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

Episode Date: January 30, 2025

Steve Magness is a renowned performance expert and author of “Win the Inside Game,” who has dedicated his career to examining why we often calcify into patterns that no longer serve us.   This conversation explores how our modern obsession with achievement often leads to self-sabotage. Through the aperture of his journey from elite runner to pioneering coach, Steve offers a framework for sustainable excellence that emphasizes internal growth over external validation.   Steve reveals how social media hijacks our basic needs, why group identity threatens individual growth, and what it truly means to win the inside game.   This is a masterclass in moving beyond surviving to genuinely thriving. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors:  Pique: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first purchase 👉🏾 piquelife.com/richroll On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style 👉on.com/richroll AG1: Get a FREE bottle of Vitamin D3+K2 AND 5 free AG1 Travel Packs 👉drinkAG1.com/richroll Rocket Money: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money 👉 RocketMoney.com/RICHROLL. Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors 👉 richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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That's on.com slash richroll. 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. 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 Magnus 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. So much of whether we're talking about 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 gonna strive for this, but I'm still gonna have a little bit of space between this goal and my sense of self. And I think that's where the magic occurs. 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. The reality is none of us are that good until we try something for a long enough period of time. We're not allowed to not be good.

Great, 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 it's adults or kids. So what's the solution, Steve? Like, how do we emerge out of it? I think step one is.

Steve, great to have you back here. Oh, thanks for having me. 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, you know, creates this curiosity and this desire to like understand like what held you back and how you can kind of pay forward what you've learned to help other people kind of avoid the things that you had to contend with as a young person.

That is the essence of my writing career. And you're still doing it. How many books have you written at this point? Oh gosh, five. Five, yeah. But like expanding the aperture, right? Starting very, you know, kind of specifically on, you know, the art and science of running

and now kind of like blowing it wide into kind of principles that are applicable to everybody. 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 wanna write like the be all end all on 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, like I've kind of expanded because the questions have expanded at that time in my early 20s, like what mattered to me. How dare you get outside your lane coming from like the origin of that metaphor, right?

Like a sport in which it's literally about being in your lane. You know, 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 that. Yeah, like I don't know how people kind of do that. Like they're so into one thing and they stay there.

Yeah. They get bored. It blows my mind. I'm, you know, I was talking to a good friend and author who's got a book coming out on this, Alex Hutchinson. Sure. I'm trying to get him on.

We're working on scheduling right now. He was a very early guest on the show. Yeah. When his book, Endure came out, which I still think is like, that sets the bar for everybody else. 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 I can't, you can explore deep, right? You can go nerd out on the science of running and like go deeper and deeper, but at some point the gain becomes smaller and smaller and smaller, right? And the returns more and more diminishing.

Exactly, it's why at a 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 gonna go nuts because it was just going deeper and deeper and deeper on a narrow end 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 skillset 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 like, 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, it 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 like keep that exploration going. And then 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. That's the name of the game. Because nowadays, especially with AI, like 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 applicability, it's the translation that really matters. 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 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, you know, reflex around exploration starts to become limited and they stay in that world rather than take everything

they learned as a result of that experience and then translate it or apply it in other areas of life. I'm always curious around like why that is or our own kind of human facility for whether you call it like denial or some version of that, right? Like 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 like lauded for what you've done within that world and yet it becomes this trap. 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 24 seven, could do it all day with no prep, right? 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 that 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 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. Right, but we become calcified A as a function of aging. And secondarily, just because it's, you know, we delude ourselves into thinking like, oh, we're still exploring the edges of our comfort zone while remaining within it all along.

Yeah, I mean, the best antidote to this is have a young kid. Cause when I- Which are on the precipice of, you know, doubling down on, right? You're about to have a young kid. Cause when I- Which are on the precipice of doubling down on, right? You're about to have your second kid. Exactly, but like 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 and 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 like,

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 gonna happen, right?

We can predict if I go on this run, this is how I'm gonna feel. If I write this book, this is how I'm gonna 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, uncertain, feels like we might not belong

or like find our path because like it's the social media of everything, then that just pushes us more and more to narrow. 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. Yeah, there's like five or six different psychological theories that all say the same thing. 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 like notice that within themselves and step outside of it, and the person who has the awareness to like 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. So a couple of 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 gonna 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 gonna go back to the toddler example. It's on my mind. Sorry, you're gonna 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 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,

and explore. Because that sense of security is already taken care of. Bingo. You know mom or dad or someone there is gonna step in and save you if you got in real trouble. 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 and kind of who we are or our environments or where we belong, then we're not gonna 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 gonna leave this like couch or mom or dad, because like, this is the only place I feel safe. 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, you know,

kind of in fact make us feel perhaps a little bit more uncertain than we have in years past, but at the same time, you know, 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. The way I like to explain this is our brain is predictive. So I'll use another toddler example. Is a couple of 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 baby's head, 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 gonna 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, coming through our social media app and all that stuff, then our predictive brain says, okay, what am I gonna 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 gonna 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 pioneer called George Gerbner

coined a mean world syndrome. And he essentially found that the more people watch 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 like their neighborhood wasn't safe. And it's only gotten worse since then.

There was a, again, years ago when the Boston Marathon bombing occurred, they were in 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, TV, they had higher stress levels than people who were actually there that day. Wow. 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 tribe mates 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 gonna 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.

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, you know, 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 our kind of brain's inability to see it for what it is and take a step back from it. Exactly, we can, in that example, you can take off the boot, you see the nail isn't in your foot and you're okay.

Your brain goes, okay, I'm gonna 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. 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. 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, you know, the kind of terms that, you know,

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 like 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, like usually like to your point about like how we kind

of withdraw, you know, 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 like 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, I didn't, what did I do? I tagged you in it, right? And so I was like, cause 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, you know? And I was like, okay, this is exactly why I don't do this.

Like, I'm not doing this again. This is not worth it. And like, was this productive? I don't really think so. And so, you know, my brain goes, yeah, take a step back and like maybe not engage in this way. But your relationship with it is a little bit different. Like you move towards it.

I wish for my own mental health that I did what you did, because it can be both addicting and 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, like correct and put things out there. Cause if we didn't, who wins?

We get nonsense all the time. So I have this like inner battle of myself. I'm like, okay, do I really wanna to go through this and put this out on social media? Because like, 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 like 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 gonna 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. But there is a countervailing incentive, which is when you do that, it does gather attention.

I can't remember, 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 all the stuff that he shares. And so 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, you know, aspire to accomplish or, you know, the trajectory that you wanna be on very much has to do with your attachment to things that are at cross purposes with it. That is, you know, 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 like the psychology of high performance. Absolutely. And as I said, with the social media, I think we're only beginning to understand about like the psychology of high performance. Absolutely. And as I said, with the social media, I think this is the problem. It incentivizes attachment.

Cause if I wanted, if my goal in social media was growth, right, or notoriety, I would just tweet out or send out into the world, like fact checks on controversial things. I would talk about cold plunges every day, all day, right? I would talk about zone two in high intensity interval training in the most controversial way.

But if I do that, what happens to me is I essentially like cling and attach to these things is 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 like might be good for some people, but not the best for all. I think those studies might exist.

They probably do. I think those studies might exist. They probably do. I'm 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. Cause if I tie my entire identity around, in my case, like correcting people on endurance training stuff and X, Y, Z, 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 a potential.

I've got to be able to change and adapt. And if I'm too attached, I'm not going to. Yeah, hold your attachments loosely. And it goes to 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 your ability to grow and evolve. And the problem sort of is rooted in this evolutionary, you know, kind of impulse or demand that we have, which is to, you know, be a member of a group, right? Like that is our core thing.

Like we wanna be, you know, part of a community. And the problem arises when that becomes a really calcified attachment that then any idea, And the problem arises when that becomes a really calcified attachment that then any idea, you know, that is at cross purposes with that kind of is taken as like an attack or an assault. Yeah. That you have to defend against. 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 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 like 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 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 like they fill a void. And when we do that, we stop listening learning. 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 like nuance, right? Like an intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations. Like we wanna be intrinsically motivated, which means we need to have this connection

and relationship with ourselves where 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 kind of taken as a threat to that. There's ideas or opinions, but when those are too closely aligned with like who you think you are

and how you hold yourself out to the world, then it becomes problematic. It's one of the central problems of our current world. Because think about it, whether we look at, I'm not gonna 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 protective end mode because there's that identity intertwined man. Yeah. Where it's like, you can't even mention it. 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 dies for, 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 it continues to kind of become atomized and there's more and more subgroups, you know, like that's only gonna like proliferate as far as I can tell. We've, yeah, you're spot on.

We've made everything politics. And the result is like politics used to be. Until every single person is their own little political. Right, but that's separated. This is the thing you keep. Our desire to be part of a community then leaves us like completely alone on our own like, you know, deserted island.

Bingo, 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, like it pushes us towards like living in threat mode, it pushes us towards like 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 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 for 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. We're brought to you today by AG1.

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Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com slash richroll today. Go to rocketmoney.com slash rich roll today at rocketmoney.com slash rich roll. There's an alignment problem because our environments are kind of pushing us towards this, you know, without us even cosigning it. Like it's just sort of happening in the background.

All the tectonic plates of our external environment is kind of driving this result. So in terms of like opting out, like to me, it feels like a big piece within this is on us. Like we have to take individual responsibility to kind of rebut these forces in a way that maybe we never had to in the past.

But at the core of being able to do that is this identity piece that you talk about in the book, but that requires like a degree of real discernment. Like you have to really know who you are so that you have a barometer or a compass that can point you towards whatever your true North is and be able to distinguish like what you actually care about and what you don't and how much,

like what to really invest yourself in and where are the things that it's in your best interest to detach. 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? 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. Exactly, right? We had, even if you look at kids, kids had time to explore, right? They weren't inundated with social media comparisons. They explored locally, right? So me and running, how did I fall in love with running?

I found out I was pretty good, right? Not globally, just within my class and like, you know, middle school and beyond. And 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, the 50 other kids who are in my class or grade or whatever. I'll keep doing this. Now it's global. Can you imagine young Steve, like he runs up like a 558 or whatever and a mile

and he decides to post it on social media and just gets shellacked with like, why that's a terrible time. Exactly. And then what do you do? You're like, I'm not doing this anymore. Bingo. That's it. Like we have cut off the role for like 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 we try something for a long enough period of time. But we've kind of just kind of- We're not allowed to not be good anymore. And I even struggled this with myself, right? Because as adults, what happens? You stop trying to do things that 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 it's adults or kids, because we don't get that natural cycle of like exploring something until we figure out if we're good at it.

So what's the solution, Steve? What have you discovered going down the rabbit hole of this problem? Like how do we emerge out of it? Just read my book and I'll give you all the answers. No, but here's the nuance of it. Is there, 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 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 help people and help ourselves like fulfill those needs in a productive way? Like how do we reach for the vegetables

instead of like the candy that's just gonna give us temporary fulfillment. But, you know, an hour later, we're gonna feel miserable and hungry again. Breaking that down to it's, you know, kind of elemental pieces. You know, 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 in breeze in between, thought and action or like idea and execution that we get hamstrung, right?

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 like, 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 like the normal stuff, right? Like what is the first step or the kind of catalyst to like trigger somebody out of that rut and get them into kind of a new way of behaving? 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 one place. And this is one of the fundamental mistakes we've made in society. We try and get it all from our work, right?

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, is I wanna 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, right? You volunteer to coach your kids, you know, soccer team. You look for other avenues that kind of fulfill and give you the 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, you know, eventually books. But it was just, it wasn't, I'm gonna become a writer. I'm gonna use this to fund my future life. This was, I need another sense-making outlet that gives me some sort of, fulfills these things that running once did, but can't right now because of the situation I'm in.

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 sense that like 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, you know, doing it for me. Like I'm gonna write books. Like, well, I don't like coaching or coaching isn't really doing it for me.

Like I'm gonna write books. Like, well, I can't write a book. I've never written a book. Like that's for those people that write books. Or it's like, just like, 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, that you feel like you can accomplish and just start to like stack those. And this is again a consequence of the environmentally living 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 like the comparison tells us that, oh, if I'm gonna be a writer, I need to write books. That's what everybody else does. But they forget that like, you know, 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 like succeed or fail. And it comes back to one of the things that prevents people is we've internalized failure is 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, in the writing example, writing for yourself, where that's sharing with friends, whether that's taking the smallest step to just explore something else in a safe and secure manner, like 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. Like, can, 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 gonna 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 like 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 like 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. 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 like kind of like nutrition.

It's the quest. Yeah, I know. It is and one of my favorite studies I talked about in the book, they looked at Olympic swimmers. And these are like Olympic medalists, some of the biggest names. And they looked at and 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 gonna 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 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 in its important part, but we get distracted and think the important part is like achieving that end goal when it's not. Yeah, the best modern example of that with respect to Olympic swimmers,

I think is Caleb Dressel, 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 like rejuvenated his love for the sport, but the relationship was different, right? It was no longer about performance and podiums necessarily and more about like 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. I love that moment.

And I think it's so great. And I think people discount those experiences and think that like, oh, like that's not what got him there, right? But that is the, 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 add the perspective to understand and embrace it.

Cause there's so many athletes that I've worked with, you know, who they get the performance and it's wholly unfulfilling. They thought it was gonna be X, Y, and Z, but then they achieve it. And they're almost like empty. Because there was this implied promise that this was going to fill

whatever hole that they have, right? Like, Bingo. And then they realized like, well, you take yourself wherever you go, right? And when you arrive, you're still the same person. Even like, even Alex Honnold, who I wouldn't characterize as somebody who is like, 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 like, you know, when I did all these things that I would be the man. And like, 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. That's like.

But it's another great example. But it's identity, you know, it goes back to like this attachment to your identity being contingent upon these performance goals, as opposed to being, holding it a little bit at arms distance and saying like, I care about these goals, but if I don't achieve them, it's not a threat to like, you know,

the core of like 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, like their value is inextricably linked to, their career trajectory 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 gonna feel like, you know, you're less than and that is really the definition of your identity. That's the crux of it. And I think coming to the nuance is, it's not saying, hey, achievements don't matter

or performance don't matter. It's your relationship. It's your relationship with them, right? It's being able to say, okay, I'm gonna strive for this but I'm still gonna 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 gonna take us all the way back to the African Savannah. 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 of 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 in the end result is like people feel kind of miserable and not motivated. Yeah, what is the avenue where they can contribute and feel good about that contribution? And if that's not available when 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 like figure out, we should live in environments that are like, kind of moving us towards that inevitably. It is, but what we've done is again, societally, I mean, a lot of the book is about narrowing and sprouting,

but societally we've narrowed those paths. So if you're a young kid or young male, especially you coming out, you see only a handful of paths, right? And 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 like going to college versus trade schools and things like that.

Like we've kind of minimized the non-college route and pushed everyone over here, but that minimizes potential paths for people. And 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 like 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, 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 it's something like 15 to 20%. Okay, why? Role model effect. You see a future and that future is a little bit more attainable because like you have someone to relate to, right? The same thing applies to whether we're talking out different jobs, avenues, anything

is we've gotta be able to see future paths. And instead what we've done is kind of narrowed them so that it's kind of impossible. At the same time, and this goes to the, it's not a black or white thing and it's you know, it's kind of yes and, and both. We're also, you know, I think it needs to be said like 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, you know, who goes on YouTube can find, you know, 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? Like, 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. 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 gonna 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, you know, potential paths. I think the other aspect of it is again,

if you come back to the idea of like, we evolved to grow up in local communities. In fact, archeologists and some scientists called it like the transition from known to anonymous societies. So there's all sorts of data that showed that again, way back in the day, tribes generally expanded to about 150 people. And then they had infighting 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. In 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. And 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 it's 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 like the ability to expand past that barrier. At the same time,

that's beyond the individual's sort of agency or capacity to create. And turning back to like 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, like I think the biggest piece obviously

is your relationship to your own identity and being willing to go on that kind of inward journey to understand who you are. But within that, in terms of like the way out or like 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. Like, are you really curious about that? Or is that just a reaction to, you know, an external stimuli, because you've seen other people doing that

and you don't know what else to do. Instead, like, I think that the better path is to really understand your own curiosity. The problem with that is that, you know, it goes back to our environmental, you know, kind of incentives like this American, like, like capitalistic society is not conducive to everybody kind of create,

sort of investing in their own curiosity. Like 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, right? Like 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, youated it to some kind of dark place. So when you say like, be curious or invest in your kids, 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 get back to that place where I can be curious and like notice things. And then when I do notice them say, oh, like 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. You know what one of the biggest propellers

of curiosity is? Boredom. And we've eliminated boredom. Cause 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 algorithm will say,

I know what you're curious about, but are you, or are you just impulsed in some kind of addictive way, you know, that's being directed by your lizard brain. Right, that's it. So, and again, what psychology research tells us is that like, 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 out. And just raw dog it. And I'll just go, right? What a courageous man you are. It's almost like you're cutting against the grain to even go running without your earbuds in

and the latest podcast or music, album that dropped. But that, and I'll tell you this 100%, if I didn't do that, I would not be writing books. Because most of either my ideas or the solving of how in the hell am I gonna make this connect and work in this book comes either on a walker or 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 like bring that back. And 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 for fellows

with kids is it teaches them how to interact. It teaches them how to develop their own rules and constraints, et cetera. It teaches them how to solve problems and like explore. And I think as adults, you're probably saying, well, I'm not gonna 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 insight saying,

you know what, and I'll do this. I'll go on, I call them down the rabbit hole days 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 gonna go anywhere but I'm just gonna 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,

I'm gonna use this for, to create my next book. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The new year is upon us. Everybody's thinking about how to get healthier, how to lose weight, how to eat more nutritiously, and we have the perfect solution for you. It's called the Plant Power Meal Planner.

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So to learn more and to 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 Approve 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 to state where your blood is pumping and lends itself to your brain, kind of being in that, you know, to inhabit that space? 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 and our thinking. If we go too elevated, we stop being able to like think because that attention has to be direct towards the activity we're doing. So if I'm running, you know, VO2 max intervals or something,

I can't be creative because all my resources are diverted towards like 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 like more creative side. In easy runs, they're like at like 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.

The problem arises for me though, because that's the place where I have all these ideas, I've learned that I often like forget them. you know, it's sort of like a dream. Like 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 it'd make a voice memo or to like, you know,

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 in like, which is obviously every time you do that, you're really in that space, you gotta stop a lot in order to do that or to pull it out and like, which is obviously every time you do that, you're interrupting that flow. I need someone listening to make a device

that doesn't interrupt where I can record ideas. Rich and I can just somehow record ideas without disrupting it because I, same deal, there have been so many times I figured out something or thought I have and then been like, oh crap, I've gotta make it like the three miles home without forgetting. Without forgetting, I know.

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

It's like, think of it as like, 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 like good companies do this, right? It's the old classic like 3M example, right?

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. And some great ideas came out of that. Like the sticky notes came out of that. Other companies have copied stuff like that, but you need to have like this time and period where you just get to explore things

and dabble long enough to see if they're interesting. And you know, some things won't and that's fine. But if we never go on that journey, then we never sparked that curiosity. We never get that exploration kind of gene going. And instead we stick to narrow, comfortable, you know, same old, same old. And then our identity tends to, you know,

constrict around, whatever it is, we get that kind of numbness of experience. It's harder in the work context unless you have like a management structure that is conducive to those sorts of activities. I mean, Ed Catnall comes to mind, like what he's done around, like the importance of cultivating creativity

in the workplace and kind of taking failure off the table because 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 exercising curiosity or an exploration, right? So it's, 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 kind of convince yourself that this is not like that. All you're trying to do is convince your brain that it's okay to try and fail.

Yeah. I mean, this is like- You're not gonna die or get kicked out of your tribe. That's it. Because when we activate these things, our brain goes, okay, I'm gonna be alone and get kicked out of my tribe. Like, I can't try this. And that's like the circuitry that is there.

In so much of life, especially in a world as we've talked about where like failure is public. If we look at the number one thing that causes like 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 about sport, performance or creativity is figuring out these almost like mental games to convince our brain or convince the people you're working with 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 you. 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's that short circuits mastery.

Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things that is simple to talk about, but really freaking hard to do. Why is it so hard? Because we're human. Because we have these, we have an inbuilt psychological immune system that wants to convince ourselves

that like we are the hero of the story, that we are a good person, and that like 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 gonna like shut that down.

We're gonna disconnect from that. We're gonna make sure that that doesn't attack us. 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 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, you know, 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, you know,

create this individual who could be healthy in the world. Short of that, somebody else who, you know, maybe this individual who could be healthy in the world. Short of that, somebody else who, you know, 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 gonna be more resistant in that kind of transition. So the good news is this, just about everything is trainable to a degree. Now, are you going to go from like, am I gonna go from, you know, maybe not that good to Zen master? Probably not, right?

If my environment like doesn't, 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 gonna take that person and make them like OCD free? No, probably not. But we're gonna 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 yips. 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 nine to a four. And if we're at a four, we can function, right? And that's the key. 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 in, 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. Like these things happen over time by creating, by putting yourself in a situation

that's just risky enough to manage and then developing the resilience that comes with every kind of like notch up from there. It's a long path. This is why like we struggle with it because it takes time to like 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 like a long time spent like slowly adapting our mind or body works. Can we shift gears and bust a few fitness myths? I can't have you here and not like have you kind of roll up your sleeves and, you know,

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 two training, high intensity training, VO2 max, terms that are getting thrown around quite a bit, even more so than a couple of years ago,

do a no small part to everybody's fascination around like emerging longevity science, right? And so now we have these like 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 in my fitness, 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, Rich. 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, 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 like vigorous exercise, right? And the relationship of that with this marker, VO2 max and the importance of that marker in terms of like longevity. And so for the time crunched individual, she's basically saying like the 80-20 rule, which is like, do most of your, 80% should be like 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 would 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 marker. All right, so let's break this down. And I agree, I think Ron 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, 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 sub max 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 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 gonna live longer based on the research or the longevity piece. All you need to do is go down to 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 like some watches do it pretty well, some are like all over the freaking place. So like, and you 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. In other words, stop obsessing about this marker as an end game, but look at it rather as a by-product 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, you know, numbers are incredibly high, but not because they're focused on elevating them, only because they're focused on the training that, you know, the VO2 max of which is a by-product of that. So there was a lot of like, there was a lot of like energy around Tadej Pagache or going on Peter Rettias podcast. And Peter is someone who's very interested in VO2 max

and curious about it and somebody who is, you know, a longevity, you know, expert. And it seemed to me that he was somewhat surprised that Tadej was sort of dismissive of this or like not all that interested in like measuring it very often. And that's just because like that, 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. 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 this is because of all the components of endurance performance, it's the least trainable. 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 gonna take care of itself if we don't train like an idiot because it's gonna reach a natural number and then kind of fluctuate a little bit, but it stays.

It stays around. It's not something that's wildly, you know, vacillating. Right, so if, 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, like we measure the thing to get an idea,

but we don't like tie everything to it. And I think in the longevity community, they've missed that lesson a little bit and that they tie too much to it because it's a nice round number that tells us something and is like fancy. And we tie something to it without realizing like, hey, like holistic endurance performance,

holistic performance is probably the better thing to worry about, which includes all these other things. So like, let's just worry about getting people a little bit fitter. Right, but then you're opening up the Pandora's box of like, well, how do we get there, right? And 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 aren't exactly all that enthusiastic about like all the zone two stuff. Although there is a lot of energy, like people are fascinated by, in a way that I would have never predicted.

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, you know, 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 gonna 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. 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 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. Yeah, you will plateau. 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 gap 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, then I'm running intervals every day or every couple of days. Overtraining is going to happen at some point. And we, 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 like the assistant football coach as their cross country coach, who just like stood at the track and timed them every day and they did intervals. And you'd see, you'd be like, hmm, 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 them,

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, like get the benefits you need. You might not have the balance of like the 80-20 rule

because you're not running that much or you know, 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, like 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, right? 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. And it's still the case. It's still the case.

We can argue over the nuance of, well, should this be at like lactate threshold or a 10K pace or 5K pace or repeat 400s 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. On some level, the arguments around the margins are from a psychological perspective, like a sort of a master puratory,

excuse making machine that gets in the way of just going out and doing the thing. Like let's, you feel like you're doing it if you're arguing about these things rather than actually like kind of executing on the thing that's gonna 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, 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? And that 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 to keep these things even, that's because you don't have an aerobic fitness foundation. I couldn't have said it better myself. I totally agree. It's a quick, easy, like marker that tells you. And I'll tell you this as a, you know,

someone who runs 35 to 40 miles a week when I used to run 100. Like 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 base, 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 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 that's 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 like bending over, catching your breath, like 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, another 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 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. You got in some heat on social media for responding to a tweet where somebody was comparing, I think it was around the time of the Paris Olympics, comparing like the physiques of sprinters

to that of marathoners, saying like, it's pretty obvious, like who's held here based upon, you know, how they physically present. And you took a bite on that one. And that turned into like a new cycle. Do you wanna explain that? I just think that we've fallen for what I'd call is performative health,

meaning how health looks instead of what it really is. And I think if we look at, often we see these memes where it's like, sprinter versus endurance athlete, and people are like, oh, why would you wanna look like the marathon? The emaciated elite marathon runner and the completely jacked 100 meter runner.

Bingo. But if you look at the data and I'm scientists, I go by the data. There's been tons of studies that I've looked at former Olympians, elite athletes and a variety of sports. And what most of the data says essentially is this, is that endurance or mixed, you know, event athletes have better longevity.

Sprint, speed, power, strength, pure strength athletes tend to have lower longevity. And it makes sense physiologically because like, 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 like jacked, we're not very efficient. We don't have many mitochondria, like in the mitochondria density isn't there to handle the energetic load of the force output that we have there. So again, I love sprinting, I love all that stuff,

but if we're looking at purely from a health standpoint and longevity, like the endurance athlete, like there's a reason we used to be persistent hunters, right, is for the efficiency of the thing. 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

and you knew about running is wrong. Long run is dead. It's just junk miles, et cetera. And you're like the average collegiate 800 meter runner runs way more than the kind of amateur average person who's training for a marathon. It's true. 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 230 to sub three hours, et cetera, et cetera. And if you look at the three hour to 330 hour marathoner, who's pretty dang good. Like that's not bad.

Like that takes some training. On average, they run about 40 ish miles a week. 40 ish, no, 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 three hour and change marathon or 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 wanna improve? I'm gonna tell you, it's not their interval training or their, you know, 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 gonna 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 asked 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 wanna get better?

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. 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 they need to do is go from like a nine minute per mile to like an 830 per mile, there's no fast running involved at all in that. The way to achieve that is just by building your aerobic base.

Yes, it's the exact thing that I did when I started coaching high school and you'd get the freshmen in who had never run before and has run in like nine, 10 minute miles because they've never done anything. And you say, okay, what are we gonna do? No intervals, no workouts with the varsity or JV kids. We're gonna just do some running and increase our mileage. And some of that would be with breaks 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.

Yeah, to go from a nine minute to an eight minute, you're taking 26 minutes off your marathon time without ever running fast. Speed isn't the limiting factor if you're talking about nine minute miles for most people, right? It only becomes a factor when you start to get up, you know, kind of below seven minute per mile pace.

Yeah, it's the way we look at everything is simple, is you look at the gap between the race distance you're running and you're kind of like speed component. So it's simple idea. If I'm running a, if I'm coaching 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. 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 like the speed and endurance, right? And at the highest level, you're playing with that gap.

Sometimes you're being like, okay, we gotta 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 like the endurance just isn't there so that like the gap is huge in terms of if I took them down to the track and said,

hey, go run a hundred meters or 400 or what have you, there's enough speed there. It's just they're not fit enough to like 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 cool down, the time component kind of cancels itself out. Cause you can't just go down to the track and say, hi, I'm gonna go run some hard intervals. You gotta 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 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, you know, those intervals will prevent you

from doing anything hard, you know, for a certain amount of time. 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 wanna 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, 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 mileage.

I, when I was running- Yeah, the perimeter. 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 like, just keep it simple. Get a lot of endurance work in. At some point you're gonna notice

you're fit enough to train. Like I think we need to get fit enough to train before we train. Once you're fit enough to train like I think we need to get fit enough to train before we train. Once you're fit enough to train, then start having fun with some- Then you can 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 Roche. Like, are you familiar with David Roche? So he's like, he's on the podcast this week. And I think what he's doing is really interesting and cool. All of his like high intensity work and like, you know, like having his treadmill at an insane grade and like studying competitive eaters and experimenting with his ability to like absorb

carbohydrates and bicarbonate and all these things. But these are like, these are, 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 base

that he built for like almost two decades before he began to play with all of these other things. 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 is insane. Off of very little.

But it's why? Because I've been running at a relatively high level for 25 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, you know, especially on the female side who are in their late thirties or early forties, for instance, Sarah Hall. Sarah Hall just broke her record. Yeah. Yeah. 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 Groner, now she's coached by someone else, but she just broke the, I think 45 plus 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 like VO2 max work or this intense interval stuff or the fueling or whatever you have you, that's when you get to play with the margins

because like you're fit enough where you can. 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. Yeah, if I stopped 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 we see so many endurance athletes or ultra endurance athletes like excelling at, in later phases of life. Like we can't do the a hundred meters like we could when we were 21, but maybe we can go a hundred 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. Exactly, and I would also argue that like what 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, like wanna talk about her in the book, but one of the, 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 like, I let go of like this performance,

like outcome achievement thing. Yeah, it's not a threat to your identity anymore. You're- Like it doesn't matter. Yeah, 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 like 40 year old Steve into 20 year old Steve's body, I would run so much faster. We all, yes, if only all of us could do that, Steve. Right, 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 like continue to challenge you in these ways because they bring so much, not just physical benefits, but also mental.

Sarah just ran 228. Is that what she ran? 223 or something? I think she ran 223. 223, yeah, that's unbelievable. What is her PR? Do you know? 220 and change. 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, 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 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 gonna now face somebody who's in their prime age for that particular sport and the way that you contextualized it was by sharing master's records in running and to show kind of like how,

this sort of the curve of how these things decline over time, no matter what. Yeah, 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.

So NFL player set the know, set the world record on the four by one. We knew we could perform at like, it was a freak at his peak. And then we had his 55 plus year old age, right? You know, and when you saw it, he's still amazingly fast. No, 11 points, something, right? But if you compare that, you realize like,

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 like it's ages undefeated, even among freaks of freaks.

We're all gonna sustain despite, maybe someone's gonna solve it, but despite what I think what we've seen in the health and wellness field is like it's still gonna win. So when you look at these longevity influencers and in particular, like let's take Brian Johnson, right? Who you kind of had to go at for,

he was sharing his VO2 max numbers and you kind of like, you spanked him a little bit on that. But in terms of like, you know, this idea of like defying death and aging, you know, where do you, weigh in my friend. You're just going all the controversial things. I know, it's like. Hey, listen, you're the one who like went out there

and like made a statement about these things. Here's why, and then I'll get to the answer to your question, but Brian Johnson, this is why, okay? This guy is known for optimizing and tracking everything. Everything. And if you look at his BO2 max protocol fitness, it is not optimized. I think you said it's like 30 years out of date or something.

Yes, it's not. What's wrong said it's like 30 years out of date or something. It's not. What's wrong with it and what should he be doing? 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 is essentially he was doing

four by four minutes, VO2 max work, repeating that multiple times per week. This is the Norwegian. Norwegian. Rhonda spoke about this the other day as well. 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 it again, 30, 40 years ago, is gonna repeat the same style of workout over and over again, without some variation of intensities. It comes 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 gonna maximize the thing

that he actually cares about, which is like the overall aerobic performance, which is tied to longevity. 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 was the whole reason why you began doing it in the first place.

This is why we change workout types. And even if you said, I wanna do four by four 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 adapt or we're not gonna adapt. And again, going back to history, 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, little faster, little faster, little faster, till he 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 2020s. So I think again, that's just my little track running fault there. But I think on the longevity piece here, here's what I think again, that's just my little track running fault there. But I think on the longevity piece here, here's what I think.

I think it's worthy to explore. Yeah, to your point of like, you know, 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 like trying all of these things

and willing to like have people make fun of him in the public sphere. Is he doing everything absolutely, you know, the way that he should be? Maybe not, maybe, you know, like everybody's got an opinion. You certainly, you know, have legitimacy to weigh in on the fitness piece of it all.

Exactly. And I think I have no fault for him doing that exploration. I think, again, I'll tie it to running. Arthur Lidiard revolutionized training by experimenting on himself. He was a milkman who decided, you know what? I'm gonna try and run 200 miles a week and see what 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 scientists to like figure this out. It was a milkman. I think that like 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 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. 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 interval training, four by four, whatever it is, this goes back, I mean, in the 70s, when I was a kid swimming, all you do as a competitive swimmer is intervals, right?

And that can mean a million different things. So sometimes it's 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 at the same pace that you initiated it. 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 like 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. And this is one of my biggest complaints is we don't understand the 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 Mahali Iglou 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 Sch, who he coached, he did all intervals, we should copy him.

He didn't do any aerobic, your 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 we was building that zone two aerobic system. Yeah, you're basically, you're trying to be at the highest or outermost edge of your zone two the entire time,

but you're not gonna be able to complete the set if you exceed that threshold. Bingo, and that's it. So I think like that nuance is lost. And I think, again, coming back to Rhonda Prattrick, 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 the, 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 like twist all the variables.

But my job as a coach is to say like, hey, when we say high intensity interval training, I'll tell you, I looked it 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, you know, 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,

you know, in full of lactate and acid with 15, 20 second intervals off like 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. And we'll be fine. 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. It just like takes you like three hours or whatever, you know, like a couple hours to do this, you know? That's an interval set. Exactly, and I think this is where again,

I just wish, and my call is like, you know, and I'm a scientist at heart, but like 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's be, and coaching, whether it's swimming, running, cycling, like it all get you to the same spot in terms of like understanding 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 gonna 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 like they understand, you know, 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, like do my athletes improve and get better

and you understand that along with your knowledge and history. All right, so Brian, give Steve a call. He's waiting for your call. But here's the deal is I hate on, I throw things out on social media a lot on whether it's longevity or health or 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, you know, give some people some shit, I really do want them to like 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 list top. Here's all my resources for coaching. Like let's understand this because I think at the end of the day, well, it's fun. 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 gonna help people. And that's what I'm about. And sorry if I get on you every once in a while, but like that's the goal. I love the passion. I love the energy. All right, well, let like that's the goal. I 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, you know, winning the inside game is about the inside job, right? So what do you wanna leave people with in terms of like how they should think about why this is important

and kind of how to go about it? 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, you know,

teaching to the tests, which makes teachers miserable, it makes kids miserable, and it hurts our performance as well, as if you look at it. And then if you look at the workplace or entrepreneur or what have you, as we've talked about, like the sole zero sum game of like win or lose, defining success externally,

like 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. Okay, 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 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 realized that like myself and I had to, the fact that my mile best ends with 401

instead of three something, might've 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. Yeah, if you would achieve that goal

and run 359 at some point, you wouldn't be sitting here, you would achieve that goal and run 359 at some point, we wouldn't be sitting here, you would not be writing, 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 it's that splinter, you know, that basically is the generative energy

behind like all of this exploration that you've done. 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 like 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, you know, 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 like, you know 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. Yeah, nobody who's in the midst of, you know, kind of dealing 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, you know, ultimately are things we can, we, if we have the resources and the wherewithal are the building blocks for something better. You know, 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. Well, I appreciate that. So I'm just gonna remind myself that Rich Roll tells me, it's all right that I ran 401, we're all good. 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 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 gonna go home now because his wife is pregnant and is gonna be having a child.

By the time we put this up, you will have a new baby, boy or girl? Girl. Girl. So two girls. So two girls, wow. That's me too. Dad. Girl dad. I So two girls, wow. That's me too. Dad. I'm gonna have to come for you for some tips. 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 wanna learn more about you, maybe just leave us with like all the places and all the things. Yeah, on all social media, Instagram, Twitter, all variations at Steve Magnus,

my website is SteveMagnus.com. And then I've got a newsletter along with good friend and colleague, Brad Stolberg. Friend of the pod. Yep, called the Growth Equation Newsletter. You can find it if you Google it. Excellent, man. Thank you, buddy. Thanks a lot. Peace. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire

podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Boising Change and the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment.

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Plants. Namaste.