycling, another sport, another hobby, I don't care. But have things in your life that continue to challenge you in these ways because they bring so much not just physical benefits, but also mental.

[A]

Sarah just ran 228. Is that what she ran? 223.

[B]

She ran 223.

[A]

223, yeah. That's unbelievable. What is her priority, do you know?

[B]

220 and change.

[A]

So only three minutes slower than her best time. Which reminds me, speaking of like longevity and performance declines with age. You weighed in on the Jake Paul Tyson fight. You know when everyone's like, well, Mike Tyson's Mike Tyson, but he is 50, how's this gonna go? It was an interesting kind of thought experiment because. Because nobody was as powerful and fast and as fierce as Tyson at his prime. So on some level he's like an outlier. And how much does age factor in when you're somebody who is just so much better than everyone else who's going to now face somebody who's in their prime age for that particular sport? And the way that you contextualized it was by, by sharing masters records in running and to show kind of like how, you know this sort of the curve of how these things decline over time no matter what.

[B]

Yeah. You know I think there it was interesting cause we had the perfect comparison in running because the masters I think 55 plus 100 meter record was set by a guy named Willie Galt. Who was it? He was the guy, he was the guy. NFL player, you know, set the world record on the four by one we knew he could perform at like was a freak at his peak. And then we had his 55 plus year old age, you know, and when you saw it he's still amazingly fast, you know, 11 point something, right? But if you compare that you realize like uh, oh that's like a very good high school girls time for the hundred. Which tells us that like speed in power, although it's in the legs, like it has a steep decline especially once we get to 50, 55, 60 years old. And I think that's what we saw with Tyson is that age is undefeated even among freaks of freaks. We're all going to sustain despite, maybe someone's going to solve it. But despite what I think what we've seen in the health and wellness field is it's still going to win.

[A]

So when you look at these longevity influencers, and in particular let's take Brian Johnson, who you had a go at for he was sharing his VO2 max numbers and you kind of spanked him a little bit on that. But, but in terms of this idea of defying death and aging, where do you weigh in my friend?

[B]

You're just going all the controversial things.

[A]

Hey listen, you're the one who went out there and made a statement about these things.

[B]

Here's why, then I'll get to the answer to your question. But Brian Johnson, this is why this guy is known for optimizing and tracking everything, everything. And if you look at his VO2 max protocol fitness, it is not optimized.

[A]

I think you said it's like 30 years out of date or something.

[B]

Yes, it's not.

[A]

What's wrong with it? And what should he be doing?

[B]

So what he's doing and maybe he's updated. Hopefully he's updated. If he wants some advice, call me. Brian, happy to give it for free. But what he was doing essentially he was doing 4 by 4 minutes VO2 max work, repeating that, you know, multiple times per week.

[A]

This is the Norwegian. Norwegian like this is. Rhonda spoke about this the other day as well.

[B]

Yeah, and here's the deal that got popular because someone studied it, because some Norwegian cross country skiers were doing it and said hey, it works pretty well. But there are a million variations of the same workout that will get the same result. They just have not been researched and studied because researchers generally don't study individual workout types because it's really hard to run that study. And the data isn't actually that good because we have to constrain things from a research standpoint. So the reason it's wrong is because no individual athlete, unless we looked at again 30, 40 years ago, is going to repeat the same style of workout over and over again without some variation of intensities. It comes back to, back to what we talked about earlier. It's like his better approach would be a little bit more easy running or easy exercise, whatever it is, and then a mixture of interval training where sometimes you're going around threshold, sometimes you're going around 5k pace, sometimes you're doing this. Why? Because that's going to maximize the thing that he actually cares about, which is the overall aerobic performance, which is tied to longevity.

[A]

If you're doing the same workout every single day, your body adapts to that. Right. So it no longer is producing the stimulus that, you know, was the whole reason why you began doing it in the first place.

[B]

This is why we change workout types. And even if you said, I want to do 4 by 4 minutes all the time, I mean, your choice. But within that, what would we have to do? We'd have to change the speed sometimes, we'd have to change the rest intervals. Sometimes do it with really short rest intervals, a little slower, sometimes long rest intervals, like faster. Because if we don't, we're going to just, you know, adapt or we're not going to adapt. And again, going back to history, like, even though the training was less mature and evolved, even people like in the 1940s and 50s, like Roger Bannister, if you looked at Bannister did 10 by 400 all the time. But if you look at his progression, what did he do? He started in the fall at 70 seconds per 400 and then gradually got a little faster, a little faster, a little faster, a little faster, until they could run them in 60. And occasionally they throw in a different type of workout in there. But again, if you're the guy who's optimizing everything, you shouldn't be training like Roger Bannister did in the 1950s. You should be training like we do in the 2000s. So I think again, that's just my little track running fault there. But I think, think on the longevity piece, here's what I think. I think it's worthy to explore.

[A]

Yeah. To your point of we need to be more explorers. He's certainly that. And it's cool and fun to see him doing something so audacious. It's like we kind of need somebody like that who's out there trying all of these things and willing to have people make fun of him in the public sphere. Is he doing everything absolutely the way that he should be? Maybe not. Maybe everybody's got an opinion. You certainly have legitimacy to weigh in on the fitness piece of it all.

[B]

Exactly. And I think I have no fault for him doing that exploration again, I'll tie it to running. Arthur Lydiard revolutionized training by experimenting on himself. He was a milkman who decided, you know what? I'm going to try and run 200 miles a week and see what happens, happens. It was a little too much, so he dialed it back. But he experimented on himself, and that's what led to training principles being revolutionized and running. It wasn't like some scientist who figured this out. It was a milkman. I think that there is a degree of we need explorers experimenting. I think where I struggle with is we have to separate out what an experiment is on the individual from then validating that with good science.

[A]

Well, and on top of that, like, there's a difference between, I'm exploring this thing and I'll tell you what I find versus, like, do as I do. Bingo. And I think the human mind, like, it just wants to be told what to do. And these things are delivered in kind of these reductive pieces that aren't necessarily as helpful as they appear to be. I mean, in terms of like, like interval training, four by four, whatever it is. Like, this goes back, I mean, when I. In the 70s, when I was a kid, swimming, like all you do as a competitive swimmer is intervals, right? And that can mean a million different things. So sometimes it's, you know, 10 times 100 on very short rest. And the goal is to make each one of those exactly the same time so that you're completing it, you know, at the same pace that you initiated at other times, a little more rest. And you want each successive interval to be faster than the one preceded it. It's called a descending set. Sometimes you do pyramids where you build up and you come back down. Or sometimes you take an extreme amount of rest and you do fewer intervals and you're trying to just absolutely go all out on every single one and see if you can be consistent to the end. So the point being to say you should do intervals is sort of a meaningless concept other than that you're taking a compressed time and distance and trying to extract some kind of fitness gain out of that. But within that, there's a million variations and ways to kind of improve around the edges of your performance.

[B]

And this is one of my biggest complaints is we don't understand the nuance. Nuance of what you're just talking about that in the health and social media world. Because to your point, there was a guy in the 1950s and 60s named Mahaly Igloi who coached a bunch of Americans to world records. And he lived in Los Angeles. And because of that, they did all intervals, like swimmers, very little easy running. And people look at that and they're like, oh my gosh, you know the 1964 Olympic gold medalist Bob Schul, who he coached, he did all intervals. We should copy him. He didn't do any aerobic or easy stuff. But if you look at how the intervals were set, right. What was it? It was like hundreds and two hundreds with like laser short rest that wasn't that fast. So he was building that zone two aerobic system.

[A]

Yeah, you're basically built. You're trying to be at the highest or outermost edge of your zone too, the entire time. But you're not going to be able to complete the set if you exceed that threshold.

[B]

Bingo. And that's it. So I think that nuance is lost. And I think again, coming back to Rhonda Patrick, I think she does great work, but I think her downfall is that when it comes to high intensity interval training is she looks at the science, which is good. But you have to understand, I'll just call it the coaching artistry of what you're just talking about there, where there's a million ways to do these intervals and how we twist and turn the variables will impact the adaptation we have. And I get we can't tell everyone how to complicate and twist all the variables. But my job as a coach is to say, hey, when we say high intensity interval training, I'll tell you, I looked at up about a month ago to see what the science said on it. It said essentially defining high intensity interval training was anything from, I think it was like 20 seconds to 15 minute intervals at varying intensities. And when I saw that definition, I'm like, I can do something that puts someone in the hurt locker full of lactate and acid with 1520 second intervals off three intervals. We'll just go all out and you'll be done and on the ground puking. And I can do 15 minute intervals completely aerobically yeah. And we'll be fine.

[A]

Yeah. We would do in Christmas training, like the most intense training season of the year for swimming. We do every year we do 10 times 1000 long course meters, 10,000 meters of swimming. You know, these like, takes you like, you know, three hours or whatever, like a couple hours to do this. You know, that's an interval set.

[B]

Exactly. And I think this is where again, I just wish my call is, and I'm a scientist at heart, but the research is good. But I just wish people would take the time on the health and fitness and longevity space to understand some of the history of training, whether it be and coaching, whether it's swimming, running, cycling, it'll all get you to the same spot in terms of understanding of it, because I think there's so much data and understanding there that it gets lost. And I think you see that with Brian Johnson, for example, because what does he do? He sees the Norwegian method, the four by four minutes or whoever he's working with, and he says, oh, this has a research study. This must be the best. I'm going to do this where if you went down to your high school cross country coach and they were decent, they could write you a better program because they understand the interval training or the same with the swim coach at the high school, because they had to understand and see and test. Hmm. If I do this, this and this, do my athletes improve and get better and you understand that along with your knowledge and history?

[A]

All right, so Brian, give Steve a call. He's waiting for your call.

[B]

But here's the deal is I hate on or I throw things out on social media a lot, lot on whether it's longevity or health, what have you. But I'm doing that in my areas, as we talked about, because I have the expertise and hopefully knowledge to pass along. And while I might give some people some chit, I really do want them to understand and update. And if anybody ever comes to me and I've had people do this and say, hey, let me understand this more influencer podcast or whatever, I will give them free stuff. I will say, here's, let's talk, here's all my resources for coaching. Like, let's understand this because I think at the end of the day, well, it's kind of fun and you get addicted to like, you know, calling people out on things. The goal is better information. And if you have a large platform and you're talking to health, fitness, especially in endurance world, I want you conveying information that's going to help People, and that's what I'm about. And sorry if I get on you every once in a while, but I.

[A]

Love the passion, I love the energy. All right, well, let's kind of end this with some concluding thoughts or synthesis of kind of what we've covered today in the context of winning the inside game, which is really winning. The inside game is about the inside job. Right. So what do you want to leave people with in terms of, like, how they should think about why this is important and kind of how to go about it?

[B]

Our society's like, pull towards success and achievement is a making a lot of people miserable. We can see this on youth sports. The dropout rate. I think it's like 70% of kids quit sports by 13. We can see it in academics. If you look at the pressure and stress around everything from elementary to high school teaching to the test, it just makes teachers miserable. It makes kids miserable, and it hurts our performance as well. If you look at it. And then if you look at the workplace or entrepreneur or what have you. As we've talked about the sole zero sum game of win or lose, defining success externally causes us to perform worse, not fulfill our potential and make us miserable. And my call in this book is simple. I'm not telling you, forget about achievements. I have achievements and goals that I want to get as well as anybody else. But what I'm telling you is we need to rebalance that equation. And part of that means we need to redefine success, not having our entire identity tied to it, but diversifying our kind of sources of meaning, diversifying our definition of success, and move more towards that exploratory nature where we realize that, like myself and I had to. The fact that my mile best ends with 401 instead of 3. Something might have heard in the moment. But what mattered more is that journey that I went on to understand and explore my limits, even if I didn't find the outer bounds of it, because that led to basically everything else that I've gotten to explore and do.

[A]

Yeah, if you would achieve that goal and run 359, at some point.

[B]

You wouldn't be sitting.

[A]

You would not be writing books. Who knows what you would be doing? But, like, I really don't think any of these books or any of the stuff that you've done would have occurred because. Because it's that splinter that basically is the generative energy behind all of this exploration that you've done.

[B]

It was the worst thing to happen in the moment, but the best thing in my life because you're spot on. I wouldn't have gone on that exploration. So that's what in the research bears this out in a number of ways. Away from sport is like sometimes those moments that hit us the hardest are the path opening up for us to explore somewhere new where we never thought we'd go down. Because if you asked teenage Steve or 20 something year old Steve if he'd be writing a book about redefining success and talking about Eastern and Western religions and academic studies and stuff, he'd be like, who were you talking about? Steve only cares about running and running a fast mile. That's all that matters. So again, sometimes that's the universe saying, like, hey, get exploring.

[A]

Yeah. Nobody who's in the midst of, you know, kind of dealing with a, with a, with a, with a big failure wants to hear that. But time and time again it's proven true. Sometimes the timeline has to be, you know, pretty long for that to kind of bear fruit. But I see it all the time. These things that we perceive in the moment to be cataclysmic or just setbacks ultimately are things, if we have the resources and the wherewithal, are the building blocks for something better. You could be that guy. Maybe you even went on and won the gold medal in the 1500 meters or something like that. But then who are you? Are you the guy who's just dining out on that for the rest of your life? Yeah, you know, who knows, right? But I don't know, you seem like you're pretty happy doing what you're doing right now. And what you're doing, I'm sure, gives you that sense of meaning and purpose because it is an act of service to other people.

[B]

Well, I appreciate that. So I'm just going to remind myself that Rich Roll tells me it's all right that I ran 401. We're all good.

[A]

We thank you for running 401, Steve. And we then, of course thank you for all the books that you've contributed as a result of that deep wound that you're still trying to, trying to heal within yourself, the product of which is win the Inside Game, which is great book. Congrats on that. And everybody can get it everywhere. Steve is going to go home now because his wife is pregnant and is going to be having a child. And by the time we put this up, you will have a new baby. Boy or girl? Girl.

[B]

Girl. So two girls.

[A]

So two girls. Wow. That's, that's, that's me too, dad.

[B]

I'm gonna have to come to you for some tips.

[A]

I've been through it all. Well the youngest is now 16 so I've seen it all my friend and I will happily take your call. Thanks man. For people who want to learn more about you, maybe just leave us with like all the places and all the things.

[B]

Yeah on all social media, Instagram, Twitter, all variations tevemagnus, my website Steve Magnus.com and then I've got a newsletter along with good friend and colleague Brad Stolberg.

[A]

Friend of the pod.

[B]

Yep. Called the Growth Equation Newsletter. Can find it if you google it.

[A]

Excellent man. Thank you buddy.

[B]

Thanks a lot.

[A]

Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode [e-mail] where you can find the entire entire podcast archive my books Finding Ultra Voicing, Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power meal [e-mail] if you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify and on YouTube and leave a review and or comment. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com sponsors 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 [e-mail] Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Cameolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake, portraits by Davey Greenberg, graphic and social media assets courtesy of Daniel Solis. And thank you Georgia Whaley for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatta Wyatt and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace Plants Namaste.