Brad Stulberg | Peak Performance, Mastering Change, And Willpower For Ultrarunners

Finn (00:00.985)
Brad Stolberg, I am excited to have you on the show. How are you doing today?

brad (00:04.81)
Hey, Finn. I'm doing alright. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Finn (00:08.577)
I'm excited to have you. Of course, you have a new book out called Masters of Change, which we will be talking a lot about in this episode today. There's one question that I do want to start with. It actually goes back to your first book, Peak Performance, and you talk there a bit about energy management, more specifically, mental energy management. And for context, most people who listen to this show...

They are either pro trail runners themselves or they're interested in the pro trail running scene. So I do think it's worthwhile getting into the weeds on this a bit. If you're one of these elite runners and you're working really hard towards, you know, executing a key workout or a long run, I'm wondering how helpful it is to be conscious of how much you're depleting your mental energy or your willpower for the rest of the day, because...

And before reading peak performance, I had always thought that exercise was sort of default helpful to whatever we want to accomplish with the rest of the day. But but some of what I read in that book made me wonder if we might be discounting the cognitive load of these runs and how much they can actually take away intellectually from doing other things. Well, like a nine to five job. What are your, what are your thoughts there based on the research you've interpreted?

brad (01:23.57)
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of nuance here. Exercise is good. It's good for your body and it's good for your brain. There's a fair amount of research that shows with even elite athletes at the very pointy end of the field, particularly elite aerobic athletes, more training tends to be better for long-term cognitive health. So if you want to stay sharp, prevent Alzheimer's, other forms of dementia.

Parkinson's, more is good. That's over the long haul. Day to day, I think it's not so much about the volume, and I think you're alluding to this, it's more about the intensity, and even there, not so much the physical intensity, but the emotional and psychological intensity to stay on your workout and to hit your pace. So I would think of the psychological component of the workout as separate from the physical.

If the psychological component is really hard if it's requiring all your willpower to hang on if you're having to constantly Tell your body to keep going when your body doesn't want to If you're having to really try to thread the needle to stay on a perfect pace or to run a hill repeat Just right and that's just requiring a lot of cognitive or emotional strain Then yeah moving on throughout the rest of the day. You're gonna have burned a match

Uh, it's no different than if you have a toddler that melts down in the morning, or you have a really stressful meeting or presentation at work. After that, you can feel kind of deflated, you know, your, um, your stress response goes up and then it comes down and it doesn't like to go up again. And if it's asked to go up again, it might not be as sharp. So I think that that's right. That the more taxing the workout is psychologically, the more psychologically fatigued you're going to be from that.

and that could have effects throughout the rest of your day.

Finn (03:20.425)
Yeah, I found this super fascinating because I had always and again, probably wrongly assumed that willpower was circumstantial or you could have a certain amount for each category of your life. But sort of what you showed in the book is that there's sort of this one big pot of willpower and it doesn't matter how you use it. It's sort of going to be reduced over time. Is that correct?

brad (03:44.098)
That is, but it's a flexible pot. So it's like a muscle. So as you build willpower, just like as you build physical fitness, you gain more capacity. So the example that I like to use is the first week of medical school. Most medical students would be completely burned out if they were faced with what a fourth year is doing. But by the time they get to their fourth year, they have enough psychological, emotional, social resources and capacity to deal with it. So yes, we each have a willpower budget.

but that willpower budget changes based on practice and essentially based on fitness. So if I were to try to run like a really hard eight by 800 workout right now, and is we're recording, I'm kind of at the tail end of COVID. One, it would be really dumb because I'm at the tail end of COVID, but two, like it would require a lot of effort to show up and do it when I'm feeling like this. And I'd probably be pretty cash the rest of the day. Whereas if I'm in a circumstance where I have good fitness, I'm not on the tail end of COVID.

Other things in my life aren't stressful, that 8x800 workout might not take that much out of me. So, it's a really situational type of math that we have to go through.

Finn (04:52.653)
Is the measurement of, let's call it this willpower budget, is it pretty hazy and like sort of qualitative in how we describe it? Or can you like look out there and reference somebody like a top performing consultant or a top athlete and say like, they are maxing, they are at the upper bound of this quote unquote budget. Like, how do you think about that?

brad (05:15.186)
I think it's all qualitative because even the people that we maybe see and we think like, wow, they're just machines. They just go, they must have such willpower. Generally, if they're in the public, they're in a financial situation where they can outsource a lot of daily stressors. So maybe part of the reason that they can be such a machine is because they've got people helping them with everything in their life. So I think that it is qualitative for sure.

Finn (05:40.693)
And then as far as we know, as far as like the science we have out there, does it seem like, like growing our willpower is sort of this infinite game and we're not going to really rub up against some sort of like mental wall in the same way that we are seeing top athletes, you know, hit and brush up very closely against like what all the math and science has shown is like the capability in a marathon or the 10 K stuff like that.

brad (06:06.358)
Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know if there's like a limit of willpower, but I think that most people can continue to cultivate their ability to do hard things and stay focused, so long as they're doing it in appropriate ways, no different than fitness. Like it can't just be all stimulus, all stress all the time. There's gotta be rest and recovery. And I think our psyche functions a lot like our body.

Finn (06:34.349)
All right, another thing that I have been absolutely fascinated by in the trail running world, we've sort of talked about it ad nauseam on this show is the lack of co-located teams and the phenomenon of so many top athletes training in relative isolation. And I've wondered both A, how sustainable this is and B, whether these athletes are leaving performance gains on the table by not utilizing a group team environment. And again,

And I know peak performance awesome book I'm referencing it again, you had this great story to share that you dubbed the Shalane Flanagan effect and you outlined some really compelling data about how impactful it is to work collaboratively with other top performers, or at least to be in their orbit. So talk about all that if you don't mind because I'm wondering whether it works in all worlds, including our sport or if there's something about the disposition of trail runners that makes them for whatever reason better off going at it.

brad (07:29.71)
It's another good question. I think there's a lot of individual variation. So, it's a bell curve and some people are hermits and they're super introverted and they perform and they feel better when they're alone. Other people on the extreme of extraversion really feed off the energy of others, so on and so forth. And they perform better when they're within a team. I think generally speaking, one of the nice things about being a part

a team or a group for an individual pursuit. So tennis, trail running, writing, a solo musician. These pursuits can get very narrow and very ego-focused and not ego-focused in the sense of like, look how great I am, but ego meaning like the self. Like you can kind of feel like what's all this for? Like I'm just running, I'm just trying to get better, I'm just trying to go faster. I love it. But like...

Finn (08:20.651)
Yeah.

brad (08:29.066)
At the end of the day, it's just kind of about me. And not everyone has this experience, but sometimes that can like start to feel a little bit empty or there can be like an existential distress that kicks in, especially after a poor performance. It's like, man, I just spent like six months writing this book all by myself. And it didn't do well, or I just spent a four month training cycle for this race all by myself and like, what do I have to show for it? I didn't race while I DNF'd. And I think when you get into a group environment,

the process becomes more fun and I think a lot of the meaning and a lot of the growth happens in those relationships so what we do know across pursuits is that generally speaking when people are post big accomplishment a Decade down the road or in the extreme example at the end of their life and they look back on that They don't remember like the gold medal or you know, the hard rock 100 win or the Western States belt

Finn (09:15.929)
Yeah.

brad (09:24.726)
They tend to remember the people that they trained with or the rival that they were competing against. So, it's the relationships. I think that that's really important to keep in mind in these individual pursuits where it can be isolating. Then, of course, there are very real trade-offs. So, you run with a group, they might not be as scientifically dialed into your pace. So, you might give a little bit on the quote, unquote, like precision of the workout, and that's a loss.

But you probably gain more than that because you have this group effect, which is so powerful again for meaning, for fulfillment, for, um, for motivation. So I think that if it is possible to train in a group environment, um, I highly recommend it. Uh, if someone has a really good reason not to, uh, a commute, uh, a life circumstance, you have a sick parent or partner that you need to take care of. Um, then I don't think it needs to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It doesn't mean that you're doomed. It just means that, all right, you got to train solo now.

Finn (10:22.069)
Yeah, prior to this conversation, we just had somebody on the show. They wrote a book about the 1984 Women's Olympic Marathon event where Joan Benoit Samuelson won. And just going into her background, the author was talking about her experience running collegiately at NC State and how to some extent it was to her detriment to be in a team environment because she essentially identified the other top performers on the team and they just like...

took each other to the well in every single workout and a lot of recovery was lost in the process and maybe they did a lot of their race and training and didn't bring the best of themselves to the ultimate goal, the race day environments. I can see how in some contexts people respond differently. Before I forget though, for listeners that didn't read the book, can you talk about the

brad (11:19.198)
Yeah. So Shalene Flanagan, I don't need to tell listeners of this show, is one of the greatest ever American women distance runners. And for quite a long time, Shalene trained solo. So she had the very typical world-class 10K marathon or lifestyle of run 100 to 120 miles a week, eat, recover.

find some intellectual pursuit, read, sleep, and do it again. She did that all on her own. Shalane had a four-time Olympian, medaled in the 10K, but had never won a major, major marathon. That was the last ornament that she wanted to put on her tree.

Later on in her career, uh, she started to feel just a little bit burnt. And I want to be careful because the word burnout has such strong connotations. It wasn't that, but more just like a little like tired. And of course she's been running these a hundred mile weeks for years. Uh, so she decided to, to co-locate and move with a group of other women, um, and start training together. And that doesn't mean that they did all their workouts together.

Finn (12:18.166)
Yeah.

brad (12:35.246)
They often didn't. It simply meant like they would meet at the track or they would meet on the trails or at the road. They'd maybe warm up together. Some days they do their long or their easy runs together. Some days they do their individual work and then they'd come back, they'd cool down. Maybe they'd go out for a drink, for lunch, for dinner. After that decision, Shalane's training really reached a new level for her at the marathon. She ended up going on to win the New York City Marathon.

And what's fascinating is all the other women that she trained with also had career years. So multiple first time Olympic qualifiers, first time Olympians, and then first time Olympic medalist. And the writer at the New York Times, Lindsey Krauss, coined this, the Chalane effect, which essentially said like, you know, Chalane's energy and vigor and wisdom for the sport, and she was the elder of this group, not only helped Chalane to be amongst all this young energy,

Finn (13:19.746)
Haha

brad (13:31.362)
but also lifted everyone else up.

Finn (13:34.653)
And I'm not sure if it was you or Steve Magnus that said this, but there's a recovery component to this too, right? Like you're apt to bounce back from workouts and races in long runs faster in a group environment. Is that true?

brad (13:46.626)
That is, it's my collaborator Steve, who's more of the science nerd that loves to talk about this. And it is interesting. So essentially after a big hard workout, you have a stress response, as I said earlier. And that's often associated with a spike in the hormone cortisol. That's the stress hormone. And cortisol gets a really bad rap, but we actually need cortisol because it signals to the body that, whoa, like you just put us through the wringer, it's time to repair, rebuild, come back stronger.

So it's not that we don't want to have a big cortisol spike, but we don't want it to linger after a workout. And research shows that if we're in social environments with friends, with people that we trust, our cortisol response dissipates much more quickly. So we get that like big spike after the workout and then it goes away. And the mechanism by which this happens is really interesting. So researchers speculate this is because in our evolution, if we were ever like alone,

on the savanna, you know, it's very dangerous. Like we could get picked off by a mountain lion or some other predator. If there was any kind of famine or drought, like, and it was just us, we wouldn't have enough food. So we really like evolved to be in groups. And that's why groups help shunt off our stress response. That's why support systems are so helpful for grief or depression. I mean, you name it, anything that has a big stress response getting with others tends to help.

Finn (15:10.753)
I'm not sure where this would go in the conversation, but I did want to bring it up. You have a quote in one of your books, you say that self-actualization is possible only as a side effect of self-transcendence. Are you making that statement in the context of doing things as often as possible in a group environment or to sort of like outsource your purpose to something better than yourself? Talk about that.

brad (15:34.482)
More the latter, I think, that if you're just doing something like purely out of ego, and it's okay if a big part of it's out of ego, but if the whole thing is out of ego, I think it holds us back because then we perform with like a big weight on our back, which is like, oh crap, like if I mess this up, you know, it says something about me. Or we become way too fused with the result, which can also lead to a lot of baggage and pressure. Whereas if we can...

get a little bit outside of ourselves. It doesn't have to be some grand purpose. It can just be like, hey, I'm a part of this group and I want to do well by the group. That helps us compete from a place of joy and openness versus fear and narrowness.

Finn (16:16.261)
Mm. Well, it.

brad (16:18.154)
I mean, I, it's why I partner with Steve. Like I practice what I preach, right? Writing. Like it's hard to find a, a pursuit more solo than ultra running or trail running. And then maybe, you know, tide would be writing a book, which is its own kind of ultra marathon that you undergo alone. And, um, Steve and I coauthored our first books together because we didn't want to do it alone. And, and now we've seen all this research. So even with our solo books, um, we promote them.

Finn (16:22.422)
Yeah.

Finn (16:47.761)
Oh, Amber alert, okay.

brad (16:47.79)
Uh-oh, I'm getting an amber alert here. All right. Sorry. That's never happened. My phone's on silent, but they, um, they ring loud for good reason. Uh, what I was, what I was saying is that, so Steve and I, we co-wrote our first two books together, um, and we, we saw this research and even when we wanted to go write solo books for, uh, you know, topics that were just more near and dear to each of our hearts. We said like, it's still going to be a community game.

Like we're going to promote these books together. We're going to have our podcasts together. We're still going to co-write our newsletter and our joint books and our solo books are going to live under one umbrella because otherwise it's going to be really hard and painful to like go on the emotional roller coaster ride of writing a book and putting a book out in the world individually. So we want to do it as a team and thank God because that's been the biggest help. Like, I don't know if I'd still be doing this if I had to do it alone.

Finn (17:43.321)
I was just going to ask you what are the pros and the cons of having co-authored something versus written something independently now that you've done two of each?

brad (17:52.926)
I think that I prefer writing independently just because it's easier, but I would never choose doing the whole thing independently. Writing independently is easier for me, but then couching it with the promotion and the marketing and all the late night conversations about, oh, it's not selling as well as I thought it would, having a teammate for that, I would not trade for anything.

Finn (18:19.357)
It's interesting because I just read Peak Performance, I just read Passion Paradox, and heading into those two books, I wondered if I would notice a lack of synchronicity between your two voices, but I couldn't tell. As I was reading each chapter, I couldn't necessarily tell who had primarily written this chapter versus that chapter. I think that that's good.

brad (18:40.658)
Yeah, it's good and it's attributed to good editing, to ease over that voice. I'd be curious, when you got to the practice of groundedness and master of change, did you notice a difference?

Finn (18:51.917)
Honestly, I felt like the same voice continued, which I also think was a good thing. I felt like there was a consistent voice with new insights across each book.

brad (19:00.338)
Oh, that's good to know. So, and Steve and I are such close partners, we spend so much time, we do co-write a newsletter every week, we host a podcast together that we joke that we end up thinking a lot of the same ideas. So, you know, there's like a rule in our world, which is like the worst sin that you can make is to plagiarize, but Steve and I forgive each other if occasionally we plagiarize each other because we genuinely don't even remember who thought what. So that intimate partnership.

is the foundation that even the solo books come out of. And I really don't think I would be as well if I did this without having that partnership.

Finn (19:38.021)
Hmm. Well, so we've been, we've been talking about sort of like the pros and the cons of going at it alone versus being in a group environment, sort of like working from a position of ego versus a position of like, you know, non-dual thinking, all that kind of stuff. And this has been a hot topic on the pod recently. Because when we examine top performers in most sports, I often wonder how many of them are driven primarily by some sort of

You know, you call it ego fragility and for the ones that were like maybe like Michael Jordan comes to mind whether we can definitively say You know would they have had would they have achieved comparable levels of success in a more healthy sustainable? Psychological frame because one of the trends to me it seems like when a lot of these athletes Solved the problem of the ego and they become you know, quote-unquote more, you know psychologically healthy

that they seem to care less about performance, they care less about external success. And I'm curious like what you think about that. Like have you reached a conclusion on whether like talent needs trauma or in the best years of our prime, we need to be like operating in some sort of like threat mode, what do you think about that?

brad (20:49.406)
I think that it is one of the thorniest, hardest questions to wrestle with. I don't know. I'm not saying this is a cop out, but I'll make it a little personal. I think it's kind of person dependent. I think some people perform better from a place of freedom and joy, and then others from a place of compulsion and fear or ego fragility.

Finn (21:04.269)
No, no, yeah.

brad (21:18.978)
There's a lot of research that shows that talent does come from trauma, but the scope and the size of that trauma, it's not like always capital T trauma, meaning, you know, parent in jail or death of someone close to you. It can just be like being a young sibling with a lot of older siblings. The youngest tend to perform really well. So it's tricky. In my own athletic pursuits, and I write about this quite extensively in Master of Change,

My identity as an athlete and where that sits in my life has shifted recently in a way that has made it a little bit harder for me to really turn it on, even though I'm so much more psychologically healthy. Because for a whole bunch of reasons throughout my life, sport was my identity. It goes back to being bullied in school, to being beat up in eighth grade, to getting really strong and playing football.

Finn (22:05.975)
Yeah.

brad (22:18.626)
girls like me because I was a football player. Then in college, when I didn't play football, getting my heart broken by a girl, throwing myself into endurance sports and triathlon to escape the pain of getting broken up with by the girl I thought I'd marry. So then triathlon and marathon really just became about numbing that fragility and insecurity and pain.

And fast forward to a couple years ago, and I'm happily married with the love of my life for over 10 years now, or I guess now it is 10 years, but with dating 15. So we've been together forever. Thank God that first girl dumped me. I've got super healthy young kids. My career is good. And for the first time in my life, I don't really, my athletic, I don't want to say I don't really care. I was about to say I don't really care, but my athletic performance just doesn't really matter that much whether or not I make a lift to my identity.

Finn (22:54.789)
Thanks for watching!

brad (23:13.174)
But I really struggled to turn it on when I get under the bar because now I'm strength training. Whereas in the past, it was very easy to turn it on because it was like my entire identity was on the line. But there was also a lot of anxiety. So for me, the question always is like the ability to really turn it on, that gets you something, but the anxiety that you carry probably takes away some performance. And I think the best performers...

Finn (23:37.253)
Mm. Ahem.

brad (23:39.986)
and the psychologically healthy ones, they can turn it on and then they can turn it off. So it's like when they're on the trail, when they're in the oval or in the ring or on the court, that is all that matters. But then when they step off, they have identities that span beyond the sport.

Finn (23:57.573)
Is that a gift that turn on turn off or can do you think that can be trained?

brad (24:02.366)
I think it's a little bit of nature and a little bit of nurture. So probably both. I think that there's probably some genetic or temperamental component to the ability to switch between different roles really fluidly. And then I think that, yes, it can also be trained.

Finn (24:20.505)
So this might be an open-ended question because you just made me think about it in real time. But like you said earlier that there's at least some people that may very well need this like negative disposition to achieve greatness in sport. And I think my question off of that is if there is a portion of the athletic population that needs to come from like a place of negativity to be their best athletic self, is it?

Is it morally okay? Like should we tolerate and celebrate great performances at the expense of like deep personal suffering and other areas of life for these athletes?

brad (24:55.646)
I think if they're not cheating and they're not hurting anyone else, then yes. Because the example that comes to my mind, and it's no stranger to the trail and ultra running community, is individuals in recovery for substance use disorder and addiction, and then individuals battling demons of depression. And I think that if the outlet that you find is trail running...

and you take that pain and you channel it for greatness in sport. I still feel bad for the suffering that someone undergoes to have that pain that they need to channel in the first place, but I think that's absolutely something to celebrate. I mean, that's a somewhat constructive use of that pain and suffering. I think where it crosses the line is again, if you're cheating or you're breaking rules because your ego is so fragile, you feel like, if I don't win,

then who am I? I mean, we see this all the time in doping, right? Like Lance Armstrong, fragile ego. Elizabeth Holmes, corporate doping, fragile ego. But as long as there's no cheating or harming other people, I think it's fine.

Finn (25:58.852)
Yeah.

Finn (26:04.245)
I don't know why my mind just went here. But like, have you ever seen the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise like 20 years ago? Yeah, like there's that whole concept of pre crime. And I'm just imagining like 10 years now where we have the technology to sort of like, go inside the brain of people measure their disposition. And if they're like at a certain percentage chance of you know, like doping, for example, based on you know, a history of ego fragility, you sort of like, you know, slap the cuffs on right then and there. I don't know. I don't know why I just went there. But it just it's fascinating to me.

brad (26:08.982)
Yeah, back in the day, yeah.

brad (26:32.514)
Yeah, it is interesting. And people can outgrow that though, right, with good coaching and good mentorship. And you can have that ego fragility. And I think all of us have that to some extent. I mean, I'm certainly not the Buddha. So I think some of it is just naming it, being aware of it, recognizing your own frailty and imperfections, and then putting constraints in place to make sure you don't step over a line.

Finn (26:42.793)
Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Finn (26:55.541)
Um, just thinking about like other problems of the ego that we face in our sport, there's a lot of, you know, pro athletes who, you know, it's in their contract, not just to perform at a high level, but to, you know, develop a personal brand and to be very active on social media. And I'm bringing this up because in one of your books, you really warn about overemphasizing professional identity and in a similar case warning against developing this sort of like marketing orientation to the world.

What's dangerous about these choices as they relate to, you know, being a key part of the community, being a strong presence in your family, fostering friendship? Like, what are the why is this a dangerous place to be in?

brad (27:39.414)
Well, I think that there's the self that we portray to the world and then there's also the self that we really are. The bigger gap between the two, the more cognitive dissonance we feel and often the worse we feel. That's the first thing. If you have a performative self and a real self, that can feel kind of icky. But it's equally troubling if you bring your real self to...

social media and brand partnerships and whatever it is all the time. Because then instead of just your close friends and family kind of like reflecting back on you, your personality, you're essentially turning yourself into a commodity on a marketplace. And people are liking or retweeting or following or commenting. And it really is. It's like you become like a stock almost. That's how social media operates. You are a stock and your followers is your share price.

brad (28:36.499)
That just alienates you from your own life in so many ways, I think. So it's really important and hard to protect a part of yourself that is just for you, that isn't for the world to judge and comment on and so on and so forth.

Finn (28:55.425)
You've obviously had a lot of experience being a public figure, writing these books, reaching a lot of people via podcasts and social media. Are there any interesting takeaways that you can share about how you've managed either merging these two identities or whether you've even seen value in sort of having two separate ones and both could be good, but they're discrete.

brad (29:21.502)
Yeah, it's something I think a lot about. So, I try to be just really intentional, and my social media is really just like a place to showcase my writing. And ideally, people will see my social media, they'll read my writing, they'll learn something, they'll wrestle with the ideas, and if they wanna go deeper, they'll buy my book. What I don't post on social media are pictures of my family, pictures of my friends, pictures of me training, because that's not my job. Like, I don't want the product to be

Brad Stahlberg, I want the product to be my book. So if I use social media for marketing, then I'm marketing my book. What is my book? It's writing. It's not my dad lift. It's not how my pretty kid's face look. It's just the writing. So I've really tried to draw a pretty rigid boundary from the things that are just for me versus the things that go out to the world.

Finn (30:13.701)
That's interesting. So like if we're, if we're looking at this from like a pro athlete standpoint, in your case, you're, you're putting the product in between you and your audience. The product is the book is the product for the athlete, purely their race results and sort of their performance on a given day, or are you, would you like. Advise them to, uh, to kind of take a similar route you've taken where it's like, okay, maybe invest more in like media products and stuff and just create further distance.

brad (30:40.814)
I think, again, this is so tough because you could argue that I'd sell more books if I was the product because people identify with the author. I know the brands in sport, it's not just about the race results because unless you're Elliot Kipchoge, they want a vibrant, bubbly personality. So then it is kind of the personality that the sponsor is banking on.

Finn (30:46.561)
Yeah, that's a really good point.

Finn (31:02.052)
Yeah.

brad (31:10.154)
which is really, really tough. So then it's like, there's a trade-off between some cognitive dissonance, like here's the personality I'm gonna bring to social media and it's kind of performative, but that's okay, and I know it is, because I don't wanna lay myself out there for everyone to judge always, and I'm just gonna be okay with that cognitive dissonance, versus no, I'm gonna be completely authentic, but then somehow I need to cultivate like enough...

emotional resilience to not really care about the likes, retweets, comments, how I'm doing. And that's very hard.

Finn (31:46.461)
Do you struggle at all with like the battle between which identity you identify with more? Because one thing you wrote about, I think maybe it was in practice of groundedness, is sort of for people that are public figures or people that are really invested in building some sort of following social media, there's sort of like the trap of isolation where you really extremely identify with that work. And you know, you no longer want to invest as much in friends and family and like you're in real life community.

brad (32:16.126)
Yeah, it's something that I have absolutely struggled with. I've learned over time that I just have to be really deliberate in having a minimum effective dose for the nourishing things in my life, especially during a book launch. When I'm out on the road, I'm traveling.

The people are reviewing the book like, you know, and I'm so far from like actually big time I can't imagine what this would be like for you know, like Arnold Schwarzenegger Bruce Lee like someone who's actually big time but it's still it's a wild freaking emotional roller coaster ride to just like be out in the world and You want to be online when your book comes out? Especially if you have a national audience because so many people buy books on the internet So it's very easy to be like, oh, these are my people on the internet, but they're not at all. You don't know these people

Um, so what's the minimum effective dose for timeout on my front porch with my neighbors for making sure that I never like cancel plans with a certain set of friends so I can do a media event. Um, and then the ebbs and flows in different seasons. So there is a time to go all in on releasing a book, but it's got to have some kind of constraint around it. Is it the first two weeks? Is it the first month, the first three months?

And then how do you make sure that you just have enough of a minimum effective dose of the things that actually like keep you sane in there?

Finn (33:38.037)
I think you talk about this a lot in your latest book, Masters of Change, but you lament the fact that, and this is cross culture, it's for all types of people, so much of our lives are spent under fragmented attention and we're essentially training our brains to always care about what could be happening over there somewhere else. I mean, we want to check in and see. Maybe this is a weird question, but I always think about how culture ultimately conforms

what people are doing. And I'm wondering if there's any positive to this, or at least whether society adapts to accommodate this, or are we going down this pathway where, for people that now really deal with attention deficit disorders and addictions to their phones, are they gonna pay the consequences and ultimately be left behind in a natural selection manner? How do you anticipate this playing out?

brad (34:36.094)
I wish I had an answer. I don't know. I think it's still to be determined. I do think that being able to be present and to focus and to separate what is meaningful from what is not is an enormous competitive advantage in just about anything. I also think it's the key to happiness and fulfillment. So not only does it impact performance, but it impacts mental health.

I think a big part of the reason there is such a mental health crisis right now, especially amongst teens, is because the digital devices and the distraction and the noise to signal ratio is just so high that if attention is so fragmented and scattered always, life starts to feel so frantic and frenetic and almost like an emptiness or a meaninglessness comes as a result.

Like what people find meaningful at the end of the day are single, focused, intimate connection with activities, other people or places. And if you put in all of these distractions, that goes away. Now listen, I know I'm talking to a bunch of runners. It's not to say if you want to listen to a podcast or like an album on a long run, that's fine. But that's very different than like stopping 19 times to check your Instagram.

Finn (35:57.529)
Yeah.

Finn (36:01.637)
Thanks for watching!

brad (36:03.166)
making sure that you have the perfect picture in front of the waterfall, worrying what other people are going to say about it, so on and so forth. Then the philosophical world is alienated. The more alienated you are, which is just a fancy way of saying space between you and what you're doing, the worse off you tend to feel. I think that so many of these devices, they just alienate us from our entire lives.

Finn (36:21.866)
Mm.

Finn (36:28.017)
Yeah. And I think, I think the reason why I wondered if there was, and I, and I agree with you, by the way, I, I'm firmly in the camp that, you know, uh, you, like you have the phrase be a minimalist to be a maximalist and, you know, you sort of preach the values of single tasking. I'm totally in that camp that the Cal Newport type stuff, but like, I was just thinking the other day, like I'm a part of a lot of slacks, a part of a lot of discords, a lot of group text threads, uh, one-off text threads. And when I think about

the amount of time and effort that's required to be present in those and to stay on top of those, it's reached the point of becoming a full-time job. And there's this, now I would say cultural expectation to not respond in like three to seven days, but like in a matter of minutes or hours or else you've sort of lost the entire thread or you're no longer keeping track. Like what do you think about that? Like do you think we should just like...

declare attention bankruptcy and sort of like opt out of all of these, you know, digital social organizations to some extent or like, is there any value to continuing to play that game and to sort of like be present in the social sphere at the expense of like, you know, sitting down for three or four hours and preparing for this podcast episode or reading a book uninterrupted or, you know, whatever falls into the deep work camp.

brad (37:49.214)
Yeah, I think it just depends. And it's like, is this working in service of my values or is it not? Uh, is this helping me or is this getting in the way? And that could change at different times of your life. Um, like I am not enough of a curmudgeon to be like, get off all your text threads, if you've got six good friends that are in different states and that's how you guys can act and like, you have an ongoing discussion, that can be great. If that text thread is getting in the way of you meeting friends in the new town that you just moved to.

Maybe it's not so great. Maybe there's a hidden cost that you're not seeing. So I think it's just being aware of the trade-offs. I think if what you're describing is like you feel so frantic and frenetic that it's just hard to keep up, and I've had that feeling, then yeah, I'm just like, fuck it. Things are going to fall through the cracks. I'm not going to respond. I might not engage in that email thread for the next two months. And no one will notice I'm gone either. That's the funny thing, right?

brad (38:47.322)
and just release some of that pressure to be on top of everything always. Because it used to be, right, being on top of everything always socially meant within your local community, within your neighborhood. And now it's within infinity because of the internet. And that's really hard.

Finn (39:05.549)
Do you think, and I love how much time you spend in your books on identifying and living out your values, are there any values that are at risk of being exploited by this sort of like digital connectivity culture, or if you're clear about your values, they can sort of be like portable and work in any environment or be defended against and like not exploited?

brad (39:31.126)
I think anything can be exploited. I think the question is, are you getting the real thing or are you getting the superficial fulfillment of your value? Let's do an extreme example just to get this from esoteric to on the ground. Let's say your core value or one of your core values is love. You can find love through intimate connection with a romantic partner.

You can find love with brotherhood or sisterhood and friendship. You can find love through throwing yourself into a sport and just getting lost on the trail and being completely immersed in nature and a flow state. That's all living your core value of love. You can also do opiates and feel incredible and feel like the world loves you. One is the ultra-process superficial version.

that in the short term feels great, but in the long term is quite harmful. And the other is the real thing, which requires more work, which maybe is not as immediate, but in the long term is really fulfilling and leaves you feeling good. And I think the question that we need to ask ourselves with these new technologies is, are we essentially just doing the ultra-process version of it? Is having a bunch of followers the ultra-process version of being known in your local community?

is being vulnerable on the internet and having people give you a bunch of hearts, the ultra process version of opening up to a really close friend, so on and so forth.

Finn (41:07.781)
That's a really good way to look at it. How many things can we simultaneously be good at or have on our plate and still be doing each one of them to some degree at a level of excellence?

brad (41:25.102)
I mean, I can make up a number. There's no science here. My guest Stalt says two to three.

Finn (41:33.575)
What are your two to three?

brad (41:35.094)
What are my two to three? My craft, which is writing, and I try to be national class, world class, but I'm also competing against myself. My family, so being a husband and a father. And those are really the only two that I'm truly excellent at. I said my third would be my own athletic pursuits, but it's not the same level of excellence, but some of that's genetic too.

But if I like completely got rid of writing or reprioritized and spent more time on training and recovery, then I would be better as a power lifter.

Finn (42:13.849)
Were there any tough choices you had to make? Like, were there any parts of your life that you feel like you had to sacrifice to reinforce those two to three?

brad (42:22.802)
Oh, all the time. I mean, I'm constantly feeling torn between writing and family. So it's not like a past tense thing, it's a current tense thing. I have to believe, and I don't think this is delusional thinking, I think it's real, that having these two areas of my life that I care so deeply about makes me better at both and it relieves me of pressure in each. But day to day, there are times when I want to push really hard on work.

but I need to be a present parent or spouse. And there are days when the last thing I want to do is show up for work because I want to wrestle with my kid, but I need to show up for work. So I am resenting both of those things on a day-to-day basis, but over the long haul, I've realized that it's so important to have both because I'm going to have...

writing pieces and books that both crush and fail. And both are dangerous, because when it crushes, it gets to your head, and when it fails, it also hurts in a different way. I guess the highs are high and the lows are low, and having this other room in my identity house, family, to go seek stability in is so beneficial to ride those waves. I'm also aware, as much as it pains me to even think about, that one day, hopefully if all goes well, my kids will grow up and flourish and leave the house.

And that's going to suck. And I'm going to be really glad that I have some other identity box. Maybe it, maybe it won't be writing anymore. I think it probably will, but who knows? It's a ways away, but like, it's why I think it's important that parents, you got to love your kid, but you got to keep like something there for you too, because otherwise you become really fragile. So the metaphor I use in Master of Change is it's like, it, and I said earlier, identity house, like I think it's just so helpful to think of identity like a house.

And if you just have one room in your house and that one room floods or catches fire, you're screwed. Like it's going to be very disorienting. But if you have multiple rooms in your house and one room catches fire or floods, you can go seek refuge in the other rooms while you work out the fire or the flood in the main one. And the rooms don't have to be the same size. You don't have to spend the same amount of time in each room. I just think it's important to have more than one.

brad (44:41.002)
And you can make renovations, you can add on, you can take rooms away, you can switch rooms, um, in different phases of your life. You're going to spend different amounts of time in each room. But I think it's just really important to like get out of the one room mentality. Um, because I just think it makes you so fragile to unexpected change. You see this all the time with athletes who struggle with injury and transitioning out of sport.

Finn (45:03.521)
When you're picking two to three lanes to be present in on any given day, does that fall into the realm of a balanced life or would you still say, given that you've narrowed pretty sufficiently, you're living a passionate life?

brad (45:16.842)
I think it's a very passionate life, but I think that this is splitting hairs with various words because I hear like balance and I think of it as perfect friend, perfect family member, perfect employee, caught up on all the TV shows, in on what's happening in all the major sporting leagues, so on and so forth, kind of like equal times to equal things automatically versus like...

knowing what you're doing, being really deliberate and intentional. And when you're in one room, really be in that room. But I think that because the stories, you mentioned Michael Jordan, gets told of that obsession, I just think that there's such selection bias in the stories that we tell. And for every Michael Jordan, there's a Tim Duncan who doesn't get a documentary because he was so chill, but won five championships.

Top five NBA basketball player, fundamentals, right? Was not like an aggravated, pissed off person that came from trauma, whether like real or, you know, or made up. And I only say made up because, you know, Jordan's famous for like, he'd have to make something up to get angry about. Like he was just, he was fueled by anger. And I think that makes for like really good entertainment, but it's not the only way. And I think that we...

Finn (46:14.201)
Fundamentals.

brad (46:43.094)
It's a lie that you can be balanced and be excellent at something because you have to kind of go all in on something if you want to be excellent, but you don't have to go all in all the time.

Finn (46:56.418)
I love the emphasis on selection bias there and I'm constantly from here I know I'm gonna be thinking about Tim Duncan whenever I over rely on Michael Jordan to make a point. That's a, for those that are fans of the MBA, that's a great example. All right, getting more into Masters of Change because that's your latest book. I wanna start by asking this question and it is what is unique in this current moment about our collective inability to cope with change

why was this skill set less of an issue or less at risk in preceding errors? Like how can we tell in 2023 that we have a bigger problem dealing with change than we did in like 1950?

brad (47:40.266)
I don't think we have a bigger problem. I think we've always had a problem dealing with change. I would say that it feels like the pace of change is accelerating. So that's the short answer. Why is the pace of change accelerating? I think in large part, it comes back to this computational law that computing power doubles every year. Moore's law, exactly. And I think that...

Finn (48:02.861)
Moore's Law.

brad (48:07.618)
the rapidity of technological change that has really impacted every facet of our life. Not just artificial intelligence, which is all the hype, but you could argue that climate change is by and large a product of the industrial revolution and computers making it easy to do cross-continental travel and shipping and so on and so forth. I think we're just on this escalating path of change. Then...

we're under equipped to know how to even think about it, let alone what to do with it. It's just very easy to feel like you're getting swallowed by.

Finn (48:46.501)
What do you see as the biggest consequence? For someone that's reading this book that doesn't act on some of the suggestions, I think we'll talk about rugged flexibility in a second, non-dual thinking, core values, responding versus reacting, what do you see as the biggest facets of life that are at risk by not following through on some of your suggestions here?

brad (49:11.47)
Feeling like you're just completely overwhelmed and like you're not even living your own life. Like you're just kind of like along for the crazy ride, getting pushed and pulled this way and that by forces beyond yourself. Or kind of just like going through life like an automaton, like without agency. So it's like these two extremes. Like on the one hand, like if you cling to agency way too much and you're like really rigid.

You just get thrown around and it leads to anxiety and depression and it's not fun. But if you're so flexible that you just kind of go with the flow, then it's kind of like, well, what do you stand for? Like, are you going to give up all your agency amidst this change? And I think those are the two traps that we can fall into.

Finn (49:55.733)
It's interesting and I actually kind of want to come back to the discussion about core values as it relates to navigating change and sort of being able to be relevant in any given era because of that. But like when I think about my childhood and early adulthood, for sure, I had outside influences like parents and extended family and friends and maybe some mentors in various areas of life that suggested, you know,

this and that in terms of values. But I can't think of any one moment in a school setting where I sat down and the assignment was like, okay, pick these three to five values that seem to resonate the most with you and then start to practice them in your life. Do you think that there's any, in the same way that people admit not having very many personal finance classes in young adulthood, do you see any value for future generations to really have classes dedicated to this exercise?

brad (50:52.938)
Absolutely. I do. I wish it would happen. Well, particularly because these aren't just exercises that I'm coming up with, right? This is the evidence base on all the third wave therapies for anxiety and depression. Third wave simply mean they've been studied. So there's empirical proof as to what works and what doesn't. And we know what works.

Finn (50:57.389)
Why don't we have it? What's your thought on why we don't have it?

Finn (51:15.071)
Yeah.

brad (51:19.346)
it works wonderfully for people in acute anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, in some cases bipolar, schizoaffective disorder. We know that if it works at those extremes, it absolutely works as a prevention tool or just to help people find meaning in life, yet we don't teach it. And we're in the middle of a huge youth mental health crisis. So I think acceptance and commitment therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, those should just be classes taught at an age-appropriate level.

probably starting in like, I don't know, fourth, fifth grade.

Finn (51:51.717)
You know, another thing that comes to mind for me is like, and I think you mentioned this in the book, we're at this point in society where we're less religious than ever religious institutions play a much, much smaller, a very diminished role in society than they did even, you know, 1015 years ago. You know, we could have a whole podcast dedicated to the to the merits of, you know, being a part of, you know, various churches, but do you think that in some way this like move towards, you know,

secularity or, you know, atheism has actually been like a net negative in the sense that, you know, we don't have we haven't, we can no longer like outsource our values to some higher power. And now, at the individual level, we're responsible for like making meaning in our lives.

brad (52:37.922)
I don't know if it's a net negative, but I know that what you just said can place a whole lot of onus on some people, but it can also be really empowering for other people. It can be both at the same time. It can be both terrifying and empowering. I do think that having a North Star or a belief system or a philosophy of life is very helpful. I think growing up where one is defined for you...

is lovely until you hit middle age or teenage and you're like, actually, this is all a lie. And I'm not saying that it is. Some people believe, some people don't, that that's for every individual. But I guess what I'm saying is like, they both have their pros and their cons. I actually think the biggest issue in the decline of organized religion has nothing to do with the religion and just everything to do with like, it used to be a regular place of community that everyone would go to at the same time. And that, I think, is what people miss most.

Finn (53:27.969)
Yeah.

Finn (53:34.853)
That's a really good point. All right. So, that's the end of the presentation.

brad (53:36.558)
There's fascinating research that I go through that talks about how people in religious communities tend to live longer. These are pretty well-controlled studies. I say this half-jokingly in the book, but it's true. It doesn't matter if it's Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, they all have the same effect. It's not the fact that you're praying to a certain God and they're saving you or deity.

It's that you're in community with a belief system and a philosophy of life. And that's what matters is being in community with a belief system or a philosophy of life. And if you call it Christianity, that's fine. If you call it Hegel, that's fine. If you call it Dharma, that's fine. If you call it ultra running, that's fine. But it's gotta be a belief system and an orientation and then community. Those are the two things that are important.

Finn (54:14.307)
Yeah.

Finn (54:28.489)
Yeah, it reminds me I think, oh, what's the seventh day Adventists if you look at where they are dispersed across the world, wherever they are, it's a blue zone, like they a lot of them live to, you know, age 100 and above because of the community to diet all that stuff.

brad (54:43.402)
Yeah, do you want me if this isn't a side, but do you want me to break your heart on the Blue Zones because it kind of broke mine? I think the Blue Zone stuff is really good. And there was just a study that came out that it's a pre-print paper. So who knows if it'll get past peer review. But it essentially says that what the Blue Zones actually have in common is really poor record keeping of birth certificates. I know it's a gutter. It's such a gut punch. And I read it and it seemed very good.

Finn (54:47.609)
Please, please, please.

Finn (55:06.345)
Ugh.

Finn (55:09.765)
Ha ha!

brad (55:13.034)
And when these places started to get serious about keeping birth certificates, their per capita centenarians started to look like the rest of the world.

I'm sorry, I had to. It's tough. But it's tough because all those habits that come out of the Blue Zones work are supported by years and years of public health. And if anything, I think that it just goes to show there's a fair amount of luck involved, too.

Finn (55:25.241)
Okay, we might have to edit that out of the podcast. I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding.

Finn (55:41.737)
Yeah. All right. Just a few more questions. I promise the first one, again, relating to Masters of Change, you have this really, I found it fascinating part of the book where you talk about this responsibility that we have as individuals now to distinguish between what is tradition versus what is core to our humanity and our values from what is merely habit, like just going through the motions. And I'm curious about why this is key and like

brad (55:45.944)
Yeah.

Finn (56:09.497)
just to illustrate it, to get concrete, like what's an example of a change event in our culture where we determined that, you know, some things stayed put and other things were up for grabs.

brad (56:19.554)
The example that I use in the book is I think one that makes this crystal clear and that is the newspaper industry and how in the last 20 years it's contracted by some estimates up to 70%. There's massive layoffs, so many newspapers have shut down and there's one news organization that has really flourished and thrived during this period and that's the New York Times.

brad (56:48.534)
whether they're too left for you, too right for you, just perfect, put that aside and let's just talk about the New York Times as a business. As a business, the New York Times was able to say that delivering a print newspaper on people's doorstep was merely habit. The New York Times core value is not a print newspaper. Their core values are things like excellence in reporting, telling stories nobody else tells, so on and so forth.

They stepped back and they said, all right, how do we do this in a digital world? And the answer is their website, their newsletter network, and their podcast. When I reported on this and I talked to people in the New York Times, they don't even mention the newspaper is one of the core elements of their business. Isn't that crazy? And this is like the New York Times newspaper, but that was habit. The print newspaper was habit. The values were the reporting, the storytelling, so on and so forth.

Finn (57:35.737)
That's a mate, yeah.

brad (57:45.294)
and they had to take those values and figure out how to apply them in the new world.

Finn (57:52.441)
Fascinating. Yeah, no, I'll...

brad (57:55.178)
And we can do this as individuals, right? Like, I think this is why it's so important for us to have some sense of like, what's really core to us and what are our values and then what is merely habit. Um, and this can get pretty meta. So, you know, I am not, I was never a near pro athlete in anything, but like, I spent 10 years of my life trying to get as fast as possible in, um, triathlon, like long course triathlon, and I really wanted to qualify for Kona. Um, I got close.

Finn (57:57.06)
Yeah.

brad (58:24.842)
I went low 950 at Ironman, Arizona. This is back before everyone was super fast. Now that's not even close, but before everyone got super fast, I got a little close. I think I was probably seventh in the top three go, but I never did it. I ran 301 for the marathon. I was so close to breaking three, so I was a decent athlete, but it was a big part of my identity. I developed chronic exertional compartment syndrome, which is just a really gnarly condition that affects your calf.

Many ultra runners probably know about this. And, um, it got to a point where the anxiety before a workout that it was just going to be 10 out of 10 pain. Even if it didn't happen, it made the workout no fun and it happened more often than that. So I ended up getting a fasciotomy, uh, which is the orthopedic procedure to release your calf, to give it more space. And, um, it allowed me to get back to hiking, but I still can't really run. Like it just comes on. And, um, it was really, really hard for me to give up this sport.

that had just been an outsized part of my identity. But I kind of like zoomed out and I'm like, you know, is running the thing or is running habit? And is the thing being an athlete? And I actually said like, I think the thing is being an athlete. Like, and I love the running community, even though I haven't run in five years, I still consider myself a part of it. But like, it wasn't running, it was being an athlete. It was training. I like training.

And yes, I went through a grieving period. Yes, I had a period where I would like walk down the street and literally get like shots of anxiety when I'd see runners because I'd be like, oh, like that's not me anymore. I can't do that. What am I gonna do? So it's not like it was easy, but I got to the other side of that and I'm like, I'm an athlete. And then I got really into strength training. And now like I love strength training every bit as much as I love running. No more, no less, but like what I like is training. And as I age, knowing this, I think is gonna be so important.

because I can step back and these transitions are still gonna hurt, but I can be like, wait a minute, what does it mean to be an athlete at age 45, 55, 65? What does it mean to be an athlete that is going to have other physical injuries because I'm a human? But not what does it mean to be a runner, not what does it mean to be a power lifter. That stuff for me was mere habit, and the value was really physical activity, training.

Finn (01:00:46.765)
That's, I think that's a really good example reference point for this audience. I'm pausing cause I'm trying to think of like, if I'm a pro athlete in this sport and I'm thinking about ways to make my values and my activity portable. And I'm wondering, like, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, is another example, like how we often see aging athletes level up in distance to stay relevant. Like, you know, maybe they've been a hundred mile racer for their entire career. There's now this new venue, the 200 miles scene where

You know, it's adaptive to their new physical realities. Like is that is that another example of this? Okay

brad (01:01:20.686)
I think so. And I think that makes so much sense because generally speaking, the longer the distance, the more wisdom matters, I think, in problem solving. And the older you are, the more experience and problems you've solved. So yeah, I think there's a reason that you don't see 45-year-olds winning gold medals at the 100-meter dash, but you can be pretty dang competitive at an ultra-inventure endurance event. And then I think the other example, who did what I did but did...

Finn (01:01:28.568)
Yeah.

brad (01:01:48.942)
it to the umph extreme degree because he can be a polarizing figure, but I think he's just a physical freak is Ryan Hall, who's now the biggest meathead on the internet. It's crazy, but I think clearly what Ryan Hall likes is training. I'm sure he grieved and he's written beautifully about how coming out of the sport at a fairly young age was so hard for him, but he was able to still be an athlete.

Finn (01:02:21.093)
I want to end on this and it's a little bit of a pivot from what we were just talking about but I just found this so fascinating. You talk about this idea of self-distancing in the process of evaluating our athletic lives. So this is actions like journaling in the third person, pretending that when you're giving advice to yourself, it's as if you're giving advice to a friend. I know it works but it seems a little bit weird to me.

Because like if I'm writing like a Strava status it could just seem like I'm like coming from place of like ego mania like Finn did you know what I mean? Why does this work?

brad (01:02:57.162)
Yeah, so I don't think it necessarily works like when you're writing on Strava. But it does work when you're going through a challenging circumstance and the path forward is uncertain. It creates some space between you and your experience. In that space, you can make hopefully a more thoughtful and wise decision. Because when you fuse with your circumstances, which we often do in uncertain, emotionally charged experiences...

It gets really hard and we often don't make good decisions. So the example for a runner is you've got a proximal hamstring strain and it really hurts to straighten your leg and get down the stairs. Yet you can't straighten your leg and get down the stairs, but you're going to the track to attempt a workout because it's what's on your program that day. And then if you imagine that one of your training partners couldn't straighten their leg, you

couldn't get down the stairs and then told you they're going to go to the track to attempt like five by one mile, you'd probably tell them like, that's nuts. I know how hard it is to miss a workout, but like adapt the plan and better to miss one workout today than to blow up your whole season. And then of course like, well then that's what you got to do yourself. So I think in getting through injuries in particular, it's so helpful to pretend a friend was in your situation and give advice to that friend.

Finn (01:04:18.637)
And I'm assuming too, like if you are two thirds of the way through a 100 mile race, a similar level of self-talk, distancing yourself from the pain, reaffirming that what you're doing is good, you're going to make it, it works in those types of scenarios too.

brad (01:04:34.274)
For sure. I mean, how much easier is it to tell a friend, like, just be patient, this is a dark patch, versus when you're in it and it's all consuming. If you can zoom out and pretend a friend came to you and said, it's all consuming, it's never going to stop, I just want to quit, you'd probably say, get to the next mile, just be patient.

Finn (01:04:52.901)
Cool. Brad, this has been awesome. There's so much, especially in your latest book, Masters of Change that we didn't even get to, but I promise to all the readers and the listeners and the viewers out there, it's excellent. Go buy it. We'll link to it in the show notes. We'll make sure to link to all of your other social media, your website there as well. Is there anything that you wanna leave listeners with or any further calls to action that you wanna discuss before we go?

brad (01:05:20.106)
No, I think this was just a wonderful interview, so you were so well prepared, and I appreciate you shepherding the conversation the way you did. I enjoyed it.

Finn (01:05:30.637)
We got it. Thank you so much. I could

brad (01:05:31.911)
Oh, man. That's great.